It’s a gorgeous Kentucky morning. I have the day off  today, so I’m looking forward to catching up on some chores. I might even get some fall mums to put out on my porch.

Took my daughter’s family cat to a local vet yesterday to be spayed and declawed (front paws only). The kitty gets released this afternoon, so I have to pick her up and watch over her until my daughter comes home to get her.

The newspaper where I work ran the last installment of a three-part series about our local animal shelter today. (Our online edition is subscription only, so I can’t post a link — you wouldn’t be able to read it.) Our lead reporter discovered a sobering, shameful statistic about our local shelter.

In 2008, nearly 80 percent of the more than 4,000 animals brought there were euthanized. That’s more than 1,200 kittens, more than 700 cats, more than 700 puppies and more than 650 dogs.

One reader did the math and posted a comment on our web site — the shelter on average would have had to kill 13 animals a day, every day they were open, to put down that many in a year’s time.

The thought makes me sick to my stomach. It’s an embarrassment to our community. We are better people than that.

Our reporter learned the shelter director refuses to establish an Internet presence for the shelter, will not allow volunteers, and makes it so hard to adopt an animal that some prospective pet owners just give up and leave.

Now, however, the shameful way our shelter is being operated has been exposed, and local residents are shocked and angered. I know our citizens won’t continue to allow such inhumane activities. I’m eager to see what happens next.

I love my cat, and I admit, I’ve been giving him a bit of extra love lately. When I got him a few years ago, he was one of a stray mama’s litter. When I think of how he could have had the same fate as thousands of unfortunate kittens (because there’s no telling how long this has been going on), it makes me want to cry.

I’m thankful our newspaper was able to be the voice for those innocent creatures unable to speak for themselves.

For the past few days, I’ve had an overwhelming desire to cook real food — not pre-mixed, pre-packaged stuff, but actual made-from-scratch yummies.

Thursday, I had a couple of overripe bananas that were just shy of rotten — perfect for baking banana muffins. Somehow, I managed to find my muffin pan, buried under several years’ worth of dust, and in a few minutes — with the assistance of my Kitchenaid mixer — I had enough batter mixed up to fill all the cups in the pan.

I’d forgotten how yummy fresh-baked muffins can be!

Today, I went grocery shopping and, while trying to decide what kind of snacks to get, got the itch to bake again. I passed over the Little Debbie cakes and avoided the candy aisle, instead grabbing a couple of bags of chocolate chips and a dozen eggs before heading to the checkout.

Surely cookies made at home from the flour, sugar, eggs, and butter you buy at the store have to be better for you than cookies made with all the above plus preservatives, wrapped in plastic, shipped thousands of miles, and stored in a warehouse for who knows how long before they ever reach the supermarket shelf.

If you like chocolate, try this recipe:

Chewy Chocolate Cookies

1 1/4 c. butter or margarine, softened (I used Butter-flavor Crisco)

2 c. sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp. vanilla

2 c. unsifted all-purpose flour

3/4 cup Hershey’s cocoa (I used Hershey’s Special Dark Cocoa)

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1 bag Hershey’s white chips

1 cup finely chopped nuts (optional — I didn’t include nuts in today’s cookies)

Cream butter or margarine and sugar in large mixing bowl. Add eggs and vanilla, blend well. Combine flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt; gradually blend into creamed mixture. Stir in chips and, if desired, nuts. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-9 minutes. (Don’t overbake. Cookies will be soft. They’ll puff up while baking, and flatten as they cool.) Cool on cookie sheet about a minute, then remove and let finish cooling on wire rack. Makes about 4 1/2 dozen.

What to do with cookies when done:

Open mouth.

Insert cookie.

Chew.

Repeat.

So … I’m feelin’ a bit creeped out right now after watching the renumbered/updated/digitally enhanced version of Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi, which was once known as simply Return of the Jedi or Star Wars III,  which changed when a new Star Wars III was released, Revenge of the Sith, which mean the first SW III had to change its name to SW VI, which greatly confused all us senior citizens (i.e. anyone who had seen the first three SW movies … oops, I mean the three SW movies that were made during the disco/punk/new wave eras when movie popcorn was only $4 for the large bucket AND that included all the extra butter you could eat).

Anyhoo …

So we’re sitting on the couch, hubby and I — he’s playing his guitar and I’m catching up on work on my laptop PC as the above-mentioned SW film is playing in the background on some satellite TV channel we rarely watch, but turned on tonight ’cause we thought an intergalactic battle scene would help us relax.

Apparently hubby happened to glance at the TV during the final scene where the spirits of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader appear side-by-side, smiling at Luke Skywalker as their bodies are being burned atop a celebratory funeral pyre while Ewoks and other assorted life forms joyfully cavort near the flames.

Hubby says, “Is that the guy who played in the first movies?”

I look up, not knowing whether he means “the first movies” as in the original Star Wars, now known as Star Wars IV: A New Hope,  or Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. And there is Obi-Wan, bearing a strong resemblance to Sir Alec Guinness (as well he should) and not Ewan McGregor. (As well he shouldn’t, because after all, the Episode Formerly Known as III was made only a few years after Guinness starred in the Episode Formerly Known as I.)

Beside Obi-Wan is the translucent Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker spirit AND THE BODY OF THE 1983 ANAKIN IS WEARING THE HEAD OF THE 2005 ANAKIN. I AM WRITING THIS IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE I AM TRAUMATIZED AND WHEN PEOPLE ARE TRAUMATIZED THEY GENERALLY SHOUT, RIGHT?

I am now wondering how I could have watched this movie so many times since its re-release and not noticed that freaky Hayden Christensen head pasted on top of Sebastian Shaw’s body. I mean, it’s even mentioned on Wikipedia.

Maybe some extra-buttery popcorn will make me feel better.

When I think of the pressure/obligation/necessity writers feel about social networking/blogging/cyberconnections, I think of a t-shirt I saw once that advertised a famous “31 flavors” ice cream shop: “So many flavors, so little time.”

It’s not easy managing multiple Internet presences. I have this web site and blog to express the children’s writer’s side of me. I now have a work blog, where I must chronicle my adventures as She-Ra, Princess of First-Amendment Power.  I have a Facebook page that started out dedicated solely to AuthorWorld, but somehow my persona from The Daily Planet got sucked into its orbit — now it’s connecting friends from the fiction side of me and the people I’m acquainted with on the fact-finding side. (Or as Merle Haggard might say, the fighting side of me.)

I want my fiction-writing life to be prevalent. But the part of my life that ’s my job seems to take up (and suck dry) more and more of my mental resources.

Basically, what’s happened is that my brain has turned to oatmeal. And not even the Quaker Instant Oats kind that has that yummy maple and brown sugar flavor added. It’s more like the kind you get served when you’re a patient in the hospital. It’s bland and watery and not even good for wallpaper paste.

Web site, blog, Facebook, Twitter — I can’t do it all. And because Twitter feels as though it’s the least-tangible and worthwhile of these communicative forms, at least for me, it’s the easiest one to let go. I’m still going to keep the account, for now. Maybe I’ll pick it up again when I have more time.

In 1923, William Carlos Williams wrote about a  red wheelbarrow, rain water, and white chickens, using 140 characters or less, and it’s still considered a work of poetic genius.

I wonder if folks would consider it worth retweeting today.