dameargyle

Phew. Well, now I've played catch-up in Real Life after the con, and spent a week sucked into the singularity known as Tumblr, as I figured out the new interface and new culture (you can find my account here; a few NSFW images but mostly SFW). Time to get more back on track, though -- I've got a lot of writing I want to do, and a lot of LJ/DW-ing. :)

I'm being a bit of a slouch and spamming this exact post around, word-for-word, on all my LJ and Dreamwidth accounts; it seems appropriate, since this is a rare case where my dameruth and argyle4eva selves really intersected.

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I swear, if it were really possible to end up "ded of cute," I'd've been a goner long ago.

I have a crud-ton of pics built up over the last several months that I've been meaning to post; I hope to work through the backlog a bit fairly soon, but as anyone who's been tracking my FB participation lately knows, that may be a total pipe dream on my part. However, it *is* my dream. ;)

Anyhoo, as part of my trip over to Norwescon this year, aibhinn and her friend Lisa just *had* to take me to see the Fremont Troll: a delightfully oddball piece of local sculpture, famous throughout the Northwest. I declined to get my picture taken in front of him (which was possibly a bit ungrateful of me, but I always feel like a hopeless dork in pics of that sort), though I did snap some photos of my own:



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One of the (now-retired) long-term professors in the university department where I work used to say he always knew it was spring (regardless of the actual calendar date) when the magnolia tree at the corner of the Life Sciences building bloomed.

Well, this weekend, it finally did -- and I happened to have my camera, so I figured what the heck, it's a pretty picture to share:



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Anyway, happy (northern hemisphere) spring! More, I hope, fairly soon.

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).



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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:



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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. :)