Sketchblog: The Truth Behind Squidoo Glitches

Lolcats. Or more accurately, wandering little Lolkittens.

They are to blame for everything. Not that you can really blame them - eight waving fishy-smelling tentacles? How could they not chase them? Don't worry, they'll get distracted by a Twitterbird or fall asleep soon enough.

The Top Five Things A Cat Owner Should Have

Partly through semi-expensive trial and error, partly through the forbearance of my ex-pet shop worker flatmate, I've collected a variety of cat products through the years, and found a few that work wonderfully for my cat.

I should point out first, that I adore my cat, but refuse to spend loads of money unless absolutely warranted, and that I am highly aware of how fickle she can be.

The five products I recommend for looking after your cat with are:

1. FURminator deShedding Tool for Cats
2. Advantage Flea Treatment
3. Bergan Turbo Scratcher Cat Toy
4. A heating pad for cats
5. A claw clipper

Toys


There's not a lot of point buying toys for my cat. Her favourite toy in the whole world is toilet paper - she goes mad for it! Shop-bought mice are occasionally played with, especially if they are catnip-y, but not really better or worse than anything else.

Bergan Turbo Scratcher Cat Toy

My parent's cat loves chasing small balls and marbles, my cat prefers to ravage something she can actually sink her teeth into. Kittens love everything. The only toy that was actually completely worth the money was the GREEN - Turboscratcher Interactive Cat Toy. And frankly, that's mostly valuable for the fact that it's now her favourite scratchpad.

She also will chase the ball, and has great fun fishing out treats dropped in the ball run, and enjoys sitting on it. But its main function is to preserve the couches!



Warmth



A heating pad is ideal for cats - and on the right, you can see she agrees with me!

The one in the photo is a pet shop cast-off, so it's old, has no on-off button and I have no idea what the wattage or brand is. But it works fine and gets hot, but not too hot to touch. I gave it to her a few hours ago... she hasn't moved since!

My cat has arthritis, and has had it for years - she can't jump in winter, and is in a lot of pain. She's also thirteen and starting to show her age a little, so I'm getting extra-protective. Cats love warm spots anyway!

Encouraging a cat to stay on one spot is also very useful, as it stops them a) ignoring the expensive cat bed you may have bought them, that is taking up space somewhere and b) spreading fur all over everything, then moving on to fur up another spot!

There are a lot of different heating pads on Amazon, almost all highly rated. Basically, they're low power heaters, similar to an electric blanket, that is usually covered in some kind of fleece covering to protect the cat and provide comfort. Most of the choices are highly rated, so it usually comes down to size, price and appearance. Some of them are designed for outdoors, and some have some kind of heat-level control.



Fur


The FURminator Cat Brush is my absolute, all-time favourite pick. I recommend it unreservedly for any kind of overly-furry cat.

My cat sheds a lot and I've been through a variety of brushes, steadily moving upwards in price, from old hairbrushes, basic brushes with hard spikes, soft brushes of different kinds, and lastly a handheld rubber comb (that last one worked best). But I still had to brush her every day for them to be much good, and they didn't get the underfur.

I finally found some reviews about the FURminator, and bought it, and after an initial 'I hate new brushes' period (in which the only real way forward is to brush the head and neck until they decide this is an awesome toy of awesomeness... or just too blissed out to resist), the cat now tolerates it. Actually, she's now at the point of running over to say hi, headbutting it, and then flopping over for half an hour to be de-furred!

And golly, gosh, blimey, does it ever work. I never knew my cat could pack so much fur onto her back (well, I did know, because she kept sharing it - but it was hard to conceptualise!). And better, it pulls out all the loose fur, but not the rest of her fur, doesn't hurt her, and gets all the under-fur (the under-fur normally goes untouched, only to continue working its way out the next day).

I actually wrote an entire page praising the FURminator! And you can see how much fur it removed last spring, when it suddenly turned warm and the cat decided it was time to shed.


Claws


Apart from the scratchpad mentioned above, I also clip my cat's claws. She's getting old, so her claws get too long - apart from her accidentally gouging me, she also gets tangled up in cloth and needs me to separate her. When a cat can no longer retract its claws all the way, they're too long.

A basic claw clipper, like this one, is cheap and versatile. You can use it for any small dog or cat - or bird! I actually borrow the one my flatmate uses for their parrot.

If you hold the paw and push gently on the back, the toes will spread slightly and the claws come out. As long as you stay away from the quick - the dark centre which holds the blood and nerves, and is easily visible against the white, somewhat translucent, 'dead' part of the nail - the cat will be fine.

The cat won't approve, of course, and you might need two people to hold the cat and clip the claws, but it is fairly straight forward, and doesn't have to be done all in one go.


Fleas
Sadly, fleas are an unfortunate reality of pets. The best flea stuff I've found is the Advantage brand - both Moss and my parents' cat have shown allergic reactions to fleas, and my parents' cat reacted very badly to the cheap Spotton brand that is the only option in NZ supermarkets (we have to get the Advantage stuff from the vet or pet store).

 It costs more, unfortunately, but each little dose lasts a month, and it tends not to have nasty side effects (like a skin rash and fur loss!)



I also recommend growing some catnip... in a cage, of course! Water it regularly and it's pretty easy .

Cat and Birds

Met a really friendly black and white cat on the way home today, on the walkway over the ponds. That's the second (and completely different), really friendly black and white cat I've met there.

Also got this awesome photo of my cat.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a clear photo of the tongue? (more photos of my cat over at A Year of the Cat )

And finally uploaded the little twittery Zebra finches video clip from the zoo.

A Year of the Cat - A new Blog Project

I've  been wanting to do one of those photoblogs, or 'photo of yourself for every day of the year' projects, but I don't want to take photographs of myself, and I do like taking photos of my cat. And cats are much more photogenic, after all.

So that is what I will do. Every day possible, I will take one new photo of my cat and post it. It won't be every single day, because we both have to be around at the same time, when I have a camera, but hopefully it will be regularly. I might even throw in pictures of other cats occasionally.

I think it might be interesting - both for photography practice, and just to see if she changes over the year. It will also be practice for actually keeping a blog that is only about one thing!

It's over here at A Year of the Cat

(Actually, my cat forced me to. She decides I'm becoming too internet-famous and it's her turn).

My Cat Likes Crisps

Have a random silly cat-owner post. It'll be short, so don't worry.

This evening I come back from work with a couple of bags of shopping, which I put on the kitchen floor while I get the cat some dinner. I turn my back, for a mere moment, and when I look around she's half into the bag of crisps I bought, fishing out her next one.

Naturally I snatch it away and scold her, then retreat with it to the sitting room, while my dinner cooks. The cat follows, and curls happily on the couch while I put together a jigsaw puzzle. And then she sees - the bag of crisps! Unattended! Only a mere 'giant leap to the table and dive headfirst into the bag' away!

So she does that.

So I separate them again, and she stands in front of me looking excited, so I am a sucker and give her a crisp, in her box. She chases it around a bit, then picks it up, brings it back to the middle of my puzzle, and eats it messily.

I persuade her to move.

I start doing the puzzle again. Unfortunately, she is now convinced that I am in fact, putting down little crisps for her, so she leaps after every piece I put down. This makes it difficult to do the puzzle, so I lure her away with another crisp. This one is too rounded for her to bite, so she bats it around a bit, licks it, then comes back and flops in the middle of my puzzle.

I didn't have my camera handy to document her evilness, so have her sitting on a previously finished puzzle.

I keep trying to work around her - but alas! I have crisp fragments on my fingers! She leaps with glee upon a piece of puzzle and starts licking it! I cry out and try to snatch it back, she pulls away and tries to eat it.

I rescue the piece, and give up, as she sprawls over the entire area in front of me. My dinner is cooked, anyway.

Cat and Mouse and Tui T-Shirts

I was talking to my mother about Zazzle recently and explaining that things don't always sell the way you expect, - for example, the t-shirt my dad and brother both liked so much that I had to buy them each one had never sold anything.

At which point I realised I'd never put it on a t-shirt on Zazzle, only RedBubble for my own buying needs (I am not paying to ship from the US, thank you). I had it on a few other designs - mousepads (ha!), greeting cards and stuff, but not a t-shirt.

Cat & Mouse by Flynn_the_Cat

Browse Cat and mouse T-Shirts

So here we are - the little cat, playing with her mouse, that was the second design I ever did in ArtRage 3. I didn't take it seriously until my family started requesting it.

Green Cat & Mouse Cat & Mouse

by Flynn_the_Cat

Browse Cat and mouse T-Shirts

The brighter green one is slightly nicer, I think, but works less well on different backgrounds, while the paler one looks really nice on light grey and works on various colours a bit better (picky artist!).

Cause Zazzle is customizable, things like size and alignment should be easy to change - that's a real pain actually with RedBubble, because if the cat is too small or in the wrong place, I have to redesign and reupload the entire file. Changing designs on Zazzle is easy.

I know the quality's good because it's the same image, and the same type of t-shirt (American Apparel) that both my dad and my brother were wearing last week (Teh brother had a sweatshirt and dad got a t-shirt, both in pale greys).

Funnily, I'd categorised both this design and the Tui one as 'girly' - but both get the most interest from guys (at Armageddon for the latter, the majority of people who asked after it was male. Might be the oriental look appealing to the number of anime fans, though!) ...seriously? I didn't make the Tui one a t-shirt on Zazzle either? I guess that shows where my priorities are! *promptly goes to rectify situation*

Oh that's right - I had a problem with the metallics turning out transparent when printed. Right. I know I fixed that, because I ordered some Tui t-shirts too. AHA, found the file. Right, one t-shirt coming up...

NOOOOO. IT BROKED THE INTERNET. I dare not save this post now! Stupid giant print quality art files.

*one restarted computer and forty minutes later*

Tui Bird and Cherry Blossom by Flynn_the_Cat

See other Tui T-Shirts

I will say it's nice to actually know for certain sure how something turns out - my keychains still haven't arrived, sadly (%&*#&$* NZ post, I suspect).

My Cat Is Helping Me With My Jigsaw Puzzle

My cat decided to help me with my jigsaw puzzle - she climbs up onto the table, wanders around inspecting the pieces, headbutts me a couple of times, wanders past the jigsaw box cover, then carefully lies down in the middle of the puzzle.

I can't decide if she's being clever or annoying.

The puzzle is a cat in the middle of a round quilt (the puzzle itself is round), by Lesley Anne Ivory. My granny sent it to me from the UK a few years ago, probably because the cat looked like Moss!

Eventually she decided all the attention she was getting warranted wriggling around and finally moving to lie around the emerging curve of the puzzle, and there was no more conflict.

Took The Cat To The Vet Today

Just got back from the vet with the cat. She promptly lay down on the driveway and demanded food (more or less in that order!). She's been on my mind a bit these last couple of days, hence the amount of writing about her I am doing. She's my dependent :D And I vastly prefer her over both a kitten and a child (the first is crunchy, the second gets you in legal trouble if you cook it).

This is the third time in her life that she's ever been to the vets - once as a kitten for the uterine-excavation-operation-of-doom, once a few years back for flea allergies and then again to the same vet today. She's thirteen (minus an estimated month). So it was a rare and special occasion for both of us.

Ah, and here she comes. Mewing and chirruping. Because, obviously, she ran out of food. And my bag is in her spot on the bed, so she's standing there and calling me over to pay attention to her, and fix it damn it, these bones need a comfy spot!

She's got some kind of intestinal bleeding, which leads to extremely smelly stools, black with digested blood. Which led to panic in the flat on their discovery in the litterbox, and I got to research various gross things on the internet (and poor Arkillian was driven away from the couch by the smell). So now I have to sneak antibiotics and stomach-lining stuff down her throat everyday for the next week... and to try and persuade her that outdoors is so much nicer than the litterbox. Really. Even when it's wet and cold and has stray cats nearly as big as her.

Got some supplements (Seaflex) for her arthritic joints, so she can stop limping and being miserable everytime it rains. And growling at me when I pick her up, that's important too... as it can lead to biting. Luckily she thinks they're cat treats.

Otherwise she's very healthy, weighs 4.44 kg (she lost nearly a whole kilogram when she was sick!) and happily shed all over me. The cat brush was buried under the pile of computers from the LAN Diablo 2 character creating event in the sitting room... I had to dig it out and drag another handful out of her fur when we got back.

She's funny - I don't know if all cats do this, but when she's in the carrier in the car she meows very pitifully - these long, moaning, wails, sort of 'whyyyyyy?'. She's very well behaved - and we actually let her out on the way back (it was Mum's idea. I'm not quite sure what she was thinking, but I was greatly entertained, so I don't regret it. The cat was loose in the car on the ride up from Hamilton ten years ago, so there was precedent...)

The cat promptly ran and stood up on the side door, looking out the window, then came through the seats into the front, and I diverted her onto the passenger side. She sat on my lap awhile, and wanted to climb onto the dashboard and shed profusely in vengeance at being denied. Then she went in the back and stood against the door, watching dreary Auckland roads go by, then climbed up and lay on the back dashboard area. At which point we decided that she should probably go back in the box.

Then she climbed down and lay on the seat, looking between the front seats at the view, and then she realised there was another side door that she hadn't looked out of, so she went to do that, and managed to stand on the automatic window button. Which led to great panic, and probably great interest on her part, as the window went down... and we promptly pulled over and poured her back into her carrier, and she "MAOOOOOOOW"ed her way home. Where she commenced to be quite happy and most demanding as soon as she was let out.

Edit: Hey, cool - vet follow-up. Just got a phonecall from the vet, with more care tips (bland diet and so on) for the next week, in case she did poison or injure herself. Cat spent the entire phonecall headbutting me in the knees and mewing for attention.

Breaking News: Three Kittens Created From Cat Fur

....well, no. Not really. But only because I didn't have the patience to create them. Summer arrived over the weekend here in New Zealand and my cat took that as a sign to shed her entire undercoat in a day. I come innocently home from visiting my parents over the weekend, pick up the cat brush (the really awesome FURminator) to bond and get rid of any stray loose fur. Sweep it through, watch in surprise at the large clumps of puffing fur at the end of the first stroke...

And an entire kitten emerges.

I swear, I got three kittens worth of fur out of her. I made balls out of them, and even squashed down, they each filled my hand. I threw the first one away (after showing it off), took pictures of the second lot (she was a very obliging model), then discovered still more later. Then the cat got grumpy :D

Now I have to decide. What shall I do with all this fur? I could make a kitten, but they tend to be a nuisance. I could make fake beards and wigs to sell. But a lot of people are allergic to cat fur (and I don't know how to make a fake beard). On the other hand, it's the skin and dander that people are actually allergic too - maybe I can microwave it, rub my face in it and see if it makes me sneeze.

I could stuff a pillow, or sell it to birds to make their nests. Or line my increasingly holey shoes!

Catty Blessings and the FURminator

Cat-related Squidoo lenses that I've blessed in my September flight as a Squidoo Angel.

*newer*

This list of FatBat's Demands, from Kylyssa is a perfect example of the idiosyncratic, rightfully Centrex-of-the-world cat and fun to read.

----

Egyptian Mau - Cats of the World by Vladi (a lensmaster slightly more catty than me!) is a lovely lens about the very lovely Egyptian Mau. My mother has one of these - she's undersized and very nervous and very friendly. We adopted her from the SPCA and spent months arguing over whether she's a Silver Spotted Tabby or an Egyptian Mau - turns out they're often the same thing. It seems to depend which side of the ocean you're standing on - different cat breeds and histories...

[Subtly segues into talking about 'OUR' cat!]

There's two versions: the original Egyptian one and the ones that are actually/probably Silver Spotted Tabbies in the UK (varies hugely by cat book, breediing club, country.... ). One version bred from Siamese cats to mimic the old Egyptian cats - and you can tell from their affection (*coughneedinesscough*), build, piercing yowl, the fact that they often wag their tail when happy and come when you whistle. (It's the high pitch - Megan goes crazy for bad singing!)

Also typical - very wary of loud noises and strange people. She's a very jittery cat!

Vladi is also responsible for The Cats of Rome which talks about the many strays in Rome, along with a lot of photographs.

Top 10 Cat Toys - Voted by Cats is a very helpful and accurate lens! GroovyFinds mixes freebies with recommendations for shop-bought toys - and this is where (I think) I originally read about the FURminator. (And I can confirm that my cat also comes running for it). The only things missing are my cat's favourites - passing feet and toilet rolls!

And this :D

Oh, and some self-promotion: my cat got to show off (which she did, happily) for a video, which I then built a lens around, about the FURminator brush/comb. Which is awesome. I just got another handful (full handful, unless squashed, as it's very soft and fluffy) of fur off her, so I was reminded to post this...

The (Real) Cat Returns

The real, furry, purring cat, that is.

I brought my cat back to my flat again this evening - she seems to remember it, which is good, and is following me around and lying on the floor everywhere. She just climbed up on the chest of drawers, until blocked by the large box of paints, and wriggled her head under the curtain so she could sit and look out into the dark...

She's a good cat, and a very good natured one - she's nearly thirteen now! Unfortunately, she's very, very, very furry and sheds a lot.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to having a cat on my bed again, to keep me warm, and to come and say hello when I get home. I'll have to pick up some nice catfood for her though. Before she decides to do more than just nibble my fingers...

Cats on the Trampoline

When I was younger, we had a huge trampoline and it was great fun. I also had a cat (which I still have). Appparently the site of my feet flying up and down was irrestible, she'd leap up, and throw herself at my legs, in an attempt to either capture them or love me to death, depending on her mood. I inevitably would be in midair, and come back down to send her three feet in the air.

Apparently that was fun, because it usually inspired an attempt to eat me. I had to slow down, stroke her, and persuade her that I was not a toy, and she can get off now!

In light of that memory, have some trampoling cat videos :D (happy cats only, I don't approve of the ones where the cat's only been put there to be bounced for the camera)