There is a photograph on my site of a cardboard box in the grass, a saucer, and a tortoiseshell kitten roughly the size of a pear, pressed into the corner with the specific flattened posture of an animal that has decided the world is too large.

That is Tuga, at about two weeks old, on the day everything in this blog started.

She is now a full-sized cat who sleeps in car boots, owns every chair in this house, and has her name on a website, a YouTube channel, and sixty-odd articles about Bitcoin. None of that was the plan. The plan, that afternoon, was to get a very small animal through the night.

1. Two Weeks Old Is Smaller Than You Think

People hear "I found a kitten" and picture something that walks around and eats. At two weeks, a kitten is a different proposition entirely:

• Eyes barely open, ears still folded, no real coordination.
• Cannot regulate its own body temperature. Cold kills far more orphan kittens than hunger does, and a cold kitten cannot digest food — warming it comes before feeding it, always.
• Cannot eliminate without help. The mother stimulates it. Without her, somebody does it with a warm damp cloth, several times a day.
• Needs feeding every few hours, around the clock, including the 3am one, for weeks.

And the one that catches everybody: cow's milk is the wrong thing. It's the universal instinct and it causes diarrhoea, which in an animal that size is a serious problem fast. What they need is proper kitten milk replacer from a vet or pet shop — and until you have it, warmth and a vet's phone number beat improvising.

I say all of this plainly because somebody reading this will find a kitten this year, and the first forty-eight hours decide most of it.

2. What Nobody Tells You

The physical care is in every guide. Three things aren't:

You will not sleep, and you will be weird about it. Two-hourly feeds at night for weeks is a newborn's schedule with none of the social support. You'll start checking whether she's breathing at 4am. This is normal and it passes.

You will weigh her obsessively, and you should. A kitten that gains weight daily is a kitten that's winning. A kitten that stops gaining needs a vet today, not tomorrow. Kitchen scales are the single most useful tool in the house.

Some of them don't make it, and it isn't your fault. Orphan kittens are fragile in ways that have nothing to do with the quality of your care. Anyone who has done this more than once has lost one, and nobody writes about that part.

Tuga made it. A lot of the reason is that she was found in time, and a lot of it is luck, and the honest ratio between those two is not flattering to me.

3. What She Turned Into

The flattened kitten in the box became a cat with opinions about absolutely everything.

She supervises. She has a specific chair, and the specific chair is always the one somebody just left. She goes out at 4am through a flap she regards as her sovereign territory, and comes back in at dusk via the kitchen window instead, for no reason anyone has established. She once spent two days watching a washing machine because a mouse went behind it.

She is also, and this is the part I did not see coming, the reason I understand money better than I did.

Every analogy I've used across this blog came from watching her: the cat flap that explained Lightning, the high shelf that explained volatility, the burying that explained privacy, the sixteen hours of sleep that explained doing nothing on purpose. I didn't set out to write about Bitcoin through a cat. I set out to keep a kitten alive and then noticed she'd been explaining things to me for years.

4. Where to Actually Meet Her

All of this lives at tugathecat.com.

There's a diary — dated entries with photos, from the box in the grass through to this month. If you only want the cat and none of the Bitcoin, that part stands completely on its own, and it's the part I'd send to someone who doesn't care about any of this.

There's the colony — Os Amigos da Tuga, the six to eight street cats who turn up at dusk every day and are the reason the donation page exists.

And there's the Bitcoin half, in plain language, for anyone who arrived for the cat and got curious.

Three languages: Portuguese, English, Polish. No newsletter popup, no token, nothing to sign up for.

The Point

A box, a saucer, and an animal that fitted in two hands. If that afternoon had gone differently there would be no channel, no site, no articles, and I'd probably still think a bank balance and money were the same thing.

She's asleep on the chair I was using. Go and meet her.

🐾 tugathecat.com — the diary starts with that box. ⚡