October 4, 2021

Weekend with Cat

Cat

Last Tuesday, I got a message from a friend of mine, who I met while I was an intern at Hootsuite. He asked me if I had any plans for the weekend, and I kind of had an idea where this was going.

A few months ago, he went on a long-weekend trip, and mentioned that he had asked one of his friends to stay over and watch his cat. He must have remembered that I mentioned that I would love watching his cat one day, because I suddenly had weekend plans to take care of a cat.

I don’t know where my love of cats began; I’m ashamed to say that I’m not a huge fan of animals in general. That’s not to say I don’t like them, I just don’t have the same attachment to animals that some people feel. Cats, however, are a completely different story. I love how independent and attention-seeking they are, seemingly at the same time like some rather literal variation of Schrödinger’s Cat. The fact that their affection appears to be hard-earned rather than easily given away is also a distinguishing factor of cats that I enjoy. I’ve been talking a lot about cat but not really showing cat, so here’s a collage:

I’m not sure how much it shows, but I’m generally a pretty anxious person. But the three days I spent with Peeka ¹ were some of the most relaxing days in my recent memory. There’s something about a cat that just climbs up on your chest and starts purring that does wonders for your mood.

Back to Business

I could spend the rest of this post writing about how much I love cats, but that would get old pretty fast. After my meeting with Gail last week, we decided to pivot away from code search and explore task contexts. Of course, after being in the lab and hearing about how nearly nobody gets their thesis topic on their first try, this was entirely expected, but not any less annoying.

Hopefully I’ll have more to say on this next week.