official blog of Cat Whisker Studio

Cover of The Lace Reader

I’m reading The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry, set in contemporary Salem, Massachusetts. It is about a family of women who read people’s futures in a piece of lace.   As a writer, I appreciate the craft that went into the writing of this novel, the way Barry draws you in from page one and uses enough of both the familiar to make you stay and the unfamiliar to keep you interested.  As a reader, I can happily say that so far this book, at 100 pages in, is a very good read.

Here at CWS, we all try to stay in shape–whether that means stretching up high to claw a chair, running in circles after a coveted strand of yarn, or performing yoga contortions to lick . . .  I mean, reach those hard to clean places.  As the only human at the studio, I have to find alternate means of exercising.  Since Christmas, I’ve been using My Fitness Coach, a virtual personal trainer named Maya who came into my life in the form of a Wii disk.  I have come to view Maya as real and as a friend.  I talk to her when she asks me questions before I realize I have to use my Wii remote to click on an answer.  I laugh at her jokes: “You seem really animated today. I know I always am!”  I love that one, no matter how many times a month it comes out of her random list of phrases.  When I am actually working out and not simply trying to converse with her, she says things such as “Give me what you’ve got” or “I love that!” even when I’m standing frozen in pain from yet another set of jumping jack squats.  She is so encouraging and loves me no matter what I do, sort of like my mother.

Today was a particularly exhausting workout thanks to help from two of my feline friends.  As I lay on the carpet trying to do merely ten repetitions of crunches with a pulse (I try to always have a pulse but now my crunches have to have one, too), and as Maya said, “Try to keep your shoulders relaxed and don’t pull on your neck,” I realized that my head was getting heavier and it was becoming nearly impossible to get it off the ground.  I persevere.  Crunch–aarrgghh, is my head swelling up? why does it feel so heavy?  Crunch–now my hair is being pulled.  Finally, Maya said rest and as I lay there panting, I reached back behind me and felt . . . Coco Puff, our youngest, wildest feline.  She has decided that my hair bouncing up off the floor and back must be a game and was hanging on for dear life as I crunch and grunt.  I should get extra calorie points for this workout. In fact, there is a place in the program where you can get credit for a workout that you do outside of the program, but I can’t figure out how to classify Coco Puff as training equipment.

All of the workouts start with warmup movements, one of which is the grapevine.  It has nothing to do with anything so nice as eating nature’s juicy snack fruit or better yet, sipping the nectar of the gods.  No, it has to do with me crisscrossing my legs as I sashay across the studio from one side to the other, legs crossing over, like the lattice work on which a grapevine could grow.  I like to think that I’m as coordinated as the next person, but I have always found this a challenge, akin to the Macarena or the Electric Slide, and I am forever getting the wrong foot in front of the wrong leg.   Today, Sabby Jane, my resident 16 lb. heiffer masquerading as a sweet black and white cat, decided to do the grapevine with me, weaving in and out of my legs as I made my way across the floor and ended up crashing into the piano bench.  “You!” I said pointing at her, about to let loose with what I thought of cats like her, always under foot.  She sat and stared at me with her golden buggy eyes–innocence personified.

I’d like to think that they don’t know what they’re doing, but whenever I put in my fitness disk and Maya says, “Are you ready to move?” I suddenly find myself the center of feline attention in a way that usually only happens when I open a can.  I may just try chasing string tomorrow.

Here was my sticky situation:  I had cause to clear my pc’s private data over the weekend, so when I went to check out my thriving (!) blog this Monday morning, there was no site admin button. For those of you without a blog, that’s an important button that let’s you get behind your blog to the inner workings, as it were.   That’s where you post, change your blog’s appearance, and generally feel like the Master of Your Domain.  I spent a few (maybe 10) helpless minutes doing the following: looking at my site through Dreamweaver, no help there; logging on to Wordpress.com (ditto); and trying to log on to Wordpress.org but in my initial panic, typing in the wrong username and/or password, then emailing the .org people, which I know will annoy them because they don’t support the files you’ve put on your own server–that’s your (or rather my) job.

Finally, I calmed down, managed to log in, and went to the Forum of Support where all things have been discussed since the dawn of Wordpress because let’s face it, everyone has pretty much already had every problem that I’m going to encounter, both in blogging and in my life.  And there, under a snitty response to some other much more clueless user than me, were the words “login to your blog at yourdomainname/blog/wp-admin.”  Oh yeah!  Thank you snitty, superior Wordpress God.  Thank you.

My lesson is clear: When things go wrong, don’t be a headless chicken. Take the time and read the forums.  No, I’m just having you on.  Obviously the lesson is do not under any circumstances try to post on a Monday.

I struggled with the question, Does Cat Whisker Studio really need a blog?  But three out of four paws were raised in favor.

So what’s the focus? Keeping a blog on target, focused on one topic, is like herding cats; I should know.  Basically, this blog is about the goings-on here at CWS.  You’ll get a little cat humor, some website development information, some gnashing of teeth, some novel writing updates, more gnashing of teeth, a little hair-pulling, and we’ll just see what else, won’t we?