Noise
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Tusus Census
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Winter Cat House 2018


First snow. Fiona and Buddy were each in a house, then they paired up on the second floor to keep each other warm.
Alfie still doesn't like being enclosed and is opting for a beam underneath the deck. I'll have to work on him about this.
I don't know where Liza stays these days. She was one of the first cathousers when she was young but she's a crazy old lady now and hasn't partaken. I will make sure there's room at the inn if she changes her crazy little mind.
Okay, Alfie (who doesn't like being enclosed and has been sleeping on the roof of the cat houses) came down from the beams to do just that. That's a thermal tarp beneath him, so I hope it reflects body heat in some small way. He looks cozy enough.
LIZA is in da house!

We discussed our concern yesterday about Liza (the crazy old girl who hasn't slept in the parameters of cat house central for quite a while). This morning I checked to see how breakfast was coming along and there's Liza in one of the doorways of the Cat House.

I HATE my stupid phone. It is so user unfriendly that I miss a ton of awesome shots. Too much activity (by me) will get the Space Monkeys uneasy and they'll take off for a while.

That's why a lot of these pics look like photos of Bigfoot and Nessie.
I'd rather err on the side of their comfort than winning Pulitzers for Photojournalism.
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A couple of days late because of the hurricane but...

A really nice donation to the cat fund made this possible. 60lbs of dry food, 120 cans of wet food, a BIG jar of treats and that green thing on the bottom is another thermal tarp for the cat houses when I put them up again. Thank you so much, Karen :) <3 


Space Monkey Update August 2018
 
Grem August 2017
I was just thinking last night how I haven't posted any Space Monkey news for quite a while. The main reason is I haven't had a camera on my phone for ages. I've been doing all pics and videos on my Amazon Fire which is so old and slow now it's near useless. 
Everything has been good except for, of course, our two sad losses. Earlier this year Elsa (http://heatercase.blogspot.com/2018/03/very-sad-news-elsa-died-yesterday.html)

Liza is a crazy old lady now (they age so quickly out there). She doesn't hang with the group but, sure enough, knows when breakfast and dinner come out of the magic door.

If she's late, I throw a little plate out there for her.

Then she goes off to whatever hermit hideout where she spends her day and night.

The 3 Amigos are all grown up and each has their own personality.

  

Grem July 2018

Grem is Grem (see video). I've decided to keep her outside 98% of the time. That's where she wants to be. She wants to hang with the gang. I think she's been instrumental in socializing the colony as well as it is.

I still bring her in for maelstroms and fireworks.
I'm not even going to try to throw a flea collar on her- plus they are dangerous for mostly outside cats (accidental hanging).
It's been a year since she was rescued, terrified and doomed, from that terrible steelyard with the sparks and HEAVY machinery and mud.
She's VERY friendly to me. She's like a regular house cat. I can pick her up whenever I want to and she'll tolerate a big smooch and everything, but she is still very wary of others and I'm glad since she's spending so much time out there

Friend of Moon Base Heater Susan is sending some nontoxic topical flea and tick lotion (thanks!).

We'll see what happens then.

To stock up extra well for Autumn and Winter, I'm gonna bump up the target and ask past contributors NOT to donate any more than you have (you've already been wonderful) but rather share the link again so we can get some new eyes and ears out there.

Later this month I will do my first big order from Walmart.com, as they are giving Amazon Prime a run for their money (and I fired Amazon Prime over a year ago). Walmart has some awesome prices on cat food and free delivery and all that stuff.

So there, how's that? ;)




Sometimes trying our best is all we can do...

A few months ago, I found this little bugger on my back (outside) stairs. Top step. I'm thinking one of the Space Monkeys put her there from lord knows where. I could have stepped on her. 
Irene was doing yard work and called for me to come out and pointed to this little pumpkin. We honestly thought she was dead. Flies, zilch movement. 
I was about to put her in a plastic bag when she suddenly took a big breath. I gave her some water with a syringe and took her to the vet. Vet cleaned out her mouth and throat of some goo. He said the next 24 hours will tell. 
I gave her a little kitten formula every hour and, when she was not on this heated cozy, I cupped her in my hands and gently exhaled warm air on her. 
Thanks so much, everybody. Your thoughts and love were so very appreciated. Sadly, the little baby didn't make it through the night. It was getting harder and harder to feed her. She not only didn't have a nursing reflex (which could be one of the tough facts of nature as to why she was abandoned) but then she stopped swallowing altogether. 
Take comfort in that she didn't have to leave the world all alone on a cold wet cement stairway. All evening and until a little after midnight, she was warm, dry, cozy and handled with love. I managed to get her core temp back up and she napped and stretched and yawned like any little baby until she was quietly gone. 
And she was purring! It says newborns can purr after 6 six days. I guess she was an advanced student. RIP, Little Baby.
VERY SAD NEWS: 
Elsa died yesterday. I don’t know at what point she came back into the yard but, for quite a while, I thought she was sun-napping on the grass. It wasn’t until I let Grem out for the afternoon that I saw her (Grem) run up to Elsa to patently annoy her. 
Elsa didn’t budge and Grem moved on.
There was no sign of trauma or blood when I examined her, but there are so many dangers out there. Statistics give ferals an average 4-5 year lifespan. The vet estimated her to be 2-3 last year.
I lined a box with a plastic bag and (using big disposable gloves, of course) gently transferred her. I know it’s silly, but I made a nice bed of newspapers for her.*
With all the assistance and moral support of so many of you, we managed to get her through several very harsh winters and give her a home and a family. It’s not lost on us that she wanted to come home before passing away.
For documentation, I took some pics of how I found her. I debated posting one but chose to show her at her best. 
* it's ironic that I never got to hold her until she was gone. That's why I was extra respectful while handling her.

SPACE MONKEY UPDATE: Winter Mix

(This is an earlier video where I put out regular dry food AND the winter mix. I think you can tell which was a hit.)
 Pulverize dry food into powder.
Heat up canned wet food in hot water.

 Add heated food to powdered food. Add warmed up chicken broth and olive oil. Mix it all up!
 Meow? More like MEE YUM!
 I put this plate out just before I made this post. Clean plate by the time I looked back. They LOVE it.

Space Monkey Update

 
With the recent zero degree temps, snow storms and the addition of the 3 Amigos to the tribe, I resorted to getting real pre-fab cat houses. The ones I built were getting pretty banged up. These are actually cute and provide LOTS of room and adequate roof/couch support that they like. I lined up the front door and back door on each , creating a larger walk through two room shelter.
Some of them don't like the texture of hay, so I stuff the hay into old flannel pillow cases and they work great.
Unfortunately, the thermal tarps keep you from getting a better look at the new shelters, but they are invaluable for increasing the insulation and warmth.
The 3 Amigos are getting big! Here we captured two of them back at the ranch while everybody was out doing important space monkey business.
 

A Love Letter To My Car

by Heater Case 


A man once said, "I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride."


Another man once said, "Sometimes I sit up at night and wonder how I ever got this far, but I guess I'll always pull out from under 'long as I got a car and guitar."


Okay, I was the second guy, but take a good look at your car. It's metal and rubber and plastic and glass. It's perfect, except for the human factor. That's why we make agreements amongst ourselves. We all stay on the same side of the road. We all stop and go at the same colored light.


There are also agreements we make within ourselves. Those are the agreements we break the most because we don't think there's anybody to call us on them.


"Character is who you are in the dark" are the immortal words uttered by Dr. Emilio Lizardo in the motion picture The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension. It is the only movie of which I own a copy and the only movie I've ever tried to fashion my life after.


Character being what you are in the dark is probably one of the most significant self-awareness tools I have ever come across.


Every affect you have worked so hard to perfect is useless in the dark. There is no room for poseurs and wannabes. There are no coattails to grab and no rear ends to kiss. It's just you, baby, and the door out could be eight miles away or two inches behind you. That's why getting there is half the fun.


That's why a car is more than just metal and rubber and plastic and glass. It's a means to get somewhere or a means to get away. A car is a container for our hopes and dreams or a trash can for our failures. A car is a conveyance to a better place, a Promised Land. A car is a church… and traffic is a Holy War.


 


Why No Radio?

by Heater Case


Back in the '60s, long before the twenty-something age and twenty-something job era (including becoming the greatest recreational director in the history of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health), the first profession I ever envisioned was disk jockey.


I truly believe that mass communication reached its finest point in the first half of the twentieth century. There was radio and print, supplemented with the occasional phone call and telegram. The written word is probably the most amazing talent of our species. To think that someone could transfer their thoughts into little squiggles and, years later, recreate their 'voice' for a distant reader is tantamount to cosmic.


The only equivalent miracle was the ability to talk over great distances. I often wish that our mass communication technology stopped there. We would still have made it to the Moon. After all, Flash Gordon made it to Mongo.


When information retrieval requires more than one of your five senses there is a lessening in the quality of life. You become part of the machine. Sure, back then, there were the theater and movie houses. Yes, they involved a voluntary hostage-taking of your eyes and your ears for a voyeuristic escape. But these had built-in time restraints. In the era that followed, even television knew when it was time to go home. Remember test patterns? The national anthem?


These days, we are constantly teetering on the brink of a twenty-four hour cable/satellite/internet looking glass and the resulting couch potato syndrome is rampant. Maybe this is an example of what is referred to as the Gaia Effect, where Macro Organism Earth always has the last word when it comes to organization. In light of overpopulation, cathode tube catatonia could be a way of keeping everyone from bumping into one another. Either that or the government has found a way to keep us in a herd until the flying saucers can harvest us for the Chicken McNuggets that we really are.


Radio was the cultural oracle of my generation. It delivered a message and that message was music. No obligatory video and no increasingly rapid cinematography to hold its grasp on an ever decreasing attention span. We never even knew what the musicians looked like until we checked out the album cover. A concert hitting your town was right up there with major holidays and a free concert in the park was manna from heaven. Our guides and mentors were the disk jockeys.


They were the naturalists in an exploding Gadda Da Vida. They knew the bands and all their migratory patterns. The later the hour, the more time they had to talk. It was sometimes as much a treat to catch them emceeing a concert as the Mass that ensued. They were the keepers of the Holy Flame.


It was Horace Greeley Junior High Assembly Day, 1966, and our guest speaker was WABC's 'Cousin' Bruce Morrow. During the question and answer period, I raised my hand and was called upon. I asked Cousin Brucie what it was like where he worked. He responded by describing the office building that housed the radio station.


In retrospect, I should have said, in front of the entire student body, "Hey, I'm really interested in radio. Could I come down there sometime and watch you work? Hmmm? Huh?"


That brazen foot in the door ploy had more potential than even I could have imagined, as Morrow would later move to the legendary and way cool WNEW-FM.


Heater's Law #7: Hindsight is a wish you already know didn't come true.


In the years that followed several other crossroads eluded my grasp. The '80s, however, was a spaghetti bowl of pathways that eventually put me in touch with several radio types and, eventually, several radio gigs. I felt like the Mother Ship had retrieved its last lost crewmember. 


When creative differences and upper management interference crept in, I attributed them to problems ingenious to that station and not the nature of a bigger beast.


By 1991, I had become a major personality at a major station in a major market. It was at that point I realized what the game had become. It was no longer the love of music or the love of radio as an art form. It was Arbitron, Q Ratings, consultants and, most of all, money. Radio had become a business as cut and dry as any firm on Wall Street.


Ninety percent of all disk jockeys were abused, overworked, underpaid and constantly in fear for their jobs. Playlists were determined weeks in advance by computers and freedom of speech had gone the way of vinyl. Listening to the radio was like listening to those censored, stiff upper lip tapes made by prisoners of war.


Throughout my life, I've pursued many a lover on a pedestal and I've seen them all crash in the flames of reality, But you never forget your first. 

What I Learned in High School

by Heater Case

* Believe it or not, you will have dreams about high school for the rest of your life. This is a proven psychological fact. Most of them won’t make sense. Most of them will be about the hallways. I suggest you spend part of your next three years memorizing details of the layout of your school, so that your dreams will at least be architecturally accurate, albeit confusing in other aspects.

* No matter how you feel about your looks, you look great. I know this is tough to swallow sometimes. Years from now, you’ll be wishing you look this good.

* Every girl in your class notices you, whether she acts like it or not. Make sure you don’t pick your nose when you think nobody’s looking… ‘cause somebody probably is.

* Don’t say mean things about people just to fit in. Say mean things about people who say mean things. It uses up the same amount of energy, but it shows courage and character. Much like the Batmobile, chicks dig courage and character.

* In fact, less is more. I was terribly shy in High School. When I graduated, everybody finally told me that they thought I was the coolest guy in school, ‘cause I didn’t say stupid things. All the hottest girls (with whom I thought I’d never have a shot) all signed my yearbook wishing I was their boyfriend. Yikes! Don’t let this happen to you. The ‘not knowing until graduation’ part, I mean.

* Learn how to type. You already use computers more than anybody who has ever lived. This is the 21st Century. That might not mean a lot to you, but it did when it was only the 20th century.

* Righty/Tighty, Lefty/Loosey
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