Oct 13 2008

Last Year’s Kitten Has Her Own

Category: Dasha&Kittens — ChrisM @ 9:05 pm

Last year Dasha had a kitten, the little sister of our Karra and Muska. She (Tishka), in turn, had her own couple of bundles of joy last week. As Olympiada (more to follow on the re-assignment of her original name) has just been given away, it was nice that these two kittens came along and replenished stocks 🙂
They are called Nushka and Simeon.

Nushka, Simeon, Tishka and Dasha

Nushka, Simeon, Tishka and Dasha

As this is Tishka’s first litter, she was at first a little uncertain as to exactly what she was supposed to do with these miniature versions of her. Dasha (the kitten’s grandmother), was eager to try and help, and can often be found giving a tongue bath to all three of them!

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Oct 08 2008

Vets In Astana

Category: Dasha&Kittens,Personal — ChrisM @ 10:25 pm

(This post isn’t sponsored, nor did I mention that I would write this post to them).

If you find yourself in need of a vet in Astana, the options are sometimes a little scary. The previous one we visited was in the basement of a building, through filthy corridors, into a not much cleaner office that the vet rented. To be fair, he seemed like a nice man, and probably did his best to look after the animals, however the dirt in a place that should be close to sterile REALLY put us off.
As I recently mentioned, Karra and Muska needed to be spayed, and Irina was concerned that the only other vet she knew of was where an older cat of hers had passed away. However, after speaking to a few friends, we decided to visit the Cat and Dog specialist “Zoosfera” (someone remind me to use the proper Cyrillic characters once I’ve converted the MySQL tables, please).
Their address is House 10, Micro Region 2, Astana – not too far from the big Eurasia market, nr. Orbita. You can contact them on 8 7172 344585 or 8 7172 365425 . They also had some pet rodents that they had been looking after, so I assume its OK to ask if you don’t have a cat or dog etc. to help out. There were two vet-like ladies there, and a receptionist who also seemed to know a little about the subject. The place was clean, they had all the medicines they needed in stock, and actually seemed to care about the animals, rather than seeing them as purely a source of income.
Like I said, this post was written because I wanted to help out anyone else who might need a safe vet and no money/discount was given for this info to be published.

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Oct 06 2008

Path To Recovery

Category: Dasha&Kittens — ChrisM @ 5:19 am

Our cats our recovering well, following their operations last weekend. Although Karra is still a little more cautious when it comes to jumping up too high, both her and Muska are no longer frantically searching for an emergency exit when we sit close to them. Unfortunately we will need to catch them again this week, place them in their travel bags, and pop them to the vets to check their wounds have healed correctly, and in Muska’s case, have the stitches removed. (Karra has already removed all but one of hers!)

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Aug 30 2008

Karra And Muska Are 2!

Category: Dasha&Kittens,Personal — ChrisM @ 2:17 am

Looking at the pair of them, I can’t believe it was a full two years ago that Dasha gave birth to them. I don’t yet know how we’ll celebrate what is an entirely normal run of the mill day to them, but hopefully we can find some new toys at the local pet store.

Happy Birthday Karra Muska

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Jun 10 2008

Looking For Advice

Category: Dasha&Kittens — ChrisM @ 12:08 am

Our kittens (Kara especially) love to find inanimate household objects, and kidnap them for future use as toys. Whether they hide stashes of pens or lighters and coins, we eventually find them chewed up, under the sofa or bed. At first, I either tidied them up or threw them away if they were beyond hope. Now I’m starting to wonder if we should allow them a ‘toy’ pen (with the ink refill and metal spring removed of course) in the hope they will not find the need to steal new pens?

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Mar 13 2008

Let Me In

Category: Dasha&Kittens,Videos — ChrisM @ 7:16 pm

Check out the Up Late post for the last animation I posted from the same artist. This one involves the same cat trying to get in through a door.

I’m definitely not showing these clips to our kittens. hmmm, when are they kittens no longer, but cats? Ours are 18 months old now. Anyway, we have already had to start putting tin foil on top of a door that Karra uses to leap frog onto a kitchen unit top. She gets stuck up there, and other than the obvious worry of her getting hurt, there are also a lot of crystal wine and shot glasses on the same unit.

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Mar 01 2008

IT and Cats

Category: Dasha&Kittens,Personal — ChrisM @ 5:04 pm

This week I started giving computing lessons to a colleague of Walton. She came round with her laptop, and we are going through basic skills, as well as how to save time by learning various shortcuts. One hour of pure IT can be a bit much for the non-geeks out there, but luckily Karra and Muska (our kittens) were on hand to provide occasional distractions. Some of the cat products in our flat have seen better days – one of the toy mice had its ear ripped off whilst my pupil was here!
We also got out the squeaky mouse that sits on the end of an elasticated fishing rod-type affair. Karra tends to watch it jumping around, almost as though she is analysing the patterns of its movements, then pounces when she thinks she has the best chance of holding on to the grey squeaky furry thing 🙂 Muska on the other hand will carry out all sorts of aerial acrobatics in her quest to trap the prey.
Once I had changed the batteries in their other favourite toy, we had a little laser show going on. I picked it up last September, as a replacement for the little laser pen we had previously been using. This version has two lasers, some mirrors and a couple of motors, to create pretty geometric patterns on the floor, and normally grabs the kittens’ attention. Hmmm, how old are kittens once they become cats?

Anyway, we need to find some new toys for them sometime, so I’ll keep my eye out in the local shops and online, to see what can be found.

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Feb 20 2008

Amsterdam Trip IS On

Category: Amsterdam,Dasha&Kittens,Friends,Internet Connections,Personal,Pictures,Windows Mobile — ChrisM @ 6:44 pm

Almost all the details are now sorted… We have bought the plane tickets, paid a deposit on the Apartment, now we just need to sort out a pet-sitter again. Either that or re-unit Karra and Muska with their Mum (Dasha) and younger sister (Tishka) that they’ve never met. Ira thinks 4 cats in one house would be too much work for her parents, so perhaps Mira fancies trying out living on her own again?
Anyway, see below for a map of the general area we’ll be staying in.


View Larger Map

Sadly Alex and Mat won’t be coming this year, as was originally hoped, as their flights cost even more than ours. btw, congrats to Alex – Dryad Musings has just got an Alexa rank… around 12 million, but that is better than the dreaded ‘no data’. At one point this site almost broke into the 200k region, but since then its bounced back up to the million mark again. Which is a little odd, as my unique visitors per month have been steadily increasing, but there you go. ChrisD (who doesn’t have a blog, so doesn’t get a hyperlinked name 😉 ) can’t come either, as his new work randomly tests its employees, and he is worried about passive smoking whilst he drinks.

The apartment we are renting has internet access, but it is wired, so unless Ira’s laptop comes for the journey, we’ll in communicado for a while (my PDA/phone has WiFI and BT, but is obviously lacking an RJ45 socket LMAO)

Anyway, enough on Amsterdam for now, I’m sure I’ll be boring you with more info a lot more over the coming weeks…

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Dec 19 2007

Pet Sitter Found

Category: Dasha&Kittens,Friends,Personal,Pictures — ChrisM @ 1:40 am

As you know, Ira and I will be travelling to Britain this Saturday, and as her parents are coming as well, we can’t very well ask them to come and feed the kittens whilst we are away. A solution has been found in the shape of Mira, Ira’s colleague from work. She will come and spend some time in our flat§, seeing what independent life is like whilst not at work very much, and obviously making sure the kittens are fed, watered, and that the litter tray doesn’t over flow 🙂
Anyway, I dug out her picture from a couple of months back

Mira Muska Laser Our Bedroom

Or at least I am hope that’s the right picture, I very helpfully forgot to include any useful information in the folder name, other than the date. In case you are interested, the object in her right hand is a little laser toy I picked up on my last trip home, mainly to entertain or distract the kittens when we need them to behave well.

Anyway, huge thanks to her for making sure we can sleep well, knowing that Muska and Karra are going to be looked after 🙂

§ – I am trying to force myself to use the UK English word, rather than ‘apartment’, as I already find myself sometimes unable to recall which nation’s vocab I am using…

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Nov 15 2007

Up Late

Category: Dasha&Kittens,Kazakh Driving,Personal,Videos,WordPress — ChrisM @ 5:32 am

My lessons for the rest of this week were cancelled on Wednesday, as the student is busy organizing his relocation to Moscow. This means less money coming in, so I have tried to catch up with a few more sponsored posts. Karra and Muska are a little confused, as since I started giving conversational English classes, my bed times had been closer to midnight than 6am. They have wandered in and out of the living room a few times, demanding strokes, and eventually giving up, to return to the bedroom. Hopefully they’ve not woken Irina up.
Anyway, the following animation was posted to my Facebook funwall, it portrays one cat’s not so subtle attempts to wake its owner.

I think I will check for any blunt objects near the bed before sleeping tonight 😉

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