A happy cat
Pepper's in charge
No apologies. Some new photos of Pepper that show how pleased she is with her life. Seeing her flop out in a small rectangle of sunlight projected onto the carpet is so Pepper. She's talkative, playful, relaxed and, as seen playing with a small packet of Post-It labels, even kittenish.
Instant karma.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 9:06 AM
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20 Comments:
Awww, caaaats!
For me, when I look into those eyes (in the last picture), I don't see cute. I see the cold, calculating, clinical gaze of the hunter-killer this animal was bred from many generations ago. What thought lies behind THAT gaze? Cats have their own agenda, unknowable to us. With the best of intentions you attempt to provide a companion for Pepper, I suspect she has be planning to get the place to herself for the last 10 years. That gaze tells me that this ambition has been realised. You are her servants now and hers alone. What’s she planning next? I don’t know. Watch your back…
Och, she's just thinking what's for tea. Cats are always thinking that. Or else "can I kill it?"
she looks like a contented cat to me. You can feel sure that you made the right decision there.
Oh definitely some plan going on in the last one...the determination in that face is far beyond the "why don't my humans hurry up with my food" and more into "where is the best place to sink my claws ?"
Glad to hear Pepper is back to her old self again. I much prefer cats to dogs - the old saying goes that dogs have masters whereas cats have staff - how true. Only a cat can flounce in after having disappeared for 2 days, eat all it's food up and then flounce off again without any explanation. At least a dog would turn up completely covered in mud if it had been away on a "trip". I am sure Paddy is happy too in his new home, so everything has worked out well. More importantly Andrew, how do I stop the blinking squirrels nicking my bird feeders and making off with them to the bottom of the garden? I have wired them to the bird table and don't mind them having a share, but the birds aren't getting a look in?!
Contented cat, yes. Rectangle of light? Not sure, looks more like a parallelogram.
Oh she is gorgeous! I go gooey over peoples cats, babies I have to really feign interest about!
Just taken in another abandoned kitten to foster today - an absolute beauty, will photo him for my blog tomorrow.
I disagree with the other comments about the malice in the last pic. There's nothing sinister there apart from self satisfaction and mild amusement!
I'm certain no offence was meant, but I don't like your comment about Pepper, Clive. I'm not going to remove it, that would be Stalinist, but every time I see it makes me cross. You're welcome to remove it.
Oh, and Tim, I don't think there's anything you can do to keep the squirrels off the bird feeders. My solution: buy bigger feeders and more of them, so that the birds can feed at the same time. That may not be practical though. I have genuinely lost feeders down the years that have fallen down and been taken away by the squirrels! Never seen them again.
Andrew: Absolutely for sure no offence was meant. Perhaps in future I should heed the comment Richard Herrings once made on his blog about the tone intended not matching the words on the page. Those who listen to you regularly can pick up the tone implied from your writing, but of course there is no way this could happen the other way round.
I can’t see any way to remove a post from my end of the blogging thing, possibly only you have the correct permissions. So you may have to stick on a big ol’ moustache and purge away at your end.
A friend tried to introduce a new adult cat to her home with 3 other adult cats. I don’t live with cats but didn’t think it would work simply based of cat behaviour in the wild. Lions live in groups where all the members are from the same family, usually all female. But they do seem to be the exception. Think cheetahs, leopards, jaguars, civets or even those wild cats that live in Scotland (which seem more like the kind of thing the domestic cat where bred from). These all seem to be solitary creatures. They put up with young until they can fend for themselves then split up. Has this tendency come down to the domestic cat? Does this mean any cat not known since birth is unwelcome in their word, especially as they get older (or more adult)? She said it depends on the cat’s personality, I said she did not have a detached enough view of cat psychology (they’re not small people etc, you know the line). I think I’m scientific, she thinks I’m a cat hating monster… In the end it didn’t work out (cats or us). Dog trainers use knowledge of pack behaviour to train dogs and keep them happy in our company, can cat psychology applied in this way? (I suspect the TV series is already in production.) I have no idea what cats think of people. The superior cat grooms the sub-ordinate cat with their tongue, and people groom their cats all the time in a similar way by stroking. Do they think people are big adult cats so are happy with us?
These are rhetorical questions by the way, just random musings, in case the tone is unclear to readers. I suspect you know the answers already; you seem like man who researches the things close to him.
So delete away, it’s your web site and I should have been a bit more sensitive to you cat based circumstances.
Sorry, Clive, just read my previous post back and it reads a little irrascible! I posted it last night after reading the story about Richard and Judy in the Sunday Times - they're contesting a tax investigation that could turn out to be test case over whether or not TV presenters can claim back agents' fees against tax, and if they lose, it could be a back-dated free for all by the Treasury against - gulp - presenters and authors and need I go on? Anyway I was in a bad mood. I won't remove your post. It's not libellous or offensive, just, as you say, a victim of the toneless nature of hard print. No offence taken. I didn't realise how protective I was of our cat! I'm quite proud of myself in some ways.
It's a bugger about apostrophes coming out that way isn't it? I can't crack the code.
No problem, while my empathy with cat owners seems suspect, my sympathy for freelancers threatened by the revenue is total. While we don’t have agents in the computer business I do have accountants and lawyers and they are tax deductible, or as my accountant likes to put it: “The costs of maintaining existing trading rights
and assets are revenue expenses”. I would hope agents come into that category but what do I know, the revenue seem to make things up as they go along (oh dear, should I have said that, they’re not listening to us right now, are they?)
I almost didn't notice until you mentioned it but in my capacity as freelance computer consultant I can crack the code of the dodgy apostrophes. I write my text in Word first. (I have to; I am illiterate. Without spell check, grammar check and thesaurus I am nothing. It even has a go at correcting my apostrophes, which is just as well). I then copy and paste into the blogger thing which seems to mess up the apostrophes.
Technically speaking (I’m sure a techy or two will read be reading this) when typing into the blogger the apostrophe is represented by hex number 27 (which is normal) while copy and paste results in a 3 byte UFT8 encoded version E2 80 99. This is partly the fault of the blogger software which uses UTF8 encoding but they probably felt the need to do this to accommodate people posting in Japanese.
It reads back OK on my computer, in fact it gives a classic curly tailed apostrophe compared to the rather straight up and down version given by Hex 27, but how it is interpreted by Macs and other versions of Windows I have no idea.
I think (tell me how i turned out) the solution is to write in Word, copy and paste to Notepad, then copy and paste to the blogger. Or learn how to write. Or post comments not essays.
For the record, I'm seeing hieroglyphics where the curly apostrophe should be: an 'a' with an accent over it, a Euro sign and a TM . . . Being a Mac user, I'm used to be a second class citizen. I can't even post pictures on a Mac, which you can do on a PC. I have to transfer all my photos to Flickr and then copy the URL. But I will not give up my Mac!
Once you've got used to a Mac, it seems a step backwards to return to a PC doesn't it? I love my iBookG4 even though it adds chinese letters to words on some websites and refuses to display prices of things so I have to guess. I forgive it as it's so cute and pretty.
Assuming you view the blogs via a web browser I would assume the browser does not deal with UTF8 encoded text correctly. Unfortunately while I know a Mac can be made to to do this I don't actually know how. It involves downloading stuff, but what you download depends on you operating system version and what browser. If it is upseting your browsing pleasure then it can be fixed. I only really know PCs, any Mac experts listening?
Thank you clivec, I blame my browser, not my Mac, and can live with it. I appreciate your help though. What kind people populate Andrew's blog.
Clive, you probably realise this but... You could just stop Word changing your quotes to those advanced characters that Macs apparently won't worry their pretty little heads with. This is a setting under AutoCorrect (Replace as you type).
Dave, that's amazing. I never knew THAT dialog box existed. Word autocorrects an apostrophe (hex 27) to a "closing quote" (hex 92). Cut and paste seems to turn that into a 3 character UTF8 character (on this blogger) and Mac users get unhappy. So the option is Tools->Autocorrect Options->AutoFormat as you Type->"straight quotes" with "smart quotes". Obvious! Trouble is it's a nice thing to have for non-blog based work so I don't know if I should have it on or off. Mostly I struggle to get them in the right place; this is a whole extra dimension of apostrophe confusion.
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