Lenine's meme
I asked to be asked and she asked me:
1. Please describe the state of the cats.
2. Please link to one photo that you love. One of your photos.
3. Describe your favorite pair of shoes at the moment.
4. Are you planning a holiday? If so, where? If not, where was the last one?
5. What's behind the Johnny Depp icon?
OK, so: [long & picture heavy]
1. Current status of cats:
Leo
When I got out of bed this morning, Devilcat was standing in the hall between Skye and Tabitha, in a total quandary because he couldn't decide which one of them to jump on first. He was too slow about making up his mind and got a tap on the rear from me instead, at which he galloped off to sit on the bench by the kitchen table, licking his boy bits.
Gem
Ate a stolen lettuce leaf, followed it up with quite a bellyful of his cat biscuits and some water then threw up in the middle of the kitchen floor. He just loves to eat lettuce then puke, I could list it as one of his hobbies. I'm therefore psyching myself up to go clean the kitchen floor sometime soon, but I woke up feeling a bit queasy this morning even before this barfing incident occurred.
Skye
Last seen standing on the wide kitchen window sill batting her eyes the length of the room at me as I waited for the kettle to boil and directing pointed glances at the food dish, because last night's catfood is just boring and utterly unacceptable in the morning. However, Skye's wise enough to my ways that she wasn't about to expend any serious energy miaowing or applying tail pressure to my calves to extract second breakfast; in any case, she clearly had her contingency plans at the ready - sip some fresh water from the drinking bowl (also on the kitchen window sill) then proceed to fill up on cat biscuits.
Tabitha
Has predicting my behaviour and movements down to a fine art. She waited in the hall with a view of the kitchen long enough to check that alternative breakfast wasn't forthcoming, then got herself secretly into position outside my office door ready to dodge inside ahead of me as I opened it to bring my coffee to the computer. (In theory, all cats are banned from the office, but in practice cats can't be banned from anywhere.) Once in, she patrolled the room, miaowing loudly as she went, then hauled herself up behind me with her claws in the back of the padded computer chair. She scritched up the chair back a bit, still miaowing but also purring at the same time. She perched on the top of the chair back for a quick look out the window then made her way towards my lap via the chair arm. However, she decided to take a detour onto the desk where I have various negatives lying out for digitising... as there's nothing quite like cat fur in the film scanner, much to her disgust I intercepted her, opened the office door and directed her through it. As a final strategy, she halted half way out, but a firm shove from me on the fluffy bum propelled her into the hall and let me close the door behind her... All this is kind of a normal daily (like, 10 times per day) routine for Tabitha.">
2. Current favourite photo(s!)
Mwahahaha. Clearly Lenine2 doesn't yet realise what a huge mistake it is to ask me anything about my photos or that I'm far too much of a photography geek bore already with zero encouragement. However, today I'm showing enormous restraint and self-discipline by posting only two of my current favourite photos. My favourites change day to day anyway; give it a week and chances are I'll loathe and despise these ones and like something else altogether. But for now:
This one's truly a disaster - all out of focus or only minutely in focus, oversaturated, off-colour, grainy, shot on colour film so cheap and nasty the scanner software doesn't even bother having a profile for it, taken during my first use of a new-to-me camera and macro lens when it was really far too windy for outdoor macro shots and I couldn't be bothered anyway, my first attempt at scanning colour negative film with this scanner, etc, etc. Still, at the moment I love it inordinately. To cure me, I need as many people as possible to tell me how mediocre or downright bad it really is.
The story behind the pic is that, although I own Canon film and digital cameras already, I really needed wanted a film camera that takes Canon EF lenses, so I bought a Canon EOS 3 on Ebay, described as being in "as new" condition, £130 for a hefty pro camera that would've set you back over £1500 new just a few years ago. I get it, unpack it, look through the viewfinder and what do I see but a lovely web of mould growing on the undersurface of the pentaprism. I email the Glaswegian weasel that sold it to me, WTF fungus!!? He replied, Oh, noes, I forgot that was there [yeah, right, pal] but it still works wonderfully and perfectly! So, to test out this mouldy old camera and decide whether to return it, I went out and bought the cheapest available colour film and wandered around the Top Of The Town snapping any old thing, hayfevered and asthma'd up to the eyeballs, sneezing and wheezing and totally not in the mood. I'm keeping the camera; it actually does work fine and seems pretty pristine apart from the fungus issue, which in fact I stopped noticing after a wee while. I've also found out I can probably clean the mould off the pentaprism if it bugs me, or get it cleaned off at a repair shop for about £30 if I'm too chicken to poke around in the guts of the camera with cotton buds myself. Anyway, the above pic was about the only shot worth keeping at all from that test film.
- bridges over the Clyde in Glasgow city centre, from the film I shot on the one "traditional film camera" session during a 10-week Saturday morning photography course I've just completed at Glasgow Metropolitan College. Right now I'm extremely fond of an awful lot of the images from that one 35mm b&w film, although I haven't got round to putting them online until now; I could equally have posted any of another half dozen here. Kind of ironic that in these days of digital, I'm right into photos taken with the old Canon T70 I got from my father for my 21st birthday back in 1987. The females with cameras in the photo were fellow students on the course.
3. Footwear
Well, I don't really wear shoes at all in summer (from May to October, maybe, in a good year) if I can help it. I'd wear my trainers or walking boots for serious walking, but the rest of the time, indoors and out, this year I'm mostly wearing these:
Monsoon flipflops, made in China with recycled rubber tyres, seagrass and cheap labour, with gold beads sewn onto the thong. Cats like them too - ease of toe-licking access, light and easily subdued when fought with under the bed, and offering two alternative textured surfaces for scritching purposes. So far they seem fairly cat-proof, but give it another month or so...
4. Holidays
Well, I'm on holiday at home right now, or at any rate not working, since I got sacked from my job at the beginning of June under my former employer's "Frequent Sickness Absence Capability Fuck You Too Procedures". (Sympathy not required here; in most ways that matter, I've never been so glad to get the hell out of anywhere.) Apart from this, I can't afford to go away anywhere off my own bat and can't at the moment foresee a future time when I'll have acquired the necessary dosh, but I'm fine with that for now. If I could've afforded a holiday this year, I wanted to go to either Madeira or Santorini, or possibly, as cheaper options and since I've never been to any of these places, one of the Canary Islands or Cadiz, Seville or the Costa de la Luz in Spain. In terms of destinations, I've definitely got a thing for islands and I love wandering around all day long in heat and sunshine, but apart from that I'm easy to please and don't really give a flying fuck about accommodation, food, drink, swimming pools, shops or any of the typical resort shit.
Daydreams aside, I'll take whatever I can get, and I did go away with my parents at their expense for a week in Argyll in May, and despite my role as assistant father-picker-upper and my mother being a raving madwoman much of the time, I enjoyed it. We stayed in a cottage in a remote, quiet valley near Loch Ederline; I know the general area well from childhood caravan holidays in Knapdale, lots of prehistoric archaeology and sheep. (I got ticks - only three or four latched on, but I caught plenty more of them walking on me, heading for the tastier bits. I can cope with the Argyll midges, but ugh, I really truly hate the ticks!) I did some walking, took some photos, some of which I'll probably get around to uploading sometime, and generally lazed, though by the end of the week I'll admit I was somewhat relieved to have the excuse of my Saturday photography class to get the bus home by myself a day early instead of travelling back in the car with the parents.
5. My default LJ icon
Hmmm, Johnny Depp wearing eyeliner and rolling his eyes... what's not to like with that? :-D
I made the icon long ago when I was first learning how to do animated gifs in ImageReady. I could possibly do a better technical job now but I doubt I'd like the end result any better. It still always makes me smile and all too often is a pretty good visual representation of the kind of thoughts I'm thinking as I read around livejournal.com. I used screencaps from the film "Don Juan DeMarco"; what you don't see from the icon is that Johnny is dressed as a hareem girl... That's a great, strange, sweet, funny, feelgood movie with an excellent cast - Marlon Brando, Faye Dunaway and Johnny in many weird and wonderful get-ups. I totally recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it. Lots and lots of eye-candy. I can't resist:
Finally, Lenine2, I hope your horse-trodden foot isn't too badly squished. I've long experience of taping up my sister's fingers and toes after horse-wrangling injuries, but I'm not too sure what can be done for a whole foot...
1. Please describe the state of the cats.
2. Please link to one photo that you love. One of your photos.
3. Describe your favorite pair of shoes at the moment.
4. Are you planning a holiday? If so, where? If not, where was the last one?
5. What's behind the Johnny Depp icon?
OK, so: [long & picture heavy]
1. Current status of cats:
Leo
When I got out of bed this morning, Devilcat was standing in the hall between Skye and Tabitha, in a total quandary because he couldn't decide which one of them to jump on first. He was too slow about making up his mind and got a tap on the rear from me instead, at which he galloped off to sit on the bench by the kitchen table, licking his boy bits.
Gem
Ate a stolen lettuce leaf, followed it up with quite a bellyful of his cat biscuits and some water then threw up in the middle of the kitchen floor. He just loves to eat lettuce then puke, I could list it as one of his hobbies. I'm therefore psyching myself up to go clean the kitchen floor sometime soon, but I woke up feeling a bit queasy this morning even before this barfing incident occurred.
Skye
Last seen standing on the wide kitchen window sill batting her eyes the length of the room at me as I waited for the kettle to boil and directing pointed glances at the food dish, because last night's catfood is just boring and utterly unacceptable in the morning. However, Skye's wise enough to my ways that she wasn't about to expend any serious energy miaowing or applying tail pressure to my calves to extract second breakfast; in any case, she clearly had her contingency plans at the ready - sip some fresh water from the drinking bowl (also on the kitchen window sill) then proceed to fill up on cat biscuits.
Tabitha
Has predicting my behaviour and movements down to a fine art. She waited in the hall with a view of the kitchen long enough to check that alternative breakfast wasn't forthcoming, then got herself secretly into position outside my office door ready to dodge inside ahead of me as I opened it to bring my coffee to the computer. (In theory, all cats are banned from the office, but in practice cats can't be banned from anywhere.) Once in, she patrolled the room, miaowing loudly as she went, then hauled herself up behind me with her claws in the back of the padded computer chair. She scritched up the chair back a bit, still miaowing but also purring at the same time. She perched on the top of the chair back for a quick look out the window then made her way towards my lap via the chair arm. However, she decided to take a detour onto the desk where I have various negatives lying out for digitising... as there's nothing quite like cat fur in the film scanner, much to her disgust I intercepted her, opened the office door and directed her through it. As a final strategy, she halted half way out, but a firm shove from me on the fluffy bum propelled her into the hall and let me close the door behind her... All this is kind of a normal daily (like, 10 times per day) routine for Tabitha.">
2. Current favourite photo(s!)
Mwahahaha. Clearly Lenine2 doesn't yet realise what a huge mistake it is to ask me anything about my photos or that I'm far too much of a photography geek bore already with zero encouragement. However, today I'm showing enormous restraint and self-discipline by posting only two of my current favourite photos. My favourites change day to day anyway; give it a week and chances are I'll loathe and despise these ones and like something else altogether. But for now:
This one's truly a disaster - all out of focus or only minutely in focus, oversaturated, off-colour, grainy, shot on colour film so cheap and nasty the scanner software doesn't even bother having a profile for it, taken during my first use of a new-to-me camera and macro lens when it was really far too windy for outdoor macro shots and I couldn't be bothered anyway, my first attempt at scanning colour negative film with this scanner, etc, etc. Still, at the moment I love it inordinately. To cure me, I need as many people as possible to tell me how mediocre or downright bad it really is.
The story behind the pic is that, although I own Canon film and digital cameras already, I really needed wanted a film camera that takes Canon EF lenses, so I bought a Canon EOS 3 on Ebay, described as being in "as new" condition, £130 for a hefty pro camera that would've set you back over £1500 new just a few years ago. I get it, unpack it, look through the viewfinder and what do I see but a lovely web of mould growing on the undersurface of the pentaprism. I email the Glaswegian weasel that sold it to me, WTF fungus!!? He replied, Oh, noes, I forgot that was there [yeah, right, pal] but it still works wonderfully and perfectly! So, to test out this mouldy old camera and decide whether to return it, I went out and bought the cheapest available colour film and wandered around the Top Of The Town snapping any old thing, hayfevered and asthma'd up to the eyeballs, sneezing and wheezing and totally not in the mood. I'm keeping the camera; it actually does work fine and seems pretty pristine apart from the fungus issue, which in fact I stopped noticing after a wee while. I've also found out I can probably clean the mould off the pentaprism if it bugs me, or get it cleaned off at a repair shop for about £30 if I'm too chicken to poke around in the guts of the camera with cotton buds myself. Anyway, the above pic was about the only shot worth keeping at all from that test film.
- bridges over the Clyde in Glasgow city centre, from the film I shot on the one "traditional film camera" session during a 10-week Saturday morning photography course I've just completed at Glasgow Metropolitan College. Right now I'm extremely fond of an awful lot of the images from that one 35mm b&w film, although I haven't got round to putting them online until now; I could equally have posted any of another half dozen here. Kind of ironic that in these days of digital, I'm right into photos taken with the old Canon T70 I got from my father for my 21st birthday back in 1987. The females with cameras in the photo were fellow students on the course.
3. Footwear
Well, I don't really wear shoes at all in summer (from May to October, maybe, in a good year) if I can help it. I'd wear my trainers or walking boots for serious walking, but the rest of the time, indoors and out, this year I'm mostly wearing these:
Monsoon flipflops, made in China with recycled rubber tyres, seagrass and cheap labour, with gold beads sewn onto the thong. Cats like them too - ease of toe-licking access, light and easily subdued when fought with under the bed, and offering two alternative textured surfaces for scritching purposes. So far they seem fairly cat-proof, but give it another month or so...
4. Holidays
Well, I'm on holiday at home right now, or at any rate not working, since I got sacked from my job at the beginning of June under my former employer's "Frequent Sickness Absence Capability Fuck You Too Procedures". (Sympathy not required here; in most ways that matter, I've never been so glad to get the hell out of anywhere.) Apart from this, I can't afford to go away anywhere off my own bat and can't at the moment foresee a future time when I'll have acquired the necessary dosh, but I'm fine with that for now. If I could've afforded a holiday this year, I wanted to go to either Madeira or Santorini, or possibly, as cheaper options and since I've never been to any of these places, one of the Canary Islands or Cadiz, Seville or the Costa de la Luz in Spain. In terms of destinations, I've definitely got a thing for islands and I love wandering around all day long in heat and sunshine, but apart from that I'm easy to please and don't really give a flying fuck about accommodation, food, drink, swimming pools, shops or any of the typical resort shit.
Daydreams aside, I'll take whatever I can get, and I did go away with my parents at their expense for a week in Argyll in May, and despite my role as assistant father-picker-upper and my mother being a raving madwoman much of the time, I enjoyed it. We stayed in a cottage in a remote, quiet valley near Loch Ederline; I know the general area well from childhood caravan holidays in Knapdale, lots of prehistoric archaeology and sheep. (I got ticks - only three or four latched on, but I caught plenty more of them walking on me, heading for the tastier bits. I can cope with the Argyll midges, but ugh, I really truly hate the ticks!) I did some walking, took some photos, some of which I'll probably get around to uploading sometime, and generally lazed, though by the end of the week I'll admit I was somewhat relieved to have the excuse of my Saturday photography class to get the bus home by myself a day early instead of travelling back in the car with the parents.
5. My default LJ icon
Hmmm, Johnny Depp wearing eyeliner and rolling his eyes... what's not to like with that? :-D
I made the icon long ago when I was first learning how to do animated gifs in ImageReady. I could possibly do a better technical job now but I doubt I'd like the end result any better. It still always makes me smile and all too often is a pretty good visual representation of the kind of thoughts I'm thinking as I read around livejournal.com. I used screencaps from the film "Don Juan DeMarco"; what you don't see from the icon is that Johnny is dressed as a hareem girl... That's a great, strange, sweet, funny, feelgood movie with an excellent cast - Marlon Brando, Faye Dunaway and Johnny in many weird and wonderful get-ups. I totally recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it. Lots and lots of eye-candy. I can't resist:
Finally, Lenine2, I hope your horse-trodden foot isn't too badly squished. I've long experience of taping up my sister's fingers and toes after horse-wrangling injuries, but I'm not too sure what can be done for a whole foot...