midnight monday

Midnight Monday: Sick days

A few weeks ago, Luna had a feline upper-respiratory infection. Lots of sneezing and distress, but also a lot of time sleeping on comfy blankets:

This weekend I seemed to have a particularly nasty bug, which means being in a lot of physical distress (with fevers, aches and a runny nose), but also some time to just curl up with a blanket and rest.

It's amazing to see how similarly we deal with illness. It's a reminder that we share a lot of basic traits, despite our obvious anatomical and behavioral differences. On that note, there is a book Your Inner Fish that I am quite curious to read – and of course this would have been a good to read it, being as I have very little energy for anything else. It describes the many mundane and bizarre traits we share with other animals. For example, we have traces of fish anatomy and physiology like gills. Reading about things like this, and observing our own animal companions, it is hard too see how we don't share a common heritage, as some “anti-evolutionists” suggest.

For more black cats on Midnight Monday, visit our friends at House Panthers.

Autumn sun, Midnight Monday, and Site Improvements

Well, I am back home at CatSynth HQ in California. That means back home with Luna, of course:

Although she is calm and poised in this photo, it's been all purrs and cuddling today, even while I try to work. Not that anyone is complaining.

Today we enjoyed what I traditionally called the “August sun”, that really deep yellow sunlight that gives everything, but especially green leaves, a rich yellow coloring, that feels warm even as the air cools down. It is difficult to capture in a digital photo, but here is one attempt:

I think I should change “August sun” to “Autumn sun”, since the phenomenon extends well into September and even October. And not only here on the west coast. New York was exceptionally warm and getting plenty of “Autumn/August” sun this past week.

I have been working on several improvements for this site, including upgrading our software. As usual, a few things break in the process (e.g., comment displays were a little off, the “tag search” featured on the highways page and elsewhere was completely broken, our “cats synthesizers music art opinion” slogan was missing, etc.). Those are mostly fixed, and now we can proceed to making actual improvments.

Actually, the main change we need to make is in our hosting service. The good folks at A Plus net (the same people who messed up our domain name and left us stranded in the CatSynth FEMA trailer for a week) let us know that we have exceeded our CPU usage limits (not storage or bandwidth) and will need to switch to a more expensive hosting plan – all in a message from the friendly-sounding “abuse at aplus dot net.” So we could simply upgrade our plan, but since our lease is up on October 7 anyway, it might be a good time to shop around for an alternative. We welcome suggestions from our readers on good and bad experiences with hosts – please leave a comment or contact us. Of course, we have to act quickly on this matter…

Midnight Monday Studio Cat

Luna wanders into the (somewhat messy) studio, where I spent much of this weekend working on several projects, including music you will probably never hear and the Sunday podcast. It's a rare shot of both the PC and Mac laptops along with the keyboards and other gear.

Actually, I think the ketzela is more interested in those cushions and bedding than in any musical or technological mischief.








Midnight Monday Moral Dilemma

Late last night I caught Luna appreciating one of my art prints a little bit too intently. That almost always means she has founding some poor unsuspecting creature to hunt. And in this case, there was indeed a rather large spider that had crawled behind the print and then along the nearby wall. You can see Luna and her arachnid target in the photo to the left.

Luna loves to hunt large invertebrates, though she rarely catches them. And anything that high up on a wall is pretty hopeless. But in reality is just a game, a chance for Luna to play with her hunting instincts.

So should one try to coax spiders or insects closer so that she can better play at hunting with them. Or leave them be? My instincts always suggest the latter, letting the bugs get away, despite the desire to bring more small joys into my cat's life.

Of course, this question is not something that keeps me up at night – and I have no innate fear of spiders. But it's interesting, and a good excuse to participate in “Midnight Monday.”