cellio | random bits

Purim was this past weekend. We continued the tradition started last year of having "Esther's banquet" after the evening megillah reading and Purimspiel -- adults-only, food, alcohol, study/discussion. This year we had about 50 people, I think, up from last year, which is good to see. Last year I had brought some homebrew along. I hadn't planned to repeat that this year because there hadn't been a lot of takers -- but then one of the rabbis, in announcing the event to the morning minyan, said "and Monica's going to bring her homebrew, right?", so I shrugged and did. I brought 12-year-old horilka (made with spiced brandy) and some mead, and both were very popular. (They polished off most of a liter of horilka! Last year they drank maybe a cup.) I haven't actually been making stuff for the last decade or so; I guess I should queue up some more horilka in the fall when cider is in season again. (The ingredients in horilka are unprocessed cider, honey, brandy or vodka, spices, and time. Thanks,

hlinspjalda!)

I talked with the vet today. The test of Baldur's liver function came back normal. As we were discussing next steps (the ones that could produce answers are dangerous), she asked me just what he eats. There's dry food out all the time and its rate of consumption hasn't markedly changed in recent months, but of course I don't know who eats how much. Baldur has ready access, though. He gets tiny amounts of tuna and canned food; basically he gets to lick the spoon when I feed such to Erik. Baldur wolfed down half a can of food in about 15 minutes at the vet's on Thursday, so my vet suggested giving him real amounts of canned food. I've generally avoided that because it's unhealthy, but y'know, he's 17 years old now -- am I really worried about him picking up bad dietary habits at this point? So I'll give that a try; he enthusiastically ate most of a can of food today (between morning and evening), so we're off and running.

I see that the post office wants to cut a day of mail delivery to save costs. I don't mind the cut, but I think it would be much better for us customers/taxpayers if they chose a day in the middle of the week, say, Thursday, instead of choosing a schedule that sometimes means four days between mail deliveries. I assume that giving up all their Monday holidays isn't on the table. (There actually is a segue from the previous item to this one: this morning I refilled a mail-order prescription for Baldur.)

Dani recently ordered some Israeli CDs, and the MP3 tagging has been strange. Two or three different two-disc sets tagged one disc in English (transliteration) and one in Hebrew, for instance. Sometimes song titles will be one way and performers the other. In one case we got gibberish, presumably a unicode failure or something, and Dani typed stuff in by hand. Any one of those cases wouldn't have surprised me, but mixing it up on the same recording is bizarre.

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The most recent thinking is that canned food is healthier for cats than dried.

It's just way, way more expensive, which is why our cats are still on dry food. Premium dry food, but dry food nonetheless.

How do you maintain dental health? Hope they'll still eat enough dry food along with the canned? (In Baldur's case my vet's advise was to give him as much canned as he wants.)

They're starting to wonder if eating dry food actually DOES do anything to help dental health.

Anyway, I do my best to brush their teeth, and otherwise give them dental chew treats.

On first mention, I misread homebrew as Hebrew and was confused.

(The ingredients in horilka are unprocessed cider, honey, brandy or vodka, spices, and time

You don't mean thyme, do you?

"but I think it would be much better for us customers/taxpayers if they chose a day in the middle of the week, say, Thursday, instead of choosing a schedule that sometimes means four days between mail deliveries."

I hadn't thought of that. It seemed to me that eliminating Saturday delivery was the logical thing to do, but yeah, that means that with Monday holiday weekends, there would be no mail delivery for three days in a row.

There have been studies done that conclude that food choice does not affect dental health at all (unless you feed bone-in raw, which I don't think you're considering!).

The dry kibble breaks on the top surface of the tooth and doesn't actually "scrub" the sides of the tooth.

We have tried some dental treats that have been shown to be effective - they're made like sausages so they hold together to kinda scrub until the outer casing breaks... Hunter and Yates didn't like them though.

For some cats, really large kibbles will work (they helped clear some tartar off of Yates's teeth - before his allergies showed up, obviously! - but did nothing for Hunter, and Hunter is the one with all of the dental problems). These are generally marketed as dental varieties of food. I think Science Diet and Iams both have some, but I don't really like the ingredients in those brands (now that I've done more research... I think when we tried them before we did SD).

I've got to run, but I'll try to dig up those studies after work tonight or tomorrow morning.

I wouldn't say "starting to"... they were considering it when we started having dental problems with Hunter in 2005, so the discussions been going on for awhile now.

My guess would be "no". Seems to me like an infusion like that really WOULD need time more than it would need thyme.

Thanks for the information! We've been pretty much going on auto-pilot, food-wise -- once upon a time canned food was not favored, and we're only now talking again about it. So we'll do this for a while and see what happens.

(I do sometimes buy treats that claim to be good for teeth; whether they actually are I don't know.)

On first mention, I misread homebrew as Hebrew and was confused.

You thought maybe I meant He-brew? :-)

You don't mean thyme, do you?

No, I meant time, as in patience. It's best to let it sit a year or so (two is better). The spices I use vary depending on what liquor I'm using, but usually they're from the cinnamon/ginger/nutmeg part of the spectrum rather than the green-and-savory part.

What made me think of this is that I just mail-ordered some medicine for Baldur, which reminded me of an insurance plan I no longer use where I could mail-order maintenance drugs but they wouldn't send a refill (even though they were maintenance drugs!) until the previous one was nearly out per their records. That already has potential to go wrong; this would make that worse. I can choose to fill prescriptions locally (it costs me a little more but I prefer the access, plus I'm supporting an independent pharmacy), but I don't assume that everyone can.

There isn't a lot of truly-high-priority mail (that comes via USPS), and in most cases you can plan around upcoming outages/slowdowns (e.g. late December), but there are still corner cases. So unless there's an actual reason (beyond simple preference) for choosing Saturday over a day in the middle of the week, I think they should choose the latter. I'm not sure where to direct that opinion, though. (Yes, I recognize the irony that I am suggesting they work on Shabbat and I'm sure some postal employees are non-observant Jews.)

Also, anything that has to be signed for ... if someone is working every weekday, they can fill out that little, pink, "sorry we missed you" slip and indicate that the next delivery attempt should be Saturday. But not if Saturday deliveries are done away with. (Similarly for packages in neighbourhoods where leaving a parcel on the porch isn't reasonable, but some percentage of those are being send via FedEX and UPS instead of USPS already.)

I was thinking about the different postal days and it seems likely that if they drop a weekday, they will simply lose business shipping. I don't think companies would bother to maintain the Post Office for package shipping if they couldn't use it for 20% of the work week. FedEx and UPS would probably love that idea, though.

Interesting point. I hadn't thought about the effect on business customers. I wonder if they're set up in a way that lets them segregate business and residential delivery. Or, for that matter, how much of their cost is in delivery (the last mile) versus all the flow up to that point anyway.

You are asking interesting questions. I would think that stopping delivery for another day is about saving money on the "last mile". My guess is that the long distance trucks would keep running (which I *think* I've seen be the case when tracking deliveries from UPS or FedEx even though they don't deliver on the weekend).

It is also interesting to note that if you order books using the free shipping option from some online sellers, they use FedEx for the long distance part and the package ends up with the Post Office for the last mile. This sort of setup makes me lean towards the last mile being the higher cost of delivery.

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