Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
A picture from 2001 of our cat Templeton, this picture has been offline since I took my old site down a while back. He was a handsome little fellow in a gray tuxedo coat and would transform my thinking about cats. What a blessing it was to have known him.
Looking at this picture from 2006 of Templeton recuperating in our guest room reminds me of the role the room has played in the lives of several of our cats. He spent a little time here in isolation from our cat Scout until he recovered from surgery to remove a sewing needle in his stomach. Two years later after he died, we adopted Sam and Emma and they spent time here before we were ready to introduce them to Scout. Now little Trixie is in the room after we adopted her in January, we’re just beginning her introductions to the rest of the family. Boo never spent time here after we adopted him as it was July and we don’t have air conditioning and this room gets rather hot during the summer.
The picture above I was surprised to see I had never put online before, the pictures below have been but I’ve recently re-edited them. Templeton was amazing and completely changed my thinking about cats, all the cats that have followed owe a debt of gratitude to this charming and occasionally mischievous little fellow in a handsome gray tuxedo coat. The pictures aren’t posed, I had been editing pictures on my Powerbook and got up for a moment and Templeton did what he always did — he stole my spot.
We weren’t sure how Templeton would react to having another cat in the house when we brought Scout home in May of 2001, but thankfully he accepted her quickly. She idolized him and snuggled with him every chance she got, and he’d often lick her head and sometimes give her an entire bath. The two friends have been reunited again. As we did with Templeton, we had Scout cremated and my wife picked up her remains on Saturday. Scout’s ashes now join Templeton’s up on the mantle.
I took this picture of Templeton and Scout snuggling in the window seat of our old house in November of 2001. Nearly everything in the picture has changed since then. Both Templeton and Scout have since passed away. We moved half a year after the picture was taken and I no longer have that wonderful window seat where the cats and I so often snuggled. The pad that lined the seat, just visible in the lower left corner, was made by my mother-in-law who passed away a few years ago.
The blanket though, made by my wife for me years ago, remains. Time has taken its toll and there are tears in the fabric, but it remains the blanket I use every day in my office. It links all the pets together, as all past and present spent many hours sleeping and snuggling on it. I took it into the bedroom when Scout and I stayed there at the end of her life, she spent her last day on it as she slept on my chest.
There are more valuable blankets, but none more treasured.
I’ve been doing a lot of work on my home office lately, but it isn’t just my physical life that’s getting organized. I’ve been shooting digitally since Christmas of 2000 and over the years my pictures ended up pretty scattered around. Worse yet I have gotten hopelessly behind in sorting and editing. Worst of all I wasn’t sure which ones were properly backed up.
So it was time to start getting my digital life in order too.
Thanks to a few days of drudgery, all my pictures are now stored in a common directory format on one big hard drive, loaded into Aperture, and being backed up onto a second hard drive as I type. While loading in my older pictures, I couldn’t help but take a break every so often to play around with a few.
For some reason I never edited this picture of Templeton back in the day, he was inspecting my 15″ Powerbook shortly after it was delivered in May of 2004. I’ve written about the two of them before, so it was kind of funny to see them together at the moment the laptop arrived. I was rather ambivalent about cats until I met him, but he was such an ambassador for the feline kind that I can’t imagine my life without them now.
What a wonderful little creature he was.
After the long writeup about workflow in the previous post, one more thought about tools. This is a picture of Templeton with the 15″ Powerbook I referenced in that post, my favorite computer of all time until my current MacBook Pro.
The picture was taken in January 2006 while Templeton was recuperating from surgery to remove the sewing needle he swallowed right before we left on Christmas vacation. He had to be kept from running and jumping, and isolated from Scout, so one of us stayed with him in the guest room while the other stayed with Scout. He had to wear a plastic cone to keep him from pulling out his stitches, but we gave him supervised time with it off so he could relax and clean his fur away from the incision.
I left the room for a brief moment and came back to find him sitting at my laptop, paws on the trackpad as though he was settled in for work. What he had really done was an old Templeton standby, though.
He had stolen my spot.
Templeton and my 15″ Powerbook. I loved them both. I miss one. Important as they are, tools are just tools.
Templeton was not sticking his tongue out at Scout but rather licking his lips after chowing down on catnip, which was usually followed by him laying on his back on the concrete sidewalk and wiggling around, a legacy now claimed by little Sam. While he is definitely his own cat, he does share many of Templeton’s traits.
He’s a full-on no-apologies I’ll-sleep-on-your-legs-until-you-can’t-feel-them lap cat, just like Templeton was. He sticks his head out the door to greet me the moment I come home, just like Templeton did. He then goes downstairs to his food bowl and meows loudly to be fed, meows even if his bowl has plenty of food but he can actually see a bit of the bottom of the bowl, meows just because he likes the comfort of having me come down and go through the motions of feeding him. Just like Templeton did.
He’s an excellent groomer and yet never has hairballs, just like — well, Templeton was an excellent groomer.
Templeton used to love to sleep atop the bookcases but as he aged he had trouble jumping that high. If he sat beside my bookcase to indicate he wanted up, I’d place him up there for a catnap and get him down when he woke up. On this particular day, I climbed on top of a chair so that we’d be eye to eye when I took the picture.
This is one of the last pictures I took with my Canon 10D before upgrading to the 20D in March of 2005. It certainly wasn’t my last picture with the 10D, not even close, as I like to shoot with two cameras in the field and the 10D has soldiered on as my second camera.
Templeton didn’t care either way.
Templeton loved his outside time and if he wasn’t exploring the sights and smells of the backyard, he’d usually sprawl out in the grass for a catnap. But he also liked being in high places and couldn’t resist the occasional climb to higher elevations to survey the kingdom. This was especially true if I was enjoying a bowl of cereal at the table, he’d wait until I was distracted and then the sounds of slurping would bring me back to attention, Templeton face down and going to town on the milk.
Oh how I loved you little one.
As I mentioned in my previous post, this year I’ve seen three long-tailed weasels (Mustela frenata) after never having seen them before. However they weren’t my first introduction to the weasel family itself, the mustelids. I had a similar experience last year with mink (Mustela vison), I saw three after never having seen them before — unfortunately I haven’t seen them since, I hope I have better luck with the weasels.
And of course I once had daily contact with the gray-tailed weasel (Mustela templeton), the sort of weasel who would act like he wanted to play, then when you got up to follow him, double back and steal your chair. And still look up at you with the purest innocence. That is a weasel.
While the gray-tailed weasel has sadly gone extinct, scientists are studying a mammal that some believe is a new species, the orange-tailed weasel (Mustela sam). The scientific community wants to wait for more data before final classification as a weasel, but two young scientists note that he will push you aside and steal your food, and with manners like that there’s really no reason to wait.
However, another scientist argues that the gray-tailed and orange-tailed weasels are likely one species, the little weasel (Mustela minimus). Or, since the orange creature seems to eat anything that even remotely resembles food if you leave it unguarded for a few seconds, that perhaps it is not a weasel at all but an unusually cute species of goat (Oreamnos terribulus).
Boolie 