Friday Cat Blogging – 5 September 2014


I have sad news today. Domino’s thyroid finally got the better of her, and she’s been a pretty sick kitty for the past month or two. About six weeks ago she gave up on dry food, so we switched to wet food. That helped, but she gradually ate less and less of it. A couple of weeks ago she stopped eating entirely no matter what we tried. She’d lap up microscopic amounts of gravy or tuna juice a couple of times a day, but that was it. She just wouldn’t eat anymore.

By last week she was very thin, and her energy level was pretty low. She slept most of the time in her favorite hidey-hole, and came out only a few times a day for five or ten minutes at a time. By the start of this week she’d gotten a bit unsteady on her feet, and it was obvious the end was near. I talked to our vet earlier this week, and yesterday we took Domino in and had her put to sleep. I hated doing it, but I’m certain it was the right thing to do. She didn’t show it, but she must have been in a fair amount of pain, which was only going to get worse over time.

To the very end, she was sweet and sociable, which made it even harder. She lost her meow several weeks ago, but she never lost her purr or her love of tummy rubs. She was a good cat. She’ll be missed.

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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.

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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.

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