Monthly Archives: December 2011

My parents have a cat that I cleverly named “Dipstick”, due to her solid blackness with a white-tipped tail.

This cat was born at our house in the laundry room which is an exterior room off the garage. With a washer and dryer in there, it was always warm and with the garage door closed, wild animals weren’t a concern, so it was a safe spot to birth and raise a litter of kittens.

Dipstick was the runt of the lot and was born not breathing. My father was watching over the natural progression of things and quickly swooped in, as naturally, this would have been that for that kitten. He held it upside down and pumped its chest, and fluid poured out, and it started mewing.

We’ve always had multiple cats wandering around the house, and we’ve let them decide if they wanted to be indoor or outdoor cats. We’ve had some cats that would only go outside once a week or so (and less than that in the winter), and some cats that stayed completely outside, only swinging by to eat.

Dipstick was a cat that lived in limbo, not really an indoor nor an outdoor cat, instead deciding to live entirely in the same laundry room she was born in. So where she could have a warm house to sleep in, or dozens of wooded acres to wander through, she has instead decided to spend her entire existence in a 48 square foot room.

Dipstick is now approaching 12 or 13 years old. This cat has spent all but a few minutes per day in this crowded little room. This makes me sad on some level, as she’ll pass on eventually within a few feet of where she was born, but she doesn’t seem to be in bad spirits at all about it, and she knows both what the inside and the outside holds, and she’s chosen her lot.

I’m not sure why I think so much of this cat when I’m home. Now that I’m only coming home once a year or so, things are always slightly different and off from the last time I visited, but that black cat with the white-tipped tail is always curled up in the same spot she’s literally spent her entire life in and that kind of constancy is reassuring, especially when my own travels have taken me very far away from home.

This past week left me emotionally drained, with the excitement of signing on for my new job and putting my notice in at Flickr. I’ve started to say a few farewells at the office and each one leaves me in a slightly altered state. On top of that, I’ve been fighting the office flu. So this weekend was mostly a collapse.

On Saturday, Meghan and I biked out to Outerlands with Phil Dokas and Traci and had a nice brunch and then went on towards the beach. Traci’s bike got a flat at some point, at which we parted ways.

On Sunday, I got out my sketchbook and started to working through a few exercises in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to be working on something where my efforts would come to naught, so I poked at my yearbook a bit, formatting a few of the pages.

At night, we joined Trevor and Camille at Nopalito where we enjoyed hearing about their Disneyland trip and discussing Meghan’s book club.

I’ve already started mentally preparing for next week. It’s an odd feeling when you know your days at work are numbered and you start tallying through the things that you’re going to make your best effort to accomplish. The next week is going to fly by and I need to hunker down and crank.

As of yesterday, I'm on my way out the door at Flickr, as I'll be joining some former Flickr folk and some new faces at Caterina Fake's new startup in short time.

I'm terribly sad about leaving such fantastic people and a product that I truly love, but I'm also incredibly excited about what's next.

I was listening to Stereogum’s Top 50 Albums of 2011 and started at #1 and started working down. There were probably only 2 in the top 10 that I’d consider okay so I stopped. Just not good at all.

This, this though, is good.

“For the next 3 minutes, I am the milkman of human kindness.”