Friday Cat Blogging – 22 September 2017

I have been gravely disappointed by the Irish cat situation. I figured cats would be roaming all over the place, and I’d be able to easily take enough photos to keep catblogging going for the entire vacation. But it’s been tough sledding. I saw a cat in Waterville, but it ran away. Our house is at the top of a hill, and there’s a sociable cat down at the bottom, but just as he came over to make friends a car rumbled by and he ran off. I haven’t seen him since.

Finally, though, Kenmare came through with perhaps the friendliest cat on the planet. This cat was so eager for attention that she came running out even though it was drizzling rain and her fur was wet. In fact, she was so friendly it was hard to take a picture of her. Every time I pointed the camera she came running up so close that all I got was out-of-focus fuzz.

That makes this picture appropriate. She’s about six inches away in this one. I think she had just finished rubbing her cheek on my camera bag and then came rushing over to get her head scratched. She was friendly with everyone else who walked by too. Truly a delightful cat, even if she wasn’t smart enough to come in out of the rain.

The future of catblogging is uncertain. Unless my luck changes, the next few weeks will be filled with either file photos of Hilbert and Hopper or pictures of other animals. I have quite a few of those. Feel free to put in a request for a specific (plausible) animal if you like. So far I have horses, cows, goats, sheep, butterflies, and birds.

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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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