The long and short of it

I just noticed that my posts tend to be as long.

I don’t know why. Maybe that’s my “literary style”; I find it easier to be superfluous than concise.

***

By the way, I have new cat. He’s a gray tabby, the kind with lighter-hued stripes. He’s very small but is quite terrible – he’s so inquisitive (kittens are supposed to be like that) that he keeps on finding ways to raid the kitchen top. We found our adopted kitten in a wet market nearby. Apparently this kitten was the best of his class – the market people have a policy of exterminating or deporting stray cats in the area.

Currently we have a 3-year old dog named Hershey and a 2-year old cat named Ming. All of them live in the house and the cat never roams outside the house. I’m the official pet name-giver at home (one of the few responsibilities I have taken wholeheartedly). My job is getting ever harder as I run out of names. We have a habit of giving our pets monosyllabic names so they wouldn’t have a hard time memorizing their names (we still cling on to the irrational myth that animals recognize their names). Particularly cats, we just give them generic and local-sounding names like Muning, Miong, Meow, Maliit and Puti. Hershey is the only exception – we decided to name her after our old dog. Our Old Hershey was really old when she died (she was older than me by a year and died two days after my 14th birthday – go figure). We want the Young Hershey to live as long.

I christened our new kitten Mao. Long live our new Chaircat!

***

By playing with my mother’s cellphone camera, I have developed a way to keep my pets still so I can take more photogenic (or should I say “controlled”) shots of them. The problem I often encounter with animals is that they, like 7-year olds in a birthday party, keep still when you want them to move and they move when you want them to keep still. I wonder if I can use this to a more ambitious degree – like taking a formal-looking family picture with all of them (dog and cats) sitting still and looking at the camera.