Hey everyone it is finally BLACK FRIDAY though you could be forgiven for thinking it was last Friday or any given day between now and then. Retailers, Black Friday is not a thing in Australia nor will we ever accept it being a thing, and we are all studiously ignoring your many many emails about it, kthx. And it is exceptionally bad taste given the bushfires raging at the moment. There, my annual Black Friday rant is over. NEXT!

Watching: Still stuck on NYPD Blue.. Sipowicz I just can’t quit you. But in between I watched The Crown (fantastic) – The Knight Before Christmas (cheesy but still funny and worth the watch) – we are watching the final season of Mr Robot – Take That released their most recent concert that I went to see in the cinema earlier in the year LOVED IT – can’t stop watching Below Deck – and some truly terrible television AKA 90 Day Fiancé.

Listening: to my art studio playlist and playing one Take That song over and over – Everlasting.

Mourning: The recent loss of Bob which reminded me very much of our loss of Grumpy. Despite the cuckoo kitten and Happy entertaining us greatly this loss is still very much felt by us.

Importing: All the brooches to sell at the markets. :)

Eating: Mini cupcakes. Greatly loving to bake at the moment.

Hanging: out in the delicate nirvana with the kitties. Yes there are two kitties in this photo, can you spot the second one?

Playing: soccer with Cuckoo who appears to be a natural.

Chilling: with Cuckoo and Carter.

Her Royal Highness descended upon our humble abode with a freshly shaved belly and small shaved spot on her front leg from her desexing operation. What an impression she has made here already. After a time of great sadness, she is making us laugh again. She is also helping us to remember all the happy times we had with Grumpy when she was a kitten many years ago.

She is mostly black, with one tiny white patch on her chest, and some white on her belly which is currently growing back. She does have some tabby-style stripes which you can see in certain lighting but they are just slightly different shades of black. Personality wise she is very patient and kind, she purrs constantly, she is determined, fearless and brave.

Her name here on the blog will officially be Cuckoo, and to be fair that is the word I most use to describe her regularly.

Happy is not such a fan. We were hopeful that given her 6 years of trying to make Grumpy accept her that she would be accepting and even eager to have a little one to play with. Thus far there is quite a bit of hissing, a lot of staring, and the occasional paw swat if Cuckoo gets too close. We have seen small signs of progress and the occasional bit of play together – it especially tends to happen when we are not watching – it is still early days and we have hope for the future.

Cuckoo has zero fear and like any child believes she is invincible and cannot be hurt. She is incredible at jumping – the nearest thing to the top of this room divider is a metre away. She just leaped and there she was, up on top of it.

She is a great sleeper and has two modes – awake and full pelt, or fast asleep. Sometimes when she wakes it takes her a short while to switch from one mode to the other. She already has several favourite places to sleep throughout the house and she and Happy are swapping sleeping spots which is a positive sign.

Keep a good thought for our kitties, that they will learn to love one another. :)

Losing a much loved pet is always hard on everyone in the house. On the one hand life must go on, we’ve had markets we’d committed to attending, we’ve had to keep the business going, The Other Half had to keep going to work and keep studying – the studying probably being the hardest part for him to push on with at this stage..

I’ve been able to throw myself into the business but there is at least one moment every day when it hits me fresh once again. Yesterday two weeks to the day I finally was able to bring myself to wash my lap rug. It was the favourite place for Grumpy to sleep. Washing that was the last piece of the letting her go puzzle for me. The healing can truly begin now that the holding on is complete.

The one it has been hardest on surprisingly is Happy. She’s lived with the tyrant of tortitude Grumpy for over 6 years adoring her from afar, never being allowed to love Grumpy like she wanted to, any advance met with the swipe of a paw. But every day she misses her and she is completely lost without the Big Kitty to keep her in line. Her routines – while we have kept them the same as much as possible – are not the same without Grumpy here.

Every morning when The Other Half would go to the shower, both the cats would go into the bathroom and await their tuna feast, often vocally telling The Other Half to hurry up. Once he was done with the shower, they would walk to the end of the hallway and perform a little play we liked to call Kitty Bookends, where they would sit exactly the same way on opposite corners of the mat there. Once he would appear there would be a lot of meowing and one if not both cats would jump up on the kitchen stools to watch the preparation of their tuna snack.

Now Happy stays on the bed with me for much of The Other Half’s morning shower before wandering in to see what he is up to in there. She still does kitty bookends but she does it alone and every time it breaks my heart.

Worst of all, during the day she is mopey cat now instead of happy cat. She still looks for Grumpy but never finds her. It is almost like she is expecting her to return home from the vet or some kind of kitty vacation. She spends a lot more time sleeping than she used to. We are spending a lot of time trying to encourage her to play – kibble catch is presently her favourite game and she will often get 3 or 4 20 minute sessions of that in the space of the day.

We’ve always been a two cat household and we want to continue to be a two cat household, so this week we will (hopefully) begin the process of introducing a new cat to the house. We did take Happy out to the shelter for a meet and greet but it did not go especially well, Happy was too freaked out by the new surroundings to get comfortable even though we stayed quite some time. But we were able to see which of the kitties was the most interested in Happy and which one reacted the best to her, so we made a choice.

I did not take even one photo while we were out there – we were too focused on Happy and the kitties. But you will certainly see some once the new kitty arrives here. We hope this will begin a new era of Happy Movement – she is definitely in need of exercise and a new cat in the house – one who will actually play with her – might be exactly what she needs.

Please keep a good thought that the introduction will go well, and that Happy will become Big Kitty to a new Little Kitty. A very little kitty – the staff felt the best chance for a good fit with Happy given the situation and her past experiences was a kitten. We usually would have chosen a slightly older cat but in this case we took their advice. We hope Happy will take her under her wing.

We created these for two reasons – one far more important than the other. First the less important one –

1. Cosmetic reasons. It isn’t beautiful to have the place cats eat on display all the time. We want to hide their food place away from view when they aren’t using it. Especially as this area will be visible to people using the water closet if they are attending my workshops.

2. The more important reason – Happy is overweight. We’ve been trying to work on this and were quite successful last year but unknown to us over winter she began sneaking food from Grumpy. She put on almost the exact amount of weight that Grumpy lost.

Grumpy is a very slow eater thanks to her health problems with Horners Syndrome – she tends to make a bit of a mess when she eats. Happy inhales her food within seconds, then she goes looking for more. If we aren’t there to supervise, she will annoy Grumpy who will then walk away from her food, enabling the Food Vacuum to snorfle up anything left.

So all mealtimes are now supervised. If Grumpy walks away, we can close her food lid and she can eat it later on. Once Happy walks away, I get her favourite mouse on a stick and provide some exercise while Grumpy finishes eating.

Grumpy also gets secret kibble snacks in The Other Half’s office when Happy is not around to notice. Though the sound of Grumpy eating often attracts her.

The design is pretty simple, though the triangle shape was born from having less material on hand than expected. There is a strut on the side that locks the lid into the upright position.

This improvement plus the wonderful kitty litter enclosure I mentioned recently are so awesome. Happy tends to walk away without burying – well she thinks she buried it but she actually missed it entirely and sometimes it could be quite stinky so I would go and bury it for her. Since The Other Half added the fan to the kitty litter enclosure I have not experienced one stinky at all, and we have a lot less kitty litter escaping the enclosure.

Life for the kitties goes on much the same as it ever does – morning tuna – run around like a crazy thing for a few minutes after the tuna then find a nice spot to sleep the daytime hours away – rationed kibble during the day if one can be bothered waking up for it – see if you can sneak onto a lap at lunchtime for an extra warm nap – human sleep time AKA annoy the humans by first chasing each other around the house, meowing loudly at random intervals during the night, try to find a spot on the bed which keeps the humans awake.

Snoskred, as accustomed to living with a kitty as she is, always manages to fold herself around the sleeping kitty even when leaving the bed for a bathroom stop and returning to the bed folds herself into place perfectly, according to Happy Cat who never has to move. The Other Half is not so good at this trick and a kitty choosing to sleep on his side tends to get jostled a lot.

The past couple of weeks have been a time of much cleaning, decluttering, and general upheaval here in this household. We’ve gone all “Marie Kondo” even though I haven’t read the book, it was time to declutter. The house now positively sparkles and everything has a home to return to once it is used.

But one thing remained annoying to both of us – the kitty litter corner. First of all nobody likes to look at kitty litter. Secondly it tends to kick up some extra dust whenever it gets used. Thirdly the kitties were sometimes so intent on their burying of items that they managed to send kitty litter flying across the floor.

Fourthly we wanted to design a special kitty litter box and eventually move that out into the Nirvana permanently but were not sure what the perfect design would be, so The Other Half made a few possible designs and we thought more about how it would work. Then we procrastinated, until we decided to JUST DO IT. And here is what he made. We’re calling it The Kitty Litter Pod.

The door opens up for scooping but remains closed the rest of the time. Fans for the top are being printed on the 3d printer and will have charcoal filters added. But for now even in this format the Pod works a treat.

The kitties seem perfectly fine with The Kitty Litter Pod. Move their feeding stations though, that causes them to freak out and lose their minds. We did that too, and we have a design for building them a feeding station next!