This is one of my two cats. He’s a mask artist.

When he was a kitten I gave him one of those string ornaments to play with. He used to bite the edge of it, and it would flip, almost going over his head. One evening, as I was hosting a dinner party, one of my guest said, “Kitten! What have you done?”

I had nightmarish images of the kitten dipped in paint and looked under the table, to see this tiny black kitten with a giant white bubble on his head. After dying with laughter, I pulled it off the poor thing. Five minutes later he had it back on. Our best guess is that looking through it makes him think of tall grass. When it still fit over his entire head, I painted it like a jack-o-lantern for halloween. None of my guests believed me that he liked it.

He’ll greet me at the front door with it on, occasionally falls asleep wearing it, and will run from one end of the house to the other with it on. I bought a twelve-pack of the balls, because he does wear them out. And yes, he can take it off on his own. He’s an odd, odd cat.

If it weren’t for the fact that so many editors have a strong aversion to cat stories, I would totally write one about Marlowe and his helmet of invisibility.

Three people today have sent me emails saying that they hope I’m surviving the rain and storms. It’s sunny with blue skies today, and only scattered clouds. So, I’m fine. No problems to report here, no matter what the news agencies tell you.

Modern Mechanix » Typewriter Spaces Words To Fill Lines

Really. What girl wouldn’t want one of these? Such a cool gadget.

Although, it does make me very conscious of all the retyping people used to have to do. I dimly remember this from when I was typing on our IBM Selectric, but we had some sort of special eraser tape that would either lift the mistake up or paste something over it. It only worked really well if you spotted the typo as you were going. If you had to correct something later, it was a pain to get the page to line up again.

I like my computer. Such a cool gadget. But I still want one of these.