Friday Cat Blogging – 25 May 2018

Last week I showed you our freshly painted patio cover—except that the patio cover was cropped out of the shot and all you could see was Hilbert. This week, both cats star in a patio cover Before-and-After. First, here’s Hopper in a rare file photo taken before it was painted:

Yuck! Not Hopper of course, who’s as beautiful as ever. But the patio cover has been torn to shreds. What happened was that the association sent over painters to paint the house, and they used a power washer to prep the wood. Unfortunately, they weren’t too careful about where they aimed it, and the patio cover got pretty badly beaten up. So we called the painters and out they came:

So fresh and lovely! And Hilbert is breaking it in with a little rolling around, which he usually does out in the garden where he can get himself suitably filthy. He was probably hoping the paint was still wet on the wood, but we were too smart for him.

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.

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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.

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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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