Photography Friday

Although I’ve been in the middle of moving to a new apartment the past few days, the middle of our move turned out to be the perfect time to get pictures of Maggie. She’s been a little perturbed by the move and has spent a lot of her time hiding out on top of the cupboards above the fridge. That hasn’t made her any less curious though! She’s gotten into absolutely everything in our new apartment (including the cupboard she’s sleeping in for two of the above pictures) and has looked out every window. I think once she relaxes, she’ll end up liking our new apartment a lot.

I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats

Title: I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats
Author: Francesco Marciuliano
Source: library
Rating: ★★★★☆
Fun Fact: Like comics, books of poetry are actually categorized as non-fiction!
Review Summary: Short and very sweet, these poems made me laugh but also made me stop and appreciate how much fun it is to have a cat.

You can probably tell this already from the title, but this book was both adorable and hilarious. Although these were definitely not your typical poems, they were still quite well written. The cadence imposed by the line breaks and the placement of the words on the page were used very effectively to guide you through each poem to the punch line.  Each poem briefly takes you into the mind of a cat for one typical cat moment. Did moving confuse your cat? Well, now there’s a poem to help you understand their sense of lose and confusion. Does your cat desperately want through a door… until you open it? There’s a poem for that too. And familiar to even non-cat owners, thanks to youtube, there are also poems for the cat who destroys your toilet paper roll and for the cat who deliberately knocks things off the counter – just to watch them fall. And oh by the way, that was (obviously) a link to a hilarious cat video, so if you didn’t watch it the first time, here it is again 🙂

Amazon|Goodreads

Photography Friday

I’m having a little trouble doing blog-y things this weekend, since my boyfriend and I have friends from undergraduate visiting. However, I did get a chance this last week to try using my new lens to get some pictures of my cat and it worked beautifully. She almost always runs away as soon as I get out my camera, but the smaller lens seemed to bother her less. And in the picture where she’s upside down, she was distracted by the speaker phone. The boy was driving home and I put him on speaker phone. My cat, Maggie, was immediately interested. She circled the phone sideways so she could keep facing it, before getting up the courage to poke it with a paw. Then she went to lay down, but I think she still wanted to keep an eye on the phone, thus the upside down pose 🙂

Photography Friday

This week I wanted to share with you a bunch of pictures I took at Buttermilk Falls but for some reason I’m just not feeling happy with any of them tonight. I played with the bench one forever and I’m still not sure I like it, so I didn’t have the heart to do another. Fortunately, I always love pictures Maggie (really always – you’re lucky I post anything else :-P) so I’ve filled in with a few of those. These are all some of my first attempts at shooting raw as well and let me just say – where have you been all my life? I am definitely loving the greater editing options 🙂

Bookends – The Week With All the Cats

Despite being in the lab so much this week, I did have some time to read, mostly while waiting on reactions to happen.  So I decided to finish the alarmingly large pile of cat books I picked up while reading in the 636’s and for bookends this week I’ll be giving a brief review of each of them.

Photography Friday

You know it’s been a busy week when you’re spending your Friday night taking pictures of your shower curtain because that’s really just all the excitement you can handle.  Well, that and the fact that this is the first chance I’ve had all week to even think about pictures.  Another busy week in the lab, the sort of week which has caused the boy to start telling his family that I’m doing “mad scientist stuff” and possibly “making zombie e. coli” (the second part, at least, is provably untrue, while the first part is… subjective).  Anyway, back to the shower curtain.  A while back, I took a picture of my shower curtain as part of my first few fumbling attempts at abstracts for the Ames Camera Club competition.  But the lighting was all wrong, so today I decided to move my own lighting in.  Unfortunately, it seems like there may be one interesting way to take a picture of a shower curtain and I just couldn’t find it again tonight.

Fortunately, I also have an awesome picture of my cat Maggie to share or I might feel pretty sad about my picture selection this week!  She thought I was paying way too much attention to the shower curtain and wanted to play, so I decided to try to take pictures of her while playing with her. Easier said than done! First, she would grab the yarn and sit up and look fierce – until the moment I got my camera oriented for a portrait shot, when she would roll on her back and look adorable and very horizontal.  She also did her absolute best to look at the string (and therefore the camera) for the minimum amount of time possible while still holding the string.  I swear, she was laughing on the inside.  In fact, the one non-motion blurred face shot I managed to get is the one you see here, and I’m pretty sure she’s singularly unimpressed with my picture taking speed.  If she could talk, I think she’d tell me that if I was trying to catch mice, I would be utterly hopeless 🙂