dameargyle

Little did I know it, but when I chose Dex's name, I was part of a trend; I guess I wasn't the only one who thought naming a small, household predator after a TV serial killer might be appropriate. The article doesn't mention that slant, but c'mon, seriously!. If nothing else, the end-credits music, or "blood theme," strikes me as being great Cat Music.

Anyway, since I focused on cute shots of Lumen last time, here's a Dex-themed post. The great news: he's finally starting to relax and enjoy this whole "domestication" thing, and I've been able to get some pretty good pics of him. Witness:



Compared to his dainty little sister, he's growing up to be one stocky, muscular critter! Lookit those thunder thighs . . . :)

( Read more... )

I have tons of kitty pics racked up, the best of which I'll be posting over the next while. The big news is that Dex has *finally* started to relax a little. He comes out of hiding now when familiar people are around, will rub my legs at feeding time, and even lets me pet him under very specific circumstances. It's much the same way Lumen behaved when she was first deciding this whole "domestication" thing might not be so bad after all, so I have hope her brother will end up as happy and well-adjusted as she is.

In the meantime, I'm getting some great pics of the two of them together, now. This one shows their relative sizes pretty nicely (the red thing behind Dex's head is a toy ball the cats like to bat around).



( More under the cut. )

I've been trying to snap pics of Dex now that he's out and about more, but he's still skittish about attention (including cameras) pointed in his direction for too long, so what I've been getting for the most part is uninteresting shots of his vanishing backside. But the last couple days, I've been lucky enough to catch him in better poses, particularly in/around the cat tree.

This shot was taken from only a couple feet away; he looked freaked, but held his ground -- which is a decided improvement:



( More kitty pics under the cut. )

Whew! Been a while since I posted a Kitty Update (or much of anything else, come to that). Lots has happened.

( Pics and more, under the cut! )

Dang. Plans to catch Teeny Kitten and get him to his wannabe-adoptive family have hit a possibly-fatal snag.

Yesterday morning, when we'd planned to catch the little guy, a gigantic moving van pulled up alongside our porch at the crack of dawn, and large, loud humans began shifting and banging boxes and furniture into it with a will. This is what it looked like yesterday (and still looks like, for that matter):



No sign of Teeny, either today or yesterday, and frankly if s/he took off for greener (or at least quieter) pastures, I would not be at all surprised. Hell, the noise is occasionally startling the cats *inside* the apartment.

Not much to do but swear a bit and keep putting out food and water -- which has continued to disappear when we aren't looking, but whether it's Teeny or someone else, there's no way to tell at this point.

Oh, well -- we gave (/are giving) it our bet shot. And Lumen and Dex are adopted and safe. One does what one can.

So, another day with Dex, Lumen and Fry. Lumen's learning that Petting Is Good, and has started rubbing at my ankles until she gets skritches; Dex is still scaredy, but I can coax him out a bit with the offer of moist food; and Fry is loving having Lumen around, but needs a few time-outs because he gets too enthusiastically rough when playing with her. Overall, it's going well.

Then yesterday I'm at work, and countessaleska makes this FB post: "There is a new kitten outside. The smallest fuzziest cutesy little guy. When I opened porch door for air it ran off under the bushes but I've heard the pitiful mews. It's saying, I wanna be saved too!! I don't see how something that teeny can live out there this season."

*headdesk*

When I got home from work, the kitten was still mewing pathetically. Dishes were hastily organized out of recycling materials and set out on the porch with food and water, and a cardboard box was filled with old t-shirts and covered with a few rugs for insulation. The scoop of moist food on offer vanished at some point during the evening, and when I glanced out once, I saw the silhouette of something small and fuzzy running by in the parking lot.

Cue this morning and the kitty food rounds, expanded to include a handful of kitten crunchies outside. While my coffee was brewing and Lumen and Fry were prowling the kitchen together, I happened to glance outside and saw this:



Oh, hell.



The only way this little fuzzball is out alone in the world is either that Mom is dead, or someone decided to dump an unwanted kitten (kittens?) in the parking lot. (Sometimes I share the Ninth Doctor's dim view of humanity, lemme tell ya.)

When I made to open the door, Teeny Kitten readied itself to bolt, so I backed off. It was okay with me watching (and photographing) from the other side of the screen door, though I could only do that for a short while as it was butt-numbingly cold out there -- right around freezing. Teeny Kitten was shivering a little, but determined to get a good meal. No sign of the shelter box being used, but I didn't expect it; I'm sure the little critter's got a nice, warm den under one of the dense cedar trees at the side of the building (lots of piled needles and low-hanging branches), probably better than any makeshift nest I could offer (but I can't help making the effort anyway). It *must* have a way of keeping warm, since the temps were easily down into the 20F range last night, and a critter that small wouldn't have lasted without shelter.

We'll have to figure out what to do from here on out. The local shelter is a no-kill and is full up (based on what the clinic folks said when we took Dex and Lumen in -- the volunteers were *so* relieved we also planned to adopt our two foundlings as well as get them fixed), but . . . cute kittens can usually find a home more easily than older cats. Dunno.

*sigh!*

A busy day today, and not much time for updates . . . but just quickly, the vet visit went well for the feral kitties, but, as predicted, it's been a rough time emotionally (and physically) for the little guys. They've been kind of quiet/dazed/watchful, but fortunately have not been freaking out, and have learned the use of a litterbox already. We've made no move to interact with them, letting them acclimate to their new situation, but at the same time we've been making use of the bathroom in which they're being kept, and they're OK with people moving in and out so . . . not a bad start. No pics yet, since we don't want to introduce flashes, people actively pointing things in the direction of traumatized kitties, etc.

Fry, entertainingly, seems to be clueless. He knows *some*thing is up, but doesn't seem to relate it to his outside friends. it will be interesting to see when the penny drops for him.

In other news, a while back my mom sent me a collection of her oil paintings (including one of the TARDIS I posted here before as a digital image, and even made into an icon), and I've finally got round to hanging them over the couch. It's not the best job I ever did (I spaced them entirely by eye, and by what I could reach while standing on the couch itself), but I think it's okay. And it gets them away from where they were, namely propped in front of a heating vent that we will be wanting to use as the weather gets cooler. :)

The lighting sucked for taking individual images, and using the flash just put unwanted highlights on the glossy surface of the paint, so here's an overall image for now; more pics to follow as I get the opportunity (and if people are interested in seeing more).



More later, gotta run and Do Stuff. :)

Not that I've been a towering presence here lately, with one thing and another keeping me too busy to post often, or comment much (though I've been making an effort to keep up to some extent on at least reading the f-list). But I did want to let everyone know I'll be taking off to spend a week with the Family Unit; I'll miss countessaleska and the Area 51 kitties a great deal over the break, but I haven't seen my nuclear family in over 2 years, so that'll be welcome, too. :) I may or may not have internet; can't promise anything, but I may be talking sporadically.

In the meantime, have this early holiday video of cuteness. Enjoy! TTYL!

So today I got a doggie vampire costume to put on countessaleska's plastic flamingo, Floyd, who guards the door to our apartment (doggie costumes are a godsend to those of us with plastic flamingos, I'll have y'all know). I had it out of the package, looking it over, and Fry walked by and . . . well, you can guess what happened next.



( More Vampire Kitty pics under the cut, plus a meme fulfillment of sorts. )

When I logged on to post these pics, I found I'd been tagged by both tardis_stowaway and sahiya for the following meme:

If you read this, you're tagged. Take a picture of you in your current state, no changing your clothes or quickly putting on makeup. NO PHOTOSHOP. Show your f-list the real you!

I figure the 5th pic in the sequence above satisfies the meme, even though you only see a small slice of my face (mostly my sunburnt schnozz, in fact). It was taken just minutes ago, and it's preemptively "come as you are." ;) (FWIW, I certainly don't intend to hold anyone else to the terms of the meme -- no worries there!)

Anyway, that's all for tonight . . .

Another week, no more fic, lots of life kicking my ass (but in a low-level, energy-drain kinda way rather than any one specific thing). Also a historical group event this weekend, followed by SpoCon next weekend, so I don't know what kind of writing time I'll have in between all that, either. Sorry; I know folks are waiting on fic from me, and I have a set of stories I need to beta for an f-lister, but right now it seems to be taking all I've got to just get through the day.

. . . Which, true as it is, sounds far more melodramatic than reality, now that I re-read that. :/ Ah, well, moving on to fun stuff, I've long been coveting the Rassilon action figure that came out after EoT. I mean, it's the freaking Action Figure of Rassilon -- for real! How could I *not* want that? The possible bad jokes alone are endless.

A random crawl around the interwebs recently showed a drop in both price and availability that set off my "going out of production" alarms, and I finally took the plunge. In fact, I also got an EoT Master action figure thanks to the reduced prices. I didn't want to miss out on getting a John Simm action figure while they were still available (seeing as how I didn't spring for any of the first gen Master figures).

The new boys arrived a couple days ago, and while I was posing them on the entertainment center for the hell of it (before they join the general action figure display on the nearby bookshelf), in front of a small vase of lavender flowers from the container garden on the porch, a cracky idea struck me and a short Action Figure Theater episode was born.

The question that started it all was: what if Rassilon had been a hippie during the Time War?



Rassilon: "Peace, man!"

( The rest of the story under the cut, plus one really bad visual pun by Aleska. )