Let me start by saying a hearty “Thank you!” to mArniAc.  After mentioning I had inadvertently recorded this video with the camera held sideways, and after venting my frustration at the lack of readily available tools that could rotate it without mangling it, I had not yet found the time to search for alternate solutions.  I already have Microsoft’s Movie Maker available but couldn’t use it because its rotate function doesn’t preserve the original aspect ratio, so the resulting output is a mashed video that looks like it’s spent way too much time under heavy weight.  Quicktime offers no rotate function.  So I was stuck until I could hunt down something else.

Then mArniAc came to the rescue.  She sent me an e-mail today with this link that included information on virtualdub, a GNU licensed video editing package.  I downloaded and installed it, and the next thing I knew the video had been rotated successfully without losing its original aspect ratio.  From there it was simple.  I added letterbox bars on the sides to return the video to its original 320×240 size (although the actual video content has been reduced to 160×240 so it fits within the standard resolutions), ran it through Movie Maker to compress the AVI stream (since Quicktime kept mangling it for some reason), uploaded it to YouTube, and finally embedded the player.

So again, thank you ever so much, mArniAc!  You saved me time and allowed me to show this cute little video of Kazon.  Sure, it won’t win an award and doesn’t show him reading Shakespeare or solving the meaning of the universe, but I thought it was worth sharing and you enabled that.  You go, girl!

Now on to the video…

As with all The Kids, Kazon and I have our little games, our personal interactions that no one else can share, and our innate understanding.  This brief film shows one such piece of our relationship.

When Kazon wants attention, he asks for it.  They all do, each in their own way, and each according to how I respond to them.  For Kazon, it’s a question in his voice and the need to reach out and touch me to get my attention.  What he says carries an undertone of purring that is quite evident.  If I don’t respond verbally, however, he gets needier and closer and needer and closer until he just can’t stand it anymore—at which point he gets as close as possible, gives me a kiss and head butt, and paws at me incessantly, talking the entire time.

That’s what you’ll see below.  All I kept doing was moving my head back and forth to let him know I was looking at him but not really listening (although I was).  At the end…  Well, at the end he takes matters into his own paws since I wasn’t giving him what he needed.