Oh, I’m so glad! I’ve been thinking about your last post and hoping for the best. It can be such a tough call, because you don’t want them to suffer, but sometimes they do pull through. Damn adorable little drama kings and queens!

I’ve been fostering kittens for a few years now, but had my first bottle babies and my first loss last year. In fact, 4/5 of the bottle babies I had last year tried to die at one point or another. The only one that didn’t was accepted by a nursing queen that I was fostering at the same time. The most dramatic kitten was actually the last one:

I had a litter of 3 orphaned kittens. First one refused to eat, so she got tube feeding & antibiotics. A week or so later, her brother’s appetite went from 200% to 5%, so he also got tube feeding & antibiotics. Both of them spent a few days on a downslide before eventually turning around. When they were about 3 weeks old, and I was finally starting to relax a bit, the third one decided it was her turn.

I was feeding them every 3 hours around the clock, but occasionally skipping one feeding per night so I could sleep for more than 2.5 hours at a time. At 6p, she threw up, but was otherwise fine, and at 9p, she didn’t want to eat, but was still alert and active. I couldn’t fall asleep that night, so I figured there was no point in skipping the midnight feeding. When I went to feed them, I found her completely limp and barely responsive, so I rushed her to the ER, and I was scared she’d die before we even made it there. The vet immediately took her and it was probably 20-30 minutes later when they came back to me and said she wasn’t responding and it would probably be best to put her down, but they’d keep trying a little longer. It was probably 15 minutes later that the vet came back again and had me follow them to the back where the little kitten was suddenly alert & responsive again.

On the vet’s advice, I went back to feeding them every 2 hours for a bit. Everything was smooth sailing from there, and I got to send them off to their forever homes when they were about 10 weeks old. I hope they don’t give you any more scares!

You might find that switching to a different food helps with the smell. According to my vet, corn, wheat, soy, fish, beef, and lamb are ingredients likely to cause digestive issues in cats, so switching to a food with less/none of those ingredients might help. My friend’s cat had terribly stinky (but solid) poos and when she tried a different food, the smell became much more tolerable.

I think I was about 23 when I started to have to stop and calculate my age whenever it came up.

Wait… People eat things like grilled cheese as anything other than an excuse to shove cheese into their mouths? No judgement intended, I fucking love cheese, probably too much. How could a food where “cheese” is such an important part of the name possibly be “too cheesy”? Isn’t cheese the entire fucking point???

In the US and currently fully WFH, but if I need to go into the office for some reason, it’s a 10-15 minute walk.

Walkability is pretty important to me, so I moved to a city with decent public transportation and don’t currently own a car. I use ride sharing apps or traditional car rentals on the rare occasion that I need a car, and even though they feel expensive, my annual car expenses are still significantly less than what I’d pay for parking alone if I owned a car.

And at the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s cats who intentionally don’t cover it, as a way of marking territory. One of mine has a lot of “dominant” tendencies, including a habit of not even trying to cover his poops.

Her poops shouldn’t smell like roses, but the smell shouldn’t be so terrible that you can smell it from the next room either.
Are her poops solid? If they’re not, definitely talk to your vet, as she could be sick, and diarrhea is especially dangerous in kittens.
Assuming it’s not a medical issue, looking at the ingredients of that food, I think you might find the smell improves if you try a different food. One of my cats has a very sensitive stomach, and my vet said that ingredients such as fish, beef, lamb, corn (maize), soy, and wheat are frequent triggers for cats. I see that the first three ingredients of that food are on that list. For proteins, poultry (chicken, turkey, duck) or rabbit tend to be well accepted. I’ve had to switch my cats to 100% wet food, but my vet previously suggested Dr. Elsey’s chicken kibble, and they both liked it.

He’s pooped in that stance since he was a tiny kitten. We have litter boxes of various styles and sizes, and I’ve even tried setting up an identical box for him, minus the lid, but he seemed to prefer the one with the lid. 🤷

In the places I’ve lived (all US), no businesses could sell alcohol between the hours of 2am and 6am, and some alcohol licenses have even more limited hours. I’m pretty sure I overheard a cashier at the Target near my parents’ place telling a customer that they couldn’t sell alcohol until 8a, and I believe I’ve encountered some alcohol licenses with a cutoff as early as 10p.
I hear that some regions don’t allow alcohol sales at all on Sundays, but luckily I’ve never lived in any of those places.

Right as cold/flu season was taking off, the location near me went and removed over half of the equipment cleaning stations (paper towel dispensers & spray bottles), so I decided to cancel my membership. After hearing so many horror stores like yours, I was shocked at how easy it was, since I was able to cancel mine online.
Although, I did quickly learn that I had also effectively prepaid for another 3 months, so even though I cancelled on October 31st, and was not charged for anything after that date, my access didn’t end until January 31st. I think part of it was credits from the COVID times, but I never went back to test it, so if anyone reading this is thinking about cancelling, be aware that you may have access for quite some time after cancelling!

The only reason I check Reddit with any regularity anymore is for content local to where I live. There’s a few communities on the fediverse for my area, but with only minimal, sporadic activity.

I would love to see more activity around fostering animals, particularly cats. I started !fosteranimals and have participated over at !fosterkittens, but it seems there’s not many of us so far.

Edit: No clue why I can only get 1 of the 2 links to work correctly, but FosterAnimals is on kbin.social, and FosterKittens is on lemmy.world.

I have 2 cats, one who generally yells the entire time I’m preparing food, and the other is totally silent. I have also found myself quite annoyed with the yelling and have tried various methods to train him. The most effective method to stop his meowing has been feeding him via an automatic feeder, meaning that there’s a separation between when I prepare his food and when he gets to eat. For a variety of reasons, I had to stop using the auto feeder, and have instead worked on training myself to be less annoyed by the meowing. It still gets to me when I’m already stressed, but I’ve learned to appreciate it most days. The other thing I notice with my cat is that if I respond to his meowing, he tends to meow more, so if it’s one of those days where I’m annoyed by it, I try my best to keep my mouth shut while I dish up their food.

One other idea that I haven’t actually tried yet is clicker training. Well, I’ve done some super basic clicker training, but haven’t reached a point yet where I’ve tried using it to train “speak” or “quiet”. My loud cat is also HIGHLY food motivated, and seems to pickup new commands with the clicker training very quickly, so you might also have some luck with that option.

I’m a millennial, and I will abandon my basket 99% of the time when there’s not a staffed cashier lane available, especially if I’m trying to buy more than 2 items.

I actually tried to use the self-checkout at the airport recently when I was buying a single bottle of water, and the cashier jumped in almost immediately to assist anyway. I forget exactly what happened, but it was definitely overly complicated compared to the staffed checkout that I used at the same shop the previous time I flew through that airport.

Yup. Use an instance that makes that data visible, such as kbin. It takes a few clicks, but it’s there for anyone to see.

Noooooo! Never encourage cats to see hands as toys! I’ve been watching “My Cat From Hell” recently, and so many “vicious” cats have a guardian who thinks roughhousing their cat is a good idea, but can’t understand why their cat attacks everyone else. Once they get into a routine of using appropriate toys to play with the cat, suddenly the cat stops attacking everyone else.

Me. I’ve been gone for way too long and just got back home this afternoon.

Hey! Who said you could post pictures of my cat? Lol

Definitely the most low tech solution, but I could imagine reasons why it might not be a good solution. Sharing the bed with another human seems like a pretty valid argument against this style.

As a random tangent, I’m signed up for Google Opinion Rewards, and I got a survey today that was asking me about my search for this. Some of the questions were so awkward to answer because I was like, “I was just trying to help an internet homie on lemny solve their troubles, I don’t know!”

Have you considered a completely different style of table? This style might be an option:
https://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/Home-Garden/70.9-Overbed-Table-Rolling-Over-Bed-Desk-with-Adjustable-Tilt-Board/37511631/product.html

Yeah, my numbers were definitely very round, but if we are trying to get more exact, aren’t there only 52 weeks per year, so 4.33 weeks per month?