Swamp creatures lives matter. Make swamp creatures great again.

The link at the top of the post works. Not sure why this comment one doesn’t.

Handyman: Charisma. Being personable means not going bankrupt by competing on a race to the bottom on price.

It’s really a lot more boring than it sounds. Or maybe it’s just something that has happened too often to me for me to think it’s not a regular thing.

She was dating my ex girlfriend. When the split my ex suggested that she should go out with me.

Have you ever cracked open a floater and found a perfectly fine egg? You are counting the ones that confirm your bias but don’t have a large enough sample size to work from. I have 21 chickens. 5 ducks and an unknown number of geese that lay eggs. I’ve seen fresh hour old eggs that are bad and sink. I’ve seen 6 week old eggs stored at room temperature that sink. I’ve had day one eggs that float and are still fine. Eggs are a natural product with high amounts of variation. We can’t even reliably tell if a fertilized egg is male or female using the best science available and people expect a float test to determine if it’s infected with bacteria? Not happening. The float test tells you how much air is in it. That’s all. And that isn’t even a guaranteed way to determine age.

By the way. That’s Harper. She moved in a year before my girlfriend. I made sure to ask “if I have to do I have medical permission to have that eye removed.” We eventually did remove that eye. It almost killed her. But when she did finally recover she was a 14 year old kitten with lots of bounce because that cranial pressure was no longer there. The other eye was mostly bad too. Never saw anything other than a laser pointer. She was this way from birth.

When offering up advice in public places I sometimes include options that won’t work in a specific situation but might apply to the few dozen or thousand that might read it. That’s why I specifically mentioned that that probably won’t work in this case. And I stress “probably” because I had a “blind” cat that could see a laser. The first time I lured her into the bedroom with a laser my then girlfriend, now wife, started crying because this cat had previously only detected sun vs shadow and she wasn’t even entirely sure that was not at sensing heat thing.

The difference between sinks and floats is a pretty small amount of air. Now if the egg truly does go sideways then there is probably an issue because the air sack has broken. But floating itself doesn’t say anything about the safety of the egg.

This doesn’t tell you if it’s good or bad. Just tells you if it’s new or old. Older eggs have more air in them.

I’d avoid coddling too much. One tool I found that helps cats get along is the laser pointer. They both get so focused on that that they kind of forget that they’re in each other’s space trying to get it at the same time. Once they realize that they can be in the same space at the same time, without that hostility they tend to get along a lot better.†

It may not work in this situation because of the older cats health issues. But generally the closer you can keep them without any risk of attack, the faster they adopt each other or at least tolerate each other.

† sometimes I wonder if cats are soothed by hunting and exude some kind of smell that disarms other cats.

This is a tough one. When I find out someone has a 13 year old cat or dog I gently tell them that they need a second pet and they need it now. Because statistically in one to 6 years they will come home to an empty house and their soul is going to break when their buddy of more than a decade isn’t there.

You have a cat in declining health. It isn’t 100% possible to tell if their new issues are because of the kitten or if these were things that were going to happen anyway and the kitten’s arrival is just coincidence.

All joining of a new cat to an established cat house is going to be rocky for a bit. I foster ferals for the local county shelter and SPCA and tame them up so they can be adopted. I have mean nasty cats show up and piss off the locals every month. But after a few days everything settles out and they all get used to each other because there is plenty of food they don’t need to fight over and another room they can go to.

Except Junko. She is our 8 year old and still wants to be angry around cats that have been here one year less than her. Because she is mean. If I had the money I’d get her Prozac to see if it helps.

And that’s where your next step is. Your senior cat needs a vet visit. Let’s check their weight and everything else to see if they are getting enough nutrition. Is some medication to chill them out an option for them?

Do they have a spot in the house that is just theirs? Is the kitten making an effort to stay way or are they up in their face trying to make friends?

In San Diego the default assumption of “dude” is that it can be literally anyone or any thing.

The people there accepted this decades ago. It’s not one person’s experience. It’s a shared experience of millions. It’s a geographically specific situation with the Smurf language phenomenon. Any noun can be Smurf and everyone there understands the smurfing meaning when it’s smurfing said.

As a former resident of San Diego I have no problem sleeping with dudes. Because everyone is dude.

People think they’re clever when they ask “would you sleep with the dude?” My response is " bold of you to assume that I haven’t." Everyone is dude. You can try to twist things as much as you like but dude normalization reigns supreme.

Geese. We got them to cut down on the number of chickens that hawks were taking. They live exclusively on grass so they cost nothing to maintain. We haven’t lost a single hen to hawks in the three years since we got them.

So that’s all about saving money. Where is the profit? Goose eggs. In the spring they lay eggs that are 5.5 to 7.5 ounces each. Chicken eggs are only 30% yolk. But goose eggs are 50% yolk. A single egg has a yolk almost 3x the size of three chicken eggs. These are worth money as food at $7 each or as hatching eggs for barter with other homesteaders that want geese and have incubators.

Edit: forgot to add that they are the best lawnmowers ever. They have dramatically cut down how much we need to mow. Which saves fuel and W&T on the mower as well as time.

I used to sit, or lay, for all those hours. Now I’m up moving around. Talking to my geese, trimming trees, painting rooms, figuring out what some idiot electrician did 60 years ago that’s causing me a problem today (stupid loopbacks and hot neutrals, aluminum wiring optional), going someplace to hike and get the physical therapy I need after breaking my back falling off a ladder, etc. Living life while managing my ADHD and still consuming massive info dumps while also having one of the 200 podcasts I listen to play in my ear at 2.5x speed.

Definitely. If you know your device is infected then someone drastically messed up. The new stuff isn’t like the old stuff.

Before I had a phone I was on a computer for all that time. And before that I was reading in bed for all that time. And before that I was watching TV for all of that time. This is so much healthier than anything else I’ve done in 5 decades.

I used to do phone security for a living. I’ve seen a handful of cases in person. The bigger issue is that most of the time you don’t know it was the phone that caused your problems. One day your bank is drained and you don’t know why.

There have been several zero days that gave anyone that wanted to the ability to own your phone with a text that you never even saw because the phone doesn’t show you command texts.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/apple-zero-click-imessage-exploit-used-to-infect-iphones-with-spyware/

I’m on my phone 8 hours a day. Quality counts. Slow is bad. Lacking features is bad. Crappy cameras are bad. Get a good phone. Use it until one of the following happens:

• It no longer gets security updates
• There is a new built-in hardware feature that will actually improve the quality of your life because you’ve been wanting it forever
• You break it or the battery performance starts to suck too much.