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02-Nov-2009

Gratuitous cat picture

windos sill cat

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.

Revenge of the ink caps

ink caps

(late October)

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

ink caps

There were even some on the bike path.

08-Oct-2009

Return of the ink caps

ink caps

(last week of September)

They were gone in a few days, though. Probably because of the warm weather.

I can smell it…

kitchen cat

… 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.

Backlog of gratuitous cat pictures (2)

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.

bicycle cat cat near bike repair shop
cat under hedge fluffy cat
stray kitten drinking chocolate milk keesje

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.

25-Feb-2009

Backlog of gratuitous cat pictures

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.

black kitten black kitten catching something
cat above street sign sniffing bicycle
calico on windowsill calico in shop window

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).

05-Jan-2009

Frozen bubbles

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.

20-Dec-2008

One misty moisty morning

Trees in the mist

My favourite tree shrouded by mist. Here’s a bigger version of it in case anyone wants to use it as a background picture (I will, when I’ve cropped it to widescreen proportions).

The street is still being worked on, hence the wooden skirt the tree is wearing. It makes it wonderfully quiet (only residents are allowed through) and easy to cross at the bridge where it’s usually scary because cars tend to turn left without notice.

Frozen spiderweb

This is what the mist and the frost together did to a bit of spider-web on the bridge railing.

This other picture of it would be much cooler (not only cooler than it is, but also cooler than the other one) if the camera had wanted to focus on the right thing, confound it. Well, there’s a price to pay for carrying around a convenient little Praktica instead of a huge beast of a camera that can do everything.

21-Nov-2008

Snow!

first snow

First snow, November 21, 2008

Yes, this is actual snow. The ground and most other surfaces were too wet and not cold enough for it stay, but it was real all right. It even did its snowy thing in the air, fluttering every which way instead of falling straight down heavily and wetly like prettied-up rain.

Some kids and I were the only people who enjoyed it (though I don’t enjoy the way it made it both wet and cold, triggering the mild arthritis in my fingers).

29-Oct-2008

Quite another kind of fungus

tree from bike path

This is what I saw from the bike path through the park today.

fungi around tree trunk

Closer inspection revealed it to be this.

closeup

Click the picture to see it larger (almost a megabyte and it’s worth it).

Afterthought

Orthodox Christians should write and paint and sing and dance. We should make movies and television shows. We should make clothes and produce textiles as art as well (the fullness of culture is itself too large to describe in a sentence, a paragraph or even a book). And in all these activities, they will be expressive of the fullness of our humanity without having to stick an icon on everything to prove its Orthodoxy.

—Father Stephen in Glory to God for All Things