Breaking news! William has a blog!

Sweet William has finally (after a year!) settled in at Grandma's house. And now, he is finding the time to write about his experiences:

wiremus feles philosomus

If you miss Sweet William (the Conqueror) as much as we do, be sure to go and leave him a comment!  You may not be aware, but William is actually an excellent agony aunt/clairvoyant - so if you have a problem, maybe he can help you solve it?

Care instructions vis a vis apocalypse (snow)

 
Dear Foster Mother

It has come to my attention that Everything is about to End.
The very clouds themselves are falling from the sky and have been scattered across the earth.
There can only be one possible explanation for this.

The Great Dog in the Sky has been tearing apart the Furniture of the World.  

Obviously, we are all going to die.
Soon, I mean.
Like, not right away.
Well - at least - I'm not dead yet.

So I think you ought to realise that I don't intend for my last few days on this mortal coil to have to be uncomfortable.

For me.

It pains me to say it, but, you know that thing that happened that time? 
On your bed?
It wasn't me:

I was set up!  Seriously?  She thinks she's people.

But look - dogs like it in the snow. 

 Just chuck her outside. I would. 

Sometimes, back when I lived with my real parents (before they callously abandoned me here - bitches) water would fall inexplicably from the sky.

And when that happened, we used to sit inside together by the fire and watch nature documentaries about birds while they fed me strips of bacon by hand.

 Let's do that!  It'll be fun.

Oh, and you know that time with the rat? 
I don't know why you got so upset.
My real parents used to love it when I brought bits of dead things into their bed for them.
Next time I'll make sure it's still alive.
I understand - you probably just wanted to kill it yourself.

Oh - and we'll have a better chance of surviving the apocalypse - or at least enjoying the last few days of existence together if you'll just get rid of the other cats.

Just send them to the market.

Sweet.

If you run up to the supermarket now you can probably get us enough bacon to last us through until the end of days.
I'll stay here and keep the fire going with the awesome power of my laser beam eyes.

Just make sure the boy stays away from the bacon - otherwise he'll have to go too. 

There's not going to be enough for both of us, kid.

I suppose he can stay if he brings in the firewood. 

And KEEPS AWAY FROM MY BACON.

Okay bye!

Sweet William and the Nana

The great thing about pets is that they are something and someone to look after.  In Vietnam we have decided not to get another pet, because we're not sure how long we're going to be here, and also because Vietnam is just about the worst place in the world to import animals to New Zealand from. If we ever went home again with a Vietnamese dog or cat, the poor animal would need to endure a very long quarantine period, and that just doesn't seem fair.

 William's greatest day - the day he brought home a frankfurter.

William really did bring dead animals life to our home, and we miss having him around.  He mostly has settled in well at my mother's place - after those Great Escapes of the early days.  But there is one, quite significant problem.

We got William as a kitten from a state house not far from our flat.  There were a pile of kittens in the window, and I knocked on the door and asked if they wanted to get rid of one.  The people in that house thrust him at me.  The woman said to me "It's best if you get a boy one.  The girls just get more and more babies," as if the creation of kittens was a mysterious process.

Little William stunk. He is a greyish brown tabby, with a white front and paws.  His back legs were a sort of pale ginger colour.  It took me ages to figure out why he was still so smelly - even after a couple of days in the new house.  That ginger fur on his back legs was not ginger at all.  It was urine stained.  All the cats at the house he came from home were not properly litter trained, and Baby Bingle had clearly been walking around a lot in puddles of wee.

That cat was the most difficult animal to train to use a litterbox. And once he got big enough to jump on the bed, he started to wee on the bed.  It was a disaster!  It was so bad, we ended up having to replace the mattress and I was at my wits end. I researched online frantically, and found lots of helpful advice, about keeping clean litter trays, and trying different mixes of cat litter.  One site told me that cats often pee on their owner's clothes or bedding when they are nervous or afraid, or just plain unsettled - because it comforts them to mix their scent with ours.  Which helped explain the behaviour (William was a very nervous cat) but not to solve the problem!

Eventually, I noticed that he kept on going on piles of discarded newspaper when I had it around.  And I finally realised that newspaper is probably what the people in his first house would have put down for the cats to go on - if they used anything at all.  And at last we found the perfect litter tray recipe for William - a few sheets of newspaper, plus a couple of tablespoonsful of cat litter.  Changed after EVERY use.  We stopped calling it a litter tray and started calling it a nappy.  And when he was finally big enough and brave enough to go outdoors on his own we only needed the litter tray for emergencies. Like rain.  Scary, scary, rain.

I would just like to state at this point that my mother KNEW EVERY POINT of this troubled history when she agreed to take William on.  I had called her regularly throughout the years to ask her advice.  My mother was convinced that I was the problem, not the cat.  And that she - as someone who had raised cats all her life - would be IMMUNE to William and his idiosyncrasies.  HAHAHAHAAHAHHA!

Guess who has had to replace a good number of cushions!

You might think it mean of me to laugh, but she was all, "You're spoiling him. You wouldn't have any problems if you didn't treat him like a baby.  Blah blah I'm perfect and blah blah blah YOU SUCK and blah blah blah blah blah."


HAHAHAHAHAHA!  Just wait till we have real children, Mummy!  We're going to send them for holidays at Grandma's!

Poor William.  A few weeks ago Mum told me he'd been banished to outdoors altogether. But my little brother was sneaking him in for cuddles. And clearly he's back in the good books now.  My Nana has been visiting my mother for the last couple of weeks, and Mum sent me this photo:

Sweet William and the Nana. Smooching it up.

Apparently he's been 'smoochy' lately.  And was on his best behaviour for Nana's visit. Quite obviously he's out of coventry. We miss him.

One and a half more sleeps

We have two more days left in Godzone. 
It is now very early on Monday morning.  I am awake but no one else is.

The first item on today's agenda is literally herding cats.  They all need to be rounded up and boxed and driven to the cattery.  We are planning on a breakfast time ambush. There are four of us and three of them.  So I figure that it will be one grownup per pussy cat and maybe we can get Oliver to hold the doors of the cages open. William is really good at non-passive resistance when it comes to cat-cages.  He does that thing where three legs are rigidly gripping the perimeter of the opening and the fourth is aiming directly for your eyeball, claws extended.

The afternoon will be dedicated to banking, printing tickets and the Final Pack.

Tomorrow is the drive up to Auckland, dumping the dog on the way and sending everybody off on their flights.  Ours is at 8:30 am on Wednesday. 

Bella was so pleased with herself.

Last night I called my mother to give her an update on progress.

"How are you?" I asked.

"Not good." Was her reply. William had been missing since Sunday night.

William is not a cat who has ever shown any tendency to run away much before. He's a hider. I thought I had lost him as a kitten - certain he'd run away - to eventually find him rolled into a tight little ball on a shelf in my wardrobe. When I finally found him, and tearfully reached out to him - he hissed at me with all the venom his little milk-teeth could muster.

His tactic with dogs, vacuum-cleaners, the ironing-board, visitors, amplifiers and all other scary things has always been to dive for under the bed and stay there until either the coast is clear or he has been forcibly evicted.

So I was pretty certain that he wouldn't be lost, but that he would have been hiding, and watching everyone call for him like the big ol' scaredy-cat he is.

I arrived in Hamilton at about 10pm. We had a cup of coffee, armed ourselves with torches and headed out for the bushes. Mum and Oliver had already scoured the neighbourhood every night and morning for 3 days, so they weren't hopeful. Mum had knocked on all the neighbour's doors and distributed fliers and nobody had seen him. One neighbour had said that he had seen William chasing off a big burmese, and then run off himself - on Sunday.

It took all of 5 minutes, really. As soon as he heard my voice calling for him he came yowling behind me, with Bella in hot pursuit. Bella, my Grandmother's cat, considers herself the rightful owner of the Hamilton house. Bella was NOT HAPPY about William having emerged again, when she had been working so hard these last 3 days to keep him OUT of her house.

She saw us coming and started dancing on the street - as if to say - "Look, I chased that horrible other cat away. Aren't I good?"

I scooped William up and carried him the 3 doors down the street back to the house. Jess, the dreaded Doggie gave us a bit of a rush at the gate, and William in his panic scraped my decolletage (to put it politely) to pieces.

Once he was back inside Bingle was perfectly happy again. And hungry. Smoke is of course delighted to have his playmate back.

Who needs sleep anyway?

It has been a week without William.  Martin says he is sleeping MUCH better. That will be because every night for the last three years he has been woken up in one way or another by the cat.  Either because the cat wants out, or because the cat wants to play, or to have something to eat, or just because the cat was lonely. 

Before we moved to Pt Chev we used to often get early morning deliveries from William - of little animals, or parts of little animals.  Dead or alive.  But the hunting grounds at the beach have not been so fertile, for some reason - lucky for us.  I wonder how he'll get on in Hamilton - there are lots of birdies in that big old oak tree.

I am sleeping badly, though.  It is, I suppose, the anxiety of moving.  I'm very grouchy all the time when I'm awake, and when I sleep I have anxious dreams.  Silly really - because it's all going quite well, actually.

We have flight bookings almost confirmed - Dec 15th.  We have the packers organised - they are coming next Friday, Nov 5th.  The new tenants in the flat actually WANT us to leave stuff behind for them, and have even given us some money for it.  Bless them.  I have paid all the bills - including the FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS of parking tickets I didn't even know I had until I got the Court Fines the other day in the post.  That'll be the last time I'm ever tardy about getting my registration renewed. William is rehoused. We have LOTS of undies (hooray for Bendon sales!). Most of the major worries are taken care of.

Outstanding worries:

• We need to get confirmation of no criminal records from the Ministry of Justice, and then get them authenticated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.  
• We have to get academic records notarised and authenticated.  A lawyer friend says she can do the notarising. Problem is, a couple of years ago, Martin accidentally disposed of my degrees, which were in a poster roll. So I am in the process of requesting letters from the universities confirming that I am, in fact educated.
• Martin's Passport - Martin accidentally disposed of his passport about a month ago.  (Notice a pattern here? Also, this morning I was mad at him because I think he accidentally threw away my shoe.) So we are waiting for the new one to arrive. Martin's passport is needed for EVERYTHING - flight bookings, visa, shipping - EVERYTHING.  Hopefully it will arrive in the next few days.
• Medical - we need to go and get vaccinated for, probably, every disgusting thing on the earth.  Despite being told several times by everyone to do this, we still have not begun the process.
• Sell the car. I have never sold a car. Am counting on Martin's extensive car-worldly family to help with this one.
• Work.  I'm really hating being a Dead Woman Walking.  There's not much longer to go, I keep telling myself. 26 Nov = last day. Martin finishes a week ahead of that on Nov 19th.

But, hey.  Look at this:

http://www.timflach.com/

Neat, huh?

Just because it has a KFC, doesn't mean it's good.

As we were driving through Huntly Martin said: "It's sounds like he's saying 'no'".

"Naaooo"
"Naaaoooo"
"No"
"No"
"NOOO!"
"Nooooaaa"

Ten minutes before Huntly, the cries had suddenly gotten a lot louder.  Martin turned around to check - and: "Oh my god!  He's out! Stop the car! He's out!".

So I pulled over.

We had originally wedged the cage on the floor between the passenger seat and the back seat - which seemed like the safest place. When I turned around to look, William was three quarters of hte way out of the box, with the front grill gaping open, and screaming at us. 

2 minutes later he had escaped a second time, so we had to rethink.  For the remainder of the journey Martin balanced the cage on his lap, while I drove as slowly as I dared in the holiday weekend traffic.

Apart from the vehement protests at the misery which is the drive through Huntly, William did actually calm down quite a bit after that. 

At Grandma's house, he quickly found himself a hidey-hole and calmed down.  I forgot to take any pictures, of course, so maybe my mother can send some through and I'll upload them (hint).  Grandma's kitten Smoke desperately wanted to play with William, Bella was pissed off about the whole thing, and Jess was excited about having a new baby and on her best submissive behaviour. 

When I called after the second night to see how he'd coped, Grandma said: "You never told me William was so good at playing ping pong at 3 o'clock in the morning."  And then this text the next day:

Bella is watching tv jess and smoke are curled up at my feet and William is on my knee they have me trapped

I think he'll be fine.

Sweet William (Wees Bum)

He knows.


The worst part about that is, even though he knows, he doesn't really know how bad it actually is.


William has been Mister Snuggles all week. He is glued to us. He has always had this endearing character trait, of preferring to be equidistant between us at all times. For the last three nights he has planted himself firmly in the middle of the bed between us, and stayed there all night. He gets up to go to the kitchen for a snack when one of us gets up. And then he comes back to bed.


Occasionally he forgets, and plays with his ball for a bit, or chews Martin's shoelaces. But then he comes back. He sits on the pillows. He claws the couch. And he looks at us with this mournful little face.


And then this morning - he hid. Under the bed, not even making eye contact when we shoved our heads down there to find him. And brutally yank him out, and turf him onto the street with a strong admonishment to POO.


Because tonight is the night of worst drive to Hamilton I have ever had to make. We will be prepared: wet wipes, rubber gloves, plastic bags, old towels. The litter box, the toys, a cushion, the carpet squares, a tshirt his Daddy has worn to snuggle into when the dreaded DOGGIE is looking at him.



Poor little Bungle.