What gets to me is Danï’s extra toes. I still can’t quite get used to that.

Danï is now a big seven months old. As she’s grown physically she’s also grown into complex relationships with the other cats in the household. Here’s a example of her, in the dark, with the two boys. Many is the time I see the gingers grouping together, and the torties doing the same. And then they break up and go scampering all over the house. Lest you think this is somehow interfering with Danï and Zoë as littermates, it’s not. They still nap together, wrapped around each other. I don’t think that will ever change.

When you’re sheltering in place, it takes some creativity to come up with ways to cope. One of my coping mechanisms is the collection of cats that have built up over the past few months. Right now I have five cats, three more than I originally intended to have. I originally started with the Gingersnaps, the two brothers, who were both born in the same litter in 2015. They’ll both turn five years old this October. I’ve certainly written about Bo and Luke (a.k.a. the Gingersnaps) over the past five years in this blog. It was a quiet relationship with just the two boys, and so it would have remained for the foreseeable future

But back in April of this year, my wife read a story in Love Meow about The Runaways Animal Rescue over on the west coast of Florida, just north of Tampa. They’d rescued a mother and her litter of four newborns (who were born on St. Patrick’s Day, no less). What really made all five special is that momma and kittens were polydactyls. My wife sent an email to the young woman who runs The Runaways about the kittens, and before I knew it, we’d been selected as the #1 future forever home for two of the kittens, if that’s what we wanted. After all, two more cats? Two more mouths to feed, to care fore, two more litter boxes to keep clean? On top of that, how would the boys react?

So we finally brought the girls in and set them up in the cat nursery, which was our middle bedroom in the house. For several weeks we kept them in there with the door closed, going in constantly to feed and water them and clean out their litter box, as well as spending time playing with them. We then set up our ‘cat cage’ in the middle of the house, a large wheeled ferret cage where we could put the girls in and let the rest of the animal household see and smell and hear and in general grow used to them. The girls  knew they were safe, especially resting on some of the ledges in the center of the cage. After two more weeks of that, we finally opened the cat nursery up and let the girls out to roam at will inside the house. We never had a single problem out of anybody. As for the boys, it was Bo who decided to look after them. More often than not I’ll find him grooming the girls, and the girls sit there with their eyes closed until he’s finished. So much for worrying…

And Momma Makes Three

By the time we’d picked up the kittens at nine weeks, we’d also come to know (vicariously) their mom, Joan Jett. All four of Joan’s kittens had been placed, and she was the only one left looking for her final home. So we waited, and waited, looking to see who, and when, she was adopted. But she never was.

As the weeks went by we grew more concerned until I finally said, we need to go get Joan. And so we did. We picked her up in early August and brought her home to the cat nursery. By then, the little girls were out and about, and momma could spend time alone getting acclimated to her new digs. After two weeks of getting acclimated, Joan started to venture out of the room more and more each day. Now she’s fully integrated in with the other four. I’ve had people ask if Joan recognizes her kittens. I don’t believe so, but then, there’s no strife within the group either. Everybody is chill. Joan has picked her favorite spots to nap and watch around the house, just like the other four. The spot on the back of the sofa above is unique to her.

And so here I am with five cats. Any problems so far? Not the kind I anticipated, and nothing worth mentioning. They all love their dad (me), with Zoë in particular wanting to come up into my lap and just stare up at me. My wife she has a real bad case of daddy admiration, but give her time, and she’ll grow out of it. They give out all sorts of sweet affection to me and my wife, and they are a hoot to watch as they play with their toys and each other. I couldn’t have asked for a sweeter group of cats. When things get really crazy in the outside world, I turn inward to the five (and the two dogs, Ruby and Annie) and let their sweetness wash all the bitterness from the outside world away.

Momma Joan and her Kittens: The Very Early Days

Luke naps everywhere. There is not spot nor position that Luke hasn’t tried over the past nearly five years of his life. In this tumbled position, with his head tucked under his arm, he looks like a Ginger teddybear.

All while the girls were up in the cat TV bed relaxing along with Luke. Danï is just beginning one of many yawns, while Zoë lies with her head draped over the edge of the bed.

Later, after the girls scamper off to explore something else, Luke climbs into the cat TV bed to do a bit of different napping. You should note the size contrast between the kittens and Luke. Both girls, if they try hard enough, almost fill the bed. Luke fills the same bed without really trying, his forelegs draped out over one edge.

I do enjoy the feline environment in this house.

The humans in this household have been working to peacefully blend the new kittens with the existing cats and dogs. I came across this scene today, where Luke is snuggled into the chair with Zoë. That’s Zoë in between the back of the chair and Luke’s back. Zoë has her head snuggled into Luke’s rump, and seems quite content.

We’ve been working really hard to make sure everyone is totally chill with everyone else, and it looks like that’s happening in grand style. I’ve watched the boys defer to the little girls in all things, especially eating. And the boys will come up and groom the little girls, which I find pleasantly surprising. If I didn’t know better I’d swear the boys adore the little girl kittens.

The cute one on the right is Misty. The old ugly one on the left who hasn’t had a haircut since December and with two days growth is me. You can see Misty’s polydactyl forepaws. I have watch both Misty and Daisy dance and play with one another, and I swear they’re learning to use the extra toes (the ones on the inside of each paw) as thumbs. And I strongly believe Misty used all those toes, front and back, to come scrambling up my back and perch on my shoulder.

Misty then decided to groom me. It’s always interesting to feel their tongue on some part of your skin. In this instance it was the side of my face right at my eyebrow. That was all cute for about five seconds, when she started to nibble at my eyebrow hairs. That’s when I said, rather loudly, “OK, that’s enough,” and Misty leaped down into my lap and then into the floor to play with Daisy.

Life with kittens, again.

It’s been a while since I lead off with any of the household animals, especially the Labs. I can still call out plural Labs because Annie is a Labradoodle mix. Pride of place in this photo belongs to Ruby, who has perfected the side-long look like no other Lab that’s ever lived with us. She loves to hop up on the sofa next to me, sidle over close, and then give me that “come hither” look, which for a Lab means “walk hither.” Annie, back in the shadows, is watching, picking up tips. Her schtick are her flying leaps, which I’m assuming come from the Poodle side of the Doodle mix.

The Mackerel Tabbies seem to be getting along pretty well these days, at least in the big cat tree. I’ve not checked in about a month, but back in April, at six months, the Gingersnaps were weighed at nine pounds each. Lulu, resting at the bottom, is a little over fourteen. Everybody realizes Lulu is our special needs cat, and they give her reasonable wide berth. But when it comes time to nap, everybody gets along in the cat tree. As long as nobody but Lulu goes in the cat condo.

Gear

I’m photographing more, but posting less. The breaks are good as long as the don’t become indefinite. Top photo was taken with the Olympus E-M10 and the 14-42 EZ pancake zoom, bottom with the E-M10 and 45mm Zuiko. I also took the luxury of post processing with Lightroom 6.

I know I’ve written how I’m pretty much into using my Apple MBP as my primary driver. Which has meant that the old Samsung R580 running Ubuntu 15.10 has been sitting, forlorn and ignored in its bag. I hate wasting anything, especially a working computer, even the R580.

So I pulled the R580 out of its bag and updated its 15.10 installation. And then, on a whim, I ran the updater a second time and got the notice to upgrade to 16.04. I figured why not? After about an hour of downloads and installs, the R580 rebooted into 16.04. And following that whim, I downloaded the Vivaldi Browser 1.1 Debian package and installed it as well. Easy peasy using dpkg.

Since before its official 1.0 release Vivaldi had become my BFF browser, surpassing every other browser I’ve used (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, IE and Edge) across all my computers. And just like on Windows 10 and Mac OS X, it’s blazing fast. And I just like the way it works. Even the Gingersnaps, especially Luke, likes it. He’s also something of an Ubuntu fan cat, which is why he’s sitting next to the R580 above.

I don’t know that I’ll dust off the R580 and start using it again like I have in the past. But for the record, I am extremely impressed that the R580 is still usable, and that Ubuntu 16.04 runs on it without any issues that I can see. Even though the R580 was purchased in 2011 with Windows 7 installed, it’s run Ubuntu as long as it’s run Windows, and run Ubuntu with a lot less drama (Ubuntu went on when Windows 7 corrupted itself). For the record this is the last version of Ubuntu Long Term Support I’ll install on the R580. I know I said that with the last LTS (14.04) and when the next Ubuntu release (14.10) came out it went on over 14.04. But I have a sneaking suspicion I’ve pushed my luck with this machine and upgraded Ubuntu as far as I reasonably aught to. It’s still usable and from my brief tour of 16.04, it’s as polished a Linux distro as you could ever want. And Vivaldi is as polished a browser as you could ever want. Especially if you want a Linux computer.

Here, in no particular order, are some interesting photos of some of the critters that live with me and my wife. They fill our lives with joy and keep us entertained and on our toes (if not standing on our toes). They are, from top to bottom, Annie, Ponder, Ruby, and Annie again. I try as best I can to capture little moments from their lives. I have no favorites, I love them all. However, I have to admit that as Annie gets older she’s looking more and more like a living Muppet. She reminds me of Animal.

The boys have continued to grow, consuming a constant flow of kitten chow and canned cat food, and expelling a constant flow of kitten pee and poop. In between the trips to the litter boxes (there are two) they’ve been playing with each other intensely as well as with me and my wife. The way they leap about now, if they had wings like sugar gliders, they’d be literally flying around the house. Which I find simultaneously cute and frightening.

The Gingersnaps have also started wearing little kitten collars with bells. I had to bell these cats just so I can find them when they’re moving around, especially under the furniture, something they’ve instinctively done since the first day they came to live with us. Greebo is too busy tracking Ponder on the floor to properly model his collar, which is why the eyes are slitted and the head is a bit blurry. Right after this he made his pounce.

Both cats have also learned how to be held in my arms so that I can rub their briskets and stomachs. My oldest daughter and her boyfriend starting working with the boys when they were tiny kittens old enough to be held. When I hold them this way and rub them their purring goes up considerably. They love to be held this way as long as I’m calm and gentle and not aggressive. When I stopped long enough to use the Olympus to grab this shot, Ponder decided he wanted to swat at the lens; this is a mid-swat photo.

Some of their other little activities include:

• Their desire to give me lots of licks on my face. They both come up, sit on my chest, and groom my face. And of course they purr the whole time.
• Burrow under the covers. It’s been cold of late and they burrow under the covers to get next to me and warmth. That tends to freak me out when I’m sound asleep. So I carefully lift them out and put them in a “nest” made from part of the blanket next to me, where they go back to sleep.
• Chasing their toys all over the floor. Their favorites are round balls with a feather and a bell in the middle. Second favorite is a feather on the end of a string. Third is the laser pointer.

They’re still loving little guys. They’ve filled the void left by Lucy. I can’t forget little Lucy, but these guys are the perfect replacement. I almost let them slip past me; it’s a good thing I didn’t. It’s almost as if they were born just for me. I’m so glad they’re here.

I hope they never completely lose this new aspect as they continue to grow.

The two little kittens are growing. They still hang together, now more than ever. They’re free-feeding, eating out of a larger bowl than what they started with when they arrived back on 1 January. They’ve discovered they like to sleep on the bed, especially with each other. The eat together, sleep together, and play together.

Today they learned that my lens cap was fun to play with. It squeaks and rattles when they toss it around between themselves. Eventually when then lost interest I picked it back up and put in back on the lens where it belongs.

They love to have their ears gently rubbed. They’ll sit next to me, competing for my attention and rubs. It’s a good thing I have two hands. This one photo was taken right before I had to put the camera down and rub both of them. It’s worth it just to get those magic looks and hear them purr like little motors. The same way Lucy did. I used to think that Lucy’s purrs were unique. But with the two males I now know better.

Friday was a trip to the vet for both Greebo and Ponder as well as Ellipse. Everybody got their claws trimmed. I would have done it but I’m not used to kittens and I was afraid I’d hurt them. Ellipse loved the attention while the two boys, being new to all of this, couldn’t quite make up their minds how to act and react. They loved the attention, but not so much the trimming. In the end Ponder was nervous but Greebo just chilled out.

I’m enjoying having the two little ones and watching them grow. This time I’m paying a lot more attention as these two become integrated into the household. That’s one key lesson I learned with Lucy. When Lucy arrived she literally came in through the front door and that disturbed the pecking order with Ellipse and Lulu. This caused problems, especially with the establishment of territory within the house. This time, the kittens are carefully kept in a back bedroom and are let out under supervision. One more week of this and they’ll start to roam the house with the other two cats. In the mean time my wife and I are busy cleaning up the house and making things a lot more kitten proof.

The world is full of advice whether you want it or not. One piece of advice is to “only photograph what you love.” The love I have for the little creatures in my life has grown over the years, much as the love for my wife and children has. The foundations for love might be inherent in us all, but it takes time for any kind of love to develop both breadth and depth. Once it starts growing, it never stops.

I’ve always considered all my animals little angels, but the Gingersnaps make my heart melt with their looks and their tiny meows. It’s the size of their eyes in comparison with the rest of their faces that helps tug at my heart. Yes, you could say I love the little guys. I’m now trying to find ways to express a bit of what I feel tempering what I see.

Today I came across Ponder sitting on my camera bag in the window box at the same spot where Lucy used to sit. He was doing the same thing, looking out at the world. I keep one of my OM-Ds in the room with the Leica 25mm for quick grab occasions such as this one. Unfortunately (or fortunately) by the time I swung around with the camera Ponder was looking in my general direction. So I composed and took several quick exposures, picking this particular one to work with.

Normally I don’t talk about all the steps I took to create a photo, but this time I’ll make an exception. First of all I’m using the Panasonic Leica 25mm on the OM-D E-M10. That combination is compact and quick. I’ve owned the 25mm for over three years; the more I use it the more I keep coming back to use it even more. I don’t use it wide open unless I absolutely have to, preferring to step down to f/2 to f/2.8. A lot of people say that’s a waste of a fast lens, but what folks don’t realize is that a fast lens helps to see and focus in dim light. You might not make the exposure wide open, but you certainly use it to help focus.

Once the exposures were made I transferred the JPEGs from the E-M10 to my iPhone using OI.Share. Once on the phone I post processed them a bit using Snapseed, where I converted the three color images to neutral black and white using the defaults. I applied a bit of vignetting (-60) to finish and then exported back to my camera roll. I then opened the black and white output from Snapseed in the Formulas app and applied the Ambrosia filter to get the result you see above. This enhanced the eyes even more while flattening and softening the lighter details around the eyes. It gives an old-fashioned warmth to the overall photo. And it helps make Ponder look like a little angel.

These are two more black and whites that have gone through just Snapseed.

There’s a movement afoot in the photographic community these days to lament the passing of film, especially black and white. I think those lamentations are ill-conceived. Whenever anyone complains about the digital vs analog, the issues as I see them usually boil down to lighting and composition. Ignoring composition for the moment, in all three of these photos the light coming into the room from the window was soft and surrounding of my subjects, the kittens. Talk to any “old timer” and to a photographer they’ll emphasize how critical the quality of the light is. I had a classic north light, enhanced with an overcast day. The light coming through that window today was incredible. As were the kittens.

The first night has passed and the two have managed to survive, in spite of what their tiny hearts might have thought when first arriving. Greebo, the larger of the two, has been in hiding the entire time so far. Ponder has spent the time zipping in and out of hiding spots, checking things out, and learning just how comfortable pillows are for resting your head.

During the night I felt the tiny body of Ponder hitting the bed as he leaped up on the side, and then climbed to the top to run around on top of me. At least once he play-attacked my fingers. He might be small but his claws are still quite sharp.

When I got up in the morning the bowl of cat kitten food was fairly well depleted. It’s been refilled and fresh water put in the big dish on the floor. I’m assuming that both Greebo and Ponder are feeding and drinking. I have seen Greebo under the furniture peeking out at me when I went looking for him. I’m leaving him alone while he continues to adjust.

So far the guys have not wanted to stray out of the back bedroom, which is fine by me. I’d hate to have to go find a Greebo hiding place in the much larger house.

The kittens have arrived. Their visage is a bit formal in these photos, having just entered their new forever house and being gently deposited onto their cat tree. I can tell them apart because Greebo is the darker of the two while Ponder is the smaller. I can also tell them apart by their distinctive behaviors; Greebo wants to hide while Ponder walks right up to me, nuzzles playfully into my side, and purrs like a motorboat. Ponder’s behavior is just like Lucy’s. Greebo is shy, so I’m going to give him his space while he and I get to know one another a bit better. Both are as sweet and gentle as any two cats I’ve ever known.

I’ve made the decision to fill the gaping hole left by Lucy’s death with a pair of Ginger males. The loss of Lucy is still painful, but time moves on, and there are other cats in this world that need Persons to care for them (and that they can care for back).

I chose to adopt both because my oldest daughter and her boyfriend have both noted how the males are very close to each other. I don’t have the heart to break up the pair by picking just one. So I picked both. This means the cat population at my house will double to four, two females (Ellipse and Lulu Belle) and two males. How they’ll all interact will be interesting to observe. But the first thing that’ll happen to the new guys is they get neutered here in Orlando. I will not have males spraying around the house marking their territory. Right now I’m planning on picking them both up the end of December, with a trip to the vets the first week of January to get them fixed.

Sunshine their mom has been the perfect mother, with the infinite kindness and patience of a saint. Regardless I’m sure she’ll be glad when four of the five are gone; Caramel (the one chomping her ear) will stay, and both are going to get fixed. Mom produces beautiful kittens, but this is mom’s last litter.

I named my two males after characters from Discworld, in honor of Sir Terry Pratchett. Long before there was Potter, we had Rincewind and the far more entertaining Discworld to explore. And before you ask, yes, I can tell them apart. In color or black and white. Now I just have to get through two more trips before the end of 2015 and another four weeks and get the house prepared for their arrival…