I hope you've all been having lovely holidays. For me, they've been pretty nice so far. I had back-to-back-to-back family gatherings, which were all pleasant. My parents bought me an air fryer for Christmas, which I've been pretty stoked about. I haven't cooked anything in it yet though! I've cleaned and run it empty a couple of times first, to try to get rid of that new plastic smell.

Some friends did movie streams as well. I got to see Ernest Saves Christmas with Coracroma, and Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas with KingDead. Very different vibes between the two, but I had fun with both!

My art production has slowed down a lot over the past couple of weeks. Christmas stuff took up a lot of my time, obviously, but I was also sick with a cold for a while before then that sapped a lot of my energy. (Don't worry, I tested negative for COVID-19, and had recovered before I did any family gathering stuff.) My house has been disheveled, which seems normal for post-Christmas, with disorganized decorations and gifts and stuff around. I'm trying to get back into the groove of things by fixing that.

This has been a very catful winter too. Some of my friends already know that I rescued three stray cats about a month ago: a mother and her baby, and then a third one that I think is unrelated. None of them had owners; they were all wild and roaming my neighbourhood. I set up a couple of shelters and had been feeding them for a while, and managed to get them out of the cold and into the house. I hated seeing them outdoors; it gets lethally cold where I live. Plus leaving them to roam, it doesn't take too long before you end up with more cats, hence the mother and her kitten.

All three of these cats are timid, but they have been coming around. The mother cat is the most social; she was the first one to voluntarily walk into my house, when I lured her with food and heat. The other two I had to catch with a trap. The mother hangs around me a lot, is talkative, and after a few weeks, was the first to let me touch her. Her baby is slower to socialize, but I'm making progress; she's not hiding as much, and I got to touch her yesterday for the first time. The third one is really timid; I hardly see him come out, so I have to leave food out for him, since I can't feed him individually. All the cats will go at it though, so I'm gonna end up with a bunch of fat cats. My cat food budget has increased by a lot.

It's kinda funny; it's been ages since I've named a cat, while my siblings and mom have been naming their own. Now that I've finally had the chance, all I've settled into is "Kitty" for the mom and "Baby" for the baby. Very creative. It was how I baby-talked them when they were still outdoors, and I guess it just kinda stuck, haha. It's probably not too late to rename them, but they already respond to it.

I'll probably need to rehome them at some point, when they're more tame. If I do, I'd ideally like to send the mom and her kitten to the same home. There was a week when they were separated, after the mom came indoors, as I had difficulty catching the kitten. During that time, the mom was constantly meowing — something she eased up on after I brought her baby inside. My brother said he saw the kitten looking in through the window the day before I caught her too.

I feel a bit bad about the idea of sending the mom off somewhere else though; she seems to really have taken a liking to my brother's cat. She gets excited when he's around, tries to rub against him a lot, and actually meows at him — something cats don't usually do to other cats. She does this a lot, even when she's not in heat (and yeah, I will take her to a vet and get her fixed, after she gets more used to being handled by people).

As I'm writing this, the kitten ("Baby", I guess!) is playing with my brother's cat. They're kinda chasing each other around. It's nice to see her out and about instead of just hiding all the time. She's very cute. She also kinda looks like my fursona, so if I did keep her, she might make a good art reference, haha.

Anyway, I should get back to productive stuff. It's just nice to journal once in a while; I used to do this a lot, back in the LiveJournal days, and I've really missed it.