Crazy Cat Lady Part 14: Fred and Lily Update

Oh hey guess what? I haven’t talked about Fred and Lily for about a gazillion years have I?

Or since July. Whatever. That was like a whole season ago I’ll have you know. I remember it well, it was a time when there was sun and I my hands didn’t feel like they were about to break into a thousand pieces because of the cold. Oh and you could take photos...Anyway. I digress....
So yeah, Fred and Lily are doing pretty well, thanks for asking.

I had a week of looking after them a couple of weeks ago when I was on my blogging hiatus and we had lots of fun together. Actually scrap that, we didn’t. They are like moody teenagers who spend all their time asleep, only appearing when they want feeding. I started just not letting them upstairs after they’d had their tea and forcing them to sit in the lounge with me and be a family.

(Yeah I totally do talk to them when I’m looking after them. I won’t even pretend I don’t.)

Fred continues his obsession with getting in things. You leave anything on the floor for long enough and sooner or later, Fred will get in it. Sometimes I think he genuinely wants to get in things, sometimes I think he does it to annoy Lily, who has the idea first but lacks the motor skills to actually achieve her goal, at which point Fred slinks in past her.

I’ve never known a cat as clumsy as Lily. All those visions of felines gracefully leaping on to windowsills? You will forget those when you see Lily, who prefers to try and haul herself up things rather than jump on to them like a normal cat. This means you hear an awful lot of banging and clattering from upstairs, it’s not necessarily Lily falling off something, it’s just her jumping off the bed, but she seems to land with all the grace of a rhino.

Lily tried to get in the Tesco bag that you can see Fred in there. Except she decided she would try and crawl through the bag handle and inevitably ended up stuck, walking backwards, attached to the bag, freaking out whenever I tried to help her.

For some reason I find it almost impossible to take a good photograph of Lily. I don’t know how she manages to be so un-photogenic but I have a plethora of cute photos of Fred and then a shedload of Lily where she just manages to look slightly deranged.

For instance. I took some photos of Lily when she was sitting down nicely and not dashing all over the place and she looked terribly cute, she really did. And yet for some reason, I look at the camera and all I can see are her massive bat-like ears. Poor Lilster.

The other reason I can’t take photos of Lily is because she never stops bloody moving. Although my friend has pointed out that the sport setting on my camera should make that easier – I am yet to give it a go.

Fred on the other hand was born to have his photo taken and I think he quite relishes our little photoshoots that nearly always occur when I come and see them. I took some the other day and he looked so unbearably cute I made a very high pitched squeaking noise which scared him under the bed. My mistake.

Fred is also a bit of a cling-monster lately. When I was looking after them we had a routine, whereby he would disappear upstairs to sleep after eating his dinner, only to reappear at about 9pm to come for a sleep on my knee. It was almost a little too cute for words. Lily is incredibly friendly and will come and throw herself all over you, but she will rarely come and sit with you and go to sleep. Fred could not be more different.

I swear there is something about a cat sleeping that is the cosiest picture there can ever be. Those photos just radiate warmth and smooshiness. And Fred is a master of the smoosh.

Sometimes I feel sad that they’re growing up. They’re not as ‘togethery’ as they used to be – they no longer need each other to go to sleep and they are pretty independent of one another. But even though this is the case, they are most definitely a team. They’re a unit not to be messed with. For instance, see this photo that I took in September...

This is Lily’s standard “imaginary spider” pose. Basically Lily sees something incredibly minute and then becomes fixated on the point she last saw it, convinced that it’s going to reappear again. She might not have grace but my god does that girl have patience. This particular morning she sat like that for 20 minutes, at which point I got up and moved everything out of the way so that she could see that whatever it was she was looking for no longer existed. She remained vigilant, and then Fred appeared, who had absolutely no idea what she was looking at in the first place and hunkered down with her to keep guard also. The pair of them remained there for another 20 minutes. Weirdos.

Here ends the Fred and Lily update.

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Hey do you like cats as much as I do? (Not possible.) Go and have a look at this set on Flickr. It’s ALL cats!

PS. Sorry for spelling Stormont wrong in my last post. It's all changed now. Forgive me?