🍁 Kat 🍁

She has some tough competition this year. (I'm looking at you, 602 and 901.) She's chonky, but she's not quite THAT humongously, ginormously chonktastic...yet.

She doesn't scamper up a nanny tree quite as easily as when she was a coy (or when she was a slightly less stuffed yearling).

She has ridiculously long legs now that her winter coat is pretty much gone. She's entering that gangly teenager phase, and it's adorable.

I admire your resolve. I'd be heading for the lovely-smelling Lodge food myself. LOL

They are a handful. You just know they're going to be little terrors as they get older.

Nice picture.

The stress and trauma (on cub, mom, and sibling) of the cub being trapped and sedated to have a couple of quills pulled out would be so much worse than just letting the quills work themselves out.

I'd say little 171jr came away pretty good from that encounter with only two quills and in an area where they won't impede its ability to move or climb. Might make nursing a bit uncomfortable, but the quills will probably work themselves out pretty quickly. And a good lesson will have been learned.

And that butt scar she's now sporting, so you can tell her from either end. LOL

That's going to take time to get used to. (She will always be Bean to me.)

Very cool. Wish I had some spare $$ lying around.

Yup, that's what I was thinking. Idiocracy.

Lovely to see BC top the lists. Toxicity, housing prices, cost of living...so much goodness. ;-)

I'm disappointed in, but not surprised by, a lot of the Lower Mainland, stuck as I am within the thick of the blue on the outer reaches. But still happy with the overall results.

There are other Scottish Gaelic resources around that might work better for you to start out with.
speakgaelic.scot
learngaelic.net

(I took some Gaelic courses with my father when I was a teen, but I've long forgotten most of it. I should probably look into relearning it myself. 😄)

I started playing around with Duolingo a few weeks ago. It most definitely isn't effective on its own, but it makes a good supplement to practice/test skills you're gaining elsewhere.

Jesus Murphy. I just can't.

That is cool. I didn't know that muskox lived that far north. I knew there were wolves and other animals, but just never imagined muskox for some reason.

This song tickles my ADHD brain, and I've used a really great (but no longer available) remix to help me focus more often than I care to think.

Closeup view of a senior brown tabby cat's face as he stares into the distance.

As a cat tax and feed-cleansing for anyone who needs it, I offer the following picture of my landlord, Benji, relaxing on the deck on a lovely sunny Lower Mainland day.

Terrible as it is, I haven't bothered voting in an election in years. I made sure I was registered for this one -- I am not willing to sit back and see what happened in the US replicate itself up here.

FamilySearch.org Discover your family history. Explore the world’s largest collection of free family trees, genealogy records and resources.

I use FamilySearch.org at times, along with Ancestry, MyHeritage, and other online resources (free and non-free). (I remember the old days of poring through microfiche and microfilms at the archives. Research was so cumbersome pre-Internet, but the breakthroughs were more exciting as a result.)

FamilySearch.org Discover your family history. Explore the world’s largest collection of free family trees, genealogy records and resources.

I have. Shortly after my mother (and her two remaining siblings) died in 2010, I had unexpected breakthroughs on Ancestry that opened things up. Still dead ends and new mysteries, but that's the fun of genealogy. 😀

I want to see all the subadult/mama gangs take over the falls from the old boys. 😄 Just for a season, then they can all emancipate and get on with things.

Or it will be wild with the even fluffier, decidedly-not-independent girl gang still together. ;-)

I love it when an unexpected snippet of info breaks through a wall like that. My dad did a great job with his side of the family, but my mom's side was much harder because my maternal grandmother died when her kids were young, and no adult cared to remember much about her.

Snapshot of Google image search results for "imac cat bed".

You say that like people weren't/aren't making cat beds out of old hollowed-out iMacs. Your first thought was valid.

I was just thinking that. Mind you, he prefers AI-generated versions of himself so reality is a disappointment to him.

I'm not sure Canadians need a travel advisory, though I get your point. The Canadians I know and see online were already boycotting travel to the US and would be even if there was no travel advisory.