Cats on Twitter

My husband enjoys Instructables.com, and today he sent me a fun link. Here's a description from the site:

Give your cat a Twitter account and have her post updates automatically whenever she sits down on her bed or when she leaves her bed. In addition, capture pictures of your cat when she's on her bed and upload those as well so you can keep tabs on her antics while you're away from home.

In this instructable, I'll walk you through the process of
* building a cat sensor out of a simple momentary switch, foam core and foam strips
* reading the cat sensor on your Mac or PC using Arduino and Processing
* automatically posting status updates to Twitter when your cat takes a nap or wakes back up
* taking pictures of your cat on the bed with a webcam and uploading the pictures to a webserver

Want to see a twittering cat in action? Follow @zooooey on Twitter.

Maybe when my husband wants a new project, I'll see if I can convince him to set this up for our kitties. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the link and fat burner reviews. :-)

Dinner

Someone sent me this and I thought it was great!

Back to Atlanta

We traveled back from Orlando to Atlanta last weekend after a nice and refreshing break. We had a really nice Thanksgiving dinner, where I had seconds and even thirds... I'm going to have to go on a weight loss diet soon!

The kitties loved their time in the warmer weather, spending much of their time on the porch where they could see the ducks, birds, and squirrels and chase bugs and geckos.

Coming back to Atlanta, we had the cats loose in the car again. Lewis in his usual fashion curled up between the front two seats and stayed there the entire trip. The car doesn't seem to bother him at all. Ebony, on the other hand, was another story. She cried and cried for 2 hours after we left Orlando. She kept pacing around the car and driving me nuts (I was driving). Finally, I pulled off the highway to a Walmart and picked up a cat crate. We have a soft-sided carrier for them, but I was worried that it wouldn't be a comfortable place to leave them for a long period of time. I thought perhaps she would feel more at ease in the crate. At the very least, it would keep her from getting in my way as I'm driving.

She still cried, but I felt that they weren't so desperate of cries. We'll definitely use the crate for her in the future. Lewis does fine without it, so I'm not sure we'll get one for him (it's a small crate, only big enough for one cat).

Next time we go on a long trip with the cats, we're going to try and get some sedatives to at least take the edge off. Poor kitty.