Wednesday, October 31, 2007 , terribly early in the morning

Victory!

Behold, I give to you my first completed sewing project, designed completely freehand and off-the-cuff:  the catnip toy

first_catnip_toy

My visible stitches at the end of the tube aren’t spaced properly, but I’m still learning that you need to leave lots of seam for the fabric to feed properly.  I’m thinking it might be wise to close that seam with a smidge of non-toxic glue before sewing it closed, eh?  I enjoyed putting this project together, but I’ve got to rehome Greg and Spiderman so I can reclaim my office.  I was trying to sew downstairs on the dining room table, and Bunny almost stuck her paw under the needle as the machine was running.  Once my office is cat-free, it will be my super-special private work area.  It will be dreamy and cathairless.

Here’s a picture of Bing taking the toy for a test drive.

bing_loves_my_sewing

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/31 at 05:42 AM
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Monday, October 29, 2007 , terribly early in the morning

A very talented cockatoo

I love this video my father sent me; it’s of a very talented cockatoo who dances and sings when music is played.  This cockatoo is just as talented as Wayne Newton was on “Dancing with the Stars” this season.  Here’s the video link:  http://birdloversonly.blogspot.com/2007/09/may-i-have-this-dance.html

In the upcoming week, I’ll write about my sewing machine adventures (I’m winning!), and we’ll also start to sell catnip toys, so I’ll provide information and a sales page for those.  Also, I’ve got some free sample packages of Wild Kitty cat food, so if anyone would like to try it, please drop me a note.  All I’d ask is that you reimburse me for $2 in postage, but I won’t worry about figuring out the details until I see if anyone is interested.

One last thing… I just wrote another small entry for The Bark Blog, and I’m also now writing a daily blog for Vertexhost, a website hosting company.  The blog is about tech and gadgets and silly things, so please visit if that stuff interest you.  Right now I’ve got comments turned off because I don’t want too much of a work burden, but once the blog gets visitors other than spambots, I’ll turn comments on again.  I’ve had my own dedicated server hosted with Vertex for a couple of years and their service has been just perfect, so if can ever recommend them for hosting, or offer you cheap hosting myself, please email me.  Vertex is working on putting together special hosting plans for rescue groups and nonprofits, but I’ll give you my own deal on my own server if it’s something you need.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/29 at 03:00 AM
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Saturday, October 27, 2007 , terribly early in the morning

Firey moon

Courtesy of the California fires, the full moon was a reddish-brown this evening, shining through an atmospheric layer of soot and ash and dust.  Pretty, but yuck.

solo_red_moon

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/27 at 03:12 AM
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007 , late at night

Bunny is spayed

Bunny was spayed this morning, at our usual vet clinic—the one where we feel comfortable, even if we have to pay a little extra.  She’s been kept overnight and we’ll bring her home tomorrow, but the vet already called us with assurances that Bunny was doing great.  As a bonus, the vet is giving me Bunny’s little kitty uterus in a jar of formaldehyde, to go with TJ’s kitty testicles!  Soon, I’ll be able to build my very own hermaphoditic Frankenkitty…

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/24 at 11:11 PM
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Japan loves cats

Oh Japan… I love you so, except for how you kill whales and sometimes cut sashimi off fish that are still alive.  Regardless, I want to shop at your Internet store of crazy cat products.  If only I’d learned Japanese instead of French!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/24 at 01:48 AM
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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 , late evening

What Pets Do While You’re At Work

Be careful what you wish for.

I love reading, and I love new products, and I’ve always wished that publishers and pet product companies would send me stuff to review.  At SuperZoo, I made a point of going around to all the book publishing companies, giving them my business card, and requesting review titles.  I get quite a few books to review via our website about author Dan Brown, but they don’t interest me nearly as much as books about animal issues.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I was thrilled when Simon and Schuster contacted me a couple of weeks ago and asked me to review their new title, What Pets Do While You’re at Work (written by Jason Bergund and Bev West).

Now, I could write a “best case scenario” review and make the book seem like something you should buy for yourself, or for someone else, but I wouldn’t be doing you any favours.  I’d just be doing myself favours, and hoping I’d get more books to review.  The fact is, this book just isn’t very good.  It’s designed to take advantage of the popularity of other really good titles, like Bad Cat, but the premise is kind of weak, and the authors struggle to stick to one consistent theme.  Sometimes there are funny photos captioned with things that your naughty pet might do while it’s home alone, but other times the pictures are just of cats or dogs sleeping, or sitting around, the captions try too hard to make the picture seem hilarious.  Lots of the book just isn’t funny.  Some of the photos are tightly themed, like, ‘While Bob is out flipping burgers, his dog Chuckles is...”, but other photos seem completely irrelevent to the concept that the pets are supposed to be home, alone, unsupervised.  Some of the pets in the photos are captioned as if they’re speaking the photographer, which kinda spoils the “home alone” effect.

The most disappointing thing about this book is the photos.  I assume the authors recruited pictures from people via the Internet, and given the available pool of pet owners, the photos are surprisingly poor.  Many are poor quality—blurry, shot with a camera phone, etc.—but others are shameless ripoffs of common photos we’ve all seen as avatars, or passed around through email messages.  Uncredited photos used in this book included the well-known ”sniper kitten”, and ”cat with grapefruit (or other citrus) peel on head like a hat”.  It’s pretty lame to use those photos in a professionally published book, especially when the photos aren’t attributed to any particular photographer or graphic artist.  If you ask me, you shouldn’t profit off photos if you haven’t obtained permission to use them.  And were those photos absolutely necessary for inclusion?  They’re funny, but they don’t add much to the theme, and I’d rather see more candid photos of real pets than posed shots, or Photoshop fakes.  There are a couple of Photoshopped pics which use the same original cat picture, fer cryin’ out loud.

I really do enjoy funny books about animals, and I’m looking forward to the print version of I Can Has Cheezburger whenever that is released.  They’ve got a clear-cut theme and hundreds of photos to choose from, and I really hope they’ll publish the best ones.  As for Simon and Schuster, I recommend their upcoming title, ”Old Dogs are the Best Dogs”.  It’s going to be a photography book of senior dogs, and even though I haven’t seen it, I know it will be better than “What Pets Do While You’re at Work”.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/23 at 10:54 PM
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Sunday, October 21, 2007 , the wee hours

The crazy spinning lady

I’m sure you’ve seen this as it’s been passed around the Internet, but which way does the curvaceous lady spin when you look at her?  She always spins clockwise for me, unless I do something concerning math (for example, checking stats to adjust my fantasy football lineup).  If I then immediately look at the image, it spins counter-clockwise.  As soon as I think to myself, “Cool, she’s spinning backwards!”, she immediately returns to spinning clockwise.  She’s such a tease.  Flippy says that the pivot point which determines the direction the image appears to move is the woman’s extended toe.  I have to assume this means most of the rest of the graphic is irrelevant, so I’d like to see the equivalent version of this as a hunky man with a swimmer’s body.  I may be gay, but I appreciate good art.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/21 at 12:00 AM
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Wednesday, October 17, 2007 , the wee hours

History Book Club

I love books, and was an easy target when the History Book Club sent me an invitation to join.  Surprisingly, the books offered weren’t just about history; they had sports books, reference books, and even a couple of kids books.  I bought a gift for my niece, and for us, I purchased an Oxford dictionary, a two-volume reference manual of mythology, and a couple of others which slip my mind right at this second.  If you have family and friends who enjoy reading, it’s a great place to browse for gifts.  The introductory offer at this moment is 4 books for $1 each, plus shipping and handling… it averages out to $4 per book.  You also have the option of buying a fifth book at half price.

Oh, one more thing… you don’t have to make any further purchases in the book club after this initial offer.  In fact, you can cancel your membership immediately if you want.  It’s a pretty good deal.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/17 at 01:44 AM
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Tuesday, October 16, 2007 , early evening

Ellen is wrong

If you haven’t heard about it already, there’s a huge kerfuffle going on regarding Ellen Degeneres and a dog she adopted from a rescue group.  Ellen signed an adoption contract stating that if she couldn’t keep the dog for any reason, she’d return it to the rescue.  When she decided the dog wasn’t a good fit for her household, Ellen gave the dog to her hairdresser, instead of contacting the adoption agency and returning it to them.  The adoption agency removed the dog from the hairdresser’s home, and today Ellen was on TV and crying and complaining that the adoption agency wasn’t being fair.

The adoption contract Ellen signed wasn’t unusual, and I totally support the adoption group for wanting to keep track of the dogs they’ve rescued and rehabbed.  I’d be very angry if a cat I’d adopted out to someone ended up passed from household to household without my knowledge.  There was nothing to stop Ellen’s hairdresser from legally applying to adopt that particular dog herself, and just because Ellen spent money on the dog, it’s not her job to be ignoring the rules the dog adoption group had set.  The rules exist for a reason, even if not everyone agrees with them.  Our cat, Derek, was adopted from Best Friends (before we realized how easily stray cats would just fall into our laps), and we have a similar agreement with them.  Technically, Derek belongs to Best Friends, but we provide his care.  If we can’t keep him, he must be returned to Best Friends.  His microchip is registered to Best Friends, not to us, and we aren’t allowed to modify it.

The adoption group is being vilified by a lot of people today, and I really feel sorry for them.  They’re receiving death and arson threats, and have had to shut down the retail establishment which supports their rescue efforts.  They can’t adopt out any dogs for fear they’d be adopting to someone who was trying to get revenge.  Ellen has basically put this group out of business; no more dogs going out, means no more dogs coming in.  I would never adopt an animal out to Ellen, anyway; this is the third dog she’s given up in the past couple of years (that I’m aware of… maybe there were more), and she makes a lot of bad decisions.  She wants a dog which is good with her cats, but she keeps adopting puppies of breeds with strong prey drive, as opposed to looking for an older dog who’s been proven to like cats.  I’ve never really cared for her one way or another, but this pretty much seals the deal for me in the “dislike” column.

I’m not big on financial retribution, but Ellen needs to apologize publicly to get her minions off the backs of the rescue, and she needs to put up enough money to put the rescue back in business.  If she really loves animals, like she claims, she’ll want to ensure that people actively working to put dogs in good homes will be able to continue their mission.  As for the dog in this situation, perhaps there was a waiting list of people wanting to adopt it, and the dog can now fairly go to the next person on that list.  It’s a cute little thing, and I’m sure someone will be happy to get in line to adopt a coveted puppy of a popular breed.

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We’re in the minority, but this Texas newspaper columnist agrees with me, as does this HuffPo blogger.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/16 at 06:34 PM
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Monday, October 15, 2007 , the wee hours

Carlo is doing well

Sorry I didn’t update this sooner—Carlo is doing much better as of today (Sunday), and I think he’ll be back to his normal self within the next day or so.  Earlier this evening he made a huge jump from a tall cat tree to the top of a piece of furniture, so he’s obviously comfortable moving and stretching.  He just has a couple of moments in a day when he gets a bit glassy-eyed and spacey, and I think it’s when he’s having twinges of pain.  It took him a very long time to settle down after we brought him home from the vet (the second time), and Flippy sat up with him until almost 8am Saturday morning, waiting for his pain meds to kick in and for him to relax.  Carlo had more discomfort from his neuter than I’ve ever seen a female cat have from a spay.

I’m glad it seems that this event has come to a close.  I desperately want another “inexpensive” surgery when we have Bunny spayed, but I don’t want to pay the emotional price.  We have a low-income cat clinic in town which only charges $25, and I could get her into that, but I’d again worry about shortcuts and mishaps.  I guess we’ll take her to our regular vet, and pay over $250, but we’ll know that she’s in hands we’ve trusted for many years.  We would have normally had both Bunny and Carlo taken in for surgery at the same time, but we chose to have Carlo done first because we couldn’t afford to pay for both right now (especially with Dobby needing shots and TJ being ill).  We figured that with Carlo as the only unneutered male in the house it made the most sense to have him fixed first, but Bunny’s day will come before the end of the month.  At least for now, she and Carlo have stopped doing what Flippy referred to as, “sexy wrestling”. 

TJ has had a sinus infection (just one nostril) for the last couple of weeks, and he started to feel better this weekend.  He’s eating normally, but is still a bit weak.  Dobby exhibited no adverse affects from her disastrous veterinary visit, but today she was in a foul mood and didn’t want to eat.  She was eating well by the evening, so I think she might have a tooth/teeth coming in, and her mouth was sore.  I have scratches on my face because I dared to try to pick her up earlier today.  She wants to be a sweet cat, and she likes to be touched and petted, but only on her terms.  Sometimes she runs up to us for attention, and other times she runs from us like we’re going to try to eat her.  That’s just silly, because she’s not nearly big enough to eat yet.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/15 at 02:23 AM
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