The Cat Amazon

SO what can you do when your cat apparently likes boots, boxes, and a life on the West Coast?

Hello. Today I'll let Dr Furgatroyd provide the article, what with him being - you know... A cat and everything, and this being about an (attractive, he assures me that the subject is a most attractive queen) cat. And I'll include a cat classic country Youtube video down the end of the article. (After the good Doctor has finished the article, I've no wish to see my shed dust extractor project turned into a fusion reactor. Imagine the first time I turned it on and it generated power - the Men In Black would have to hunt me down and kill me, claim there was a gas leak that caused the explosion that killed everyone in a 500m radius - and Furgatroyd would just stroll out of the roiling destruction, smooth his fur, and - well, just make sure you follow the link...)

It's a slightly spooky tale, it arrived on our News desk this morning, right when we've experienced an eerie autumnal fog here. Make of that what you will, and  - take it away Dr Furgatroyd! 

A tortie cat (tortoiseshell, a cat with three colours in her coat, and I say "her" because that third colour takes away a spot normally reserved for the male gene so torties are female) survived six days on an impulse journey.

When Carrie Clark realised her cat Galena was missing she went through all the usual agonies cat owners are familiar with when cats go AWOL. Flyers posted locally in Lehi, Utah garnered no responses. Searching the neighbourhood for fuzzy speed bumps met only negative results.One bad result, one good result.

But Galena was still missing... 

For six days...

In a classic Shroedinger's Cat / Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle / the Amazon Box Dark Energy scenario, she was eventually found alive in Riverside, California, 860km southwest of her hometown Lehi. In an Amazon box. And the husband did it. (Oh crap, I think I gave it away. Did I give it away? No, luckily that didn't really give it away. Carry on!)

Bear in mind that cats naturally prefer Schroedinger's thought experiment and celebrate it at every opportunity by jumping into boxes -any boxes - that happen to be around. Especially, apparently, Amazon boxes. Their fondness for Heisenberg too they show in the way that you can only ever see where they've been by the trail of items swept to the floor; or measure their speed when they do their 3AM Zoomie Skedaddles. 

The place in Riverside where she was found was an Amazon warehouse. Six days after going missing, she was a bit dehydrated and starving hungry but otherwise seemed okay. Thanks to her chip, her family was contacted and they flew to Riverside, picked up Galena, and drove home with their blue eyed girl. 

Turns out that Mr Carrie (who, given the cat's mineral name and the fact that this story is about to deal with work boots, may have been working at a mine?) had bought several pairs of workboots from Amazon, selected the pair that fitted best, put those aside, and turned back and taped up the box to return the unneeded pairs of boots. 

You see where this is going, right? There's an accessible cardboard box. It's an Amazon box. It contains several pairs of boots, and a space where a pair of boots have been selected and taken out. A cat-sized space, in a box, an Amazon box...

Schroedinger Points In Space, Time, And Alternate Universes

Apparently that's the Schroedinger Point, that moment where two Universes intersect and create a fork, one with Galena remaining at home, and one where she gets a holiday on the West Coast. We're apparently in the latter one. We draw a discreet veil over any other possible Universes which this Schroedinger point may have brought into existence. (Sorry - Multiverses aren't "fair" or "cruel" - they just ARE. And Bad Things happen in some of them...)

Take-away Points

1. If you have a cat and a box, you have potential for a Schroedinger Point to coalesce.
2. If you feel you'll ever face such an event, get your pets chipped! It does save many animals every week.
3. If you're the husband that created the trigger conditions and then didn't perform the most basic safety precaution of looking in the box to establish the starting parameters, make sure the newspapers never get your first name, because Names Have Power. Let your wife take the flak.

Seriously - get your pet chipped. If you pack a box - any box - and you have a pet - any pet, we hear that dogs, reptiles, and some birds have been lobbying to be permitted to experience Schroedinger Point Amazon Box events. They also get under or over fences, the postie unwittingly lets them out when delivering your parcels, and may also get into laundry sacks, your gardening Wellingtons, or secrete themselves in your car while your attention.s distracted and then suddenly appear when you're on the Freeway crossing three lanes to the exit - and in this case, you're also part of the experiment...

The End (But Wait! There's More!)

Keep reading for the video link, meanwhile please share this article if you enjoyed it, and us the donation buttons to help me keep these sites online and alive.

Still waiting for that link?

Okay - here it is. Chad Morgan is an Aussie who did comedic Country music in Australia, back when "political correctness" meant voting Labor. Enjoy!

From Ye Old Blogge: Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Memory Lane

From Ye Old Blogge: Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

At The Old "Cat'N'Coincidence"

Ghostie (my little ginger buddy) plucked me out of the doldrums on Friday. He'd been a bit more miaowy than he normally is and seemed t be sleeping more. By evening he had a limp - and scored an immediate visit to the vet - and by 6:15 he'd had a dislocated knee joint put back in and been prescribed anti inflammatories even though he showed no immediate signs of bursting into flame. But it did reduce the inflammation around the knee joint, over the next four days.

And because he kept wanting to jump and climb stuff, he became a carpet cat for a week while his hip relocateda. Loved the special attention, the cuddles and earscratches, and has been very cute. His litter tray went in the bathroom, and he joined me in the bathroom once. This a a "biggified" bathroom wehere we tore out the pathetic shower nook and the baby surprise size bath, and installed a large spa with shower.

No shower curtain you see - and usually no cats - no SANE cats - would stay there when anyone was showering, Ghostie picked the spot on the mat that was driest, indicating that it rarely got wet, and then he studied me, really did the "watch every move" thing. Then he waited until I was looking at him, raised his paw, licked it, and washed his face.

The message was that he'd figured it out, I was grooming and washing and he was down with that, he watched a while longer and then started washing himself too.

Now coincidentally to the cat becoming so intelligent, my other system admin stayed home Monday, with a busted knee from football. And here's a coincidence, Diego Maradona is also in hospital off work (with heart problems (that I don't have) and respiratory problems.) Which I do have. Now if only I hadn't misread Maradona as Madonna, maybe things would have settled down. But obviously I didn't. Becaue McDonald's manager in Australia died of a heart attack...  Think that's mad anyone?

I think we make a habit of ignoring coincidences and odd similarities in our lives, and maybe we're missing a lot of the fun of life because of that. I'm making a conscious effort from now on to note and remember as many of them as I can, and blog them for your amusement...

Sunday, April 18, 2004

Weird Search Behaviour

WTF? Type in projectgutenberg.org and get taken to http://iraqi-mission.org ??? How the hell can IE make such a connection? Is PG a subversive organisation, is Saddam considered a benevolent source of wisdom, WTF WTF WTF?

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.    

Recess Of Ye Old Blogge Posts

Just a quick note, "From Ye Old Blogge" is going on a winter recess while I thrash out a few knotty software template issues. I'm also trying out a few other things that may or may not become useful.

This Sunday marks a break in those postings that'll last until the weather warms up again, sooner if I can get through a pile of accumulated to-do items.

Here are the key bits:

Why The Recess?

Because - I'm trying to create code and templates for my articles that should lift them out of the plainness that most blog templates have, which will hopefully put in header image content *only* when other image content doesn't exist further down, that can work out which publication it's on and put in only the relevant links, etc. It's probably easy-peasy for a webdev - but for me it's been a headache and I need to sort it out because currently adding my code to each article manually takes valuable time, time I really don't have.

Yeah there are already templates that change layout and colours and fonts but they're specific to blogspot/blogger and WP and so forth - and also, I'd have to write (at this stage) more than ten different templates and keep each one updated individually - I can't just change just the link to some common resource that I share on all articles (like (say) a bookstore link or whatever) without having to find and manually change each template on each publication that it might be relevant on. 

It's nothing revolutionary or cutting-edge but it's difficult for me to do with everything else going on. My brain hurts. 

Also A Reason

I also have a lot of catching up to do in the real world. Our kitchen got an upgrade from the landlord which means 1/4 of a remodel and a really new but very basic electric stove, and a loss of storage spaces that I've been painstakingly building for things and the spaces where those storage cabinets were, are now occupied by blank tile splashback that I can't attach the storage to or that gets in the way of the cabinets. And a whole list of other stuff I now have to deal with if I want my kitchen back to something I can enjoy working in again.

A bloke can only enjoy cooking on the electrically-powered equivalent of a campfire for so many days before "pretend we're camping" ceases to be fun.

The handyman also broke the mixer tap I'd bought specifically to fit the 13.5cm water pipe spacing in the kitchen (everything else in the civilised world uses 15cm spacing, it took me ages to find a suitable tap) and so for the moment our washing facilities have also gone back to "Click Go The Shears" days as well.

And I know - it was my tap, the landlord gave tacit permission for it by letting his plumber install it for us - but now his carpenter/handyman has rendered it unusable, and I - I'm just too soft on people. I can't make the issue a problem for Bob the Builder (as I'll call him) so I even gave him $50 to go buy two standard taps as a temporary fix because I didn't want this coming out of his wage. I can't make it the landlord's problem because he's on a few weeks' leave and besides he's done the right thing for us all the way and even let me fit a tap that suits me but might not suit the next tenant.

So I've bought a new mixer tap but - aw hell just read on, it's near the bottom of the post and more info on a linked post. Suffice to say I'm still in Click Go The Shears timewarpsville... 

Disclaimer: The landlord has done the right things all the way along, we no longer have ANY polluting gas appliances - and is to be commended on their efforts to make the house a home - but it's just thrown a spanner in our works at an already fraught time. 

My shed needs to be finished and space made for the new parking spot, the heater I bought needs to be installed in a way that won't need me to punch holes in the walls, there's still shelving and storage work uncompleted, and due to our medical crisis - which has ended better than we at first expected - is still going to take most of our efforts to manage the recuperation of for a year at least. 

And I'm as always trying to find a way to turn this hobby of mine into something that I can use to offset the costs of operating the websites and domain names and project building. And then that can perhaps put even a little bit of the thousands I've poured into the things, back into our petty cash tin so we can afford to do more at this time.

Future Directions

First and foremost, I want to spend time with my Other Half because I/we've realised that we want as much time together as we can fit in. I'll still be posting (no moaning from the back row there) as regularly as I can, but I'm putting my "recap of old posts" time into making the publication process and articles a bit better. 

I can also see that there's a crop ofAI apps that'll soon make it relatively easy even for an old dog like myself to stitch together audio and video content with MY text, video, and voice - and produce something that'll not be too embarrassing to post online.

Automation

I'm also at my wits' end with the automated scheduling / posting solutions I've been using, as they keep b0rking. I can only afford to use a cobbled-together solution using chains of "free" sites, the most affordable option would be close to $30-$40 a month - and I just can't afford it. This is why I really need a few people with means to make monthly donations. Many small donations will take a considerable load off my pension

Why scheduling and automation are important is that I can see a definite correlation between when a post schedules and when views of that and other pages goes up for a few days. More eyes on the pages means more chance that someone will share the page or even donate, and when that happens I'll finally be able  afford to use an auto-schedule service. 

As things stand I'm spending a fair bit of time finding scheduled posts, extracting the permalink and title, writing a slug for it, and then manually posting that to the three main places I release, FB, Mastodon, and BlueSky. If I was using automation I could cover around a dozen release sites with only the time cost of writing a slug - but right now, those three are all I can manage.

Alternatively

Go to Teds News Stand and bookmark that, then you can go there anytime and check out my last twenty articles across all my publications updated almost in real time. If you take a look you'll see a link to subscribe to my weekly newsletter but I can't recommend doing it right now because - well, this:

I'm also working on getting a "new" newsletter software up and running that doesn't want my money every month or that offers a "free up to 500 subscribers" service - and then wants me to manually transfer the newsletter among their pool of servers every few months and having to transfer every aspect of the newsletter manually. At that rate I'm better off with a list of email addresses and a copy to Outlook running on my laptop, extra work that I really don't have enough time as a sole person to manage. 

Anyone with solutions to these things - sites that have truly free newsletter and/or scheduling sw, or tools for automating video and podcast production - please please please drop me a note in comments or using my Mastodon account.

All Right - The Last Li'L Bit:

That Damn Tap

I'm using (or rather - sad smiley - was using) a bathtub mixer tap with integrated hand shower diverter. Because it saves water AND saves my hands. They look like this:

This is the "replacement" tap, and it's almost 2cm too wide...

The rest of the story's here. For now  - long story short, it took me almost five years to get permission to install this tap and we've had it for less than a year before the handyman fwrecked it, and now ..... timewarp forward a week or so .....  UPDATE: Got a handyman and between us we took off the new tiles the landlord's handyman had put up and finally spaced the plumbing out to fit standard spacing. Photos will be back on the PTEC3D Blog link. 

The Rest Of The CTA

As always, please share this page and my others like it, use the links and buttons below. Wider circulation means perhaps a few donations that can take the load off our limited pensions.

Use the Ko-Fi cup or Paypal icons to make a donation if you can, it really would help,

Go forth and be Earthlings!

Unrelated, but sorta linked, but humorous anyway:

While writing this I was also listening to a podcast about female orgasm, the discovery of the G spot, and then the eventual discovery that this spot seems connected to the clitoris. The presenters were pretty out there and open about it all. (But wait, there's more.)

Decided to go to ABC podcasts page to find the episode there, accidentally tapped an adjacent food blog page tab by mistake - and it had a picture of a slider sized bun split in half with a cocktail frank laid in it like a mini-hotdog. Or just like an illustration out of a biology textbook... 

That's partly the reason this article and the PTEC3D article I linked have taken so long... It's hard to type when your eyes are streaming with tears from laughing. 

Hominids out there - REAL Earthling hominids - be kind to your mate and your family, be kind to the other Earthlings from the most advanced (cats, of course) to the lowliest plankton, and look after our spaceship, because one day it'll be a really good ship if we start cleaning now and fixing the clagged-up life support system. 

😹😹😹😹😹