Christine feeding two of her Riverfront cats – Leroy and Lion King

For many of you that know me, you know that Christine Michaels of Riverfront Cats, Miami, is a dear friend of mine. She is known in the cat blogosphere for being the caretaker of her twenty or so outdoor community cats in the Riverfront area as well as being the original source that exposed the inhumane trapping of the outdoor cats on the Loews Universal Resort properties in Orlando that spearheaded a nationwide movement to save them. Read more

To see full beauty of image, click to enlarge.

By now, we all know that for Zee, his motto would be “Make Love, Not War.” Zee is the epitome of a sweet, docile, sensitive, loving, caring, affectionate, and giving cat who doesn’t have a mean bone in his big furry body. Quite the opposite. He spooks at the drop of a pin and will quickly allow Zoey to growl the commands in the house. Comfort is the name of his game and he is everyone’s happy-go-lucky best friend.

Once in a blue moon, however, we will see the feral side of Zee emerge and Dan was able to capture this rare moment on camera that you see in the above photo. This wild look was courtesy of a lizard who had not caught on yet that it was about to be a tasty kitty snack… But don’t fret lizard lovers. Once the conquest had begun and Zee reigned victorious with his wiggly prey, Dan gently pried it out of his mouth, complimented Zee on being such a mighty hunter and Zee was back to his care-free and blissfully domestic self!

Blessedly, we are getting closer to the deadline for Pettie voting (July 31st)!! If you would care to vote for us for “Best Designed Blog” or “Best Blog Post” for our interview with Steve Dale on pedigree cat breeding, please click this link. As always, thank you for your support!

The human keeps mentioning something about a “vacation,” but to us cats, it’s just another day in paradise…. Actually, that’s not true at all. The above photo is nothing but a made up dream sequence, because there has NEVER been a day the human has left us outside unsupervised. She gets really uptight and edgy – even with the fenced in yard, we are watched like hawks by her and the male human when they let us outside on occasion. I suppose the fact that some of us can get a bit overly adventurous might have something to do with it. They always claim they wish we would just settle down and relax and then they would let us out more, but hey, we’re cats and that’s just not how our DNA rolls… Take a look at what really happens! Read more

In order for me to look so effortlessly ready for the camera, it takes at the very least, some hot rollers to the hair, a modest amount of makeup, some leopard cat ears, and a really talented fiance to take the picture. For cats, especially the ever charming and wide eyed, Peanut and Mia, it is a mere matter of standing atop a pedestal to look completely stunning so that they may pay tribute to this quote by the  late Lilian Jackson Braun.

The thing is, when Dan took this photo, he did not artfully place the cats on the pedestal, posed in perfect composition with the trailing ivy background. No, all he did was see them together, grab the camera, keep his fingers crossed they hadn’t jumped down yet, and snap the shot. If it were me, he would still be telling me to “move a bit to the left.”  Or is it, move to the right? Oh never mind, now the sun has moved and the lighting is terrible…

Lilian Jackson Braun (June 20, 1913 – June 4, 2011) was an American writer, well known for her light-hearted series of “The Cat Who…” mystery novels. The “Cat Who” books center around the life of former newspaper reporter, James Qwilleran, and his two Siamese cats, KoKo and Yum Yum, in the fictitious small town of Pickax located in Moose County “400 miles north of everywhere.” Although never formally stated in her books, the towns, counties and lifestyles described in the series are generally accepted to be modeled after Bad Axe, Michigan, where Braun resided with her husband until the mid-1980s. (Wikipedia)

Please take a moment to vote for Zee & Zoey in the DogTime Pettie Awards – we are nominated for “Best Designed Blog” and “Best Blog Post” for our interview with Steve Dale on pedigree cat breeding. You can vote once a day up to July 31st, and winning blogs will get $1000 donated to the rescue or shelter of their choice! We have picked a local organization called Abandoned Pet Rescue where we got several of our dogs throughout the years.Click here to vote.

My oldest son, Chris, came to visit Dan and I last month and introduced us to the world of “geocaching.” It apparently has been around for years, but since I live in a cat induced bubble, it was new to me. For those of you that also may have no clue what geocaching is, it is an outdoor sporting activity in which the participants use a GPS receiver or mobile device to seek hidden containers of various sizes, called “geocaches” anywhere in the world.

A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a logbook where the geocacher enters the date they found it and signs it with their established code name. Geocaches are currently placed in over 200 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica and the International Space Station. After more than 12 years of activity there are over 5 million geocachers worldwide. Read more