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I took a short quiz to determine how addicted I am to Facebook. Not much!

How Addicted to Facebook Are You?

Created by Oatmeal

It just doesn’t trip my trigger, tickle my fancy, make much sense to me. But lots of family and friends use it, so I visit it a bit more now than when I first signed up for it.

The defunct dailybooth was my poison. I really liked it, but the management never managed to figure out how to monetize it. At least I think that was the deal. It went out of business at the end of November 2012, freeing up tons of time for me to do other things!

grass

My Persian cats, Andy and Dougy, play well together. Many activities they do together without conflict.

..or this favorite activity:

They can get territorial with each other when one wants something the other brother has. “It” can be a place or thing.

A magazine dropped by the side of my recliner becomes a cat home base. One of the boys plops down on the magazine, then chases the other away if he tries to get near it.

An ottoman in front of the glider never gets used to rest my feet because one or the other cat claims it first. It is from this perch that the floor-bound cat gets harassed with fierce claws when he walks by. This territory always is in dispute!

There is a pet stroller that always seems to have a cat resting on top of it, ready to defend his rights to this favorite perch. Dougy especially likes to play feather toy games while on top of this stroller.

Sharing such a happy place is difficult for Dougy! Why, he’d no sooner let Andy rest in his tub or tote than share the stroller. Fortunately for Andy, Dougy isn’t omnipresent!

Yesterday, I weeded out a clump of grass from my mint patch. It had such a well-developed root system, I decided to pot it up and bring it inside for the boys. The next video shows you how that went!

Andy is a cautious adopter. Today he decided to try the grass out. He tasted it and played with the same seed head Dougy played with in the video above. It is such a big hit, I plan to pot up more grass so they have enough on hand for the year. The grass I’ve grown from seed never went over this well with the boys. I have no sense why not! You know cats.

Louie the ginger tabby cat

I guess everyone has a favorite pet, now defunct. I mean, Andy and Dougy are dear to my heart. Yes, I congratulate myself for accepting them as gifts when they were kittens, but there is one cat before them that was something else: Louie the ginger tabby cat!

Before he died suddenly on 1 August 2011, I compiled photos into an adventure for a friend’s son and daughter, both pre-schoolers at the time. It has a moral, since it’s for kids. The story has some sloppy spots when I look at it again, but it still has some charm. More importantly, it reminds me how much I miss Louie, a goofy, fun cat that actually was the second cat I rescued at the time from the animal pound. The first one was in my life briefly. (Freckles the gray tabby, died after being spayed.) Louie was meant to be a companion to Freckles, but turned out to be the main cat, the only cat until I got Andy and Dougy.

So, here it is. A cat tale with a moral and a Jazz soundtrack, because Louie was named after Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong:

I hope you enjoyed the video, which was created from a PowerPoint file, something I couldn’t do when I made the story in 2011. I hope it also shows how a cat rescued from an animal shelter hours before he was scheduled to be euthanized became a good companion to some old, retired guy, who learned most of what he knows about cats from this loveable lump!