Business Ideas that Are Causing Damage to Businesses

I'm going to take us on a strange topic today that is completely different than all of my blogs to date.  As I spend time working as a retail manager, I find that there are a lot of business practices that aren't really helping businesses at all.  I'm not here to talk about my business or the things that they do, because I would be out of a job that I need.  What I'm here to talk about today are the business ideas that keep cropping up around the United States that need to go away.  Many of these businesses are trying to fill a need.  What they're doing instead are creating havoc and theft.  Let me take a step back and give a few examples of what kinds of businesses I'm referring to, as they are causing far more theft and crime than they probably ever meant.

• The first of these businesses I want to talk about are scrap yards.  I am sure everyone has seen these huge plots of land filled with various scrap metals and cars.  These yards have been around for ages and really haven't caused all that much trouble in the past.  Most of the time scrappers simply go around picking up cars, appliances and other scrap pieces of metal from the curb of a household that doesn't want it anymore, and they take it to sell at these scrap yards.  Most of the time they'd get a hundred dollars for the amount in a pick-up truck or some other amount depending on what kinds of metals that they have brought in.  This worked pretty good because home owners who couldn't afford to pay to have their oversize garbage taken away found it gone the next morning.  I get rid of lots of things that I know I can't sell but someone else can use and I can't afford to drive it somewhere to donate it.

• The second business is very similar to the scrap yards, as it deals with selling electronics or gold or some other items for cash.  Mind you, pawn shops have been around for a long time.  You take in small items, and they give you a bit of cash for it, and you can either leave it behind forever or come back to get it when you have the money to pay the loan back.  Simple enough.  But now there are places that buy more specific things like gold, electronics, phones, etc.  These places will usually recycle the items much like at a scrap yard and your items are gone forever.

• The third business has to do with gift cards.  In the past gift certificates were non-transferable pieces of paper that one could buy from a business if they didn't know what to get someone from that store.  The person could bring it in and use it as cash to buy something they actually wanted.  Certificates changed to gift cards when the technology for card swiping machines were included in nearly every store as the credit card companies expanded.  Around the 1990s everyone could get credit cards and so businesses started selling gift cards, cash cards, phone cards, you name it.  But what if someone bought you a card for a business you didn't like?  Suddenly there were websites popping up to exchange the cards.  Then, more recently, there are kiosks that could exchange cards for cash.  The company would take a small profit for the card, but you got money instead of a card you couldn't use.  More recently, CoinStar is starting to exchange these cards as well, making it less of a local program to a wide-spread problem.  (I say problem as you'll soon find out).

All of these companies and businesses fill a need in our consumerist driven society.  How to get rid of something you don't need to get something you do need - money.  That's all fine and dandy.  I, like everyone else, needs money to get by.  These ideas on paper probably look really good and for many people, they use these businesses rarely and use them honestly.

However, there's a catch.  What if these offerings are not used honestly?  What if people start selling other's items to get money for themselves?

Sure, you see pawnshops in every lower class area, every 'ghetto' area, everywhere that people start finding they're just scratching by.  I won't even talk about loans and check advance places or gambling places because they all have their own problems and you'll see them everywhere as well.  Most of the time these places move into a bad neighborhood, but as things change they get forced out by a changing economy and eventually the run down neighborhood gets a face lift and the pawn shop moves away.

But what if the area doesn't make a comeback?  What if things make a turn for the worse when something like the Great Recession of 2008 happens?  There's a huge bankruptcy crises, mortgages collapse because banks let people over-borrow, they go into dept because of credit cards, and large businesses that never had trouble staying afloat are suddenly buried.

Suddenly homeowners are forced to leave their homes in foreclosure.  The honest ones will leave their houses quickly but fairly intact.  The others, instead of being able to crawl out of the debt by moving on, take every scratch of appliance, every wire, everything that isn't nailed down (and even some that are) and run to the nearest scrap yard to sell it.  That doesn't get them out of debt, it merely helps them survive.  They run out of things to sell and so they start taking things to sell.  They steal from friends and family, they steal from empty houses on the street and take pool pumps and air conditioning units.  They take copper wires and clear out entire homes of everything that could bring them a bit of spare change.  Suddenly these people allow themselves to do corrupt things in order to just get by.

I digress... the reason for this blog is to point out that these ideas that should be helping honest people are merely helping thieves.  Thieves will steal purses and backpacks to steal phones and laptops.  They don't use these items because they need them, they steal them to sell.  They break into cars and into homes to steal and pawn TVs and computer equipment.  The police can't track them down or won't unless the items are worth just so much, and if they find out the owner has insurance, then they won't bother at all.  The items will just get replaced.  That, in turn, makes the insurance fees go up and it causes those people who were stealing to go around without insurance because they can't afford it any more.

Gift card kiosks are the worst of these businesses in the last few years.  It's stores that get hurt because they're trying to be nice to the honest people.  Here's how it works:  Thief knows that store will take back merchandise without a receipt and give them a gift card in return.  So they go in and steal stuff.  Maybe they'll have a crew that steals and a crew that 'returns' the items.  The person who 'returns' these items takes the gift card they get and takes it to the kiosk.  They get free money.  It might be $20, but for some of these people it's enough to buy a meal and some drugs.  Most of them are usually out for the drugs since food stamps pay for the food.  So the stores are out the money, but if they refuse to do the return, they're out the items.  If they take back the stolen items, the store shows an extra in their stock and when they have inventory they'll come up short which takes a hit on their theft shrinkage.  That means they'll get hit twice, first with the theft of money, and then with the supposed theft of items in inventory.

But thieves don't stop there.  Eventually the thieves realize that the store isn't cooperating and if they find out that it's too easy to steal things, they'll go to great lengths to get tons of things out the front door.  I've seen huge boxes and carts full of things leaving the door.  I don't work in a retail establishment that sells food or items of great value, nothing that these people would need to live.  So what are they doing with these items?  Pawning most likely, some of it.  Flea markets maybe.  Selling it to other businesses that buy items for money, I'm sure.  Whatever big score they can get to buy them a bag of drugs or some money to feed their kids.

And what is stopping these thieves?  These businesses say they track these people.  They say they only let people get just so much money a day...  But how do they stop them if they use fake IDs?  Many of these people have drivers licences as well as just IDs... And I'm not sure why the government is allowing this, but I won't get into that.  What I'm saying, however, is that there's nothing stopping these people from getting multiple "IDs" with various addresses and they can get around all of the rules in place to stop them from fraud.


What I hope though, is that these businesses would take a much better look at how people are going to use their product.  Will this cell phone sell-back service cause theft from honest people?  How can this business be abused?  If every business would take a step back before promoting their product and ask, "can this go wrong?"  I think perhaps that thieves would have to think twice in order to make a profit.  Businesses are losing money because they aren't planning ahead.  Sure, if everyone was honest, putting that gift card kiosk in the store would be great.  You would make a profit and customers could have the convenience of buying a card for a gift.  However, what about those people buying gift cards with stolen credit cards?

How about we all just start looking at the world with a bit more suspicion.  I like to be optimistic when the economy is starting to bounce back after our recession, but there are too many out there who have gotten used to this dishonest system.  They take advantage because the system has taken advantage of them.  Maybe someday these people will all get jobs and be productive members of the society again, perhaps the government will give them a reason to, but more likely these people will keep doing what they are doing, teach their kids to do the same, and if we don't stop them from doing these things, it will continue to get worse and worse.

So, I plead with new business owners and these people who are thinking about starting up the 'next great thing' - ask yourself, "How can this be abused?"  Don't put it into practice if only a few honest people will actually be able to take advantage of this and a few hundred thieves are using it daily.  Take a good hard look at what protections you have in place.  Then, not only will your business thrive because thieves aren't taking advantage of you, but the honest person will also trust you to know that you're taking care of them too.

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EDIT ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS:  It was brought to my attention that of course not all homeowners forced to allow their homes go into foreclosure are thieves and vandals.  Some, like those in the military, may have to move and cannot sell their homes and have to forfeit the home they bought.  There are others, as well who just have financial crises and family problems, job lose, etc.  In this article, I'm talking only about those people who, instead of finding ways to make ends meet honestly, turn to making a quick buck as an answer.  There may be some people who turn to this life of crime or vandalism once and then find their way out again without letting anything get on their permanent records.  However, there are still so many more out there who allow themselves to be swept up with the lie that "it's okay because everyone is doing it" or "just one more time and I'll quit this drug and won't need the money anymore."

I sincerely believe that anyone, anyone can go through a hard time in their lives due to unforeseen circumstances.  A job can be taken out from under them, a loved one can die, a tornado or flood can take out a house where insurance won't cover it...  Good people (and I believe everyone can be good, but it's much harder to do sometimes than to be bad) will try to crawl out of their situation even if that means taking a part-time job that pays squat, or they'll give up and start over again somewhere new.  It might be hard, but there's always an honest way out, so long as one is willing to put everything they have into it.  The problem exists in the 'easy dollar' or trying to find some way out that usually results in a temporary solution that tends to hurt not only the person doing it, but those around them as well.  And perhaps if businesses paid their employees enough to live, they wouldn't have so many employees stealing from them and adding to a whole set of other problems!  But...that is for another day.

Followup: The Demise of Anime Conventions

If you have not read my previous blog on this topic, please skip this entry and go to "The Demise of Anime Conventions".  I got a bunch of interesting feedback and I plan to do a short followup with some questions that arose after publishing.

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In my blog entry, "The Demise of Anime Conventions" I pointed out a distinct shift away from "anime-only" conventions and towards more of a return to the sci-fi/comic book convention that originally spawned these genre specific conventions.  Some people agreed with me whole-heartedly while others disagreed with me completely.  This made me realize that I have been looking at anime conventions from a distinctly East Coast point of view, and more likely a Mid-East/North-East point of view since I've never been further than Chicago in my convention wanderings.  That doesn't mean that everyone West of Chicago disagreed with me as a few of them also agreed that things were making a distinct shift, but I did start to wonder about location and also about saturation of the market.

Let me start with talking briefly here about West Coast conventions.  Now, really, I don't have anything but my own personal perceptions of these West coast conventions as I've never been to one.  From what I can see online, however, most of them are quite large and run by possibly, larger corporations.  I could be completely wrong, there may be dozens of little conventions (and I'm sure there are) all over the West coast, but because of population numbers, I wonder how near to one another these conventions are located.  Simply looking at population, I can only imagine that larger cities tend to host these conventions as most of the time larger cities are where there are more convention spaces and hotels.

That said, if you move to East Coast conventions, we have a whole heck of a lot of them.  They range from fairly large 22K or bigger Otakon, down to some very small 100 people conventions.  Within the range of where I am in Ohio, I could probably drive to a few dozen conventions just within an 8 hour drive.  I usually attend at least 2-5 conventions a year which are within the 3 hour range.  What does that mean to me and those who agreed with me on the demise of conventions?

Perhaps it means that the true demise of anime conventions lies in the demise of smaller conventions.  These conventions range probably less than 2,000 attendees and are forced to cater to a larger group of genres for their attendees or risk losing attendance each year as children/teenagers grow up and move on to other things rather than just anime/manga.

Perhaps though, this genre switch is also taking place in the larger conventions.  The largest conventions that I've attended are Anime Central, Ohayocon, and Otakon.  I've attended Ohayocon since 2003, and Anime Central off and on over the years, and Otakon only once in 2006.  So, if I take Ohayocon for example, it started out in 2003 as perhaps less than 5,000 attendees, their dealer room was about 12-20 vendors who dealt strictly with figures, plushies, manga from Japan, doujinshi from Japan, Funimation, MediaBlasters, and maybe a sword dealer.  Artists in the alley attempted drawing doujinshi, but more often they had tables full of fan art.  I do not remember any cosplayers playing anything but anime or manga characters.  Fast forward to 2014 and there were American comic book stores, card gaming and video gaming, artists and clothing ranging from cosplay to gothic to steampunk.

Now, Ohayocon was always an ANIME convention.  It's expanded into something a bit more, and for it's size it can have anything it wants.  It's a Pop Culture convention, no matter what it may call itself now.  And if you ask the 18-20 sect, they might still say it's an "anime" convention.  However, don't be fooled, because running the anime convention Tsubasacon and sitting in the Ohayocon dealer room advertising for that convention... we had people coming up to us saying "Oh, you're an anime convention?  We don't go to anime conventions."  WAIT..... WHAT?  But YOU'RE AT ONE!

I've seen the same shift in genres at Anime Central a few year's back and at Colossalcon, at Matsuricon, Tekkoshocon, and every single other convention that I've attended in the past few years.

Does that mean it's happening everywhere?  No.  It doesn't.  But...I have a feeling it is happening everywhere.  You can't stop cartoon characters from popping up at anime conventions.  Can't stop people cosplaying various objects and people found in other sci-fi genres.  People go to these events to share in their geekdom and they've realized that if they stand out a bit by wearing something from a different series that isn't Japanese, then they'll get more photos and more interest.

Ah... so there you are again.  Interest.  People are interested in far more things now than just anime.  It was actually a lot easier a few years back to pick up dozens of manga and anime every week and keep your daily dose high.  Heck, I used to drop $100 a week on all of that and it was my life for a few years.  However, it's a lot harder to do that now with only a few companies putting out anime and manga.  Okay... so I take that back, there's a WHOLE LOT of stuff out there on the internet, and if you're reading this then you're probably thinking "well, I watch all of my anime on Crunchyroll or I download it, and I read all of my manga online" - but when you're online, are you only doing that?  Aren't you downloading "Game of Thrones" and watching "Adventure Time" as well?  And when you go to a convention, aren't you hoping to find something to support those genres too?


I'd really love to know if anyone else out there has a different opinion on anime conventions.  Feel free to drop me a line at my email: whatcher@juno.com  if you have a different idea on this.  Or just comment below.  If you go to a convention that is sticking with it's anime roots and not bowing to the American comics or cartoons... I'd love to know.  If you think that there are still 'pure' anime conventions that will outlast this 'death' I've foretold, it would be interesting to look into for me.

Otherwise... I have a feeling I'm still somewhat right about this.

The Demise of Anime Conventions

This is going to be a serious look at the demise of anime conventions.  Over the past twelve years I have seen the rise and fall of anime conventions, and it's at once a sad, and yet inevitable fall of this strange incarnation of fandom conventions.

If you were to Wiki the term "Anime Convention", you'll find a fairly accurate description of this strange beast.  Originating around 1980 or so, anime conventions spawned off the more popular comic book conventions of the age, and those spawned from even earlier science fiction conventions that started around the 1930s.  In that day and age, conventions were a way of drawing authors and fans of the genre together for a day or weekend in order to share their common fascination with science fiction.  At the time, science fiction was mainly found in the format of dime novels and compilation magazines, the occasional radio show or movie, and later in comic books.  Obviously, drawn comics spawned animated comics, called cartoons, which were for a typically younger audience.  As those youngsters grew up, however, they found a need to gather at conventions of their own where they could celebrate all things comic-book related away from the older science fiction group.  Comic conventions were created, which eventually drew in the likes of Japanese comics, called "manga" (mahn-ga, not MAN-ga) and the animated equivalent of "anime" (short for animation).

Right around the early 1980s, anime was starting to creep over to the United States in the form of recorded Beta/VHS tapes, many of which were sent over from people who were stationed in Japan as part of the US Military.  At that time, things of Japan were starting to take on a new level of fascination since WWII was starting to fade from the minds of many Americans and there were these strange cartoons, books, and foodstuffs starting to pop up around Japanese immigrant areas (Little Japan).  People could find sushi and Pocky and these strange adult cartoons that were often of a pornographic nature, but not always of course. ( I'm sure the guys who brought back some of these tapes in the day probably got a real kick out of it while they were stationed in Japan!)

With very few copyright laws surrounding these VHS tapes, the bootleg industry boomed.  Comic book conventions were an excellent way to pick up VHS tapes of these strange Japanese anime shows, and slowly the artwork of manga started to trickle over to be translated by comic book companies in the USA.  By the 1990s, quite a few of the fans of Japanese comics started spawning their own conventions.  These conventions were typically run for an entire weekend, rather than one or two days of the weekend.  Often held in a hotel which could be open 24 hours, they would show anime translated by fans (fansubs) and sell bootleg merchandise that could be anything from figures, posters, wallscrolls, whatever could be imported or bought from shops that imported from Japan or China.  At the time, it didn't really matter where the fans were getting this stuff, so long as they could get their hands on it!

I came into the anime convention circuit rather late in the game.  American comic companies were starting to get copyrights from Japan in order to translate and distribute anime and manga.  Funimation was born after the success of Pioneer (which was a Japanese company with US distribution) and MediaBlasters had the corner on hentai (pornographic anime).  Many of these companies were reacting to the demand and picking up titles that had not yet been copyrighted.  Japan, excited to get their product sold in the USA, started licensing titles to all sorts of up-and-coming companies.  Many of these companies would rise and fall, leaving only a few survivors today, but I'll speak on that later.

About the time I was getting into anime, Cartoon network had followed in the footsteps of SciFi (SyFy now) to play the now English dubbed anime.  Children's programming such as Pokemon, Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura were being chopping and recombined into new shows for American audiences at an alarming rate (note, this was done 10-20 years earlier but it started to gain more popularity since merchandising around these shows were so much more profitable to the 80/90's era children).  Tokyopop had started printing manga in it's original, although translated, form, rather than the left-to-right format most people read.

This whole huge boom of anime, manga, and conventions reached a head right around the year 2000.  A handful of companies were bringing over anime titles to the point there was a new DVD each week, if not more than one title a week.  The anime section at Best Buy in my town grew to encompass 16 feet (maybe even more) of 5 foot tall racks: hundreds of titles, with more coming each week.  Bookstores went from one 4 foot shelf of graphic novels to entire walls of manga, and at one point Borders even started to buy up manga straight from Japan to sell in some of their locations.  Before long there were figures, wallscrolls, T-shirts, posters, bags, stuffed animals and food stuffs and just about every store you walked into.  Something Japanese could be found anywhere from the local grocery store to the shelves of Walmart.  

The true saturation limit of all of this anime and manga hit right between 2002-2006.  For a time there were actual anime/manga stores cropping up in college towns where only normal comic book stores once controlled the territory.  Anime conventions could bring in 2,000 people on their very first weekends, and some of the larger conventions were starting to break out in LosAngeles, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and quite a few other places as well.

But for every good growth period, there comes a downfall.  2008, or the beginning of the "Great Recession" in the USA, suddenly things started to take a downturn.  The Blu-Ray/HD Disc war started, and VHS tapes were no longer being produced.  DVDs were on the decline.  The internet was starting to take over the distribution for anime and manga.  During the height of demand, quite a few fans moved to Japan, learned Japanese, or perhaps made contacts overseas.  Suddenly there were hundreds of fan subtitled anime, hundreds of scanned/translated manga, and conventions were no longer a place to meet friends, because the internet could instantly connect someone with dozens of others who liked the same things as they did.  Japan started realizing that they could make a whole bunch more money if they brought over anime and manga themselves rather than selling the rights off.  And especially after the scandals over the many anime/manga sites that were just distributing fan copies all over the internet reached an all-time high.  Eventually many of them started to bring lawsuits against this illegal distribution and many companies couldn't compete against the rising prices of licensing Japanese titles.

I always kind of mark the downfall of anime conventions with the death of Big Apple con.  I'm not sure what happened there in New York, but for some reason this very large convention died a pretty big death and other smaller conventions started dying off afterward.  Maybe it was because every other anime fan thought that he could 'start a convention of his own' and with very little start up money and no financial backing, went overboard and brought themselves into financial collapse.  It takes a lot of money and time to start up a convention, and even more to keep it running.  I've personally seen two or three 'almost cons' start up and fail either before they even had a single weekend or after that one weekend.  The most successful conventions of course were run by business people who perhaps run two or more conventions around the country.  With proper financial prowess and dozens of contacts in the industry, these conventions will most likely be the last ones standing when all the other conventions fail.

The true demise of anime conventions today is the stigma of being an anime convention.  It might sound strange, but the same thing that used to drive people to an anime convention now drives them away.  "ANIME."  You wouldn't think the title would mean a lot, but anime conventions are starting to slowly be driven back to their original roots.  These conventions must now drop their subtitle.  They must reach into the American comic book interests, the pop culture and the cartoons that drive the geek interest in today's world.  The younger fans drive the money, and if they think they don't like 'anime', then they'll say so.  They won't come to an anime convention unless they think they'll get something from their Marvel universe.  

Anime conventions are now being forced to either allow the cosplayers of American comics to compete, or they find themselves shunned by the fan community.  There has to be Steampunk and Cartoon Network related things, there have to be memes and trading games.  They have to encompass all things "Geek" now just to keep bringing in the attendees.  In essence, these Anime Conventions are becoming Pop Culture Conventions.  

Will some of these conventions die if they continue on with their chosen category of fandom?  Yes.  Why?  Because the fans are no longer fans of just one thing anymore.  That guy over there who likes watching anime also likes Game of Thrones.  That girl who reads manga also likes to watch Dr. Who.  No one likes just one thing when there are so many things to choose from.  Social Media has made staying in touch with others who like our fandom easy.  Conventions merely provide a place to socialize in person.  Many of these also provide a change of pace and scenery.  Conventions are starting to become places to go on a vacation.  They have to have a unique venue, unique guests, and interesting vendors to shop from.  They have to cater to a wide variety of fans, must have a wide variety of programming, and must continuously find new ways to hit these marks each time.

This, of course, is not to say that new fandoms won't spawn from these conventions.  I'm merely stating that anime conventions are no longer the social meeting places they once were.  Anime conventions now spawn off other conventions such as My Little Pony conventions.  Will these last longer than the series?  A few perhaps, but more for collectors rather than fans of the series.  Comic book conventions have survived the growth of anime conventions, and they will most likely out-live them as well.  Many anime conventions will most likely return to their roots or join back with the comic book conventions of the 70's/80's.  Many of them will end when those who run them grow older and wish to deal with families and their futures.  

We will probably never see a time again where anime conventions were once the sprawling places where someone could dress up in their favorite outfit and get surrounded by other fans of the series.  We won't see 'glomping' or dozens of fans sitting around a room watching a 'new' anime because almost everyone has seen it within the week it was released in Japan.  Cosplay won't be limited to just characters coming out of Japan.  Video game rooms won't be limited to titles released in Japan.  We won't be able to find the vast numbers of bootleg toys and items (which, is actually a good thing) but we won't find the vast numbers of manga and DVD/BDs that we once could in dealer rooms.  We won't see artist alleys filled with fan art of our favorite series as now they're limited to mostly original artwork and comics that are more American.

All of these things are in the past.  I hope, if you are reading this, you were able to enjoy some of the rise of Anime Conventions, and if you are still attending them now, I have a feeling many of them will never been the same as they once were.  My guess is many of them will have fallen to the Pop Culture influences (if they haven't already) within the next few years.  Enjoy them while they last, as they are a dying breed.

Backyard Birdwatching

Welcome to the wonderful world of backyard bird watching!  Your host today - me - will walk you through a couple of basics when it comes to starting your new hobby of watching birds in the backyard!  I will walk you through a couple of easy steps to attracting birds and then go over a few of the species that you'll see regularly if you live in the North/Eastern United States.

Okay...actually, that's pretty cut and dry stuff.  Actually this blog is more about showing off pictures I've taken in my backyard, but I thought maybe putting some educational stuff in there too might be a bonus.  I've been feeding birds in my backyard since I was pretty young.  My mother had a bird feeder that hung from the eaves outside our patio window and she'd fill it from time to time.  Growing up I thought these little birds in the picture above were "chickadees" - they are not.  They are House Sparrows.  (I'm only capitalizing the names of birds as I name them, don't freak out all you English major types.)  I had a small, metal windup toy of one of these sparrows and for some reason I got the wrong assumption that they were chickadees from a mix up of my grandmother talking about the song of a chickadee (chick-a-dee-dee-dee) and this little toy bird.

Since then, I've learned about all sorts of birds.  I especially love feeding them out in my backyard as my cats get a bit of a kick out of seeing them, and I just like to see what other types of birds I can attract.  Without feeding birds, you might only see these nesting in nearby bushes or trees or typically the birds will hit in a group after mowing the lawn or because of overgrown weeds.  Other birds that are common are Robins, Starlings and a few other species that pass by.  It is possible to see birds without feeding them, but if you wish to see their antics up close, it's good to buy a nice feeder.

My backyard setup at the present are two different feeders (one standard seed, another for thistle which they call something else but I have no inclination to walk downstairs for the proper spelling as I'm lazy - njyger maybe) on hooks that I have attached to my fence - these can be hooked onto back porches and other flat surfaces like tables if you're so inclined.  I also have a new yard hook (shepherd hook) that has a suet attachment and eventually a birdbath if I start to feel ambitious.  It only takes one feeder to bring in birds, and be patient, it sometimes takes a full week or more for birds to find it and start using it, but they'll be all over the place once they do!

Before long the birds start coming and drain the feeder within the span of an afternoon.  Typically, this large hole feeder (which, by the way, I do not recommend as it can be emptied within an hour by an industrious gang of sparrows) attracts all number of small brown birds and their larger cousins.  Starlings tend to love emptying them and I've had a number of flocks of these birds in the past take over the feeder until all the seed was on the ground.  What this does, however, is encourage the birds who don't, or can't sit on a feeder, to come and feast on the fallen seeds. The Mourning Doves in the top photo have taken advantage of this for the last three years and they have multiplied from only one nesting couple the first year I moved into my house to three nesting couples and a lone sibling.  They will just sit under the feeders sleeping for hours until a flock of rowdy sparrows or starlings comes and empties the feeder.


Two other birds which enjoy this mass-emptying are the Junco (slate-gray in this case hopping on the fence) and the Song Sparrow (seen by himself in the photo below).  This particular sparrow is a very vocal sort of chap, and loves to drive my cats crazy by sitting in the bush that sits in the front yard in front of the window and sing until it's lungs give out.  I tend to only see one of these at a time, so am inclined to think it's the same bird over and over, but I could be mistaken.

One misconception that I've had myself over the years is to believe that the birds you see out in your yard are the same birds.  Now, it's possible.  However, many times if you see a species you are unfamiliar with, they are simply migrating through.  Quite a few species, especially starlings for example, might appear in your yard multiple times during the week but then they move on in their large flocks and won't come back until months later, even though you've seen a very similar group come by once a week, normally these aren't the same birds.

On the other hand, my mourning doves do return year after year as I've taken pictures of them to compare coloration and markings.  Doves like to find a good nesting ground and they will return.  My group, as I explained before, were just a single nesting pair that chose to use my fence for their nest.  Since then I never count more than seven birds at a time, have watched the most recent three grow up from small babies.  A few in this group are almost pink in color.  Some are avid singers (as seen in the photo below where he's belting out a tune), though others sometimes coo quietly, the loud singers tend to wake me up by sitting on the fence under my bedroom window.

Mourning doves are prolific breeders and can nest multiple times during the course of the spring and summer.  I have found multiple nests all over my fence line which causes some pretty messy situations after the babies have hatched and choose to poop all over wherever they are currently sitting.  I wouldn't encourage this behavior necessarily as it takes a lot of scrubbing to get bird poop off of porches, chairs, tables, fences, etc.

Another popular bird that can be spotted without a bird feeder is the robin.  Growing up in Michigan, this was our state bird so if you didn't know what a robin looked like you were pretty much stupid.  I remember children coloring in our state bird to look like a blue-bird (blue with a red breast) and would have to argue with them that robins are more brown or gray.  Pale robins without the darker head as seen in these photos are females.  I caught two males sneaking suet from the feeder.  Worms and bugs are tough to come by after this cold winter so these two hung around for a few days before moving on.

Just like starlings, robins migrate.  Often they don't stay around more than a few days, unless they are nesting, that is.  I have had a nesting couple in the maple in my front yard last year and have had a few fat little baby robins pooping all over the porch.  I suppose I need to do a short blog on baby birds sometime this spring to show off some of these photos I've taken over the past few years.  However, because robins migrate at the first signs of cold and then return at the first signs of spring, they are good indicators that spring is coming when they show up.  My mother always believed spring was here when the first robin showed up in Michigan.  However, warm weather typically is marked by the red-wing blackbird.  Unfortunately, even though I have had two of these visit my feeders this year already, and can hear them singing by the train tracks near my house, I have been unable to photograph the buggers.

Now to change tracks just slightly and visit the prettier birds that I've been able to attract to my feeders.  This is the smaller thistle feeder which attracts mostly finches.  Gold Finches, in this case, have been visiting since early February, and I tend to see these birds year round in Ohio, so it's possible they don't migrate nearly as far if they have a good food source.  This male is just starting to show his summer yellow.  During the winter the main distinguishing feature of a gold finch is its black and white patched wings.  They are darker than any other species I have locally and even when the birds are brown in the dead of winter, it is easy to tell which type of bird they are.  As the month wears on this male will shed the brown feathers and become bright yellow.

Another less noticeable finch is the House Finch (not to be confused with the house sparrow) which has a red coloring on its face and chest.  These pretty little birds often show up about the same time as the sparrows and I've seen them fly off together in little groups and next together.  They're about the same size, but the males are brilliantly colored.

The last birds I will cover for now are also two very flashy birds.  One probably wouldn't include the Grackle as a 'flashy bird' but I believe they are one of the sharpest birds that grace my backyard.  There is something about this jet black bird with the purple/blue/green iridescent head that just really stands out to me.  They tend to stay in groups and sometimes appear with starlings or red-wing blackbirds.  This one will call his friends to come over when the feeder is freshly filled and they will do everything possible to empty the feeder so they pick from their favorite seeds.

The cardinal is one of the most recognizable birds in the Northeast United States and oftentimes people know what this bird is even when drawn in very abstract ways, so long as it has red plumage and a black face, most people know the name of this bird.  Females are more brown, but still as recognizable.  Perhaps this is the reason that so many states (including Ohio and West Virginia and many others) actually have this bird as their state bird.  I've had a pair of these birds at my feeder, but they really loved my sunflowers last summer, so they tend to like larger seeds in the feeders.

 For now, this concludes your backyard bird watching lesson!  For now I'm concentrating on birds I've taken photos of only this year rather than ones I've seen in previous sessions (plus the photos are prettier with the new camera).  Be sure to click on the photos to see the large versions as some of the earlier photos have a multitude of birds in various angles in flight.  I hope you've enjoyed this short lesson in bird watching!

I'm not sure what the next blog topic might be on, perhaps cooking.

Olivia's Journal #1

The cat journals this week conclude with Olivia; cat number one.  The story of this little gray fluffy cat starts when we bought our home.  In fact, maybe even before we bought our house as I was dreaming of a cat from the moment I moved into a cat-free apartment building with my then boyfriend (now husband) who also wanted a cat.  We waited out the three or so years in the apartment until we could afford to get married and get a house of our own.  And in January of 2011, we walked through the house that would be ours and I could picture certain places in the house and how a cat would be in those areas.  There's a small ledge at the top of the staircase that I imagined a cat sitting on waiting on us to come out of the master bedroom.  I imagined how they would like to wander up and down the stairs and peek out through the railings.  I got pretty sentimental about the house even before we were finished house-hunting.  This wasn't a beautiful home by any means as there were so many things that needed to be fixed before adding a pet to our home.

But by spring, we were popping into pet stores and looking at adoptable cats.  I saw a particularly cute one around April or so of the year and begged my husband to let me fill out the paperwork to adopt it.  I'm going to put this right out there though - adopting through a pet store that's just showcasing cats for other shelters is a bad run.  It took us a lot of time to even get the paperwork from a cashier who said it wouldn't get faxed in until the morning, and then we waited a week to find out that they had never faxed it in, nor had they even any record of us filling out the paperwork, and oh...by the way...the kitten was already adopted.  Too bad, so sad.

Frustrated by the whole thing it would be another week or so of visiting the local Humane Society and a last-minute evening trip that would give us only about a half hour of looking time when I spotted the kittens in the front glass enclosure.  A gray kitten!  Just like the one I'd seen at the pet store!  I rushed in, almost bumping another woman out of the way in my efforts to grab for the kitten... and some how this little gray furball actually came up to me.  I scooped her up and except for when we got to play with her in the little bonding room, I hardly let her out of my arms until the paperwork was signed and she was in the new carrier on our way home.

As you might be able to tell, Olivia is my first child and my favorite.  Mina might be an adorable, purring cuddler, and Tenchi might be a rough and tumble head-bumper, but Olivia is my buddy.  Her name at the Humane Society was "Brioche", although I have no idea why they'd name a gray kitten after a type of bread.  We were fans of the television show "Fringe" and that's where Olivia's name came from.  She was every bit the strong female lead in the story that would become our family of cats.  She still is, in fact, as she's able to strand lying near Tenchi and jump neatly away from his advances of playtime.

Brave cat that she is, Olivia scales the highest heights of the house, managing to climb on just about anything in efforts to get to a good vantage point.  She climbs the rafters in the basement, managed to get up to a ledge at the top of our cathedral ceiling bedroom by balancing on a bedpost, can make it to the top of our kitchen cupboards...well, you name it, she's gotten up there.  She's lightweight, and small, only about 7 to 8 pounds on her heaviest days.  Small pink toes, a warm pink-gray in most lighting situations, and an extra-thick layer of fur that is almost wavy.  Unfortunately that also comes with a ridiculous penchant for shedding and even worse when she lays next to my face in bed and I get a mouth full of fur!

When Olivia was a kitten we would get up every morning and make an effort to play with her.  Sometimes she would get so excited she would start panting and have to lay down.  It took us awhile to figure out this was normal and even good to wear a cat out like this, but our first time cat-parent selves were always cautious of her.  She fell off a tall shelf in the basement at one point, hurting herself and she limped for a day.  Another week or more went by with Olivia squinting and barely opening her eye.  This was followed by a week of wearing a cone and putting in eye drops prescribed by the vet.  And then followed by the realization that Olivia squinted with that eye when she was irritated with us for bringing home Mina.  In fact, she squinted more for putting the medicine in her eye so that when the cone was removed and the drops ended, the squint only reappeared when she was irritated.  That was a couple hundred dollars and lots of cat humiliation that could have been avoided!

Olivia still likes to play, but she doesn't like to do it around Mina.  Even when Mina was a kitten Olivia wasn't a fan of her younger sister.  They would tolerate one another at windows and in sunny spots, but if Olivia was playing with a feather toy in one room and Mina popped in, all interest in the toy dropped and Olivia simply walked out of the room as if she were never playing at all.  It took nearly a year before she would return to asking for playtime in the mornings and they went from long, pant-inducing bird hunts to short, crazy jumps until Mina joined the fun and then she would watch from nearby until Mina tired out enough for Olivia to return to her playtime.

 Introducing Tenchi a year later after that and Olivia returned to her snooty "I don't want to play now that that is here," attitude, and again she fell silent to asking for playtime for nearly another year.

Jump back in time now since I forgot to mention how much of a vocal little thing this cat can be.  She asks to play.  She asks to have her 'snicky-snack' (aka hairball medicine which I'm sooo glad she takes on her own since she has such problems with hairballs).  She asks to go out to the garage.  She asks for closet doors to be opened.  She meows at ceilings and random spots on the wall.  She meows in the half-bath on the first floor where, for some reason, she'll howl for fifteen minutes straight if you let her an we're still not sure why three years later.  She chirps when you wake her up from a nap.  She meows to make me roll over to cuddle with her.  Oh yes...she won't shut up until I roll to face away from my husband in bed so that she can knead on my left arm until she feels it's soft enough to curl up against and shove her face in my face and nibble on my nose.  That doesn't happen every night...but it used to before Tenchi arrived.

For the most part, Olivia is a cuddler.  She likes cozy spaces like piles of warm laundry, and my computer chair or now, most recently, my lap.  The two girls fight over it, but refuse to share it.  If Mina is on my lap, Olivia will come up and meow at me and sulk off.  Mina will come up to sniff Olivia if she's in my lap and then go lie on the floor with her head on her paws looking at me all pathetic like, as if she were saying "Why don't you love me anymore?"

If Olivia gets chased off of my lap she might go into CRAZY CAT MODE.  I'm sure most cats have this, right?  That moment where the energy builds up so much they just have to release it by running around the house at full tilt?  Some do.  Mina and Tenchi get out most of their tension by chasing after one another through the house or chasing Olivia.  Now, Olivia on the other hand, barely ever instigates a chase (once in awhile, but not usually) as instead she enjoys suddenly going crazy, meowing her head off and doing kitty parcour against the back of the sofa.  Then, if you turn to look at her, she'll go wide-eyed and high-tail it out into the kitchen.  Eventually this act, plus running into the bathroom and meowing to high-heaven, will get her a playmate of one of the other cats and they'll go racing out of the room and upstairs.  There will be the sound of a great thundering stampede in the ceiling until eventually they race back down again and into the basement.

 Cats are weird that way, I cannot deny it.  Olivia is for the most part, very sweet.  She doesn't mind her toes trimmed.  She loves to be petted in the master bathroom, even my husband gets love from her there.  She loves to meow at us after we come out of the shower until she gets to rub all over our ankles and hands.  She stays out of the way most of the day by finding a nice place to nap.  She doesn't struggle when picked up, but doesn't like it either, usually using it to her advantage to get a good spot on top of our shoulders to see if she can find a good jumping place somewhere she couldn't reach before.  Her main flaw, I suppose, is that she teaches the other cats bad behaviors like trying to get into the catnip (which we've had to lock up due to Tenchi's aggressive nature and fact he's chewed his way through the butter-tub shaped container we have it in).  But because of her bravery, she doesn't hide from storms and gets to play while the others are hiding.  She will bat at the vacuum cleaner if you get the hose too close to her, but she doesn't stand down.  She enjoys spending time watching TV as well, and I've caught her more than once, en rapt with the moving objects on the screen.

And that about does it for now on the three cats in my household.  I hope you've enjoyed reading about them!  If nothing else...this is my own personal memory at this point in time of my three cats.  As other events happen to these sweethearts, rest assured that there will be new journals posted with new adorable photographs.  I hope you have enjoyed what I've posted as well.

Next time on WhatcherStudios... most likely something about backyard birding as I've been doing a lot of that lately.

Mina's Journal #1

 In part 2 of the cat introduction, I present to you the black cat Mina.  She came to us a bit of a raggedy kitten, found as a stray by a different coworker.  It does seem like cats come from people you work for - they always seem to pawn cats off on unsuspecting people!  But that's not where Mina's story begins...

In October of 2011, we had settled into our new house with our new cat Olivia.  I'll tell her story in the next blog, but it's important to note that Olivia had been an 'only child' for a good six months before Mina came into her life.

We run Tsubasacon, in Huntington, WV, so when the convention was over that year we had talked about getting another cat to keep Olivia company.  Perhaps, we thought, having another cat would keep Olivia occupied so she wouldn't constantly bug us to play with her.  Maybe a buddy would help?  Well, I told my husband that if we were to get another cat, it would have to 'come' to us.  I know there are a lot of people out there who don't believe in God, but for those of you on my side of the fence, I believed that God would bring me another cat if that's what was to happen.  Not two days after I got back from my leave from running the convention, a coworker said to me, "You have only one cat, right?  Weren't you talking about getting another cat?"
            "Yes...we were talking about getting another eventually," I replied, wondering where this conversation was going.
           "Well, I have this stray running around my house, and I've been feeding him but my cats don't like him and I can't have another right now... He's a real sweetie."  We talked about this kitty and my coworker told me about how she'd seen him being dragged around in the arms of a toddler a few houses down when he wasn't fending for himself out and about.  Of course when you hear about a cat being tortured by a child I immediately went home and told my husband about this desperate situation.  He agreed we could go look at the cat.
            After a week or so we arranged to go to my coworker's house and she arranged to catch the kitten and have him ready for us to look at.  We made the almost a half hour trip out to nowhere land and there was this kitten in a carrier out on my coworker's back porch.  She brought the cat out and he wove in and out around our ankles and climbed around the back porch area.  I looked up at my husband with big eyes, and begged to take him.  He called the vet on the drive back, because he knew he didn't have any argument about the little raggedy black cat with the silly white hairs sticking out of her chest and back.
              At the vet, just as I'd already assumed after seeing the cat in person, that 'he' was actually a 'she'.  My coworker didn't realize it with how long haired she was, but I knew immediately.  We passed back and forth dozens of names on the drive to the vet and already had a name picked out by the time we got there to have her checked out.  "Mina" was a character from an anime (not originally an anime though, an opening sequence anime to a Japanese drama called "Densha Otoko").  I'd wanted to use the name when we got Olivia, but didn't due to other reasons.


 Olivia is a pretty easy going cat, but for some reason the moment Mina came into the household she lost interest in playing.  Mina basically took over being the kitten with all of the energy.  She'd silently run into a room while we were playing and take over the battle over the birdie or mousie, or whatever feathery toy we would be waving around.  Olivia would sulk out of the room and let Mina have the run of the place.  When they were younger, Mina and Olivia would spend time near one another and sometimes even sleep near one another.  Unfortunately upon the entrance of Tenchi, they lost interest in cuddling together and everyone took up their own territories in the house.

Mina's territory is the first floor.  She rarely comes upstairs to the second level.  UNLESS of course, there's playtime going and she comes running.  She can appear mysteriously wherever a feather or string object is being thrown around.  Occasionally she'll come upstairs to check out if everything is okay, but Tenchi usually runs her out.  Where she shines though is the first floor where she loves to look outside and watch us when we're in the yard.  She stalks the birds and the bird feeders.  She runs in and plops down on the living room floor and will roll over to show you her belly.

Unfortunately a few quirks still exist from her kitten days.  Mina does not like to be picked up.  Almost immediately this normally quiet cat will start to yowl like I've pulled out a toenail or something.  She absolutely hates to have her claws trimmed, which is sort of ironic as she also doesn't use scratching posts so if I don't trim them, they curl back on themselves.  I'm not sure why she has such an aversion to having her feet touched, but the only time she allows them to be touched is when she's completely asleep or she's forced into the trimming.  Luckily she only struggles and yowls, doesn't bite like Tenchi will try to do on occasion.

Mina also hates the sound of thunder.  We discovered this the spring after we got her.  The first thunderstorm that rolled through and she hid herself under the television stand.  She still does it even a few years later, and she'll stay there until long after the storm has passed.  We're not sure where this fear came from as neither of the other cats have a problem with storms and even though Mina used to run from the vacuum cleaner, she mostly stays put now that she's older and won't leave too far from her perch in the front window.

An unusual thing happened when Mina would hide under the television:  Olivia would play again.  In fact, I sometimes think that Olivia enjoys feeling like she's the only cat in the house during thunderstorms because she will play and snuggle up to me on the first floor when Mina is no where to be found.

Then, after Olivia was just starting to act a bit more normal (at least back to her six months of being an 'only child') we introduced the kitten Tenchi.  For some reason he clung onto Mina like they were going to be the best friends in the entire world.

That, of course, was not the case.  Mina hissed, howled, growled, spat, clawed...turned into basically the most nasty sounding evil cat I'd heard - all coming out of the sweetest cuddly thing you can think of.  She didn't want to have anything to do with Tenchi.  (Olivia, on the other hand sniffed at him, but overall just avoided the kitten.)  But Tenchi was enthralled with Mina for some reason.  He would find her sleeping up by the window and curl up next to her.  If she was sound asleep then he could be near her, but the moment she woke up she would sniff at him in disdain and leave.

Even a year later, Mina's admirer still takes time out of his busy schedule of eating and being an overall pain in the butt (walking his bulky 14 pounds of bony feet all over me, bringing toys to fetch and eating when he's bored) to annoy Mina.

Mina's schedule is usually like this - she sleeps on the couch, or the cat tower, and when she hears her humans get up she runs out into the living room floor and throws herself down for scratches.  If we take too long to get up she might run up to investigate which causes Tenchi to chase her out.  Then she rubs around our ankles in the kitchen, throwing herself down on our feet if we stand in one place too long without petting her.  Tenchi comes in and chases her out of the kitchen.  If I don't have to go to work and take up residence on the couch, Mina plops herself on my leg until it goes numb (about a half hour or so) and then plops down on the floor to the left of the coffee table and sprawls out until I get up and walk around.  If I sit down again she'll be on my lap within 5-10 minutes.  Repeat, lots of times through the day.  In the evening, Tenchi comes out from hiding and will lie on the floor and copy-cat her position in the floor, both of them showing off their bellies.

Mina stays downstairs when we go upstairs as that is Olivia and Tenchi territory.  Now, if we've left something on the floor - Tenchi's blue rubber bracelet for example - we'll hear her meowing to tell us that it's been left on the floor.  Mina also has a cute habit she started as a kitten, and that was fetching small objects that DO NOT BELONG.  I say this because she makes a point of making a ruckus if one of these objects is found.  The first was a bit of cement from the basement floor; she brought it up in her mouth, carefully dropped it in the living room and meowed at me.  She rarely speaks, unlike Tenchi and Olivia who are avid talkers.  So it's quite a shock, and the first time she brought me something I thought she had hurt herself.  But eventually we figured out what the meow meant.  "This does not belong on the floor," she seems to say.

Mina has brought up a list of things from the basement and also warns us if we've dropped items that could potentially be harmful to step on.  Maybe it's her foot thing, I'm not sure.  But her list includes: cement, stone, shards of mirror, screw, twist tie, some strange velcro thing and Tenchi's bracelet.  We're not sure why she's so bothered by that bracelet as it's a human object, yes, but my husband has worn it only once and Tenchi took over carrying it around ever since, so in essence it's become a cat toy.  But not to Mina, even though she's played with it herself.

It's taken nearly a year to get 'used' to Tenchi enough to get back into the routine of disrupting play time again.  Olivia got fairly used to the new boy in the house, but Mina stopped playing when we got him, all but on occasions, and maybe it's because she's got such short legs she doesn't run very fast.  She runs with all claws and can't jump very high.  Most of the time she stays on at least two feet to catch birds.  She's scared of heights as well.  She will get to the top of the cat tower, but it took months to get over wobbling with fear when we'd put her at the top.  She started lying on the bottom, then the first ear, then another until finally she would sleep at the top.  She can't jump up on counters, her legs just won't let her jump higher than a foot or so.

I don't mind that she doesn't climb (Olivia is enough of a hassle to chase down off of things), because she's quite the cuddler.  When she's on my lap, if she's really loving she'll start up this little motor going (Tenchi, I didn't mention before, doesn't purr.  He has a tiny little rumble that will come for maybe five seconds at a time when he's feeling cuddly, but it only happens maybe once a week.  Olivia purrs, but more about her later) and put her paws on my shoulders.  She'll rub her face in mine and bury her face in my neck.  She doesn't do this to my husband (only rarely) but she cuddles with me at least once a day.

She also begs for food.  She's the only one of my three cats that care at all about people food.  She LOVES it.  Oh wait... LOVES it.  She'll plop up next to me on the bench at the kitchen table and put her paws on my shoulder and rub the side of my face and then reach over to the dish that I'm eating.  I give her occasional table scraps, but only meat, and only tiny bits as she won't eat anything over the size of a pea.  But she's insatiable.  She'll beg until every scrap of food is cleaned off the plate.  Then she'll turn around and get annoyed that I didn't share anything and leave dejectedly.

And there you have it, Mina.  Next Journal up:  Olivia, Cat #1!

Tenchi's Journal #1

 This is Tenchi.  I was thinking about doing a journal for all three of my cats at one point or another to give a basic introduction to their weird quirks so that I could have it for reference in the future.  Any why not?  There are a ton of people out there who have blogging cats and they get tons of hits on the internet from people who like cats.  There's whole blogging sites dedicated to blogs about cats and cat owners and everything in between.
       I thought to myself as I was going through the sites the other day that I really should at least set it in stone (or digital stone so to speak) who my family is living in this little two-story house.  So, why not start with cat number three and work my way backwards?  Maybe then you can get a good idea of what a cat household is like.  Cat households are different than dog households or children households, in case you were ever wondering.


Cat number three came to us in May I believe, or 2013.  The reason I can't remember Tenchi's date exactly was that I have his birthday memorized as being Feburary 21st.  His mother was a stray that followed a coworker's male cat home one day.  She had four kittens in the litter, two females and two males.

The two black females and one tabby male were named Izzy (long fur), Squeak (short fur) and George.  They wound up staying with Tenchi's mother as my co-worker adopted her after Smudge, they're supposed father died after being run over.


Having been an indoor/outdoor cat, my coworker decided from that point on she would not allow any of the kittens go to a outdoor cat home and refused to adopt any of the kittens out unless they were to be inside cats only.  Tenchi would not ever run that risk as I don't like the idea of outdoor cats at all.  Two of my cats when I was growing up ran into trouble being outdoor cats.  One of which we suspected drinking coolant or some such nasty thing outside and died shortly afterwards.  Of course, in my mom's day, how you treated your pets is a whole lot different than people treat them today.  Even my coworker decided that it wouldn't be a good thing to let them have the run of the neighborhood.  She'd already saved too many strays and later remarked that Tenchi and George's dad may have been a different stray altogether as when a foreclosed house down the street was revealed to be a cat-hoarder's home, one that looked an awful lot like Tenchi wandered the neighborhood not long ago.

 Tenchi was the only one of his siblings to be adopted out, and he was the craziest of them.  My coworker called him "ornery" because he was constantly moving and meowing and running around playing.  We thought to ourselves that we have two cats who love to play and we already played with them quite regularly, so what harm would there be to adding a third to our crew?

WELL...  Tenchi doesn't tear up the furniture.

What he DOES do, however, is get himself torn up by the other two cats.  The moment we brought him home he was calm and quiet.  He had, after all, been worn down by us playing with him before we picked up him that afternoon.  I could have had my pick of any of the kittens.  I could have pulled out the quiet George or the scared Izzy, and if it hadn't been for Squeak being a black female (which I already had) I may have picked her because she'd come out to play when Tenchi was panting in the corner.

I never for once regret...okay...maybe once or twice regret bringing the Tench-meister home, but for the most part I love him.  He IS a bit ornery though, and he can get a bit grouchy.  He's also FAT.  He's managed to get himself up to about 14 pounds of cat now, double the size of our smallest Olivia.  Olivia, for her part, is a jumper so she can get away from him and he's got multiple wounds to prove that she's gotten him from time to time.  But for some reason he likes Mina the most.  He loves to bug her.  Mina is about a pound heavier than Olivia and she's sweet and gentle.  Unless Tenchi gets up in her face and then she growls like nobody's business.  They tear each other up, black fur and white fur everywhere.

But...they live in peace most of the time.  I can't deny that when Tenchi isn't eating (which he does every time he gets bored and there's no one to play with) and when he's not tearing around the house trying to attack the girls, he does get sweet.  He'll bump into my face like a bowling ball though (I swear I've bruised my nose sometimes when he bumps it hard enough) and he's gotten to the point that if he wants to be petted, he'll grab your hand with a paw so he can push his face into it.  However, he seems to only like to be petted on the sides of his face.  Occasionally a stroke down the back or a scratch on the rump.  He'll bite when I try to pet his belly so I have to keep his claws trimmed back.  Luckily it's never a super hard bite, and only once he broke the skin.

Unfortunately, even with Tenchi being a sweet cat, I've had my moments with him.  If you have ever watched "My Cat From Hell" with Jackson Galaxy, you'll know that cats can snap from being treated wrong.  I know that from time to time Tenchi gets this expression on his face and it feels like he's just not there.  It's almost as if a demon has taken over my cat and if I do the wrong thing or act the wrong way he'll just snap and I'll have to make a phone call to the Cat Daddy myself.

So far, it hasn't happened.  Thank goodness.  But he goes through these moods where I swear he's had enough.  I'm not even quite sure what tips it off, although I do know that he's a MEAN drunk - or should I say when he's got catnip he's really mean.  He goes for blood when he's on the stuff, and even though my other two cats are perfectly sweet and adorable and it puts them to sleep...he just wants to tear into everything.  So I have to be very careful about the 'nip.

Tenchi is hit-or-miss when it comes to strangers.  Sometimes he'll be all over them, curious and playful, but for some reason larger men really scare him.  He acts like he's never seen another human before besides my husband and myself.  He'll run and hide from our best man David and he was scared to death of the cable guy last week.  Sometimes he'll get a wild, fluff tail pose on him and scurry away like we're complete strangers too, which is that part of him I wonder if his brain has flicked over to a different cat setting.

The last thing I'll talk about is how our cat thinks he's a dog.  In fact, I compare his actions (even the crazy wild-eyed cat thing) to things I've seen dogs do.  He'll be sweet one moment, wanting to get petted, then bat his paw at me when he's had enough.  I've seen him just randomly lash out at the girls because he wants to play.  And he has favorite toys that he loves to play with.  I don't have pictures of these things, unfortunately, although I do have video I've thought of posting on my YouTube channel (which might get linked someday if I can get things together) but he has a blue, rubber bracelet and a blue chair cushion tie (that he chewed off the cushion and I never bothered to sew back on) that he drags around the house if he wants to play fetch.  He'll also play with these items on his own if he's really desperate, but most of time they wind up next to the couch where I'm sitting or on the bed when I'm sleeping, only so I can throw them across the room and he can fetch them back three or four times.  He does get bored of this, but he has been known to do it for a half hour or more if he's in the mood.

So there you have it.  Tenchi in a nutshell (or at least in ten or so paragraphs).  I think that covers all but the fact that he likes to sleep at my husband's feet at night, he LOVES fresh water out of the tap (we have a separate bowl in the bathroom just for him even though we have a perfectly good fountain) and that he hates to be picked up, held or have his claws trimmed.  Also isn't much of a height cat due to his fat, although he did just make it up on the counter the other day, much to our dismay.

Next entry will be on Mina - Tenchi's arch-rival and best friend.

Bird Watching

    I've never been sure if there are distinctive levels of birdwatchers.  I have heard different prefixes in front of the word 'birdwatcher', ranging from 'amateur' to 'avid' to 'professional', but I'm not sure what distinguishes the levels.  There may even be a few more levels that I'm not aware of.  I'd imagine there are even a few categories that describe people who know what birds are which but don't care to look for them or feed them or hazard a second glance when they see one fluttering in the woods.

     On the other hand, I know there are quite a few people out there who not only know what the birds are, they hunt for them specifically, and even others who make a living out of showing people where to find these birds.  In fact, there's an entire documentary I watched on Netflix about some of these professional birdwatchers.

          I am not a professional.  I don't make a living at it and there are a whole lot of birds that I've never seen in person, even if perhaps I know them by name through looking at books.  I'm not avid, and I'm not amateur... so there must be a category for what kind of birdwatcher I am.  However, I've never spoken with enough birdwatchers, so if you know what kind likes to feed birds, likes to look them up in books and take pictures of them, well, then you've got me down.

        Birds are a wonder to me, and I've always been interested in the different species that live around me.  When I lived up in Michigan, there were a dozen species I'd see on a regular basis.  Robins, House Sparrows, House Finches, Flickers, Starlings and Grackles were the main birds I remembered being able to name throughout my childhood.  Of course, at the time I called House Sparrows, "Chickadees", and it wasn't until much later in my life that I saw what a real chickadee looked like.  My grandmother had a tin windup toy of a House Sparrow, but we always called it a chickadee so I never knew what it was.  Of course, there were also Cardinals and Blue Jays, Seagulls and Crows, the random woodpecker (red-throated mostly) and a dozen other passers by like the random Baltimore Oriole I spotted one summer.
         Now that I'm an adult (ahahaha) and living in my own house, I had to have bird feeders.  I have two of them currently on a backyard fence.  One of them has a standard songbird mix, another is a mix with various small millett seeds and thistle (or I guess it's called Nyger).  I never had goldfinches growing up at my mom's house, but my Great Aunt Doris always had a goldfinch feeder and now that I'm older I have a few nesting pairs that come to my feeders.

 Now, if you're not a birdwatcher, some of these species of birds may be familiar to you in the photos, some may not.  The first one at the top of the page was a Scarlet Tanager that I spotted on Mackinac Island, MI.  The second photo is of a group of birds during one of the more recent snowstorms.  The biggest one being a Mourning Dove (one of my favorites still to this day as it's call reminds me of my grandmother) and Slate-colored Junco (flapping it's wings) and a few others like a song sparrow and white-throated sparrow.  I have an awesome photo which I have yet to upload to my computer of a bunch of house sparrows flying up over the fence that I'll need to post in the near future as it's a fascinating photo - all of the birds hurl themselves up into the air at different rates and angles.
      The two photos above and to the right are my breeding cardinal pair that live nearby.  I believe they take up residence in the more mature trees by the railroad tracks, but when the feeders are full they like to visit.  These photos were taken on different days (as you might be able to notice) and my yellow feeder has now been replaced by a better, more sturdy version.

            Just recently I participated in the Backyard Bird Count on Valentine's day.  I had hoped to participate more days in a row but my work schedule made it awfully hard.  Plus, when the feeders aren't full to brimming (which happens only 15 minutes or so before a group of house sparrows or starlings breeze in and completely empty the songbird mix) I usually get a very small group of birds.  I have about 3 pairs of mourning doves that come to my feeders quite a bit.  Two nesting pairs tend to use my fence as a good place to have their babies and since the first pair arrived, they had two babies the first year that survived to breed somewhere nearby, and a single chick that survived last year.  On some days all 7 or so will sit out on the fence.  I have a few gold finches who are just sleek and brown with little dashes of black and white until their spring plumage comes in.  The cardinal pairs and an occasional hawk that disturbs the whole thing by hanging out on the fence.  Add to that an occasional pair of mallards, and a mockingbird...that about rounds up the group.
            This spring though, I'm looking forward to adding suet to the mix and a couple more feeders, so hopefully I'll be able to start adding new photos to the mix.