Doesn’t need comment, does it? Picture is worth n words.

On one of the last days that the swimming pool was still open before they closed it for maintenance, I saw two unfamiliar birds in the road that was already closed for maintenance. Black and white, the size of a gull but slimmer, long red beak, aggressive movements, and when they saw me coming with the camera they flew away shouting “Peep! Ta-PEEP!”

We don’t seem to have a bird guide, and online taxonomy sites didn’t help much, but I think they were oystercatchers. There aren’t many oysters to be caught in our town (those at the restaurant across the road from our house have already been caught by someone else) but Wikipedia says “they breed far inland”. The map on that page shows them not quite so far to the east in the Netherlands, but the picture looks exactly like the birds I saw.

Outside the supermarket, a few meters to the side of the entrance, there was this puddle of red ink-like liquid. Surely it can’t all have come from the little container lying in it?

Nobody was paying any attention to it, and when I took four pictures from different sides nobody paid attention to me, as if the whole thing was invisible.

It was still flowing: in the first photo there isn’t any liquid in the crack between the tiles, and in the second there is.

My best guess is theatrical blood, but I’m open to suggestions.

This one was sitting on our next door neighbours’ [1] window sill and wanted scritches. Later, she sat on the window sill of the shop across the road and wanted more scritches.

[1] who are dog people, definitely not cat people.

(late October)

Across the road from where the other lot was, popping up almost a month later and in much greater number.

There were even some on the bike path.

… but how do I get in?

Here’s the cat that tried to sample our roast beef. We used to call him and his sister “the Cats of Little Brain” because last summer, whenever they saw us on the roof terrace, they looked up longingly, mewing, without seeing the obvious way up; but this one seems to have figured it out.

At last I’ve cleared my folder of cat pictures! I’ve given up trying to bake cupcakes for humans belonging to any cats appearing here.

The scruffy-looking stray kitten only didn’t run away as it saw me because it really wanted to lick the last drops of chocolate milk from the tin. The haughty one next to it is called Keesje and lives in the same house as the black tomcat one shouldn’t ring the bell for, who turns out to be called Beau. There’s also a Kareltje, but I haven’t seen him yet.

Only the pictures of the black kitten are really recent (one of his humans allowed me in on a Tuesday night after early music and let me pet him). The rest are from my serendipity generator: screensaver that shows all my pictures as a slideshow. The calico sleeping with the orange curtain as backdrop was the one that prompted the gratuitous-cat-pictures series, but I thought I’d overwritten it with another of the same filename.

If you recognise your cat, please claim your cupcakes by giving me your street address! Nobody ever has: all my readers live on the other side of the world and/or don’t have cats (well, except one, you know who you are, and I’ll catch your cats on camera yet and bake something savoury for you instead).

Not Frozen Bubble (or play it here; works with Firefox, doesn’t work with Konqueror, haven’t tried anything else. Update: it’s a frames site <grr>, you have to find it from the menu), but real frozen bubbles. Next time it’s so cold that spit goes “clink” I want to try this too.