I love, I love my calendar girl

Every year in the fall, Microsoft runs what they call the Giving Campaign. Basically, it's the company push for charity giving, and employees give like crazy. Microsoft is a pretty remarkable corporate citizen. While most of these efforts aren't inclusive of vendors and other contingent staffers, some are. One of the open efforts is the Cats of Microsoft calendar, featuring photographs of employee pussycats. How it works is that you make a donation to a particular local animal shelter and then, depending upon the level of your donation, you can submit X number of photographs, a smaller proportion of which will be included in the final calendar. Now, each donor is guaranteed a certain number of photographs in the calendar--every day gets a cat so there's plenty of room--but no one is guaranteed to be the main featured photograph for a month. Those spots are competitive and chosen by a juried panel.

Of the five photographs I submitted, two were chosen for inclusion, one as the featured cat for February, and one as a runner-up for April--both pictures of my beautiful Sophie. (I also submitted two of Merlin, neither of which was chosen.) Here are those pictures:

February Sophie:



April Sophie:



That's my girl, only 3 and already a model! :-)

ETA: Just found out that Sophie will also be included in a day thumbnail picture in the calendar--that's three pics! The team tells me that this almost never happens. I'm willing to take some of the credit for this as the photographer--but Sophie gets the lion's share for being such a beautiful girl. Here's the third picture: