One solution you might consider if no one responds is to keep Beasley outside in a screened in porch or something similar. I have friends that are extremely allergic to cats and after taking them to hospital after they stepped into my house (only for a minute) I have nothing but respect for allergic reactions. My aged and ill tempered cat is banished to the back porch because she has trouble finding a litter box (revenge? old age? health reasons?). It took her a while to adjust to her outdoor cage but it has greatly improved her health and she is much friendlier to humans now that she sees them walking by all the time.

Cat6 is better than Cat5e. I spec'd Cat 6 but then 6 months later actually looked at the cable and realized the electrician put in Cat5e, which is very unfortunate. Cat6 gives you the ability to run network attached storage (NAS) at reasonable speeds. You could (either now or in the future) run drops to storage at 10Gb/s or higher, which would be great for a very fast video archive. For regular video, Cat5e would probably be good. Only Cat 6 is "officially" rated to run at 1 Gb/sec speeds, but Cat 5e can generally run that speed as well. I only run a single port into any room, and if I need more, I attach a small Gigabit switch. I guess you could do it either way. I have a drop in every room in the house where I might ever have a TV. I hadn't thoght about the IP cameras, but that would be a good idea if you're installing those. No need to waste wireless bandwith on that.

I missed my chance to post before this became a debate about indoor/outdoor cat thread. As an adult, my cats have all been indoor only because I've lived in the innner city. Hasn't stopped them from bringing me trinkets. My previous cat learned his lesson when I stepped on a mouse he'd killed and freaked out. Not a lot of tensile strength in mouse fur, doncha know! Ever after, he knew to alert me to the fact that he had a dead mouse. Usually he'd stand a foot away from it and meow, not making eye contact with me or it, until I saw the carcass. I'd praise him, throw it out the door, and give him a special snack. Win, win, win! (Well, except for the mouse....) Twice now my Siamese has caught a mouse while he's been out in the yard with me when I'm gardening. I haven't taken the mouse away from him, but I have told him it's an "outside toy" and he can't come back inside until he's done throwing it up in the air and catching it again. When I was a kid, my old tomcat used to bring me stunned animals all the time. Mice, voles, snakes -- he'd stun them and deposit them at my feet with a special meow. I've read this is the way cats teach their kittens to hunt -- I'm sure I was a huge disappointment to Butterfly, because I never mastered the killing bite!

Oh, I feel for you. I am in a very similar situation. One of my cats has hyper-T and CRF, my other does not and feeding them separately is not a very viable option. At first we were constantly covering and uncovering bowls of food on demand- great if you're home all day and want to be a slave to a cat. Forget ever leaving for the day... I have switched my kitty over to non-RX food, both canned and dry, and she is doing very well- her last numbers were better than when she was on the RX diet. The dry food is a commercially available brand that is made for older cats, so it's fine for my old boy to eat too, and it's analysis is about equal to science diet RX- at least where it matters for CRF cats. When we feed wet food to her, we give her a blob, she eats off it, and it the other cat eats it we don't worry about it a whole lot. The wet food I do have to order online, but even with ridiculous shipping it still costs about half what canned K/D did- and she actually LIKES this food. I don't know if the ingredients are really much better quality, but right now I'm mostly concerned with just getting her to consume calories in a food that works for her. Since she was diagnosed a little over a year ago she has put on 4 pounds. We've had to increase her sub-q fluids, so that's a sign that things aren't really even staying stable, but she's doing very well with management and is living a happy life. She gets thyroid meds 2x/day too, but in pill form. If Pepsi is younger, I wouldn't switch him over to a food like what I feed my cats that is for seniors, he would still have younger cat nutritional needs. I don't know what you should do if that is the situation. There are also homemade diets- many on the internet. Getting the cat to eat them is really hit or miss in my experience, but does you give you control over ingredients. The one I made for my cat was potato and chicken with a few other ingredients. It is a pain to make and I freeze excess in jars in the freezer. Once we found the other non-RX canned food, she liked it better, it was easier on me, and her numbers were actually better than when she was on homemade food. If you search the internet, you will find a lot. Here is a link where I have gotten a lot of info over the past year- there should be info about the commercial foods and CRF, look for the link to the chart for US pet foods- very interesting place to start. You can email me directly too if you want more info about what we do. Good luck. Q Here is a link that might be useful: feline CRF info