A Digest of News Stories

Lovely Lucy

We have so many options for sharing news, stories and images that it’s difficult to figure out which way is best—and which way pleases most readers. This blog, I hope, will please the greatest number of readers, and be easy for me to update as well.

I’ve always had a sidebar on The Creative Cat that included links to news stories that I found interesting and so did others. So many stories moved across the internet, though, that the list was soon outdated. When I deleted an older story and posted a new one, readers asked where it had gone. I even went looking for a few and realized I hadn’t bookmarked them and they were gone.

I then entered them as blog postings, but there came to be so many they were difficult to find.

I also love to “share” postings and links on Facebook and this works fine—for people on Facebook. Not all my readers and friends are on Facebook, so I’d reference an article I shared, but they hadn’t read it…

Best of all in in social networking and being able to bring information to the public, I love blogging because the stories are indexed by tags and categories and are easily found both within a blog and from outside of a blog. And, unless someone’s server has a big problem, they are archived until the blog no longer exists.

So I think I’ve found the solution to this issue. Undercover Kitty is a digest of news stories I’ve found around the internet on other blogs, in news services and on Facebook. I’ve just included the title, brief synopsis and a link, and tried to carefully index them so they are easily referenced. Every post is tweeted on my Twitter account @portraitsanimal and posted on my Facebook fan page for Portraits of Animals as well as in my Yahoo profile.

I See You

As usual, one or more of my kitties is the public face of one of my blogs…in this case it’s Namir and Lucy. I know Namir is already the face of The Creative Cat, but for one thing, Namir is the cat who started me blogging so he deserves a little more, and I always liked the photo of him and Lucy that I used in the header; it’s actually what suggested the name for this blog!

Lucy, being a kitten in a house of cats all 12 years or older, had her work cut out to liven things up. Often running around with cobwebs all over her face, she crept and crawled and investigated places in this little house that hadn’t seen a cat in a decade or more. She learned respect for her fragile elders, but she adored Namir, sitting near him, imitating what he did, often receiving a swat from one of his long white paws for her adulation, but that was just how Namir acknowledged her.

Both are gone now, Namir to the hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that had ailed him for years, and Lucy, too quickly and too young, to FIP. You can read more about them both on The Creative Cat and on my website where they appear in artwork. I won’t go on and on about how I lost them, but suffice it to say that at every chance I will see that the unique and loving personalities they were will live on in what I do.

And that is another reason for this particular blog. For both illnesses, having the internet available to me was invaluable as I could find articles and connect with other people who had cats with the same illnesses, this in turn immensely increasing what I could do for these two, and others. Much of what we write about and link to has to do with health and wellness, and this is in part my payback for all I learned.

I hope you find this site useful. Please comment if you’d like to see something more.