Friday Cat Blogging – 3 April 2015

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They say that no box is complete without a cat on top of it. As you can see, Hilbert agrees.

Catblogging will be a little iffy for the next couple of months, because tomorrow Hilbert and Hopper will be going to my sister’s house to stay for a while. This is for hygienic reasons, since obviously Marian could take care of the cats by herself while I’m gone. However, my transplant doctor told us that although indoor cats probably weren’t a problem even with a compromised immune system, it would be a good idea to board them somewhere else for a couple of weeks before the stem-cell transplant and extending for a few weeks after I get home. So the two furballs will be with Karen for about two months or so. In the interim, catblogging will depend on (a) whatever pictures she sends along, and (b) my ability to post them.

I’ll be off at City of Hope next week starting the stem cell collection, so I thought I’d leave you with more than just catblogging. Spring has sprung, and our garden is full of blooming flowers. So here they are for you to peacefully zen out to. In comments, I expect everyone to figure out exactly which flowers these are.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist 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 need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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