This is a cat-intensive week for the Thingo extended family. First of all, Chris has gone to Florida for a month and we agreed to look after his cats while he's gone. We don't want them to spend a whole month with minimal socializing, so we've got them here at Thingo central. And so yes, for the next month we'll be a five-cat household. It'll be a interesting mix. Griffith is an adult male who's very mellow but somewhat unfriendly towards other cats. He's also part Maine Coon, which means he's damn big and damn furry. And Carbon is about six months old and still very frisky. If I can eventually get some snapshots of all the cats interacting, I'll make them available somewhere (probably my professor home page).

The related news is that my parents adopted a cat yesterday! Things were a little too quiet for them around the house since the passing of Poor Flint a few years ago. And so I'd like to introduce you to Charlie Brown:

Charlie's just the sort of cat my parents wanted: older (he's about eight years old) and declawed. Someone who just wants his head scritched once in a while. He's a brown Burmese. I'll be over there in a week for Passover. I'm looking forward to meeting him.

For anyone who's counting, Zebula turned eighteen months old yesterday. She's as wonderful as ever, though she celebrated by coming down with a cough and mild fever. The usual baby cold symptoms. She was in the presence of other, smaller babies yesterday. Hopefully she didn't pass anything on to them.

Nath is celebrating in her own way too. She's left town for the night, away at a girls' night party a few towns over. And hence, for the first time, I am alone with our baby overnight. Now, we didn't decide on eighteen months as some appropriate threshold for Nath to start spending nights away from Zebula; it just worked out that way. The upshot is that I'm on watch, hoping the night goes smoothly.

So I'm down here in the basement, with the baby monitor hissing in the background, hanging around on this quiet night. I admit I'm feeling a bit of anxiety, which is perfectly natural given that Nath has done most of the caring for Zebula when she's been sick. Hopefully Nath isn't at her party wondering every two minutes whether her daughter is alright.

[update: 21 March at 16:45]: I blogged too soon (I couldn't avoid the temptation of having an entry timestamped at "00:00"). Nath came back within the hour. There was a possibility that she was going to make it home the same night rather than staying over at the party, and she did. So alas, my success minding Zebula overnight is only a partial one. I guess we'll try again in another eighteen months.

Don't think I haven't noticed the visible fading on this site. It does produce a certain amount of guilt, though apparently not enough to compel me to write. Maybe I need to augment the Stagnometer to deliver electric shocks of increasing intensity as I go longer without writing. Yes, the shocks would only be delivered to me, though perhaps I could set it up to happen every time the page is viewed, to further enhance the experience.

I'm feeling especially guilty about not writing because of this FLC I joined. An FLC is a "faculty learning community". A group of new professors with too much free time get together and work on developing some important faculty skill. I joined an FLC about research writing. I'm a good writer once I get going, but find it so hard to start. I figured the FLC would be a good way to develop some good habits.

We had a meeting a week ago. As part of our discussion, we decided to try "free writing". The idea is that one of the barriers to getting started with writing is the collection of internal censors and critics who don't want to commit to any printed words that aren't above some minimum threshold of quality. Free writing demands that you silence those critics and put down something, anything, for a fixed time period every day. Once you get past the horror of writing down words you aren't happy with, you realize that the sloppy text you're producing is a significant part of the work of writing a paper. The revising, editing, and polishing that follow are a craft that can be applied to even this pre-draft draft.

That's the idea anyway. Needless to say, I haven't even started yet, even though it demands only about fifteen minutes a day. Today. Yes -- today I'll start.

Actually, I've been thinking for a while that it would be cool to create a text editor that supports free writing. There would be no backspace key, and text would fade to the background colour almost as soon as it's written. You could reveal text by dragging the mouse over it, but that will quickly fade as well. This dim view of the past would force you to keep moving into the future. Mind you, the same effect could be achieved by starting up a text editor and turning your monitor off.

Teacher, can I count this entry as my free writing for today?