okay, 13 cats. And now you have a swimming pool. Does this mean you might be ready soon to make your own Cat & Dolphin video?
Never say never!
I know you probably mentioned it before, but I am too lazy to look for it….what camera did you end up getting?? I love the panoramic shots. I think my camera does that too but I have never used it…maybe it was my old one that did :-/ I need a new toy…it’s been a while since I got one, but I don’t think I will go so far as to have my pet pee on something to get one!
It’s a Sony Alpha A55. I looked at a bazillion different cameras, but in the end we’ve always had Sonys and really liked them, so after reading the reviews on Amazon and thinking hard about it, I decided on the A55. It’s lighter than the A100 was (though that could be because the lens is smaller), and it has a rubberized grip area so that it’ll be a little more difficult to drop (and unless I’m using it, I keep it in my desk drawer to avoid having it peed upon). So far, I really really like it. The next sunny day we have, I have a date with Fred in the foster room to get some jumping kitten pictures!
Also, perhaps I mentioned that I really like the panoramic function?
While I’m recommending things, I recently got and LOVELOVELOVE an Eye-Fi Card for my camera. In short, it automatically, via Wi-Fi, uploads your pictures to your computer. So if I’m wandering around snapping a zillion pictures, by the time I mosey back to my computer, all those pictures are ALREADY on my computer, waiting to be looked at. You can also use it to post your pictures on various sites (Flickr is the only one that I can remember at the moment), but I don’t use that function. You can read more about it at the main Eye-Fi site.
I love this thing SO MUCH, y’all. Like I told Craige on Facebook yesterday, if this were an infomercial, you’d see the text/ hear the voiceover “NO FUMBLING WITH CARD READERS OR MESSY CORDS!” and me fumbling through my Drawer of Doom looking irritable.
I swear, this is the best thing I’ve purchased this year. I HIGHLY recommend it. (I would have tried it before now, but the Eye-Fi wouldn’t work with the A100 and doesn’t work with my little W300.)
Go get you one! (I got the 4GB card because I’ve never in my life filled up a memory stick – I like a clean memory stick – and also because you can set the Endless Memory function so that when the memory stick is too full, it will automatically delete pictures that have already been uploaded. How neat is that!)
PS: Annika, I will post a more in-depth review of the camera when I’ve been using it a bit longer, along with pictures of the camera itself. I can tell you that it’s not a camera you’d throw in your purse and go. It’s got heft to it, and though I’d take it on vacation (to Myrtle Beach or Maine or any other place where I’d get scenic pictures), I wouldn’t take it with me, say, on a trip to the supermarket (that’s what my little W300 is for!)(Also my cell phone.)(Also my iPod Touch.)(I have too many things that take pictures, obviously!)
beautiful mb pictures, thanks for putting them up – i miss the southeastern beaches, a lot (i was born and raised in blacksburg, va and spent time during every summer of my childhood at the beach – va beach, nags head, cape hatteras, annapolis, md). did you eat hush puppies while you were there? people out here (utah currently) don’t know what a hush puppy is. 😛
I live in Alabama – I don’t have to go to Myrtle Beach for hushpuppies, they practically hand ’em out on the corners here!
Okay, not really – but since I can have hushpuppies whenever I want, it turns out that I rarely do, and I didn’t have any in Myrtle Beach. Five bucks says that if I were to up and move to a place where I couldn’t get hushpuppies, I’d probably want them all the time!
Wow!!! That is one giant sparkle ball! Where did you get it?
I wish I knew! I’m thinking maybe Pet Depot, though I think it’s also likely that I just saw it in passing somewhere, bought it, and wiped the location from my memory.
Any word on Buster? It saddened me to hear that he did not play well with others. Hope he finds his forever home soon as well.
Buster is still in residence at Petsmart. Lisa (one of the CH adoption counselors, who brought me the big Peppers!) reported that the first time she let him out of his cage so she could snuggle him, he started herding her, like he did me in this video:
AGH, HE IS SUCH A SWEET BOY SOMEONE NEEDS TO ADOPT HIM RIGHT NOWWWWWWWWWW!
I will, of course, let y’all know when he gets adopted – his picture’s over there in the sidebar under “At Petsmart”; I plan to put a big red “ADOPTED!!!!” banner on his picture when he’s adopted!
20 cats…WOW! Just how many litters boxes do you have in operation right now?? And does everyone come inside to go, or do you have some that prefer to do their business outside?
Right now, I’ve got three litter boxes in the laundry room, two in the front room, and two in the upstairs bathroom. In addition, I’ve got two in the upstairs foster room, and two in the guest bedroom.
(Getting out my calculator…)
So, that’s nine (stupid calculator) eleven litter boxes. Which I personally scoop twice a day.
I know that conventional wisdom says that you need to have one litter box per cat plus one, which would mean we’d need 21 litter boxes right now and I can just tell you that, um, no. We don’t have the room for 21 litter boxes. We don’t even have the room for the 14 we’d need (following that conventional wisdom). The number of litter boxes we’ve got seems to work well as long as they’re scooped twice a day and completely dumped out, scrubbed out, and refilled with clean litter every other week or so.
We are talking about getting air purifiers to put in a couple of different locations in the house. Not so much for the smell but more for the dust. Even the Cat Attract litter, which is the least dusty litter I’m able to find, produces some dust, and Fred’s been coughing a lot lately.
Most of the boy cats will use the back yard as a litter box (hey, don’t you want to come over for a cookout? We can hang out in the back yard! No, really, take your shoes off and walk around!) and I know Kara will too, but Miz Poo and Alice usually come inside to use the litter boxes, then go back outside. They’re layyyydeeez and they have some manners, don’tchaknow.
How big is Joe Bob? My male cat, Logan, looks very similar (though he has more grey and less white) and I’m thinking they would be a match made in heaven. 😀 Logan’s 18lbs of tall, long Tom.
Joe Bob’s actually lighter than he looks – he recently weighed in at 11.8 pounds. He’s a big cat, but he’s more tall and long than heavy.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one that makes up cat songs. I make up songs about our two cats all.day.long. In fact the other day I was hanging with my 2yo when our 22 pound tabby came over. His name is Youk, and after he KNOCKED ME DOWN head butting me, I referred to him as Youkapotomus. Then I began to sing, “Oh I want a Youkapotomus for Christmas,” which is now my 2yo’s favorite song EVER and he must hear it sung anything Youkie comes near us.
Love it!
(Also, I love “I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” – I have to hear it multiple times every year or my Christmas season isn’t complete!)
That Elwood, he’s HUGE. Do you know what he weighs?
14.2 pounds as of mid-July (I think). He is a big, big boy. I actually thought he was bigger than Tommy, but Tommy is actually about half a pound heavier. I won’t be surprised if (when) Elwood passes Tommy, though.
Have you seen this kitty attacking apples…funniest thing I have seen in a long time.
Is that a Scottish Fold, do you think?
How cute is that!
I do think that might be a Scottish Fold, but I’m not super-familiar with the breed, so I can’t say for sure. Looks like it might be, though!
Is Joe Bob an outside only kitteh?
No, not at all – Joe Bob goes outside during the day (and is supposed to stay in the back yard!) like the rest of the cats, but occasionally figures out how to get out of his collar and comes to let me know that “Hey, Mom, look what I did! Now let me roll around and purr!” I would have thought that he’d make the connection that finding Mom = being brought back inside and recollared, but somehow he hasn’t figured it out yet!
I think you should calculate (as best you can) the total number of cats you’ve had in yours and Fred’s lifetime, plus all the fosters. When someone asks you how many cats you have, proudly announce that total: “Elebenty-billion!” and when they come to, laugh and say that you’ve had cats all your life and fostered many more, and all “your” cats are living all over the world. Then that ‘thirteen’ seems like nuttin’.
and
ooo, I like the way that sounds: your cats are living all over the world!
(ok, probably just all over Alabama, but it still sounds pretty cool 🙂 )
I’m not sure I could actually count that high – and wouldn’t I feel awful if I missed/ forgot someone!
My fosters are actually living all over the country, if not the world (though, with the Army base being in Huntsville, I wouldn’t completely discount the idea of them being all over the world!). Remember, Gus and Mike (now Topher and Dorian) went off to live in Oregon a couple of years ago. Hoyt (aka Lugnut) is in NC with Michelle, who drove down here specifically to get him. Starsky and Hutch (now Percy and Jack) are in Indianapolis with Jen and Kiefer. Dorothy‘s in St. Louis with Andrea. And let’s not forget Maddy, my very first bottle baby, who went to Pennsylvania to live with Nance and her family way back in 2006!
Hmm. This appears to be the time of year when people fall in love with one of my fosters over the internet and drive long, long distances to come adopt them! (Well, except that Michelle came in the Spring and Andrea in the Summer.) Something about the cold weather makes people in fall in kitten love, I guess.
I love cats dearly but I think twenty in the house would drive me completely crazy. I currently have two and I always feel as though I’m surrounded by cats when I’m home. Like today I am home sick and have one cat under the blanket with me and the other sitting next to me on the couch. I can’t escape them. Twenty would bury me alive.
I have got to say that though there are times when I’m like “OH MY GOD I CAN’T BREATHE, GET OFF ME!”, those times are pretty few and far between. Right now, I’m sitting at my computer and there are four cats (Spanky, Miz Poo, Charlie Peppers and Sally Peppers) within reach, but they’re not on top of me or even against me. Molly will probably come and flop down in front of me in a little while (she comes, she stays for some belly rubbing and kissing, then she goes along her merry way). If I go watch TV later, one or two kittens will probably climb up for some love for a while, then go off to play or whatever.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the Peanuts character Pig-Pen, only instead of a cloud of dirt around my feet, I’ve got a cloud of kittens.
Also, I cannot stand having cats on me when I’m sleeping. I can handle having them up against me (and when the weather turns cold, more and more of them show up to sleep against me), but the only cats who reliably sleep with me are Miz Poo (ALWAYS – she’d crawl in my mouth and sleep there if she could) and Tommy, who sleeps in the cat bed at the end of the bed.
What on earth do you and Fred do with all your cats when you both go out of town together? This issue has been on my mind since we’ve been arranging care for our three cats during our upcoming Christmas travel blitz (6 nights, 2 states, lots of driving!).
What is this “go out of town together” you speak of? Seriously, since we bought this house 5 years ago Fred hasn’t left overnight even once. I WANT him to come away with me, I keep harassing him about it, but he just… doesn’t want to. We used to go to Gatlinburg pretty regularly, and we even went to Ft. Walton Beach a few times, but since we moved here, EVEN THOUGH we’ve had friends and family members offer to take care of the animals for us if we go away for a few days, he just hasn’t been interested.
I imagine that if I could convince him to go away, we’d either ask a friend/ family member to scoop and feed for us, or hire a petsitting service to come in and do it.
Ideally we’d have a college-aged kid who could come stay in the house while we were gone, but we don’t so that’s a no-go.
I should have known when the kittens started jumping down from the tops of the bookcases all of a sudden that there was something going on.
There was.
A wasp had gotten inside. I had no problems finding it, thanks to the kitten alarm system, and scooped it up and squooshed it before they could get stung.
(Alice’s face is cracking me up. She’s like “What fresh hell is this?”)
Harlan and Lucy watching bugs out the window, while Charlie gets a bit too familiar with the sniffing of Harlan’s chest. How RUDE.
“Someone need to clean this window, lady.” Shaddup, Harlan.
I love the way the sun is shining through Lucy’s ears.
Our Lucy’s getting to be a grownup lady cat, isn’t she?
ATTENTION. THIS IS YOUR WEEKLY EMERGENCY NOTICE. PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO THIS IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT.
CORBIE.
IS.
BEAUTIFUL.
THAT IS ALL. YOU MAY GO BACK TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED LIVES.
Speaking of Corbie, back in the Spring, someone (or as it turned out, TWO someones) were spraying in a couple of spots in the house. We couldn’t figure it out who was doing it, and so we did the obvious: we bought a motion-detect webcam that would record when there was movement, and so in the mornings I’d come downstairs to a thousand short movie clips on my computer that I had to glance through.
I got a couple of clips that showed just how Corbie – who is kind of muscularly challenged from the midsection back (he’s perfectly healthy, there’s just a lack of muscle back there that makes it so he walks funny and can’t really jump. It doesn’t slow him down – he climbs well in spite of his lack of Arnold-sized muscles) – gets up on the couch.
One thing for sure – we can never clip his front claws, or he’d never be able to get anywhere!
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Previously
2010: Grumpy boy.
2009: No entry.
2008: No entry.
2007: Good thing they’re not our cats, huh?
2006: No entry.
2005: One should always stretch well after a smackdown is completed.
Love the night vision video. Do you have any more?
Love Alice’s ‘you kids woke me up from a perfectly fine nap’ face during the wasp emergency, too!
🙂
Keep the laughs coming!
DB, I’ve got one more that I’ll share next week, and then one from a few years ago (I put it on the front porch to see what showed up overnight!) that I’ll share next week or the week after if I can find it!
“(ALWAYS – she’d crawl in my mouth and sleep there if she could)” — Laughed SO HARD. This is Yoko exactly. And she will dig my face until I let her sleep on it. Something about torties…
When she was a young kitten, I started meowing at her to see what she’d do, and she honestly tried to climb into my mouth. I laughed so hard I cried at that!
Torties love their people. 🙂
They DO! When you posted that Miz Poo has to soothe you when she hears you yelling or laughing or making a loud noise, I laughed. Luanne does this to me. If I get upset about anything, she will come running and meowing from wherever she is, jump into my lap, head-butt my chin, and purr. It totally works! I forget all about whatever I was yelling about. I think it is the sweetest thing ever.
Ha, our tortie loves her people, and she’ll paw at your leg annoyingly rather than just jump up in your lap…on and on, before she decides whether to jump or not.
As to litter, I have trouble with the dust/fragrance/clumping balance. I tried the one by Arm & Hammer called Natural Essentials (I think…it’s Essentials, at least) made from corn cob I believe. I put that in one litter box and ScoopAway Multi in the other and I like the A&H one better. The “girls” use it, seem to prefer peeing in that and pooping in the other box. It is expensive compared to clay litter but to use it ‘part-time’ isn’t so bad…no dust! and not too perfumey and I love how it scoops…just a user review here!
thanks for the info on the camera too!
This is for the person living in Utah who loves hushpuppies. If you’re close enough, go to Holy Smoke BBQ in Layton. They have good hushpuppies. I’ve lived in Utah for most of my life, but spent my teenage and early twenties in St. Louis. I hope that qualifies me enough to know what a good hushpuppy tastes like.
“A cloud of kittens” — I love that!
I also have a tortie who sleeps close. Harley began her life as a feral and has never become a lap cat, but every night, she sits right next to me in bed and pats my face. Eventually she lays down right next to my head.
Alright, what’s a hush puppy? You’re readers aren’t all amercian you know, Robyn!
the new camera sounds excellent – and it puts the photos onto the computer for you? Oh My Word!
Motion detect webcam! I’d love to see what the boys do when i’m not home. and at night for that matter. are they very expensive? I’ll just go check ebay, ‘k?
Zorro, my little tuxedo boy like to sleep up against me most nights and somehow though he weighs all of 4 1/2 kilos he somtimes manages to push me into the middle of the bed. bloody kids!
Oh, Luanne, as I can’t leave a comment on your blog let me just say, wonderful Dorfy update! much appreciated, many thanks!
Thank you! Just had to get all of it together. I don’t know how Robyn does this every day! 8-|