It’s all your fault

You’ve all given me so much encouragement to go and try new things that I can’t find time to blog anymore!  This week we had a great sushi lunch, a couple of doctor’s appointments, a set of vaccinations for TJ, the arrival of birthday gifts from my parents, and a lot of work.  My vet tech program is briefly on hold while I wait for my transcripts to be evaluated, but I’ve tried to get ahead in my reading because my old brain just ain’t what it use to be.  All week I’ve had things I wanted to blog about, and now most of them slip my mind, so I need to make a point of writing when I’m hit with inspiration.

One thing I can write about are two “slightly used” cat toys we received this week after shopping on eBay.  The first one, the Bug Jar, just isn’t as exciting as it should be.  For one thing, it’s noisy, which makes it annoying to run for an extended period of time.  Also, the “bugs” fly around far too quickly—I’d hoped they’d have more of a gentle “flutter”, but they whip around inside the jar so quickly that the cats lose interest. It’s a good idea which needs improvement.  The second toy, the Hartz Poking Fun toy, was better but still suffered from being too powerful.  It’s a small dome with a ball inside, and there are holes in the dome where the cat can reach in to try to poke the ball around.  It also runs on batteries, and the batteries cause the ball to spin rapidly around inside the dome.  It’s supposed to build excitement, but again, it moves so quickly that our cats were bewildered by it and walked away.  They do play with it when it’s shut off, and they like to reach through the holes to poke at the ball, so it’s a toy that needs to be toned down a notch.

One other toy I’ve meant to write about for months is called the Ba-Da-Beam Rotating Laser cat toy.  We bought it because the cats just love the chase a laser beam, but our poor carpal-tunnel hands get tired of holding down the buttons on regular laser beam pointers (can’t someone just make one with a regular on/off switch?!).  The Ba-Da-Beam uses a laser beam which reflects off a mirror to aim the laser at a floor or a wall, and an internal motor makes the laser beam move automatically.  I figured this toy would be perfect, but it was sort of disappointing.  The motor just moves the laser around in a predictable circular pattern at one constant speed, so it’s not very exciting.  If it could slow down, speed up, change direction, or even move in a figure eight pattern it would be more interesting.  Our cats like it, but only for a few minutes and then they get bored and wander off.  One advantage of the toy is that you can hold it in your hand and move it around yourself to make more exciting patterns, and that’s sometimes more comfortable for us than holding a laser pointer.

Long story short, the cats would rather have a crinkly paper bag to play in than fancy toys with batteries.  We received two beautiful snuggle sacks that we got for free from the Paw Points program, and they’re a huge hit.  Bing spends most of the day curled up inside one of them.

Here are some photos to go along with the toy descriptions:  first is the Bug Jar, then the Poking Fun dome, then the Ba-Da-Beam, and finally, the snuggle sack:

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Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/13 at 06:45 PM

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  1. My Bear would love one of those snuggle sacks. grin

    Posted by Simply Coll  on  01/17  at  07:47 AM
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