Friday Cat Blogging – 6 November 2015

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When I came home from the hospital last year, we (i.e., Marian) scurried around for a few days moving furniture. In the end, one of our sofas ended up getting shoehorned into my study, where it was out of our sight and all too vulnerable to feline claws. So a few months ago we bought a cheap slip cover, basically designed to give the cats something to claw at other than expensive upholstery. It’s mostly worked, but there were unforeseen consequences.

You see, the slip cover has an elastic band around the bottom to keep it in place. When the cats discovered this, they decided it made a great cat hammock. Over on the right, you can see what it looks like from the outside. Basically, it’s just a bulge. I think you can guess what happened next after I took this picture. (Insert Battle of the Bulge jokes here.)

Luckily, I also took some pictures before Hopper showed up, something I’ve been doing for weeks. But as you can imagine, it’s really hard to get a decent photo from underneath the sofa. However, thanks to my persistence, along with my camera’s articulating LCD screen, I eventually got one. Below, you can finally see Hilbert in the the cat hammock close up. It’s pretty obvious what the attraction is. In fact, you’d practically think it had been designed as a cat domicile: dim, cozy, and shaped like a cat. Who knows? Maybe it was, and we just got tricked into buying it.

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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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