Don't you just hate Mondays?

unlike the fluff-cleavaged orange smiler below, this calico cutie was a little wary of strangers coming on her porch.  Imagine waking up from a slumber in your secret little spot to see Steph towering over you in her Swedish Hasbeens trying to snap a pic of your sweetness on her iPhone?  You might be a little scared too.

Don't worry little one!  We'd never hurt you!

smile and the world will smile with you

There's nothing like a beautiful smile to make you feel welcome.

The Witch and the Manic Familiar.

Every witch worth her salt needs a familiar

see my witching hour boots?

but sometimes the familiar goes manic with love and witchcraft

witchcraft and midwifery

midwifery and MANIA!!!

I'm afraid if I don't go buck I won't get enough love!

Maybe this witch's claw will caress me?

It will.

BUCK WILD!!!!  Touch me!!  I'm a swirl of marbleized fur!

psychodoolick

Steph and I peer into a window, as our feline counterparts peer back.

Back to Business

Now that the most important event of my year, the Queen West Art Crawl, is successfully completed, I can get back to what I do best - obsess over cats.

The weekend was fun, exciting, amazing.  It was also extremely long days of tough work.  Thankfully, I had two little kittens staying with me who made coming home a treat.

Rupert still holds the record for longest cat tail ever.  He is the sweetest, most loving, long as heck, best big brother to bollo kitkat in the world.

Gotta get right down on the floor with the kittersons after a long day at work.

Bollo wins for best miniaturized tux-wearing-fruit-bat, best black toe tufts, and best survivor. 

The reason why they were staying with me is because a disgusting pest control company sprayed them with toxic chemicals in my friend's apartment while they were spraying for roaches.  They knew it was toxic, but because their mother wasn't home to relocate them, they just went ahead and sprayed it anyway.  When she got home they were scared and shaking, in puddles of toxic chemicals. Foaming at the mouth, unresponsive.  She asked the guy why he sprayed them and he pretty much said it was her problem. They were rushed to the emergency vet, and it looked as though Bollo might not make it through the night!  It cost thousands of dollars, but they pulled through and survived to come over to my house for recuperation.  I just hope there are not any long term damages!  This company needs to go down!  How anyone could do that is beyond me....

Being Bashful

Sometimes, no matter how beautiful you are, you just need to hide from the world.

Luckily there is mock bamboo you can hide your pretty face behind.

sometimes you feel shy

September is a serious month, a time for reflection.

and in the jungle they can't see you cry

Cat Show

Life is Good.

Photo taken in Malta by Jennie Suddick.

I must get into this pot!

I must get into this pot!



I did it! I got into the pot!

The Night Watchmen

Herding Cats

Enough lovely friends have send me this vid that I feel I would be remiss not to share it. 



It's worth watching even if you just watch the video starting at 2:43 when a little fluff ball is batted off an IKEA chair.  Those homoerotic Marketing Genius Duo landed on a sure thing when they chose to use cats - nothing goes viral like cats!

The Brenda Phenomenon

Brenda is a contradiction in fur. She is the peace-weaver. She is a light-house keeper. She is a paw-dangler. She is a show cat. She is a stray. She is a weirdo. She is a cherubic infant on a Victorian valentine.

She'll shreik and cower if Betty comes near her, even though she's twice her since. The mood will hit her once or twice a year to scamper.  Mostly she just saunters through our lives like a dusty peach cloud.

She acts so unlike any other cat I've known that sometimes I check myself and wonder if she really is a cat, or if maybe she's actually a teddy bear that some soft headed scientist animated and sent out into the world and into our hearts. 



The face of innocence.



She wears peachy-cream bloomers of varying lengths, depending on how recently she's been groomed by Becky at "Grooming With Finesse".  We have to have her groomed because she's too round to clean her nether regions properly.

She also has inter-digital tufts of fluff, which she pulls on when she cleans.

She loves to dangle her paws off of things. 

she sits on the edge of things to better dangle off of them. Yes, that's my Paxil in the background.

Brenda waiting to go inside.  As you can see from the look on her face, she's got the weight of the world on her shoulders. "don't tread on me"

Puss in Boots by Klimt

The first cat I ever owned was Puss, after Puss in Boots. He looked like this royal cat, captured (on film, not physically) in Brockton.

I look like a dust cloud with a handsome regal face painted by Klimt.

We had Puss when I was four, and I didn't think anything of his name.  Whenever I say it now I feel uncomfortable, due to it's similarity to two uncouth words in the English language.  Can you guess what those two words are?

On the wildnesses of cats

Steph captured this wild beauty in her neighbourhood of Brockton, digging in a garden. She approached her, and the kitty was like : "I'm so wild right now."

I'm so wild right now.

I wonder if this bb is polydactylic.  It's pretty common for kitz to have extra toes, and this stray sweetie looks like she's wearing mittens.

Only one out of every thousand calico (pink, grey and white) cats is a male.  For a male to be calico, it needs to have an extra X chromosone (xxy).  Gender warz!!!!!

my protector

i think in every life, there's an animal companion who is sent from god to protect each other, and as soon as they meet, they fall in love and know they're meant to be together.  For me, that animal is Betty.  The Anglin family adopted her from a raver girl who found her under her grandma's porch with a little of kit kits and took her in and tripped on acid with her under the sheets.  Unfortunately her rave carreer got in the way of her cat ownership, but luckily she found a wonderful home for little "Christobel".  I was 17 when we got her, and we just immediately bonded and had a great connection.  I was into Bettie Paige then and re-named her Betty, and the love-affair began.

10 years later, we're as in love than ever.  I had a really hard time moving out of my parents house, because I meant I'd have to leave her.  I felt it was for the best that Betty live where she was happy, well treated, got a lot of love and attention, and she was used to.  She can also play outside at my folks place unlike if she lived with me in my second floor Parkdale neighbourhood.  I miss her every day though.

It's always been hard for me to capture Betty's beauty.  Nothing can convey how gorgeous she is.

Even if I'm gone for many months, when I reunite with Betty, she'll lay down before me and look up directly into my eyes!!! She's definitely one of the smartest cats I've ever met. The intelligence shines through her face.

Betty waits patiently to be let outside.  Great markings!

the face of a model. Nice whiskers!  She loves to hide beneath the porch steps and spy across the street at Fella!

Even though Betty is the ripe old age of 13, she's really really healthy.  This photo demonstrates that she's a lil chubby, but compared to Brenda, she's positively svelte. 

She's extremely loving to humans.

But extremely hateful and violent to other cats. Poor Brenda is declawed (by her former owners - not us!), and she's always getting her ass whooped by Bett Bett.

She loves me.

She crosses her back feet!  Could anything be cuter??

Did you know that the higher a cats tail is, the happier they are?  If it's wagging, they are irritated. If the tail is down, they are scared.  If they wash their face, they are embarrassed. They will often get embarrassed if they don't successfully complete a leap.  It's so cute.  Look how high Betty's tail is here!  She is a happy cat.  She looks like a tea pot and her tail is the handle. 

She loves to show off her beauty.

Cone of Mirvish Village.

My dear friend Steph has reeled another gem in for Cats of Parkdale. 

Stephanie and Diego recently visited Mirvish Village, where they met a dear-sweet-cute-heart of a cat, named Cone.

Let me show you what I'm talkin bout.

"Cone makes me wanna leave the one I'm with and start a new relationship with him, this is what he does, does." - Usher.

My two lovely friends sat on a stoop, drinking beer and eating chicken wings.  And Cone delighted them with his luxurious company all the while. "Enjoy" is right!

Diego kindly offered Cones a treat.

Cone didn't really care for jerk chicken, but he cared a lot for Diego.

Look into that face and just try to tell me that God isn't fundamentally benevolent.

A permanent smile (but not in the ultra-violence sense of the term). 

OH, Cones!  Thank you for sharing this story and angel with Cats of Parkdale, friends!

Cats of Brockton - part 2.

this cat lives outside the petty human paradigm of class. he lives in a dream scape of orange fluff and tufts, but still within the borders of Brockton.

that chain link fence and bad-boy air kind of makes me think he's a greaser hanging outside the high school waiting for the pretty girls to get out of class.  In the words of one Steph Hoff, who also took these photos, "I'd let him".

In keeping with the 1950's sockhop ethos that's prevalent in Brockton cat culture, Steph caught the DEBUTANTE, who was allowed out of her father's estate to attend her cotillion (in this evergreen brush).  

Do you know that 25% of cat owners blow dry their cats hair after a bath?  I bet the debutante gets a lot of grooming.  But wouldn't you say that the orange kitty looks pretty beautiful with only self-grooming?  Food for thought.  This is my passive aggressive method of saying don't bathe your cats!