tigertoy

Saturday, I went to a meeting of the Midwest Exotic Feline Educational Society in Anderson, IN.  MEFES is mostly people from Indiana, though it has had members from several nearby states as well.  In the past, it has worked to make exotic cat owners in the area aware of each other and help them both to keep their animals in the face of increasing government pressure and to have better husbandry.  In the last couple of years, the active membership has dropped to a handful and we haven't done much beyond meetings, but we have hopes of getting some new people involved.

MEFES pretty much got started because of one man and one amazing serval.  I may have a few details wrong here, but the outline of the story is right.  Somewhere around 1985, a man named Marvin Hierlmeier and his wife got a pet serval they named Hush.  (Hush rhymes with 'bush', not 'gush'.)  Not long after that, Marvin's wife died.  As she was dying, she told Marvin to share Hush with the world, and Marvin carried out her wish to an amazing degree.  He took Hush all over the place and shared him with many people, allowing them to meet and touch him.  In particular, he took Hush to nursing homes in southern Indiana and surrounding areas.  When I say that, you probably think that half a dozen times, he walked through the lobby with the cat on a leash and maybe gave a little talk.  But that's not what I mean at all.  He took Hush to actually visit the patients, in their beds, on thousands of visits to hundreds of nursing homes.  Hush had over ten thousand visits with nursing home patients.  It seems crazy, either that someone would try to bring a 50 lb. wild cat into nursing homes, or that anyone would let him, but he did.  He never hurt anyone, and he made the lives of thousands of people better.  Marvin and Hush have both died of old age in just the last few years, but those of us who got to meet them will never forget.

In addition to the lives of so many nursing home patients, Hush met a whole lot of other people, and some of those people were the ones who were inspired to found MEFES.  That is why the club named their special award for service to exotic felines the Hush award.

For some reason, they saw fit to give me this award this weekend. 

( a footnote about responsible exotic ownership )

I have successfully replaced the bare-bulb light fixture over my sink with one which includes a cover like the new covers on my ceiling fan lights.  I'd bought the replacement kit, thinking "how hard can it be to replace a standard light fixture?"

Turns out it can be pretty hard indeed, when you discover that the original fixture was on top of the paneling and wallboard, but the junction box was completely inside the wallboard, with a nearly inch long gap spanned by extra long mounting screws instead of the fixture fitting flush on the box.  The new fixture doesn't mount on the standard junction box mounts; it mounts to a crosspiece (provided) which mounts to the standard mounts, with screws which aren't long enough to reach across the extra gap, and of course are a different diameter from the extra-long screws which held the original fixture up.  I suppose I could have made a trip out to a hardware store and bought extra-long screws that would fit, but in practice that would mean the job wouldn't be done today, and I really didn't want to put the old fixture back.  I managed to find a way to use the extra-long screws to secure the crosspiece outside of the wallboard and use the provided screws to attach the fixture.

Hopefully the house won't burn down.

In other news, I finally made concrete progress on the MEFES newsletter that I was supposed to have in the can a couple of weeks ago at least.  I'm not quite sure why I've found it so hard to apply myself to this, but I've just been putting it off and putting it off.  But the last minute I can work on it before FKO will be Tuesday, and if it's not done before I leave, we won't have a newsletter before the meeting next month.