A new week...

We are, officially, exhausted.  Mr Boo sleeps all day until about 3.00pm and then, once awake, is desperate, and I mean desperate, to get out and worryingly his hitherto friendly relationship with the other cats has gone out of the window so whilst we are reasonably unconcerned about the state of his ear we are really concerned that given the chance Charlie will be quite violent towards him and could cause him additional injury.

I had the night shift last night and because Boo cannot go out he is confined to the spare bedroom where we have provided him with food, water and a litter tray.  The windows and doors have to be shut up and so the temperature within is about 40 degrees but feels more like 50 degrees.

He is nervous of the ceiling fan so having it on anything more than a slow rotation freaks him out.  He cries at the fan, he cries at the window and the doors, he cries when he is hungry and he yowls his head off when he wants to go to the toilet and whilst he will use the litter and use it successfully it is only as the very last resort and then he kicks the litter all over the place in a sort of clean 'dirty' protest.

So there I am in a stiflingly hot bedroom with a piddleass fan and a cat whose poo could give Fred (mum and dad's cat) a run for his money - nearly but not quite - I think Fred still holds the record for whiffability when it comes to movements!

Boris choses the wee small hours (pardon the pun) to use the litter tray and because of the odour I have to get up and sort it otherwise John will come in, in the morning, to find I have perished through asphyxiation.  Boo might then settle for a while until the crying begins again around 5.00am because he is hungry.  He has to be fed in isolation but any movement near the fridge will awaken Charlie's curiosity and so he too needs to be fed, then Minnie perks up and requires her dish to be brought to her outside by the pool because for some reason best known only to her she currently refuses to eat indoors, God knows where Chivers is but he always manages to pitch up just when you think it is safe to sit down and breathe a sigh of relief.

We have an appointment for Thursday for stitch removal but decided to speak to the vets to check to see whether Boris needs to be confined until the stitches are removed because if he has to then we will keep him in but it will kill us and he isn't going to be to happy about it either.

On ringing the vets they seem to think even Thursday may be a little early - they recommend seven to ten days before removal but the vet does say that if the wound is clean and dry and he is careful then he could go out.  Whoopity whoop whoop - great idea but the Charlie v Boris interaction is a concern.  We decided to err on the side of caution and keep Boris in for one more night but make preparations about his reintegration but consulting the Oracle (Google) about stopping cat aggression after a visit to the vets and apparently it is all about smell - not Boris's farty arse but the fact that Boris now smells chemically different and because I have been wiping him down and keeping him cool with antiseptic wit wipes I am not surprised.  The advice is to re-establish a 'family' smell amongst our four and in order to do that they suggest smearing them all with the juice from a tin of tuna - in this heat? are they out of their minds??????????  I got some guff from one of the packets and tried it on Boris and Charlie - it stank and neither of them were impressed - Charlie really got the hump and hissed and spat at me and Boris so now the problem has multiplied.  One last night of interrupted sleep and multiple opportunities to think long on hard as to how to manage this.  The stitch removal date will be changed tomorrow.

 I had posted yesterday about the sound of the cicadas.  No wonder they seem to be so loud as we found the remains of one on the wall of the pump house.  This is a shed skin from a cicada nymph and one from a pretty large cicada at that.

Nature is fascinating - these creatures have their skeletons on the outside and the young cicada nymphs emerge after having been underground for up to 17 years and then shed their extoskeleton and become adult cicada.

I did not take the photograph below - we only had the skeletal evidence of what had occurred previously but the photograph shows you what the nymph cicada will have turned into having done its shed.

We had some lovely news over the weekend that our little chicken visitors Jordan and Abi had got engaged.  Big congratulations to the pair of them - we hope they will be very happy - no news yet of a date...

So it being Monday it was back to normal with art.  I couldn't go last week because Sheila was having the results of the biopsy on the little lumpy thing she had removed from underneath her eye.  It fell within the large 'skin cancer' range they now have which includes all sorts of skin defects that previously were un-named or not included within the cancers.  They are happy that they removed it all but she must be careful and keep an eye out for anything else that looks abnormal.

Poor Klaus went to get something from the shed and disturbed a wasps nest and got bitten a dozen times for his trouble.  Good job he is not allergic to such bites.  The wasps nests over here are small - no larger than an apple and once they get to that size don't seem to get any bigger - not entirely sure how many wasps it supports but guess the number is relatively small - good job when you find one in a confined space.  Interestingly two wasps were trying to start to build a nest on the lintel of our back door.  John gave them short shrift.  Interestingly all the doors on the estate that face towards the Troodos which I think must be East have a small wasps nest attached to it but only on the doors which have a wooden surround, perhaps the metal ones get too hot.

It is good to get back to my picture - I spent the whole morning working on the glass ball underneath the bird - this was my challenge - recreate the look of glass.  It is slow work but I am enjoying it.  Sheila is busy working on her commission - still a secret until it is finished and the recipient happy.  After that she is going to try acrylics once again and has chosen a photograph she took one afternoon when she and I went around Arodes together.

We had a visit from John and Susan this afternoon.  They are both ok, John's eye is settling down but until they are able to operate they won't know for certain exactly what the final outcome will be.  Millie is doing ok after her encounter with a snake which is good news.

So very very very hot again today - so hot that we decided an evening dip in a cooling pool was in order before tackling the hot and sticky bedrooms.