Halp! Tabbies!

Shaved pussy[cat]

I shaved my cat the other day.

She looks damn funny now.

She also looks very skinny. I have to keep reminding myself that this is the normal size of a cat and it's only American housecats that typically look like teddybears.

In case anybody's wondering why I did this, Lina has this amazingly silky, beautiful fur which is great for thermoregulation - in winter. In summer what we end up with is a sad pancake-shaped puddle of cat stretched out on the kitchen floor tiles desperately trying to cool off.

The other pertinent issue is grooming. Last year near the end of the summer in fruiting season, she would come home with a coat full of burrs which I would then have to spend hours picking out, and in many cases, I'd give up and out would come the scissors.

Also, hairballs. For those not familiar with the concept of "hairballs", a hairball is a mat of fur and food particles (mostly lipid) that accumulates inside a cat's stomach as it grooms itself. Sometimes, if the hair doesn't pass into the intestine and out the other end, the poor cat spends a good long time hacking and retching before vomiting it up. Before acquiring a cat, I imagined they were sort of dry things like owl pellets. Nope. They look like turds. There is a whole division of the pet product industry devoted to hairball control.

No hair -> no hairballs. Kitty happy, me happy. And since cats generally don't pass the mirror test, she doesn't know how silly she looks.

Selamba

Click for full-sized:

Gata Positioning System

For a while I've had an idea of using Google Maps to map out my cat's range, based on where people have called me from to say "Is your cat lost?" but I didn't get around to it for a while. We have 5 data points so far.

Given how bloody cold it is, she's not going outside on her own for a while, obviously, but I'll start again in the spring.

Check this out, you can click on the points to see the descriptions I wrote! The labels are the dates she was found there.
View Larger Map

NOTE TO ANY CREEPY PEOPLE WHO ARE THINKING OF USING THIS TO STALK ME: My window has a security device on it that I can set to prevent the sash from being opened more than 4 inches, just enough for the cat to squeeze through. There's no way a human could get in.

As to the post title, "gata" means female cat in Spanish. Mi gatita es princesa. ^_^

2008 New Year's Resolution

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions (e.g. "I will not bite my nails" has been a historical failure since age eight or so) but I've come up with what I think is a viable one this year:

• To match any amount I spend aside from regular groceries, household, and toiletry supplies with donations to NGOs doing food aid, health, education, social justice, or women's issues - both secular and Christian.
• To match ALL spending on my cat with donations to animal welfare (not animal rights) and wildlife conservation organizations.

This way I'll probably spend less money this year on silly stuff and waste less time Internet shopping.

Maybe it sounds a bit extreme to some people but I've found since leaving home and starting to earn my own money at age 18, that the less stuff I buy, the less stuff I want. Materialism is a self-perpetuating lust, and most of the hobbies I really enjoy require very little material.

Other things I'd like to do:

• Write at least 2 short fiction stories and submit at least 1 to Writers of the Future or a science fiction magazine.
• Draw more, and spontaneously.
• Reinstall Creatures 3/Docking Station on my computer and start tinkering with the CAOS (Creatures Agent Object Scripting) language.
• Call parents and sisters and "small" boy more often (sometimes I forget my brother has a phone because he never calls me...)
• Clean my bike more often.
• Cook for my boyfriend and make him take his vitamins regularly.
• Watch more movies.

It's gonna be a personally interesting year...my project is going to get into animal studies...I'll have to write a thesis and hopefully graduate...my parents just got transferred to Penang...two of my London cousins are getting married in the summer so I'll finally have a chance to go to England...a couple of Phases kakis are getting married in Malaysia...another couple is having a baby, which makes them the first friends my age to reproduce...my boyfriend is taking 2/3 of a year off school for an internship...his mum wants to show our respective cats in the summer (TICA lets you show household pets)...

Et cetera. 'Tis life. =)

It's Cwismas!

I'm at Steve's house for Christmas. Didn't want parents to go around telling church people that I have a boyfriend (in 2003 I brought David back; people are still asking me about the "Mat Salleh boyfriend" two years later), so anybody who asks is going to be told I'm staying "with a pastor". Which is more or less correct [cough cough].

Steve's mother's cat is fantastic. It's only 6 months old but it's enormous even for a regular-sized adult cat. I think our typical shorthair mongrel in Malaysia would take one look and slink off. He's something called a Norwegian forest cat. They're like the St. Bernards of cats or something, huge feet with fur between the pads like a snowshoe hare. Ultra cute.

Anyway...I'm not the kind who typically likes to quote the Bible a lot, scared of sounding too holy (which is stupid of me), but it's Christmas, and there's this paragraph from Paul of Tarsus' letter to the church in Ephesus which I like a lot:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.

The "two" he talks about are (AFAIK) Jews and Greeks, but you can think nowadays of so many polarities among people - ethnic, political, national, sexual, economic, educational - that are confoundingly hard to reconcile two individuals across.

Any time you have more than one human being in a situation, there will division, there will hostility, somewhere, regardless of how much goodwill there is otherwise. We're all designed to fight each other. Humans are competitive, bearing the seed of evil, Darwinian. Even relationships as close as sister against brother, son against father, friend against friend, lover against lover, are full of hostility, overt or submerged. There are so many solutions proposed for peace at various levels of human interaction, but the only universal one is love.

He is our peace, who has destroyed the dividing wall... Merry Christmas everybody, and to my non-Christian friends, Happy Arbitrary Westernised Midwinter Festival. A public holiday is a public holiday mah =)