The last part of the excursion was a visit to Hütscheroda - that's a small place in Thuringia which calls itself "the wild cat village".

Wild cats live in the forest next to the village - but these critters are so shy, and so well-disguised, and so quiet that to see one in the wild is an extremely rare thing. So in addition to a small path through the forest, and a longer route if you want to see more of the beautiful landscape, there are a few enclosures with male wild cats (who come from breeding programmes, they are not taken out of the wild). Chances to see one of the cats there are higher - and you are guaranteed to see them three times daily, when it's feeding time.

You also get some info about the cats during this feeding time... and if you are lucky, a photo or two with more or less of the fence visible.

[caption id="attachment_4746" align="alignnone" width="640"] One of my lucky shots - that is Carlo.


If you are interested in wild cats, this place is definitely worth a visit! In addition, they are now having a lynx pair, in hopes of breeding some more lynxes. We didn't get to see these, as they are freshly arrived, but they will soon go into their enclosure.

[caption id="attachment_4745" align="alignnone" width="640"] Wild cats make funny faces, too.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that we have the privilege to be door-openers and can-openers for a little (though really not so little) cat. Things that you might not know about said little cat:

She came to live with us in 2012, when we fetched her out of an animal shelter. She'd been found, as her previous owners had set her out in the midst of winter, so her history is unknown. The shelter gave her a name (Madonna), sterilised her, had her chipped and her ears tattooed (these are standard shelter procedures in Germany, to help identify an animal if it gets lost), and gave her a general health checkup. She never felt at home living with other cats, and from what we gleaned from her behaviour, she was probably all on her own, and she definitely had no possibility to go outside in her former home.

After she'd been with us a bit, we realised she had weird coughing fits. A bit like coughing up a hairball, but never with any hair coming out... so we did a bit of research, and then we went to the vet, and we were told that yes, she has feline asthma. So we did some more research, and we found out that there's several ways to treat the asthma: Depot cortisone injections, cortisone pills, or inhaling cortisone with a special inhaler. The two first methods are systemic treatment, and daily doses of cortisone are, unfortunately, not without side effects. Inhaling, in contrast, puts the drug only there where it's needed: into the lungs.

So we got an inhaler, and cortisone spray, and started the rather long and tedious process of getting the cat used to inhaling. (She got pills during that time. That was even less fun than the inhaling training.) It took about three months, and it is daily ritual since, morning and evening. Usually, it's a very quick procedure - she gets a "bribe" treat, lies down, inhales, gets some more treats, we wipe her nose, even more treats (they are small ones), and then she's getting her food, or we open the door so she can go out and do Important Cat Things.

This process has fascinated quite a few people in our acquaintance, so in case you are curious now as well, here's a video of me doing the inhalation stuff with Madonna. The colours are a bit flat, but everything should be visible enough...

 

It's a holiday here in Germany today, so instead of giving you a proper blog post, let me point you to another blog: Jenny Dean's Wild Colour, where she writes about tests with Anglo-Saxon mordants (clubmoss) and lots of other interesting things - if you like to read about historical dyes and natural dyestuffs, you will definitely want to check out this blog.

And for those of you who don't care about these things, here's at least a gratuitous cat picture:



That bag she is lying on, by the way, contained unwashed Waldschaf wool... resulting in a cat that was not only well-rested and happy, but also quite definitely smelling of sheep!

It's a bit colder again outside, even though there was more sunshine to make up for it. I'm a little tired and a lot busy with all kinds of writing-related work, which sucks all the creativity out of my brain, so instead of a nice proper blogpost, you are getting today:

One gratuitous Cat Picture.

Here you go:

The cat, kind soul that she is, wanted to let me know she thinks my keyboard could use a bit of a cleaning. As she is perfectly and clearly understandable when she meows and purrs, but her human personnel are a bit slow on the uptake, she had to use drastic measures to demonstrate the cleaning necessity.

Which was achieved by hooking a claw underneath the Alt-Gr key and pulling. This, of course, was at first misinterpreted by her desk-sitting, cat-petting human as a mere coincidence, as she likes to knead when she's hanging out on the desk. The human was soon aware, though, that there was an astounding amount of dust and cat hair under that key... so obviously, there must have been a reason for the cat to do this. Right?

[caption id="attachment_3236" align="alignnone" width="902"] The culprit, erm, the graciously observant cat right after the deed, acting like nothing has happened.


So I did take the hint, and subsequently the small vacuum cleaner with a little brush (after Madame had left the desk, of course, as she is not fond of vacuum cleaner noises), and removed more astounding amounts of cat hair and dust from underneath the other keys.

Then came the fun task of figuring out how the three bits of plastic are supposed to fit together... and after two or so false starts, I managed to get them into correct order and position again.

[caption id="attachment_3238" align="alignnone" width="436"] One of the plastic bits. And cat hair.


Placing the two white parts together again required bending the smaller one to get the little axles into their sockets again; for the rest, it was the combination of sliding something into one holder, then pressing the other end down until it clicked into place - once to fasten the white bits to the key plate, once to secure the whole setup to the keyboard again.

[caption id="attachment_3237" align="alignnone" width="768"] The two white bits, reunited, waiting to be set back into place underneath the key plate.


Actually, that was fun, if a bit scary when doing the bending-to-set-into-place-bit (especially as I had to do it twice, not getting the stacking order correctly at the first go. Not something I'd have chosen to do this morning without the cat prompt, but I do find it interesting to see how things like that work - and putting torn-apart bits together is an excellent way to figure that out.

Now, though, I hope the cat will abstain from pulling out more keys - I do have actual work to do...

Things happening here, in no particular order:

The cat is sleeping. Well, mostly - sometimes she wakes up and goes "meow". Sometimes she wakes up and has an itchy ear, which results in something like this:


The first seeds from the surprise seed mix have sprouted, and it's cress:


Also green, but a long way beyond being a seedling? My hippeastrum. It's blooming.

And just in case you are wondering what I have been doing, apart from taking photos and annoying the cat by waking her with the camera click - I've been doing some weaving. Proof here:


That is silk and gold thread, and I can tell you right now that the warp is a nasty thing to handle - the silk and gold are quite, quite different in their elasticity, and the gold especially needs careful handling. I did test runs with the materials, but with a shorter, narrower warp, and it does not scale without trouble, so I had some figuring out of solutions to do (and there might have been "aaaargh" sounds along that way).

For now, though, it seems like I've found ways to compensate for the different takeup of the two materials, and should I ever do this again, I'll definitely be smarter. Well, maybe. Hopefully.

Thank goodness it's Friday! There's a few more things to write and sort and do, and then it's time for the weekend, which I'm really looking forward to. While I still have things to do, the cat is, ever helpfully, hanging out on my desk, draped across my right forearm. Which means she is wobbling up and down when I am typing (something she comments by purring even louder), which is quite amusing!

She is a very helpful cat anyways. Here's picture proof of her helping me when I was neatening up the fabrics for Bremerhaven:


And yes, these are my scissors under her left hind leg. She's sleeping right on top of them. Or rather - not sleeping, but hanging out, waiting to have her belly rubbed...