You Capture: Animals

One of my daily blog reads is I Should Be Folding Laundry, written by Northwest Indiana resident Beth Fletcher. Beth is a gifted photographer, and she hosts a weekly photography challenge called You Capture. There is a weekly subject matter assigned for your photos, and then each Thursday Beth posts her weekly photos and links back to yours.

I have never participated in the You Capture challenge, because ... well, I don't know why. But this week the theme is "Animals," and you all know I have a soft spot in my heart for cats, especially a certain fat, white cat:

Okay, so she's a little bit orange, too. When I got her, a mere six-month-old kitten with greasy fur and a little bit of her own poop stuck to her leg (yeah), I asked Bill what I should name her. I told him she was orange and white, and he said, "How about Leia?" because orange and white are the two colors Princess Leia wears. Now, I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, but I liked the idea of naming a cat after a princess. Because all cats think they are princesses.

And so, Leia got her name. As I said, she was a mere kitten when I got her. Within the next six months, perhaps due to the stress of her mom marrying a new father for her (Bill) and having to ride in a car from Los Angeles to Chicago, Leia ballooned into a much larger cat. Shoot, our whole family got a little fatter when we moved to the Midwest. Here is what Leia looks like today:
\This is one of Leia's favorite positions to sleep in. She also enjoys sleeping in a more standard curled-up position, sleeping on her stomach, sleeping on newspapers, sleeping on beds, sleeping on the couch, sleeping on people's pillows, sleeping on the chair you want to sit on, etc. See, like most cats, sleeping is Leia's main pastime. I seriously don't get it when, at the end of the day, that cat is curled up on the couch, dead to the world, like she has had the world's longest, hardest day of ... sleeping.

But she doesn't sleep all the time! Sometimes she eats! Or meows incessantly because her food dish isn't filled to the brim, and then when you finally give in and fill it, she doesn't even eat any, she just walks away, relieved that she can check off "meow for food" from her to-do list.

She doesn't like to play with any commercialized cat toy. Instead, her favorite toys are: (1) jigsaw puzzle pieces, and (2) those gel clings you put on your windows to decorate for holidays. It has gotten to the point where I decorate my windows with gel clings for every holiday, just to have the pleasure of waking up in the morning and seeing which gel clings have been felled overnight.

But on a more serious note, she is a sweet, sympathetic ear to listen to you. (Lack of comprehension of human speech is an asset when your owner is blubbering about her petty problems.) Her fur has absorbed my tears on more than one occasion. (This sort of sympathy is very selfless on the part of a cat, because you know how they hate to get wet.) She's the sweetest, least complicated member of our family, and I love her for that.


A few more shots:

This is a photo I took of her with the retro camera app on my phone:


And this is the cake Nathan and I made for her recently on her (estimated) birthday:


And here is a pathetic camera phone shot I just tried to take of her, demonstrating how cats are hard to photograph because as soon as they see you coming, they get all squirmy and cat-like and want you to use those gifted photographer's hands to pet them:


I love my little Leia-Loo! And please adopt pets from shelters!