Today was one of those days where I despair of getting anything done at all. Poor Patches had to spend part of the morning at the veterinarian’s office for an exploratory teeth cleaning. The vet decided to remove two of this teeth, and when I picked him up he wasn’t doing too well. I spent the day either driving back and forth to the vet (three hours total, in two chunks), or keeping cats separated.

Shadow is still young enough that when I brought Patches home all groggy from the vet, I thought it would be best to keep them apart, since the last thing Patches needed was to have Shadow jumping all over him. Patches seems to be feeling better now, though he’s starving and I can’t feed him yet because of his teeth. And other than that, he hates me because I’m the bad mommy who stuck him in the cage and took him to the bad place that made him hurt. I hate it when I have to be the bad mommy.

Now the vet is recommending a special prescription diet for him because it’s official: he’s obese. Yeah, so he weighs 18+ pounds, but he’s just a big cat. Or so I keep telling myself, and anyone else who inquires as to his fitness level. When he came to live here, we think he was 8-9 months old, and he weighed 12 pounds, which was already pretty big. Neutering and an indoor life have taken it’s toll on his girlish figure, leaving him a bit, shall we say, portly? Good thing he’s not much of a lap cat.

It’s not like I haven’t tried to make him skinny. I’ve been buying Science Diet Adult Light for years, to little or no effect. He never gets table scraps, and he always seems hungry. I try to play with him, but he’s lazy (maybe because he’s so fat?!?), and he doesn’t climb the cat tree anymore since it fell out from under him twice a couple of years ago when ITMan didn’t get it solidly installed between the floor and ceiling. I’m sure you’ve seen those pics of kitties hanging from tree branches that say “Hang in there baby” right? That was poor Patches, hanging from the cat tree as it swayed. Read the rest of this entry »

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Adding pictures to the posts on your blog is a good thing, providing interest and illustration and giving readers a glimpse into your quilty world. Sizing images correctly is a must though, since images that are too big for the layout of your page will cause other elements like sidebars to move around and end up out of position, and pictures that are too small are just difficult for readers to see. Here’s a quick tutorial (I use Photoshop Elements, but the theory is the same for any graphics program):

Open the image in Photoshop (or whichever graphics editor you use) and edit the color, fix red eyes or crop the image to delete any unnecessary background from the shot. Once you’re satisfied with the image, you need to know the size of the space where the image must fit, in pixels. That’s the important part here. Inches mean nothing, it’s all about the pixels.

I generally worry more about the width of an image, because that’s the dimension that will cause the layout of my pages to break if it’s too big. I use a tool called MeasureIt, which is an add-on for the Firefox Browser. When you have MeasureIt installed, you can click on the icon and then click and drag on your screen to measure an area in pixels, like this:

I’ve measured the width of my post area, and I know that my image can’t be wider than 491 pixels. I usually stick with about 450px, because I like to leave a little room around the image, and it’s an easy number to remember when I’m sizing the images in Photoshop.

In Photoshop, there are two ways to size the image properly. You can use Image>Resize>Image Size, and then enter the width in the Width field, making sure that the box next to “Constrain Proportions” is checked at the bottom, and that the drop down menu next to the Width field says “pixels.” Once you enter your desired pixels for the Width, the Height will change automatically if “Constrain Proportions” is checked. Click “OK” to resize the image and save it. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m not sure what the deal is with cats and sitting in or on whatever you’re working with. Every cat I’ve ever had or heard of has issues like this, so it must be an attention thing. “Mom’s paying too much attention to those papers, that fabric, the quilt, this book, so I shall sit on it.” It’s just life with a cat. I’ve been decluttering a bit around the house, so Shadow decided to try out the Longaberger Bread Basket that I’d emptied of it’s previous contents and left at the back of my cutting table:

This basket fascination continued off and on all day long once he’d discovered the spot. He made himself even more comfortable toward the end of the day. Since it probably really is an attention thing and maybe what he really wants is to be famous, we submitted one of the other pics to I Can Has Cheezburger?:

moar funny pictures

If you’re not familiar with the LOLcats, check out the I Can Has Cheezburger? site for more funny captioned cat pictures (and the occasional non-feline participant). Bad spelling and grammar in giant white letters is the norm there. I don’t visit too often, because I can spend (read: waste) quite a lot of time just laughing at the pictures and funny captions which isn’t too great for productivity! If you’re so inclined, you can click the captioned photo above to go to the page where you can vote on Shadow’s picture. With enough votes, maybe the attention seeker will make it to the front page of the site!

Then this morning, the little twerp was cuter yet as he made himself more comfortably at home, with a pose and look even more suited to the caption I put on the previous photo:

Now you know the answer: yes, an 11.5lb cat can fit in a Longaberger Bread Basket, just in case you ever really need to know. He’s been in and out of the thing more times than I can count today. He doesn’t just stay in there because if I get up and leave the room, he simply must be on my tail until I come back. I wonder how long this basket fixation will go on?? Maybe I should find him a bigger one…

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