I'm assuming "Big cats" refers to the fluff butts in your household so I second "the kitty with the death wish."

No need to say happy Hanukkah - that was weeks ago. I say merry Christmas to those I know celebrate. There's always happy holidays or season's greetings. But...as those holidays are now past, it's coming up

HAPPY NEW YEAR 🥳

Oh, thanks the gods that the holiday season is over ... I think everyone who could get out and travel came to the Big Bend this year.  Actually heard one fellow say that "This is the desert, it's supposed to warmer than it is at home!" I don't know where home was but we were having a couple of our 20's nights and if they were camping, yep, it got a bit chilly.  More about our stupid weather in the snow thread.

Yeh, @amymeme the "Big Cats" of course was a reference to the dogs.  Not only hasn't she backed off, she's becoming downright - playfully - aggressive.  I don't mind the attacks where she's on the couch as one of the dogs goes by until she uses claws in the attack and bring a "yipe" from the dogs.  I'm afraid that one of these days the dogs are going to react without thinking and I'm going to end up with a hurt cat.
It's gotten cooler and, coincidentally, the dogs have decided to spend more time on the porch ... wonder how much of that decision is cat related ...???

Now a question ... she's decided to take over Sky's crate.  Last night I heard Sky yelp when she headed to her crate for bed and, of course, BC (er, black cat) had taken up residence.  I've zapped her several times with compressed air to no apparent avail.  One evening I put her in Sasha's old crate (still in the living room since it's also acting as an end table) just to keep her out of trouble.  
As long as the dogs are participating in the play - as play - and no one's getting hurt, I don't mind the play.  But any suggestions on how to keep her out of Sky's crate would be greatly appreciated.  Sky seems to like her crate and spends a lot of time in it watching what's going on around her.  Like others have said, it's (supposed to be) her safe place and I'm getting frustrated / angry that the kitten won't respect her boundaries.  Help!!!!

Water in a spray bottle usually does the trick unless BC is one of those cats that like water. And work on cat training. Ive done it with all my cats and seriously if you can train (or semi train) a husky a cat is very similar. And from there you can work on boundaries. Just find something BC really likes.

I have never been successful training cats. Closest was using pine cones for mulch on my border next to the house - cats were pooping there and it was next to the back steps. Pine cones stopped them. But i doubt Sky would tolerate pine cones anymore than the cat would.

As for BC? Our last cat was PC. Short for Prick Cat. That cat had ATTITUDE. She came to live with us after terrorizing our neighbors dogs and getting thrown out of the house destined to be a barn cat. Apparently she thought barn cat was beneath her dignity so she wafted over this way. We fed her, she kept the rabbits at bay and was allowed to sleep in the wood shed. Winters we built her an insulated shelter. She was queen of the hill until Ami arrived. Tried her laser stare at him, suddenly realized that was not gonna work any longer and headed to the top of the nearest tree. Fortunately, the property has lots of trees to ponder upstart wolves invading the property so PC and Ami managed to live in detente.

I use citrus spray to keep my cats out of places I don't want them. They hate citrus. The big question though would be if your dogs dislike citrus, then it might just run everyone out.

I've actually been dealing with a new kitten here lately. It showed up the other night. Not sure if a dump or if it was up in someone's vehicle looking for warmth and went for a ride. It's mostly white with a calico tail. My other cats are not thrilled. My youngest sounds like she is summoning a demon when she sees kitten. We will see if that passes. Past experience has been after about 5 days everyone starts to settle down and be less hissy with each other. This is my youngest's first kitten experience though. And this kitten is at the endless energy stage. For the most part after a year mine have lost the desire to bat at every swishy tail that wanders by, but that 4-6 month age range is brutal with biting and clawing and everything is so sharp.

Jenn - she is beautiful!

Aye, that she is! And side by side with my BC they'd make an interesting pair.

BC is gonna get her self in a bind. I yelled at Sky for picking her up ... yeh! So she drops her and silly kitty turns around and attacks her again!

I found this on one of my old cameras.  The picture isn't really that bad ... sorry.



Part way through she had to stop and make sure I was coming ...
God, do I ever miss that girl.

Kenzi has gotten better about checking in with age. I still don't let her go off leash around but will long line her and she will stay in close pretty well now that she's gotten old. Not so well when she was younger.

Okay, this is NOT funny!!!  This is south Texas!!! But for the next few days we're going to be hitting sub freezing temps again!


Now I realize that for most of you all these would be balmy temps but we in the Big Bend are more prepared for 100 that 30!

---

ETA: Definitely not funny! Our low for last night was supposed to have been 35 - not too bad; so why is the current temp 26°

Not sure how far below zero we were this am, but the wind chill was -40. Yesterday at 530am it was -17 and our high was 8. Too cold even for the girls.

We are currently 13°, on our way down to 5°, with a new foot of snow. Let the dogs out this morning for morning business and they just stood there. As if "where am i supposed to poop? Z'ev porpoised towards the shed porch, Ami waded off to the woods, perhaps in hopes of a spot somewhat sheltered from the snow.

Hand still doesn't work but at least no pain in over a week. MRI next Friday (earliest available appointment)

I think me and al are in the same arctic front. Its cold.. even by rocky mountain standards. Dunno if the humidity hit tx, but here today it was at 79% and thats unheard of here outside monsoon season.

Stay warm

We've had about a foot of snow on since the end of last week. Been down to around zero with chills around -20. Wind was terrible but we are on the other side of it now and it's attempting to melt off which is good because the U-joint I think is headed out of my truck. Terrible clunking sound coming up through the floor when letting off the gas. Going to tear into it this weekend and see if U-joint or CV axel, but really leaning toward U-joint right now based on conditional behavior. Had to finish pushing out driveway of the ice it's been packed into to get the Mustang out.

Kye loves to eat the snow so he's been driving me nuts wanting to run in and out of the house. Kenzi somehow managed to scratch her lower eye lid pretty good though morning one which bled a lot and swelled up. Being diabetic it will be slow to heal, extra prone to infection, and mess with her numbers for a while unfortunately. Spring is on its way. My peach trees are starting to awaken.

Ah and well, I put the pipes back together today since we're due to a warming trend. It's not supposed to get below freezing for the next week (Wunderground forecast) No snow for us this winter but this roller-coaster weather has almost everyone in town sick with something - and I have to go into town to the grocers (don't really want to but need to add to the cupboard)

@lostmaniac mentioned the humidity with the front that went through there and that normally means we're gonna get wet - we didn't, no precip of any kind and we could have used a little.

Silly cat goes out when I do and then ducks under the trailer ... I leave the back door open so she can come in when she's ready. Hope she has sense enough to NOT go wandering on the desert, her black coat would make an excellent target for a big bird.

Put the pipes back together?!!? What happened? We've been dripping faucets in our upstairs bathroom whenever the temperature goes into the single digits. Someone, in their infinite wisdom, put about 1 ft of water supply in an unheated, exposed crawl space

The other big weather casualty has been deer and the yews on the western end of the house. Starts with Ami, the ducks last fall and severely restricting Ami's free roaming. Then came mud season and we closed the western gate because it's at a low spot and drains the hill above it. Dogs were constantly muddy, floors muddy and vet warned a lot of dogs had foot fungus this year from constant wet. So we opened the eastern gate. And then winter came abruptly, froze both gates in their respective position, followed by burying then in snow. Thus leaving us for the winter with dogs heading east to go out front. And the snow is so deep, neither dog wants to wade through it (hence the dog poop in the driveway and pee stains on the snow banks lining the driveway. )  And with the deep snow, there is little forage for the deer. Hungry deer, no dogs patrolling...bye bye yews    I now have a foundation planting full of sticks. At least yews put out new buds on old wood. I'll be doing rejuvenation pruning down to about a foot. Hopeful all will come back. And hopefully, my ulnar nerve will be back from vacation and telling my fingers how to behave properly!  Otherwise, me and the baby chainsaw are gonna have quite the dance.

Oh pipes, since this trailer isn't weatherproofed (the newer pipes - within the last 20 years or so - all run below the insulation) the last time I had to fix them I put connectors in so that all I have to do is unscrew them to drain the pipes. I drained them at the start of our latest cold snap (4 days of subfreezing temps) and since we're supposed to be entering a warm(ish) spell I put the connections back together and now have water (that I don't have to carry) in the house again. Wunderground is pretty good - may read a degree or two high - so when they say we're looking at 33 I make sure I'm prepared for 28.

I bought a couple of oaks and a maple last summer, so far I have the maple left after the rabbits got hungry - I have about the same success with rabbits as Mr Fudd did! I've left the trees all out figuring that they had to live with cold weather before we humans decided to cultivate them so I'm hoping that they all make it through the winter. The oaks were all about 18 inches tall and are now about 6, so I'm hoping to see some growth from what's left ...??? My fig looks good, I brought it in last winter and it never did produce a crop of decent figs last year - here's hoping. The maple looks good, the rabbits obviously didn't even look at it ... I repotted it last fall into a bigger pot and may put it into the ground this coming fall if it gets another foot or so of height.

My biggest problem now with the ulnar nerve is that my little finger on my left hand isn't always going where i want it to. An attempt to hit the shift may produce an "a" or it may hit the caps lock - still a lot better than having almost no feeling in the two outer fingers of that hand. Prayers that you and the chain saw get along, a slip with one of those - even the little ones - can cut off more than what one wants.

I know exactly what you mean by the pinky finger. Mine just doesn't play right with the rest of the hand and stays of far out in right field. Looks like a hoity toity lady with affectations holding a cup of tea I have full sensation. Whatever the damage is, it's the deep ulnar nerve branch on the hand because it's all motor function, no sensory defects. The rest of the fingers are significantly hampered as well, even my thumb index finger pincer grip. I don't think I can get hurt with my baby chain saw - it's battery powered and you need both hands to engage all the safety. So the problem will be, can i keep it powered. I still have full function of my forearm and fist grip so I'll be able to "steer" the thing if I can just keep it powered.

Smart move on the pipes - we have the basement plumbed with all sorts of drains and shut offs for winterizing, thinking we might one day become snow birds. That had become less attractive between the price of real estate and, prior to this year, at least, the general warming of winter. This year is challenging that thinking...

I'm going to have to find some way to tone this cat down some ( A LOT!!!)  The dogs are wanting to stay outside rather than having to contend with her.  Watched Sky come around the end of the couch and the cat attacked from the arm ... Sky just shook her off and put a foot on her which prompted more "rough housing"!   They'll play for a while and then the dogs head to the door with a "Let me OUT!!" look.

Our weather --- we were at a high yesterday of 48, today 72 (currently 73 and breezy) and tomorrow in the 80's ... broke the pipes again night before last, the prediction was for 27 and the dogs bowl was solid when they went out yesterday morning and a good skim this AM. It's been the roller coaster from hell this year!!! Wunderground says that our low yesterday morning was 35 but like I said, the dogs bowl was solid - more like the 27 they predicted than the 35 they say it was.

@amymeme how's the hand doing? You be really careful if you pull that saw out, better to have one that doesn't work right than to not have it at all!! I've been tempted to talk to the VA again about mine but sometimes dealing with them isn't worth the hassle. And the nearest VA is 300 miles up the road ...

Re that unheated crawl space with a water pipe, have you ever considered putting a 100 watt incandescent light bulb (if you can find one) on a switch in there. That's what my uncle used in the pump house in Jefferson county with bales of hay around all four side and over the top. The pipe from the pump house to the house would occasionally freeze even with a slow stream but the pump never did. That pipe ran a couple of hundred feet and passed over solid stone so it couldn't be buried more than a foot or so - not deep enough! We had to go down about 4-5 feet below the freeze line ... most of the time we could.

I've got some decent internet, all I have to do is get the dish up on the catchment roof. Our local telephone company was charging $90 for 6MBs service and I'm seeing 150MBs+ with Starlink. I swear sometimes the page loads before I hit return on the URL! $600 investment but if I have no more problems than I have had, I'll be happy. (( Oh, breakdown: equipment $500, prepay $99, $99 a month with no caps. The phone/internet service was $97, cut that back to $23 a month so I've replaced it for about $100 (starlink) + $23 phone - so it costs me about $25 more a month to go from 6MB to 150 ... ))

The hand is...mostly the same. Maybe a tad bit stronger for holding a cup or spoon, but the little finger is really more and more out in right field. MRI Friday - cursory reading by the on call radiologist, who emphasized he is an abominal/solid organ guy, but emphasized that my lunate bone in my wrist looks to be advanced avascular necrosis. Enough so would be visible on plain film. But. This is NOT near my ulnar nerve, most likely from a known injury 40 years ago and not pertinent. That wrist has been stiff and reduced range of motion since then so unless the bone is now fragmenting and a piece is impinging on the nerve, its not the problem. Unfortunately, the hospital is currently down to 6 radiologists from 13, does not currently have a hand radiologist ("one coming in July") though the do have "a bone/muscle guy" who will be doing mammograms/bone density tests today. Probably just wait for the written report and then maybe send the studies up to Rochester Hand Center.

Son has been ogling Starlink. They just launched some satellites that were supposed to server our area. But...big BUT - over 40 of them destroyed in electromagnetic storm. I will pass on what you posted about speed.

Typing with a finger several keys away from where it shoul be is...let's just say, aggravating.

amymeme wrote:

The hand is...mostly the same.  Maybe a tad bit stronger for holding a cup or spoon, but the little finger is really more and more out in right field.  MRI Friday - cursory reading by the on call radiologist, who emphasized he is an abominal/solid organ guy, but emphasized that my lunate bone in my wrist looks to be advanced avascular necrosis.  Enough so would be visible on plain film.  But.  This is NOT near my ulnar nerve, most likely from a known injury 40 years ago and not pertinent.  That wrist has been stiff and reduced range of motion since then so unless the bone is now fragmenting and a piece is impinging on the nerve, its not the problem.  Unfortunately, the hospital is currently down to 6 radiologists from 13, does not currently have a hand radiologist ("one coming in July") though the do have "a bone/muscle guy" who will be doing mammograms/bone density tests today.  Probably just wait for the written report and then maybe send the studies up to Rochester Hand Center.

Son has been ogling Starlink.  They just launched some satellites that were supposed to server our area.  But...big BUT - over 40 of them destroyed in electromagnetic storm.  I will pass on what you posted about speed.

Typing with a finger several keys away from where it shoul be is...let's just say, aggravating.

Well, I didn't really want to quote the whole ting but I'm going to respond to several pieces so may as well.

There's a whole lot of hype out about Starlink and Musk. I'm taking 90% of it with a grain of salt since what I'm seeing is "Oh, he's gonna be so bad for our economy / astronauts / astronomers ... etc" but damn few solid facts. I know the astronomers are having fits about so many satellites in low earth orbit, but several have already acknowledged that with a few quick timed exposures they can "photoshop out the difference." A real problem, yes but it's one that can be worked around.
Speed is very different on my devices. The modern tablets are blazing fast but not something I'm going to want to do genealogy on. The older tower, once I dropped a dongle in is fast - just the electronics behind the dongle are slower. My laptop that's pushing 10 years old (or more, maybe) is again slower but like the tower it's because of older tech behind the scenes.
Yeh, those 40 satellites got hit by a solar storm, they didn't have a chance to reach their orbit when it hit and then didn't have the fuel to get up where they belonged. Lots of strange debris going to be coming down from them - but they'll disintegrate on their way down.
My biggest problem right now is that I need to get the antenna on my roof. As they travel I lose communication unexpectedly (seems as if the signal can't travel through the side of my trailer ... gee) and it takes them a second or so to connect to the next satellite. Curently hitting 261Mbps on that tablet. The tower, on the other hand, is doing 45Mbps ... need to trash my old stuff and get a good laptop with a big screen!

Hospitals and medical care in general is taking a big hit. I'm not sure I'm not sympathetic to the staff who have been working 80+ hour weeks ... the money may be great but not if you can't do anything but eat and sleep between shifts.
We've lost half of our EMS fleet. The owner of the service for the northern part of the county died and his family aren't going to keep it going. So our southern fleet (read TWO ambulances!) are having to do double duty in a county that's, let's say, 120 miles north to south and 80 east to west ... they're not getting much rest either. Non-paramedic volunteer firemen in north county are trying to fill in for the "light stuff" but when you need an ambulance, you really do need an ambulance - and it may be well over 100 miles away!

I know about out of date computers - I've claimed the oldest (well, not oldest - the old Quantex 95, upgraded to 98 and 7 is sitting in a closet, waiting form me to destroy the hard drive and take for recycling.) The acer M3910, went windows 7 to 10 is the one I use upstairs. I got tired of always having to close my windows on the new Dell 'cause Wayne gets annoyed with clutter (meanwhile, he keeps a zillion tabs open - I even had a shortcut called "wayne's open f*****g tabs" to keep them out of my way ) Finally, decided to configure the Acer to my liking - stripped all the shortcuts from the start menu and the desktop. Uninstalled a bunch of irrelevant programs, cleared up the task bar. Used colors I like for chrome...and I can leave my in progress tabs open as long as I like! Except...the damn thing takes FOREVER to start up, clickety clickety click on and on. Left it on, figured it was defragging or something. Nada. Then I looked at specifications. And disc usage. Only 6 gigs of RAM and the HDD is 90% full. Sigh...I have a ton of music on there, Wayne bought me some lovely speakers to have up there, getting a DAC to bridge the computer and an old receiver. So now, looking at new computers and they are pricey, so at least, a new hard drive and more RAM. Maybe new motherboard, CPU, with m.2 capacity and small SDD for windows with 2-4 TB HDD for storage, mostly music and photos. All the music Wayne collects is in lossless so takes a bit of space. New motherboard etc is attractive because the Acer is not windows 11 acceptable. But, upgraded RAM and 2nd HDD much easier on the pocketbook.

Now. Time for dinner

Windows 11 is a disaster. I made the mistake of upgrading without checking my win 10 backup and got stuck with Win11. Then repartitioned and installed Ubuntu. I built a crazy top of the line box in 2004. Its still a good comp. It functions as my router/harware firewall. Still runs windows server2000 x64. And i saved my first computer from preschool. Its a something 86 runs dos. Power supply went a few years ago and i haven't tried finding a new one. It was also the first computer i upgraded. I was SO excited to go from the 16mhz intel to the 33mhz pentuim.

Depending on what you are trying to get some things are hard to find right now. I wanted to upgrade the gpu on the laptop and couldnt find what i wanted to put in it.

It's a good thing for me that neither my desktop nor my laptop are upgradable 'cause like @Lostmaniac I consider 11 a disaster! I brought it up on my Raspberry Pi when it was a beta release, thought to myself that this looks like Linux. After playing with it a bit I decided that this was nobodies Linux!

The only thing I can say for Win 11 is that it's going to be one of the strongest pushes to get folks to move to Linux.

I had something like 6 old computers here at one time. Some of mine, a couple of a lady friends, some I'd been given to see if I could do anything to speed them up - finally ended up giving them to a fellow who wanted some toys to play with. Haven't heard anything back from him ... and his collection of boat anchors.

yes! they found a ganglion in my wrist!!! its fixable