Nine minus Three!

They say that a cat has nine lives. We have three cats, all ex-feral who have given up a life of hardship and uncertain meal times, for the luxury of having servants to cater to their every need. The first two to arrive I named Daffy and Dilly and the last one in I called Dopey. I should have called them Austin, Morris and Bentley, names that at least sound a little different from each other, as I end up saying 'Mind Daf, uh Dop uh Dil' just before I trip over one of them. Anyway, Dill is usually called Dilbert, we call Daffy, Daphne (don't ask), and Dopey, well, his name actually suits him. And, he is gradually working through his nine lives. And once those are used up, I imagine that he will move onto the other eighteen that belong to his pals!

Dopey, bird watching!

Soon after Dopey arrived he wouldn't eat his breakfast, a sure sign of a problem. Off to the vet who said that it was the feline equivalent of Biliary, the canine sickness caused by a tick. We nursed him through this, crushing his tablets and mixing with anchovey paste and chicken liver pate, tempting his appetite with morsels of chicken and pilchards, syringing water into his mouth to prevent dehydration and allowing him to remain on the bed all night instead of persuading him to leave with a gentle nudge of a foot! He finally bounced back to his old self, thank goodness.

Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth!

Then, he fell off the roof. We have a double volume house, with a steeply pitched roof covered with corrugated metal. During the night we often have a lot of dew and the roof gets wet. And slippery. Our bedroom has a veranda and the cats like to lie there in the sun. While we sat in bed drinking our early morning cup of coffee, Dopey decided to hop onto the veranda wall and from there it's an easy leap onto the lower edge of the roof. All was well until he decided to climb to the top of the gable after a pigeon, and all we heard was the sound of nails scraping on metal, and a thump as he landed on the brick path below. I rushed outside in my pyjamas to find him crouched on the bricks. Fearing broken bones, internal bleeding and loose teeth, I gently picked him up and took him inside and put him on the couch. He sat there for a minute, then stood up, shook himself, stretched, leapt off the couch, hurtled into the kitchen and onto the working surface next to the sink and sat there waiting for breakfast!
His third life was used up last week. I always hang my towel over the top of the bannister rail after showering, especially in cold weather, to help it dry. Dopey was playing with Daffy on the stairs, threading himself in and out of the wooden railing, finally jumping onto the towel hanging over the rail. As he did, the towel started to slide, but not towards the safety of the landing outside our bedroom. No, it slid the other way to a several metre drop onto the dining room table. If I hadn't been so worried, I would have laughed. It was like a cartoon, with Dopey trying to climb up the towel as it slid down, and in slow motion he simply disappeared to land on the table in a towel covered heap! A soft landing thank goodness as a metre away is an old sewing machine with lots of nasty things to spear an unsuspecting cat!

Dopey and Daffy, brothers in arms!!

You know how some people are accident prone? I think we have an accident prone cat!