read write run

Miss Puss does look as if she’s up to something a bit, uh, kinky in this photo. Actually, her only intention here is to beat the stuffing out of her toy. Despite being the sweetest-looking little kitty-cat with soft fur and also being very tiny, she is the roughest, toughest cat with the baddest attitude I think I’ve ever had. I think it’s probably because she was a street kitten. Brought up in the wilds of Bega and having to take care of herself, she learned to scratch and swipe with the best of them.

She is also (to my dismay) the most prolific hunter I’ve ever owned. Fortunately we have a cat bib, which is working brilliantly. Without the bib she was known to catch up to 2 birds a day. With the bib on, (and she’s had to wear it whenever she’s outdoors for weeks now) she has only caught one bird. She knows she’s not allowed outside without her bib. Poss’s theory about Miss Puss and her hunting skills is that cats who have to hunt for a living (as we belive Miss Puss once did) have the added edge of desperation, and will leap at prey with their mouths open go in GO IN! I need food!

Miss Puss’s small size would also attest to the resurgence in a somewhat Lamarckian field of study which seems to indicate that some acquired traits can be handed down from generation to generation. The study was done in the Netherlands where a group of pregnant women who were starved during an incident in WWII gave birth. Their children were (understandably) of low birth weight because of the hard times the mothers had been through. The thing is, in the 1960s, when these daughters were having children, they also were of low birth weight. And then in the 80s, the same thing happened again with the grandchildren of the original low birthweight daughters. I’m not sure what happened in the following generation, they never got to that in the radio show I was listening to (and I can’t remember if it was The Science Show or The Health Report on ABC Radio Australia) but it was very interesting.

More cheek is the Fat Cat who has two favourite places to sleep: clean laundry and anywhere black. As you can see, he is more of a white cat with some ginger than a ginger cat with white on him. He’s a classic A-spectrum cat with lush fur and a generous girth and he has RADAR whenever there’s clean laundry about. Okay, I know it’s partly my laziness. First of all: I don’t iron. I really don’t. I don’t mean “I hardly ever iron” or “I only iron once a week” or “I only iron when I need to” I mean I just don’t. My theory is that by the time I’ve worn something in the car to wherever I’m going, it will be full of creases anyway, so who’s going to know? Okay. I know. There are some things that you can tell, but I just don’t care all that much. I don’t notice it. I figure it’s enough that it’s clean.

So anyway, when I bring a load of laundry in off the line, I generally dump it on the bed. This way I will be forced to put it away before I can sleep (because I couldn’t stand to have one thing on the bed, not even a sock. It would drive me nuts.) Maybe the Fat Cat can smell the fresh breeze and warm sunshine in clean laundry and that’s what brings him to come and sleep on it. I don’t blame him. I love the smell of it, too.

Conversely, the Fat Cat’s mortal enemy, Mr Black, loves to sleep on white stuff. Is this some sort of cat-conspiracy, that cats must only shed their fur on contrasting colours? I am currently knitting a free-range baby blankie (it’s free-range because I’m not sure who it’s intended for. It was originally going to be for one of Beloved’s workmates, but she’s gone and had her baby and I didn’t get it finished. So I’ll just have a spare). This blankie is a mostly pinkish pastels with a second ball of dark pink for contrast. You can imagine how great that looks, covered in cat fur. Fortunately my theory with baby blankies is that they should be made of bright, colourful, easy-to-wash acrylics, because the last thing any new parent needs is to be worried about hand-washing some special blankie that’s made of pure virgin lambswool. I’ll give this one a wash when it’s finished and hopefully nobody will be any the wiser (sssh).

This is my third cheeky thing of the day. Not just cheeky but ironic. A spider that builds its web on the open mouth of a pitcher plant, thus depriving the poor plant. Very cheeky, Mr Spider.

I do like my carnivorous plants. I have a collection of Venus Fly Traps on the kitchen window sill and I rotate them to the verandah outside the bedroom when they start to look a bit tired or go into their dormancy. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes they don’t. I’m always delighted when they do. As a kid I regularly bought and killed Venus Fly traps. although perhaps if I’d known better I might have just left them for a year and they might have come back.

I only keep the pitcher plants outdoors. They don’t seem to enjoy it at all inside. I have some short, fat ones like the one in the picture, and some long, skinny ones. One of the long skinnies made a flower at the start of summer. That flower is still there. I’m quite amazed with its longevity. The long skinnies have also caught a lot of stuff over the summer. Not sure what because it’s hard to see down their long, skinny necks, but I’m told they’re partial to European wasps, so that’s fine with me.

I also have some Sundews on the verandah. I never bought them, they’ve just hitched along with the Venus Fly Traps and been quite happy to live alongside. They have long leaves, different from the round leafed little Droseras that I sometimes find in my back yard. I am tempted to dig some of the little native ones up and add them to my collection. There’s something cute about carnivorous plants. They have a personality. They don’t even seem to mind when cheeky spiders do them out of a meal. Maybe they have that planty patience, maybe they know that if they wait long enough, that spider will someday slip to where no web can save it.