Black Cat Appreciation Day 2017

Today, August 17, is Black Cat Appreciation Day, and we wanted to take a moment to remind you why black cats are terrific. We have written a fair amount about black cats in the past, so we'll be sharing links to some of those posts.

First off, a black cat is really just a cat who happens to have a black coat. We don't know why some people have such a "thing" about them. Oh, sure, there's the old "black cats bring bad luck" issue, but in plenty of places around the world, black cats are believed to bring good luck. See our posts on Black Cat Superstitions and A Guide to Cats, Colors, and Luck for more on black cats and luck.

We think black cats are some of the most beautiful cats around. Their dark coats complement any decor and go with any outfit. Also, holding a black cat is very slimming (note: this is a made-up "fact" that may or may not be true). The basic beauty of black cats makes us wonder why they get passed over at animal shelters. We wrote about that in Black Cat Syndrome May Be Real.

Finally, old SoLT has known one black cat whom she thought was pretty extraordinary. We wrote about Jack last year for Black Cat Appreciation Day.



Let's all take some time today to cherish the black cats in our lives, remember those black cats we've known in the past, and celebrate black cats everywhere!

Cat of the Week: Midnight Moon in Baltimore

Each week in this space, we feature an older adult or senior cat (7 years +) in need of adoption or sponsorship. Mature cats make great companions, and unlike kittens, they (probably) won’t climb the curtains! Adopt an older cat, and help them enjoy the best years of their life!

Today, please meet Midnight Moon. He is nice, quiet guy who is 7 years old. Midnight Moon is a Maine Coon mix, but he is not one of those giant Maine Coons you see on the internet; he’s described as a medium-sized cat. He is a brown tabby with a stylish white ruff on his chest (he even has some ear furnishings!), and he enjoys getting head and neck rubs. He also enjoys gazing out the window. Midnight Moon (we love that name!) has lived with kids before. He also lived with his sister Cinnamon, a 7-year-old orange & white tabby also available for adoption. Seriously, if old SoLT’s home wasn’t already at maximum cat capacity, she would drive over to meet these guys today!


Midnight Moon is currently at the Baltimore Humane Society. Learn more about him here.

Can’t adopt? You can still help! Check out Sammy’s Cat Necessities Fund, which provides money for everyday and medical needs of cats at the Baltimore Humane Society. You can also make a general donation or sponsor a particular animal on this page. Every little bit helps!


Are you a dog lover? (It’s okay; we understand if you are—sort of.) Well, if you love dogs and are in the Baltimore area, make plans now to attend DogFest 2017 on Saturday, September 16. You can get discounted tickets online through September 14.

App Review: Simon’s Cat—Crunch Time

Today we bring you our review of a relatively new match-3 game: Simon’s Cat—Crunch Time. We love Simon’s Cat, so we have been looking forward to trying this game. Turns out it is really cute and very easy to learn, but on the levels labeled “Hard,” they are not kidding!

Easy to start…

In Crunch Time, you are basically taking a trip through a series of backyards and fields. To progress through the levels, you solve match-3 puzzles by connecting strings of colorful cat treats. The puzzles present different scenarios. In one scenario, your object is to feed the cats by collecting a certain number of each kind of treat. In another, you match treats to collect the fish crackers hidden underneath them. There’s another where you feed a dog, and one where you collect acorns to throw at a squirrel.

Of course it starts out super-easy. But pretty soon you reach the levels that allow you only a certain number of moves to complete your objective. If you run out of moves before you’ve fed all the cats or whatever, you lose a life. (You start with four lives; if you use them all up, they will regenerate over time.) You can also do a “Level Rush,” in which you try to complete a certain number of levels within a time limit. And of course you can compete with other players, but we aren’t into all that, so we don’t pay any attention to it. C’mon, we mainly want to see the cute cats and have something to do during commercials while we’re watching TV, right?

Old SoLT made this video of herself playing one of the early levels. Looks easy, right?

But then it gets more difficult…

This is a shot of the early part of your journey, when things are
pretty easy. We love the little scenes you come across as you
advance through the levels.

There are boosters you can use to help you clear a level (by clearing a whole row for you, for example), but be careful how you use them. Old SoLT squandered her boosters on some levels just because she wanted to get through them quickly, but now she is stuck on level 53 and has no boosters to help her (there are videos on YouTube about how to get past level 53, so she is not the only person who has this problem). She also doesn’t have enough coins to buy any more, and it is really not that easy to get coins. You get them for achieving certain things (“complete level 50,” for example), but these don’t come along too often, and they will typically get you only two, three, or maybe five coins. A booster costs 70 coins. Yes, you can use real money to buy things, but we rarely do that in games, at least not this early into a game. You can also earn coins and boosters by watching ads—1 coin or 1 booster per ad, but everything you want to buy costs 70 coins (thought that was worth repeating!).

But we didn’t come here to talk about money. Our real point is that if you want to get very far in Crunch Time, you need to pay attention to what you’re doing. You need a strategy. This is a simple game to learn, but on those levels labeled “Hard,” be prepared to put your little gray cells to work. (BTW, “little gray cells” means your brain cells—just in case you’re not familiar with Poirot, or brains.) And if you get to a point where you are out of boosters and low on coins, well, you are pretty well stuck with playing that level over and over until you either get it or give up.

Our verdict

At a much higher level than we're at now, you'll come
across this neat crop circle along your journey.

This is a fun game and we do enjoy playing it—we love the graphics!— but we think it could be tweaked to enhance the fun factor. We like that Crunch Time is challenging—it would be boring if there were no challenge to it—but we wish you could accumulate coins more quickly so you’d at least feel like you had a chance of being able to buy boosters when you need them. We feel like we’re being pushed into buying stuff to continue with the game, and that annoys us. That’s often THE thing that makes us stop playing a game. We’d like to go back and replay some of the lower levels to earn coins (that's what we do in other games), but that’s just not how this game works; we’ve been playing lower levels for a few days now and have earned exactly zero coins.

So, we regret that we can only give Crunch Time one paw up. This saddens us, because we wanted to love this game, but the deal with the coins is just too annoying. (While writing this review, old SoLT has used up all four of her lives—again—on level 53. Each time, she is just one or two moves away from getting that stupid mole!)

Details

Simon’s Cat—Crunch Time is published by Strawdog and is available for iOS and Android devices. We played on an iPad. The download is free, and you can make in-app purchases. 

Sunday Selfie: Paisley Strikes a Pose

This week, our Sunday Selfie comes to us courtesy of Real Cat Paisley, who was kind enough to strike a pose in the sunroom while old SoLT was in there with the good camera. Thank you, Paisley!

We are joining the Sunday Selfies blog hop, hosted by The Cat on My Head.

Caturday Art: Find the Kitty!

We are sharing our Caturday Art today, even though the blog hop unfortunately had to be cancelled this week. If you haven't already, we hope you'll send a message of cheer and best wishes to Athena and her person, Marie.

In today's first artwork, we have accidentally created a challenge for you. There is a (highly stylized) cat in this picture. Can you find him--without scrolling down to see the original? (If you need a hint: It's not a little tiny kitty cat hidden amongst the swirly bits, so don't go looking for your magnifying glass. Just look for something that resembles a face.)

Did you find him? We didn't think it was too hard, though you do have to use your imagination. Here's a different artified version of the same picture. It's Real Cat Webster, sitting in a pet bed. He looks sort of glowy in this one:

Both of these pictures were created in Dreamscope. The top one is the Jeweled Bird effect, and the bottom one is the Irises effect.

 Here's the original:

Friendly Fill-Ins

Today we have just one fun Friday feature for you. Real Cat Webster has a word all picked out for Words with Webster, but old SoLT said something about having “entirely too much work,” whatever that means. Anyway, she says she doesn’t have time to help Webs look up his word or type it all out for you. Next week, she says!

We are pleased to have Friendly Fill-Ins, from 15andmeowing and McGuffy’s Reader. They are a fun way to learn a little bit about the authors of the blogs you read. The first two questions, answered by old SoLT this week, are from Ellen of 15andmeowing, and the next two, answered by Real Cat Paisley, are from Annie of McGuffy’s Reader.

Old SoLT’s answers:

1. Blind dates—never been on one, never want to go on one!

2. Thirty years ago, I graduated from high school. I know it’s been that long because my class just had a 30-year reunion, and people keep posting pictures of it on Facebook. I recognize exactly two of my former classmates.

Real Cat Paisley’s answers:

3. I admire tigers because they are big and fierce and beautiful. I’ll bet no one tells a tiger, “No, honey, it’s not time to eat yet,” or “Here, you can have four of these little, tiny treats”!

4. Our dog makes me think evolution went wrong somewhere. Dogs are so clearly some sort of horrible mistake, like that movie "The Fly," where the guy turns into a fly? That's how we got dogs, I'm pretty sure!

Getting Ready for Remember Me Thursday

This is what we got from Remember the Rescue to help us help them
spread the word about Remember Me Thursday, on September 28, 2017.

When we were at the BlogPaws Conference in Myrtle Beach a few months ago (has it really been that long?), we met a really nice lady from the Helen Woodward Animal Center. She told us all about Remember the Rescue and Remember Me Thursday, which happens on September 28,  2017.  This year will be the fifth year for this event, which focuses on highlighting pet adoption and remembering all those terrific pets who are stuck in shelters. Unfortunately, many of those pets will die before they find a home.

Years ago, when old SoLT was in high school, she volunteered one summer at the local animal shelter. This was back before “no-kill” shelters were a thing. Every week at this shelter, animals—most of them beautiful, adoptable animals—were picked out to be euthanized because space needed to be made for incoming animals. Sometimes the rationale for euthanizing a cat was, “Well, you’ve been here a week and haven’t caught anyone’s eye. It’s time to give someone else a chance,” or “There’s another cat in intake that looks just like you. Let’s give him a chance.”

Heartbreaking does not begin to describe it.

We want to emphasize that this was not some horrible, dark place where animals weren’t well cared for. This was a shelter where the staff and volunteers really cared about the animals who ended up there. But the reality was, there was limited space and there was no rescue organization (at least so far as old SoLT knew) that would swoop in and take pets who were in danger of being euthanized simply because the shelter needed to make room.

That’s why we’re so proud to be participating in Remember Me Thursday this year. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that on most Tuesdays, we feature a mature adult or senior cat who needs a forever home. We do that in honor of the older cats we’ve known who have been so special to us. We do that because we know there are many older cats who lose their home and aren’t lucky enough to land in a no-kill shelter. Perhaps they were someone’s beloved pet for years and years, but when their person died or became unable to care for them, to the shelter they went. Too many of them will never know what it is to be loved again because, even though they may have years of life left in them, they will never make it out of that shelter. This is intolerable. No pet deserves to die because they have lost their home, or have never had one.

We want you to be ready to take a moment, or longer, to remember all those pets in shelters on Remember Me Thursday, so we’re announcing it today, to give you time to get ready. You can find out a lot more at remembermethursday.org. Plan to light a candle in honor of a rescue pet who has touched your life, and in honor of the shelter pets who are just waiting for a chance to touch someone’s life. Then commit to helping those pets in any way you can: financially, with your time—or by adopting one!

Save the date!

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Wherever you are, light a candle for a rescue pet & all those who are waiting!