I have various sets of photos edited to put in posts and keep forgetting the actual posting part. As it’s quite late and I need to clean litterboxes before I go to bed, they’ll have to continue to wait, but here are a few standalone cat pics so I don’t entirely forget how to do this.
I hope you already did your counting, because I can’t help but spoil it with my delight at achieving this: I got ALL the cats in one photo! Lifetime achievement unlocked!
(My joy was somewhat inhibited by the horrid “update” to Photos that happened in the last couple of days, removing most of the useful features and replacing them with crummy filters, but I’m still happy about it.)
As you might imagine, treats were involved.
Home from Australia with over 500 photos, and that’s just what’s on my phone, not the ones spouse took with the big camera. I tried to write some posts while I was away, but generally didn’t have the connection for it except on my phone (which was still too slow to do anything with pictures), and I don’t really like writing on that. So I’ll probably be putting up outdated posts of what I did two weeks ago for the next two weeks. There were cats on a couple of days, though.
We got up at 5:30a on Sunday to catch our 14-hour flight from Sydney to LAX, after which there was a layover of a couple of hours (lengthened due to delay). Mom picked us up from SFO a bit after noon on Sunday, which is to say just about exactly 24 hours after we woke up. We didn’t nap on the flight, either. Around 2p I was shaking badly and took a nap that lasted until nearly midnight. Then I got up, had a snack and read some email, and joined CMY in the giant kitty bed around 4a for a nap that lasted until about noon. Then I got up, intended to have a snack but didn’t, and went upstairs and napped from about 2p to 5p. Now it is nearly 2a and I should’ve been in bed two hours ago, but am not really surprised not to be. We do have landscapers/yard workers coming by between 7a and 8a later this morning, but after sleeping 21 hours out of the last 36, I’m not too surprised that I’m still awake. Time for some melatonin.
First, the answer to the previous Count the Cats is six. The tricky one is here:
Quot was hiding in the shadows back there. (I kept Five-Spice in the crop to match the post title better.)
Here’s another cute picture of Five-Spice that reminds me a lot of one we have of CMY as an adolescent climbing in that same shelf.
A few weeks ago at the vet I saw (and got to hold) this adorable dilute calico kitten waiting for her very first checkup.
Naturally I had to go look for photos of Five-Spice at a similar age. This is probably the first one I took of her, before we trapped the kittykins:
Five-Spice doesn’t look much different, other than size. But look at little baby Vanilla:
See, she really was vanilla-colored. (We just called her White Kitten at the time, and her family was White Cat, Calico Kitten, Orange Kitten, and Gray Kitten.)
A rare event: Vanilla out and about on the upstairs cat tree. I had to brighten the picture quite a bit because of the backlighting, but you can see her lovely markings now. Hard to believe she was nearly white as a kitten (hence her name).
As a bonus, here’s one I took of her on the windowsill. Her back looked so bright (for her) that I actually mistook her for Walnut at first. Maybe that’s why she’s giving me that Look.
I really needed to see some kitty pictures today. And I thought, I have some of those!
This is possibly the best kitty yinyang I have ever photographed. Not that that’s a particularly high bar, but still.
Adorable diagonal of kittykins in the new(ish) cat tree. Meringue seems to have misplaced her nose.
CMY’s lovely furry tummy.
Find Moonstone!
Rhombus on the living room cat tree, looking utterly content up there.
Licoris on the oldest piano. From a few months back, but she’s probably underrepresented here.
I was going to attempt to do something meaningful today, but instead spent the afternoon reading my class notes from my 1992 and ’93 music and linguistics classes.
So instead I present Vanilla.
I don’t think I’d noticed before how different her two back paws are. (And her legs are normal-shaped; she just was still getting up when I took the first picture.)
Coming soon: Count the Cats!
We got some pre-owned cat furniture recently from a person whose cats had both passed away (ages 15 and 19, I think) and who is going to move before re-catting. So far it seems a hit.
We have one (nearly entirely) white cat and one (nearly entirely) black cat. Naturally, when they were on our bed with its dark purple sheets and white comforter they were arranged like this:
Later on:
Vanilla has the palest eyes I’ve ever seen on a cat.
They’re ever so slightly blue-tinted in that photo, but part of that is just from the bits of orange on her face — which I’d barely noticed before, since she averages out to sepia.
Her eyes were even paler when she was maybe six months old:
Then again, so was the rest of her. It’s rather more obvious from that pic (taken just after she was neutered, which is why she’s in the cage) why she was named Vanilla. Before being named she was “white kitten”, though by then she was looking kind of Siamese. But only in the sense that her paws, tail, and ears were darker than the rest of her overall — she’s not even slightly solid, anywhere. Her tail is stripy, her legs (as shown) are speckled, her ears are too, and her face has tabby stripes. And her coat has subtle leopard spots. I really have no idea how to describe her briefly, except with words like “lovely.”
Fuzzy Tinking 