This Chair is Mine! Don't You Dare Try to Get Up Here XingXing!

Once again, "The Chair" offers endless photo ops. I like how the color of the chair is similar to one of FuFu's eyes, and the background foliage green is similar to his other eye. This chair has a tendency to topple over under the stresses of vigorous cat movement if you don't weight it down, though, so lately I have been drooping a weighted bean bag thing on the seat.

You Know that Feather Toy You Got Me From Petsmart? I'm Done Playing With It.

So, I bought a nice feathered teaser for the cats from Petsmart last weekend and just started playing with them when it was (human) meal time. After dinner I came back downstairs to find this scene! Lesson: only supervised play from now on with feather toys. Actually, it would be interesting to leave them down there with the feathered toy and a video camera to see how something like this happens.

Red, White, Blue and FuFu

Red, White, Blue and FuFu, a photo by Jon From Cincinnati on Flickr.

Happy Fourth of July!

Kitten Kraziness at Kitty Kind

Among the wonderful felines available to be adopted at KittyKind in NYC (operating out of the Union Square Petco), you can find this kinetic trio of kittens named Piano Man, Uptown Girl and Vienna.


I'm not quite sure who is whom, but when one of the kittens was "relaxing" on a tireless KittyKind volunteer's lap I took this series of pics which I made into a collage:

Here are some of my favorites which I pulled out of the collage individually (with titles).............
Look Ma, I've got claws!

What do you mean calm down?

I'm soooooo embarrassed!

I got it! Now what?????

Snoozing Cat is Easy Prey for a Predator.....

The ever-vigilant XingXing really zonks out on the red cushions by the dining room table. Letting his guard down to this extent would make him easy prey for any predator that made it into our well-fortified dining area!

Well, That's an Awkward Pose FuFu!

This weekend at one point I saw FuFu in this peculiar pose. I went to the other room to grab my camera, thinking that there was only a slight chance he would remain in the pose (both because it looked uncomfortable and because he likes to follow people into rooms), but sure enough when I returned Mr. FF was still straddling the windowsill and countertop.



For this last one I liked the perspective a bit better than the others (from below) but FuFu was rather severely underexposed and it didn't quite look right making the standard adjustments, so I decided to throw the kitchen sink at the photo: posterized, over-the-top sharpening and "fake" (since its only from one expsoure) HDR toning in Photoshop. Kind of looks like an old color Polaroid gone horribly wrong (or right, depending on your persuasion).

Before you play with your mouse, you must stretch.........

Here are some pics from an impromptu mouse-play session last week. I love the cat stretching pic. This is fundamentally one of the most difficult aspects of feline photography. You can entice a cat to jump, look inn a certain direction, etc., but there is no way to make a cat stretch unless it decides to on its own. I would like to get some pics of XX or FF stretching from the front, but you have to be in front of them, with camera at the ready, when they decide to stretch - and of course the lighting is hopefully good and you have your flash set up ready to go. All the stars need to be aligned.

XingXing loves the multi-colored mice, I got a 60-pack (no kidding) of them for Christmas. At least half of them are unaccounted for, which means underneath the couch. On an unrelated note, we attempted to brush the cats' teeth tonight. It didn't go terribly well. No pics. I hope they don't hate me now.