New Kittens

Seems to be that whenever I get something new, I take photos of it, and then post them on here in the guise of saying ‘look at my pictures, aren’t they nice? Oh, the thing? Yeah, I guess that’s nice too’. Honestly, I don’t do it to humble brag – I only post the pictures if whatever I’ve bought is relevant to this blog or if the pictures I’ve taken are worth sharing.

This is one such occasion. A couple of weeks ago my wife and I adopted a couple of kittens. This is why it’s been so quiet on Creative Splurges for the last few weeks – it turns out, herding cats is a full time job. Like all kittens, they are the cutest things in the entire world, and me being me, I’ve photographed the hell out of them.

The top one is a little girl called Zelda, the bottom her brother Rambow. They are tiny and boisterous and lots of fun to watch playing. From time to time, however, they slowed down enough for me to get some photographs of them.

Okay, maybe that’s an extreme example (Rambow, it should be noted, is quite an accomplished sleeper). It’s fun to watch though, as they run around hell for leather for half a hour then run out of energy and go to sleep. They both have the same sleep patterns too; they’ll both curl up about the same time and wake up about the same time, and they are usually inseparable. Our existing cat Cookie (by which I mean the cat we had before we adopted these two, not a cat that is in the process of existing. All of them are existing) is finally, after a fortnight, beginning to get used to the new presences in the house, albeit by chasing them around from time to time. As far as the kittens are concerned it’s playing; whether Cookie sees it that way is another matter entirely.

One thing I’ve yet to really do is capture them in the act of their boisterous play. Given a perfectly timed shot I could get the both of them photographed in the air in banzai-style poses. Sadly, I’m never ready and the light is rarely sufficient. Indeed, this is the closest I’ve gotten to an action shot:

Fortunately from time to time they’d at least settle down in a reasonable amount of light so I could get some relatively well-lit shots without to much ISO noise.

In most of these images so far they look a bit scared. Maybe they were, these are all from the first day we had them and they were still quite timid. Still, after a while they settled in a bit and helped produce some far cuter images.

It is really quite surprisingly soothing to have your finger chewed by a kitten.

The people that have seen these images already like this next one. It looks like a kitten who’s seen a spider.

I didn’t get many shots of them playing – it’s one of those things that’s far too distractingly entertaining to remember to photograph, not to mention there rarely seems to be that much light where they play.

The only serviceable shot I got of them playing is a semi-submerged bum poking out from under a pillow, mid-dive.

Fortunately I can tell which kitten is which from their backsides – that is Rambow making a playful lunge for his sister.

It seems to me that most of the images, however, are of Zelda. I guess it’s because she sat still for longer.

A few days after adoption day, I took a few more shots with my nifty fifty.

They kittens have now been at home for over two weeks, and they’re settling in nicely. They’ve turned into two very active but loving kittens, and even Cookie is warming to them – not enough to share a sofa with both of them yet, but we’re getting there (she is still generally happier when she’s ignoring them, though). Maybe eventually I’ll be able to finally grab a photo that will make a perfect LOLcat image and make me rich and famous. That’s how LOLcat images work, right?