Signs of October

After yesterday's stoned tree (thanks, Richard!), I went with something a little less pharmaceutical today.

Basically, I learned how the Hue-Saturation feature works. It lets you change everything that is one color (or close to that color) to a different hue/saturation/lightness. Definitely helpful if you're aiming for an autumn feel.

For my test image, I started with this pile of leaves that I photographed a while back:

With the help of the clone tool, I made the shape more pumpkin-like. I added some lines to help with the illusion, and then went overboard with Hue-Saturation to produce this:

Maybe I shouldn't have made the stem orange. Whatever. It makes me happy.

Foster Kitten Updates

Sir Humphrey Grumpybutt actually put up with the debridement of his cornea better than I thought he would. We're probably not going to be friends any time soon, though.

The babies with the feral mom seem to have stopped vomiting (whew!). One had diarrhea, and a different one lost a bit more weight, but they seem active. Fingers crossed they're on an upswing.

The office kittens got dewormed and vaccinated today, so they're sleeping deeply now. It's weird — I can walk in and out of my office without needing to foil escape attempts. That will only last another couple hours.

Other Stuff

Just remembered I have a newsletter to put together before Saturday. Oops. I should get on that.

Beware the Trees!

I was aiming for spooky this time, but shot past the mark to land squarely on unintentionally hilarious. Feel free to laugh with me!

Foster Kitten Updates

Spent a couple hours at the shelter today for vet appointments. Some/all of the five remaining babies have been vomiting milk. They tested negative for parvo, so for now I'll just be giving them fluids to keep them hydrated.

One of my other fosters, Sir Humphrey Grumpybutt, has a corneal ulcer due to an upper respiratory infection. Now I'm supposed to numb his eye and then debride it — basically rub it with a dry, sterile cotton swab — twice a day. I'm sure this will be super easy without anyone to help hold the kitten...

A Little Fun

It's day 13 of Horrordailies, and this is officially a new record for my participation in the event.

Today, I followed this simple tutorial to create a ghost because it was an excuse to use the paths tool. GIMP has channels and paths and I've never used them — I should probably investigate those a little more, because they could be useful.

I had some weirdness happen around the head that created unerasable pixels — still not sure what I did wrong (though I suspect I ran into a GIMP bug), so I copied all the visible layers into a new layer and edited that.

Foster Kitten Updates

I think all is going well — the babies all gained weight overnight. The feral mom acts like she'd be happy to ditch her kids completely, but there's not enough space in the crate for that.

Herbie Lovebug got kinda upset when it rained. Not sure what that was about, but he calmed down when I closed the window.

Other Stuff

Dragon Fortune comes out tomorrow! I finally loaded the paperback today, and I sent a free download link to the people who were reading it on Kindle Vella when the platform went away before I'd finished the story. I really hope they enjoy the ending after waiting for so long.

Now I just need to finish that AITA post for my Patreon members and I'll be mostly caught up.

I did a 30-minute run/walk this morning and didn't die. I'll have to be content with that. I wish I lived someplace with some hills. Literally the only elevation change within two miles is the freeway overpass. Hiking up a hill sounds like a more fun way to get some exercise.

Your Guess Is as Good as Mine

It's day 12 of Horrordailies! Do I know what is going on in this image? No, I do not. But it's scary if you're scared of heights or green lights glowing in the misty darkness. So...

The kitten picture and the lichen-covered stick he is on are both my pictures. Everything else is drawn or otherwise created in GIMP.

Foster Kitten Updates

Everything was very calm today, which was nice. My friend Elisabeth came over to socialize kittens, her superpower. Garage kittens Spanner and Sabot were quickly won over with Churu. Bagheeri and Bailey Potato paused in playing to come over to say hello. Humphrey Grumpybutt ate some Churu for her. Harrison Ford the Explorer did not, but there's always next time. Herbie Lovebug made air biscuits when she held him, which is... 

[brief intermission for me to catch the four kittens who escaped the office while my attention was elsewhere]

Okay, where was I? Oh, yes, Herbie was his usual adorable self. We decided mom and the kittens will be named after snacks, but didn't get more specific. The kittens were on the bed between us and they spent all their energy attempting to make suicidal leaps off the edge. No sense of self-preservation whatsoever.

Other Stuff

I realized this morning that I was out of paper plates to feed kittens on (which reduces cross-contamination and also means that I don't have to constantly wash dishes). I find Costco exhausting and generally avoid it until I run out of Diet Coke, but this was an emergency. So I went and found out that the onion soup is back! (It's a seasonal item.)

Light and Shadows

It's day 11 of Horrordailies, and while I've pretty much given up on the horror, I'm still here for the daily!

It turns out I like playing with purple, so I indulged myself for another day. This time I took inspiration from an image from The Art of Evelyne Schulz (the search was random, but I really like her art). The image in question has a person silhouetted by a night sky, with a bunch of little fantasy additions.

I'm not that skilled or patient, and 99.9% of my images are of cats, so my results bear no resemblance to the original. I still like mine, though, and I did get that haloed silhouette effect I was aiming for.

I really need to get my drawing tablet out and figure out why it stopped working with my computer. That's a goal for another day.

Foster Kitten Updates

It turns out I was not being paranoid about that one kitten. He crashed yesterday evening and was gone less than two hours later. This part of fostering sucks and I'm exhausted today from taking him to the emergency vet and also worrying about the remaining kittens. They seem fine at the moment, but everything can change so rapidly that I will remain worried until they grow up and leave for adoption.

In happier news, the kittens I found in my garage have finished their two-week quarantine, so Spanner and Sabot are now running around in my office playing with Bagheeri and Bailey Potato and the whole area is chaos.

Other Stuff

I need to replace the flapper on one toilet and I thought this would be simple, but the company no longer makes that part, and the replacement for that discontinued part has been discontinued, and the replacement for the replacement for the part has been discontinued and...

I think I've figured out what info I need to buy the correct thing, but this feels far more complicated than it needs to be. I'm really not cut out for home ownership.

Purple Skies

It's day 10 of Horrordailies! Today's picture is just random stuff I put together. It has a bat; ergo, it's spooktacular.

Gaussian blur was my friend.

Foster Kitten Updates, or Why I Am So Tired Today

Warning: The sarcastic "Fostering is so glamorous!" applies here.

The semi-feral mom has been eating a ton of food, but her poop has been somewhat unformed. And late last night when I was scooping, I found this long tapeworm in the mess. So then (of course) I mentioned this to my fellow foster-parent Jennifer, and she wanted a picture. (I love that my friends are the type that hear stuff like this and immediately demand pictures.)

This is what gloves are for.

Anyhow, I found the tapeworm, rinsed it off, and then photographed it next to a tape measure. It was over seven inches! Disgusting, yet fascinating!

Today I mixed anti-parasitics that treat tapeworms into mom cat's food and she ate it, so hopefully there will be no new gross surprises.

Mom has occasionally been hissing and swatting at the babies, and I'm not sure if it's because they are nursing with teeth or if she's got mastitis. There's really no way for me to safely get close enough to check. One baby hasn't gained weight, so I'm keeping a close eye on their weights. Hopefully I'm being paranoid, but I don't think I am. 

Things I've Read Recently

I finished listening to Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann. It's a murder mystery about a herd of Irish sheep, translated from the German. It's delightfully weird, but I didn't like the ending. Or, put another way, it was a very German ending, and I can say that as someone who has a minor in German literature.

Endings are a theme here — I also finished A Feast of Phantoms (Book one of Lingua Magika) by Kat Ross and I really enjoyed it. The genre is sort of steampunk fantasy western? There are different grades of demon-like creatures that can be harnessed to do things. Each type is commanded in a different language, so the powerful people are the ones who can speak multiple languages. My only real complaints are

1)  One character I thought was somewhere in the 40-60 year-old range is revealed to be 24 years old at the end — I think he's being set up as a possible love interest, so that threw me off. I was picking up mentor/father-figure vibes. (The age confusion could be lazy reading on my part, but I think I just interpreted vague clues differently than I was meant to.) 

2) The book just sort of ends. I guess it wraps up some things, but the main quest isn't resolved. Far be it from me to tell other people how to structure books, but it felt unfinished. Then again... all three books in the series are published and they're in Kobo Plus, so I can treat this as the first third of the story.

I already have the next book loaded on my ereader.

Shane Peers Through from the Other Side

It's day 9 of Horrordailies, though you wouldn't know it by looking at what I'm posting. You could be forgiven for asking what this has to do with horror or Halloween. It's purple! And it has a cat! That's good enough, right?

The window grate is from my own photo. I thought it would be a breeze to remove from the background, but I was smoking the crack, as they say. I ended up finding the ivy brush to fix my slapdash isolation from the background. Whatever works is my motto.

I could probably do a better job with the window by adding some shadows, but I have a critique meeting in an hour and I have cats to feed. Speaking of which...

Foster Kitten Updates

A bunch of the hoarder-case kittens have bad diseases, so I took in a semi-feral mom and her kittens that didn't come from that area so they would be less likely to contract something horrible. The kittens are about three weeks old and mom is doing a great job with them, so my role is just to make sure the kittens continue to gain weight and also handle them enough that they're used to people.

When the kittens are weaned, mom will be spayed and returned to the area where she was found. The kittens will be adopted through the shelter.

So... yeah, I currently have 14 foster cats/kittens. That's probably frightening enough to count as horror.