Favourite Blogs - Amazing Pics of India

This is India.

Or at least one little tiny piece of India. This photo is only one of many you can find at the two links on the sidebar.

The photography is beautiful. The photographer's commentaries are insightful, sometimes humourous, frequently poignant, giving a rare glimpse of life in one of the most interesting, and to westerners, one of the most mysterious places on the planet.

Spend some time exploring M. A. Rauf's world. Well worth every second.

Cat Tales

This is Boots.

Not a name I would have chosen, although it makes sense since she has four white paws, white belly and white chin.

Mostly I just call her Cat when I call her anything at all. She knows who she is and hasn't told me yet. But she stays so I guess it doesn't matter.

She weighs in at about 20 pounds. 32" from tip of tail to tip of nose. Yes, that's 20 pounds. No, I don't know what that is in kilos...google it. I think maybe around 9 kilos? Big girl that she is, she doesn't bite or scratch when upset or frightened.

She just throws up. Profusely.

I have learned through trial and error that to give her canned, wet cat food is to invite disaster. You can see the wool berber? It is no longer uniformly warm beige. So she must be fed only the expensive, dry food. Not only that, it must be the hairball formula food (just mineral oil but you just try to get a 20-lb cat to swallow that stuff!) and it must be only chicken or fresh water fish flavour. Not lamb, not turkey, not salmon, just fresh-water. You know, if my kids were ever that picky I would have sent them to boarding school or something. Lucky for them, eh!

Another thing about Cat, and all cats except the hairless varieties, (duh!) is that if you don't comb or brush them frequently, your whole house, your car and every item of clothing and bedding you have ever owned will soon be permanently covered in cat hair and dander. Forever.
Until today Cat has never had a bath. She is quite good at personal grooming and I do brush her sporadically. And when stoned on catnip she drags herself around on the carpet leaving large clumps of black hair for me to vacuum. This is an interesting thing to watch actually. She lies on her side, digs her claws into the berber's woven loops and pulls herself around the room for about five minutes. It is just as effective as brushing, and removes the same amount of fur.

I have problems with my hands and find it painful to use nail clippers or scissors to trim her claws. So once every 3 or 4 weeks I trick her into her travel box, haul her, mewling and whinging, 4 blocks up the hill and get the pet groomers to do it for me. Today I splurged and got them to give her a bath and blow dry. too. She was quite subdued when I picked her up. She is very embarrassed about the pink bow they gave her and has been licking herself all over to get rid of the shampoo smell. But I think they removed at least a pound of hair.

She seems lighter somehow.

Influential Books - And How they Change Our Lives

Just received a comment from Rauf, wherever he may be, regarding not a post but a book I listed as an all-time favourite. The book in question is the 1949 speculative fiction "Earth Abides", by George R Stewart. Rauf says the book changed his life, and from what his life has been since he found the book second-hand, 20 years ago, I'd say it was a pretty major influence. You can read his comments, see sidebar "How Many Degree's..."

Aside from the obvious Mein Kampf, Little Red Book and Communist Manifesto (and a whole whack of others), books really have been the main transmitters of ideas for a very long time. Let's not go into a history lesson tho. Without them we'd still be farmers, blacksmiths, travelling salemen and herders. And tribute collectors.

Rauf also says that try as he might to share this book that so profoundly changed his perspective and life, his friends couldn't get past the first chapter. This, when you think about it is also really fascinating. I had the same experience after reading Frank Herbert's Dune for the first time. The novel can be appreciated on so many levels - as a basic boy-meets-universe novel, as political/religious analysis, as ecological warning, as huge examination of human behaviour and our interconnectedness to all other parts of the whole damned universe (quantum physics anyone?). I wanted to share Frank Herbert's ideas with my friends. They couldn't see past the sci-fi label to the meat of the treatise, either.

So why is that?

I still run that "...I shall not fear. Fear is the mindkiller..." quote through my head once in a while when life gets a bit too weird. It helps. And I have an exceptional nephew who is into camo and soldiering and saving us from the bad guys/monsters/aliens. I keep meaning to tell him that basic survival sometimes means pennies can be pounded into arrowheads and never mind the rayguns. Anyone who has read Earth Abides through to the end will know what I mean.

Anyone out there who has similar stories?