Super action kitty Henry prepares to strike the pesky toy

Another week, some more gratitude!

RP sent $25, plus a surprise revelation. Thank you!

And then another RP – bless her – sent $20, along with some warm feelings. Thank you kindly

The ChipIn thing isn’t nearly as cool as it ought to be. The $20 contribution wasn’t made through ChipIn, but you’d think the system would have some way to let you enter a manual payment. Nope… at least, I can’t find it.

And here’s some feline action for you to enjoy. No, Henry is not watching the UFOs land. There’s a stick-with-fur-strips toy being jiggled above him, out of frame. None of the actual “strike” photos turned out, of course. The shutter speed on my mobile phone’s camera just isn’t up to the task!

As my friends and regular readers know, I’ve left Slovakia and taken up provisional digs in Granada, Spain. There were two reasons for getting out. The first is to be able to tell the story of being brutalized at the hands of the Slovak Police and to publish Miroslav Pašek‘s name widely, without same beasts knowing precisely where I live and having easy access to my fragile corpus. The second reason is psychological. From the time of the attack until I left, I was more or less a shut-in. Leaving my building, walking around the city, taking a bus, even visiting with friends all were liable to trigger memory and emotional associations which would set off various negative psychological/somatic reactions in me: fear, stress, anxiety, depression.

Image unrelated, but still a good read

So it was time to go, get my story out — for what that’s worth — and try to rebuild my psyche. And getting out has done me good: the fear/stress/anxiety stuff is gone, since I’m not in the triggering environment. The depression — something I’ve been prone to for long years anyway — is still there. And now there’s a new element, too: homesickness, an emotion-complex I’ve not really experienced before. Bratislava had become home to me, and now that’s been ripped away, along with easy access to my dear friends there. This will all get better over time, I know, but it still sucks for the moment.

So, to the bleg. Moving is expensive. And it gets extra expensive when you have a sweet 18-year-old cat depending on you for his daily love and vittles. €857.48 worth of expensive, to be more or less exact, or US$1,274.99. Money I don’t really have.

An itemization of my moving expenses is below, followed by a special treat. If you can help out, I can take payments to mike (at) gogulski (dot) com via PayPal, MoneyBookers, Revolution Money Exchange and Pecunix. Direct “pay” links to all of them can be found at Support nostate.com above, and there’s also a ChipIn widget here now. Please don’t mark anything as a “donation”, since PayPal particularly seems to think anyone who accepts “donations” needs to be a state-registered charity. Use “gift” instead, if anything.

And thanks as always for your attention, your interest and your support.

And now, the promised treat!

Henry's first breath of freedom (which he used to complain, loudly), in Marbella, Spain, after 10 hours of undignified travel