Cat Whisperer

A stray kitty has been coming around some. I feed him dry cat food and every once in a while wet. I'm not completely sure he's a stray. He's really friendly now that he's used to me. Maybe I'm a cat whisperer. He's pretty thin to belong to somebody, though. At some point I decided to call him something besides new kitty but wasn't in a hurry. I finally looked up popular names from the 1880s to the 1930s. It's amazing how many of my relatives and other people I know have or have had names on the lists. After two or three days I narrowed it down to Nelson. That's a good solid name, and I don't have any relatives named Nelson. I started calling him that.

I had previously mentioned to my mom I was going to name the stray cat. When I told her he was Nelson, she had a fit. A woman she used to go to church with lives across from a widow whose deceased husband was named Nelson. So what? I can't name the stray kitty Nelson, because it might offend somebody she doesn't even see any more? I ran through some of the other names on the list until I found one she didn't object to: Patrick. We have no relatives and know no one named Patrick. So, I started calling him Patrick. He seems to recognize that that's his new name, although I'm not certain yet.

So, I was talking to my mom yesterday. She's had a change of heart. She's not sure he should be named Patrick. /facepalm You know what? If I have to change it again, I'm changing it back to Nelson. The moral of the story is you can't worry too much about what other people think. If your stray cat should be named Nelson, that's what you should call him.

Guess what Facebook told me today. "Matthew, we care about you and the memories you share here." Really? They care about me? Me? Then why can't I set preferences for the news feed? How come they won't stop showing me Buy and Sell Groups Near You, when I've Xed them all out I don't know how many times trying to get it to stop? Why do they keep recommending other pages to me at all? Why won't they stop showing me what people on my Friends list "Like" or "commented on" or were "mentioned" in, etc.? I don't care about any of that. Why won't Facebook stop showing me "Suggested Post" listings? I did a search for a car in Microsoft Edge this week. Now in Google Chrome, I'm seeing "Suggested Post" ads for that car and the website I used for the search. How is that possible? I went to a website for some Victorian era research I was doing. I'm seeing ads for one of those sites, too. "Matthew, we care about you..." Sure they do. When an older man on my Friends list is now Friends with the 100th underage girl, I don't want to see that any more! That's not caring about me, Facebook!

A bit of a rant there. The Zuckil made me do it. But seriously, I'm really starting to hate Facebook.

So, I finished up the second round of AoE and began the third. It's not going as fast as I'd hoped, but progress is being made.