Our precious little cat, Erin, a 14-year old Cornish Rex, eats crunchy snacks with his remaining teeth and sits on my lap.  Both his ears are curled after recovering from big blood clots never fully diagnosed (no visible scratch sites from fighting and no mites or other infestations).  He has permanent vertigo, his world constantly spinning, making him walk/stumble with his head turned sideways.

Erin was as surprised as I was to learn that the Federation of Planets, its current headquarters a satellite circling our Moon, issued an emergency passport to Edward Snowden.  The FoP, if you remember, issued its honorary first passport, No. 0000000000000000000000001, to Galileo Galilei and its second to Leonardo Da Vinci, but clearly said it shows no favoritism toward Italy, issuing its third honorary passport to a group of amino acids found inside a meteor that crashed in Antarctica a long time ago but was recently discovered and immediately classified as ultra top-to-bottom secret by the corporate-owned country that sponsored the expedition.

The FoP is in negotiations with the Russian Federation to send a special launch to the International Space Station with Snowden on-board, hoping the ISS will be the first official embassy of the FoP while Moon and Martian headquarters are being designed and constructed.

Meanwhile, Snowden continues his astro/cosmonaut training within a hidden facility of the Moscow airport.

The Chinese government will neither confirm nor deny that it has made room for FoP diplomats in its new space station.

As the morning sun warms the sunroom, Erin hops off my lap and heads to a chair under the skylight, a hint for me to step outside and work on the foundation for the new privacy fence.