Monday Musings

Here I am, blogging in the comfort of warm slippers, thanks to Pinky! The slippers are somewhat worn out, some of the cozy lining has worn away, but they’ll do for a bit longer and if I get some sheepskin insoles, even longer, ha ha! It’s not like I’m a miser or anything, it’s just that I’m really mean on a very low income so I have to make things last as long as possible!

Mickey asked about the “black” in rum and black. The black is blackcurrant cordial, e.g. Ribena. You may call the concoction something different in Canada and Mericky, or maybe you eschew the “black” in favour of something else, such as Coke, as Mickey mentioned he had heard of that. Personally I can’t stand Coke, in rum or on its own, but here is an interesting factoid I picked up from a lovely innernet cat-breeder friend (sorry, I can’t find a direct link to her – I thought she was in my “Places I Like to Visit” but it seems not) but she and lots of lovely animal webcams and bean webcams can be found here. Well worth a visit because the cams stream in real time and most of them have chat rooms. Back to the factoid. Apparently Coke (original recipe, not diet variety and not other brands) contain every nutrient you need to stay alive, but the Coke has to be flat for it to work. I don’t know where this info comes from or if it has ever been put to the test. I keep meaning to Google it and then get distracted into something else! Ha, I’ve just found the link; it’s http://chinktonks.camstreams.com/ (she breeds Tonkinese cats and they are awesome. She only broadcasts when she has a growing litter).

Somecats have noticed that I have a new banner on my blog (it still needs a bit more tweaking) featuring three cats. These are, looking from left to right (and in the order in which I served them) Oliver:

William:

and Cybil:

One day (or rather, over several postings) I will tell their stories. They were all wonderful cats. Strangely, none of them were nipheads. I would have thought the odds against this were fairly rare. I feel another poll coming on… Anyhoo, Oliver was the inspiration for my nickname “Black Cat” because he shared my life at a time when I was a CB’er and I chose “Black Cat” as my handle. I was the original Black Cat (in the area where I live at least) although bean Black Cats have proliferated all over the place since then! Pinky was the “Pink Panther”, which got shortened to “Pinky”, and he gets called this by our friends probably as much or more as by his given name!

Miles: thanks for telling me about your hoodie. Seeing you relaxing with your meezermom while wearing it made me go “Sqeeeeee, awwwwww”! The hole in the back for a leash sounds like a good idea so you could wear it out walking on a cold day but a pocket on the back? I’m with you there, like you could get your paw round to it. You’d have to be a contortionist! Or, if you felt in need of a Temptation or some nip that you had put in there to sustain you during the walk, you would have to roll on your back on the cold ground and shake them out of the pocket. Duhr, I don’t think so!

Diamond: you asked why I have a bunny rabbit on my MySpace page. Dunno, I just came across it somewhere on the innernets and liked it. I love all animals (though bugs, not so much, though I respect their right to life) and a bunny with tiger furs just seemed cute. I know it must be photoshopped but it’s cool, IMHO:)

I have a question but I see I’ve “rabbited” (no pun intended) on for quite long enough so I’ll save it for another day.

Oh, another question (probably rhetorical) which I won’t save for later. I am wondering why a website called “crescenet” is commenting in mine bloggie and in Portuguese too. If they want me to sign up for something, they’re out of luck coz I don’t speak Portuguese, ha ha! I’m sure they’re lovely people, but come on guys, I don’t understand you, sorry!

Enjoy the rest of today everykitty and have a nice Toes Tuesday. I’m off to the Orthoptics Department tomorrow so keep you paws crossed that mine eyes can be uncrossed, lol!

I’ve Been Shopping on the Innernets

I’ve been shopping… What could I have bought? These might give you a clue:

Wigger and Teddy

These are some of my cuddly toys. Wigger is the big tiger and Teddy is, well, the teddy bear. The little tiger is Tiggy and the black cat in the foreground, which you can’t really see properly, is an as yet unnamed pencil case. If you biggify the picture you will see that poor old Wigger is very, very dusty. He’s been with me for most of my life. Oh, sorry, just tested it and neither of these pics will biggify. I had to make smaller copies to upload and I must have overdone it, lol! Just as well though, coz I didn't really want you to see the dust in all its gruesome detail!

This is the net curtain at my bedroom window. Ahem, I should mention that although the curtains are dirty, they are not as dirty as they look in this picture! Seriously!

The two cats who have lived with me at this house liked to sit on my dressing table and look out of the window, but to improve the clarity of the view they would move the curtain aside. Not having Opposable Thumbs, they would make judicious use of a claw or four…

Actually William almost did have opposable thumbs, though he still preferred to steal our sweet corn and peas by spiking them and eating them off a claw! To see more of him and the cat who came before him, Oliver, go here and have a look in my photo album “Cats”.

BTW, I’ve just realised that I forgot to do #5 and list who had played before me in the Desktop Meme, so apologies to everykitty! My excuse is that it was about 4.30 a.m. Doh!

Very Blonde!

This is a picture of Mickey which I came across on his bloggie and it struck me how much he looks like Oliver; even the pose is similar. Hope you don’t mind me copying your picture dear Mickey.

I’m having yet another very blonde couple of days… The adorable Skeezix told me how to fix the aspect ratio of my silly picture in my blog, which I did, but the picture is still messed up, changing its width doesn’t seem to have made any difference. Oh well, I’m thinking of removing it anyway, I’m a bit sick of the sight of it (apart from William’s ears)!

Some of you may have noticed that my template has changed. This is because I thought I’d tweak some of the HTML while I was changing the width of the picture. Yikes, what was I thinking of?! Me, tweaking HTML? So anyhow, I completely messed up and couldn’t find my way back to where I’d altered the code. Doh, only solution was to load another template!

In other news, I had a little windfall the other day and so I hope there might be a digital camera out there with my name on it; not that I’ve got anything interesting to photograph, but hopefully I can find some things out there to photograph and so break up the monotony of all this text, ha ha! I wished I had a DC the other day when I came home because next door’s cat George and Missy from round the corner were having a little social in George’s front yard and they looked so cute.

George followed me into my house one evening a few years ago. I didn’t know she (yes she is a girl cat despite her name!) lived next door then so I phoned the number on her collar tag and her bean said just to let her out of the front door and she’d come home when she was ready. This is a residential street but there is a lot of traffic so I wasn’t really happy about this, but her bean declined my invitation to come and fetch her so I had no alternative. The two cats who have lived with me here, William and Cybil, were never allowed out the front door. I suspect William did get into the street sometimes because he was athletic and could jump the garden walls, but if he did, I never saw him out there and he always came home via his cat flap in the back door. Cybil hardly ever went out and on the rare occasions she did, she would be out there for no more than ten minutes, then she would come in and make straight for her litter box! Apparently the outside world was not suitable for her to pee or poo in, bless her.

Missy often accompanies her bean part of the way to the shops, then turns round and goes home. She’s a very sensible cat because she will only let strangers pet her when her bean is present.

OK, it's official - I'm an alien

According to my Profile my astrological sign is Zwilling...*sigh*. As I have never heard of such an astrological sign, I can only think I must come from another planet, or even another galaxy. I've always suspected this to be the case but I kinda sorta feel this confirms it.

I have been driving the adorable Skeezix bananas with my constant questions about the problems I'm having... such as bits of German and Latin creeping into the various set-up windows, my inability to get to grips with creating a blogroll, my inability to get to grips with... well, just about everything really, lol! I'm obviously a very thick alien...

It's probably because I never really intended to set up a blog until I am able to share my life with a cat again, so the Mind of Blogger is telling me I'm premature. But it just sorta, kinda happened... I needed a Google account to post comments on some blogs and, well, erm, suddenly I found I had an embryonic blog and the thing just ran away with me. It's not even as if I have anything interesting to say, I'm the dullest person I know, hehe! I do have some doolally dreams though, but I'll save those for another time (you'll know from the blog title if one's coming up so you can avoid reading it!).

I do have a MySpace blog but I don't post to that very often. I needed to join MySpace so I could read my Camstreaming friends' blogs... *sigh*, where does it all end...

But yay! William likes my ears, thank you William! And as you will see to the right, they are William's ears; not William of MD's ears, but the ears of my much beloved chocolate Burmese, who was also called William. My BB (Best Beloved - thanks to Sarah Kennedy for this, I hope she doesn't mind me plagiarizing it) aka OAFH (Once and Future Husband) aka Pinky chose William's ears as they were a nearer match for my hair and he was a fruitbat! But my nickname, Black Cat, comes from my much adored black cat Oliver, who looked very much like our WMD! One day I will tell you his story.

Sorry this post is so long.