High Tech Gadgetry, Zaia-Ka Style

In my youth, one of my chores inspired my lyric misunderstanding of the song "Rock the Casbah" by The Clash. I heard, "Cherie don't like it. Not the catbox, not the catbox" and thought they wrote it just for me. I hadn't lived with cats since I lived at home before college, but I knew I would live with them again. And now, I have Ka and Zaia.

But let me back up a little and get to the point. Two years ago, when I was daydreaming about having cats again, I remembered my "Not the Catbox" song and researched possible ways that the 21st century might have been brought to the litterbox. That was when I discovered the Litter-Robot being raved over at the Automatic Litterbox Forum (if you don't think there's a forum for just about any topic, rest assured, there is one). Intrigued, I headed over to the company website to see how it worked, and why I should believe it would be reliable. The product itself is essentially a barrel on its side atop a waste bin. The barrel holding the litter, upon detecting cat usage, would roll, sift out the good litter, and continue rolling until the clumped litter could be dumped out into the waste bin underneath it. Then it would roll back, putting the unused litter back in place and ready for the next visit. Thus, scooping would be done automatically, requiring only that the waste bin be dumped out every few days or so. The smell, hopefully, would be confined to the waste bin only. Cats, being cats, could still find ways to foil this ingenious system, not the least of which would be refusing to use it. This was by far the biggest obstacle according to the litterbox forum. But I was intrigued (and not a little jealous that I hadn't thought of the idea myself). But I didn't have cats then.

Now I do.

Since Ka and Zaia are still kittens, I figured it would be easier to get them acclimated to a fancy new litterbox than if they were older. So it was a red letter day when I pushed the order button. And with much anticipation, I saw that it would be delivered on the Friday before Thankgiving.

We predicted that Ka, as our resident adventurer, would be first to check it out, use it, and thenceforth try to figure out how it worked. Zaia would be a little slower to take to it, but once Ka experienced it and didn't yowl in displeasure, she would be fine with it.

And so it arrived:

The box was huge. Ka was with me when I opened it and put it on the floor to have a look. It was still huge. He didn't seem too perturbed about it. He sniffed all the parts. It wasn't until I carried it up the stairs to their bathroom that it began to dawn on him that he ought to pay more attention to it. Zaia was with us by then and she sat farther off to watch the goings on. I moved their current litterbox to the side and set up the Litter-Robot in its place. It took both Lee and I to read through the instructions and put litter in it. Once it was ready to go, we unplugged it so as to not freak the cats out too much. According to the company's suggestion, we left the current litterbox in place, but didn't bother cleaning it. We put a clump of the old litter into the new litterbox to give them the right smell of an idea.

Both had a habit of having to use the litterbox the second we dug around the litter to clean it out. So we scooped around in the new litterbox to get their attention. To our surprise, it was Zaia that led the way. She poked her head into the old litterbox, sniffed disdainfully and stepped up into the new one and used it. Ka was not one to be left out and crawled in after her, relishing in the depth of the new litterbox with apparent glee. Said glee was evident in the rain of litter making it out of the box as Ka flung it about, rearranged the clean litter, dug to the bottom to find out what it was made of. All seemed to be going well so far. That is, until we cycled it sometime later in their presence for the first time. Ka fluffed himself up and backed up. Zaia ran to their bed and hung out there for a few moments. She hopped down and made it halfway back to the litterbox by the time the cycle ended. A soothing pet for Ka soon after the litterbox cycle sent him all-paws into the air. No, that didn't go well at all.

The next time Ka went to the litterbox, he went into his old box, out of it, sniffed at the Litter-Robot's step, then ultimately went in his old box. Sigh. But it was only day 2. We had 58 days left in the company's money back trial period. We left the old box in place over the next couple of days and only cycled it while the cats were distracted with their feather toy so they could get used to the motor sound of the litterbox cycling (which sounded eerily like their nemesis, the Roomba). During the week, we soon graduated to cycling the Litter-Robot while they played within sight of it. They would perk up and show interest in the box, but played on. By Tuesday night, when we were gathering up the trash for trash day, we decided to keep the Litter-Robot on supervised cycling only and remove the old litterbox. At the start of Thanksgiving weekend, we left the new litterbox on automatic mode during the day and turned it off at night. By Friday, we were leaving the box on 24 hours a day.

But now, on Sunday, we have a new challenge. Ka has gotten over his initial wariness and is in full investigation mode. As soon as he hears the motor going, he trots upstairs to watch it. He has since discovered that stepping on its entrance step will stop the cycling momentarily, a handy safety feature. It also allows him to go inside and see what's different if the barrel is upside down (there's no litter and there's some sort of grate to stand on). Unfortunately, it also starts moving again 15 seconds after he stops it mid-cycle unless he triggers the sensor again. We have not yet come home to a thoroughly confused robot, but I foresee that event in the near future. Hopefully it won't be long after that until the Litter-Robot finally becomes their regular old, boring litterbox.

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NaNoWriMo 2008

I'm a winner, I'm a winner, I'm a winner *dancedancedance*! It says so on this nifty certificate right here, all printed out and ready to hang on something prominent. As you can see, the certificate is even on a first name basis with me. We are new good friends and we just met!



With five days left in November, I'm declaring this novel writing month complete (except for the requisite celebrations) for me. I ended up with 51,585 words, written in approximately 60 hours this month. (That's it? 60 hours? It felt like at least 60 gazillion). I also have a complete story in those 51K words which is even better.

This year, I decided to write a mystery. In my youth, there were two sections of the library that I think I managed to read all the books in: the fantasy/sci-fi section and the mystery section. Since I wrote fantasy for NaNoWriMo last time, I thought I'd try my hand at mystery. My co-workers gave me the idea of setting the murder in the corporate world and the idea of a Dilbert-ized murder mystery intrigued me. I don't think I achieved quite the funny Scott Adams does regularly for Dilbert, but at least it was the inspiration. For my detective, I picked a happily married female to defy the loner, unhappily married or single stereotype I'd already encountered several times before. As a matter of fact, some of the easiest scenes for me to write was going home with her and just being part of their oh-so-normal familial routine, complete with cats Ka and Zaia. Ah, how life imitates art. It probably makes for utterly undramatic reading, but it did make the words go by faster.

And they didn't go by very quickly for me this year. In stark contrast to last year, I had no plot outline. I was busy just before November kicked off for some reason that had something to do with Muppets and didn't get to do more than brainstorm elements of the story and about the detective. I didn't even use all of the elements I jotted down and my detective sure didn't end up acting like I had originally intended. I did reinforce my learning from last year that goal-setting is key for me. I set my daily word count goal to the same goal as last year: 2000. And even though I would often sit down at the keyboard with no idea what was happening next, somehow by the time I went to bed sometimes quite late, I'd have those 2000 words. Once again, I lost track of my characters' names and it seemed like I went through a lot of incidental characters this year (red herring potential). I tried to make myself an index to reference, but apparently the characters were coming too fast and furious to keep up (or I got lazy). It will be very interesting to figure out later that I had actually meant Sophie to be the same person as Sarah and the person I called Jonas was initially Jacob. Ah well.

Surprisingly, I also spent less time delving into the community which was so exciting for me to participate in last year. The people are still way cool, of course, but I found myself just typing to the entertainment of my cats and some iTunes music. I 'sponsored' a couple of local write-ins once a week which served to prove to me how much faster I can get through words without the distraction of home stuff. And the commiserating at the write-ins let me know I hadn't completely lost my mind, which was comforting. I completely kicked my word warring habit from last year (*Word War: a friendly competition among NaNoWriMoers in which the person who writes the most words in an agreed upon time frame gets bragging rights). And apparently, I gained the annoying habit of using many parentheses.

And of course, there was the mid-month Write-a-Thon. Thanks to the generosity of family, friends and even some strangers, I got to partake in a thrilling night of writing! It was set in the SoMa Arts Center in San Francisco with a Noir theme. How apropos was that? There were many fedoras and evening gowns to be seen around laptops. We had a tasty pasta dinner and many sweets and caffeine and even alcohol to keep us going. Chris Baty, NaNoWriMo's founder, gave us a humorous overview of the last 10 years of NaNoWriMo and I got to sit next to the attendant who had traveled the farthest to be there that night, Adrian from Sydney, Australia, who incidentally was also writing a mystery.

I understand that common wisdom of NaNoWriMo is that the sophomore year is tough, dragging people down in the depths of despair. I'm glad that I've survived intact, early, albeit less interested in this past story than the previous year's. And now on to gratitude and turkey!

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Cat Clicker Training or What My Kittens Will Do For Treats

I'm not sure how I got the idea of clicker training cats in my head. Or even training cats to begin with. So I'll start this story with my Google search for 'clicker training'. Of course I immediately found Karen Pryor's website for clicker training dogs, cats, horses, whatever animal you want to train. But more importantly, she had clicker training gear. I ordered the beginner cat training set that comes with an instruction book and a clicker. I went and picked out some suitable treats (small bits so they don't get full too quickly and different from their regular cat food so it seems more like a treat) from the pet store. I ended up with Wellness brand jerky treats that fit the bill. And judging from Ka and Zaia's motivation, they really fit the bill.


As soon as the instruction book arrived, I devoured the beginning pages. It did start off with the benefits of clicker training (like closer connection to your cats, another way of communication and mental stimulation for both owners and cats) but I skimmed through that and headed straight for how to get started. The first step was to have them associate the click sound with something good happening, i.e. treats. That may have taken 0.5 seconds but I wasn't timing. Next, we tried target training. I held out a chopstick and click/treated them when they touched it. It was maybe a minute later that they were following me and chasing the stick around so that they could touch it and get a treat. Apparently I made a bit of a mistake here in that I rewarded any sort of contact with the target when I should have just rewarded nose touching. We're retraining this now. Zaia gets it better than Ka. He'll still raise his paw to grab the target and bring it closer faster.

I noticed a few things during this process. The first is that they both learn amazingly quickly. Ka is more persistent in learning. I call him our Puzzler and can almost see his little brain pondering new things to try. He's figured out that doing something to knobs, whether they're doors or cabinet pulls, makes them open. He hasn't quite figured out what he needs to do to actually get them to open, but we'll find him trying every now and then.

The second thing is that I look forward to our training sessions in the evenings and I'll catch myself dreaming up new things to try the next time we train. I try to make sure we keep our sessions short to leave them wanting for more so that they don't decide it's boring for the next time. But if it isn't going well, I have to talk myself out of keeping on trying until we get it. I'm a big fan of learning anyway, and during training, I'm learning how to best communicate what I want them to do so that they get it and get treats. I find it even more engaging than flipping the fishing pole with feather around for them to play with. We still do that of course, because it's good to just play sometimes too.



Things Ka and Zaia know:
-Touch nose to target (Zaia knows this better than Ka. He likes to swat at the chopstick instead)
-Come when called. Currently, we call them with 2 knocks on the floor. I think we need to move this to something better suited to outside (whistle?) eventually.
-Sit (Ka knows this better than Zaia. Actually, I'm not sure she knows this yet)

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Electric Mayhem Rising

Way back in September, Todd and Ali fired off a simple email for a Halloween costume idea: Are we in for Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem band? For those uninitiated to the band of the Muppets, these guys:



I was initially wary. Todd and Ali have previous expertise with Muppet construction. Their award winning costume in 2006 were a pair of Beakers, Dr. Honeydew's lab assistant(s). While Lee and I have had our share of elaborate costuming attempts in the past (which I expect I'll blog about retrospectively sometime) it seemed like stepping up to the Electric Mayhem required a whole 'nother level of commitment. Of course, that level of effort requires the optimal place to showcase our craft. A place, preferably with a costume contest, that would appreciate the love and care that would go into achieving Muppethood. We had several good contenders, but we ultimately decided to make our band debut at DNA Lounge's Halloween party on Halloween night. DNA Lounge is known in San Francisco as THE place to go and be if you're serious about quality Halloween costumes. The very prospect seemed daunting and yet appropriate.

Because I'm impatient, I'll just go ahead and jump to the end result. Read on to see the riveting (or maybe glue-gunning?) documentary behind-the-scenes look at "Electric Mayhem Rising"! (Warning, image and media heavy post ahead!)

Tada!

The original Electric Mayhem had 5 members and we only had 4 people. Turns out Zoot was off making a solo foray during Halloween and so the rest of us had to soldier bravely on without him. Yeah, that's it. Our first band practice was Oct. 11. It was a busy weekend for everyone, but we squeezed in a mad brainstorming session as well as a parts shopping spree where we closed out Michael's, JoAnn's Walmart and the Halloween Spirit Store in rapid succession.

Thanks to Todd's l33t screen capturing skillz, we each had our own master character sheet with which to derive our inspiration. My original plan was to build the muppet heads on a hardhat I have so that I could have some structure underneath whatever the head was made of to interface with my head, create a bit of an airspace and better distribute the weight. But I only had one hardhat and there were four of us. So we got some bicycle helmets at Walmart as the basic scaffold for all of us.

We decided that both Dr. Teeth and Animal had roughly spherical heads. Last year Ali had experimented with creating a Dr. Honeydew muppet to go with their Beaker costume but it was abandoned and the remaining papier mache ball, when cut in half would start both Dr. Teeth and Animal. I used exactly half of the ball and poked some zip ties through to tie into the zip ties through the bike helmet.

Tada! A wearable papier mache half-ball. Dr. Teeth's half had to be modified somewhat so it wouldn't be as wide as Animal's head so we made a cut up to the center and glued/stapled the overlapping ends.

Floyd and Janice's head shapes were no mere spheres. Lee and Todd started on Floyd's head shape since it was a simpler pear-shaped head. They started the fishbone spine using 14-gauge wire from Home Depot. Then they attached wire mesh that we found at Michael's as the base skin. Wielding only wire cutters and pliers against the irascible mesh, Lee and Todd emerged scarred and battle-worn but with a Floyd-shaped head. Todd would go on to fatten Floyd's head up with a layer of foam.


Janice's head was the trickiest of all. It was vaguely Kermit-shaped. But the real beauty of her head was her chin. What Muppet had a chin? But there it was, unmistakeable in the screenshot, so we had no choice but to give Janice a chin. With the learnings from Floyd's head creation, Todd and Ali further honed their wire shaping skills and wounds to create Janice's head.

Wire-form Janice head

With the head shapes established, there were many Muppet technologies we had to invent to add each character's signature look. We decided that Dr. Teeth would merely be a happy guy - his signature is his reflective gold tooth.

Dr. Teeth looking eerily like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy green head. Since we were all looking out of the character's mouth, we put a light, sheerish black fabric there, complete with tongues. A little hard to see out of, but impossible to see in!

Animal needed movable eyebrows, preferably controlled invisibly. To simplify the mechanism, I opted to default Animal's look to half-lidded with the movement being a more wide-eyed look. Animal does have an expression that involves almost fully closed eyes, but I left that out. I ended up using a partial Halloween wreath (black like eyebrows), tying some fishing line to it, threading it through the papier mache and sewing it to some velcro. The velcro would attach to the bike helmet underneath and serve as a chin strap. I could then open and close my mouth to move Animal's eyebrows. I did have a movable jaw for Animal, but I opted for manual jaw movement given that my chin was already attached to his eyebrows, I didn't want to get confused and raise my eyebrows to open Animal's mouth. Since the jaw movement was hinged through only paper and glue, I stuck the jaw wire through some plastic disks attached to the head for durability.

Janice needed to be able to pout. Lee came up with the idea of running fishing line through one strand of her hair, attach beads to the end so that she could tug on her hair to close up the mouth. The fishing line would of course be attached to her jaw.

Did I mention that Janice has a chin? How to mold wireform and foam to look like a Muppet chin? Well somehow, Ali made it work. And work it she did!

Floyd also employed what we ended up calling "M5 Muppet technology" to have a hair-controlled jaw (Floyd has a ponytail he can yank on). He had some additional challenges in the nose department. The initial nose color was unfortunately toxic to Muppet noses (styrofoam).

On the left is Floyd's nose on drugs. On the right is Floyd's nose out of rehab. Any questions?

Fortunately, the Electric Mayhem didn't travel around naked, even though Animal was close. Dr. Teeth modified a giant pink top hat with some additional feathers, a pimp costume from a Halloween Spirit store with some red fringe on the back. Animal wore his two-toned rock shirt and ripped pants. I also wore the requisite chain so that the rest of the band could keep him under wraps. (I also ended up sewing some Muppet gloves and booties for Animal.) Floyd wore his signature Sgt. Pepper jacket and cords. Janice was in her rock babydoll tee, miniskirt and sandals. They carried around their lighted guitars and Animal carried drumsticks to beat on everything I could get ahold of.

Then we were ready to take the stage at DNA Lounge. We were an instant hit! We got hugs. We got pictures. Each member of the band had their fan club. Some couldn't believe they were actually seeing the Electric Mayhem live and in person.

There were some that posed with us over and over again.











But the culmination of the evening was the costume contest and this was the reaction:


Which ended up with this as the result:

We took first place! At DNA Lounge! By a large enough margin that they had a run off for 2nd and 3rd place but not for first! Second place went to an amazing Predator and 3rd place went to Bender.



Additional pics

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Welcome Ka and Zaia!

Ka


Zaia

We went by the Milo mobile adoption event down at 4th Street in Berkeley today and brought home these two beauties! They are formerly named Ike and Clara, 4 month old brother and sister from a litter of five. As soon as I saw Ka (aka Ike) I knew I liked him. The lady at the adoption event let us hold both of them briefly. Ka really really wanted to jump down and play. Zaia was pretty nervous about all the sidewalk goings on and merely cuddled.

It took them several hours to wander out of their carrier once we put them in their own bathroom upstairs. Ka was lured out by the feathers we bought for them. Zaia is a little shyer but she soon followed her brother out. It wasn't long before they were exploring not just the bathroom, but also the adjoining playroom. Maybe they're still uncertain, but they were very polite about their exploration. By the end of the evening, I had two purring kittens in my lap just before bedtime. We're very happy to have them.

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