Tanya's Blog

Two cats (3 years/3 months) – tabbys, oodles of personality, okay one might have a slight brain malfunction every now and then – but the other one’s cuteness makes up for it tenfold. Guaranteed to give you hours of fun and excitement.

They come completely house trained – able to use a catflap (albeit only one way); have boundless energy (think of the weight you could lose chasing playing with them) and are very affectionate (those scratches on my arms… they’re love bites).

Please……I’ll pay you!!!

One thing… you can only have them daily between the hours of 02:00am and 05:00am – the rest of the time I want them back.

(As an aside, my in-laws gently chided [aka full on nagged] me for shirking my blog responsibilities – so I thought I’d best put finger to keyboard and write something. The fact that they already know everything I’m about to write is tough – they can read it all again)

Saturday night Gymmie decided he was tired of having 7 lives left, and figured he’d take a walk on the wild side and lose another one. We live on a very busy road with cars hurtling down at break neck speed most of the time. We’d decided to invite a few friends round for a braai and were happily chatting, quaffing and generally ejoying ourselves when there was a screech of brakes and a very loud thud. Next moment a cat streaks across the garden almost at the speed of light and disappears. We all thought the car  had either hit another car or a pedestrian, it was only when the woman from across the road came over to ask if I’d seen my cat that it dawned on me the thud we’d heard was Gymmie. ‘Course we couldn’t find him, which then led to much snot and trane on my part. Eventually he surfaced, limping slightly and looking decidedly sorry for himself. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious damage and the fact that he was once more chasing after Bagheera at 5 this morning must mean something. Fool of a cat.

As for the other one, well she’s had a few adventures of her own, ranging from trying to drown herself in the bath… to deciding our bedroom needed a little bit of additional decorating.

One has to love her though, ‘cos she is so damn cuuuuuuuuuuuute.

And even though they’d like us to believe they hate each other…..

  

They really don’t.

Although I suspect our two cats need about 149 lives. Jessica has been away since Wednesday evening at a guide camp and so Bagheera has been sleeping in our room. Picture it – one very small cat sleeping at the head of the bed and one somewhat larger cat sleeping at the foot, this in itself is not a problem, the problem comes when they both decide it is time to get up. Somewhere between 5:00 and 5:30 the games begin.

Thumpitty, thumpitty, thump…. one cat streaks across the wooden floor – followed shortly by – thumpty, thumpty, thump…. crash. Then Gymmie starts his… meeeuw, meeuw, chirrup, meeuw. Then more galloping, only now they’ve switched places – more thumpitty’s and thumpty’s – more crashes, wallops, scratching of furniture and meeeuw’s. This goes on for as long as it takes for me to get out of bed – yell at them and figure if I don’t get up – they’re just going to get worse. So I get up and suddenly all is quiet and they disappear somewhere.

I’m going to bliksem them.

Meet Sophie Bagheera, having had her for a few days it was obvious that Sophie wasn’t going to cut it. We needed a name with heaps of potential, a name that would symbolise great things to come, a name that would strike fear into the bravest of cats…Rudyard Kipling sums it up best…

“Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.” Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

She’s already living up to her name – then again Gymmie isn’t exactly the bravest of cats.

He’s trying really hard to ignore her in the vain hope that she’ll just disappear one day soon. In a way it’s a bit of poetic justice – when we had to relocate Gymmie to Bellville (for health reasons – both Gymmie’s and Tamsyn’s) he became the thorn in Wouter’s cats sides – so much so, that Benny packed his bags and moved in with Wouter’s Mom almost immediately – it took another year for Joon to follow. Not that Gymmie remembers any of that – all he knows is there is this upstart, this pipsqueak of a cat who scares the bajeesus out of him. It’s driving him to *drink*.

We reckon she’s going to grow up to be a cat to be reckoned with.

Although how anything this cute could be so scary is anyone’s guess.