Shine On You Cuddly Diamond – Elephant Family Sanctuary. Go here!

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baby-ele-walking

Baby elephant walk.

I’ve just had the privilege of playing with elephants at Elephant Family Sanctuary, in the Maewang District, about an hour and a half south of Chiang Mai. It’s run by my Thai adopted brother Chaiw, who rang me on Saturday afternoon and said he had booked me in for the next morning to go on a half-day excursion and I would be picked up earlier in the a.m. than I am generally comfortable with. So I hauled myself out of bed, foregoing my crucial morning coffee, (potentially fatal to those around me) and got myself ready for this momentous occasion. The EFS silver van duly picked me up at 7.15am and we did the rounds, via back roads and lanes, to pick up the other clientele that were in on this particular trip, Theresa and Tom from California and a young lady from Israel who I think was named Carly. We were a small group today, which I’ve found is always a good thing, as you get to ask your guide lots of questions. And I am indeed rather nosy, although I prefer the label “Curious” or “Enquiring”. There was also a driver, who didn’t speak English, and our guide was a lovely young lady called Hnong, friendly and full of smiles, with quite reasonable English.
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NOT For Sale – One Maine Coon Holder with Bamboo Accent

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Aha!! I have found a nest. I will get very comfortable, for obviously this is My nest. MaineCoonHolder 1 72

But wait, there is a human watching me. It must be jealous, for I have never seen it in a nest.

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I will wash. I will wash and ignore it and it will go away.

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This is not working. The human is not going away.

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I must come up with a plan. Let me think.

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Aha! I will stick my leg out. Everything knows that when a cat sticks its leg out, it is obviously washing. And the universal law of cat washing says that a cat washing must be left in peace.

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Hmm. It is not going away. Okay, I will act nonchalant. Everything knows that a cat being nonchalant must be left in peace.

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Not working. Okay, I will sniff. Everything knows that a cat sniffing something is busy and must be left alone.

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This human is not leaving. It is obviously ignorant of cat law. I shall put it to sleep. I will yawn and it will go to sleep.

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Drat! It is not going away. Then I must go back to my nesting.

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Perhaps it will leave me alone and go and inhabit the other nest I have left for it. Then it will not be jealous any more.

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It is seriously ridiculous what a cat has to do to keep a human happy.

 

Camera Rambles: Look Who I Found in the Garden Today – Kereru

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P1050455 72Kereru – New Zealand Wood Pigeon. They’re a handsome beasty, with red eyes, beak and feet, a white breast and the head, throat and wings are a shiny green-purple colour,  with a bronze tinge to the feathers. They’re endemic to New Zealand and are unfortunately a threatened species, so it’s pretty fortunate to spot one so close to town.

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We have several berry-laden trees around us, and that’s a favourite thing of the Kereru. Sometimes the berries start fermenting and when the kereru eat them they get quite drunk. I saw one in the bush up a mountain once, crash-landing in a tree. They’re quite big birds, around 51 centimetres (20 in) in length and 650 grams (23 oz) in weight, and a drunken kereru throwing himself at a tree with the hope of actually stopping on a perch rather than falling off the other side is quite a sight to behold.

P1050459 72Hopefully we’ll see more of them in the next few days as they feast on the berries. I don’t think our berries are fermenting, but I’ll hide the keys to the car, just in case…

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Yes, I’m talking about you. No drinking and driving!

 

8. Smudge – The Tree Bear Stunt Cat!

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Spot the tree bear.

Spot the tree bear.

Servants POV:

We woke up one morning and couldn’t find Smudge anywhere. Grey hairs were almost instantly developed while running around calling her for ages and worrying ourselves silly that she was okay. Then ‘other servant’ called to my attention a creature sitting very high up in one of the tallest trees in the neighborhood. Sometime during the night, Smudge had decided that she should be a tree bear. By the time we found her though, she looked like she’d had enough of being an arboreal-type animal and wanted to come down. Read it HERE Continue reading →

The Things You Do When You Don’t Have a TV…

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Some say I’m a little hard on my friends, but I honestly wouldn’t do anything to them I wouldn’t first do to myself.

This is my friend Carol. It's been a while since I cut her face, but she's healing up nicely now.

This is my friend Carol. It’s been a while since I cut her face, but she’s healing up nicely now.

She's still talking to me.

She’s still talking to me.

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Maine Coon Madness – Kitten Rules the House!

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Meet Rose, the ruler of my friend’s house. More photos of her HERE.

A box of firewood that complements my fur nicely...

A box of firewood that complements my fur nicely…

Experimenting can Lead to Excessive Caffeine Consumption – The Gallery Experiment

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I can pay you...

I can pay you…

I’m trying something new on here – galleries. I’ve created both a Gallery page up the top, and a Gallery widget at the side. It would seem that the galleries on the Gallery page can’t be named, and the gallery in the widget on the side can’t show just a few pics that lead to the full gallery when clicked on.

This is not what I want and it has led to excessive caffeine consumption. Continue reading →

Tiny House Living – Life Without a Television. The Ice – It comes!!

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P1040449 72A lot of people gasp with shock when I tell them we have no t.v.

“Did you see blah blah blah last night…?”

“Nope. Haven’t got a television.”

“What??!!”

I do caregiving for a living, so I stay for two days and two nights in a house each week. But even then I’m still not tempted to stare at the goggle-box. Unless there’s a good documentary on, or Bones – about the only drama I like to see regularly, because her autistic-type personality has a train-smash sort of fascination to it, and the other characters make me laugh. The other exception being America’s Next Top Model, but that’s because I like watching the photo shoots that they come up with. In between the shoots (when they’re bitching at each other about who should be doing the dishes or what a cow so-and-so is) I usually wander off and hand out meds or empty catheter bags or something else so much more fascinating.

It’s no hardship though, having no t.v. We do have the internet, after all, which can keep us amused for hours. Any question you can possibly come up with, Google will find an answer to it somewhere. Which is how I know that steam rollers don’t roll steam… Continue reading →

Camera Rambles: Moa the Cat in Catnip Ecstacy

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It's that stuff again, isn't it...?

It’s that stuff again, isn’t it…?

After posting the article on catnip today, (read that here) I grabbed my camera and went to visit Moa with a piece of catnip. These were the results: Continue reading →