Fishing for cats

Well, Christmas is nearly on us again and hubby got the trusty tree down from the attic. For days Grace was eyeing the box, trying to get in and today we opened it up – cue one excited Grace and one rather bemused looking Clumsy (eh?? what’s this and what’s it doing in my house??) – Clumsy looks slightly bemused much of the time so I wasn’t too worried there – and Grace obviously clearly remembered her very own climbing frame that was stashed away in the attic after too few weeks of play time..

That was it; we plugged in the branches and waited for ...ooh....about 25 seconds. She was up the tree, down the tree, jumping in, jumping out (whilst Clumsy looked on in bemusement (predictably) being much too clumsy to even think of trying such antics)...well, plug in wire branches are not made to take the weight of 4 year old cats, however graceful and light-footed they are and before long the tree of 36 branches only had 34, then 32, then 28 and so on....

We muttered and huffed a bit and came up with a solution – a real tree with nasty spiky branches and dense growth close to the trunk to deter her and so toddled off out to buy one (real tree being much nicer anyway and keeps the poor Forestry Commission guys in work in these times of credit crunching!).

Having found a fine specimen, Hubby duly lugged it home and we set it up in its bucket of water in the lounge. “Top up daily” said the instructions “and it may be helpful to float some pieces of polystyrene in the water to easily see when the water level drops”. That seemed sensible, so we did. That was it, Grace comes in, investigates (Ow! Spikey!) tree and then spies the polystyrene beans and starts fishing in the water for them...

...ooo, bobby beady thing...

....ooo, wet....! ...(shakes paw)...

...ooo, bobby beady thing...

....ooo, wet....! ...(shakes paw)...

Repeat ad infinitum.

Well, it entertained us....!