This afternoon Kanoko was swatting around a broken piece of ceramic. It was dark red and reminded me very much of traditional Provençal terra cotta tiles, called tomettes. My curiosity was piqued — every so often, you’ll hear a story of someone buying an apartment, pulling up the old floor and discovering tomettes beneath. It even happened to my former landlords, whose floor was gorgeous. Since the parquet in my bedroom was badly laid and I thought I needed to replace it due to the water damage from the adjacent bathroom, I pulled on a corner that was already sticking out.

This is what I found. I jumped; I squealed with joy; I bounded into the kitchen to put on eye protection and returned to the bedroom to pull out as much parquet as I could. It hadn’t been glued, merely laid onto a protective sheet covering the floor. The tomettes are in perfect condition. There’s only one exception: the previous owners broke some tomettes to run… a TV cable. Ugh. (By any chance, do any readers have a few tomettes laying around that I could use to repair this? They’re hard to find. Mine are 11.5cm from point to point; 10cm from side to side.)

Pulling up the parquet brought something else into evidence: the tile elsewhere in my apartment is on top of yet more tomettes!!! Tomorrow I’m going to pull up tile in an out-of-the way corner of my living room to see what’s been done and if it’s recoverable — I certainly hope so. I’m delighted since I had in fact dreamt of redoing my bedroom floor in tomettes, but had to set aside the idea since they’re very expensive. Then today I find that it was already done 60 years ago!

Kanoko turned 6 months old two weeks ago, and is at the veterinarian today, getting neutered and being given an ID tattoo in his ear. (Why you should spay or neuter your pet, et en français, pourquoi faire stériliser son animal.) I weighed him while at the vet’s: 4.5 kilos/10 pounds! That’s a healthy weight for a fully adult cat — normal-sized kittens weigh 3kg/6.5 pounds at 6 months old.

I took the opportunity of a mischief-free apartment to put up the curtain wire over my bedroom storage nook and hang a drape (“before” photo here). The difficulty of this nook is that it’s 2 meters wide, while none of the stores I checked had drapes/curtains wider than 1m60. So I hung a drape sideways! It’s not ideal, but with the tall bed frame bringing things together visually, it works well enough. It will probably look much better once I’ve repainted my bedroom a darkish grey. After considering several color ideas over the last few months, I realized that every time I’d seen a grey room, I’d utterly loved it. It won’t be done for a few months though, since budget priority goes to repairing my bathroom, which will be expensive. It is nice to no longer see the boxes and suitcases, in any case.

Questions you may be asking about this photo:
- Are those potatoes?
- What’s that black thing behind them?
- How did they get there?
- Did you cut that hole yourself?

Answers: Yes, those are potatoes. Ever since Kanoko arrived, I’ve been mysteriously losing potatoes. Since it was only one or two at a time, I figured that I was just miscounting them and had forgotten how many I’d actually eaten. But then, a few days ago, five went missing all at once, and I noticed a rank stench coming from the corner in my kitchen where I’d kept the potatoes. The familiar smell of… rotting potatoes. Looking behind the kitchen, which had been set up amateurishly by the previous owners (the main reason I got my apartment for such a low price), I noticed two things:
1. There is a space behind the lower cupboards that’s just big enough for a kitten to get through from the open area beneath them.
2. There is also a space beneath the particle-board bottoms, just high enough for kitten paws and… potatoes.
The two spaces were not big enough for me to be able to fish around with a pole for the potatoes.

Since the kitchen is indeed mediocre, and I plan to replace it eventually, I started to attempt ripping out the particle board bottom. True to inexperienced builder form, however, it had been put together so chaotically that there was no way I could pull it out cleanly and easily. And so I started to saw. I stopped after an hour, realizing it was going to take more than a couple cuts, and decided to wait until this weekend.

Today I finally managed to hack my way through the particle board and create a hand-sized hole, having to make several cuts due to the nearly-impracticable angle in the small space available. The first potato was visible as soon as I finished ripping out the last chunk of particle board. Ten more potatoes — for a total of eleven in all — were nearby. That black thing behind them? A rotting wooden spatula, shown here in a larger view of the area beneath the cupboards, so you can see what I was dealing with.

A story in three photos:

    

As just another Joe(anna) who had her own business (but which was actually mine, and I know enough about finances to know the difference between “earnings” and “profit”), I spent some of my hard-earned euros on a big arbre à chats — cat tree. This meant a bit of DIY. For anyone else interested in putting together a cat tree/scratching post:

1. Identify all the parts and organize them so you’ll know which is which more quickly. For instance, this tree has different-length posts, so I laid them out from longest to shortest.
2. Start with the base.
3. Build up gradually. The perch attached to the cat house/box on my tree had a bracket on it that was supposed to bolt to the box, but its screws had ripped out. Luckily I’m Anna the Handywoman! and have a wide variety of screws around, so was able to reattach it, though slightly off from its original position (the original holes were useless).
4. At this point, since you have a cat, you will probably have to take into account the unpredictable addition of extra weight onto various parts of the tree, in the form of a pouncing, rapidly-moving furball. Keep a strong hold of the tree during this delicate period. Finish with the top perch.
5. All done, kitten included!

I found this particular cat tree in several places, but got it from ZooPlus since it was cheapest. (Good-quality cat trees and scratching posts are expensive…!) It’s called Alicante, and is part of the tall models on their French site. On their US site, here’s the Alicante, where it’s among their medium cat trees. I liked this one since it seemed stable (which it is indeed), was tall but slim enough for my smaller-sized apartment, had several platforms, and came in a decent color. It was hard to choose though, there are so many neat-looking cat trees!

Maine Coons love water, as every site about them seems to point out. Kanoko has always dunked his paws in his water bowl, but Malo did the same — the transparent water makes it hard for cats to see just where the surface is, so they’ll often daintily feel for it before drinking. But since Kanoko has grown large and strong enough to jump onto countertops, it’s become clear that his love of water goes much further. He’s even put himself in the sink with the faucet running over him, and he loves it! When I wash the dishes he’ll play with the water, and then snorfle from the faucet during the rinse.

Kanoko turns four and a half months old about now. Here he posed for the camera this morning, and I photographed him blissfully scratching a yucca stump a bit later. Originally I’d planned to pull out the big yucca, but Kanoko loves its stumps so much that I’ve kept it. It’s now regrowing leaves from the tops of the stumps.

Since Malo passed away only two months ago, I still remember how big he was, and can hardly believe that Kanoko has nearly reached Malo’s size at such a young age. Kanoko’s face has really filled out, his whiskers (chopped off by the people who abandoned him) are nice and long now, and his tail is beautiful. He certainly does look very “Maine Coon”. His paws still seem to be growing more quickly than the rest of him! (There’s a photoset of Kanoko that shows his development since my kind neighbor asked if I’d take care of him two months ago.)

There are also pictures of the bougainvillea and other plants on my terrace, including a baby rose plant that surprised me when I found it this morning. My cyclamen are looking to be beautiful again this year, and my lemon tree has been blooming up a storm lately: lots of lemons to come!

As for the crazy neighbor who threatened to kill Kanoko, all has been well since I went to the police, and put up the finer-grade wire on my terrace. I later gave the police report to people in her building, who spoke with their building management about it — it’s far from being the first report that’s been filed against her. Ever since, I’ve made a point of using my terrace normally and ignoring her whenever she came out. She’s stopped going outside very often and no longer bothers trying to scream at me (she never talked normally, only screamed — it’s not an exaggeration that we call her “crazy”, it truly seems that she is mentally ill, which is sad). So Kanoko is fine, I’m fine, and it’s wonderful to have such a quiet terrace.

This is truly a photo that speaks for itself.

These are pots of grass I planted for Kanoko — real wheat seeds I found in the seed for sprouts section of an organic grocery market here (Diététique Malausséna). This way I have a big bag of seeds that I can replant as often as needed. Kanoko loves his pots of grass: he’ll sit on them and enjoy himself.

Today I got Kanoko a harness, and am delighted — he understood it wasn’t a toy after just two “no”s when he tried playing with the lead, and then trotted around the apartment building hallway without a problem. As soon as he’s less wary of the hallway we’ll venture further. Malo abhorred the harness I tried on him as a kitten… even after several patient, gentle tries he would wail and fight it so energetically that I could never get the lead on. It’s great that Kanoko seems to accept a harness! I would love to walk him on weekends.

What with Kanoko’s kittenish penchant for pouncing on my toes at 4am and dashing around the apartment, another scratching post seemed to be in order. Luckily I found a fun one on sale, that’s designed like a pineapple. I hoped Kanoko would like it. At first he only went in the hole, but a bit later he’d hopped up top. Then he realized that the balls made tantalizing sounds when they were batted, and that he could propulse himself in circles around the post while swatting!

This photo is my favorite of the bunch, for Kanoko’s eminently feline expression. Plus you can see how enormous his (adorable) paws are, and the cute ear tufts.

I’ve let Kanoko onto my patio every morning and evening, under supervision until he’s grown a bit bigger. The cat door is lockable, so he won’t get into mischief during the day while I’m at work. Kittens have a real flair for getting into situations you didn’t imagine until seeing them perform with your own eyes. I hereby submit the following evidence:
- Kitten in an aerial position
- Proof of height attained by kitten as related to previous submission

Kanoko is a wonderful kitten: intelligent, well-behaved and sweet. As shown by the photos, he figured out how to climb up, and also how to get back down — I didn’t help him. (I did that on purpose, so he’d become uninterested in climbing. It worked; he only climbed twice and then stopped, playing elsewhere for an hour.) And he knows what “no” means and listens! After just four days he’d learned that there was no point in trying to get on the table when I eat, for instance. He doesn’t scratch me or furniture, since he has plenty of opportunities for play, with toys I use (left over from Malo), a scratching post (gift from the neighbor who gave me Kanoko, since it’s one her adult cat dislikes), and feathers gathered from the patio. I plan on getting a harness soon and familiarizing him with it so that when he’s older, I can walk him to a big park that’s only two blocks away. Despite months of regular, gentle attempts while a kitten, Malo never got used to a harness, but apparently Maine Coons do well with them.