Because I’m feeling silly

I was playing around with the video camera on my new phone yesterday, and had to share this. This is one of my cats, Princess. She doesn’t drink like a normal cat most of the time. She prefers to either drink out of my water glass at night, while I’m reading in bed, or she sits patiently by the kitchen sink and waits for someone to turn on the faucet. Then she sticks her head under it and starts slurping. She also likes to climb into the shower after someone’s used it and tries to catch the drops that fall from the showerhead. She gets all wet, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s weird.

(hint: For both of these, if you click on the link below each video, it’ll bring up the vimeo page with the full-size videos.)

Princess drinking from Allison on Vimeo.

While I’m in my Vimeo account, might as well share my other video, which is Princess and Buffy as babies (the little black kittens – the orange ones are their brothers, who I adopted out when they were about 8 weeks old). They were awfully cute, weren’t they? The reason they’re in a cage in my bathroom is because they were born outside, to a feral mother, and I brought them in to socialize them. Since we had two other cats already, we had to keep them separated. It took them some time to warm up to me, especially Princess, who was the most skittish of the bunch, but they eventually did, thanks to lots of playing and bribery. (If anyone finds themselves in the position of socializing kittens, I have three words for you: Gerber baby food. The chicken flavor in particular – no onion – is like crack for kittens. You can see me giving it to them at the 4:27 mark.) This video was taken about a week after we caught the kittens and brought them inside. Even after only a week, they’d made massive improvement with me. They would even climb on me while playing, and let me touch them if they were distracted by a toy, each other, or the baby food. It was a slow process, but very rewarding in the end. That said, I’m not sure I’d do it again unless I was going to keep all the cats: giving those two boys up nearly killed me.

Aw, I’m getting all nostalgic, watching it again. *sniff*

Kittens from Allison on Vimeo.

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I'm a library addict

I spent most of the day yesterday tweaking my blog a bit to add handy little buttons in the sidebar for ordering Destined and visiting the various websites I use. It looks better than a long list of text links, and takes less space, but man, was it time-consuming! How am I going to get my second book revised and edited when I spend all my free time dealing with promotion for the first one, or messing with my blog and website? *sigh* There aren't enough hours in the day. It's a good thing my job isn't really full-time, because I'd never get anything done if I had to work 9-5 every day. A 9-5 paycheck would be nice, though.

I’m going to deviate from my usual blog subject a little bit and talk about something near and dear to me: the library.

I love the library. I think I may even be slightly addicted to the library, but with good reason: when you read over 100 books a year and work less than 30 hours a week, feeding the need to read can get impossibly expensive. I had hoped when I bought my Kindle years ago that it would help curb the book cost, but then agency pricing happened and out went the “bestsellers always priced at $9.99” promise of Amazon’s that initially sold me on the device. I don’t blame Amazon: I know the publishers are responsible, and Amazon had no control. But it still sucks, and I refuse to pay more than $10 for an ebook, no matter how badly I want to read it. This, thankfully, is where libraries come in.

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