They won’t escape today!
[Editor: Every morning Sox comes into the office to stare intently at the mini-blinds hoping to catch the shadows of the doves that land on the edge of the roof. The window faces East and the rising sun casts a shadow on the blinds as the doves’ tail feathers hang over the edge. I have a large stock of mini-blinds and they are rarely totally trashed when he leaps into action.]
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Established: 21 November 2004
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17 comments
i used to have a hummingbird feeder, which, when the males started fighting over who ruled what, grew into 3 feeders. between fighting hummers flying into the windows from the outside and curmudgeon cat and his no-longer-with-us older brother attacking the birds from the inside, and none of the parties seeming to notice that the glass was even there, i finally gave it up.
i had quite a population of little green flying things while it lasted, though.
Friday Ark #157…
We’ll post links to sites that have Friday (plus or minus a few days) photos of their chosen animals (photoshops at our discretion and humans only in supporting roles). Watch the Exception category for rocks, beer, coffee cups, and….? Visit all the …
I love that look of determination. He knows what he wants!
Gorgeous cat – he/she looks utterly mesmerized by something. Love the cute little nose!
A greeting card I’ve seen:
Sox, like most indoor cats, finds his amusement where he can. Cats and mini-blinds have been irreconcilable enemies since the day the blinds were invented.
The only place for our sofa in this tiny living room is in front of the picture window, which is covered by mini-blinds.
I’m thinking of getting the vertical kind – they might prove more cat-proof. Then again, nothing stands between Randy and his view of the great outdoors.
andante, vertical blinds actually do help, at least if the slats are wide enough, i.e., not mini-blinds. Stella’s kitties regularly insert themselves behind the patio door blinds, with no real damage to the blinds.
We try to remember to raise the horizontal mini-blinds in windows a few inches in front of the cat platforms. The results of not doing so are visible in several apartments in the complex: cats make short work of obstacles they find annoying! That’s an expensive result here, where the apartment management charges several times as much for mini-blinds they replace as those one can buy at a home improvement store.
As soon as I run out of the mini-blinds I’ve stock-piled over the years in moves, I will go to vertical blinds of wide, smooth vinyl. The fabric versions can still be climbed and pulled down, but the smooth versions can’t. The cats not only go through the slats in the middle, the kittens have used one as a ladder with unhappy results as they gained weight.
Sox has a unique profile among the feral cats, showing some Persian in his background, which is also reflected in his stocky body. This is the best of about a dozen attempts to get a morning profile of Sox.
I thought of your “kids” when I met Boots, the official watch cat of La Casa de Maria retreat that I went to last weekend.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/santabarbarian/1399654753/in/set-72157602055044196/
He followed me around at lunchtime. Perhaps I shouldn’t have shared the cuisine.
What a beautiful kitty. He reminds me of Rocky Girl. She has that type of concentration. I can see how blinds could be disheveled once that Mr. Sox gets busy trying to catch the shadows.
vertical blinds are the cat toy nonpareil at chez hipparchia.
mini-blinds are a major pain, both to operate and to keep clean, even when you haven’t got cats tearing them up for you. sell your stockpile on ebay and use the proceeds to invest in vertical blinds. your cats will thank you for it [or not]. a word of warning: vertical blinds are very noisy toys, though nowhere near as annoying as the neighbors’ wind chimes.
Boots looks like he has the same “indent” over the nose and the really silky fur that Sox has, Jill. They make great foot warmers on a cold night.
What he really has, OWL, is between 15 and 20 pounds that gets launched at the blinds.
A number of the blinds are from my Mother’s house when she switched to verticals, Hipparchia. I’ll wait until the first window is without a blind from stock, and then switch them all. The vinyl they use for the mini-blinds gets brittle in the sun, so it won’t take all that long.
your mother is smarter than you are. 😈
She’s not as cheap as I am, and she didn’t have to install them.
oh, i understand about cheap. i drive a 20-year-old car, mostly because it still runs. and now that i’ve finally parted with enough money to put new brakes on it, it stops too.
Stopping is so overrated. There’s almost always something around that will help with stopping – another car, a guardrail, a tree.
i like a nice humvee myself. very solid, and there’s almost always one available when you need it. guardrails can be a bit flimsy, hardly more than a speedbump on one’s way over the cliff.