They say, “Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd,” and it seems to be true in our house. All it takes is one cat to get on my lap and then another cat wants to get on my lap and before you know it, there’s a party.
Frankie was being very vocal on Saturday about wanting to go outside so I decided to take him for a walk. Rose took out the cat harness and leash and said things like “Oh boy Frankie, you’re gonna go outside!” That got him all riled up but I wasn’t ready yet. I still had to find my shoes and put them on, which surely was an excruciatingly long time for Frankie.
When I finally got his harness on and opened the door, Chris bolted out the door after Frankie. I expected him to try that but I was still unable to stop him. That made walking Frankie more difficult because now I had to keep an eye on Chris too. He won’t run away like Frankie does but Chris will wander off after a little while.
I tried keeping Frankie close to home so I could monitor Chris.
When he would walk too far away I had to pick him up, or pretend to try to pick him up, to get him going back toward home.
It wasn’t too long before Chris made it out to the front of the house, near the street. It is a relatively quiet street but I don’t trust all the old drivers around here.
Before long, Chris made his way to the neighbor’s driveway, which forced me to put Frankie in the house so I could retrieve Chris before he got himself into trouble.
The next morning Frankie was even more vocal about wanting to go outside. The back door is right next to the bathroom where Rose was getting ready and Frankie was really annoying her so Rose asked me to take Frankie out again.
This time, with Rose’s help, we made it outside without Chris.
Frankie spends about ten minutes in our back yard just eating grass, smelling the air, and looking around.
We eventually got moving and Frankie led me a long way from home. Along the way we stopped to admire a couple of doves in our path. 
Frankie was probably thinking about an early lunch but they flew away.
After a half hour outside it was starting to feel hot so I “encouraged” Frankie to head toward home. After a while my encouragements weren’t working so I had to pick him up and carry him home.
When I open the door to put him inside, Chris ran out. It wasn’t fair for Chris to be stuck inside while Frankie was out so I let him stay outside while I watched him. Chris is funny because when you talk to him with a scolding voice, he rolls around to show you how cute he is.
“Chris! What are you doing!”
While I was watching Chris outside, Rose opened the door to ask me a question and Frankie ran out. Crap! I tried to catch him but failed and he ended up under my truck. I quickly put Chris in the house so I could concentrate on catching Frankie but he proved very elusive.
Eventually he ended up across the street under the neighbors car.
He knows I can’t get him under a car so I just sat on my porch in the hot sun and waited him out. Sometimes he would come out but stayed close so he could run back under the car if I got close.
I finally gave up and went inside for five minutes. When I came out, Frankie was gone. I searched for him for a few minutes and then went back inside. I thought I would sit in the air conditioning for a little while and watch out the window. That was when Rose spotted him on the street sitting in somebody’s Garden.
I went back outside to retrieve Frankie. This time he gave me no trouble, letting me pick him up and bring him home.
I think it’s good for our cats to get outside, but it always seems to be a pain in the butt as well.
Holly, my sister-in-laws’s cat, is like a female version of Chris, except she has a couple more years experience being bad.
How would you caption this? When you’ve thought of something, check out my answer on my other blog, JustFurLaughs.com
Today is World Cat Day or International Cat Day. A day created to bring awareness to the special needs of cats, and some of them, I’m not mentioning Chris’s name. can be very needy.
When I made my first batch of raw cat food, I was afraid the cats wouldn’t like it, which is why I bought only a small amount of the premix from TCfeline. I needn’t have worried because they loved it. Granted, I started with only two ounces mixed with a 5.5 ounce can of cat food, but it was a better start than I expected.
I made a second batch last Sunday and decided to photograph the process because I forgot to do that last time. This time I decided to give them variety and used beef instead of chicken. The decision was also helped by the fact that I had a $5 off coupon for two pounds of beef at Whole Foods using their app.
I thought I would cut it into chunks instead of having it ground so I went home to do the work myself. Often, the way I envision things going are very different from the way things really go. This is one example.
Even though I am no chef, I am still embarrassed to say that I didn’t have a knife sharp enough to cut two pounds of beef. With much effort, I was able to cut this hunk of meat into slices but then gave up.
Instead, I pulled out my Ninja blender and stuck the pieces in there. I don’t think it was designed for grinding meat but it did a good job cutting it up and it worked quite fast too.
A meat grinder may have been more suited to the task but I noticed one advantage to this method. The Ninja didn’t do a very good job of cutting up the gristle which made it easy to pull those pieces out of the mixture.
I then put the beef into a large mixing bowl.
I added two egg yolks, but not the egg whites since they are bad for cats.
The instructions then call for a cup of water (I use spring water) and a quarter cup of the TCfeline premix, which I then added to the bowl.
All that was left was to mix it up.
Put it into containers.
And stick them in the freezer.
I still had some of the chicken mixture left and wanted to use that while I let the beef mix freeze for at least 24 hours (three days is ideal) as an added precaution against parasites.
I didn’t fill the containers as high this time. Part of the reason was to allow room for expansion when frozen. Another reason was because I wanted to increase the raw food to caned food ratio by using the entire container per meal instead of half the container. Before taking that step, I needed to make sure they liked the beef mixture, so I continued to give them only half.
The first feeding of the beef went well, at first, but when everyone was done eating there was still food left in the bowls. That told me they weren’t crazy about the beef but as the week progressed, the amount of food left over decreased. The last couple of days there have been no food left over so, it seems, they are happy with the beef now.
I have to make another batch today so I will probably go back to chicken, or maybe turkey, if they have it. I also have to buy more of the TCfeline premix. This time I will buy a bigger container. I will also have it ground at Whole Foods which will cut the prep time in half and make my work much easier. Who doesn’t like easier?
Floki can’t resist a moving tail and he seems to have found a target in Chris. Perhaps he knows Chris doesn’t like it.
I want to wean the cat’s off dry food because I think it is less healthy than wet food. Eventually I want them all to be eating raw food but Chris has to make things difficult. He eats very little of the wet food, forcing me to keep some dry food out so he doesn’t go hungry.
I thought if I let the bowls go empty a couple of hours before I open a can of wet food, Chris would be hungry and eat more wet food. That didn’t happen. I gradually started letting the bowls stay empty longer and longer, sometimes as long as eight hours, but Chris still won’t eat more than about a quarter of the wet food I put down for him.
The funny thing is, when I first tried feeding them the raw food diet in 2010, Chris was the only one who would eat it. Does anyone else have a dry food addict?
Frankie and Puck used to quit eating their food early to steal Chris’s food. Now, Floki is giving them a taste of their own medicine. Check out the video to see what an ordeal feeding time is around here. Frankie was sick when this was recorded so it is even worse now that he is better.
I couldn’t decide which one of these photos of Floki and Chris I like better. I like the first one because Floki has his tongue sticking out and it clearly looks like something is about to happen.
I also like the second one because of the apparent smile on Floki’s face.
What do you think?
Bad Cat Chris 
