Saturday, December 09, 2006 , the wee hours

Revisiting an old issue—cat litter

The topic of “what is the best cat litter” came up on the ASPCA’s community message boards this week.  It’s a quick but interesting read, and it’s always fun to read the experiences and opinions of others.  Here’s a direct link to the cat litter discussion.  I participated a bit, putting in my vote for Dr. Elsey’s Precious Cat.

On a related note, Pet Ecology’s ”Scientific Cat Litter” is now available for home delivery.  It’s supposed to be able to detect urinary tract infections (the litter will change colour if a sharp change in pH is detected), but I’m not sure how the veterinary community feels about the product.  It’s pricey, but if you have one cat with recurring UTIs, I can see how it could be a good investment.  You may have seen ads for it in magazines (I think they even did an ad spread in Oprah magazine a few months ago), here’s an ad for you, just in case:

Cat Litter


Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/09 at 12:24 AM
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Friday, December 08, 2006 , terribly early in the morning

Blog World Expo—a convention for bloggers!

I’m very excited to pass along news about Blog World Expo—a convention about blogging which will be held right here in Las Vegas!  It’s not going to be held until November 8th and 9th, 2007, so you’ve got plenty of time to plan your vacations and lunches and dinners with me and Flippy. See you in November… whatever shall I wear?

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/08 at 03:10 AM
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Thursday, December 07, 2006 , the wee hours

Free books, bwahahahaha

I hate to do this to you, seriously, but BookCloseouts.com is having their annual holiday sale, where you get $1 in free books for every $1 you spend.  In other words, if you find $15 worth of books you’d like to have, you can then choose another $15 worth of books to receive for free—there’s absolutely no spending limit.  If books are crack, these folks are your pusher.  I’m always amazed that every time I venture to their site I find something wonderful that I absolutely must have.  I consider them like a wonderful used book store, except the books are new and don’t smell like mildew.

So, on the slight chance you might have a book lover on your shopping list, give the site a quick visit.  In the interests of full disclosure, you must choose your free books from a list of 15000 preselected titles, but I think you still might find a little something you like.  If you decide you can’t find any free titles which interest you, you can switch your promotion and use a discount code instead.  I was offered a few codes of my very own to use on this blog, and here they are:

Coupon code: theblogpound-5
Coupon password: bookcloseouts.com
Value: Get $5 off an order of $35 or more
Expires: Dec 31, 2007

Coupon code: theblogpound-10
Coupon password: bookcloseouts.com
Value: Get $10 off an order of $60 or more
Expires: Dec 31, 2007

The hyperlinks I used for the coupon codes link directly to the autographed book section.  It’s one of my favourite sections to browse for something fun and unusual.  Happy shopping and happy reading!

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Just to show I’m not a hypocrite, I forced myself to go do some shopping.  Oh, it was painful for me.  I spent $10.98 and bought these titles:

Complete Care for Your Aging Cat (I already own Complete Care for Your Aging Dog)
From Ace to Zummo (a book about names for pets)
My Fine Feathered Friend (a true story about a chicken living in New York City)
Discovering Cultural Japan (title is self-explanatory, I think)
21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com (the autobiography of someone who worked at Amazon while they were just a startup company)

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/07 at 02:28 AM
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A nice little story about a chicken

I was browsing the Pasado’s Safe Haven site this evening, reading the good news that Mike Minton, Sheriff of St. Bernard’s parish in New Orleans, has been indicted by a grand jury for felony animal cruelty.  Unfortunately, that link goes to a story which is mostly just history of the case, but it does contain the updated indictment headline.  It also features a link to a news report about civil lawsuits which have been launched by some people who were forced to leave their pets behind during the hurricane Katrina evacuation.

While browsing the site, I accidentally stumbled across this story about a rescued and disable chicken, Little Jerry.  It won’t be a surprise that the story has a bit of a sad ending, but it’s an otherwise happy story about people who put a lot of effort into helping an injured and unwanted chicken.  I don’t know how Flippy would feel if I told her I was going to start bringing a chicken to bed to sleep on a pee pad between us!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/07 at 01:20 AM
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Tuesday, December 05, 2006 , mid-afternoon

This frightens me






The Pneumatic Drive Highest-Jumping Pogo Stick.

The Pneumatic Drive Highest-Jumping Pogo Stick.

This is the pogo stick that set the world record for highest jump of 7’, using an air compression spring that generates over 1,500 pounds of thrust-more than any pogo stick available. Unlike common pogo sticks with steel springs that add excessive weight, deteriorate over time, and are not adjustable, this unit has a lightweight pneumatic cylinder.

I keep imagining bumping my head on the overhang of the roof, or on a tree branch, or on something similarly cartoonish.  I’d bet it would keep my three year old nephew busy for hours, though.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/05 at 04:49 PM
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Monday, December 04, 2006 , early evening

Merrick Pet Care’s pet birthday cards

It’s no secret that I love to feed our pets Merrick pet food, even if I can’t always afford it.  Still, that’s my dream—to just have cases and cases of Merrick in the garage, so I never have to worry about feeding “Friskies” again.  Merrick has a birthday club, and if you’ve purchased at least $15 worth of food from their website during the year, you can sign up all your dogs and cats.  It’s almost the one-year birthdays of Bing, Tie, and Scampi, and in the mail they each received a birthday card from Merrick, and coupons for two free 5.5 oz. cans of Merrick cat food (six coupons in total)!  I think on the dog’s birthdays, they’ve received dried pork roll chews, but it would be fine with me if Merrick sent them canned food coupons as well.  It’s a nice little customer service perk that Merrick offers, so if you ever order from them, be sure to sign up all your pets.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/04 at 07:44 PM
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My little rant about Dell

Please indulge me while I engage in a small rant about Dell Computers.

I recently had to place an order with them.  I received an order acknowledgement email, and that was it.  For all intents and purposes my order “disappeared” after that point, and was never “Confirmed”.  I waited five days and finally decided I’d better try to get in touch with Dell, because I’d ordered with a 25% discount coupon which had since expired, so placing a new order would cost me more money.  I couldn’t contact customer service, because I hadn’t yet been given a customer number or order number, and one or both were required to even get to the customer service email/chat/phone page on the Dell site.  I couldn’t contact sales about “an order already placed” for the same reasons.  I finally was able to live chat with “Rajesh” in the pre-sales department, who of course couldn’t help me, although he did assign me a customer number so I could contact customer service.  I then talked to “Poonam” in customer service via live chat, who could tell me that my order was “on hold”, but could not specify the reason.  He told me to phone customer service during “regular business hours”, which didn’t include the weekends.  Today, I called customer service.  After going through an excrutiating menu, I finally spoke to someone in customer service and I had the most horrible time understanding his heavy Indian accent.  I think I might do okay speaking to him in person, and I love accents, and I love India and their culture, but this guy was extremely difficult to decipher.  I told him my email address included the words “cynicaldog”, and he spelled it back to me: s - i -n - a....

After half an hour or so, the customer service guy can’t help me, so he transfers me to someone he assures me can help.  After being on transfer hold for about five minutes, the line goes dead and I get a dial tone.

I have a temper tantrum for a few minutes, then call back and start the entire process over again.  This time, I thankfully get someone named Jose, with a Mexican accent.  I’m not sure if he was actually in Mexico, or just happened to have a Mexican accent and was in the US (or even in India, I guess), but he was delightful to speak to.  I could understand him!  Mexican accents, I’m comfortable with.  He could have spoken to me entirely in Spanish and he would have been easier to understand than the Indian guy.  Jose fixed my problem, which he described as, “at first there was a problem with your order but now there isn’t”, and now I think everything is fine.

Dear Dell (if you happen to read this), I have nothing against people in India wanting jobs, although I do have something against you for outsourcing.  Nevertheless, give your workers training to help them eliminate their heavy accents, you cheapskates.  The workers end up taking abuse (not from me, but from other frustrated customers) because they’re hard to understand, and it’s not their fault—it’s Dell’s fault.  Also, if there’s a problem with an order, send an effin’ email to the customer, you boneheads.  I had this EXACT same thing happen with Dell six years ago with two different orders, and it also took a number of phone calls to resolve.  At that time, I ended up ordering from Gateway because Dell just didn’t seem to want my money!  Both Flippy and I now have Dell desktop computers and monitors which we bought two years ago, and we love them, but we have no love for the company at all.  We also feel no loyalty whatsoever.  I wish Gateway was still a major force like they were so many years ago.

One humourous thing to arise from all this was the “psychology-speak” the customer service reps used.  During my two live chat sessions, the guys repeatedly used phrases like, “I understand how frustrated you must feel”, “I understand that this is an inconvenience for you”. and, “I’m sorry this is taking your valuable time”.  They must have had “appease the customer macros” built into their keyboards. 

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/04 at 06:57 PM
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Grocery store cat food

No one was more surprised than I was when I noticed a new can of cat food on the shelves at Smith’s grocery store (Kroger).  The food was called “NaturalLife”, and I picked up the food with some skepticism because it was priced at just 69 cents for a 5.5 oz. can.  However, I read the ingredient list, and it’s pretty darn good!  They only had two flavours in stock, “Chicken and Veggie Platter”, and “Lamaderm Lamb Platter”.  The ingredients in the chicken one are chicken, chicken liver, chicken broth, ground rice, peas, carrots, and a few other vitamin-ish things.  I’d rather not see the rice in there, but still, it’s a nice list of ingredients for such a reasonable price.  The food looks and smells good, and the vegetables can be seen in small pieces.  The lamb version has ingredients of lamb liver, lamb, lamb broth, ground rice, peas, and carrots.  Even though rice is a filler, at least a food which is called “chicken” really just contains “chicken”, and a food called “lamb” just contains lamb.  Their dry pet food products are certified organic, but the canned ones aren’t.  Still, I feel pretty good about feeding this when a can of “premium” food is about a dollar more.  The manufacturer’s website is at Natural Life Pet Products, and they have a “retailer search” so you can locate a distributor near you.  Oddly, they don’t even list Smith’s grocery for my area, but as long as Smith’s keeps it in stock, I’ll be happy.  I had to go pick up some more cat food today, so besides this new brand, I tried a new flavour of Natural Balance, and a Petco store brand called “Pet Gold”.  I’ll let you know what Chelsea thinks, because Chelsea will not eat just anything, so she’s the true judge of taste around here.  All the other cats eat whatever I put in front of them.

While on the topic of new food, I bought a bag of kitten kibble by the company Castor and Pollux.  I’d heard of them, but had never tried their products before.  I bought Natural Ultramix, a dry kibble which is odd a mix of kibble and dried fruits and vegetables.  So far, TJ the kitten is saying, “Why the hell is a dried carrot in my kibble?”, but he’s not a big kibble fan, anyway.  If your cat likes it, it seems great, but if your cat is a picky eater, this might be a tough food to transition to.

I’ve written this entry with great difficulty while under the influence of Xanax.  Lots of spelling errors!  I was feeling pretty sad about Freddie and Fannie going (mostly sad because TJ is left behind, I think), so I took some Xanax to calm my nerves.  It’s going to calm me right into bed in about 60 seconds.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/04 at 02:43 AM
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Sunday, December 03, 2006 , early evening

Bye-bye, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Freddie and Fannie went to a new home together today… TJ is still with us, and we’re all feeling a little empty.  Hopefully TJ will soon find a forever home, too.  I think Missy Mae is pissed off at me for taking her kittens away.

image

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/03 at 06:37 PM
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Homes for the kittens?

By the end of the day, we may have homes for all three of our foster kittens.  I took some photos of them this evening, and thought I’d share a few quickly.  I unfortunately lost all my photos from yesterday when my memory card bit the biscuit—TJ had unraveled an entire full double-roll of Cottonelle toilet paper all over the bathroom, and the scene was pretty incredible.  Toilet paper is now off-limits to him.  Anyway, here are some pictures from this evening:

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TJ begs me not to throttle him after he wasted an entire roll of toilet paper.

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Fannie Mae tells me exactly what she thinks of me.

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Freddie Mac shows you how absolutely adorable he is!  Adorable!  He’ll be a real catch for whomever adopts him because he’s so much fun and so sweet.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/03 at 05:10 AM
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