At Cat Whisker, we are in high gear, 24/7. See, here is a valued staff member, hard at work:

Whoops! Wrong image. Here she is, checking the office window, making sure it’s secure and that she’s eaten all the flies:

And finally, thinking cap on, ready for anything (the fluffy blue pen is her favorite):

I am working non-stop this spring: Creating a website for a wonderful healer in VT; I’ll post the url here when it’s finished. Working on website text and every other kind of text for another VT company, waaaayyy up north, with its roots across the border in Canada. I’ll post that website here shortly as well when all the text is edited and the new site is up. Lastly, I’m spending the rest of my work hours copyediting for a major online company that produces many of the articles you read when you query something on the Internet, such as “What do I feed a yellow-spotted lizard?” or “How do I measure a hospital mattress?” Honestly! It is varied and fun at times.

And through it all, I’m reading, reading, reading. The best so far this spring has been Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair and its sequels. Where have I been? How did I let years go by without discovering this creative and irreverent writer. Also enjoyed How to Write a Bestselling Novel. No, I have the title wrong and can’t locate the author’s name at the moment either. Sorry. I will post it when I find it. Rather wry and amusing. Not my losing my memory but the book.

Back to work, as soon as I’ve read the umpteen tweets and emails and Facebook news posts that have just come in.

I have thus determined that I am not immune to the somewhat disturbing trend of our time, laying it all out there (well, maybe not all of it) on the Internet for anyone to see, while maintaining a modest decorum in real life. There is hope, however. Miley Cyrus said goodbye to twitter last week. That has to count for something. I haven’t yet said hello to it, or uttered my first tweet, but now that Miley has made room, perhaps my time has come. Now I just have to invite everyone I know with one of those intriguing little taglines: Follow me on twitter.

Blog writing doesn’t get done for the opposite reason: Nothing is happening of any interest here at the studio during the summer, so there’s nothing to write about. Well, maybe a few things. I finished my novel (hallelujah, at long last!), 177,000 words, give or take 20,000 depending on which counting method I use. But I’d been working on it for so long, I knew it needed a thorough going over. I chased off some real (as in, money-making) web design work by saying the client could just as easily put up a site himself (and I guess he did). Then just as I settled in to rewrite . . . summer vacation arrived and my two children were suddenly on my hands again for 24 hours a day. By the time I came up for air after amusement park outings, museum visits, whitewater rafting, sleepovers at which no one slept, camping, hosting visitors, umpteen games of ping-pong and badminton, and trips to the beach, my manuscript files were still sitting there on my computer, mocking me. The rewrite wasn’t finished, no agent query letter had been sent, and my blog had sat neglected all summer. And perhaps the worst procrastination of all, I had stopped exercising with my favorite virtual Wii trainer, Maya (see “Working Out”, April 2, 2009). Oh, Maya! What would she say? Would she take away all the levels I’d earned and the extra music and workout areas that I’d unlocked with all my diligent huffing and puffing in the spring?

As it turned out, when I finally slipped the disc back in the Wii, she was quite forgiving. She gave me the longest speech she’d ever given me, starting with “You’ve missed some workouts lately.” Uh-oh, did her computer brain know exactly how many weeks it had been? But she went on with “Take time for yourself, no one else will.” Sort of stern but supportive. And I’m right back into it with my new multi-tasking idea of tying a piece of yarn around one wrist while I workout. For half an hour this morning, the cats thought I was playing with them while I marched in place and did bicep curls; it was brilliant.

And now I have work to do: New web development prospects and a brochure to edit. Best of all, I finally hit send on the query letter to the person I hope will agree to be my agent (please, please, please, please, please . . . ). I have vanquished procrastination at least until tonight when I may choose the latest book I’m reading, the excellent, excellent Year of Wonders: a Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks over my dusty journal.

Also, I wouldn’t post on this day without saying that I still get choked up as I remember those who lost their lives as well as their families on 9/11/2001.

So the studio is busy and I am currently working on my manuscript’s rewrite. The cats are enjoying the warm weather, though at least two of them still find plenty of time to take up space on my desk.

Redrum Dakota

Sabrina came quite close, as you can see pictured, perhaps not quite believing her golden eyes. “What the heck?” was written all over her. “This is no duck!” It goes to show if you hang around long enough, pretty much everything will come by at one time or another; after the recent spate of animal visits, we’ve been expecting an elephant any day now. We have had goats and Christmas parades go by (I think we’ve had goats on floats in Christmas parades, for that matter). Down the road a large old furniture factory building was turned into artists studios, where there are painters, sculptors, furniture restorers, & hand knitters, among many others, and they attract an entire population to go by our studio. I’m not saying that I don’t love to travel, but for the cats who still believe “There’s no place like home,” it’s nice for them that the world is beating a path to their door.

Sabrina's First Horse

Occasionally flies are fodder for play here at the studio.  The cats will chase and jump and, yes, eat the flies.  Perhaps flies are good training for catching birds.  Birds are a rare catch.  Chloe also used to be a great jumper and could grab a bird out of the air, seven feet off the ground.  But as I said, she just watches now.  Our other older cat, Leo, never brought home anything that Chloe hadn’t already caught for him–except perhaps the blind baby mole that he carried up the back steps so proudly one day many summers ago.  He literally swaggered and paraded it around, making sure any and all humans in the area saw it.   No one had the heart to take it from him even though he had no intention of eating it; indeed, the thought never occurred to him.  Eventually, when he had shown off enough to his liking, he put it down somewhere outside, forgot about it, and came in for his bowl of crunchies.

In case anyone doubts it by these reminiscences, I frown on the cats indiscriminately killing anything around and about my studio.  But cats will be cats.  If I can get to the creature–bird or mouse–while it is still alive, I try to wrestle its freedom from the feline jaws and revive it as best as possible.  Even the occasional small rabbit has been saved.  But there is one creature that I wish the cats could and would hunt: the ant.  They plague us each spring, coming in hundreds, both the small sugar ants (not as sweet as they sound) and the large carpenter ants, who apparently know ant bait when they see it and are very good at walking around six traps to get to the trash can in the kitchen area.  At this time of year, I might look down to see cat kibble making its away across the floor as if by magic, while two or three big ants are situated under it, working hard as a team.  The two young cats show an interest when the ants first show up but after a day or so of tracking, they ignore the ants completely.  Ants are not fun like flies.  There is no challenge and no payoff.   Our full-figured young tuxedo cat, Sabrina, did try to eat one last year, which inevitably led to my having to extract sharp ant pincers from the inside of her lower lip–or where her lip would be if cats had lips.  She has learned that ants are not for eating.

I am thinking of trading one cat for an anteater; it seems like a fair trade to me, if I can find someone who owns one and who is plagued by mice.  Right now, the ants are carrying my chair away from the keyboard,  so I must end this with one last . . .

UPDATE:

Yesterday, which was the day after this post, a pair of ducks came to the back of the studio. Chloe must not have liked the references I made to her age and to her letting the younger cats do the hunting.

Visitors from the nearby pond.

Chloe spotted them from the deck.

Forget sitting this one out!

Seeing they were too big to eat, she chased them off.