Look into Lyra’s glowing golden eyes. What are those eyes saying to you?
You will post photos of your cats. You will send links to the Friday Ark. You will send your submissions to the Carnival of the Cats. You will come back here -yes, here! - to see the Carnival on Sunday. You will rub my ears now. Now, I said!
My parents gave me my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, on my seventh birthday. I’d wanted a camera for almost a year, and was thrilled when I opened the boxes containing the small camera, several boxes of film, and a pack of flash cubes.
That camera was followed, over the years, by increasingly sophisticated cameras: a Pentax K1000 (the classic late-20th-century SLR training camera), and finally a Nikon FM. I was a bit of a photographic Luddite; I loved my fully manual camera, and had no interest in newer, more automated SLR’s. I shot mostly architecture, on slide film, and even have that badge of Luddite honor: a slide projector.
A couple of years ago, I gave Paul a small digital Canon. I didn’t intend to stop using my Nikon, but instant gratification and the savings in film and developing costs won me over. However, I missed having multiple lenses. I missed control over aperture and exposure. I even missed the double click of the shutter snapping open, then closed, with each shot.
I arrived home from work today to find several brightly wrapped boxes. My birthday present had arrived: a Canon Rebel XT digital SLR. I think that I was at least as excited opening the boxes containing camera, case and compact flash card as I was pulling paper off those flash cubes 38 years ago. The battery from Paul’s Canon digital fit in my new camera, so I didn’t have to wait for a battery to charge before shooting. The instruction manual could wait for later. I knew that depressing the shutter release halfway would engage the autofocus, so I was ready to go.
My first photos were, not surprisingly, of the cats. When I downloaded the images, I was surprised to see that 8 megapixels resulted in larger-than-life images of Sasha and Sergei’s heads. And such detail - I could count each hair on their furry chins! The images below are substantially cropped, and reduced in size, but they’re sharper than many of the images taken with the PowerShot… and I don’t even know what I’m doing with this camera yet.
And who is responsible for my kid-in-a-candy-shop new camera excitement? (more…)
The title of this post is not a play on the rather overused 24/7; instead, it’s a shorthand description of the meme with which fabulous food-blogger Lindy of Toast tagged me today:
1. Delve into your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Find the 5th sentence.
4. Post the sentence in your blog. Ponder it for meaning, subtext, or hidden agendas….
5. Tag 5 others to do the same.
My 23rd post here at M&C, Feline Friday I: First Photos, contains the following 5th sentence:
Lyra, Sasha and Sergei have lived with us for a little over two years.
This post was the beginning of my regular Friday catblogging; the photos are the first ones that I took of the cats after they came to live with us. Little did I know that photos I posted of the McKittens would serve as the first point of connection with so many who are now my blog friends.
Before I ponder this sentence further, here’s a second one. It’s from my first blog, Paul vs. the Squamous Monster, which I cowrote with my husband. (He still writes there occasionally; I haven’t in months.) My 23rd post there, The waiting room, or, Come on over, is from February 26, 2004. Here’s the 5th sentence:
Please drop by, if you have some time.
I wrote this post the day before Paul had surgery to remove an oral squamous cell carcinoma from the base of his tongue. I knew that the surgery would take about 12 hours, and I wanted company, lots of company. I wrote an invitation to everyone reading Paul v. TSM to come visit me in the waiting room… and it worked like a charm. Besides my parents, 15 of Paul’s and my friends came to spend some time with me that day.
Two sentences, on two very different topics, written about 7 months apart on two different blogs. Are they related, and if so, how? While the sentences per se aren’t related, there is a relationship between Paul’s surgery and my cat-blogging. Conveniently for the purposes of this meme, I’ve already written a little self-analysis about the connection. Here’s an excerpt:
My husband Paul and I write this blog, Paul vs. the Squamous Monster, about Paul�s diagnosis last January with oral cancer, his subsequent surgery, and the ongoing process of his recovery. Not quite a year ago, I was having a really difficult day dealing with medical insurance and second opinions, but there was a moment when Sasha made me laugh out loud. Simple laughter, uncomplicated by sarcasm or fear � have I told you what a rare thing that was in our house then? It was so blissfully normal to be amused by the antics of my cat, so I wrote a post about it. I figured all the folks who stopped by every day to see how we were doing might enjoy something light and a little funny.
I almost began this post, I needn’t have worried, but that wouldn’t have been true. Rita was a big storm, and for a while, much of my family was directly in her path. Never mind that I am, when all is said and done, my mother’s daughter, and am therefore genetically prone to worrying. Katrina showed us all that there’s good reason to worry when facing a hurricane of such strength.
My mother called this morning. She and Dad are fine. She was standing in the carport in order to get enough signal on her cell phone; I imagine that some of the cell towers in the area are down. She reported that they’d had strong sustained winds, and that gusts continued, but the rainfall had been less than anticipated. While there were tree branches down on their street, there appeared to be much less damage than was inflicted by the tornado that struck their Houston neighborhood at Christmas a couple of years ago.
She and my father might have slept through the night, had it not been for a phone call at 1 a.m. from an alarm monitoring service, indicating that a motion detector alarm had gone off in my sister’s house. The alarm company would not send anyone out to check on the house; did they really think, my mother wondered, that she or my father would do so? Mom did, however, call the security patrol for my sister’s neighborhood. They were patrolling the neighborhood - to prevent possible looting? I don’t know - and reported that my sister’s house appeared secured, though the power was out in the entire area. Since my mother, once awakened (and alarmed, so to speak), does not fall asleep again easily, she was awake when their power went out at about 3 a.m. The outtage lasted for only a few hours; they had power again by the time she called.
So, thankfully, all is well for my family. I will now return to my previous worrying: for the people and animals who have suffered much from Katrina (and now Rita), for the fate of important buildings that have been damaged, and for neighborhoods that should be rebuilt with sensitivity. Thanks Roxanne, Raehan, merc and Joanna for your well wishes.
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