Julius has a problem with toys. No, he really has two problems. One is the irritating tendency to totally ignore a toy as beneath notice. The other is an opposite tendency to go too far if he does like the toy. I think I have mentioned this a few times before.
A prime example of the latter was a wicker toy that my mother sent a few years ago when I adopted Calpurnia. There was a round ‘body’ made of light wicker and a feather or two attached. I gave it to Julius to play with and he bit it into fragments in about five seconds.
So today I was trying to get him to play with a feather wand teaser toy. Until today he has ignored the toy, but today he was interested. He followed it with his eyes, then swiped at it and finally grabbed at bit it.
Then he started to look a bit worried and gagged a bit. It was as if the feather teaser was stuck in his mouth and he was choking on it. It only took about 10 seconds for him to break away, and then he left that part of the room and was done playing.
I looked at the toy, and sure enough he had bitten the toy so hard that his fang and punctured the entire rubberized plastic collar that holds the feathers in a bunch and gives them some weight and got stuck. This would not happen if he didn’t bite with the fury of a tiger when playing. And of course he blames the toy and wouldn’t even look in its direction after that.
Calla is better at playing without taking it all the way to 11. Here she is with a piece of Christmas ribbon that I had stashed and came upon today. She sure looks like she has no idea of what to make of it.
…also I wasn’t sure if I would get these pictures online because my camera import software choked today and corrupted itself. The last time this happened it forgot all the pictures and imported them again, giving me multiple copies of everything. And nowadays I have a couple thousand pictures in the camera. Ok, 1982 pictures.
I usually do the offloading of pictures on my portable instead of the faster desktop. With a big wait ahead, I did the reverse to get the pictures. I also synced the pictures that were loaded from the portable to the desktop, and luckily all todays pictures were imported before the program wiped its memory of the pictures. But I’m sure the next time I plug in the camera down there it will redownload all the pictures, assuming they will fit on the disk. That will take a good long time….
When I moved the ribbon, then she knew what to do with it and gave it the what-for.
…I just noticed something about WordPress that has changed at least in my template. At some point the first page changed from having a bottom to ‘scrolling’ when you page down when you are at the bottom. It is the same effect that the pages on the WordPress site do when you Read Blogs.
What this does do, though, is make any widgets on the bottom regions of the front page invisible. They show up on inside pages, like when you click on a post and read comments, but not the front page. I think I will have to move at least one widget I have down there to a side column widget area so people can actually find it.
ThreeCatYard 
Lovely pics again. Are you sure Julius hasn’t got some Scottish wild cat genes?
Thanks for the point about the home page scrolling, which I hadn’t noticed – I don’t see the advantage in this feature, especially if the bottom widgets are lost.
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I have not checked if it is disableable…
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I’ve just found the remedy – from your Dashboard, go to Settings > Reading and untick ‘Scroll infinitely’.
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He’s not mean, but does seem to forget and go fierce. He never has done it with the other cats, but he only rarely plays with them. He tends to defer to them when he idoes pay attention to them at all.
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Oof. Technical difficulties. It’s so odd you’re going through this now, because my camera’s acting up too. It won’t save changes on the memory card. Is it getting full? Possibly . . . . and then the cats tread on and broke the internal mouse on my laptop — what we go through, to keep on with this blogging fun . . . . still worth it, by me. Good luck to you. LOVE Calpurnia and the ribbon. So stylish.
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Julius is awesome, love the wild child cats:)
I stopped using the photo synch programs that come with the digital cameras. They were more trouble then they were worth! Once the camera drivers are installed on your system, you should be able to see the camera as a drive with your windows explorer when you have it plugged in. You can copy the photos directly from the camera folders to whatever folder you want them in on your computer.
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I like the fact that the camera program keeps track of what is downloaded for me. I just wish it would stop shooting itself in the head every six months or so.
Windows 7 at least, and probably older version even has a ‘autosync’ that can copy and clean the old pics after the c. I used that for kicks yesterday. but I wasn’t keen that it renamed all the pictures to 1,2,3.. Perhaps this can be changed.
There is another picutre downloading program on the Win7 box that seems to be similar to the camera progrem – ‘Windows Live Pictures or some such.
When I tried what you said yesterday it still took ages because friendly Windows was downloading all the pictures to get cute little icons to show in Explorer. Gah!
I think part of the problem with my older portable is that if I am using the Windows Media Player that it goes and tries to read the camera at the same time the camera program does and chaos ensues. Plus it is old and the camera softare seems to use a lot of resources to look pretty.
I tend to stop messing with computer things when they are ‘good enough’ rather than perfect. Often this is a good thiing, sometimes it gets me into trouble.
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Our Scouty tends to chew things to bits, too…especially soft toys–they lose their snouts and pointy parts within a day!
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I wouldn’t call what Julie did ‘chewing’ as it was his first and only bite on the toy that got it stuck on his teeth!
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Sometimes I think mom and dad wished I liked to play with toys more than I do. You’re all a nice looking bunch, by the way!!
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Thanks, and welcome to the blog!
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Leo has finally stopped trying to pull all the feathers off of any feather toy that comes into his view, now he just plays with them, MOL. But his stringy is starting to go bad and will have to be replaced..
Calla is lovely with the ribbon! and Julie with the paw over his face, avoiding the camera? too cute!
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