So after several months on unemployment, I am proud to report I am being paid for my time today.  I'm at jury duty! However, I have been here all day so far and not yet been called by anyone for anything. I keep wondering if I somehow missed my name or what, but I think if they would repeat it if I didn't turn up when called. I still have 3 more hours in which they might theoretically call me up, so we'll see. At one point they called most of the people who were sitting around me, but my name was not on the list. Maybe they dropped my card. This is all reminiscent of my last attempt at serving my fellow Americans, which resulted in them sending me home after a couple of hours.

Anyway, it's $40 (minus subway fare) for sitting around surfing the web. Which is probably what I would have been doing anyway. I actually got some real work done, too, putting finishing touches on the cover art for the new Motico releases (you may note as well, that the Motico site has received a long-overdue facelift). How long have they been paying $40 for a day of jury duty? It seems like it's been the same since I was a kid. Regardless, it's clearly time to update this amount, if they're going to bother with it at all. Forty bucks is less than one hour of freelance work for a web programmer, right? Who do I talk to about getting a raise for the people?

Eh, I don't really care. I just want someone to tell me to go home. Or decide the fate of some other person. Whichever.

I firmly believe that a leading economic indicator of recovery can be traced directly to the adoption of pets from shelters and foster families. We have just adopted out our third cat in the year 2010, which, I am almost embarrassed to say, is equal to the number of cats we adopted out in the whole of 2009. I don't wanna say 2009 was cursed, exactly, but … let's say I'm glad that year is in the bag.

Our latest adoptee is Carlos, who was only here as an official adoption candidate for just one week. He had been living in our yard for a few months, but he only got neutered last Thursday. When he first showed up, we didn't know he was tame, and he really kept his distance. Slowly, he would let us get closer and closer until the day I finally petted him. It is interesting to realize a cat as either feral or tame, as it changes your estimation of the cat quite a bit. A feral cat kind of needs to live outside, they will never 'get' humans, and they are most comfortable at least arm's length away from us.

But the tame ones have known humans in their past, and know they can be sources of comfort. We never find out where these tame cats come from, but they usually need some help remembering that they like people. So it was with Carlos, who met his new person like a lapcat who had never spent a night in a storage tub full of straw. It's nice to see that once you win them over, they're usually all right in their new homes, more or less.

I'm excited to finally adopt one of our fosters out to a neighbor, in this case a couple who live next door to us. I feel sort of bad, in that I had never really thought of my block as a potential source of adopters. After all, this neighborhood and its environs are the source of most of the cats we take in. But clearly not every person on this block is an irresponsible pet owner.  Carlos' new family are recent transplants from the south side of Williamsburg so we can be sure they haven't contributed to the stray cat population. But I will be more aware of this nearby resource and hope to adopt out more cats to my neighbors.

So good luck, Carlos (or whatever his name ends up being)! I took him over to his new home and he immediately took to it, in no small part I'm sure because the place wasn't crawling with cats like our house.

Okay it was kind of pretty for a while

The thing that always bugs me about snow is everybody's reaction to it. When it's imminent, everybody gets excited, running around to the store in anticipation of getting trapped in their homes (hey, some of us face this prospect daily), or the interest in seeing the beauty of snow-covered garbage or something.

But the day after the snow has fallen, everybody hates it, whines about the icy sidewalks and slush-filled puddles. Snow that sits around for a few days gets an impacted, stale look to it, and what was momentarily a winter wonderland becomes a constant irritant everywhere you look.

Anyway that's what it seems like to me. Even when I try to get into this fleeting 'fun' notion of snowfall, dread always looms in my gullet as it approaches. Mostly this is because I have to shovel the damn stuff. This isn't just some neighborly thing, it's a law that states that snow must be cleared within a few hours after the snow stops falling. In all the hype, I ended up shoveling three times on Wednesday, for fear that the snow would accumulate so high that waiting until it was over would mean backbreaking labor.

When I saw there were barely 9 inches total I felt like a dope for falling for it. I guess all my extra shoveling did make it a little easier by the time I shoveled the last bit, but next time I plan to forgo the hysterical news reports and watch Groundhog Day until the snow is over.