9 weeks is really young for a kitten to be away from it's mother. He is used to being with other cats. My cat actually spent two days (on and off) looking for the other cats, and he was 12 weeks old (which is the age most breeders seem to recommend for separating kittens from mothers). Kneading is normal, espcecially with a kitten that was probably not weaned. My current cat kneaded frequently for a week and then less frequently for a week, and then it stopped. My previous cats never did it. "Is there any tricks to getting him to go to bed when i do..." Hahaha! Sorry...I've been trying to figure this out over 20+ years of cat ownership. My current Ragdoll is the best so far. He goes up to the bedroom with whoever goes to bed first, but sometimes he howls because he likes us to be together. Now that he is a little older and understands the routine, he usually tucks DH into bed and then comes downstairs and hangs out with me until I go to bed. He then goes to bed with me, but sometimes he's a cat (no surprise there) and just doesn't want to sleep. Even when he does quiet down when we do, he ALWAYS gets up earlier than us. I would recommend that you never exclude him from the bedroom at this age no matter how crazy he is. Depending on the size of your house and the distance to the litter box you may need more than 1 (we had 2 for a month). Lot's of playing and handling of him will help with him bonding to you. You may feel funny, but talk to him a lot also. My Ragdoll is very bonded to me. My previous Ragdoll was more bonded to DH because I was out of state (except weekends) for the first 3 months we had her. Good luck!

Larry, That is a beautiful and awesomely tall example of variegated reed grass! Maybe yours is going to get head high to the Jolly Green Giant? Jacob, If I didn't have the 8' tall deer fence all around both garden plots, the deer and I would not be friends. I think Bambi lost her mother, perhaps to a hunter. We have tons and tons of fawns this year---it seems that most does had at least twins this year and one that comes regularly has triplets. I love seeing them. If only the fawns could stay little, cute and adorable forever. People who hunt the property due west of us (it is the buffer that sits between us and the river, so they get a ton of wildlife) are getting pretty large bucks every year....say they sit on their property and wait for the bucks to come off our property. I rarely see the bucks because they feed at night, but I know they are there because every now and then late at night when we are out late, we spot them as we are arriving home. I tried for the first 8 or 10 years to have nice landscaping around the house/yard, which my husband stubbornly refuses to fence off with an 8' fence. The deer ate every single thing I planted, so I finally gave up. Now we just have trees, shrubs, trumpet creeper vines (because apparently the deer don't eat those), grass and some four o'clocks. Everything else? Hostas, hydrangeas, roses, perennial salvias, any annual flowers I planted for color, day lilies, etc......all deer chow. They even would eat the tough, prickly leaves of the hollies in drought periods, but finally the hollies are so big and old and tough that they don't bother those any more. If I ever convince Tim to surround our house and yard with a big ugly fence to keep the deer out, I will plant everything I've ever wanted around the house. I think his desire to not have a fence is much stronger than my longing for one. Where he grew up in Pennsylvania surrounded by woodland, nobody had fences so you could look out and feel like you owned hundreds of acres of forest as all the back yards and farms just sort of flowed together. So, he remains anti-fencing based on fond childhood memories from the 1960s and 1970s.....even though, if you go back there to his childhood neighborhood now, everybody has fencing and the farms and woodlands mostly are housing subdivisions with lots of fencing. I still think that someday I'll at least have a fenced back yard I can landscape. We'll see! Nancy, I am so sorry about your mom's passing. I know I don't "have to" comment, but I want to. Tim and I send you and your family our deepest and most sincere condolences. What an incredible, long life she lived, and you did everything you could to move her to the place that was best for her to live out her final stage of her life. You were a great daughter and I suspect it is because you were reared by an amazing mom. When y'all do travel to Buffalo in a few weeks, I wish you a safe journey. I do think Tiny Dude needs to travel with you so he can enchant and delight your friends and family who see his photos on Facebook and undoubtedly want to meet him in real life. Many cats travel well in a cat crate. Do they microchip cats like they do dogs? If they do, I'd get him microchipped in case he escapes from the vehicle, or at least get him a collar with a tag so you could put your cell phone number on the tag. Being close to the interstate where wrecks are frequent, we get lots of requests to watch for/search for pets that escape from a vehicle (not necessarily a wrecked vehicle---pets can bolt from a broken down vehicle when someone gets out to check and see why the engine is acting up or to change a tire or just when their owners stop at a gas station or fast food place). Sometimes you can find the pet, even weeks later, but it is hard by then to figure out which traveler passing through was searching for that pet if they aren't tagged. In my meager 20 years of living here, an early winter almost always equates to a bad winter. Or, for snow-starved southern OK, a really good winter. But, we don't get the ice storms that folks further north get in bad winters so what a lot of you might view as a bad winter, I might think of as a delightfully cold and snowy winter....if we get snow. If we don't get snow, then who cares? All winter without snow means is that we are cold and wet. I don't like being cold and wet, but I love snow. Not that I've had much snow to love. Our county does sometimes get the ice storms that bring down trees and power lines, but so far, that sort of weather never has come as far south as our house---it has made it down to maybe 3 or 4 miles north of us though. The bad thing is that if we get cold enough for ice and snow, then we get cold enough to lose Zone 8 plants that I planted here in order to see if they would survive here. They will survive here for a few years until we get an extra cold winter and snow. So, I sort of hope for snow, and sort of don't. I rarely plant Zone 8 plants here any more, although I planted a couple this past year.....which pretty much guarantees a cold winter is coming so it can wipe them out. I haven't seen a hummingbird since a week ago Thursday, but left the feeders up in case any were going to ride down on the big cold fronts. I haven't seen any, but will leave the feeders up until Monday or Tuesday, just in case, and then take them down. We ended up with the oldest granddaughter coming to stay with us for the weekend after her plans to spend the weekend with her dad fell through at the absolute last minute. We are always excited to have her come visit for a weekend, even if it wasn't planned. So, we ate dinner out with her, her mom and Chris last night, and then they headed home to get sleep before the busy work weekend with long shifts scheduled at work. We went to Wal-mart after dinner and bought everything we needed to stay home indoors and out of the rain today. We're going to carve pumpkins, which she has been dying to do....but I wanted to wait for cooler weather so the heat wouldn't ruin the Jack-o-lanterns. I think the heat isn't an issue any more. We're going to decorate Halloween Jack-o-lantern cookies (pre-baked and sold with a decorating kit). She has a long list of Halloween crafts she wants to make, including the Halloween version of a gingerbread house (we'll see about that one), so we'll work out way through that list as much as we can. I awakened at six and saw on the radar that the rain was almost here so rushed to get the dogs outdoors ahead of the rain's arrival. Whew! That was close but we made it. We're supposed to have rain all morning. How deeply into the afternoon the rain lasts is the unknown. I wish it would blow through faster, but it might be a long, rainy day here. We're ready for it and aren't planning on going out in it. I have some amaranth in the garden with huge flowering seed heads I'd hoped to have harvested and drying by now, but the relentless rain has kept me from cutting them. I keep hoping for a warm, sunny, windy day without rain so they can dry out some and then I'll cut them. I think if I cut them while they are so wet, they'll just mildew and look awful. I want the flower heads for autumn flower arrangements, but the rain may ruin that idea. When I planted the amaranth seeds in July, I wasn't expecting record rainfall in September and October. Have a lovely Saturday everyone. I hope those of you that the rain keeps missing will get some of this moisture plume left over from Sergio. The unfortunate thing is that it seems largely to be traveling over areas that already have had too much rain recently, so flash flooding and flooding likely will occur in those areas. The Red River is up and running fast and looked ugly last night, so this rain will just make that worse. I am thinking the winter wheat crop here likely is ruined. Too, too much rain even for seeds to sprout and grow, so it is more likely that if the seeds sprout, then the young plants rot. That's so unfortunate, but that is how life goes here on the southern plains. Dawn

While I would still get her ears checked (just to be sure that she doesn’t have something in her inner ear going on), but I have to say that Dawn might be spot on. Once when she only a couple of years old, our lab was desparate to play in the water and apparently chewed on a spray hose at the day care. They must have scolded her because anytime she hears the phrase, “what did you do” she freaks out. She also has gas a lot and if we’d jokingly ask her if she farted or call her a stinky girl she’d freak as well. You may not ever know what the trigger was, but something she relates to that noise happened. To help get her past it, I would say those things to her while I’m playing and cuddling with her so she’d see nothing terrible comes from it. She also used to be very fearful of the noises different plastic wraps can make. To get her past that, I started having her watch me hold them and carry them around, then I’d invite her to come smell it and check it out. After a few times of doing that, I started to subtly introduce the noise while I was holding it and then I’d have her come smell it again. It almost became a game with her, but eventually, she wasn’t fearful anymore.

Economics is systems science. Multiple variables, operating at different times and rates, all contributing to the functioning of the system, but not simple one cause one effect situations, so trends take time to develop, evaluate and respond to. The price of gas at the pump is a quick snapshot, but I wouldn't make wild broad policy recommendations based solely on that, anymore than I would use a medical anecdote as the basis of a diagnosis and treatment plan. Over the long haul, I would hardly expect the price of fossil fuels to go down, even though they might fluctuate widely over periods of time due to rising or falling demands. Tech service prices are going to go up, demand is going to continue to rise. I doubt is is going to be totally unbridled, but how to tweak it to make it work for the majority is a really important issue. Again, I've already thought about it and figured out how to maximize the utility I get from media, but I am constantly re-evaluating. So far, public options have proved still to be a very good option, although the delivery system is much more varied. (Public "radio" public broadcasting, public media (which is increasingly digital although I am a lover of old school print on paper that doesn't give off radiation), and public libraries. Trouble has been brewing in the agricultural/food production sector for years, (the disappearance of local and regional brands and the domination of a few multinational companies, for example) but the "nothing to see here, nothing wrong here" drumbeat marches on for those who either don't want to change or are profiting from the system. A "profitable" agricultural system doesn't mean long term agricultural resources are being conserved, well paying careers are being sustained, or people have easy access to healthful food or that agricultural largess is evenly distributed. Never has been this way, and is becoming increasingly concentrated. Again, the lack of diversity is a red flag that for some of us portends potential problems downstream . . . GDP says nothing about what is being produced or how it is being distributed. So it can rise even if the economic activity only benefits a few. Stock market gains for example. I can only imagine when the propped up stock market starts to readjust how that is going to affect all us Boomers retirements. Again, I've thought about it an am now trying to figure out how to position myself ahead of time to be as resilient as possible, what actions I need to take. The real ponder for me is how to prepare for and mitigate the changes I know are coming as fossil fuel politics becomes increasingly prominent. (As if they weren't prominent enough already). I wonder what resilience is going to look like 25 years from now if I make it to 87 like my Mom did. I certainly won't be one of the strong ones necessarily, I'll be one of the weak and vulnerable at that point . . . I think the time to plan for economic hardship is way, way before it smacks you in the face . . . One helpful hedge against inflation is to not buy new stuff . . . I haven't totally suffered because I have dialed down my consuming already . . . and I have plenty of maintenance tasks with what I already have to keep my mind occupied instead of "retail therapy" and going out to entertainment venues . . . Edited to add that if someone wanted to take on an extra job to help pay for rising cost of consumer goods, there are no shortage of help wanted opportunities . . .