Happy Caturday! It’s time for this week’s funny photos. I had a crazy week, and I think the photos illustrate that.

I had a costume malfunction…and I wasn’t even wearing either of them!

My human was bummed she didn’t capture this on video — I shook off my hat and it landed, right side up, on these Cat Halloween Advent Calendar toys, just like you see here. You can tell I was amazed.

This was from a photo session I did for the Day of the Dead YouTube Livestream I’ve scheduled for Sunday. Yes, La Suegra will be there. And yes, I’m not thrilled about it. If you see this in time, it’ll be November 1, at 11 AM Pacific Time. Stop by if you can! The link is here and there will be a replay.

And that’s the end of this week’s outtakes! Did you have a favorite? Let me know in the comments — and let me know if you’ll be able to make it to the livestream!

Since I had my therapy cat visit at the big hospital, I got to wear my scrubs as my Halloween costume. The staff loves them, especially since they’re made by the same company a lot of them buy their scrubs from.

In spite of my outfit, my human is not so sure I behaved professionally on today’s visit! We entered the building where the Cancer Center is, and somebody was coming out of a private office. So I barged right in before my human could stop me! The person there was very surprised to see me. My human apologized for disturbing her. Then when she gathered me up to leave, the woman wanted to take a photo of me first.

We made it to the Cancer Center just in time — the patient who was finishing her infusion wanted a visit. So I sat next to her while she petted me, and she happily chatted with the nurse in Spanish.

Then we headed for the tower that contains ICU and Labor and Delivery. But as we walked by a waiting area, I decided I wanted to pester a guy innocently waiting there and not even looking at me. My human was about to snatch me up when she saw that the staff in the reception area were looking at me and laughing. So she brought me over to visit with them. They enjoyed that.

We finally made it to the fifth floor ICU and visited with the staff for a while, then went down a couple floors to Labor and Delivery. It’s a good thing I made it there because the nurses really needed me. They’d just been through something stressful. Some Labor and Delivery patients are going through high risk pregnancies. So when something happens there, it can get very serious. My visit gave them a chance to breathe and destress.

We finished up with our usual visit to Behavioral Medicine. Four patients came to see me, all women, and they were all very different. One young woman asked my human endless questions, which she was happy to answer. Another woman was quieter, and she had written some poetry about her struggles, which my human got to see when we were done. The woman at the end of the table seemed a little nervous but liked petting me. And the middle aged woman seemed to be falling asleep. It was a nice visit.
 
In spite of my going a bit rogue in the beginning, my human said I did a good job.

It seems like we are running out of my food faster than ever! Could it be that human thing called “shrinkflation?” In my world that means more shopping days!

It’s been a while since we’ve been to this particular store, and the first thing I noticed was all the new toys they had!

I knew right away we were spending most of our time in this section. Whether my human liked it or not!

A new-to-us staff member was working and she was so excited to meet me! Not because she knew about my social media or anything, just because she thought I was awesome. She spent a really long time petting me and chatting with my human.

We needed to get my food, so I reluctantly agreed to leave the toy section. But not without giving the baskets with the toys a little rub.

But there were even more cat toys! They have a whole display of catnip toys not far from the checkout counter.

The person who checked us out was the same one who I met earlier, so I got petted some more.

Was that a great shopping day or what!

I really wanted to go outside, which I haven’t done for a while. The weather was pretty, and it was much cooler than it has been. So it was a perfect morning for a walk.

Usually my human has an agenda because she is planning on a photo session. But this time she just had her phone and I took charge of the walk.

I headed for the bridge and paused there for a while, which gave my human the opportunity to take a photo or two.

I’ve always liked the bridge, although my human doesn’t really understand why.

You may wonder what’s at the other end of the bridge. It’s the upstairs part of the house, over the kitchen and bedrooms. But it’s semi-unfinished.

My human has plans for it. But she’s had plans for a while. I like looking inside and wondering when I will be allowed to explore up there.

If you subscribe to my YouTube Channel, you may have been following my Cat Halloween Advent Calendar series. We’re a little over halfway through the windows, and it’s been, uh, interesting!

Doing the videos has been fun, and I always enjoy the costumes, but the cat toys in this Halloween advent calendars aren’t exactly impressive! If you saw the first video, you probably know what I mean.

You can see the first 7 videos below. The rest are coming out daily until October 31. The unique thing about this version of them is that instead of vertical short videos, like you may have seen on my channel, these are landscape oriented versions! So you get a better view. Let me know what you think!
 

I have a couple of Halloween costumes that you may have seen briefly if you saw one of my livestreams on YouTube, or my second video in my Halloween Cat Advent Calendar series. But neither of them got a formal modeling session, and I think they both deserve it.

First up is my dracula cape! It looks good when I pose in it. But it’s actually a little large on me, and when I was wearing it for the Cat Halloween Advent Calendar, it was a little hard to run around in! I have all sorts of outtakes of it going crooked on me.

My human saw this kissing booth and pretty much instantly bought it. And it’s been mostly sitting around for about a month and a half! It’s made quick appearances here and there, in messages to friends and in a live or private post here and there. But it’s never been on the blog. In fact, it still had the tag on when we came in to do this photo session.

My human likes me to wear it this way, so you can see the Kissing Booth title at the top.

I prefer it this way, with my head sticking out. Also easier to kiss me this way!

And here’s a bonus. You saw the CVS witch hat hair clip special already. But at the same time my human got it, she also got this bat bow tie clip, and they go togehter really nicely.

So what did you think of these Halloween costumes? Let me know in the comments!

It’s time for outtakes, and I have some very funny bloopers for you this week!

When I was posing with my cat witch hats the other day, did I say I didn’t like this hat…or did I just imply it?

I couldn’t wait to get it off. The other hats, I was mostly fine wearing. At least there weren’t any notable bloopers involving them.

When my human needed a photo of me looking bored or annoyed with my cat toys, I was sure I could nail it. But maybe I overdid it in this photo.

And admittedly, I wound up having too much fun with some of the toys!
 
I hope you enjoyed this week’s silly pics! If you have a favorite let me know in the comments.

After a bit of a delay (caused by all our work on my 13 day Cat Halloween Advent Calendar), the video of my recent shopping day is up!

In the blog post with just photos, you only got to see a few parts of my shopping trip because the photos weren’t good enough for everything.

So you’ll see a few fun things that the previous blog post didn’t cover…plus the part afterwards where I went in the carrier all by myself. Yes, my human caught it on video!

The video’s below. I hope you enjoy it at least half as much as I enjoy my shopping days.
 

Yes, cat toy fatigue is a thing! No matter how much your cat enjoys a toy when it’s new, the novelty is bound to wear off after a while. So you get another toy…and another…and before you know it, you have a house full of cat toys and a bored cat.

There are several reasons this happens (and don’t worry, there are easy, simple fixes, which I’ll get into in a moment).

Reasons cats get bored of their toys:

1. Overexposure. There’s even a real term for that: Neophilia. That’s why your cat ignores once favorite toys that have been sitting around for weeks.
2. Its scent is gone. Most catnip and silver vine toys lose their appealing, intoxicating scent after a period of time (although some catnip strains are surprisingly resilient!). And once that happens, the cat no longer has a reason to play with it.
3. You stopped using it as playtime with them. It happens more than you’d think — the human uses a toy to play with a cat, and then expects them to continue playing with it on their own. But maybe, the most fun part of the toy (you), isn’t there, so the toy is no longer interesting.
4. The toy isn’t prey like. If a toy doesn’t imitate the movements of a real critter, then it’s not fun for a cat. Cats prefer playtime that mimics hunting. And if it just sits there, or if its feel or appearance doesn’t resemble prey in some form, it might not spark their interest.

The good news is that all these cat toy problems are easily solved — without buying new cat toys or spending more money. I’ve already covered a couple of them in this post. And I have several more suggestions below. The first one is perhaps the easiest.

How to give new life to old cat toys

1. Put those toys away!
   When your cat sees these toys sitting around for weeks on end, no wonder they are bored of them. So pick them all up except a couple of their current favorites. Put the rest in a bag or basket, and hide them away somewhere where your cat won’t see them. Then every few weeks, gather up the ones that have been sitting out, and bring out a couple of new ones. Rotating cat toys keeps them fresh and novel.
    
2. “Marinate” the old toys. If the catnip toys aren’t as fragrant anymore, put them in a jar or baggie with some fresh catnip for a few days to a couple of weeks. (Pro tip: rubbing the nip between your fingers or hands helps to release the scent even more.) That will give them new life. In fact, any soft cat toy, even if they didn’t originally have catnip, will benefit from this.
    
3. Think like prey. If you were being hunted, wouldn’t you try to hide? So take those old toys and put them in a paper bag or a box with some packing paper so your cat can hunt for them. Hide them behind a pillow, or under the corner of a rug, with just a tiny section peeking out. Let your cat think they are smarter than their prey!
    
4. If you’ve slacked off on playing with your cat, get back to it! And be creative. Remember what I said about thinking like prey. If you could make the toy move under a bedsheet or play peekaboo with a decorative pillow, I bet your cat would think that was fun! Look around your house and think of new ways you can create fun hunting scenarios with your cat’s old toys.

 
These are all super easy tips, and you are probably surprised you haven’t thought about them. But with daily routines, people sometimes forget about the fun things that make life with cats so enriching and worthwhile. So save this list and come back to it every so often as a reminder that a little novelty can go a long way with cats. And even with people.

2014 doesn’t just feel like it was a long time ago…it really was a long time ago! I was just 7 months old in October — my first Halloween season — and still competing as a kitten in cat shows. And I already had several costumes. This was just one of them.

I forget where this devil harness came from…but I do remember that originally my human wound up with the wrong size and had to get a second one.

Guess who got the one that was too big for me?

My human thought this orange butterfly wing thing was pretty…but it was too small, even for me as a kitten! We still have it because we don’t know what to do with it.

I had already been wearing this pirate outfit since before Pirate Day that September.

And I had my first big road trip in October — a cat show in Las Vegas! You can see some of the Halloween decor in the background.
 
I hope you enjoyed my look back at my first October!