cat(etc)blogging: July 2005 Archives

Pretty birds. Messy birds. Feathers and seed hulls all over the floor. Messy, messy birds...

Those fleece-y pet beds look so damn hot on a sticky summer day, but Cassie likes to hang out in hers anyway.

Sam is quite a large cat, and hence quite a lazy one. (Or perhaps it’s the other way around: his laziness created his bulk. Either way, I cry innocence: He was fat when he came to me last year, and try as I might, he won’t slim down. Because he won’t move.) He often lies on the kitchen floor right next to the water bowl, where he can drink without the bother and hassle of actually standing up.

And yes, the linoleum really is ugly, isn't it?

From her perch high atop the AV pile, Mrs. Kennedy surveys all her domain of the living room and also you can see a bit of the bedroom from that angle. The cable box is warm and toasty on a cool, rainy summer day. Plus, she's too dumb to know that the electromagnetic radiation is probably giving her cancer of the fur.

Birds and cats? You bet. I’ve always loved birds and would love someday to own a parrot or a cockatoo or another really big, really smart bird, but they require more attention and devotion than I am able to give right now. So I started with training wheels: parakeets. That’s Celery on the left and Snowbird on the right. These cute little guys were on sale at Petco -- which is one of the more pathetic concepts I’ve ever encountered: animals on sale -- and even though they aren’t hand-raised and so won’t sit on my shoulder and are most unhappy when I reach into their cage to change their water or feed them a lovely salad (even though they then gobble up the salad), they still give me a lot of amusement. They love everything they’re supposed to be terrified of, like loud noises and such. My bird book told me, Don’t put them near the TV: sudden sharp noises will make their little hearts give out.

Ha. The louder and rowdier a movie, the more these little creatures love it: they go wild when trolls pound battle drums and orcs howl with rage. They recognize particular voices on the tube, too -- the first time I put on the Season 1 DVDs of MacGyver, they started chirping up a storm at the sound of Richard Dean Anderson’s voice: they thought we were watching Stargate SG-1, perhaps. It’s their favorite show, and they go nuts for the big whooshing sound of the Chappa'ai.

It’s a good thing my birds turned out to be geeks, cuz they would have been pretty miserable with our viewing choices otherwise.