Jeff taught her to do that, but it turns out that a lot of Maine Coons like to fetch or learn to fetch easily. Her ears perk up as soon as I crumple up a piece of paper and she crouches, ready for me to toss it. The smaller ones she plays with more easily. After she's done batting it about the wood floors she'll pick it up, carry it in her mouth like a dead rodent, come to us and drop it at our feet. (Or on the sofa or the bed. We've awakened to crumpled bits of paper in our bed before.) If we toss the crumples, like you would a stick or ball for a dog, she'll run and get it, trot right back and drop it in front of us again.

One trait is a total mystery, she likes to be under the covers. She can be easily coaxed under a set of sheets, but she'll actually paw at an afghan to try to create something she can get under. If we drape the afghan over the back and front of the sofa (so that it forms a little cave underneath) she'll crawl right in and stay there for hours.

But her affinity for water seems to be a Maine Coon trait. She's done the first six items of this list repeatedly.

We've never bothered with cat toys, since she seems to get hours-on-end enjoyment out of those wadded up pieces of paper, rolled up plastic bags and Jeff's round elastic hair ties. It's the hair ties that she reserves for a peculiar ritual.

She'll sit in the middle of the room, tossing the hair tie in her paws as if it was alive, then lay it down, walk away and turn around just to pounce on it again. Once the hair tie is sufficiently "dead", she carries it to her water bowl and carefully drops it in.

Just last night she did this, carefully pawing at it while it was in the water bowl to dunk it further. Then one paw carefully slid under one side of the water bowl and she lightly, but quickly, lifted it up, jiggling the water. Pause. One paw slides under the bowl and executes another quick jiggle. Finally she fished the hair tie out of her water with her paw, took it in her mouth, and laid it in her food bowl.

Day after day we would find wet hair ties in her food bowl. It wasn't until last night that we got to see the whole process in action.

She'll also toss bits of her food in her water bowl. At first we just thought the soggy bits were due to messy eating habits and we separated the water bowl from the food bowl. We still found soggy bits of food in the bowl. It turns out that she would pick up a pick of food with her paw, place it in her mouth using her paw, walk over to the water bowl, place said food in her paw again and drop it into the water bowl. She'd wait a while and then come back to fish out the now softened bit of food WITH HER PAW and place it in her mouth to eat.

Raccoon. I swear.

Time for a little thinking-out-loud: Misbehaving.net has a recent post about their frustrations with other's perspectives of their site and what they are attempting to do. I commented there, but I thought I'd expand a bit on it here.

Here's what I posted:

Several years ago myself and a few friends decided to put up a web site (this was long before we discovered weblogs) about our perspectives as "third wave feminists". Mind you, it was only our own personal observations and experiences on everything from politics to getting a car fixed. Even so, people still thought that (a) we were trying to represent every other woman or all feminists and (b) that we were an official organization with headquarters, dues, scholarships, internships and jobs. It was an uphill battle to make people recognize that we could come together and speak about these things as unique individuals, on a daily basis, for the heck of it, interacting without having to turn our interaction into an NGO and anonymizing and generalizing our words and perspectives so that they could be applied broadly.

The site I was talking about was 3rdwwwave. Alana, Cindy, Kim, Janis, Sidra and myself came up with this site in 1996 when we realized that we were just emailing each other REAMS of stuff, ranting and exploring all kinds of issues from a post-1970's feminist experience and perspective. We decided that, heck, it'd be great to just slap all our thoughts up onto a web site and let others read what we were thinking as well.

What I've come to learn, over the last 15 years, is that any time women bring their expository, exploratory, and opinionated GROUP CONVERSATIONS out into the view of the public, there will be one of at four possible reactions:

1) Why don't you include men? Aren't you being unfair by not letting men join your organization?

2) How dare you represent all women. You're doing it badly. You don't speak for X, Y and Z.

3) Where are your headquarters? Do you have scholarships? Can I have a job? I'd like to join your organization!

4) Your scholarship is flawed. Where is your theory? You can't possibly be worth noting academically, because you don't exist yet in a theoretical framework.

Mind you, every group I've been a part of that has experienced this has NOT been any kind of official organization - just a bunch of friends that floated together for a while, then floated apart again after a while. They have never been more than simply a bunch of articulate women who already knew each other and felt comfortable talking with one another.

Simply put, these groups were always Friends With A Penchant For Chatting Verbosely About Stuff. Stuff that happened to be fairly weighty things like feminism, politics, current events, interspersed with things that revealed our creativity and individuality like knitting, television and other fun things. And as groups of friends are wont to do, we sometimes drifted away from each other after a time. There were no headquarters or gathering place, except in email. There were no attempts to be an NGO or organization, or an activist group. Every once in a while there might be the thought to write a book (naturally, since everybody was verbose in writing online), but Real Life was too busy and pulled us in too many directions to ever complete projects like that together.

So long as we kept our conversations private and to ourselves we received no guff for being ourselves and talking about what we did. But once we decided to let other people in on what we'd said to each other, or what we'd like to say to other people, to allow others to digest our thoughts and be inspired (or annoyed) by proxy - well, then almost everyone expected us to be an "organization" that could be "joined". They were annoyed at the presence of our individual voices, chiding us to be more generalized, anonymous and faceless so that we better represented all women.

These were never disagreements with substance of what we'd said. The focus was almost never on the opinions presented on those hot topics. No, the focus of everyone's consternation was that we were talking about these sorts of things as *gasp* individuals, without tomes of academic research and fundraising drives. We dared to think of ourselves as a group, give ourselves a silly name and chat about not-so-inane subjects without filing first for non-profit status. As long as our existence as a group was thought to be a joke (as in the case of one women's discussion group) or so long as it was invisible, private and unknown to anyone else (as in the case of 3rdwwwave until we shoved all our stuff onto a web site) then everything was okay. We were either not to be taken seriously or we were anonymous.

"Anonymous was a Woman".

Too often we think of women as Women. As one monolithic group, The Other to Men, The Sisterhood. We are WE, and ONLY "We". We move and writhe as a mass of anonymous females to create an entity called "Women". It is "Women" who shall have hopes and desires and characteristics, not the individual woman. And it is only "Women" who shall say what WE want, what WE feel, or what WE experience.

The rare female who is recognized individually amidst the mass is deemed to be A Representative of Women and therefore must be Teflon. You shouldn't be able to stick a personality to her, else it not fit with What Women Are or Should Be. She should be a non-individual, else any argument she makes for Women be summarily rejected because she doesn't represent all women. Women can only gather in smaller groups to chatter in public if such chatter is inane, ignorable and trivial (or at least, only about "womanly topics").

I abhor this. Maybe it's just individualistic me, or some naive notions of mine, but I think this kind of thing is counterproductive and even quite possibly a good weapon against women. I.e. unless a woman can be put on a pedestal, she must belong to the nameless, faceless, all-are-the-same mass of Women when confronting politics, religion, feminist issues and the world around her. But that makes no sense, since so many of us women exist in such different political and social environments. We have had different experiences shape us, and so different perspectives have been formed. Without recognizing the individual woman, her voice, perspective and experience I don't think we can really continue to learn and move ourselves forward.

I've always felt frustrated when I heard about nifty, brave and pioneering women - AFTER they'd died. I've always been annoyed that women who are analytical, geeky, or simply science-oriented find that all their personality traits are deemed "male". I get fed up with black-and-white only points of view when so many things are really shades of gray. I'm tired of of the anonymity of women.

So "hear, hear" to all those individual women's voices out there in the blogosphere. I'm not only happy to have met women I liked, but I'm happy to have met women who annoy the hell out of me. I feel I am like you and you and you, but unlike you and possibly you. That pleases me. Hang in there, be yourself and keep talking to each other.

I've was sick way too much of last year, so I got a flu shot this year. Even if I do get sick, it won't be as bad as it could be:
CDC: flu hitting earlier, stronger this season
Flu Cases In [Colorado] Up 300 Percent In One Week: Flu Season Still Not At Its Peak
Flu Season May Be Severe, Officials Say

Leonid Meteor Shower
Shooting stars should be visible tonight, the traditional climax of the Leonid meteor shower. Sky watchers in the Americas, however, will observe peak activity early Wednesday morning.

Oblivion threat to 12,000 species
Another 2,000 species have been added to the annual Red List of the world's most endangered animals and plants. The "official" catalogue produced by IUCN-The World Conservation Union now includes more than 12,000 entries.

Speaking of possible extinctions, here's something you can do to prevent that happening to your favorite seafood. Seafood watch program
Increased consumer demand for popular seafood is depleting fish stocks around the world and harming the health of the oceans. Today, nearly 70 percent of the world's fisheries are fully fished or overfished. Consumer purchasing power can support those sustainable fisheries and fish farms while relieving pressure on others.

Massachusetts gay marriage ban overturned
"Massachusetts? highest court ruled Tuesday that same-sex couples are legally entitled to wed under the state constitution, but stopped short of allowing marriage licenses to be issued to the couples who challenged the law. The Supreme Judicial Court?s 4-3 ruling ordered the Legislature to come up with a solution within 180 days."

Palestinians Surf During Siege
Cooped up in their communities for most of the past three years of fighting, Palestinians have found a way to escape: going online. Internet use has risen sharply, putting the Palestinians ahead of much of the Arab world. Business people use the Web to place orders with suppliers, university students keep up with lessons and relatives separated by Israeli closures stay in touch through chat rooms. "People are using the Internet a lot more for practical reasons than their counterparts in other regions," said Maan Bseiso, owner of Palnet, the dominant Palestinian Internet service provider. "The political issue, as well as security issues in Palestinian areas, make people use the Internet for business and information and news. It's not a luxury thing. It's for practical use."

Mickey Mouse turns 75
"Mickey Mouse is 75 today. The big-eared rodent made his debut in the first sound-synchronised cartoon, Steamboat Willie, on November 18 1928, launching the career of his creator Walt Disney, and laying the foundation stone for an entertainment empire. The Walt Disney company's CEO Michael Eisner will mark the date with a ceremony at Florida's Walt Disney World theme park later today."