Welcome to the window seat. This is the bay window in the front room of my apartment, on the second floor of an old house in Southeast Portland. The camera sits on the bookshelf next to my desk and looks straight at the seat, which is Pudge's. Olive is allowed on it when Pudge isn't using it, which is never, so she has learned to wait.

I'm Tina. I work at home typing up doctors' dictation for a clinic across the river, eight hours a day, with headphones on and a foot pedal under the desk. The cats are my coworkers. I started the PudgeCam so my mom in Medford could see what I stare at all day instead of hearing about it on the phone. Then her friends started looking. Then strangers. Hello, strangers.

If the picture is...

• an empty window seat: it isn't broken. He's at the food dish. Give it two minutes.
• black: it's night and the lamp is off, or the computer is off, or somebody is sitting on the camera.
• tilted, or all rug: Olive. See below.
• old (check the time in the bar along the bottom): my Internet connection dropped. I'm usually two feet away and I'll notice eventually.

Pudge Facts
People kept asking the same questions about him, so I typed it up the way I type everything else.

Olive's Corner

Olive is two, a little tortoiseshell, black and orange all mixed up, with a stripe of orange down the middle of her face like somebody started to paint her and quit. She weighs seven pounds. I adopted her from the animal shelter in November of 1997 as a four-month-old with opinions, and she has kept all of them.

She fetches hair elastics. She answers when you talk to her. She sleeps on the afghan at the end of the window seat, the one my grandmother crocheted, and she waits for Pudge to get up with more patience than I've ever had for anything. And on April 17 she figured out that the bookshelf could be climbed, which is how the camera found out what the inside of her nose looks like. Since then the camera has been knocked sideways about once a week. I've stopped fixing it right away. It's her show too.

Greatest Hits
Click a little one to see it big. (It's the same picture, just bigger, so it won't take long.)

	Rain Watch Saturday, November 21, 1998, 3:48 p.m. Both of them side by side with their backs to the world, watching the water run down the glass, for over an hour. The maple across the street had just lost the last of its leaves. This was the PudgeCam's seventh week, and the first time a stranger wrote to me about it.
	The Box Saturday, December 26, 1998, 8:10 p.m. My mother's Christmas package came in it. The day after Christmas, he was in it. He fits in that box the way I fit in my high school jeans. That's Olive, the dark blur down on the rug, and the Christmas lights I didn't take down until Valentine's Day.
	Hello, Olive Saturday, April 17, 1999, 10:05 a.m. I was at my desk right beside the shelf and heard a scrabble and a thump, and there she was, nose to lens. You can see the orange stripe. You can see everything. I've had more mail about this picture than about Pudge, and he knows.

The Nuts and Bolts
The camera is a Kodak DVC323, on the second shelf of the bookcase, about seven feet from the window seat. It plugs into my Compaq Presario (Windows 98), and a shareware program called Webcam32 takes a picture every two minutes, stamps the time on it and sends it up here by FTP while I work. The computer is on whenever I am, which is roughly 8 in the morning to midnight. After that, you're on your own.

The sun is on the seat from late morning to the middle of the afternoon on clear days, which in Portland means summer and September. From November to about March the best you'll get is two cats in a gray window. I love it anyway. So do they.

Cat watchers since October 3, 1998:

Tell me about your cat, or tell Pudge he's handsome: [email protected]

Last updated Sunday, September 26, 1999