In Which the Pirate Provides a Feline Friday.

Unfortunately, all the pictures I tried to take for this post came out horrifically blurry. Oh cats, why won’t you hold still for me? Don’t you know how many people wish to admire you?

Fortunately, my incredibly talented sister the Ninja drew an adorable portrait of Kipling, so this post isn’t completely without pictures! She is having a sale on toony-style pet portraits this month. If you’re interested, you can read more here, and see some pictures of her border collie Finnegan looking ridiculous while playing “catch” with snowballs.

Unfortunately, Kipling’s sensitive stomach is acting up again, so he’ll be visiting the vet next week. We’re not sure if it’s just stress from having bunches of people in the house over New Year’s weekend, or if it’s something else. Floyd has been turning into a nine-pound Napoleonic bully about the litterbox, lying in wait for Kipling to step out of it and then pouncing. That probably doesn’t help much, either, although I can’t blame him for being annoyed about the smell. My ninja-sister (who knows a *lot* about pet care and nutrition) suggested adding a little bit of canned pumpkin to their food, and I started that this morning. I was afraid that the cats would turn their noses up at the new taste, but both of them dove right into their breakfasts and happily nommed away. Floyd doesn’t need the pumpkin, but since the cats switch off on their bowls, I’m putting a little bit into each dish. Hopefully it helps, because the next step for Kipling might very well be an expensive biopsy to find out what’s wrong with his innards.

Fortunately, I got a new camera, and that means there should be much better pictures on the blog from now on. It’s a Canon SX230HS, which is one of their medium-level point-and-shoots. It’s a lot more complicated than my last camera, with all sorts of scene settings and facial detection. It even has modes for aperture priority and shutter priority, which I didn’t expect on such a small camera. And, friend Stef is going to lend her DSLR to me for a while, since she isn’t using it very much at the moment. It’s a Canon T1i, very similar to the one I’d buy if I won the lottery, so I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to learn how to use it properly, and to taking non-blurry pictures of the Dynamic Duo. Especially Floyd – I realize that I don’t write about him nearly as much on Feline Friday, but he’s so hard to photograph. Having a better camera should help with that.