Who Let the Dog In?

Fourth of July weekend was everything a summer weekend should be - a house full of family and friends, BBQ and fresh baked pies from freshly picked berries (thanks A&A!) every night, and a nice hilly 40 mile bike ride to burn off all those calories. Everyone had a great time - that is, except for the cats. My sister-in-law's family brought their lovely dog along for the weekend, and despite the fact we let the cats have their favorite room and we installed one of those "toddler" gates on the door to separate the species they still spent over 90% of the weekend hiding in the closet. The few times they did venture out, however, led to some "scaredy-cat" photo opportunities, as you see here.

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).