this post shall be entitled: an ode to cats.

i'm a big fan of cats. they've been a part of my life since i was two years old. so let's have a chat about them.

simon - a rather wise tabby cat who, when faced with a tall thin glass containing milk, understood enough physics to dip his paw in, swish it around, bring it out, lick, and repeat. also known as sugarhead because one day i was making myself a nice cold milo and i accidentally dropped a spoon of wet sugary milo mix onto his head, where it hardened and remained for a number of days.

fluffy - the king of the block with a fluffed up tail and fluffed up body and fluffed up head (i named him after these affectionate features) who would climb trees with me as a kid. often said by another family member to not be as intelligent as simon - until said family member had a dream of fluffy at night walking on his back paws saying "you don't know what i get up to at night".

tigger - a kitten who thought she was a dog. suppose this is understandable as we brought her home at the same time as our puppy macgyver.

picasso - elegantly able to chase her tail and foot around in circles to this day. named due to unique colouring and a brushstroke like mark on her nose. would bring me a bird a day for about a week every time i got home from an overseas trip. i understood her heart was in the right place. but i still got dad to clean up the mess.

phoenix - adequately described by my father in a text message whilst cat-sitting "dad slept like a lamb. mum was attacked all night by a marauding lioness." phoenix loves to chase ping pong balls up and down the hall, tries to follow us on every walk we go on, and is terribly addicted to jellymeat. her favourite flavours are jellified yuck, stinklicious lamb, gross beef (correctly labelled as: duck, lamb and roast beef.

phoenix has another skill. she likes to fly in her spare time.


thanks meg for the pic.

for those of you who noticed, i've rediscovered my blog. and in doing so, had a bit of a virtual walk down memory lane. mostly it caused me to laugh out loud. which made me ponder writing more regularly. so that i can have more walks and laughs down the virtual memory lane in the future.

this reminds me about what my sister called a "mindtrap" back in the 80s. a mindtrap quite simply is when you think about doing something and then realise you are thinking about doing something, knowing that when you actually do that something, then you will remember back to thinking about doing it and thinking about thinking about doing it. and this causes a mindtrap. pretty ingenious. i think the matrix copied our idea later.

anyway, so me thinking about writing my blog purely for the purpose of being able to read it in the future and think back to this moment of thinking about writing it is a mindtrap. but a good one, because now when i re-read this blog in ten years i will laugh and remember, possibly quite vividly, writing this anecdote.

phew. new paragraph required to delete mindtrap traps.

i pondered starting up a new one. a new blog i mean. not mindtrap. you know. mentioning eric. and caleb. and phoenix the cat. in the title. but then i decided they could just join me on my one. especially because i'm writing it anyway. as a slight aside - do i use full stops too much? maybe i should start thinking about alternative methods of punctuation. not sure. i like the full stop.

so. i started this in 2003 when i was a mere 22 year old heading to europe to start my masters. i guess it was a travel blog back then. to keep folk back home updated on my life. remember this was a time long before facebook. and now? well i don't know what it will become. time will tell. things i do know:

(a) i will be writing it
(b) i will be reading it
(c) other people might read it

let's see what happens eh?