Greetings Fabulous Felines and Hoomans of Hivelandia and surrounding communities!

I hope your week has been going well for you so far, and that you had a good "hump day!".

Smudge: A cat with two faces!

We often dedicate a lot of space on this blog to Shadow — AKA CuratorCat —but today we had some guests over for a visit and Smudge was particularly interested in them and it was a nice sunny day so we snapped a few pictures of her to share in this post!

After all, she's a very sweet and dear cat, so it's only fair that she get a little "air time!"

Enjoying the visitors, and the sunshine!

Smudge is what is generally known as a "Chimera" cat. That basically means that when you look at her straight on it looks like the two halves of her face are split exactly down the middle and has one pattern on one side and a different pattern on the other.

You got treats?

Scientists have different ideas of how Chimera cats come to being. One of them is that it is actually the twin cells of two cats that accidentally join at the cellular stage to become one cat and thus have the coloration characteristics of both cats, and it manifests particularly boldly in their face.

Chimera cats occur most often in some variation of Calico or marmalade cats. Perhaps the most famous is Venus the Two Faced Cat who has her own Following on YouTube and Instagram.

Fuzz and color patches!

One of the interesting things about photographing Smudge is that she often looks like she's slightly out of focus, at least on part of her body. This is actually an optical illusion on account of the fact that she is so fuzzy, and that the gradient between her different color patches vary from very sharp to very soft and blended together.

Enough with the pictures... time for a nap!

At 19 years of age, Smudge is in quite good health. She is largely blind in her left eye due to cataracts, and she really doesn't jump up onto much of anything taller than the couch or a chair... but other than that, all is well!

And today she insisted on having her own post!

Thanks for visiting our cat blog, and we hope to see you again!

=^..=

Love Cats? Get Involved in Hive's Cat Communties!

If you're a cat lover and often/sometimes post pictures or other content that includes your feline friends, why not become an active part of Hive's growing Cat Communities?

These are some of the more active Cat Communities — why not join them ALL? Many of the allow you to share your cat posts, even if you started at a different community!

HiveCats by Hive account@curatorcat is a central "gathering place" for cat content on Hive; promoting the use of the #hivecats tag for feline content!

Cat Snaps by Hive account@manorvillemike is a place to post pictures of your cats when you don't have a whole lot to say beyond just sharing your cute photos!

Caturday by Hive account@saboin is a community where we get to celebrate posts relating to Saturday — aka "Caturday" — our own special day!

Cat Photos by Hive account@andrarchy is a "mixed use" cat content community; posts can be just photos or longer, as long as the subject is CATS!

Cats by Hive account@captainklaus (and Sissi!) is another "general" cat content community.

There are a number of other feline communities listed on Hive, but I am not sharing them for now as they have not had any activity (by their Admins OR users) since the Steem/Hive fork. Updates as they become available!

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