Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Meet Ben and Ivy

This is Ben. He's the younger of our two cats, and he's all energy. He'll make friends with anyone, and he's so aggressive with his affection that he's been known more than once to bite me and Taz on the hand or chin if we're ignoring him or if we stop petting him before he's had enough. Why write about cats in a blog about knitting and reading? Because, as anyone with cats will tell you, they are an essential part of any knitting project. His hairs get in all my knitted projects, and he plays with the yarn too, though he doesn't seem to share Ivy's taste for needles. Ben also seems to appreciate good literature because whenever I'm reading something especially engrossing, he decides he needs to give the corners of the book a few good strong nudges so that I drop it and lose my place. So you'll have to understand if it takes me a while to get through a good book and comment on it here.

And here we have Ivy, our little calico manx cat, a year older than Ben. She's sweet, but a little shy around new people. When she's feeling especially affectionate, she likes to lick my fingers or my ankles. Ivy helps me with my knitting by chewing on the ends of my bamboo needles and batting at any loose bits of yarn she can see. As you can tell, she already has a penchant for socks (especially when they're full of catnip, like the one in the picture) And of course there are all the little bits of her hair that inevitably find their way into any finished object, even after washing and blocking. Heaven help the first violently allergic person I knit something for!

But all that said, my life would simply have no lustre if they were not in it. They greet me at the door, they sleep on my face, and they fill our house with hair. They refuse to let me take myself (or my knitting projects) too seriously, and they always know when I need a good play session, or when I just need a little warmth and softness.

Edit: At the gentle urging of Taz, I removed the strange picture of Ben sticking out his oh-so-long tongue, and instead put in this sweet picture of him squinting. If you really really want to see the funny tongue picture, it's in this album along with a lot of other cute ones of both of them.

6 comments:

Zarzuela said...

Your kitties are adorable! And amen to everything you said, what would we do without them?! :)

Jessica
http://zarzuela.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

Hey, good to see you joining the bloggers. Let's see some of those finished knitting projects!
I hope to see you at Sn'B meeting soon.
Trina

Deenz said...

Holy crap - that is the longest cat tongue ever! LOL...very cute, though!

Maneesh said...

our cats are awesome!!!

Anonymous said...

HI!
Do you have two cats now?! I didn't know that!
Nice to meet you Ben-chan!

And your pictures are so nice!

Sami said...

Ahem, Ben (a.k.a the tongue) is the Gene Simmons of cats. That picture is nearly kitty porn. Disturbingly funny.