Maybe you thought the internet was a series of tubes, but apparently it’s made of cats.

As excited as I am for my upcoming European vacation (May cannot arrive soon enough), stuff like this just serves to make me pine for a Tokyo visit in the near future.

(Via Cute Overload)

We always joke that our cat, Oliver, is the sandman. If you’re trying to get out of bed in the morning, he’ll try to keep you there with his kneading and cuddling. If you sit down on our bed (or his bed, if you ask him) to pet him, his hypnotic purrs will have you knocked out faster than a dose of Lunesta.

But these kitties at the Cincinnati Zoo are actually sandmen! Well, sand cats technically. These little desert cats have fur on their paw pads so they can walk around on the hot sand. At just 4.5 to 5.5 pounds, these cuties are even tinier than the kitties at our house. Admire the cute below:

Via zooborns

So, as I’ve blogged before, my wife and I are pretty active volunteers at the local SPCA. Our love of companion animals is well-documented throughout the site, from our tee designs to our philanthropic endeavors, but it also carries over into the three dimensional world.

About a month ago, we got a call from the volunteer coordinator over at the SPCA asking if we’d be able to foster a pair of puppies for a couple of weeks until they were old enough to be spayed and neutered before going up for adoption. Despite a split second of reticence brought on by memories of our first attempt at fostering a dog, I said “YES!” Cuteness trumps good sense 99.9% of the time.

So I drove up the next day on my lunch break to pick up Grace (fawn) and her brother Harlowe (black).

Enjoy the cuteness while it lasts!

About six hours later, I was seriously regretting my decision.

While these two are unassailably adorable, all of that goes out the window when they’re, y’know, awake. It’s ridiculous how much energy and poop is contained in those tiny bodies. I feel like the Ms. and I spent two weeks just following these two around with paper towels and sanitary wipes. The good news is, these two were both adopted on their first day of eligibility. As much of a headache as they were, I wanted nothing more than for them to end up in a loving home as soon as possible. As great as the staff and facilities at the Maryland SPCA are, a 2′³ kennel is a 2′³ kennel, and the best thing for these guys is a lot of space where they can run around, if only to tire them out so they revert to their cute and unconscious state. It’s kind of funny how they’d run and wrestle and scamper non-stop for 20 minutes, and then just more or less keel over onto their blanket and pass out. ON or OFF, there is no dimmer switch!

For whatever reason, being an SPCA foster parent tends to be something of a feast-or-famine proposition. Once we’d been approved as foster parents last January, it was a whole two months before we got a call asking us to care for an animal. After that 10-day stint, it was another two and a half months before our next call. Then, we get the call for Grace & Harlowe in mid-October, and the day we returned them two weeks later, we were sent home with 18-month old Jezebel and her six kittens!

Nom nom nom!

Nom nom nom!

Originally (and imaginatively) named Momcat and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, we slowly over the last two weeks got to know every member of the family on an intimate (very intimate—you should have seen the state of that litter box every 6-12 hours; yikes!) level. Being the jailbait strumpet single mom of six, Momcat became Jezebel.

Her brood is made up of two boys, Chunk and Thor, and four girls: Pixie, Rosebud, Clementine, and Valentina.

Sleepy Valentina

Rosebud!

EPIC CUTENESS.

Unlike Grace & Harlowe, these guys were a little more manageable when awake; small size and quiet voices are like that.

While we love every last one of these guys, I can say that I hope we get a little time off now. I miss living in a two bathroom household!

First of all, a quick update on the foster kittens. They are super cute and getting bigger by the day. Buster is by far the bravest kitty, venturing out to explore when when put him in our room with us, and falling asleep on our comforter. The other two kitties are still very skittish, but we’re working on them. The cutest thing we’ve discovered about the kittens is that they purr in unison. Once you start scratching the top of one kitten’s head and he starts purring about it, the other two join in, even if they aren’t getting petted. Adorable!

I managed to tear myself away from the cute for a few hours and designed this new tee.

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I’ve been on vacation. Actually, I was away getting married to my long-time girlfriend. That is the reason for the lack of new art and updates here and on Facebook. Getting ready for your wedding can keep you busy, no matter how small you try to make it. Anyway, the exciting news is that we’re home now and we are fostering three adorable and mischievous kittens! This post is going to be very heavy on the pictures and videos because I had too many favorites to just pick one.

I also have a mischievous kitten story for you guys. The littlest of the kittens is a tiny calico girl named Laura. She weighs about 1.5 lbs (and that’s a generous estimate.) Saturday morning I went to check on our kittens and Laura was nowhere to be found. I totally freaked out. The kittens have been living in our upstairs bathroom, frolicking in our large empty bathtub and skittering about under the toilet. There aren’t many places for them to disappear, but this tiny Houdini had certainly managed to make herself scarce. I wondered if maybe she’d snuck out when I opened the door.

I woke up my wife and we called all our friends, enlisting them to tear apart our house for the better part of Independence Day. We worried our adult cats had gotten their paws on the missing kitten and eaten her. We worried the missing kitten had scurried into a vent somehow and was lurking inside our walls. We pulled appliances out from their corners, we left treats out hoping to entice her back. It seemed hopeless, and I dreaded fessing up to the SPCA that we’d lost one of their charges.

Around dinner time I went to check on the remaining kittens, and what did I see out of the corner of my eye? The missing kitten! I only caught a glimpse of the little fiend, but I definitely saw her. She’d been in the bathroom with her brothers all day. She disappeared as fast as she appeared, but I noticed that she had run behind our pedestal sink. I checked behind the sink and discovered there was a small cut-out in the porcelain where the pipes go in. I reached inside and felt something soft and fuzzy. The hideout was so small that only Laura could fit in there, and I was barely able to get my hand inside to pull her out. Luckily, I was able to get her by the scruff of her neck and pull her out. I duct taped the entrance to her hideout and returned her to her brothers. Hopefully that was the last of her disappearing tricks, but whoever adopts this kitten is definitely in for some trouble.

Anyway, trouble or not, the kittens are too adorable for words, so here are some pix and videos. Enjoy!

Kitties frolic in a meadow of catnip and drooling and rolling about ensues.

Sure dog owners will smugly tell you how they’ve lost so much weight since they adopted Fido, what with all the walks through the park. Now you can let them know that your kitty also makes an excellent work out companion.

Alright, I’ll be the first to admit, my cats probably would not stand for this kind of thing, but they do like to watch when they happen upon me doing sit ups or push ups. I like to imagine they would at least cheer me on, if they spoke English.

P.S. Go visit the animal rescue website and help them raise money for animals in need. All you have to do to help out is click the purple box.

In case you missed it, a few weeks back the hot vid-of-the-day at YouTube was this cat spinning around on a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. It was no ninja cat or talking kittens, but hey, they can’t all be. Today, however, the gauntlet was thrown down. In an apparent effort to unseat Roomba cat from the top of robotic-vacuum-riding-cat hill, these young turks have essentially guaranteed that Roomba Cat MkI will rapidly fade into obscurity, with his only claim to fame being that he was first. Because these guys are ADORABLE. I love my full-grown cat Oliver, who is the handsomest of all beasts, but much like rock always beats scissors, kitten ALWAYS beats cat.

The best part of this video is how it actually illustrates a playground favorite: When kids would pile onto the merry-go-round, and one would spin it as fast as possible, gradually causing the weaker kids to fly off until the strongest remained. MITTENS IS STRONGEST ONE THERE IS!

A friend forwarded these to me this afternoon, and I’m a little torn. While some of the paint jobs on these cute guys are technically impressive (and, in the case of Skele-cat, kinda bad-ass), the fact that it costs, on average, $15,000 to do this every three months is a) despicably ostentatious, especially considering the current economic plight we all face, and b) implies the cats probably don’t like the procedure—nothing quick and comfortable is ever that expensive.

That being said, making kitty turds an interactive piece of performance art as they squeeze out and become Charlie Chaplin’s “necktie” is pretty freaking hilarious.