I envy my cats.
I truly do. I’ve long-marinaded the thought of lounging around on various plush surfaces while another member of the household is off working. And when they come home, they could play with my hair and feed me.
I’m not sure what’s so wrong about that.
Last night, Lola crept over to the coffee table to happily confront a bowl of Cocoa Puff Milk that had been sitting there since the day before. For those who are unaware of what “Cocoa Puff Milk” is, it’s the slightly brown, slight Cocoa-Puff-y excess milk that remains when one has eaten all the puffs from a bowl of Cocoa Puff cereal. I went to stop her but after seeing how much joy it brought to her life – as if she had discovered something sacred and beautiful – I just couldn’t bring myself to ruin her happiness.
The thing is, Lola never eats human food. My parents have a cat who would gnaw on the leg of a live cow if he just had the chance, but my Lola turns her nose up at anything remotely non-cat. Many a time, Dave and I have loathed the idea of forcing our cats to eat knobby, artificial, cardboard pieces under the guise of some clever marketing title like “Seafood Sensations” or “Meat Medley” or some other stupid alliteration. Cats don’t care about alliteration. It takes a keen eye to sort through the B.S. lurking in the cat food aisle. But regardless of what newfangled delicacy we bring home, they both prefer crappy cardboard bits.
So I let her drink it. She could have stuck her paw in it and slathered it all over her pudding-like belly and lapped it back up again – I wouldn’t have cared. Because Cocoa Puff Milk is probably the best thing that happened to her all day.
And I so envy that.
All the blog improvement advice I read tells me to keep my posts short and sweet. They suggest somewhere around 250 words. 250 words! I wrote 300 up there and that was with a great deal of editing. So tell me, loyal readers – is shorter better? I’m truly curious.
The Jackie Blog 
Your blog updates right in the middle of my daily, morning blog/news reading, so that’s pretty awesome. Regarding the 250 word suggestion for blog posts… people who enjoy your blog are going to read it if it’s 250 words or 500 words. I would argue that shorter is not better, but I don’t mind the extra 2 minutes that a longer post might take to read. I would suggest reading other successful blogs that you enjoy and check their word counts. Yesterday’s Dooce had over 600 words, and she still has plenty of readers. Thisfish.com has a pretty large readership, and her posts are usually shorter (though she did have one around 500 words a few days back). Anyway, all of that is to say, write what you want and how you want it, and don’t worry about word count. TL;DR people can suck it.
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I have to admit that there are a few blogs that I have stopped reading because they were long winded… But they were also just rambling about their day in a somewhat boring way. With you, I’ve been sad about your short posts, because you’re sooo entertaining. I think you have a good sense of when your lines run out, so just write what you’d like to read.
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What you write is great, no matter how many words. So I would say just do whatever you think is best!
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Reading your blog is one of the highlights of my day. For the purposes of literary cohesiveness I could see how concise can be better but don’t censor yourself too much because you are brilliant and no number of characters could dissuade me from reading your post every day.
Also – I am totally in love with you. Just sayin.
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Hey thanks, guys. I really appreciate the encouragement. I’ve truly been wondering whether or not it’s annoying or burdensome to have such large posts, and though my subscriber base is growing, I wanted to be sure that the length wasn’t deterring folks. Thank you so much for stopping by and for giving me some feedback! 🙂
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Hi there Jackie, loved your blog about indoor felines and their weirdy beardy antics. I too have a cat aged nineteen, going on nine months. The amount of ‘nobbly titbits’………the latest title claiming ‘deep sea treasures’ within; were in the shape and guise of multicoloured miniscule fishes. These, which we bought and which lay in the cupboard until they literally exploded; yeah it truly beggars belief but if left long enough sounds emanating therein is a ceratin pooooffffff and puuuuftttttt and of they went. A fine coating of brownish, sluggish looking dust covers all else in their path.
Well, our aged moggy went off to the vet last December for teeth extractions; they actually phoned and begged me to release them from he, as his newly discovered taste buds’ were kicking up a storm’ in the eating department. He was consuming everything in his path, literally including a certain (unnaturally candy pink) doggy brand no self respecting mutt would deign to touch.<3 Catty tales from lucygraywoolff
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haha I love this- thanks for sharing, Lucy. My oldest feline companion lasted to 19 and no months – your teethless “aged moggy” could set a record! I can’t believe your food exploded into a poof of nothingness. These poor kittens and the junk they’re conditioned to gnaw on
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