Diesel is a cat, not a petroleum product.
He lives in the Adirondack Park with his two people and his pal Alex, a female stripey cat (and purebred Iowa Wildcat). Diesel has things to share, observations about the world around him from his feline perspective. In these pages you'll follow Diesel's paws-on exploration of places, people, critters, issues and more.
Welcome to Diesel's domain and the unique perspective of a curious Wisconsin Snowcat.
I know that, with the announcement of a new iPad, you immediately thought of me. As I've blogged here before, there is little doubt that Apple was inspired by cats when they named this thing: it's svelte, black (now it is white too, so my pal Snowball is pretty excited), and easy to use with pawpads and when lacking opposable thumbs. It's almost like copyright infringement (but, legally, it is not...).
I'm honored to be one of the blogging cats that led to this great leap forward.
Nevertheless, I ask you: where is the love? Why hasn't Steve Jobs sent me an iPad? Indeed, I'm seeing myself now highlighted against a brand new white iPad 2 - blogging and FBing into the night.
It's a missed opportunity really. I'd happily endorse the iPad 2 for cats and humans. Or, I will give them kibble....I have offered. I don't know why they don't respond.
Just think how much easier it would be for the cat to play Angry Birds at night! (Thanks Ant Laura!)
I love Mac...he will always be my aluminum cat pal, but Steve, Apple people, it's time to give back.
By now you know how much I esteem the Aluminum Cat, the immortal portal. I do not begrudge the amount of time Oom spends stroking Mac, because she lets me use him too. And the new Aluminum Cat is very nice because the mouse and the letter-making thingy don't have tails. So I can use them from the floor to draft documents at night....though, as I have mentioned before, it is sometimes very hard not to play paw hockey with the mouse.
But let's face it, the big screen is HUGE. That's cool for Oom, but for my needs it could be smaller and lighter...about the size of the whole letter-making thingy. Running around between letter thingy, mouse and screen can be pretty tedious for a young author like myself.
I've been wishing for a simple all-in-one: no cumbersome lid to pry open without thumbs, an integrated touch screen made for the paw pad, seamless with the Aluminum Cat, easy to use on the floor, in a window sill, or curled up in bed, and powerful enough to hold and organize lots of photos and the musical caterwaulings of my cat pals - an ultimate feline immortal portal web tool.
So I'm thrilled to see that the nice Apple people have brought out a computer just for cats. The iPad they call it. Neat how they named it after the cat pad, don't you think? It's a brilliant strategy to bring out an immortal portal that appeals to a significant portion of the estimated 60 million cats living in the US.
I'm a bit stumped why they are marketing it to humans?
I notice my pals at North Country Public Radio were giving one away. My friend June says that if I renew my membership early, I'll have a chance at winning it. That would be cool. So I grabbed Oom's credit card (just another insult that cats can't open their own bank accounts) and signed back up. I love listening to NCPR in the morning, but the chance to win an iPad...sweet.
I'll update you if I win. I know my chances are slim, so I'll be working on other strategies to convince Oom to buy us one....like every morning when she wakes Mac up, right there on the screen will be an iPad.
Tell the folks at Apple that I'm available for endorsements.
The great electrical juice maker has been inconsistent, and from time to time, Aluminum Cat and all the other blinking whirring things in the house don't work. This makes the folks pretty uptight...
Oom in particular tends to swear a lot when Aluminum Cat hibernates because the juice goes away. She's going to a bored meeting in Arizona this weekend, and she's putting all kinds of pictures in a big electric folder to show people. To be extra careful, she turns Aluminum Cat off at night. Try as we might, Alex and me have not been able to push the tiny convex "on" button on its back.
So my blog time has been curtailed.
On the other paw, I've been having some nice outings in the mornings. No new snow in the past few days, with the weather warming and the sun out. We do now have a solid foot of packed snow, and this morning even Oom could float on itlike a snowcat. It was shiny and crystally in the sunlight, the air was crisp and my brook was loud and beautiful in the morning light.
We are all thinking spring at this point. The Goldfinches are getting their brighter yellow feathers.
We found these tracks just outside.
Mr. Raccoon I presume, from his fingers.
A little later the same morning, I found a vole working along the snow line.
I got so excited, I forgot to really do anything...not that I want to harass a little cold vole dude minding his own business outside.
The snow is even deeper today. It has not let up at any point though it got suspiciously wet in the mid-afternoon. We're guessing 14" at least, and I'm willing to swear on my kibble tin that it's more like 18".
I don't have many pictures for you today because there was an incident.
We went out in the morning after coffee and waking up the aluminum cat. The snow was decidedly deeper and still lacking pack - tough going even for a purebred Wisconsin Snowcat. I kept falling in holes and climbing out. Finally I hitched a ride on Oom's shoulder's. We visited the wetland where the following incident took place.
Did you get the hint? We didn't.
Large amounts of wet snow had been collecting on tree branches and, with a slight breeze this morning, was sliding off the branches with loud thuds. We saw a whopper release off the big white pine on the other side of my brook...big sloppy plop into the water!
After this lightweight incident with an ash tree dump, as we headed back in, we stopped to admire some tracks under my friend the big white pine. The next thing I knew there was a sliding and whomping sound and the world went kind of light and dark all at the same time.
The cat was buried! The pine tree threw a big old snow wad all over me and Oom. She didn't get buried, but I could tell from the cursing and swearing that the camera might be more in my situation.
It's a natural snowcat defense to lift the tail flag-like in a drift so folks know where you are....I think my tail was sticking out of the heap of fluffy stuff.
Like a sherpa, Oom dug me out...it didn't take much really. (The camera had one more shot in it.)
Actually, it was kind of fun.
I wonder what will happen tomorrow? It's been snowing all day!
I've been working on a pathbreaking treatise for my next blog, but then I realized: this is my 100th post!
Who would have imagined, when I first set paw to keyboard almost 3 years ago, that I'd be blogging my way into so many human, feline, sciurid (that's marmot and his cousins), and canine lives?
Here I am working with my art director on a recent blog. Layout is exhausting.
I write my own stuff and usually work late at night. The new immortal portal aluminum cat has a keyboard without an umbilical cord and a mouse without a tail. The mouse without the tail is a bit of a problem, as it's hard to stay focused and not slap it around the house like a hockey puck. Anyway, I can put out a good draft, but the html editing foxes me.
The other part of my team is my editor. He tends to work alone, bouncing stuff back to me after he's sliced and diced it. After a couple years of patient correction, I'm just beginning to understand the comma....don't get me started on the semi-colon.
It's been a pleasure sharing the virtual scratching pad with all of you. Thanks for keeping up with my cat-antics. For goodness sake, keep writing and commenting and, for the computer savvy among you: follow me!
In celebration of 100, I've gone into my private video archives and rustled up a special clip. My art director has also gone to some lengths to improve your video watching experience!
Here is my uncut 2008 Catolympics trial in Bathtub Gymnastics. It's true, before tree-scaling became my dedicated sport (okay, except for paw hockey, tail-chasing with Alex, and hiking) back when I was younger, more energetic, but generally lacking focus, I engaged in a wide range of cat-sports.
The goal of Bathtub Ball, the more common name, is to play wildly with the bouncy ball so that it is (a) either constantly in danger of bounding out of the tub or (b), for the more mature and physically adept cat, always on the verge of spiraling into the drain. Much like Olympic gymnastics for humans, Bathtub Ball pushes cats to engage in challenging but graceful, physical pyrotechnics with the illusion of ease and, all the while, skirting the edge of disaster - in this case, the danger of the ball going down the drain! Notice my careful final positioning of the ball at the end of the routine.
My female person earns the kibble by sitting at her desk all day and staring at the Aluminum Cat. She calls it Mac. Alex and I are convinced it's really a cat since Oom spends so much time looking at it and stroking it. She only loves cats, birds, and Boo that much.
I know from using it myself that the Aluminum Cat is a special immortal portal cat for blogging to humans and my cat pals around the world.
Anyway, Oom actually does work. She helps save wild places and makes critters' and humans' lives better by protecting their land, air, and water. She works with three bunches of cool people: the people who work with her that have Aluminum Cats at their homes (they are very nice, even though some of them have dogs); neat men and ladies that fly planes for free because Oom asks them to (Oom flies a plane but I haven't been in it when it's in the air); and conservation people, like my friends at the Adirondack Council, the Audubon bird people, or the neat people in Provincetown, all of whom need smart pilots and small planes to get their work done. There's more of these folks than you'd think.
Yesterday, a bunch of these folks and Oom got together and did something wonderful. They moved these three critters to a new home in New Mexico:
That's Chevaya, Catella, and Nieta. They are endangered Mexican wolves, and they were living, as a pack, in a big private place at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. Canines are like that...they hang out together.
They needed new digs, so the cool people that take care of them (so they can make puppies who can grow up and repopulate the wilds of Mexico and the US desert Southwest), made them a perfect place in New Mexico. But they needed help getting there. So Oom and a couple of super cool pilots with a nice new plane helped out. They also brought back a lone female wolfie; she's had a tough life so far but will be living in New York and meeting some fellow Mexican wolf dudes at the Wolf Conservation Center.
Isn't that neat? New homes for wolfies just in time for Cat-Solstice, thanks to Oom and the cool people she works with (at LightHawk), the very cool pilot dude and lady, and the wonderful people who dedicate their lives to making sure there are always Mexican wolves.
Me, I'm tired after all that moving around. Time to get some rest before the human tree holiday ahead, when I'll be hitting the road myself. More on that later...
