Between blotch and blok

Nope.

The lack of lumpiness in Little's spine was either wishful thinking or lying cat fur. I blame the latter.

No weight gain.

Little continues her littling.

The boys apparently howled all the way to the vet's (on a separate trip: we is cowards!) and are in fine fettle, but too fat. We are, however, well practised in the reducing of excess weight in elderly cats.

And in other news, Socks came to dinner again last night. Evidently the smell of roast duck, whether newly done or heated over in a curry, is the magic required.

And in other, other... back pain :-(

All the sock/4ply lace projects for Xmas were really a precursor to this:

'Cos I'm a coward and that yarn is almost as fine as standard sewing cotton, almost too soft to feel between the fingers, and fragile as hell (no pulling at tangles: it breaks). I've not blocked it properly yet, just given it a quick run over with the steam iron, so there is still the odd dangly untrimmed end showing.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with it. Hence the several pictures via the camera on the spare mobile phone*.

And the dead needles?

I'd decided that the past weekend would be when I finished. I'd hoped it would be Saturday, but watching 3 1/2 episodes of Forbrydelsen** slowed me up somewhat. So, on Sunday afternoon I disappeared upstairs to knit along to Professor Challenger on Radio 4 with Ozzie and Socks for company. Ozzie dozed at me. Socks sat on the stool level with my shoulder and watched. He'd evidently never encountered knitting before and was fascinated. Then he had to join in. First he hooked the end of the nearest needle with his paw, lifted it to his mouth and chewed it a bit. (Not entirely pleasant as we'd given him Little's rejected breakfast [Sheba with Trout***].) The bead on the end proved insufficiently tasty so he came round to the other end and chewed the points a bit. (Yes, I let him do all this. He was slow, cautious and remarkably gentle.) This wasn't such a good idea as the bamboo had already become very slightly split (I've been sandpapering the points regularly to keep the snagging to a minimum) and kitty spit exacerbated the situation; kitty weight dangling from the end has enhanced the bend in one of them too.

I will need to replace the needles. Unfortunately, the carbon fibre ones I want only come as dpns and not straights. I assume cat teeth won't harm something used for the outside of spyplanes.

* So the quality's not great.

** Yes, I'm utterly addicted. By the time I've watched it all, I may have learned some spoken Danish. Total immersion.

*** To be added to the unacceptable-to-small-anorexic-cats list.

Sighs.

The young men upstairs (yup, still stuck due to the little white witch downstairs) have two litter trays between them--the old, plain dark blue one and the snazzy new pink one with an anti-splash surround--in two locations--LL's bedroom and the bathroom. The blue one in the bathroom--smaller and prone to overspills of ltter--was well-used; the new one in the back bedroom was less frequented. It therefore seemed sensible as it was larger to put the pink one in the bathroom and the blue one in the bedroom. So I swapped them around. Evidently it wasn't location that made blue in the bathroom more popular than pink in the bedroom. Blue is still preferred over pink.

Can it really be the case that tomcats won't use pink accessories? And choose blue?

Downstairs, the Little cat (who is on a diet to increase her weight [yes, after all those years of keeping her weight down, she's now too thin]) prefers the pink Whiskas Senior sachets over the blue. Inconvenient when you can't buy a box of just, say, Salmon flavour.

Queens prefer pink, eh?

Three cats is, I suppose, too small a sample to definitively state that cats make gendered colour choices.

Sighs.

Well, despite Progam-ming, they've fleas. So Little could be feeling grotty because of her allergy to the little buggers.

Or it could be kidneys. So we've got to monitor her drinking habits. (Just so long as we don't have to monitor mine ;-)

The vet didn't think there seemed to be much the matter--except her weight (and Biggle's) has crept up a tad.

I'm beginning to think that my list of books read in 2005 would be more interesting, and a lot longer, were I to include the 20 minutes plus of daily bedtime reading to Looby Loo. At the moment, following a spell of, mainly minor, works by Roald Dahl, we're onto The Starlight Barking, the sequel to 101 Dalmatians. We're using the old, and very tatty, copy that I had as a child. This must have been bought for me, since I've always disliked dogs so wouldn't have bought it myself. I neither possessed nor read the first book and didn't watch the movie-with-the-annoying-name-changes until very recently.