Cute Cat Pictures

While I was getting out the Anemoi pictures, I also rediscovered a few snaps of the cats that I took, and, since no knitting-related blog can be complete without cat pictures, I present Viola and Sebastian in all their furry glory.

OK, my cat is not really manic.  It's just that she's sitting on the back of a chair (which is draped with a number of shirts, which is why she can pull the trick off at all), so she has to dig in her claws to keep her balance.  And also I kind of startled her with the camera, and the flash shining in her eyes helps not one bit.  (Every time I try to turn that off I have to figure it out again, since it's not exactly intuitively marked.)

You can't see it very well in the picture, but in addition to her white toes she has a white bib.  Otherwise she's mostly this very brown grey, a color which doesn't show up well in the photo.  She's very athletic, and likes to climb on things more than pretty much any other cat I've ever had.  Lily was also very active, but she wasn't as much into the get up on top of things as Viola is.  Viola is very into sitting on laps, except when she gets into Kipling mode and decides that she has to sit somewhere where we can see how little she's paying attention to us.  But she doesn't do that very often.

On the table in the background, by the way, you can see the box for my pysanky kit.  It's getting to be that time of year again--not that it being December was stopping me playing with wax resist, but now people won't look at me funny when I mention what I was doing.  I even have a bunch of blown-out shells all ready, most of them from the pumpkin pies I made over the holidays.  I keep thinking about trying to get my hands on some non-chicken eggs (or at least some larger chicken eggs).  Also I have discovered that the dye labelled "pink" actually makes a nice purple--nicer than the dye labelled "purple"--unless I dip the egg in "scarlet" first in which case I get a lovely fuschia.  Ah, the joys of dye interaction...

Anyway, the pictures of Sebastian are less good, because when I had the camera out he didn't feel like being sociable and was hiding under the kitchen table.

He was much more striped when he was a kitten; these days he's pretty much just dark grey, though he has some vestigal stripes around his neck and on his legs.  The picture brings out the contrasts a lot more than you can see in real life.

Kitty-boy here is rather more damaged than Viola by the poor circumstances of their kittenhood--or at least he manifests his damage in a way that is easier to notice.  He's no longer in the habit of spending all his time under the nearest convenient object and only emerging in the dead of night to eat and use the litter box, but he's still kind of skittish and, despite all evidence to the contrary, cannot understand that the mere action of entering a room does not mean that Liam's going to eat him.  We think it has something to do with the fact that his eyes aren't good; the right one has a cataract in it and the left is pretty constantly weepy and red.  The vet says it's going to be like that, so we just make sure it doesn't get any worse.

In this shot you can see that he's still got his tabby "M" on his forehead.  He's a very solid cat, and has a body type cat fanciers refer to as "cobby": legs and tail fairly short, roundish face and body.  This is in contrast to his sister, who is gracile to the extent that I seriously suspect an Oriental breed somewhere in their ancestry (that and the fact that both of them carry their tails curled over at the top, and they're both pretty vocal).  It's not even impossible that they have different fathers, even though they're from the same litter; cats are multiply fertile and they were rescued from a collector who could certainly have had multiple intact males running around.  They had another brother who had the same eye infection that left Sebastian with a cataract, but the brother actually lost an eye because of it.  We almost ended up bringing him home, but he didn't interact with Viola as well and the whole purpose of having two cats was so that they could keep each other busy while we were at work.  So far it's working out more like colluding against us, but hope springs eternal...

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