If you wake up in the morning and poke yourself in the eye with your own damned finger, you should probably just give up and go back to bed. Surely, such colossal ineptitude is a sign from The Universe?
Day: December 12, 2006
More Dog Blogging
She’ll approach someone in a gorilla costume, but wear a pair of new shoes into the house, and she loses her shit.
Pandora in the Sun
The top photo was taken in 1995, the second one in 2001, and the last four in 2004. The top two were taken with a point-and-shoot Minolta 35mm. The bottom four were test shots taken when I got my Canon T-50 (I don’t remember the lens specs, and my mom has custody of my Canon right now so I can’t check, but I think it was a Tamron). When I was shopping for a film SLR, I wanted an older, used, all manual body. I read all sorts of bad reviews of the Canon T-50, but folks I knew and could talk to in person said it was a decent entry level camera body. And, they can be picked up dirt cheap from places like KEH and B&H, so I felt like it was worth the risk. It turns out, though, that the Canon T-50 takes by far the best pictures of any of the cameras I own. I love the way it handles light and shadow (I couldn’t have taken this photo of Harriet with my digital). I’m lazy, though, and I suck at getting film developed, so I loaned the Canon to my mom when I got a digital camera.
Ajis and Her Kittens
If you look at the full-sized image of the top photo, you can see how rough cats’ tongues really are.
Ajis was my brother Gabe’s cat. She was one of the colony of ferals that lived in the alley behind my mom’s house. We gradually caught and tamed them, spayed the ones we could, and found homes for the babies and the adults that were people safe. Ajis was extremely friendly, and an excellent mamma cat, so it was easy to bring her indoors when she had her babies. Keeping mamma and kittens inside makes it much easier to socialize the babies. Otherwise, the mother will keep the babies hidden until they’re old enough that proper socialization becomes difficult.
By socializing the kittens so that they can be homed and catching and spaying adult females and homing the ones that can be tamed[1], it’s possible to humanely eradicate feral cat colonies in just a few generations.
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[1] Established colonies are pretty intolerant of male cats. They’ll allow them to hang around while there are females in heat, but the males are quickly run off afterwards. Young males have “kitten license,” but when they mature, they are usually kicked out of the colony.
red paper boat 