To be optimistic, though, the human process of piecing together the tech's failures and successes can build towards the kind of realization that Paul comes to at the end of the book. "I didn't need to turn on the computer and re-analyze the maps. I didn't need to scour the photos. I didn't need to have an animal-human conversation," Paul writes. "Clear and bright as the pink of a kitty trail on a satellite map was this final truth: Tibby had just not wanted to be at home."

I exchanged some emails with the duo to find out more about how they used technology to understand their pet, and to finally decide who is more of a crazy cat lady, me or Paul.

So let's review the basic story. Caroline, you get in a very gnarly (homemade?!) airplane crash, which puts you in the hospital for a while and then the couch for a while longer. What happened to Tibby during that time?

Paul: I crashed my experimental plane. A month into my recuperation, my beloved, shy, skittish cat Tibby disappeared. Weeks went by, no sign of him. We were sure he was dead. Then five and a half weeks after he went missing, he returned. He was fine! I was so relieved he was home. But I also wanted to find out where he had gone. He was cheating on me. So Wendy and I decided to follow him using GPS.

MacNaughton: No, you decided to follow him using GPS.

Paul: Okay, true. I became obsessed with discovering his secret life. Partly this was the vast amount of painkillers I was on. Partly this was a normal cat owner reaction.

MacNaughton (using exaggerated air quotes): "Normal Cat Owner Reaction."

Seems right to me. but does using GPS to track your cat actually work? This seems like something cat owners everywhere would like to know.

Paul: GPS works great. I recommend it for all cat owners who want to know what their cats do when they're not there, if you can stand the ridicule from your friends. But interpreting the maps was the bigger challenge. You think a cat sleeps all day. Not true! We contacted a department at Stanford University that studies GPS to help us. They were as stumped as we were.

Maybe you can describe the process you used to clean up the noisy GPS data. You know, like go into greater technical depth in case someone (like myself, say) were to want to follow your lead.

MacNaughton: We used the best technical program i knew how to use: Photoshop. We had a total of 22 maps. i created layers out of each one, placed them on top of each other, and decreased the transparency so you could see them all at the same time. That revealed the most frequented areas (aka the most pink lines) and the obvious outliers. We were able to narrow down the area he was hanging out to an area of about three houses.

You stuck a camera on Tibby, but say in the book that he did not return many interesting pictures. Tell me you got at least one great photograph from the CatCam.