McKenzie and Logan make a good team: McKenzie knocked off the table the wooden spoon that I had been using to prepare some stuff with chicken and cheese for dinner, and Logan seized it in his mouth and ran through the house with it.

(Edited to add: Just to make it clear, I'm preparing something to be served when Jess gets here - not planning to eat it all before she gets home!)

Playing with a kitten really is like a form of prayer - not worshipping the kitten, but experiencing the awe of such a beautiful and perfect creation, and being grateful for the divine creative force which brought such perfection into being, a force which I choose to call God.

On a more mundane level, I'm working on cleaning the kitten's ears (ear mites!) and re-discovering the obvious fact of how differently puppies and kittens play, and why they should have different toys. (A kitten will bat a ball around the floor with its paw; a dog will immediately bite into the ball.)

I'm thinking of "McKenzie" as a possible permanent name for this kitten. "Alley-Oop" or "Alley-Oops" is really just a temporary placeholder name until we think of something better. I'll need to settle on at least a working name for tomorrow when I set up the kitten's Banfield account.

Edited to add: From now on, the entries that are cross-posted from Dreamwidth will be going to catecumen, formerly wandering_cat, instead of this account.

I found the name for the kitten's coat color pattern: "mackerel tabby." I should have remembered that name, from our long-ago cat-breeding days, because our Siamese breeding lines included a couple of Oriental Shorthairs, and Orientals come in every coat color pattern, even mackerel tabby!

I had forgotten that something so tiny can be so perfect.