Bingbing is a Minuet, born 21 February 2023.
This is a record-keeping tool built for her.
Once you have a cat, most days repeat. You pass the bowl in the morning and add a scoop of food. The water is low, so you change it. The litter box is full, so you scoop it. Now and then you weigh her; now and then you take her to the vet. None of it is worth writing down, and all of it happens every day.
The trouble comes months later. The cat starts throwing up. The vet asks when it began, and you say recently, or maybe it’s been a while. You dig through your phone for last time’s lab report. You did photograph it, but it’s buried among food-delivery screenshots, and you’re not sure it’s even the right one. Kitten photos and last year’s photos share one album, and you can’t tell which is age one and which is age two. After a few moves, which year you lived in which city has gone blurry too.
These things are too small to have a home. Nothing kept them under one cat’s name. That is the one job this tool does.
Today
The three things you record most: water changed, litter scooped, litter topped up. No sentences. Tap an icon and a timestamp lands on today. It answers one question only — done yet or not. Nobody at home has to ask “did you feed her?”
Which food, which can — a name you typed last time appears on its own next time. Weight is just a number pad. Treats and anything off — vomiting, soft stool, listless — each have their own entry. Record as much or as little as you like; what matters is that it’s there when you need it.
The home screen opens on a single sentence. If the water hasn’t been changed in over a day, it says so. If the litter is due, it mentions it. If everything’s done, it says today went well.
Weight curve
Weight is the kind of number you don’t notice day to day and only find useful in hindsight. The weight page draws one curve over the last few months. What you’re reading is the direction, not today’s figure. The week the curve starts bending down — if that same week has a couple of “didn’t eat” and “threw up” entries — the two side by side say more than either alone.
Checkups and symptoms
Checkup reports live on the medical page. Last time’s lab results, the numbers to keep an eye on, when the vet said to come back — faster to find here than in your camera roll or chat history.
The “symptoms” in the daily log are material for the next vet visit, not a diagnosis. “Started last Wednesday, threw up three times in three days” is worth far more than “seems to be throwing up a lot lately.”
The album sorts by time. The photo from the day she came home, the first vet visit, the ugly post-shave one, the month she suddenly got round — all mixed together and ordered by date automatically. You can set a cover; you don’t have to. Years from now, when you go looking for what she looked like at two, a date is more reliable than memory.
The trail is a different timeline: the cities the cat has moved through with me. When we arrived, how long we stayed, why we left. Arcs of dotted line connect the cities, and a timeline underneath strings the stretches together. For me to look back on, later.