The idea for this blog would be that I would document getting to know my new cats, Cooper and Louis. I do kind of wish I had kept up with that, but I guess it's been a bit easier to tweet about them and add photos and so on to Facebook, rather than find time to write detailed blog posts. But I don't want to abandon the blog altogether, so here's a little update on my lovely boy cats.
I've called this post Cats on the Move because in just under two weeks we will be moving from the flat in Ashfield to a house in South Windsor. I guess it's what they call a tree change. Here's the house:
Ain't it pretty? It was built in the 1870s. There's a large yard—my sister Alison says the boy are the most spoiled cats in Sydney because I have bought them a house. And it's kind of true.I've been in my flat in Ashfield for 11 years—the longest I've lived anywhere. It's been a great place to live in many ways. The rooms are very generous in size, Ashfield is a great central and affordable location (or it was!) and I've been very happy here. I am, at heart, an inner west chick.
When I moved in my lovely old cat Bridie was in relatively quiet middle age (about 9 years old). She enjoyed going out into the garden at the front of the block but wasn't a wanderer and being a fairly cautious girl (who never EVER went near the road) stayed very close to home. As she got older, she stopped going out much past the verandah and then eventually was completely content to be an indoors elderly lady cat.
My desire to buy a house pre-dated losing Bridie and adopting the boys—I'd always have preferred a house but couldn't afford one in the city. (Truth is I've never really got over the disappointment of losing my brief marital home in Marrickville, a lovely Federation/WWI period semi*, but I've always loved old houses and was determined that one day I would be able to have such a home again.)
I started half-heartedly looking at houses in suburbs like Auburn a few years ago—we lived in (a big Federation house) in Auburn when I was a kid, and it's a more affordable part of Sydney than the inner west—but anything in my price range needed more work than I wanted to do. Then I started work in Blacktown on the Western Sydney Young People's Literature Project and started looking in the lower Blue Mountains, as well as back around Auburn. Then last year, I went to a Girls Own listserve dinner at a period home in South Windsor and turned my eye in that direction.
Then I stopped looking altogether, distracted by work and Bridie's last few months and overseas travel.
And then I got Foxtel. And my body corporate started threatening me with legal action over the satellite dish. (Yes, really.) And then came The Boys.
[Time for a kitteh pic!]
Louis! How rude!
Having lived with an always shy and timid cat like Bridie as long as I had, I completely forgotten what it was like to have two very energetic young cats—or maybe I never really experienced it as much as I might have, because when Bridie was a pup, she was certainly energetic and had a lovely cat friend from next door, Timmy, who she loved to play with, but they were outside cats from the start (not at night, of course) and played outside, leaving my china and glassware largely unscathed. (Indeed, there was a patch of dirt under a camphor laurel tree we called the "boxing ring" because they played roughhouse there and destroyed whatever grass may have been struggling to life in the shade.)I utterly misunderestimated what it would be like to have two young boy cats cooped (excuse pun) up in a flat, no matter how generous-sized the rooms. I've posted before about the broken vase and the play fights and the kitteh escapes and Cooper's first supervised outdoor visits (in harness) with Little Louis crying his little heart out from the windowsill inside. (Not to mention both cats UNSUPERVISED escapes!) And I do think many cats are happiest when they can be outside, although I also think they very much need to be kept inside at night.
Over the months, I gradually let them out more and more into the garden and grounds of the flat, but rarely letting them out when I am not at home. At least, rarely on purpose. Because it's a busy street, and its hard to be sure how much road sense they have. (Cooper, I think is OK, Louis—hard to know. I've seen him stroll out onto the road at least once, although I think to be fair, because I was parked in the car and he knew I was there.)
But they LOVE being outside and Louis, it turns out, is a total Houdini. He has paws like a chimpanzee (if chimps have paws rather than hands) and has been able to work out not only how to slide the windows open but how to jig open the catches and, latterly, how to move the dowl rods placed strategically (if not entirely effectively) to keep the windows from sliding open.
I'll come back to Louis's escapology shortly. Suffice for now to say that the more he got used to being outside the more he has been desperate to be outside—and Cooper, who has from the first clearly been used to be outside (and is utterly trustworthy even on this busy street) has been very happy to follow his smaller adopted brother into the Big Out. (He's not, as it turns out, actually as smart as Louis about opening the windows, and when Liddle Louis was liddler, and only opened them enough for himself to get out, Cooper would remain stuck inside.)
So anyway, this quite reasonable desire to be able to be outside in the elements and run around like the energetic young things they are, combined with their increasingly (as Louis has got bigger) aggressive play fights** (poor Cooper is often now the one mewing "Uncle"—or more correctly, quite seriously growling and hissing "rack off upstart!") made me start to seriously think it was time to have a house. (That, and my desire to be able to watch whatever the hell I wanted to on the TV without asking Matron, aka the body corp, for permission.) And more to the point, a garden on a street where they would be safe.
And so I set up a bunch of Domain alerts, found an agent to sell my flat, and started in earnest in the real estate market.
I can't tell you how many weekends this year have been given over to Open Houses—kissing frogs, and toads, and feeling cheerful and feeling despondent and wondering where would I eventually live. My friend and neighbour Ros sold her flat in our block and bought her dream semi in Croydon and I still didn't know where I'd be going. Eventually I decided that where I would live (Sydney suburbs? Blue Mountains? The Hawkesbury?) would depend on falling in love with a house.
And then the email with sale notice for The House you have already seen appeared in my inbox and I more or less (to cut a stupidly long post short) bought it the day I saw it—only I hadn't sold.
And then will cut this entirely short and say, yes, I did (eventually, after 3 weeks that felt like an eternity) sell this lovely flat in Ashfield where I have indeed been very settled and happy (although apparently I missed the Great Inner West Real Estate Bubble by about 3 weeks!)—this flat that has been my home for longer than anywhere I have ever lived in all my 46 years—and who knew (or who remembered) how STRESSFUL buying and selling real estate is (especially when you do it in that order).
So now, in 1 week, me and the boys are leaving the delights and conveniences of the inner west (and believe me, what with Gleebooks moving in and all the rest, I am SHOCKINGLY going to miss the inner west. The boys, not so much) for the 900 square metres and 3 bedrooms plus studio of Our New Home.
And yet, a few days ago, I thought it was just going to be me and Cooper. Which brings me back to Louis the Escapologist! Sometime after 3.30 am and 5.30pm last Tuesday (10 August) Louis, who is actually not so Liddle any more, disappeared. Escaped and disappeared—while I was at the hospital with my father, who has had a bad run with his health this year.
Escaped, opened the last vulnerable window in the flat (he'd been worrying away at it for weeks) and could not be found anywhere. For more than a day and a half.
Yes, Cooper followed out the window too, but he was waiting for me when I got home. Louis—Utterly Vanished. I thought he was dead or catnapped or worse. (Is there worse?) He was gone for about 40 hours. Who knows where he was. All these months and I had tried so hard to keep my boys safe, and just 2 weeks before we move into our lovely house and garden, the Liddle One vanishes.
It's safe to say I was pretty upset—compounded by worrying about my dad and losing sleep. Oh, but what a champion Cooper turned out to be! I actually think he sekritly (or not so sekritly) liked being (temporarily) an Only Cat, and was full of cuddles and love—in between me heading out every hour or so to look for Lou. I think our animals know when we're upset—Cooper certainly came into his own while I was fretting over Missing Lou.
[AMENDED TO ADD: Gosh I'm a twit—I forgot the most important bit. Louis did, of course, come home, the following afternoon. My kind neighbour Suzanne, who lives down the back of our block with Mr Whiskers and Diddle, found him waiting for me when she got home from school (she's an English teacher, just as I was). She slung him in her car to stop him running away again and called me—I was already on my way home from work with a stack of "Help Me Find Louis" posters, which ended up in the recycling!]
So that's a very long-winded trawl through my real estate shenanigans of the past few months. But what you REALLY want to know is, how have my boys turned out over the past 8 months we've been getting to know each other?
Well, let me start with Louis. Louis is very uncomplicated. He's possibly the happiest cat I've ever known. He's sunshine in a fur coat. He's sweet and funny and VERY smart. Everyone knows Louis. Well, everyone knows Cooper, too, from their outside forays, but when Louis went missing last week and I was an over-tired weeping mess looking for him, all my neighbours said things along the lines of, "Oh don't worry about Louis, he's a very really clever cat, he'll come home!" or "Oh, don't worry, he's so friendly, someone's probably taken him in" (did I mention it was a very cold and wet night?). I think they were right on both counts.
Louis doesn't understand getting into trouble. He's so confident, so sure of himself, that on the odd occasion when I have had reason to really get furious with him (like the night of the Allen and Unwin 20th Anniversary party, when he REFUSED to come home and I got back at midnight to find him stalking a possum that was about twice his size and weight and would have disemboweled him in a single sharp-clawed stroke) he gets so confused and hidey that it upsets me even more.
(I don't beat him or anything of course, although he does sometimes get a firm grip on the scruff while being given a serious talking to—although funny story about the guys who sold my flat. The evening they came over to discuss being my agent, Louis started scratching his claws on the sofa and as they were sitting right near him, I said "Belt him for me, would you?" and they looked so SHOCKED and then both simultaneously kind of went "cootchy-ooh!" at him that I immediately knew I'd let them sell the flat for me.)
He squeaks when I pick him up. He has the worst case of stinky-cat-breath. He has extremely sharp claws and teeth. He likes to come in for a cuddle, try and open the bedroom window AND wake me up like Simon's cat just about every morning. (At night, when he wants a lap, he tenderly places his paw on my leg. Melt.)
Being swooped at by angry noisy miners is his favourite thing in the world, after climbing trees outrageously too tall for him (usually in pursuit of noisy miners). He loves to play fight with Cooper (as afore-mentioned), loves to chase toy mice and balls and especially this toy brought for him by my friend Laura all the way from Canada.
He loves people. He is the one who will from time to time initiate a cuddle and a lick with Cooper, never the other way around. The first time I took them to the vet, and put Cooper in the cage to come home (he HATED the vet), Louis jumped in to be with him.
Cooper does not "do" the vet.
He's a total sweetheart. He's also the nortiest cat on the planet. What's not to love?
Little Louis. Little love.
And what's not to love about Cooper? Mr Cooper-Grumpy Pants, I call him sometimes, because he really can be, but as was evidenced the night Louis went missing, I think he really desperately wants to be loved, he's just not as trusting or anywhere near as confident as Louis. But while he's usually resitant to being picked up (he firmly places his lovely pristine white paws on my chin and pushes away) he loves a lap and to curl up on the couch with you when you're watching TV (or weeping over a missing kitteh). When Louis is around, he will take a back seat, no matter how I encourage him. Wherever he came from (and you might remember he apparently came from a House of Many Cats) because he continues to defer a little to Louis, although he's much better at asserting himself (even as I try to feed him first and do all those things to encourage a more Top Cat status).
He will still shy away when I go to give him a good old head scratch and it worries me that he is still not as comfortable with me as I'd have hoped by now. But he's also extremely loud-purry and chatty and certainly lets me know when he wants to be fed. Which is usually as soon as the sun comes up. Both of them are fussy-ish about food, liking the gravy on various Whiskas varieties but the meat, not so much. Louis loves proper Science Diet biscuits, which Coop only eats under sufferance—and frequently then throws up, partly I think because being such a handsome long-haired boy he suffers furballs that Louis just doesn't.
I sometimes watch the boys in the garden out the front of my flat, and it seems to me that Cooper sometimes actually copies Louis. Louis was climbing far too high up the gum trees in the front yard from his first days out there—Cooper from time to time flings himself about half way up as Louis gets and I want to CHEER him. He's not physically confident. (Know the feeling!) He baulks at jumping back up and into the flat through the security bars on the windows, and yet he's entirely capable of doing so. He's more cautious about jumping the fence into the building next door (the one with all the lavender bushes both the boys love hanging out in) and yet again he can leap the 5 foot section of the fence as easily as anything when he wants to. And he can RUN, so fast—it's a joy to watch.
He's my handsome checkerboard cat. He has the fluffiest tail and whiskers to die for:
Also, check out these paws! He's FASTIDIOUS about his grooming.
He is much photographed because he is so very, very handsome.
I really love Cooper. I worry about him, and he frustrates me because he swings madly between aloof mistrust and sweet-natured affection. He's a big bundle of a boy, lovely to cuddle, but not always willing. (Let us never speak of the weeing in the bed incident of, lo, last night...) (And yet, as I said, he loves a lap.) The first time I picked him up at the RSPCA, He stretched his arms around my neck and I melted. I thought bringing Louis home with him would be lovely for both of them, and in many ways it is, but when Louis disappeared last week it was also pretty clear that maybe Cooper was relieved to be away from that House of Too Many Cats and would have preferred the opportunity to be an Only Cat, a Top Cat, for a change.
What I am hoping for is that when we move to our new house, and the boys have this HUGE yard to play in, and will be allowed to stay outside ALL DAY while I am at work, that each of my lovely boys will utterly come into his own, and Cooper especially will stop being the backseat boy and will find his own place(s) in the sun.
We will keep you posted.
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* This link takes you to the other half of the semi I used to own with my ex, which sold recently. It's been much renovated and extended but it gives you an idea of what or house was like and what it could have been like in time.
**I honestly don't know how much this is to do with them being boy cats—they are both desexed—and how much it is to do with personality.
