Nothing much on my desk this week because I’ve been pretty busy with other things.
Before we went out the other day, I cleaned my blue shoes with some liquid polish in a bottle with a sponge applicator on the top. They said to wash the applicator after use, so I did this, and then I wiped it with some kitchen paper. The colour on the paper was gorgeous. I had to wipe up some that I’d spilt, and the water made the colour run into the paper. I decided to dry it and keep it to use in projects! I love the patterns it’s made, and I thought I could put some gold paper behind the piece with the hole in it. Not sure what I’m going to do with them yet, but can never waste anything I think might be turned into art!
I managed to complete the card and its box, and the present, for the lady whose 100th birthday party we attended on Saturday. You can see it here and here. Here is a picture.
The party was amazing and we all had a good time. Now it’s all over and I’ve finished the projects for it, I’ve been trying to catch up with my endless computer backups. There are still external hard drives and cables all over the sitting room floor… I’ve got another 4TB drive on order and I hope to get rid of the small ones once I’ve rationalised everything. It’s going to make life a lot easier once I get it all sorted out.
We’ve had a couple of afternoon outings this week, which you can scroll down and read about if you want. We are trying to take advantage of the summer weather while we’ve got it.
Cockington
Seale-Hayne
Now for your weekly Lily and Ruby fix.
They’ve found a couple of new places to sleep. I will never understand kitties. Neither of these places is particularly comfortable! They go through phases, and use a particular place to the exclusion of everywhere else, and then suddenly get fed up with it and choose somewhere else!
Here’s where I found them a couple of days ago.
They look like a cat with two heads! Lily is always underneath, with Ruby resting on top. I don’t blame Ruby – Lily is so deliciously soft, like a feather duvet.
Last night I found them here.
Here’s a fun video of them going for a ride. I think they might get used to this, and expect me to ferry them around all the time…
Here’s another one of them playing with my hubby in the garden with the birdie toy.
The only change in my studio and office this week is more chaos, I’m afraid. Some of my wools have been put away because I’ve finished the socks (not yet blocked). No change on my main desk area, so no photo of that this week.
I can’t get near my office desk at present for clutter. There are also a lot of computer cables on the floor.
After the death of my old laptop I’ve been trying to sort out my various external hard drives and in the process, managed, at a single key-stroke, to delete all the back-ups from my other old laptop that died – this was totally devastating because it was the sum total of many years’ work and accumulation of my entire music library… until I thought to do a google search into data retrieval, and for a sum I’d have preferred not to spend, have downloaded a truly excellent program called EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, and I’ve got it all back, despite it being “permanently deleted” from the drive!! It just goes to show that when you think you have safely deleted something, it is still there to be retrieved, so if you are disposing of an old computer, it is best to trash the hard drive with a sledgehammer because that way, no unscrupulous people could retrieve your precious and confidential data with a data retrieval program.
When I told my hubby I’d had to buy the program, he said, “Would you have been prepared to spend a pound for each of the files you’d lost?” and I had to admit that yes, I probably would – and what I paid for the program was a tiny fraction of the total of £1 per file!! He does have a knack of making me feel better!
So I’m mightily relieved, but there’s a huge amount of work to be done! Not only has it retrieved the back-up I deleted, but it’s retrieved a whole lot of other stuff as well which had been lurking underneath and which a “deep scan” found – and there’s some excellent stuff there. Most of it is duplicated but it needs to be checked. I’m amazed at how much stuff has been layered onto this drive, and that any of it can be retrieved. Isn’t technology wonderful?
My work is cut out for the foreseeable future, sorting everything out. I’m backing everything up onto a new 2 TB drive so all the back-ups will be together and easier to manage, and I’m going to store all my media files on another external hard drive (also backed up) so these will be accessible from all my computers.
My new iPhone is now up and running – the SIM card arrived very quickly – and yesterday I sent my first text, and I got the terse reply from my hubby in confirmation, “Got it.” Nuff said! His texts are as terse as his emails lol!
Kitties
Great excitement. I knew we’d got a pair of very intelligent kitties, but I never thought they would learn how to use the cat flap all on their own! Since letting them out into the garden we’ve been fixing it open with masking tape so they get the idea there’s a hole in the door to go in and out through, but when it was shut, it appeared to be as much a barrier to them as ever. A couple of days ago, though, Lily came out on her own, soon to be followed by Ruby. Yesterday I managed to get a really sweet video of them going out – still struggling a bit with it, but they’ve definitely got the idea! Look out for the bit where Lily appears to be telling Ruby what to do!
Before I grabbed the camera, there was a moment when they both had their heads up against the cat flap, and I thought they were both trying to get out at the same time!
We are still locking them in at night after they’ve come in for their supper, but soon they will be coming and going as they please. Lily has got over whatever fright she had that made her scared to go out for a couple of days, and we have a job getting either of them in in the evening! They absolutely love it out there.
Here’s another clip of them playing in the garden yesterday afternoon.
Not sure when I’m going to be able to get back in the studio, with everything else that’s going on at the moment. I’m still trying to catch up with a backlog of stuff from when I was ill as well.
What’s On My Workdesk this Wednesday? A Crop-a-Dile!
Magnificent beast, isn’t he. He arrived yesterday morning. I wrote a blog post about him here. Any suggestions for a suitable name for him? He’s no wee timorous beastie, that’s for sure.
This was a staged photo taken just after I’d opened him. I’m afraid I can’t show you my desk proper this week because it is covered by my Mystery Project which has to remain Under Wraps till it’s completed. Sorry about that.
I can give you a sneak-peek of one bit, though, without giving anything away.
This was some additions I made to some pieces of green patterned card in my stash which I didn’t much like (the piece underneath). I added some Forest Moss Distress Ink by smooshing the card through it on my craft mat, and then added some Broken China Distress Oxide, and finally distressed the edges with more Forest Moss, and a little Black Soot Distress Inks. I think this is an improvement. It was very wrinkly by the time I’d finished it, but I flattened it nicely with my craft iron, which I suddenly thought would do the job a lot more quickly than the heavy-books-overnight treatment.
My blog editing app seems to be working OK again! I didn’t do anything, so I’m not sure what’s been going on. I just hope it lasts.
Kittens
I’ve been so busy this week that I haven’t had time to edit my recent videos of Lily and Ruby, but I’ve got some photos.
They’ve both been incredibly wild and playful and now they are so big, they are careering about the place and nothing in their path is safe! When they wrestle they don’t seem to know their own strength and often make each other cry if they bite too hard! They are turning into two little adolescent hooligans. Lots of naughtiness which isn’t as sweet as it was when they were tiny (oooh how I miss that!) and my threats to sell them on Ebay if they don’t behave, fall on deaf ears. Ruby is far too busy and fidgety to enjoy a cuddle with Mummy at the moment, although they are both still cuddling up with my hubby while he’s still only semi-mobile.
They still suckle on the little black fluffy thing though, and like the babies they were when they first started doing that, they crash out, totally exhausted, after a heavy bout of play. I don’t think they realise how big they’ve got, because they still squash in together in the top section of the cat tree, but now, bits hang over the edge!
When a tail hangs down like this, you can lift it up and drop it, and it’s completely floppy and lifeless. We’ve never had such laid-back and relaxed kitties.
Lily got all wild up there yesterday evening and started rolling around, much to my alarm – it’s a long way to fall!
I know that all of us arty and crafty folk like to distress things. Years ago I bought a Tim Holtz distressing tool which roughens up the edges of card really nicely. I could have saved myself the money. Lily and Ruby do a far better job.
This is about two days’ work. Feline deconstructive art. Note the bits of cardboard all over the floor, too. I’m always sweeping up.
Health Update
I’ve got my second pre-assessment appointment on Friday, this time with the anaesthetist, when I am going to discuss with him my request for a PICC line to be inserted from the outset – I hope he will agree to this, so that I don’t have to go through that whole awful performance of every cannula failing, and my arms blowing up, and me not getting sufficient pain relief etc. etc. I ended up like a complete pincushion by the end of it, but got instant relief with the installation of the PICC. Here’s hoping.
I will probably get an operation date soon. It can’t come soon enough now. However, after my past experience with postponements, I shan’t believe it’s actually happening until the anaesthetic enters my system.
“Normal life” again – at least for a while
A small oasis of near normality till I have to go into hospital. Now that my hubby is so much more mobile, I’m getting my life back at last! We are back in a routine where he gets his own breakfast so I haven’t got to get up so early, and can have a more leisurely and restful early part of the day which suits me better – my internal clock is all haywire with the ME and I tend to stay up well into the small hours feeling wide awake and wired, and need time to get going in the mornings. He is also doing all the kitty feeding, just for now, and I will take back the lunch and supper feeding eventually.
I have started doing some cooking in readiness for when I go into hospital and for afterwards – I am making up some low residue dishes and over the next week I shall try and organise the freezer so that things are easy for my hubby to find. I am hoping not to be too long out of action this time, and hope to be doing the meals before too long, even if he has to carry and fetch for me for a while! I’ve also started putting things like shredless marmalade and white bread on the shopping list – I shall really miss my home-made brown bread and chunky marmalade, not to mention the huge quantities of fruit and veg I eat (mostly far too fibrous for Kermit to deal with after he’s been remade).
The greatest result of thing getting back to normal is that my creative mojo has returned big time, and I’m spending as much time as possible (never enough) in my studio. I just wish I could share with you what I’m up to…
First of all, I am really sorry not to have replied to the lovely comments I had on my blog last time I was on here. I shall endeavour to do so in the next few days. As you can imagine, with my mum dying, and my hubby’s broken leg, and then Christmas, I have had more than enough to cope with and time has been very short. At times I have become quite overwhelmed with everything and have lost the plot on more than one occasion. When things are normal, I can just about cope with what I have to do, but add another raft of problems and things start to go a bit pear-shaped chez Shosh.
However, over the past few days things have generally been better. We have had a quiet couple of days over Christmas with no visitors, and I was able to concentrate on the dinner and just spending time with my hubby and the kitties.
We have loved having everyone dropping in to see us, but it all takes up such a lot of time and I can find my schedule slipping alarmingly, and I begin to get a panicky feeling that things are slipping beyond my control. Sometimes I’ve just had to apologise to people and take myself off and get on with things, and leave them to socialise with my hubby, which has made me feel a bit rude but it was the only way to keep going. Another problem is that most people have no idea about not letting the kittens out into the house from the flat – they stand with the door open, and before we know it, Ruby has dashed off upstairs, or worse, into the kitchen and I’m terrified of her getting outside when people are in and out! I can’t blame them, because they don’t know our arrangements and their aim is to see my hubby and they aren’t concentrating on anything else, but on occasion this has happened when I am at some crucial stage with the cooking or I’m already multi-tasking more than my poor brain can cope with!
Once we are back to normal again and people aren’t in and out all the time, we will be able to give the kitties the run of the house as we were doing before. At the moment they are generally very content in the flat with my hubby – they have loved having him there all the time, with a nice big warm lap for them to sleep on, and I have been spending as much time as possible in there too.
Here is Lily, lying as she so often does these days – shameless hussy, everything exposed!!
She is the most soft, floppy and laid back kitty you could imagine. She’s as bad as my hubby – all she wants to do is sleep!
Here is Ruby being queen of the castle on top of the cat tree. This one’s full of life, and wriggles and fidgets when being cuddled, but purrs her head off the whole time!
Do you remember Beatrice the Computer Queen? Well, it seems that Lily is following in her footsteps! She has been helping my hubby on his laptop.
Ruby, like Phoebe, isn’t a bit interested in the computer – she is more interested in having fun and generally being a really cheerful, enthusiastic kitty with no intellectual bent whatever.
Here are the latest videos of them. Can you believe they are now seven months old?
I have been doing lots of therapeutic cooking! On Christmas Eve I cooked a new recipe after watching Mary Berry on TV and just had to try her fish pie with soufflé topping. Here is the result.
The topping is done with cubed white bread and whipped egg white with a melted butter and cheese mixture. I used a combination of cod and salmon and chucked a few prawns in for good measure, and it was the most delicious fish pie I have ever tasted! This one’s definitely a keeper, and I don’t think Mr. Tesco will be persuading me to buy his “Finest” fish pie again! Thank you Mary!
My Christmas dinner was a triumph. It was the first I had cooked since 2006. That was my swan song, and I managed to prepare everything and did my best table decorations ever, but I didn’t really enjoy eating it because I was going down with a horrible flu-like illness and by tea time on Christmas day I was feeling so rough that I went to bed and didn’t get up for a week. I never bounced back from that, and it developed into the ME which has been with me ever since.
This year I was determined to cook a proper dinner again, with all the trimmings. OK, I did buy a Lidl Christmas pudding, but everything else I cooked from scratch, just for the two of us. I thought my hubby could do with spoiling, having broken his leg and been deprived of going out and doing all the things he wanted over Christmas. Here is the table, just as we were ready to sit down and eat.
Starting top left: crispy bacon and pigs in blankets. Top right: gravy, bread sauce, carafe of the delicious red wine which was given to us by our lovely neighbour. Middle, left to right: roast turkey, carved and ready to serve; three stuffings: chestnut, mealy (a traditional Scottish recipe made from oatmeal, a firm family favourite), and date and walnut; carrots and sprouts with whole chestnuts. Front row – the best roast potatoes I’ve ever cooked, after finding a tip online to par-boil them and then freeze them, and cook them from frozen, having tossed them in semolina. Crisp on the outside, light and fluffy on the inside. I used Maris Piper potatoes, which, like King Edwards, are ideal for roasting. All laid up with my best china and silver on my favourite hand-embroidered tablecloth from my Scottish grandmother.
Here is a close-up of the decoration for the table napkins.
This is the small table centre I made.
These ribbon and paper decorations were made for my swan song Christmas table and I’ve used them on occasion in between. I can mix and match the different elements.
After we’d finished, we settled down to watch the Queen’s Christmas broadcast.
I was delighted a few weeks ago to discover that because I’d lost so much weight, I was able to get into my Afghan Nomad Dress again! I made this many years ago and could never bear to part with it. The whole of the front of the bodice is covered with hand embroidery, and it has a very full skirt, and is made of several different fabrics, all in rich colours.
A bit difficult to photograph as a selfie –here’s an old photo of myself in it when I first made it.
For Christmas this year, I braided my hair with ribbons and added some gold flowers. Here’s a back view.
My hubby was thrilled!
Mum
In view of all our current difficulties, we decided to have Mum cremated privately before Christmas, and then to have a memorial service in mid-January. This means we’ve got more time to plan something really special, and also more people will be able to attend who might have been away at Christmas. There’s still quite a bit to sort out, and plans for the service are coming together nicely now, and once the Christmas dust has settled, I shall be able to get down to producing the order of service as I did for Dad’s funeral.
Health Update
At long last I have an appointment to see my surgeon – on 11th January. I was getting desperate, having been promised an appointment before the end of the year and hearing nothing, so I phoned his secretary, and she passed me on to the appointments department, who immediately referred me back to her! I was spitting tacks after this. Since the return of Miss Piggy, my hernia, things have got more worrying – it is now in the same state it was at the beginning of the year when it caused a blockage, resulting in emergency surgery and me being really poorly for ages, something I am more than anxious to avoid repeating at all costs. I am suffering quite a lot of skin irritation around Kermit, my stoma, and he has not been settled all year really, and things are now worse, not better, which has been very disappointing after having such a good year last year. Hopefully my surgeon will agree to go ahead and do a proper repair in the New Year.
Finally, here is what my hubby gave me for Christmas: a set of Derwent Graphik Line Painter pens. I’d seen some reviews of these on Youtube and was longing to get my hands on a set! They come in a lovely box with a slip cover.
Hopefully in the coming year I shall get more time and energy to do a decent amount of art, after what has been a pretty disappointing year.
At last I have tidied my studio! As always happens when I haven’t been using it, it had turned into a dumping ground and was an absolute mess.
This is the further side of the room.
On the left, by the lamp, is my little gallery area. In the corner is my sewing zone with my sewing machine, and the storage boxes on the shelves contain mostly textile stuff. On the right is my drawing zone.
This is the side of the room looking back towards the window.
On the left is my iMac. My cutting machine is across the corner. Misc. supplies in the storage boxes on the shelves. I’ve got all my distress inks and Infusions and Dylusions sprays and paints out (in the plastic boxes on top) so it’s not over-tidy at present! To the right is my main work area – my desk, for the purposes of WOYWW! The white unit in the foreground is one of several pull-out units. When stowed away, this one would go under the main desk but it never goes in there because that’s where I mostly sit. When pulled out, it provides an extra surface and still gives me access to the shelves – this one holds card and paper.
Here’s the desk itself.
Apart from being a bit tidier than before, not much change – you can still see the current work in progress – my Infusions mini-album.
I continue to alternate between being busy with various commitments, domestic tasks and looking after the kittens, and crashing out on the recliner suffering from extreme exhaustion! I am taking a bit of a dip with my ME at the moment which is a tremendous bore because it’s preventing me from getting much creative stuff done – this is always what gets pushed to the bottom of the heap when energy is in short supply! I am trying not to overdo things on better days – I run on adrenaline on busy days and then pay for it later. My internal clock has gone all haywire again so I’m not getting to bed till well into the small hours, and then struggle to get up in the mornings – normal ME fare!
Zentangle
I was getting so fed up with not being creative that I charged up my Apple Pencil and started drawing Zentangles on the iPad again. I can do this from the comfort of the recliner or in bed, and I can also flip back and forth to look at the step-outs for the various patterns, either in my own folder on the iPad, or online. I can also listen to audio books while I’m doing it! Multi-tasking…
Here’s my experiment with Diva Dance flowing through Paradox – I’ve always found the latter pattern problematic but think I’ve mastered it at last! Full details here.
Yesterday I completed another one, which had taken me several days to do. Full details here.
Kittens
Lily and Ruby are now 4 1/2 months old – I can’t believe how quickly the time is going, or how big they are getting! As my hubby says, they may be growing, but they are not growing up! Here they are in the kitty bed, suckling on the fluffy toy.
They won’t use the lovely new kitten bed I bought for them, and they are now getting too big for it! I got the old bigger bed out for them and they wouldn’t use that either, until my hubby put the fluffy thing in there, and now they go in to suckle, but sleep either on top of the wooden cat tree my hubby made, or in the kitty castle.
Lily pending…
(In my hubby’s pending tray in his office!)
Together on the scratching post, looking like two little meerkats on a train.
They are getting on quite well with the clicker training but both tend to have off days when they won’t concentrate! Also, when I try and put what they have learnt into practice in a situation where there are distractions that they find far more interesting, they behave as if they’ve never heard of clicker training! We persevere, though.
A couple of weeks ago they discovered what fun you can have for a minute or two with a new roll of loo paper.
The latest video of them, wrestling on the scratching post.
Health update
I got the result of my recent CT scan this week and the hernia has definitely returned. The emergency repair done in February when I was admitted for emergency surgery because of a blockage, has not even lasted a year. I knew it would fail eventually. I am seeing my surgeon again soon, according to his letter, and we will discuss options then. I really hope he agrees to admit me for elective surgery for a proper repair, and doesn’t wait for another blockage…
As you will probably understand, there’s no change on my desk this week, so no photo to share. I have been spending all my spare time in with the kittens and making videos galore! They are 11 weeks old today and growing fast, very feisty and alternating between fits of extremely vigorous play and crashing out asleep for hours. I’m amazed at how much noise they make, thundering around on those little paws, with occasional yelps when the play fighting gets too rough, and lots of little chirrups from Lily.
Tomorrow, we will have had them for two weeks! How quickly the time passes. Their personalities and preferences and coming out now, and they have their favourite toys, and different food preferences. Ruby has decided she doesn’t like wet food and for a couple of days I was worried about her because she wouldn’t eat – she’d demand food extremely loudly (again, amazing what a huge sound this tiny creature can make!) and then when I put it down, she’d turn away, and go on asking. She loves the little kitten biscuits and wolfs them down. I am trying her on different brands of wet food because it’s important for her to have that as well, but at least they are both drinking plenty of water – something all our previous kitties have never done, at least, not from a bowl in a civilised manner, but out of the drains etc. outside!!
They are at this moment careering around my feet, ambushing each other and wrestling with each other. Half an hour ago this is how they looked.
Ruby playing in the basket suspended from the cat tree my hubby made for them.
Crashed out asleep. They often sleep on top of each other.
I tend to do more videos than photos because I can usually only photograph them when they are asleep because otherwise they are moving too fast! Here is my favourite video of them.
All the videos are on previous posts on this blog, and also on my Youtube channel (link in sidebar).
One non-kitten thing I did manage to do this week was to make a video slide show of the mixed media mini-album I made in memory of my dad for my niece. It’s a project I’ve been meaning to do for ages.
I recently acquired an app for the iPad called LumaFusion, which is a powerful video editor and I can do most things on that that I can do on Final Cut Pro on the Mac. Very convenient as the iPad is also used as the video camera and there’s no transferring of video files to be done. More slide shows will follow, of other albums I’ve made since. They take a long time to edit, but they are fun to do. I’m planning to rig up the iPad over my desk so I can start videoing myself at work again.
Health Update
I’ve got an appointment with my surgeon tomorrow morning. When I saw him last (about 3 months ago), he booked me in for a CT scan of my abdomen to check whether my parastomal hernia had returned because it was “inconclusive.” It turned out that some fat had come through. Nice thought, esp. as I’ve now lost so much weight!! Anyway, he wrote me a letter after that, saying he recommended leaving well alone – at our last meeting he’d said he’d be reluctant to open me up and perform major surgery again unless it was absolutely necessary. Sutured parastomal hernia repairs have a 100% failure rate, and it rather looks as if it’s on the way to failure already (I had the operation on 1st Feb.) so I’m hoping it won’t fail and cause another obstruction, requiring another major operation as an emergency. What I really want is elective surgery for the insertion of some mesh around the stoma to reinforce the area, so hopefully he will do this when the hernia finally returns and before I get into difficulties with it. I don’t suppose he will have anything new to tell me tomorrow.
When I saw the oncologist after the CT scan result came back, she said there was no sign of cancer, but they should have scanned my chest as well (metastases from bowel cancer often appear in the lungs) so I had another scan. A case of the right hand not knowing what the left was up to? No cancer evident, and they are happy to see me as arranged in November, which will be the 2 year anniversary of my all-clear.
I’ve been a bit rough with my ME just lately but that’s probably from overdoing things, getting the kitchen sorted again after the new pantry was completed, and all the rushing around getting the kittens and getting them settled in (nice, though!). I’m resting when I can, and spending most of the time with the kittens. They tend to sleep all afternoon, having worn themselves out with their morning play session, and we all cuddle up together!
I did warn everybody not to expect any sense out of me once the kittens had arrived. All I can think about at the moment is kittens, kittens, kittens!!! They are so utterly adorable and we are spending as much time as possible with them, which of course means doing very little else – but at least I am managing to do lots of videos of them. This delightful time in their lives is so short and before we know it, we will have two mature cats, and we want to enjoy every minute of their sweet young lives with their vigorous play and endearing little ways.
For the first couple of days they were a little in awe of us, probably because we are so much bigger than they are, and they would run away if we got too close. However, this morning when I went in, I noticed a huge change. Ruby came running towards me, crying out to me! For most of the day when she hasn’t been occupied with playing with Lily, she has been trying to climb up onto my lap. I have spent a lot of time today cuddling her and she’s been purring her head off, and then sleeping in my arms, so soft and warm. She has really bonded with me! Lily is more distant with me but I think she is starting to bond with my hubby. It will be so nice if they will come to both of us, because I’ve had so many years of having to watch both our old kitties sitting with him and nobody with me!
Here are the videos I made today.
Catch the Birdie.
A neighbour met my hubby in the street a couple of days ago and gave him this feather wand tool and the tunnel. They have played with both these toys pretty constantly – they are a great success.
Feisty Play.
They had a quite manic play session earlier this evening! No wonder they are so tired afterwards and need a nice long sleep.
I did manage to do the ironing today and for most of the time they were asleep. I also managed to cook dinner! Still, I am going to have to start doing stuff again soon or nothing’s going to get done except kitty dazzling.
Lily and Ruby are getting much bolder and more adventurous with each passing day. They play so vigorously and then quite suddenly get overcome by tiredness and their little heads and eyelids droop, and they drop off into a deep sleep, usually one draped across the top of the other.
Lily seems better today and we think she is managing to pee OK. The vet said to minimise stress and she should settle down quickly and get over her initial mild cystitis. It certainly hasn’t stopped her from being extremely busy and active today with her sister! I did add to her stress briefly though, at lunch time when I was preparing their food, and stepped back onto her tiny paw – what a yell she gave out, and how terribly guilty I felt!! Kitties are so good though, and don’t bear a grudge, and it was soon forgotten (by her, at least!).
They are both eating very well, and drinking plenty of water, too – this is something we’ve never managed to persuade our previous kitties to do. They would all turn their noses up at a dish of water, preferring to drink rainwater and from other sources outside, whose cleanliness could not be guaranteed!
Lily has purred today. They are both sweet little purrers and the sound is quite delicious! Today we have also noticed the emergence of the most attractive little chirrups and squeaks they make when they are excited by their play. They have the sweetest little voices!
Fortunately they seem to be very much together as far as active and sleepy phases go, as they both enjoy playing together, and then sleeping together – they seem to tire at about the same rate. So we aren’t having one clamouring to play, while the other says “Leave me alone! I want to go to sleep!”
After their first night in the TV cabinet, last night they slept in the chair, and have had their daytime sleeps there, too. We bought them a snug little kitten bed with a cowl roof but they haven’t slept in there yet – my hubby suggested putting one of the incontinence pads in there, that we’d put in the cat carrier for their long drive from their previous home, which would have a recognisable smell, but so far all that has achieved is to give them something else to tug at and play with! I think it will end up in shreds all over the floor eventually!
Here’s a video from today, called “Wrestling Match.” Self-explanatory!
Video Editing
I have just acquired a truly brilliant app for the iPad – LumaFusion. As apps go, this was pretty expensive at £19.99 but a comparable video editor for the computer would cost considerably more. I already have Final Cut Pro X on the iMac and the MacBook (doesn’t run on Windows unfortunately) but for some reason this runs very slowly on the MacBook and I don’t want to spend hours sitting at the iMac in the studio as it’s very tiring. Discovering a video editing app for the iPad was great. It doesn’t have all the features of FCP by any means, but it’s pretty impressive.
I also discovered an excellent tutorial course called “The Epic Guide to LumaFusion” in the form of an e-book with video clips, by Eliot Fitzroy. This was a free download and I can’t imagine why because it’s chock full of useful information and a pretty comprehensive guide to the software.
I am gradually familiarising myself with it and producing some reasonable videos now. What’s so brilliant is that the iPad is both video camera and video editor all in one. My normal dedicated video camera will not transfer footage direct to the Mac and I have to download it to the Windows computer via a cable, and then convert the footage to a format FCP will recognise, which adds considerably to the work and the time involved, but with the iPad the footage is already on the device, and anything I want to add in the form of still photos or additional music/sound effects etc., can be acquired wirelessly. The iPad is so portable and easy, and I can work on it anywhere.
LumaFusion is still quite new, and additional features will be added a time goes on. I can’t find a way yet of capturing still images from the video footage or creating rolling titles, but these features could be in the pipeline. The choice of transitions is very limited but since I normally use simple cross-fades and dips (more fancy transitions can easily distract one from the footage itself) this isn’t a problem. Many of the features normally found on high-end video editors are present, such as key-framing, Ken Burns effect, colour correction, multiple video and audio tracks, picture-in-picture, titles, J&L cuts, etc. etc. There is a choice of destinations for sharing completed videos including Youtube, cloud storage and social media.
I am very happy to have discovered all this just in time for capturing the all-too short period of our kittens’ development. They are so much fun, and so desperately cute and adorable that I want to be filming every single moment of the day!!
I have recently bought a bracket to hold the iPad, with a standard tripod screw on it, and I am hoping to be able to rig this up in my studio over my main work area, but I am not sure yet if this will be feasible and how well it would work. If I want to edit the footage in Final Cut Pro, it will be a simple matter to transfer it wirelessly to the iMac.
Yesterday we had a great day out, spending the afternoon visiting Lytes Carey, a National Trust house in Somerset, after having lunch out. You can see pictures of this in my previous post here.
In the early evening we went to collect the kittens. We had been counting down the days till the great event, and then the hours and minutes! As we expected, they had grown quite a bit since we last saw them, and they were ready to go to their new home. We didn’t stay long because they hadn’t been fed for a while, in case they were sick in the car, and we had a long drive to do (it took us just over an hour and a half, better than the two hours I’d expected). Little Lily cried quite a bit in the car but Ruby was very quiet, and eventually they both settled down and even went to sleep for a while.
We brought them in, and opened the cat carrier in the flat sitting room. We have decided this is to be their nursery and playroom for the time being, until they are settled. Their food mat is in this room, and I have set up their litter tray in the kitchen, where we’ve also got their food stored for now. Eventually this will move into our utility room.
They were quite tentative and nervous when they left the carrier, and we allowed them to explore their new surroundings at their own pace and in their own way. It wasn’t long, though, before they got more confident, and started playing – we’d set up a few things for them to play with. I took quite a few video clips of them which I spent the rest of the evening compiling and this video is now on Youtube.
My hubby went in to see them before bed, and told me he couldn’t find them anywhere! He thought they must have got behind the fridge, but I found them inside the empty TV cabinet – my parents used to have video and DVD players in there, and there’s a smoked glass door that folds down in front. At the back of the cabinet is a hole for the cables, and they’d crept in through this! I got them out, telling them we’d got a nice comfy warm bed for them and the cabinet was a bit hard and uncomfortable, but they obviously wanted somewhere dark and enclosed, because my hubby said they were back there again when he went in in the morning!
Since then they have been sleeping on the mat by the door to the garden.
They play very vigorously, and then, like all kittens, they start to droop, and drop off to sleep very quickly!
Today they have been playing very busily and enjoying all the toys we’ve got out for them. My hubby came back with a tunnel and a wand toy that were given to him by a lady he met in the street! Here’s the video from today.
We’ve been a bit worried about Lily today, because she’s been doing a lot of digging in the litter tray but not producing anything, and crying quite a bit while trying. I suspected that she might be suffering from stress-induced cystitis, which is a common problem with cats. They had a pretty traumatic day yesterday, being taken away from their mother and siblings, and all their familiar people and surroundings where they’ve been since birth, and trundled along on a long car journey, and then finding themselves in a totally alien environment with people they don’t know. We had planned on taking them to the vet next week, to register them there and get their first inoculations, but we decided to take them this afternoon instead. The vet confirmed my suspicion and said that this is not usually infectious, and the treatment is normally a dose of an NSAID, but in view of Lily’s very young age, she was reluctant to do this because it could cause more problems than it solved. She advised keeping their stress to a minimum, and keeping a close eye on her, and if she hasn’t passed any urine in the next 24 hours, to bring her back, but she had every confidence that the problem would resolve itself. On examination she found her abdomen to be a little bit tender, but she didn’t have a fever and in every other way she was perfectly fine. She’s playing hard with her sister and is eating and drinking well. So we have decided not to allow any visitors for a few days, to let them settle in fully, and get used to their new surroundings. It’s very early days yet, anyway.
Everyone in the vet’s thought they were utterly adorable! We had a new vet who has just joined the practice, having just qualified, and she said she felt very honoured to be the first to meet our two gorgeous new babies! She said how pretty they were and how cute!
Because Lily isn’t quite 100%, the vet said she wouldn’t do their inoculations today, but all being well, she should be fine by early next week, and we can take them in then, as originally planned.
The lady we got them from said that they hadn’t purred yet and that the boys were usually faster at this than the girls. So it was a lovely surprise this afternoon when I was lying on the floor to be at their level (which my hubby said was a lot less intimidating for them that us great humans towering over them!) and they both came up close, and I was stroking them gently and talking softly to them, and Ruby began to purr! The sweetest little sound! She touched her nose to mine as well. Lily hasn’t purred yet.
Today it seems that Ruby is more forward than Lily, but it may be because Lily is feeling a little under the weather. This doesn’t seem to have stopped her enjoying herself with her new toys, though!
They seem more relaxed today, but they still jump at unexpected noises, even fairly quiet ones, and they run away from us if we try to catch them, so on my hubby’s advice we are trying not to do this too much, but letting them come to us, or getting down to their level.
I have spent the afternoon in the room with them, working on my photos, blog and videos, so that I can enjoy watching them, and for them to get more used to me. They have spent quite a lot of that time asleep – they do get very tired very quickly with all that vigorous playing, and anyway cats of all ages do sleep such a lot! It’s also given me a chance for a bit of a rest after our very busy day yesterday.
It looks very much as if we have found two kittens, who will be ready to leave their mum in about a month’s time. To prepare for their arrival, we have been ordering a few things, and my hubby has begun work on some better defences to keep them in the garden.
Today the kitty tree I bought from Ebay arrived, in a heavy box.
Unboxing
All the parts laid out in order.
They had provided everything exactly as set out in the instructions with the exact number of screws etc. They also provided an Allen key to screw it all together. I separated the different sized screws into containers before I began, to make the assembly easier.
Assembling
When attaching the brackets onto the back of the ladder, I made the mistake of tightening the screws too much. I had to loosen them when assembling the ladder to the tree in order to make it easier to line it up correctly. It was a simple matter to tighten them up again once the ladder was in the correct position.
At this point I realised that I had inadvertently used the single medium-length screw instead of one of the long ones, so I had to start removing screws until I found it! Fortunately this didn’t take long. Using a longer one in its place would not have worked, because it would have poked through the bottom of the upper box.
The completed cat tree
I can’t believe this whole thing came out of that cardboard box! My hubby is going to make the box into a base for a kitty castle for them to play in. He has made one of these for each generation of kittens we have had – a series of cardboard boxes glued and taped together, with lots of holes cut in them so the kittens can chase each other through the different levels, and poke their paws through. This provides endless hours of entertainment for kitties and humans alike!
The construction of the kitty tree is heavy and substantial and the quality excellent. If anyone is thinking of getting a tree for their kitties I would recommend getting one from Ebay as I paid about half what I would have done had I bought one of this size from a pet shop. This particular one is by Purlove, and they also make a beige-coloured one. The assembly wasn’t difficult and the whole thing took me about 1 1/2 hours to complete – I made one or two mistakes but these were quickly remedied.
I am pleased that it looks quite stylish and will fit in any room. The fur fabric covering the pieces is extremely soft and luxurious, and we both like the dark grey colour, which will also co-ordinate very nicely with our kittens who will be silver tabby! I can’t wait to see them playing on it.
The kitty tree is taller than I am! It is heavy and not likely to get tipped over when being played on. It has lots of interesting things for kitties – different levels, lots of scratching posts – these pillars are wrapped with rough rope – places to hide, and platforms to sit on, nice and high up, where all kitties like to be, and three hanging toy mice for them to play with. There’s also a little ladder to take them between two of the levels, and there are plenty of convenient and interesting features to enable them to play well together on it. At the bottom is an arch made of stuff like bottle brush – they will enjoy going through this and getting an automatic grooming! The tree is also large enough to accommodate them when they are fully grown. I am hoping that having this nice tall tree will discourage them from constantly leaping up on things we don’t want them on.
Now the only thing missing is a pair of kittens to play on it!
