Friday Cat Blogging – 14 November 2008

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FRIDAY CATBLOGGING….A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that my mother had procured a new kitten from a local shelter. She named her Lily, and keeps her inside the house. A couple of days ago, though, she looked outside and Lily was under the car in the driveway. But how did she get there? Cat teleportation?

No. My mother opened the door and the cat under the car zipped into the house, ran into her arms, and started purring. But it wasn’t Lily at all. It was a clone.

Then, a couple of hours later, there was some meowing at the front door. So my mother opened the door and discovered an orange kitten, who zipped inside and started purring.

Perhaps you can guess the rest of this story? There’s no telling where they came from, but these two are obviously littermates, obviously friendly and accustomed to living with people, and took over my mother’s house within minutes. Right now they show no signs of going away, so Mom has bowed to the inevitable. The black-and-white one is named Ditto, and the orange one is named Tillamook. On Thursday night all four of her cats slept in the bed with her. “I woke up kind of sleepy,” she told me. Today, the new kittens are tearing around the house, knocking things over, and fighting my mother for every scrap of food she tries to eat. Things are getting lively in Garden Grove these days.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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