Two Adult Cats Need New Homes After Owner Passed Away

UPDATE 5:10pm Thursday January 29, 2015: Sammy and Baby Girl are safe and adopted!

My friend Nick lost his mom right before Christmas. He didn't hear from her over a weekend, which was weird; they were very close. The following Monday, he went to check on her to find his mom's body; she died sometime early in the weekend. Nick is an only child. He lives alone, in an apartment, and he has a kitty of his own. He loves his kitty, his kitty mostly tolerates him, but his kitty will not tolerate any other cat... and neither will his landlords. Nick has until the end of January to finish cleaning out his mother's apartment, and as he does that, he's been visiting the cats daily to feed, water, scoop, and play.

Time is almost up, though. These two cats suffered the loss of their person, and now with 5 days to go they are losing their home with nowhere to go. We've been trying to home them for a month and a half, but nobody wants adult cats, and the shelters and rescues we've asked have regretfully declined - they're overpopulated with adult cats, as it is.

Please, if you can spread the word, share the post, if you know anybody who can take these cats in - please send them my way. Comment here, email jenniferbaileybergen at gmail, tweet @tryjen. These two don't even need to be homed together, since the tuxedo girl sort of totally hates the Maine Coon, but they need homes.

This is Sammy. He's a 10 yr old Maine Coon.

This is Baby Girl. She's a 6 yr old chubster.

We don't know what to do. These cats deserve a home where they will be loved, but we can't find anybody who has a place for them to go. We have offered donations of money and goods to local no-kill shelters, we've asked everybody we know... Nobody can take them. 

There are five days left until these cats are homeless. 

Ideas? Thoughts? Help? 

Now and Then

Sometime between when I turned 30 in February of 2004 and marrying for the second time in August of 2006, I:

• Got my first tattoo at Infinity Tattoo in Portland, Oregon, recommended and accompanied by my friend Lisa*. Why Oregon? Because here in South Carolina, tattooing was still illegal in 2004 (yes, seriously) and I very much felt a need to mark my 30th year in a visible and indelible way. 
• Cut off most of my waist-length hair, dying it varying shades from orange to magenta and firecracker red.
• Changed careers
• Pierced my nose
• Took up a major aquaria hobby (one 5 gallon tank with 2 fish somehow became a 60 gallon show tank)
• Got a second and third tattoo.
• Decided "I'm going to be Witty Geek Shirt Girl!" I would collect funny t-shirts! Friends would think of me as the awkward but endearingly funny gal! They could always count on to turn up wearing an amusing t-shirt! Some of my favorite shirts were a vintage Mr. Yuk, a pretty-much-only-okay-in-South-Carolina tribute to the UofSC COCKS, a Flying Spaghetti Monster logo, and the highly controversial Pirates Are Way Cooler Than Ninjas. 
• Among my favorites, this:

I really do.

I stopped wearing this particular shirt when those mysterious little washing machine holes began to turn up, and a couple years later had to take it away from my husband (who thought it perfectly fine to keep right on wearing a shirt with a big hole where the collar was ripping away in front, in public).

By the end of 2006 I realized that I was not really much of a t-shirts-all-the-time person at all, and most of them went off to live in places like husband's closet or the Goodwill. This morning, halfway through July 2014, I happened across the talk nerdy shirt while packing my yoga bag before work. I allllmost passed it by again, but then paused, thinking of how cutting out the torn crew collar and trimming down most of the sleeve length might turn this old friend into a great top to for yoga class. I did, it did, and I wore it for tonight's power hour class set to the music of Rush! RUSH!! \m/

As for the rest of it, well, by 2009 that huge aquarium was drained and moved to a storage shed, where it still sits as of this writing.** My nostril piercing has closed, but now I have (and totally love) two tragus piercings. My hair is relatively short, but what was once "holy crap red" could now rightly be called "salt & pepper". I sat for a fourth tattoo not long after the third, but since then I have felt exactly zero artistic inspiration for a new one. Next month I'll have been at my "new" career for 9 entire years, and mostly I think I do a good job at it. I am pretty sure I know who I am these days, at age 40. I'm still not much of a crewneck t-shirt person, and tin only aquariums I'm interested in are ones I pay to visit and then get to leave. I am strong(ish), capable(ish), I can do hardcore(ish) yoga (I never saw that coming), and I enjoyed the hell out of yoga class tonight, in my newly trimmed shirt. Because for all the other changes, I do indeed still love it when one talks nerdy.


* Lisa, you're a footnote! Hah! Everybody else who is not Lisa: Are you in Portlandia? Stop! Drop whatever it is you are upcycling or composting! Go directly to the Peculiarium on NW Thurmond, and tell Lisa I sent you! She will induct you into the Insectatarian Club, introduce you to Bigfoot, and even show you an extraterrestrial dissection! Act now! 

** Just wait until an 8 inch long freshwater shark leaps right out of the tank flying directly AT YOUR HEAD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT (I just wanted to go to the bathroom!) and see how much longer you want to keep fish.

Try40

A year and a half ago, someone I love very much committed suicide. Years of untreated depression and alcoholism culminated in the loss of an incredible person who absolutely did not have to die. I can't go back and undo the terrible loss for a family and a worldwide community of friends and loved ones, but I can and will make a difference for the people in my own community who depend on services like those offered by NAMI Mid-Carolina.

Cocky cheering for the 2013 NAMIWalk

I live with depression and anxiety. I LOVE people with depression, anxiety, OCD, addictions, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, and more. 1 in 4 Americans are living with mental illness - which means chances are, so do you... either yourself, or someone you love.

We're not in this alone, and funding the mental health services in our Midlands community can help ensure that nobody who needs help has to feel alone or go untreated.

Every dollar helps. Every step counts. All we need to do is TRY. I'l be using the hashtag #Try40 for my walk, as I try to make it the entire 5k at age 40. :)

Yes, that's right, I'm about to turn 40. If you are inclined to give me a gift, please consider making a donation to sponsor my first EVER 5k (at age 40!) instead. You can also sign up to join Team TryJen, and come out and walk with me at the last public event at the old Bull Street "Asylum" before it is demolished and new construction begins.

Sponsor me: http://namiwalks.nami.org/jbb
Join Team TryJen: http://namiwalks.nami.org/tryjen

THANK you.

Cheetos To You!

Eme presenting to me the
Tell Them "Cheetos to you!" Award

Internet Nation, I accidentally got myself a catch phrase.

I make no secret about who I am, what I do, and the things I enjoy. I talk, you know? When I like things, I like to share that information with my friends so that maybe they will spend some of their hard-earned moneydollars on those things, too. Sometimes it happens in the other direction, although I try not to be a Cranky Cathy if I can help it. I'm curmudgeonly; I'm not rude. Usually. So it's pretty common knowledge that I like Tell Them, the organization and the women who run it. I advocate on their behalf, I contribute to their blog, and I participate in their online events. Internet, It Is Known. (It is known)

It's the online part which brings us here today. Like Vikings punter and glimmering sparklepony Chris Kluwe, my writing career was primarily born from the gaming communities (he's referred to such communities as "a seething pit of ignoramuses, born of misspoken children on the internet"), where, as he said, "if you go after someone, you'd better make sure you've got your ducks in a row or they're going to come right back at you". I'm in complete agreement with Mr. Kluwe: If I'm going to call you out, "the only way to do so without being ignored is to craft a completely logical argument that has a hook."

Which brings us to how I intervened in a fingerquote discussion fingerquote on Tell Them's facebook page. You can read the entire thread for yourself, if you want. It doesn't matter what you're saying or how reasonable your argument may be. If you start with hate, the rest of your argument, however logical it may be, is automatically a pile of poop. So, I replied, and then declared to friends "BABAM! They just got JBeebled!". And so #jbeebled you can now get, and it is a thing you can be, and be careful because it is typically contagious.

I was henceforth crowned Queen Bee of the World and a motion was carried to replace the word "kudos" with "cheetos". You might not even believe me if I told you how many women were saying "CHEETOS TO YOU!" yesterday. Heh. The thing is, Internet Nation: DON'T HATE. EDUCATE. And CHEETOS TO YOU, from the Tell Them "Cheetos to You" Award recipient and Queen Bee of the World, March 2013.

BABAM! You just got JBEEBLED!

About That #LiveLikeRick Tribute Video

James and George created this tribute to Rick Stilwell. James will say that he AND George made it; George will say that he just contributed a few bits but that James did all the work. He said/he said aside, this is a bittersweet video for those of us who knew Rick... It's nice to hear from him again, it's funny, he was funny, and he's just so missed.

The thing for me, though, is that this tribute video is especially important for me: It includes a bit of footage where Rick talked about me (!), suggesting that people should be following me on Twitter. Me! Of all people! I'm just some dweeb, and he was talking about ME! I seriously couldn't believe it. Rick was the coolest of the cool kids, and I was a total nobody... at least, an in-person nobody, and he was talking about me? That's why I'm here talking about him, to tell you not just about this video, but also about that day.

If memory serves, the day Rick recorded the bit about me was a blazing hot day in late August, 2011; it was the day when I finally got to meet Rick in person, on the steps of Cromer's Pnuts during Food Truck Food Court. I heard he would be there, and told The City Girl I wanted to meet THE Columbia social media guru. She made sure to find him; rolled me right up to him in the middle of his lunch, and made a proper IRL introduction (we'd known each other online for ages). That August day in 2011 was a big deal day for me in a lot of ways: It was the first time I beat back the social anxiety enough to attend any of the tweetups; the first time I met most of the "Real Twitterati". I was just standing up the social media department at work for real, and I needed to turn my virtual connections into real ones. Everybody who was anybody knew: RickCaffeinated was the guy you talked to about that in Columbia, SC.

So there I was: Sweaty, self-conscious, scared, nervous, and by the end of the day I had a raging sunburn, too. As it turned out, though, every single person I met was not only super fun and kind, but 100% welcoming and friendly, just as if we'd known each other forever... which, well, we had. Rick was so nice to me that day, answering tons of questions, inviting me to Social Media Club Columbia, and telling me he would happily tell me about how to do what he did, for his going price of a cup of coffee. :)

Anyway. I have been wondering what happened to that clip, and to find that not only did The Misters K and N locate it, but that they chose to include it in this tribute... well, that just means the world to me. In mid January 2013, the day after Rick died, I would go back to Cromer's - which now houses Jamestown Coffee Company - along with lots of the same people who were there that day in 2011. In 2013, we raised our mugs in toast to Rick, shared memories, and said our goodbyes to him.

Please take a minute to watch. Thank you.

Kindness and Local Happiness

Jim Sonefeld. Ring a bell?

You might know him as "Soni". You might know him as the drummer for a band called Hootie and the Blowfish. You might even know him from when he played soccer for the Gamecocks. Me, I moved to South Carolina from the West Coast at the end of 1996, and didn't really connect Jim with any of those things. I saw him around town over the years, but for the longest time I couldn't place him, I just always thought "I know I know that guy from somewhere!" (That somewhere eventually registered as having been MTV). See, when you live in Columbia, SC, the first thing you learn is that everybody knows everybody else, or knows someone who knows their mama. So I chalked up my feeling of deja vu as a part of that.

SC Governor Nikki Haley Contradicts Science, Just Because

"South Carolina's major exports are peaches, shrimp, and fodder for late night comedians." - Susanna King

Update 4/9/12: This post was featured as a guest article for Tell Them on April 4, 2012. Tell Them is a program of the New Morning Foundation, a statewide, reproductive health-focused foundation based in Columbia, South Carolina. In addition to making grants to improve reproductive health education and clinical access for citizens under age 30, the Foundation is committed to serving as a leading advocate for improving the state’s sexual health policies.

If there's one thing I never could stand, it's South Carolina politics. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart calls South Carolina "America's whoopie cushion", a nod to the countless jokes told about the regularly-occurring gaffes in the SC political arena. As a resident of the "famously hot" state of South Carolina for over 15 years now, most of the time I just roll my eyes and chuckle along with the rest of the country (world?), when SC shows up on the blooper reel.

But then this happened:

Dang it, Governor Haley! This is why we can't have nice things!

That is the governor of the state of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, appearing on ABC's The View on Tuesday April 03, 2012. I almost can't believe that anybody growing up female could bring herself to say such a thing without genuine fear of sprouting a Pinocchio nose and/or her pants bursting into flames on national television. Women do indeed care about contraception, and we care a great deal.

Governor Haley, like a lot of women, is an educated and successful person. She holds a B.A. in Accounting from Clemson University, and among numerous accomplishments on her way to becoming governor, she spent six years in SC House of Representatives.

Would Governor Haley have been able to meet her goals without access to, or use of, contraceptives? Anecdotally, one might say 'sure, maybe so'. Statistically, however, it's much more likely that the answer would be 'probably not'.

Here's why:

According to the famous 2002 paper "The Power of the Pill", the earlier a woman has access to contraceptives, the more likely she is to complete higher education and career goals . The authors state "The most persuasive evidence for a role of the pill is that its initial diffusion among single women coincided with, and is analytically related to, the increase in the age at first marriage and the increase in women in professional degree programs."

Forbes goes so far as to state that we women have "The Pill to thank for 30%" of our paychecks, in their report on a recently-released study of over 4000 women by researchers at University of Michigan.

So here I am, stating for the record: I care. If you live in South Carolina and you care, too, you can use this handy email form courtesy of Tell Them! to tell Governor Haley that you DO care about contraception, and that you do NOT support legislation which restricts your access to it. If you live outside of South Carolina, well, enjoy the current ridiculousness, and be glad it isn't you. Residents of Arizona, of course, exempt.

Internet Nation, I'll leave you with this quote, courtesy of my favorite astrophysicist: “The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.” Neil deGrasse Tyson