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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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.

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.)

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