Some things, it seems, never change. Such as the fascination of cats with turning spindles. Or, indeed, many other textile implements that move. That can make work quite, ah, let's call it "interesting"...

I'm rather fortunate in that our little-not-so-little cat is quite uninterested in textile works, usually. She will sit down on fabrics laid out on the floor, and on my note papers and scale printouts, but she is rarely trying to catch or eat or mangle the textiles themselves or the tools I use. (She will, however, try to bite the end of a pen when I am trying to write something while she hangs out on my desk. That, I can say, is also rather annoying and not helpful at all. It's even worse than her walking across the keyboard, which is over soon, or putting her paw onto the touchpad, which can be remedied by a slightly awkward but sustainable different position of my arms.)

Anyway - the fascination of cats with moving textile tools, and especially spindles, can also be seen captured in a manuscript dating to 1310-1320. A marginalia shows St. Gertrude of Nivelles, dressed as a nun, and spinning. With a companion cat. A very helpful one. The manuscript, Stowe 17, is in the possession of the British Library, and you can see the digitised image here. (I'm not placing it on the blog here due to copyright restrictions, though I'd have very much liked to adorn this post with the kitty directly.)

It's time again - for tick season! I just took care of one crawling on my foot after being in the garden for a short spell, and the cat has had a few already.

So here's your yearly reminder: If you are living in, or planning to travel to, a tick-infested region, go check if your vaccination against tick-borne meningoencephalitis is still up to date, and get it refreshed if it isn't.

Typical recommendations to avoid tick bites are to wear long trousers when outside in taller grasses or the forest, and check your body afterwards for any unwanted, unpaying temporary eight-legged appendages. Remove them with tweezers, or a special removal tool. We've tried a number of different tools over the years, and the best we've found is a tick removal lasso. Ours are from a Swedish company and called 3iX; they work much better than normal tweezers or even the special tick-removal tweezers. Sometimes you also find cards with slits sold as tick removal tools; I never got those to work on human skin, much less on cats with all the fur in the way. The lasso tool (Zeckenschlinge, for the German speakers here) does an equally good job on humans and animals, and works for all sizes of ticks, even the really tiny ones.

If you want to make sure the tick goes dead, you will need to squash it, cut it apart, pour boiling water over it, or burn it. It will happily survive being washed down the drain. (I wrote more about that here.)

I hope you'll have a good season with no tick bites!

This photo shows a happily sleeping cat:



While that may be no big new thing, the fact that the slow-motion-penny has finally reached its groundfloor destination might be. Today was the first time the little cat used her stairway-board to get up onto her cat bed without getting a reminder first that yes, this thing exists and yes, it's possible to use it, no necessity to try and jump up if you don't feel like it, little cat.

Yesterday, she still waited for such a reminder from me as she was considering how to get up onto my desk. This morning, after having polished off some food, she strolled into the office, went to the cat stairs, walked up and lay down for a nap, witnessed by the Most Patient Husband of Them All. So yay! It only took, what, about two months? We installed the thing around February 15 or so - proving that it does take an old cat some time to learn a new trick, but it's not impossible at all.

I was sort of more or less planning to write another ranty post today, because of all the Corona-related stupidity happening here in Germany right now, but I'll postpone it. Because guess who used the cat stairs today, with only minimal prompting?

Madam obviously wanted to hop up onto the desk, but she's having a non-jump day. So she only suggested a slight hop (not like yesterday, when she tried to jump but didn't get high enough, so she dropped down from having her front paws on the desk, but not more). So I petted her and tapped my finger on the stairs to get her to look at them, and maybe consider using them in her little cat brain... and she actually did look at them. And used them.

Minimal prompting, I'd say. Quite possibly next time, she'll need no prompting at all anymore! Of course she was properly praised and petted upon arrival here upstairs, and after some cuddling on my arm, she's now happily installed on her office cat bed, snoozing peacefully.

 

After more gentle nudgings these past days, and generous application of treats, and the addition of one more "stair step", the little cat seems to slowly consider using the board. (The additional "stair step" is a wood ridge right at the bottom, because otherwise her hind paws slip when she tries to step up.) She actually put her front paws up on it today without prompting, then looked about a little, then stepped down again.

Some more nudging, placing her front end on the board again, and then providing another treat did see her up the stairs and onto her cat bed, where she's now sleeping. (Someone has to, after all. Cat beds are there to be used.) Even more importantly, she wasn't rushing up the board trying to get off that weird thing as quickly as possible, but more or less strolling up it.

So it's actually looking like maybe another week or so will see her using the stairs without a prompt - unless she feels like jumping... which may always be the case. I'm fine with her jumping, I'd just like her to have the option of getting onto the bed or desk without it for those days when jumping so high is too hard.

I found out about a conference about Jewish crafts by chance, and jumped in on short notice - which means that I have some catching up to do on the other work stuff now.

Which also means you get a cat picture instead of a proper blog post:

The little cat is getting old - she's still quite fit for her age, but you can see the tooth of time taking its toll. Not only on her own teeth, which are fewer now: she's had surgery recently, with the removal of three of her remaining (not so numerous) teeth. She also almost only white whiskers now, where they once used to be all black.

We don't know how old she really is; we got her from the shelter back in 2012, and she was grown then but of unknown age. She'd probably had kittens at least once before then, so that would mean at least 3 or so years of age, and the shelter vet estimated her to be about seven. Another vet, later on, said she's probably already much older, estimating her to be 10, more likely 12 years. Which means that she's now something between at least 11, or maybe even 21. We will never know, but hope she'll remain fit and happy for some more years to come.

More important than her actual age, though, she now has some days where she seems to have a hard time to jump up onto my desk or her cat bed in the office, which are about the same height. Sometimes she floats up there utterly gracefully, and sometimes... well. Not so graceful abortions of the jump. Since she loves to hang out on my desk or snooze on her office bed while I'm working, we installed a little cat ramp for her on the side of my desk:



This has been met with some suspicion. She's not very adventurous, the old lady, and was not sure about putting a single paw on the board, let alone explore it to stroll up it. So in the last week, there's been treats and gentle putting her onto the thing and nudging her to use it... and it seems she's now losing some of her mistrust and apprehension. We're still waiting for the penny to finish dropping - so bets will be taken on when she will use the ramp without promting!