Here is Floki and Chris Tuesday evening. As usual, Chris is using another cat as a pillow.

Here is Floki and Chris Tuesday evening. As usual, Chris is using another cat as a pillow.

I feel bad for Chris sometimes when I watch him get down from a height that wouldn’t normally be a problem for a cat. His excess weight and arthritis means when he jumps down from the sofa or something at a similar height, he tends to stumble after hitting the ground.
A little while ago I watched him climb up to one of the cat perches. He first jumped up onto his crate, moved over to the tall cat perch, climbed up the “steps” and then over to the Z shaped perch and finally to the where he is in the photo below.

It looked like Chris wanted to jump to the floor, which would surely have hurt him if he tried, so I pushed a shorter cat perch next to him and then put a pillow on the ground to hopefully keep him from hurting himself on the way down.
Of course, now he’s changed places with Floki and will probably come down the way he went up.

We got our Art of Paws Heated Pet Mat six years ago. Since then, we have been using it without the heating element most of the time. I put the heating element back in when it gets cold, which isn’t very often in Florida but it did come in handy when we were in West Virginia. It hasn’t been particularly cold here lately, but we have woken up to temperatures in the forties a few days these last couple of weeks.
My wife was using a heating pad last Mondy. She set it on the bed and Floki discovered it.

Upon seeing this, my wife politely ordered me to put the heating element back into the cats’ heated mat. I did so and it was an instant hit.



I don’t have a photo of Frankie on the mat, but I am certain I have seen him on it.
Does anyone else have a heated mat or pet bed? If so, how popular is it?
Every time we walk past our community office, Frankie seems interested in going inside for some reason. The last time we were there, he was up on his hind legs scratching at the door. I didn’t get a picture of that but here he is thirty seconds later.


I have no idea what is in there that he finds interesting.
The other day we Frankie and I came across a mother cat and her two kittens. All three cats were nervous and retreated when Frankie came near. More likely it was me they were afraid of. I see that a lot in cats that we come across. Yesterday was different.
Yesterday we met a domesticated male, black cat who came toward us instead of running away.

I didn’t know what to expect from either cat.
There was some hissing coming from the black cat, who was probably protecting his territory, so I decided to pick up Frankie and get him out of there.
I am three days late with this post. We actually adopted Frankie on February 9, 2014. He did not have a name at the time, only a number.

He was a perfect fit for our house because we were already used to dealing with a bad cat. Frankie gave us a run for our money and he still does. While Chris has slowed with age, Frankie hasn’t changed a bit.
We don’t know when Frankie was born. His paperwork said he was about three years old so we count this day as his birthday too. That would make Frankie thirteen years old now.
My wife got a package yesterday and put the box down for the cats. Of course, Chris had to get in it but what happened next was unexpected.

Here is Chris nine years ago on February 3, 2015.

He still loves getting inside of things.
I saw this the other day and had to get a photo.

A little while later I saw this.

We are so lucky our cats get along like this, but I fear when Chris is gone, we won’t see this type of closeness anymore.
On our walk Monday afternoon, we encountered a woman walking her little Yorkie. That dog was very interested in getting close to Frankie, but the woman held him back. She told me he had lived with cats and really liked them but was not a fan of other dogs.

I wish I had thought to take a video of the encounter because as the dog got closer, Frankie’s paw slowly rose. I told the woman a whacking was about to occur. Sure enough, three seconds later Frankie gave him a warning whacking. He didn’t make contact, but he let the dog know that he was not a dog-loving cat.