Feral and her own little Odie

It struck me this evening while watching Tony stalk Maria around her flat on Coro that I have been devoting a little too much time to the Thursday/Friday War category at the expense of some of my other interests. So time to play a little catch-up…

As implied in the title, Feral the Cat has indeed returned to this rural stage…she has been staying with Carmen the last few months and, being an independent lady cat, amusing herself when Carmen comes home on weekends…unfortunately we think that Feral fell in with some of the wrong sort of cats from the wrong side of the tracks in Otorohanga  and snorted some bad weed. She was pretty crook for over a week and came home to recuperate. The reason we think she had been snorting weed is that one morning a week ago, she started coughing and coughing…hairball, all you knowledgeable cat types will be crying…but nope, weed.

I went to wipe some of what I thought was just gooby off her face, only too find that she had a blade of grass coming out each nostril. After a quick phone consult with the vet, I got a firm but gentle grip on her and withdrew a 3-4″ blade of grass from each nostril…no wonder she had been coughing so badly…since then she has bounced right back and is now pretty close to normal although a pleasant side effect is that she seems to have shed her FU attitude towards the rest of the world – but still manages to give her Odie aka Penny the Schnoodle a thumping most days…

Once Feral got the weed out of her system, her internal processes started to flow freely again and I had to make an emergency trip into town for some more kitty litter. On the drive in, I noticed cars parked up at all the points where the rail tracks crossed or neared the road, with lots of little groups of train spotters peering expectantly up and down the tracks. I had the camera ready as I returned from my and caught blast from the past on the straights just south of Taumarunui…and here she is the next day, heading south again up the Raurimu Spiral – this is shot from our study window and I do miss the old camera with the 6x zoom…

There she goes, huffing and puffing...

And finally, this just popped up on a friend’s Facebook page – thank God for little commas…