Pony Up!

Mrrrr Friends,

What do ponies, or horses, have to do with donating money or paying up? I gotta admit, I am confused. Is there some tie to the old human practice of horse-trading? Who knows. I like ponies (Alex wants a pony) so I kinda like the phrase pony up.

I hope no ponies are offended.

My point is: it is spring and that's a time when it is important to consider a donation to two of my local favorite places: North Country Public Radio and the North Country SPCA.

You probably noticed it is NPR pledge drive season. Well, as usual, I sent in my small contribution - okay, yes, I stole Oom's plastic thingy with the magic numbers on it. I increased my give a little this year since The Man has pulled support from our nations's public radio.

As the first feline member of NCPR, I am pleased to see an increase in the number of cats who prod their humans to make a donation. I wish I could use a phone and mrrow my thanks. But every year I write my NCPR email buddy June a little note of appreciation for all my pals there at the station.

Now, spring is also a time when wanderer cats and other outdoor-prone felines get spring fever and well, ahem. Little kittens are the product. Little kittens who, in some cases, will be born outside or who, in an act of human irresponsibility, will be abandoned. The generous folks at North Country SPCA provide a way-station.

I'm asking you to consider a small donation to the good folks at my local shelter so they can be prepared for the onslaught of sweet, cuddly kittens that will arrive at their door. These little fur balls are future companions, entertainers, best friends, pillows of love, pocket rockets and, in one or two cases, bloggers. Give them and the people who help them find their homes a hand please.

Tell the nice folks at both places that Diesel sent you!

Now I gotta go mark some trees and bushes up for the April snow headed our way. One more chance to play in the fluffy stuff!

How Do You Get Your News?

Mrrrrr Friends,

Me, I listen to my local public radio station - North Country Public Radio. I've talked here before about how much NCPR ties us all together here in the beautiful Adirondack Park. I've been listening for just a year, but enjoy hearing the voices of the folks I've come to think of as neighbors.

I like listening to the news and learning about gardening from Amy and about critters and cool natural phenomenon from Dr. Curt and Martha.  When a dog gets lost somewhere here in the North Country, the nice folks at NCPR will help the dog's person look for him by telling everyone who's listening where he got lost and what he looks like....the dog, not the person. Now I've only heard them do this for dogs...that's a bit suspicious. Do only dogs get lost? Cats never get lost, right? What about parakeets? Or hogs? There's been a lot of talk about hogs this morning on the 8 O'Clock Hour show.

They're having a pledge drive as I noted in my last blog. I nicked my person's credit card and made a donation. I didn't win the iPad drawing Monday ...though I think I get another chance later. But even without neat prizes, it's still worth it to support them so they come to my home every day and tell me what's going on.

In the name of professional journalism though, I wish they'd rethink overuse of the word "pet".

Human neighbor pals, if you're reading this blog, shoot a pledge over to NCPR on behalf of your furry friends.

I Pad?

Mrrrrr Friends.

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.

Diesel is Carbon Neutral

Would I joke about a thing like this? Look, here's proof.

I figure, now, all my trips to the vet are covered, the shipping of my food and acquisition of Yeow! Brand Cat nip toys is covered, production of the (biodegradable) packaging and manufacture, even, of my portion of my litter might be covered. Basically, I hope I'm a carbon neutral cat, perhaps the first home-based carbon neutral cat. That's pretty cool.

And speaking of pretty cool - the Adirondack Council is a very effective not-for-profit organization working to protect the Adirondack Park. They had the foresight to buy 5,000 tons of carbon credits during the big RGGI "allowance" auction in 10 Northeastern states. Those 10 states got together and decided on a cap on carbon emissions. Then, they made all the commercial power plants in the 10 states buy one carbon credit for each ton of carbon dioxide they would spew into the atmosphere. If they use less, they get to sell their credit. And that's the goal, to reduce CO2 emissions by 10% by 2018. When the Adirondack Council folks bought a bunch of credits, they, in effect, secured the retirement of those credits. Supporters can "buy" 3 tons of credits with a $25 donation. I got my three credits when I joined North Country Public Radio - they partnered with our Council friends to provide these to new NCPR members.

The Adirondack Council works on myriad conservation issues large and small. They advocate for conserving the forests and wild places of the Adirondack Park, rehabilitating abandoned mines, curbing mercury use and acid rain (don't even get me started on coal and "natural gas"), and they work on one of my pet issues, reducing road salt use. They aren't the only group doing good conservation things in the park but they get my vote (and my peoples' support) for helping me get this carbon thing under control. It was giving me a bum rap.

NCPR Breaks Species Barrier

Mrrrrr Friends,

What did you do today? Me, I joined our local public radio station (and, yes, I had to use my peoples’ bank account). But not just any public radio – North Country Public Radio. NCPR is really wonderful. Why? In a nutshell, NCPR is one of the common threads that knit our wonderful new community together.

I speak with some listening experience, having lived in very different NPR communities in both Wisconsin and on Long Island. My people have also been listeners of NPR in Chicago, Minnesota, New York City, and Washington DC. We are of accord that NCPR is something special.

Perhaps it is the fact that our world is fairly remote, winters are long here, the full-time population is relatively small, and services are sparsely scattered. It is safe to say that folks who have come to live here full-time and folks that were born here and choose to stay here, find value in these things that many others would find inconvenient. Nevertheless, knowing what is going on in your community is pretty important to staying in touch, engaged and enjoying life.

The Adirondack Park is 6 million acres of public and private land knit together by the protection of the NY State Constitution and the principle that public lands will remain “forever wild.” Hamlets and villages are scattered throughout the old mountains that reach up to 5000 feet into the sky, east across the Lake Champlain Valley, west and south to the Black and Mohawk River valleys and up toward our neighbors to the north and Lake Ontario. It is a lot of space…a lot of wonderful mostly forested and, yes, critter and flora-filled space. Tying the human elements (resources, controversies, news and society) together intelligently, democratically and creatively and integrating them with flora, fauna, waterways, and mountains in a way that complements the remoteness, is important.

NCPR does a bang-up job of giving us all the cool usual stuff of NPR: Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Fresh Air, Click and Clack…but then they also weave a very local touch throughout the day and with the 8 O’Clock Hour and the All Before Five news and information segments, lots of wonderful music and art news, and the especially cool Calendar which tells us what’s going on right in our own park. I especially like a nice segment called Natural Selections with a very nice-sounding lady named Martha and Dr. Curt. They’ve done some excellent educational work on turtles and how they breathe – how cool is that?

But perhaps the coolest thing about NCPR is that the folks are all from here. They are broadcasting and mostly living right around us. They drive on our local roads, shop in our local stores, show up at many of our regular local events and they bring that intimacy to the radio. The folks on the radio are us. They can look out the window and talk about the weather as it happens, they talk about cool critters they see on their drives. Case in point, from my feline perspective: they report the adventures of cats and dogs. I’ve noted this here before, but they do announce when people “lose” their animals. It is true that the NCPR announcers seem to couch their language in a very ethnocentric manner - “lost dog,” for example (why do dogs get lost more than cats?). But, to be fair, they might be considered a little loopy if they catered too much to their cat audience.

And they handled my membership well. During their now close to complete 2-day fund drive, I decided that my people should belong…they had talked about it. So I hopped online (let’s face it, humans just don’t even try to understand Meowese, so I couldn’t call) and filled out the form – I got a carbon credit that had been donated by the Adirondack Council, another cool group up here. I was the 102nd new member to join in the past two days and, I believe, their first cat member. I checked the box that said they could announce my name on the radio and made sure they knew that I was getting the membership with my people in mind.

At the next break, they mentioned two human names and then mine! The nice lady didn’t pronounce it right – she said Diesel The Cat not Diesel T. Hecat – but I didn’t mind, indeed, it might have been the best route to take for a radio broadcast. I could tell they were a bit unsure if I was real or if someone was playing with them (like a cat and mouse kind of thing), but they were gracious and quoted me as writing “NCPR is essential to our wonderful community.”

Turns out, in a brief correspondence with June, who is the membership front-lady, they actually have a few dog members! She did confirm I was their first cat…and stated that they were always glad to add a new species to their membership rolls.

I’d say they are pretty far along the species-relative curve.

Please note my new blog list to the right. Here you can go straight to the cool NCPR news blog and to another invaluable Adirondack blog resource, the Adirondack Almanack.

Cat Suffrage and So On

Mrrrrr Friends,

Greetings from Upper Jay!

Did you hear the news? Al Franken is now the esteemed Senator from Minnesota. When I heard this news on North Country Public Radio, I became very excited and immediately began drafting letters in support of my pet legislation – cat suffrage.

Now, I love my people and I consider them pretty smart cookies, though sometimes a tad impractical, and I can always depend on them to support my efforts to advance cat philosophy in all its forms. In this case, however, my female person insists that just because the Democrats now have a supermajority in the Senate, this is not an open door for cat suffrage. Her words were: “Diesel, they’re Democrats – not animists”.

I feel a bit let down. Actually, I was incredibly discouraged when I first recognized that she wasn’t going to be able to go along with me on this one. But after looking into a time-share in Florida, I decided maybe this was asking a bit much…and perhaps on too large a stage. I will turn my attention to local affairs and remain in Upper Jay.

Speaking of local…North Country Public Radio it turns out is the voice of our new community in the Adirondacks. All day long we have public radio at our claw-tips – NPR, PRI, BBC World Service, interspersed with local news and weather, supported by advertisements from local businesses, schools, and even environmental non-profits.

This is pretty cool stuff. I am particularly fond of the fact that “lost” and “found” cats and dogs get their 15 minutes of fame. Why, just the other day they were announcing a puppy lost in Olmstedville, just a mountain range or two south of us. I think we’re just a step away from cats calling in to request various blues and jazz tunes. So why not give us the vote!