Windypundit CatBlogging

More Pictures of Hotch

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:46:19 -0600

I was going to blog about the President's speech, but look! Kitty pictures.

Taking all these pictures of Hotch is proving to be more difficult than I expected. For one thing, the color balance is all over the place. The room is actually lit with incandescent light, which gives everything a warm glow, but of course the flash on the camera is daylight white. So while the colors in the camera images are probably accurate, it's not matching what I saw when I was there, so I've been making some adjustments, and the results havn't been very consistent.

The problem is that the camera is guessing one color balance and then I'm making rough adjustments to that guess, so the variance is accumulating. I should probably get out the grey card and switch to raw mode.

As you can see, Hotch thinks my iPhone case makes a great chew toy. Too bad the iPhone's still in it.

The other problem with taking pictures of Hotch is that my focus technique doesn't work very well. With the kinds of photograpy I usually do, I've found it works better when I disable the automatic auto-focus on the shutter button, so when I want to take a picture, I pick the object I want in focus, press the manual focus button, and then recompose the picture and press the shutter button. Now I can take as many pictures as I want at that distance, without the auto-focus deciding to do something different.

The problem is that Hotch moves so fast sometimes that between the time I press the focus button and the time I press the shutter, he's moved away from the focus distance. I've taken thousands of photos this way -- weddings, children, flowers, buildings, even marathon runners -- and it works just fine, so I wasn't expecting a problem, and it took me a while to recognize what was happening, because the camera's LCD screen is too small to show the problem unless I know to look for it.

Still, I got a few nice ones.

More to come in a few days.

Meet the New Cuteness

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 07:14:05 -0600

About 10 years ago, my wife had just adopted Ripley, and we were thinking of getting a kitten next, and we thought it might be fun to get a purebread kitten. We weren't sure what breed we wanted, so we did some research on the web and at cat shows. Eventually we settled on the Ragdoll breed, and began to contact a few local breeders to learn to learn how the adoption process works and to get an idea of the difference between breeders.

What we learned -- and this will shock you -- is that some cat breeders are a bit nuts. They all had lots of special rules we were supposed to follow once we got the cat, not all of which seemed, uh, entirely grounded in reality. I remember one even wanted the right to take back the cat if they thought it was being abused. (Taking back an abused cat makes sense, but they wanted to make the determination themselves, rather than, say, a neutral veterinarian.)

That turned us off the idea a bit, and somewhere along the way we got a kitten from a shelter, Buffy. (I didn't have the camera back when she was a kitten, sorry) Then, a year or so later, we were visiting the Orphans of the Storm shelter (where we had adopted Ripley and Buffy), and we stumbled a cat with more hair than I'd ever seen before. We picked him up and played with him and brushed his hair -- which really needed it, there was an awful lot of loose hair stuck to him -- and put him back in his cage. But he just sat there, looking at us with those big blue eyes... So we took him home, and he became my favorite cat, Dozer.

Sadly, Dozer passed away a few months ago. He looked like a purebread blue bicolor Ragdoll, and he probably was. You can't really tell if a cat is purebread without the breeding history, but Ragdoll breeders are a fairly protective bunch, so there aren't too many fakes out there. (Unlike, say, Persians.) Based on our experiences with Dozer, my wife and I decided that we must always have a Ragdoll cat.

After a period of grieving, we began looking at web sites for Ragdoll kitten breeders, trying to decide what kind of Ragdoll we wanted. My wife fell in love with the blue lynx pattern, and we found a couple of blue lynx kittens at Dr. J's Perfect Dolls. Last Friday, we met with Jennifer Woll, DVM, and took home a kitten. Check out the expression on his face in this shot:

As usual, we had some trouble coming up with the name. Because he's so cute, it's tempting to name him "Nermal," but he'll eventually grow up, and "Nermal" is a silly name for a grown-up cat. We could also name him "Joel," after the kitten in The Closer, but that too seems like a silly name for a full-size cat.

My wife likes "Roark," after Eve Dallas's love interest in the In Death series by J.D. Robb, which would also tie in nicely with my libertarian leanings because of the link to Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. On the other hand, "Roark" sounds a bit pretentious to me, and I'm not really a Rand fan. Alternatively, we could name him "Dallas" after Eve Dallas and also after the captain of the Nostromo in Alien.

For now, he's Hotch, named after Aaron Hotchner, the character Thomas Gibson plays on Criminal Minds. Among other things, it has the advantage of being a single syllable, which means it might be possible to train him to respond to it.

It could happen.

Anyway, we have the kitten locked in the master bathroom for a few days as part of the process of introducing him to the rest of the household. He's a bundle of energy, so I thought it would be amusing to setup the video camera to record his activity until it ran out of space, then I could edit it into a fun highlights video. As it turns out, however, all that energy is just for show. With no one watching, he just slept for an hour and a half.

I managed to salvage something, however, by compressing the video timeline. Here's Hotch asleep for an hour and a half, shown at 50 times normal speed:

If you haven't had enough, here's the whole set of photos of Hotch.

Dozer Meets the Cat Pillow

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:53:54 -0600

A little while ago, my wife and I noticed that our ragdoll cat, Dozer, had taken to sleeping on the floor right in front of our china cabinet. We wanted to make him more comfortable, so we put down a cat pillow for him, right in the spot where he liked to sleep.

Anyone who owns a cat could've predicted how that would turn out:

Dozer and Ripley

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:53:29 -0600

The Triumphant Return of Friday Catblogging

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:16:51 -0600

Yeah, it's been a while, but I thought it was time to hop back on the catblogging train.

This week, a brief introduction to the cast:

More photos of the kitties coming next week.

Update: The Friday Ark is up.

Update: Kip blogs about his dog Diamond.

Herding Cats

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:02:41 -0600

I gather this is an old Superbowl commercial:

Herding Cats @ Yahoo! Video

Sounds about right.

(Hat tip: Illinois Review)

A Knock In the Night

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:24:18 -0600

I've been having trouble sleeping lately. I get tired, but when I lie down I don't fall asleep.

Tonight I was finally feeling ready to doze off by about 4 am. I was lying there, relaxing, my thought process become disordered as I slipped into sleep... When I heard someone knock on the front door. Four rapid taps. Knock knock knock knock.

As I started to get up, I realized there was a more likely explanation for the noise, but by then the adrenaline surge had shocked me fully awake and alert. I grabbed a heavy police flashlight and went to investigate. No one was at the door.

It's the damned cats. Did you ever see a cat sit down and scratch its head and neck with its back paws? Well, every once in a while they to this right up against a door, and one of the hard leg joints taps against the door as they scratch. Knock knock knock knock.

I'm used to most of the things cats do in the middle of the night: Meowing, hissing, chasing, even jumping into the bed and walking on top of me. Knocking on the door...that one still gets me.

Now to see if I can get back to sleep...

Network Admin Kitteh

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:36:32 -0600

This is my cat, Buffy. Click through to vote for her.

Friday Catblogging

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:11:53 -0600

Friday Catblogging: Minky!

Fri, 25 May 2007 15:46:26 -0600

Fans of this blog, or at least of this blog's catblogging, may have noticed that most of the pictures are of sleeping cats. What can I say? I am surrounded by lazy kitties.

However, I recently paid a visit to my friend Cindy to take pictures of her new kitten.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you...Minky!

Update: The Friday Ark is up.

Friday Catblogging

Fri, 11 May 2007 12:20:31 -0600

Here's a picture of Dozer doing what he does best:

And here's a special guest cat, spotted on a neighbor's balcony:

Friday Cat Blogging

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 11:11:43 -0600

Update: The Friday Ark is up.

Friday Catblogging

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:28:15 -0600

No real blogging today, so here are a few cat pictures to contemplate.

Pupkiss, R.I.P.

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:04:18 -0600

A few weeks ago, my friend Cindy's cat Bootsy passed away. Her other cat, Pupkiss, has had severe kidney problems which Cindy has nursed her through for two years. Last week Pupkiss's health took a turn for the worse, and Cindy had to make the decision to let her go.

Carnival of the Cats #151

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 23:52:46 -0600

Carnival of the Cats #151 is up at When Cats Attack!