The hot news this weekend is that we got a new kitty. I swear, I just went to the pound to pet the cats. But there she was, a four-year-old fluffball with a penchant for laps. She only has about six teeth, so she looks surprised all of the time. We’ve been on the Maine Coon rescue list for several months, but nothing had really come up. Then I found the cat of our dreams sitting in the Humane Society three blocks away. We named her Plover.
We brought her home Friday, and I spent the weekend doing cat-integration. There were about five minutes of fur-wrenching, then a truce was called. Now the house is swarming with cats. Two cats can make an impressive swarm.
Last week I met a swarm of digital librarians. My work hosted one of Cornell Library’s Digital Preservation Workshops. I helped show off our homegrown catalog and a/v player (which generates spectrograms that you can muck around with!) and our very-exciting-for-library-geeks data entry application. So man, can I just say? Talking to digital librarians? Very exhausting. You guys? Pretty intense. I found myself saying things like “Why yes, the animal behavior table in our data model IS tied to the hierarchy nodes in the taxonomy tree”. And then I went home and drank.




May 22nd, 2006 at 6:59 pm
She if very beautiful. My favorite collective noun for cats is “clutter,” (i.e. “a clutter of cats).
May 22nd, 2006 at 7:32 pm
Very nice! Please do not become one of those Maine Coon Cat wackjobs over at wikipedia. I remember a very contentious discussion about whether it was appropriate for them to be using Wikipedia as their very own cat gallery.
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:50 am
She’s gorgeous! I used to regularly house sit for some friends when I lived in Kentucky. They had six cats and two dogs (and assorted chickens), so when I brought my cat out for the weekend, it was quite a swarm/clutter of felines. We affectionately referred to the farm as the Cat Ranch.
May 24th, 2006 at 8:21 am
Oh, so cute! I occasionally think of getting another cat, but I know that Merlin (current cat) would not go for it at all…
May 26th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
A clutter of cats, and a … um … a disarray of digital librarians? Come on, Erica, you must concede that both collectives have their loveable moments.
June 9th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
So, just how many digital librarians can one fit onto a cd?
June 25th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
Congratulations on Plover, whom you’ve now had for, well, over a month. Which means you should be back to blogging again. I mean, come on. I just found you, and I laughed at your blog, and then I discovered you haven’t posted since May.
Hmmm. This isn’t working. I’m off to add you to Bloglines and hope for updates.
July 20th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Congrats on the successful cat integration. My own (almost) toothless cat developed this funny little sneer. She still has one fang so it comes off looking a little like Bucky Katt.