and today i have mostly been...

[406Break]

The smell of burning clutch when pulling uphill... in reverse...
Damn...those Noranza 001 held so good... no wheel spin, only clutch burn






Had to move the 401 from my "father-in-law's" garage to my own...reasons...

[Welly]

THAT is quite possibly the best Photo I've seen on here

The colours, the light, I can almost feel the atmosphere, well done

[trufflehunt]

What's the car ?

Looks rather similar to one of the 1940's Humber staff cars.

Duh... 401

[PeterN]

It does but I don't think the grill was like that.

Peter

[Welly]

Is that a giant Christmas Pudding just behind (and to the left of) the 406?

[steve_earwig]

Young Charlie has a broken leg I didn't see him all Tuesday morning and, when he didn't come and try and steal my lunch, I went in search. I found him hiding in the loft, gave him a once over and quickly realised his back right leg was just flopping about. Straight to the vet's with him, only to find their x-ray machine was out of order, needing the developer changing. Errr, that seems to be the vet's job, amongst everything else, and she just hasn't got time. Can we come back tomorrow? I was concerned that if the problem was dislocation it should be put back fairly quickly. Plus spend a night with a broken leg? So she recommended us another vet's, one in Zagreb that just does small animals and is run by a guy she has a lot of respect for.

So off to Zagreb we went. It's a well-equipped vet's there, all high tech, so I was expecting English-sized bills. But hey, this is Charlie!

So, into the x-ray room and.... get ready for a surprise!




Our stupid f*cking neighbours have shot him as well. Once again I have a strong urge to go around there with my baseball bat, but I know it wouldn't end well. As my wife points out there is no point in reasoning with them because they really are that stupid. It's illegal but the police won't consider it much of a priority and my wife worries that if we do anything they may do something worse. So I have to swallow my anger once again.

There is no equivalent of the RSPCA here.

Anyway, it was a bit too late in the day so they filled him full of painkillers and sent us home. I wasn't too happy about it but Charlie didn't actually seem to give a toss, he just wanted to go outside and play and he didn't even seem to notice his leg not working. We took him in lunchtime yesterday and I collected him in the evening, together with another couple of x-rays:





He was quite groggy when he got home but today he's back to just wanting to go out and play. His leg is massively bandaged to immobilise it but it' not slowing him down much.



Btw the vets won't remove the pellet if it's not causing problems, they could potentially make things worse. I guess cats don't live long enough to get lead poisoning...

[Doggy]

Sickening.
I would be strongly tempted to give karma some practical assistance

[Captain Jack]

Jebus Steve That's sucks. I would have shot your neighbours there and then. How can the rozzers not be doing anything about this?? Looks intentional. Was the bone breakage a result of the shot?



Glad the mog is on the mend though. Could have been worse.

[steve_earwig]

The breakage is the other side, nothing to do with the pellet. There's no obvious wound so it's probably fairly old.

It does make me wonder how he got a broken leg, my first thought was RTA but usually they get head or spine injuries, or crush wounds, so maybe he fell out of a tree. Alternatively he's a very friendly cat, maybe too friendly.

It just wouldn't be any sort of priority to the coppers, they're pretty useless at the best of times.

[PeterN]

Sounds as though you have a pretty good veterinary system there and hopefully reasonably priced, our animals have cost us a fortune.

Nice looking cat by the way, hope he recovers well.

We lost our two cats earlier in the year, one was a 20 year old moggie and the other a chocolate point Siamese who was nearly 18 within two days of each other. We were looking for a Siamese kitten but they cost more than I pay for a car! But we now have three Siamese type 18 months old we got as a job lot from someone who was moving, we have had them about 3 weeks now and they are settling in nicely.

Peter

[Welly]

Really sorry to hear this Steve, give him a cuddle from me

As for the neighbours - IGNORE AT ALL TIMES.

[Captain Jack]

Siamese... you must be deaf. Or extremely tolerant to incessant yowling noises they make.

We have a Burmese and a Burmilla. Burmese is super cuddly but yowls every waking moment. Burmilla is pretty quiet though, despite being half Burmese.

I hear (geddit?) Tonkenese are just as loud as Siamese being a cross between them and Burmese.

[PeterN]

We had Tonkenese about 30 years ago before they were an officially registered breed, the lady that bred them was snowed in for quite a long period and couldn't get to the stud cat, she had Siamese and Burmese and let nature take its course.I don't remember whether they were noisy or not but our Chocolate point that we recently lost was extremely vocal, so I know what you mean.

Two of these are Siamese/Ragdoll cross although they look pretty well 100% Siamese, Seal point sort of colouring but they have a very quiet miaow - I am relived to say.

Peter

[highlander]

Our previous cat was a ginger long-hair Persian. Very good-natured cat, and one of the breed traits is that they are a "people-person" type of cat, with a tendency to latch on to one particular human and be super-clingy to that human. We called him Smeagol, after the creature that eventually became Gollum in the Lord of the Rings, because he was a sneaky little bugger.

But alas, this story comes from toward the end of his life. For the last 2 years of his life, he was stone deaf. Couldn't hear a bloody thing, no matter how loud you shouted. And relatedly, had no idea how loud HE was shouting any more.

So every so often, you'd be standing in the kitchen, making a sandwich, and suddenly you'd hear MMMEEEOOOW, yelled from the top of a surprisingly powerful set of lungs, usually from about 2 feet behind you.

On the plus side, his deafness meant that Mum and Dad were able to let their Roomba vacuum run freely. As far as he was concerned it wasn't a threat, as it didn't make any noise.

Their current cat, an Abyssinian named Marco, will attempt to kill the Roomba as soon as it is switched on. He beats it very hard around the bump-sensor at the front. The Roomba will then stop (assuming it's hit a wall), turn, and then start moving again, shortly after which it will be smacked in the face again. As far as their Roomba is concerned, it lives in a house no bigger than 2 feet by 2 feet.

[steve_earwig]

All our cats are just mogs, I think there's a fair bit of wild cat in them too.

Thanks guys, Charlie's getting quite a few cuddles just now. He just wants to go outside and play and spends a lot of his waking time crying for us to let him out and take that thing off of his leg



He's in my bedroom, where poorly pussycats usually go, mostly sleeping under the duvet. I don't mind sharing my room but unfortunately he cried on and off all night and kept me awake so I had to move out and am currently camped out on the sofa.

Ignore the neighbours? I wish I could, the problem is, aside from the animal cruelty, they constantly remind me of their presence: From the annoying folk music oozing out of their workshop all summer, to the regular "full alert ape house" noises. They have a row of apple trees along our shared fence and this summer they decided to spray it with insecticide one evening, which also sprayed into our house so I had to rush round and shut the windows. Yesterday evening Mr. Retard was chainsawing down one of the apple trees, no idea what for but I don't think the chainsaw has much in the way of a silencer. They have 3 beehives in their vegetable garden, which should be good but they face towards ours and they seem to have trained them so I regularly get stung, the bees even seem to actively chase me about so I end up spraying them with insecticide.

Btw so far we've paid 180Kn for the first lot of x-rays (20 quid odd) and 2,200Kn (250 quidish) for the surgery and second lot of x.rays. He's still under the vet here for analgesics and antibiotics so it'll be more but not too bad, certainly not how much it'd be in the UK!