short takes

[cellio]

Wow. It appears that it takes even longer to get military mail out of Iraq than it takes to get it in. A friend is a marine who was stationed there for several months. (He came home two weeks ago.) I wrote to him several times while he was there. Today's mail brought a letter dated April 30; it was a reply to a letter I sent in March. Ironically, in the letter he pointed out that things were a little slow -- it had taken my letter four weeks to reach him. I wonder how many more letters from him are in the postal pipeline.

Saturday was the Academy, a local SCA event. I took some interesting classes, including one on medieval glass, one on medieval beliefs about medicinal herbs, and one on performing poetry. I also spent some time talking with friends from out of town. The choir performance went reasonably well, and the food was wonderful. All in all, a very good event.

Our efforts at hospitality the night before did not go so well. The basement flooded about an hour and a half before our guests were due; the guest room is in the basement. We faked other accommodations, but they were far from ideal. We had an enjoyable evening visiting regardless.

At one point one of their kids had set down a partially-full cup of milk and Erik (one of the cats) knocked it over. I cleaned it up, but not before Erik consumed a fair bit of the milk. I didn't think much of this at the time.

The next morning it was apparent that milk disagrees with Erik's digestion. Unfortunately, the kids found (and in one case stepped in) the evidence before I did. It was quite embarrassing. That, and Baldur coughed up a hairball that, again, a kid found before I did. This represented more feline surprises in a day than I'm used to in a week, but I'm not sure they really believed us that this was abnormal. I felt awkward.

Sunday dinner was pleasant. We spent some of the time D&D geeking; Ralph has left us with a cliff-hanger and we were talking about ways to deal with it. I think some of our ideas amused Ralph. :-)

There will be a Shabbat at the end of July when both rabbis will be away, so the worship committee is leading services that Friday night. (The morning minyan can take care of itself.) I took the opportunity to assign myself part of the Torah reading. :-) (Yes, Reform does Friday-night Torah readings.) I'm waiting for a photocopy from the tikkun (the book that shows all the cantillation marks for the text), but I'm thinking that I should just buy one for myself. I wonder if there are any non-obvious factors to consider in choosing one. I'll probably stop by Pinsker's on Thursday (the only night they're open past 6pm) before the board meeting and see what they have.

I had my performance review at work a few days ago. We're all still friends. :-)

Comments

[rectangularcat]

I know how you feel regarding the cats. Mine tend to cough up stuff when there are visitors over. The worst was the projectile vomiting incident while having appetizers! After that, I gave Claudia some cat laxative to loosen up the hair and then she had to use the litter box during dinner - the box being very close to the dinner table in our cramped 1 bedroom apt!

Cats - cheap entertainment!

[rectangularcat]

By the way aren't performance reviews much fun? I only ever had one in 5 years of working and I have to say it takes a good manager to make a good one - I think the bad ones put them off... (also helped that I got a promotion out of that one!)

cats

[alfiechat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, i found out the hard way t hat milk doesn't agree with Elsbeth's digestion either. However she has lost some weight so i have to feed her more wet food(vets recommendation) which is pissing the other cat off. sigh. btw, no news on the job front yet.

[psu-jedi.livejournal.com]

I recall reading somewhere that, despite what we learned, milk is not very good for cats. I wish I could remember where I saw this. I've never given Smokey milk. She's stuck her nose in a cereal bowl a few times, but I've always removed it before she got a chance to have any. Of course, this is a cat that doesn't like tuna or catnip, so who knows...

[cellio]

I've heard the same thing, and I've never given my cats milk. (Well, once when they were kittens, but they weren't interested so I never tried again.) To the best of my knowledge this is the first time one of them has had milk as an adult; he seemed quite excited about it this time, at least at first. :-)

Milk for cats

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

My wife was raised on a farm so we're on familiar ground here. Kittens have no problems digesting milk. If cats receive milk on a regular basis all their lives (e.g. on a farm) there's no problem. If a cat doesn't get milk for a couple of months, the enzymes shut down and the cat becomes lactose intolerant. An adult cat can still drink lactaid milk. We give our critters an "egg-nog" (lactaid milk mixed with raw egg) about once a week to keep their fur shiny and they love their treat.

Choosing a Tikkun...

[goljerp]

This is all hearsay, since I haven't used a tikkun since I was 12.

I've heard that there are some books which are better than others in non-obvious ways. The good books can do things like highlight rare trop marks. I think someone was telling me about a Tikkun where certain words were highlighted as being easily confused... but now that I write that, I'm not so certain. And of course, how they deal with the special trop for things like the shirat ha yam, sh'ma, etc.