Captain Me-Ow

Shortly after I retired, I discovered zazzle.com, one of several places where you can create custom designs on a variety of items. Though I’ve made t-shirt, a Louie the ginger cat calendar, postage stamp, poster, Christmas card, and business card designs, many just for my use, my favorites are coffee mugs.

Without a doubt, my cat coffee mug designs are my favorites since, well, my cats are great subjects, starting with the late Louie the ginger cat. My favorite Louie mug features this image, a combination of my photo and New Zealand friend Peter Studt’s droll super hero outfit painted on it.

That image made a great poster, too, which hangs over the settee:

Thanks to Andy, Louie the Ginger Cat as Captain Me-Ow is tilted in his frame! To live with cats is to accept a certain level of chaos and destruction!

There were others; there will be more.

Today, I added these two to my mug designs:

I guess it is obvious why I might like these two designs for mugs! Of course, since today is the last day of a 40% off sale on mugs, I decided I needed two of each design. I have the design in 15 ounce mugs, but that is a lot more coffee than I want to drink at one sitting! I’ll use them for water or pencils, and the new, smaller mugs for coffee.

Captain Me-Ow is the name a friend gave to this photo of the late Louie the ginger cat, cat super hero. “Captain” because many super heroes have rank. “Me” for “it’s all about me” and “Ow” because that’s what happens to you if you don’t pay attention to “Me”! It is a favorite photo of that beloved cat.

The original photo wasn’t much. Just an under-exposed snapshot of my cat Louie sleeping on my computer chair. The cute super hero uniform is the work of a New Zealand friend with a delightful quirky sense of humor!

Some time after Louie died on August 1, 2011, I decided I wanted to hang an enlarged photo of him in my home. This was a natural. Aside from showing his magnificence, it shows him in a humorous way: Louie, if nothing, was a funny cat!

The person who custom framed things retired, so I tried to find a ready-made frame big enough to display the photo of Captain Me-Ow and failed. It has odd proportions. I ended up buying a poster frame that was way bigger than the photo. Friction and static electricity held the photo in place until wee Andrew started tugging on the bottom part of the frame, pulling it off.

I re-attached the piece; Andy pulled it back off. Finally, I took the photo down till I found a solution, which was a smaller poster frame that still is bigger than the photo. Positioning the photo in the smaller frame, I let friction and static electricity hold it in place again. No problem there. AND it hanged higher than the other frame because it was smaller, of course, and I used the same nail. Andy, I figured, couldn’t reach high enough to bother this one!

Of course he did, pulling off the bottom piece of the frame again.

No cat will defeat me, I declared, and taped the thing together. Andy tried to repeat his naughtiness, but was defeated.

Or was he? He managed to break the hold of friction and static electricity on the photo, and gravity finished the process of creating what you see above: A cat-altered piece of cat memorabilia. The whole thing is taped tightly, would be a mess to straighten out.

The more I looked at it, the more I started to see the sense of it. A household with cats always is a bit askew. Louie couldn’t have done better! Ahem! “Captain Me-Ow”, rather.