A Warm Place for a Nap

Just my cat being cute.

What's Up Doc?

Dinner in Chinatown

I can't believe how boring I've been. Hopefully, my real life is more interesting than my blog-life of late. Here are a few pictures of my recent non-adventures.


Watching the cat watching.


My son takes a trip for his 8th grade graduation. Lucky dog.


Working on it.

Cute Cat Pic

If you can't do profound, make do with cute.

Don't Bother Me. I'm Reading.

Macroday--Nose

You're not going to get a macro of my nose on this site!!!



My cat doesn't get to give informed consent or she'd refuse.

Naptime

After a long work week, the cat and I like to turn in early on Fridays.

Relax, Max

I was watching my cat sleep today and I was envious. Not of her ability to sleep for 16 hours a day, since I actually resent how much of my day is occupied by required sleeping but of her ability to relax so deeply. Not that she is always relaxed. At the moment she is doing furious battle, saving the world from a rubber band. But I envy those moments of spineless repose, where her only worry is whether dinner will arrive on time.



I’ve been hypnotized during a course on hypnosis and trust me, it is a very relaxed feeling but I doubt I looked that calm. I don’t think I’ve looked that relaxed when asleep since I was an infant and still believed that all was safe in my world. Cats have all the luck.
When my kids were infants, we read to them from a number of board books. Writing a good baby book is quite an art. It might appear easy to the uninformed. After all such a book is rarely more than 20-30 words in length. But that is the point. It has to be readable, not once but a hundred times, aloud. The pictures have to be bold and eye catching, but even more, the words have to have a certain seductive rhythm and tone, like great poetry, only catchier and more accessible. One classic of the genre, "Goodnight Moon", seems dull and lifeless until read aloud. Then the tone and rhythm catch the ear and lull the senses into a state of, see I had a point here, relaxation.
We had our favorite stories, like most families. There were the train books, the dinosaur stories, the bedtime stories. Some were funny, some sweet. Some just outright ridiculous. The queen of silliness has to be Sandra Boynton. Sandra started in the greeting card business I believe. But her board books captured my family’s attention. Our favorite was “But Not the Hippopatamus.” Quoth I:
A hog and a frog
Cavort in the bog.
But not the hippopotamus.
A cat and two rats
Are trying on hats.
But not the hippopotamus.

Doesn’t this remind you of middle school? The best reading of all was when a French family member read it with an exaggerated French accent. We nearly died laughing. I can’t reproduce it well in print but imagine “But not ze ippopotamoose,” and you get the idea.



Another favorite which I have to quote from memory since the book must be in a box somewhere is “Max’s Bedtime” by Rosemary Wells. Max loses his red rubber elephant right before bedtime. His older sister Ruby tries to comfort him with all his other stuffed animals. “ ‘Relax, Max,’ said Ruby. But Max could not relax.” The pictures are great and the story has a happy ending. Max finds his red rubber elephant and goes to sleep. If my child didn’t do as well, it wasn’t Rosemary’s fault.
I still say “Relax, Max” to my kids although I’m not sure they remember the source of the quote. I don’t know if they listen anymore but they did back then.
So we should all learn to relax from cats, and Ruby. After all, life is too short not to waste more of it.

Cats of Science

My cats graciously participated in a science fair experiment of a 5th grader in my son's class. Since it had to do with free food they couldn't object. Unlike university science they didn't have to sign elaborate forms or go through an IRB (institutional review board) before volunteering. The question was did cats prefer the same old food they always eat or something novel. Well you can judge for yourself but my scientist alter ego sees some problems with this experiment.

The Hot Seat

Click on the photo to view large--the blog cuts off part of her head but it's all there in the picture.

A very practical cat warmer. A way to warm practically the whole cat. Also how the cats welcome autumn in our house.
For Saturday Photo Hunt--Practical.

Catty

Sometimes I can be a little judgmental. I watch people I don't know and criticize them in my head. So two nights ago, I am in synagogue and I see an older woman pull out a compact during prayers. I sit in judgment that she would be so vain as to check her makeup during a moment that ought to be spiritual. Then she moves to polish the reflective surface and I realize she's checking for messages on her cell phone. At least impiety has caught up with the times!

See It Sunday--Nose

For See It Sunday I entered a macro of my cat's nose. I took it the day I got my new macro lens. I put the camera on a mini-tripod I got (also new) and crept up on the sleeping cat, focusing and taking a new picture each step along the way. My last two shots were actually too close. Of course, by this time both the cat and I got tired of the game.

Self-portrait with vintage hat and unwilling cat

Photo Friday asks for a self-portrait. This is a technical challenge but more so a personal challenge. I have never liked having my picture taken and taking my own seems all the more difficult. I set up in a room with good natural light and a simple backdrop. First I started by photographing my hand and arm which I actually like the look of. Then I tried a photograph of my face. The first portrait was terrible. I looked like a hag. The light emphasized every line and shadow on my face. I looked old, bony, severe. But, instead of giving up, I recruited my cats to help. Trying to coax an unwilling cat to pose with me, softened me up, and made me look more natural. As the claws came out, the shots became more candid. I got a few reasonable shots. Then the cats wouldn't let me near enough to catch them.
Thoughts of self-portraits and of conversations I have with women in therapy all the time (men only occasionally) also inspired this week's Poetry Thursday poem to the prompt of "The Body Knows."

A new meme?

I discovered a Tuesday meme. This way I wouldn't have been complaining of being out of words last Tuesday. I have a few days to decide. It is a cat-based meme and I have two cats. This way if the weather is too dreary I can always take pictures of my cats. They are more challenging to photograph than I would have thought. If you use a flash the eyes look very strange and I still don't have a tripod. (My Hannukah list is getting taken care of a little bit late this year).
I'm ambivalent because I am trying to do too much (this is in my profile so I am proving it to you) and sometimes I get bored of other people's pet photos (sorry but they are a little like baby pics and home videos) and hesitate to turn off my readers. On the other hand my site is nothing if not eclectic, so maybe it doesn't matter.
I am including links to the meme and to the person who introduced me to the meme here, so you can check them out if you too are a "cat person". See My Cats and Funny Stories for the meme and Calynn and her Sphynx cat, Dragonheart, who sure is cute, for some nice pics and stories from Munich.

Thursday Challenge--Orange

All right, did the folks at Thursday Challenge realize that Lensday had Orange as the prompt for last week? Orange is not the most photogenic color. After all how many buildings are painted orange? Is your favorite flower that color? How many orange articles of clothing do you own? And pumpkins are so predictable and trite. There was an orange house on my old street. My husband always thought it was a protest color, because the neighborhood was gentrifying and everyone else seemed to be trying to do the "painted lady" thing with their houses. I thought it was simply bad taste.
So I drove around looking for something orange to photograph. Southwest airlines planes are sort of orange but although I had great fun taking pictures they didn't quite meet the theme. Last night's sunset was orange but the color didn't shine through in my photo. Then I had an inspiration. The journal I read professionally is fondly known as the "Orange Journal." I have dozens of them lying around the house. But a photo of the cover of a journal is boring. So I looked around the house and found that even though my favorite color is most emphatically not orange, the house is full of items in that color. It took me less than five minutes to amass a pile of orange items and create a still life. My cat assisted by snooping around wondering what on earth I was doing with this stuff.
So great art it ain't but it sure gets the point across.
Colorifically yours.

If you can't stand the heat . . . .

Moody Monday picked Comfort as the mood for this week. I wasn't the only one to submit a photo of a cat. I guess cats have a special ability for seeking and finding comfort. Dogs comfort people, it appears to me. Cats spend 16 hours a day asleep and make a career out of doing it well. I took this photo because I cannot imagine being able to tolerate sleeping on a hot radiator. Clearly I do not have a cat's metabolism. In this photo, Dot draped herself thinly to maintain a maximum contact level with each coil of the radiator.

Dot and Dash

Dot and Dash
Originally uploaded by skron.

Now you've met both my cats.

Doing what cats do best

Dash doing what cats do best
Originally uploaded by skron.

My younger son wanted me to post pictures of our cats. This is Dash.
The following definitions from Merriam-Webster explain my choice of her name:
3 : a small usually distinctive addition--a dash of salt, a dash of humor--
4 : flashy display
5 : animation in style and action
Of course, being a cat, what Dash is best at is sleeping. The one and only time she caught a mouse (definitely the mouse was a small, distinctive addition to our living room, but not a desired one), Dash displayed that "animation in style and action" I was shooting for with her name.