No Dot For Valkyrie

Welcome to 2025 in the Cosy Cabin. The new year started off well: last night I at last had enough sleep. I went to bed at eleven o’clock and slept for the rest of the year…

The cats began with breakfast and play. It was Valkyrie contributing most of the latter. Within a few minutes, she had knocked three of the stockings off the bookcase, toppled the two little tree-ornaments next to the radio, opened both the CD player and the cassette player compartments in the radio and lost four fuzzy mice in rapid succession under the oven.

What Valk cannot do, however, is see the red dot. I have noticed that some cats see it but have no interest in it, while it simply doesn’t seem to register in the vision of others. I have tried to involve her with the dot, but for her, it is just not there.

This leads to some amusement, since she is attracted by action and noise caused by other felines. Brazil, who will chase the red dot with vigour, will be pursuing it about the sitting room. Valkyrie will pause in fighting the string-toy and bounce over to where Brazil is causing a ruckus. Once there, though, she is puzzled as to what is going on. She cannot understand what Shimmer is doing; he must appear to her to be running in circles for no reason.

She certainly has enough to do with other toys - a couple of days ago, she spent half an hour playing with a piece of cardboard torn from the back of a toothbrush package - but the red dot is not a part of her schedule.