The Front Porch

[wxntrafficfan]

My cat Grace went to the bathroom on it. I've slept on the hardwood floor before, so it was not that uncomfortable, just lower than I'm used to sleeping. I did not sleep well though.

We love our animals too, don't get me wrong. Grace and Mocha are two of the best cats we could have picked out. But they are both ruining the furniture, and I'm getting tired of yelling at Mocha when she takes a fancy to scratching my hardwood, antique, built-in bookshelf. We're only taking out the claws on their front paws. No reason to do the back. They're three years old now, which makes it more expensive. We just decided over the years that it was too expensive to be worthwhile.

[Mike M]

Declawing cats is known to change their personality and is very painful to them. They also rely on claws to protect themselves. As such, I don't recommend it to anyone. There are alternatives you can research besides removing their claws.

[WeatherWitness]

Dear Earth, why?  5.3 earthquake just 10 min ago here. It's really getting annoying. The only place that suffered minor damage is my room. I officially lost my mirrors, I lost 4 of them during the 7.2 quake and just lost the remaining last one. >_<

To be completely honest, to me it felt like a 6, but it's probably because I'm sleepy. 

Geez, I'm glad I'm not in California right now. Please stay safe, Ana. I would be beyond frustrated if I kept experiencing damage from such frequent earthquakes.

[wxntrafficfan]

Well I will attest to saying that the spaying we had for them back in July 2007 did have some effect, moreso on Grace. In fact, I remember the vet's office refused to let us take either cat out unless they were in a crate. Grace is not allowed back there. From that point, they have fought because they genuinely hate each other. Before then (and I do have video of this), they fought just to play with each other. 2007 was a great year for more reasons than one. Our cats are mainly indoor cats (except for when I take Grace out to walk on my deck's railing), so they don't need their claws for protection. Besides, the cats are 3 years old now, so most personality changes are most likely long behind them.

[TWCToday]

Funny. I also slept on the floor this morning. Not a good way to get sleep. lol

Had a fantastic time at Prom! End of senior year quickly approaching. Sad and happy!

[Al]

Funny. I also slept on the floor this morning. Not a good way to get sleep. lol

Had a fantastic time at Prom! End of senior year quickly approaching. Sad and happy!

i hated that feeling...but once you cross the stage, it'll change to just happy. guaranteed. 

[wxmediafan]

Funny. I also slept on the floor this morning. Not a good way to get sleep. lol

Had a fantastic time at Prom! End of senior year quickly approaching. Sad and happy!

i hated that feeling...but once you cross the stage, it'll change to just happy. guaranteed. 

For sure. Happiest moment of my life thus far .

Martin-- why were you sleeping on the floor this morning?  Did you have a little too much fun at prom?  

[kpetree10]

Not only were there issues on the internet (far too elaborate to explain fully here), but my laptop's hard drive failed, the weather was not all that great, the hard drive I bought to back up my laptop's files failed

Three words for everyone... off site backups! I've learned this lesson well working in IT. Carbonite is the best thing ever, $55/year for unlimited online backup. You have a client that runs on your machine and backs up 24/7 and it load balances so it won't hog your bandwidth. I know this sounds like an ad for them but they are really good at what they do.

So my story for the morning. I came in to work and the first person to talk to me was a guy on our shop floor who said his computer had an error on it and his PocketPC scanner wasn't working. I was hoping it was just him but once I got to my office I had a note there to see the error on another guys machine. Our ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system was throwing errors like crazy and nobody could do anything. I panicked for a sec then rebooted the SQL server, didn't work, then tried to clear the locked records and it said there was no space to write the logs. Turned out the server ran out of space! I removed 12GB of old crap and we were good to go again. Nothing like a good system failure to wake you up in the morning huh?

[tpirfan28]

Three words for everyone... off site backups!

At the very least anything you want saved needs to be saved three times - local copy, external drive copy, optical media copy, off site copy - any three.

[TWCToday]

Declawing cats is known to change their personality and is very painful to them. They also rely on claws to protect themselves. As such, I don't recommend it to anyone. There are alternatives you can research besides removing their claws.

I agree. I have 4 cats and have used various solutions to solve clawing. Worst case scenario, you could buy those caps for the claws. Removing them is a bit extreme.

i hated that feeling...but once you cross the stage, it'll change to just happy. guaranteed. 

Haha awesome I am sure it will I am actually glad some of my teachers are using Facebook so I can keep in touch!

Martin-- why were you sleeping on the floor this morning?  Did you have a little too much fun at prom?  

Lol No comment!

[Anistorm]

Miki has some claws there. She can climb up to the rooftop of my house using her super long claws. I am against declawing. It's just a matter of protection for the kitties, especially for Miki, who is actually an outsider. Serafina, my other kitty, she has been taught by her mommy (myself) to not scratch the furniture. She knows her scratching posts, and her non-scratching posts.

Also, today I presented my animated GIFs to class and looks like my class loved these two!
My Original Drawing: The Dancing Stick Figure! http://i45.tinypic.com/2hsbsyt.jpg

My Original Photos: Pikachu Vs. Bulbasaur http://i48.tinypic.com/2jh0t1.jpg

The third one, which was a promotional GIF, is about Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow coming to PS2 next week. It's in my blog.

[wxntrafficfan]

Cats are very difficult to mold and train, and it's only possible for most during the kitten stage. Now that our cats are 3 years old, it's impossible to train them any further. They somehow got the idea in their heads that creating scratching posts is okay, and I don't know how. But they will not learn! I have to shout at Mocha every time she scratches that bookcase, and she knows she's doing something that's wrong. She does it anyway. Grace has also ruined a chair and partially a couch, and the claws digging into my back when I hold them is brutal. They'll be fine, and like I said before, they are three years old, so it's near impossible (at least for us) to change their personality. I will admit I inadvertently taught Grace that going outside is okay, but she doesn't spend much of any time outside. Even if she does get out, she can only run around the roof and my deck. Mocha is much too timid to go outside, even though she will approach the door when I go out on my deck.

As for you Ana, not bad!

[Localonthe8s]

But that's expected when owning a cat. You have to face it with the scratching issues and understand that cats do it naturally. I had a cat before she died last year and even though Princess scratched my family room sofa beyond recognition, we let her do so because using scratching posts and training don't help.

[Zach]

I haven't had pets in my household since 2003. My parents had two dogs when I was born. A standard mutt and a miniature pinscher that both had the same color patterns. One died of diabetes when I was 2 and the other had heart trouble when I was 8.

[wxntrafficfan]

Turned out the server ran out of space! I removed 12GB of old crap and we were good to go again. Nothing like a good system failure to wake you up in the morning huh?

Hehe, I hear ya with that last sentence there. Happens a lot where I mean to delete one video, and I accidentally send an entire folder of videos (i.e. clips from a month, clips from the E.L., etc) to the recycle bin. Gives me a mini heart attack all the time

In response to your mention of Carbonite, I couldn't possibly justify $55/year to my parents. I'm having a hard enough time with getting my mom to increase our internet speed to either 12 mbps for only $8/month more, or 20 mbps for only $12/month more. I've given thought to it as I have seen the ads, and I am very paranoid about my main external hard drive failing (stores about 1200 videos, of which only 2-300 are copied onto my laptop). Heck, I even had a nightmare once that involved the thing failing.

People feel differently about their animals. You have people who just have animals and don't care much for them, and you have people who spend as much time as they can around their animals. My philosophy is that cats don't have to be aloof. As long as you care for them and show them affection from kitten age on, they will grow up to return some of it to you. Thing is, some people can mold their cats to not create scratching posts. Most can't. Some are able to tolerate how their cats use their claws, others aren't. My whole family has had issues with our cats' claws. Like I said, they'll be fine. For a while, we didn't think declawing them was really necessary, and we decided to put up with it. Now it's becoming an issue. My sis always has to clip Grace's and Mocha's claws, and she's getting tired of doing that.