Sparkle the Designer Cat's Blog, page 421

REAL Best Jobs for Cat People

While my human was researching for a story, she ran across this article about the 13 best jobs for cat people. Well, I took a look at this list, and I have to say it is sorely lacking! The jobs here include things like court reporters, film editors (which incidentally my human did a couple of decades ago), astronomer and software developer. You tell me: exactly what do any of these jobs do to promote the wellbeing of us kitties? Because you know, if humans are cat lovers, then they should be spending quality time working at jobs that help us! So I’ve decided to make up my own list of jobs for cat people. I don’t know how they fit in with cat people personality traits, but they all match up with the most important one: they love us cats.*

Buyer

This job would involve doing extensive research into different cat products, from food to cat litter to toys, and creating proprietary methods for figuring out exactly the right items for one particular cat household — the one their cats live in.

Cat Tree Manufacturer

This job is perfect for imaginative humans who enjoy crafting on a large scale. The right cat lover for the job would be good at measuring, cutting wood and carpet, and working with other materials that go into making cat trees. An engineering background is important, to make sure the cat trees are sturdy and work the way they should.

Cat Toy Maker

Humans who can’t create on a big scale often excel on a smaller level with cat toys. This is the perfect job for cat lovers who are very creative and have a sense of fun. A good cat toy maker will be able to fashion toys that boggle the feline mind!

Catnip Grower

A human with a green thumb could preside over acres and acres of nip, overseeing its growth and making sure the plants get the proper nutrients to ensure high potency, both fresh out of the garden and dried.

Valet

This important job involves making sure that a cat’s every need is attended to. Grooming, proper food preparation, frequent applications of petting and skritches, turn-down cat bed service and everything else that goes into keeping kitties happy — the valet must manage all of it, and perform each duty with an extreme attention to detail.

Lobbyist

This human must brave the jungle known as The Hill and fight for feline rights! Legislators keep coming up with laws that could potentially harm cats, and it is the lobbyist’s job to make sure these laws never see the light of day.

* Not all jobs are salaried positions, and some only pay in purrs. But does that really matter? A job well done should be its own reward.
* * *
Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Tortie In the Way Thursday (and Giveaway Winner)

My big plan today was to announce the winner of my BlogPaws Swag Bag giveaway… but somekitty is in the way!

How can I make her leave?

Maybe if I tell her politely, she will leave.

Hey, it worked!

Or maybe not.

Turn off the camera! Turn off the camera!

Okay! Now I can announce the winner of the giveaway! It is…

Delyne M.!

Concatulations, Delyne! The package is already on its way to you (and no, Binga is not inside). I just want to mention that Delyne has entered several of my giveaways and she finally won one! So never give up and keep entering! I will have some very special giveaways for you on Cat World Domination Day — less than two weeks off!
* * *
Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Every Breath You Take, Every Move You Make…

* * *
Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Kitty Math and How It Rescues Cats

There’s human math, and then there’s kitty math! I prefer kitty math because I like the way the numbers add up better! For example, adopting one cat saves two lives!

How does this work? Easy! When you adopt a cat from a shelter that euthanizes, you are saving that cat’s life… but you are also making room for another cat to stay longer! That means that some cat you may have never even seen gets another chance to find a home! This is why I always encourage humans to rescue cats from open admission shelters.

Here is some more kitty math: one day equals thousands of kitties!

That is because tomorrow is Just One Day, that one day a year where shelters across the U.S. and Canada are asked to stop the killing for just one day. The shelters that participate (and sadly, not every shelter does) will promote their events and try to get lots of their pets adopted! And it works — every year, on June 11, thousands of lives are spared for that day — and many animals find homes. Find out if your community is participating on the Just One Day website.

Here is another figure for you: 1 plus 1 plus TNR equals negative 420,000.

420,000 is how many cats might not get born over the course of seven years if just one male and one female cat are TNR’d — Trapped Neutered and Returned to their colony. That is why it is so important to establish TNR programs everywhere! When cats that are considered feral wind up in an open admission shelter, they are euthanized because they are not considered adoptable. Some shelters have barn cat programs now, where ferals are adopted out to barns and warehouses so they can keep away vermin — but let’s try to stop feral kitties from getting born before they ever make it to a shelter! As most of you know, Alley Cat Allies is an awesome resource for feral cats and TNR.

I encourage you to get involved with what is going on at your local city shelters. Support them when they do positive things, and see what can be done about the bad. If you love cats, it is your civic duty to help change local ordinances so that someday, shelters can be no kill all the time. Help make Kitty Math work in your community!
* * *
Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Meezer Colors Monday With Boodie

Some readers wonder why I don’t feature Boodie very often on my blog. Maybe this is the reason:

And when she’s not napping, she’s being photobombed by Binga.

But since June 9 is Meezer Colors Day, it’s the perfect time to devote a blog post to Boodie. Although “Meezer” is shorthand for Siamese, lots of different cat breeds have Meezer colors — Birmans, Ragdolls and Tonkinese among them. Boodie’s origins are rather mysterious. She was abandoned as a kitten in the parking lot of a vet clinic with no note and behaved like she was feral. The rescue that took her in thought she was a Birman. Finally my human figured out she was probably a Ragdoll and wrote about it in her CatChannel.com column.

Out of the three of us, my human says Boodie is the least high maintenance. She doesn’t ask for a lot of attention, she’s the opposite of bossy, she does not care if Binga beats up on her (which happens frequently — Binga plays rough), and while my human sometimes has to catch her to pet her, she is always appreciative once the petting starts. Technically she is not an adopted cat because nobody ever made it official. According to her microchip, she still belongs to the rescue where my human volunteered to foster her… in 2002!

Last month, when my human made a tortie card for Binga, some of you wondered why Boodie didn’t have her own card. Actually she has several at my old CafePress shop, but my human never moved them over. Since it is Meezer Colors Day, she finally updated one and posted it in my Zazzle shop.

Boodie gives it a paws up. It doesn’t take much to make her happy.

* * *
Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Sunday Catinee: Nip Nanner Madness!

One of my favorite cats, Shorty of Shorty and Kodi fame, seems to be a little too obsessed with her catnip banana. In fact, some may say she has a problem! What do you think, kitties? And… can any of you relate?

If you can’t see the above video, click here to watch it on YouTube!
* * *
Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Caturday Art: Fun With Black And White

I don’t have a finished photo for you today — I just wanted to show you the Black & White adjustment in Photoshop, and explain why it is awesome.

I’m starting off with a random portrait of me. The colors and contrast have already been adjusted, and the picture cropped a little.

To turn it into a black and white image, my human never changes the Mode to Grayscale because she wants to control the way the colors show up. Instead she goes down to Adjustments->Black & White, as you see here.

Here is what the photo looks like with the standard Black & White settings. As you can see, it is a little dark. It would look pretty much the same if you had changed the Mode to Grayscale.

When it comes to orange-hued cats and human skin tones, the most adjusting you will make happens with the red and yellow channels. Here, my human has lightened the red channel and darkened the yellow one just a little. This lightens my fur, but also gives it some extra contrast.

But that is not all you can do with the Black & White adjustment. You can also add a color tint to the black and white photo. The biggest mistake a lot of humans make with the tint is to make it too bright and overpowering. It’s much nicer to be subtle… unless you are going bright for a reason. As you can see, this photo only has a hint of brown in the gray and it shows up really well.

And when you are going outside of gray-browns and creamy colors, you need to be even more careful. See how close the little circle on the Color Picker is to the gray edge? And how much violet still shows up on my photo? Moving that little circle even a hair to the right makes it too intense.

There are a lot of effects you can still do with your photo, once you have turned it black and white. You can play around with it in the Filter Gallery and see what you come up with.

And of course there are all sorts of experiments you can do while you are still in the Black & White adjustment — like below, where I decided to see what I looked like as a tuxie! (To do that, my human set the red channel as dark as it would go.)

The whole point is to play around and have fun! There is a lot more to black and white than you would think!

For more Caturday Art, visit Athena!
* * *
Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Flashback Friday – Looking Back at 2003

When you are updating a blog, especially a blog that you are “self-hosting,” as opposed to having it on Blogger or WordPress.com, sometimes there are glitches you don’t see right away. That’s what happened to my human yesterday when she went back to look at some earlier posts of mine — and the first six years of blog photos were all missing! For some reason, the guy who did her website last year didn’t move one of the image folders to where it needed to be, but the problem didn’t show up until my human redesigned the blog a couple of weeks ago. After some needless panicking, she fixed it… and just for fun, I thought I would share some old photos with you. They are from the first full year I lived with my human, 2003.

Here I am, helping my human prepare her tax return in March, 2003:

Here, I am walloping Boodie — May 2003:

For my first birthday, my human put this annoying ribbon on my collar. By the way, that Tiffany box? All it held was a dumb collar that did not come from Tiffany. June 2003:

And here is Binga playing tub hockey — an outtake from June, 2003:

In case you were wondering, Binga is the only one out of the three of us who has ever shown an interest in unrolling toilet paper. Here is the evidence from November, 2003. For some reason, she only did it maybe once after that:

And here is a photo of me, just looking cute. I was a little over a year old in August 2003:


* * *
Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Pope Francis Is Wrong: Pets Save People From the “Bitterness of Loneliness”

Since neither my human nor her boyfriend is a practicing Catholic, I don’t often hear about what goes on with Pope Francis. From what I gather, he has been good in a lot of different ways. But the other day he said something that was wrong.

Pope Francis was speaking to 15 long-married pairs of humans during Mass at the Vatican, and he criticized what he saw as “the culture of wellbeing,” in which couples choose to remain childfree. The Pope felt childfree couples were self-centered beings, more interested in vacation homes than being “fruitful.” He went on to say, “it might be better — more comfortable — to have a dog, two cats, and the love goes to the two cats and the dog… Then, in the end this marriage comes to old age in solitude, with the bitterness of loneliness.”

While my human and her boyfriend don’t have children and never will, what I have to say has nothing to do with them or their choices. I want to point out that having children is no guarantee that your old age won’t be solitary and lonely. I know this because I know someone who had a family (in fact, two) who is often quite lonely: my human’s father.

My human’s father has a son from his first marriage, and my human, from his second marriage. His wife — my human’s mother — died several years ago. The son works full time. My human runs a business. Their time with their father is very limited. My human finds visiting with him frustrating because there is a lot he does not comprehend well and their conversations are often difficult. He lives at an assisted living facility, but is having a hard time connecting with the other residents (who he feels are worse off than he is), so even though he has a family, he is lonely a lot. Except for someone who loves him and keeps him company always: his cat Smokey.

As you can see, Smokey is a fluffy panther, not unlike a female version of Spitty. She is always there for my human’s father. Since she is not gainfully employed and does not run her own business, her whole job is to hang out with my human’s father and she really enjoys it. They don’t need conversation to have a nice time. He plays the red dot game with her, and then they nap together. When my human’s father moved into the assisted living facility, my human bought Smokey a small cat tree, and even though it is less than two months old, it is already well used! Smokey is an awesome companion and my human’s father would be lost without her. Since she is 10 and my human’s father is 94, she will probably outlive him. Don’t worry, we will make sure that there is always a good home for Smokey.

So I’m just saying, instead of making it sound like pets have anything to do with human couples remaining childfree, why doesn’t the Pope realize that pets do a lot of good for humans of all ages? Especially elderly humans, with or without families, who are lonely. That is a very important and compassionate thing, and it is something that the Pope’s namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, understood very well.

* * *
Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Get Your Cat World Domination Day 2014 Graphics Here!

It’s time once again for us kitties to celebrate our World Domination (and also my birthday)! As always, it’s June 24 — save the date! We are in the party planning stage right now.

In the meantime, right click and grab your graphic — below is the 300 px sidebar size.

And the smaller graphic:

* * *
Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!