Aww, poor kitties. 
The ice dispenser on my freezer just quit. Fuck you, Kenmore/Whirlpool. An ice dispenser that’s used three times per week (I’m the only one in the house who doesn’t open the door and scoop out of the bin) should last longer than six years.
SeaDragonTattoo and minor7flat5 I am so sorry for your losses. When you have been the special person for a cat for that many years, the kitty sized hole in your heart takes a long time to heal. I still miss Fred and I think I probably always will.
There is something comforting about knowing that we did all we could and then let them go in comfort. And I’m another person who looked at the pics and cried. Not for your fuzzbutts as much as for your pain.
I agree with digs, except that I think that there should be no more sick cats or dogs until at least the new year. We are looking at you, Big Al! Get settled in your new digs and stop worrying PHS.
I’m pretty sure that Bill has the flu. This has knocked him on his ass. I’m feeling badly that I mocked him…but he really did just seem to have a cold when he went down. Sore throat, slight fever, cough. He’s been down for a couple of days now, high fever and sore joints and skin and coughing up his lungs.
We got our flu shots together (ain’t love grand?), but he has been doing a lot of flying lately.
Two things to check: is it getting water? Lines gunk up. and Is something stuck in there?
We have had both happen here at the Mothership.
Thanks again for the thoughts and virtual hugs. It really helps a lot. So sorry to hear about your kitty, too, minor7flat5. We can all hope to go peacefully in our sleep. I had a dog who went the same way many years ago. We didn’t know he was sick, his heart just failed.
On a lighter note, here’s a vid I just took of Chico and Nimbus, making me giggle as they dance the dance of two cats who like each other but don’t know how to show it.
Your ice dispenser may just be “mostly dead.” We had the same problem with ours a few years ago, and a friend who is a service tech said that the mechanism was likely frozen.
Open the door to the freezer section and put a quilt or heavy blanket to cover the opening and then close the door. The blanket will keep the stuff inside cold, but will allow the dispenser mechanism to thaw out. Leave it for 12 hours or so, and then see if your ice dispenser works again.
Good luck.
Scritches for all the sweet kitties, and hugs for those who’ve lost their little fuzzy friends. Also, shout outs for visiting veterinarians. Several years ago, I lost my sweet Jake, the best dog in the history of the planet. He was a rescue puppy - I literally scooped him up from the roadside after he’d been hit by a car, raced to the nearest vet, and begged: save him if you can, I’ll pay whatever you want, or ease him past his pain. I’ll pay for that too, but either way, I’ll have to pay in installments.
That veterinarian couldn’t possibly have charged me the full amount for Jake’s three surgeries, and I know that the neutering was done for free. But I paid $2000 that I didn’t have. Best investment I ever made. Sixteen years later, old age complications left Jake’s hind legs paralyzed. By that time, he was also completely deaf, and going blind. The most humane thing to do was having him put down, but my big brave sweet puppy was afraid of only one thing: going to the vet. For about $100, the visiting vet came to the house, confirmed my suspicions that Jake was developing pneumonia, and gave him that final kindness. Sat there on the floor crying with me, too. Second best money I ever spent.
That’s a great video, SDT. My two interact in much the same way. You made me realize, I gotta try to get video of them together while Al is still around. (Apparently it’s a Maine Coon characteristic that they tend to stay playful even into advanced old age.) Luckily the pest control guy came so early that my parents were still here, so while they did have to sit in their carriers for a couple of hours, they didn’t have to actually GO anywhere, which was a nice little positive thing. Al seems OK, except that I’m seeing what looks suspiciously like streaks of blood with his poops. Do cats get hemorrhoids?
Concur that Jeep’s ice dispenser may just be clogged with ice. If it’s one of those set-ups where the ice bucket is completely removable, you can try dumping all that out, giving it a good rinse or time to thaw whatever remained on the mechanism part in the sink, and then seeing if the path from bucket -> you is blocked with residual ice or frost somewhere.
The ice maker is working…I just can’t get ice to come out through the door. When I press the panel on the front of the door, I can hear the switch click, and sometimes I’ll hear the motor whirr, but the little door won’t open and the auger in the ice bucket (located on the door) won’t turn. Based on some problems I’ve been having with it in the last month, I suspect that the motor has burned out…but I can’t figure out how to get to the motor. There’s also the slim chance that it could be the whole panel, but everything else on the freezer side (water dispenser, lights, etc.) is still working.
I had that on my Whirlpool ice dispenser. The auger was in a cylinder that rotated along with the blades. The cylinder had frozen to the dispenser housing and broken the auger blades from the spindle. I found the replacement part available at a local parts distributor, and completed the repair myself.
PM me if you think you might want to take a whack at this. I’m pretty good at looking things up.
Good god, people. Thanksgiving is 5 days away.
Grocery store was a madhouse. Had this teen aged girl with her family just run up right in front of the door as I was about to talk through it, stop, spin around and throw out her arms. Almost hit me in the face. Then I get in, grab a cart, and she’s almost through the second door, spins around and walks almost directly back into me. People completely oblivious to their surroundings all through the store. I only had 8 items, so I go to the express lane. Woman in front of me of course has 26 items. And a bunch of coupons she printed off herself, half of which won’t scan. Trying to walk out, there’s a choke point because of a food drive. Couple in front of me gets 4 feet outside the inner door, right next to the food pantry table, and decides it’s a great time and place to start re-arranging their cart. :smack: I said ‘excuse me’ loudly, the guy from the food pantry asked them to move. They moved 3 feet and tried it again. Just get the fuck out of the store, dumbshits. You’re walking 100 feet to your car to unload the cart. You don’t need to rearrange it in the middle of the exit.
Grrrrr… We’re entering That Season. The one where I dread going anywhere near a store because people shut off their fucking perception skills and daydream about what they need to buy nephew Billy.
Oh yeah, and almost got hit from behind turning into my apartment complex on the way home because the bitch in the van behind me was zoned out.
[Evil Monster Me]I’m going to make this a test for your right to continue living, on the day when we cull the Earth population. If you can’t act like there are other people in the world, you don’t get to live in it.[/emm]
Why is every damn website remodeling itself lately to have a stripe across the top which stays in place as you scroll down and requires a special Firefox plug-in to kill? Did some web-design guru fall in love with it for some reason?
Just now I found The A.V. Club is the latest website to go uglying itself up with a totally unneeded renovation.
Christ Almighty, what’s wrong with just leaving the damn sites the fuck alone? What harm is it doing to have the links on the side as God intended?
You can get rid of a lot of annoying features by turning off javascript for that site with a plugin like noscript.
Also, try using Evernote. You can clip articles you want to read and then view them there. With a single click, you can also reformat them a couple different ways.
But I’ve experienced the same frustration with one of my favorite sites recently as well. Science News completely revamped their site. Maybe once I’m used to it I’ll see the utility but as yet I’m not loving it.
Where I live, you occasionally get a bus driver who doesn’t know the route AT ALL and has to ask PASSENGERS where to turn next.
That is unacceptable in a civilized nation. That is Third World shit.
I am getting almost constant “not responding” messages that take anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes to resolve, and while that sounds miniscule, it makes getting anything done tedious at best. Die in a fire, Firefox 25.0.1.
I actually had that happen once, a bus driver who had no clue where that particular route was supposed to turn, stop, etc. I think it was his first day on that route (for some weird reason, my local transit system forces drivers to change routes every few months. Apparently, there’s something horrible about drivers staying on routes they know). Yeah, passengers pitched in to guide him, since we were all trying to get to work on time.
There was a new clerk at the petfood place today. They have free sample bags of cat and dog food. Due to my critter rescue work, I like to have a couple of sealed bags of food with me all the time, so today I grabbed 4 of them. I also bought 18 5 oz cans of gooshy food, as well as an 18 lb bag of kibble.
The clerk put all of the cans into one of my shopping bags and when I asked her to use both the bags I had given her, she rolled her eyes and put one bag into the other, then asked me if she needed to put my free stuff into a different bag as well.
Its hard to explain, but her attitude was that I had come into the store and spent over 50 bucks on a week’s supply of petfood just so I could get 12 ounces of free kibble.
Free samples that cost the store nothing, btw. They are sealed bags that come from marketing people who want us to take them and then buy their food.
Well, fuckitall. Now that I’ve vented, I’m not letting that rude little bint take up more mind space.
The ceiling fan over our bed has started ticking. Do you know the feeling of “Hurray, its Saturday, so I can just lay here covered with purring cats for a while”? Well, that mood is totally destroyed when I’m listening to the ticks and wondering how to fix it without replacing it. This is coming from a tree-hugger who has NO idea how the fan balances might work.
When there’s a new-ish driver on my route and an accident along our usual route, we have to tell him/her the better alternate routes, otherwise they go way out of their way. (No, you DO NOT go all the way down 35W to Burnsville and then up ‘stoplight every 1/4 mile’ Highway 13, unless you want to add a fucking half hour to the 35 minute drive. Oh, and you miss your next route, Mr. Bus driver, and they have to send someone else to cover it.)
And a half hour later you drove all the way back to the store to return the food you bought just so you would get totally free kibble, right? 
“You can put the food in the bag and hold the attitude.”
We went to see an open house where I think the people in it had been smoking inside seconds before we came in - the whole house reeked of smoke, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe in the house, it was so smoky. Good luck selling that one!
Well, I had to break down.
With the temps in the low 20’s, and gusts to 30mph, the Mothership had cooled to a nippily 61 this morning.
So to avoid the Gimlet stinkeye I would get, I turned on the heat for the first time since March.
P. U. 8 months of dust on the heat exchanger.
Global warming my fat ass!