One of the advantages of having a cat: free delivery of fresh fish.
Yep, that’s what one of my cats brought home yesterday. A fish. And it was alive — didn’t even seem injured.
I put the little guy in a food container filled with water (pictured above), then set it free in a nearby water ditch where it probably came from. Must have been one hell of a ride for him.
Meet Rocket.
Rocket is a (approximately) seven weeks old, cute-as-hell kitten.
I found him about a month ago, while going for a walk around my neighborhood. He was crawling through some bushes, squeaking silently, but loud enough for me to hear. I have had a few kittens throughout my life, so I immediately recognized the characteristic squeak of a baby cat calling for help. When I saw him, the poor thing looked really miserable, messy, with eyes completely matted shut. Seeing no signs of his cat mother anywhere near, and knowing that the little guy had no chance of surviving on his own, I decided to take him home.
He was soon seen by a veterinarian, and it turned out he was literally covered with ticks. As the doctor put it, they would have “sucked him dry” if he hadn’t been found. It took a whole hour to remove all those little bastards. The doctor also opened Rocket’s matted eyes, and there was some bad news. His eyes were badly infected (in doctor’s words, the infection looked “horrible”), and it was highly likely that he will be blind or nearly blind for the rest of his cat life.
This didn’t sound optimistic, but I thought, what the hell, whatever chance there is, it’s worth trying, so I took him back home and started his treatment (based on massive amounts of various eye drops). At that time, his eyes looked really bad, lifeless and empty, like those of a zombie. Rocket could open them, but it was obvious he can’t see a thing.
I have other cats in my apartment, and since Rocket’s infection was contagious, I had to isolate him. I arranged him a cozy therapy room in the bathroom and he stayed there most of the time. However, he had an unstoppable urge to explore the world around him, and whenever I opened the bathroom door, he shot out of there like a freaking rocket. Yup, that’s how he got his name.
Despite being sightless and weakened by his illness, he was unbelievably full of life. I got him a toy rat, and he spent hours biting, strangling, and generally torturing the hell out of it. Whenever he smelled food, he sniffed his way towards it like a hunting dog — and when he got to it, he ate like crazy.
I’m sure it was this exceptional lust for life that made him defeat his illness. After a few days of intensive treatment, I noticed some changes. His eyes looked less zombielike every day, and there were undoubted signs that Rocket was starting to see. This was mostly observable when he paused his activities (which mostly involved running around and biting everything) for a brief moment, and turned his head only slightly, obviously experiencing the formerly unknown sensation of sight.
About two weeks after I found him, he was all better. His eyes looked almost normal, with just a few barely noticeable spots left after the infection. The first time I saw him play with a tiny piece of paper, I had no doubt that he is able to see pretty clearly. Even the doctor was amazed by how well he was doing.
I could not keep Rocket in my apartment for good, because the other cats weren’t getting along with him especially well. Luckily, my mom decided to take him, so now Rocket has a new, loving home, and he’s a happy little troublemaker.
Every once in a while I like doing some DIY stuff just for the fun of it — I suppose it’s my deeply buried need to create something that is physical and not source code, for a change. Some time ago, I came across building instructions for a cardboard cat chaise, and I thought it might be fun to make. Besides, I had no doubts my cats would like it, as they’ve always demonstrated an evident fetish for cardboard boxes.
So, the day came yesterday — I got a big cardboard box, prepared the tools, arranged a workspace on the floor, and began reading the instructions. To my disappointment, all the dimensions in the text turned out to have been given in inches, which seemed perverted for a normal, healthy, metric-oriented person that I am.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a big deal if I just took a calculator, did a few multiplications, and got the respective values in centimetres. Or I could use the mighty unit conversion capabilities of Google search. But then I thought to myself — hey, isn’t this the 21st century, Web 2.0, and stuff? I shouldn’t be forced to do such a tedious task of entering numbers and doing the calculations, this bloody machine/Web/whatever should do it for me. With this in mind, I turned to Userscripts.org to see if there was a Greasemonkey script that could parse those awful inches and convert them to lovely centimetres right there on the webpage. But, bummer — it seemed there was no such script.
This is where my need to create something physical had to retreat for a while, as the more powerful need to immediately transform the idea for a conversion script into an implementation was taking over. I quickly coded a basic script that converted inches, feet, yards, and miles into centimetres, metres, and kilometres, and displayed the result in a tooltip when the mouse cursor was placed over the value in question, like this:
To make the script a bit more useful, I also added conversion rules for units of mass (ounces and pounds to grams and kilograms) and temperature (Fahrenheit degrees to Celsius). If you want to give it a try, you can grab it from Userscripts.org.
And the chaise? It turned out quite well, and the cats started using it instantly. Here’s one satisfied customer:
If you compare my result with the original one from the article, you’ll notice I went with a more primitive IKEA-ish design, but my cats are just simple unpretencious DSHs and they don’t like fancy furniture.
