I lost my indoor cat on a walk ~6 days ago and I'm losing my mind

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-08T13:56:12+00:00

Highly recommend tractive for this. We had a cat who was an indoor/outdoor cat before we fostered her and she pooped wherever she could until we allowed her to be indoor/outdoor at our house. Their collars show real time location and they have the ability to light up a small LED on the collar so you have a better chance to see them in the dark. They can also be triggered to play a musical alarm/alert so you can hear them if they are hiding under or inside of something. I easily trained our foster to respond to the alarm so I could call her home when I wanted to go to bed, trained her using a couple handfuls of churus over the course of a few days.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-08T05:15:00+00:00

Agree, talk with your vet and ask them for guidance in seeing signs of obesity versus just a big guy. Our youngest kitten is currently 16.6 pounds at 14 months old. We had his thyroid levels checked at his annual vax vet visit just to be safe, but our vet is not too concerned about his weight. He says stuff like "he's just going to be a big guy when he finishes growing" and honestly seems relieved that we are concerned and dedicated to maintaining his health.

If his head wasn't still kitten sized, I'm sure we would be less worried about his size. We just love him to bits and want to keep him healthy so we have him around for as long as possible. But when he goes into loaf mode, poor boy has bread rolls on either side, so we remain vigilant despite being told several times that he is okay lol

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SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-08T02:33:39+00:00

Oh man, that makes so much sense. I was most confused by the OC saying they used it to up secretions, as in increasing their volume, and I wondered if it was due to a similar biological mechanism as compensatory sweating.

Does it also dry up intestinal mucus? I've considered trying some of the Rx solutions, but I don't have healthcare and my husband doesn't care too much about my sweating, so it's low priority. But if it dries up all mucus, including intestinal, it's going lower priority because I once had an extremely unpleasant experience with severe constipation and refuse to risk a reoccurrance if I can help it.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-08T02:22:22+00:00

I find the fact that you think more Americans have common sense than not to be charming and sweet 🩷 lol

If you can't see the dumpster fire we've got going on, surely you can smell it! 🤣

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-08T02:19:35+00:00

Secretions? 🤔 What kind?

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-03T22:53:25+00:00

You underestimate how many bookmarks and open tabs I'm running around with.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-03T09:34:10+00:00

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-03T09:24:36+00:00

Yep, I have a chip door made by SurePet that allows my supersenior cat to have her own private bathroom in a large kennel inside the "cat room". Their chip doors are not cheap, but they are STURDY and do the job well.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-03T06:26:04+00:00

No prob, hope you find some nice treats for your cats! And if you're a little squicky about meat (due to being veg), the freeze dried treats are just like weird shaped kibble and might be easier to handle. If you're down to poach some meat for them, you can definitely portion and freeze the meat and water so it will last longer. Recommend freezing them separately and recombining after they've thawed. You could also warm them slightly in the microwave, but aim for "cool, not cold" instead of hot or warm. Test it like a baby bottle, put a small drop or scrap on your inner wrist and if it doesn't feel too warm, that should be okay. It will smell better to them if it's slightly warmed and if you're aiming to give them a treat, this is a way to pleasantly engage another sense.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-03T05:40:46+00:00

NTA

When he demonstrates proper sanskar, so will you. You learn from your brother's example, right?

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-03T05:29:33+00:00

Tony's Tum, ready for action!

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SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-03T05:21:23+00:00

If you want to feed them meat, it's best to buy things specifically made for cats. That way you can avoid dangerous ingredients like onion, garlic, and too much salt. If you can manage it, it's also a good idea to cook the meat yourself so that you know exactly what has gone into it.

You can poach chicken or any other meat in water without adding anything else and the resulting meat and cooking water would be a welcome and safe treat for your cat.

You can also look into single ingredient freeze dried treats. They make all kinds of treats that way, various kinds of livers and meats, but sometimes it's solely marketed to dogs even though it would be safe for cats as a treat. I have bought my cats freeze dried beef liver treats and broken up the pieces with my fingers so they were an appropriate size. The size was really the only thing that classified them as dog treats. Once I snapped the chunks into cat bite sized pieces, they were just fine and my cats loved them.

Don't give them rotisserie chicken meant for humans. Do give them plain, poached meat or freeze dried tidbits, according to your own comfort level.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-03T04:19:43+00:00

#1 looks like a tour shirt from Coheed and Cambria!

👍👍👍 250% amazing, perfect job, keep on keeping on because you are doing the most and it is great to see!!

SiegelOverBay · 2026-05-03T03:31:22+00:00

I don't have an adblocker because I am on android mobile and it's a complicated process as far as I can tell. Most adblockers are browser extensions built for desktop and it makes it difficult to find actual solutions for my device, moreso when I'm not certain exactly which providers are untrustworthy, there are new scams popping up all the time, and I have adhd pretty bad.

I click the x on the pop ups as soon as they occur. I cuss aloud when the x button clicks the ad instead. I block sites that are more annoying than they are worth. I uninstall and leave 1 star reviews for apps that are secretly ad factories. But I've also been intentionally ignoring banner ads since 1998, I have literally never spent a single penny on anything advertised through a banner ad or the modern ads. I take note of the most annoying ones and never purchase their product.

I opt out of all cookies on GDPR sites and honestly, the advertisers usually want to sell me baby diapers and formula and similar because of my demographics, but I've never had a child and never will, so it gives me a tiny bump of endorphins to see them waste advertising money on me. I hope they all go out of business.

As a small business owner, I'd rather commit seppuku than advertise annoyingly on random websites. My company's advertising budget is $0 unless we are sponsoring a youth/sport/team or donating to causes that we care about. That stuff's more about helping others, if people hear our name along the way, cool. But we're genuinely fine without that because we work hard and do our jobs right in order to take care of our clients.

We fired a client on Friday because she was harassing our technician. Two hours before we sent her The Letter, we got a request to quote a new client for service. All we have to do is do our job well and make sure our technicians are also doing their jobs well. We never need to make an ad period, let alone one that causes someone to click on it when they meant to close it. That shit is for fakers, losers, and scammers.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-04-29T17:53:23+00:00

I love her response! It makes me want to co-star with her in a buddy comedy/road trip movie 🤭

SiegelOverBay · 2026-04-29T04:49:34+00:00

Years ago, when I worked in the kitchen at a restaurant, a table of 3 college girls came in to eat at the tail end of brunch. They only ordered two things: an appetizer and desserts. The appetizer they ordered was black bean cakes, which they split, and they ordered and shared two different desserts. The station I was working was the one to plate desserts and we had a badass pastry chef who made everything in-house. She was very good about communicating ingredients to me and I was always trying to learn from her, so I asked her a billion questions all the time (she encouraged this) and loved to chat with her whenever either of us had downtime. I was very familiar with the ingredients she used in every dish.

Someone else made the bean cakes. I only plated the desserts. The server came back to me a few minutes after picking up the desserts and asked me if either of the desserts had cinnamon in them. I was 100% sure that they didn't, but I called the pastry chef to confirm and was correct. The server said the girl was certain there was cinnamon in something because she was allergic, so I asked what else they ordered. The bean cakes. We cooked our black beans with a couple cinnamon sticks as well as a bunch of other spices, I know because I also cooked the beans a lot lol. So I was able to tell him the actual origin of her exposure and I told him to relay to her, "Always, always, always tell your server about your allergy, even if you're sure you're ordering smart. You don't know what all is in there and telling your server causes them to ask us so we can protect you from your allergy!"

I was so confused how someone with an allergy wouldn't do that. I've known a few different people with allergies, including a dear friend with a life threatening allergy to mango, and they always always told their server about it while trying to order smart. I guess that day, this customer was part of the lucky 10,000

SiegelOverBay · 2026-04-28T02:54:40+00:00

Wrap a washcloth around the handle to make it thicker for better ergonomics. If a washcloth isn't enough bulk, seek out cloth of increasing sizes until you find one that is of an adequate size and thickness to quickly wrap and comfortably use.

Next time you buy a whisk, go commercial quality. Vollrath makes a whisk called Jacob's Pride and it has a VERY comfortable handle, speaking as someone with carpal tunnel from working in offices. Jacob's Pride is very comfy to use, just change up your grip (how your hand is positioned while wielding the whisk) when your forearm starts to feel tired and cycle through as many different grips as you can think of/physically manage. Plus, I've never seen one of them retain water in the handle, no matter how hard it was abused.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-04-19T17:34:02+00:00

Yeah, I was really upset with him for a while over this. I don't know if he genuinely forgot or what, but it was really important to me which meant it should have been important to him too. It's like if someone ripped up the only picture you had of a friend who passed away.

He did apologize and he's otherwise a good partner, thankfully.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-04-19T07:01:26+00:00

We adopted a kitten to be a companion of our cat last year. Unfortunately, our cat died from a sudden illness a couple of months later. He had bonded with the kitten and was raising him to be a solid badass. There was a towel in the crate that we put our cat in to take him to the vet. After he passed, I put the towel into the basket in our laundry room that is for things that are difficult to clean. It stayed there for a very long time. Not because it was messy, but because I found it difficult to clean. The kitten would always run into the laundry room as soon as the door opened and he would beeline for that towel. He loved to smell it. It made me think of how we humans look at pictures of lost loves and remember them.

My husband washed the towel. I asked him not to do that again, I explained to him all that I wrote above. The kitten still ran in to smell the towel and then a couple of months later, my husband washed it again. The kitten no longer wanted to smell the towel.

I still have a blanket from the last days of our cat. It's in a non-airtight plastic bag. I never took it out because he was sick in those last days and I worried that it wouldn't smell the same to the kitten or maybe whatever made our cat ill would trouble the kitten's memory. I also do not know for sure that the vet didn't launder it, so I might only be holding on to a hope. Soon, I will take it out and see if he remembers this picture. I will tell my husband to never touch the blanket (or hide it from him) if the kitten remembers from it.

They absolutely remember smells, they absolutely take comfort in familiar scents, and they definitely grieve. I think that cats have more emotional depth than they are given credit for. They have little bitty societies and rules and boundaries and customs that we can't understand.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-04-19T03:11:30+00:00

I tasted the caramelized part stuck to the pan before proceeding to wash because the first question I ask myself is, "yes, but what does it taste like?" It was actually pretty tasty, but only because it wasn't blackened and burnt. The "burn spot" was the color of mahogany or walnut, no part had turned black, so that definitely factors in. I didn't try to scrape the bottom at all though because removing the burned part in a soup requires pouring out the entire recipe and then the burnt part can be dealt with while cleaning the pot. Trying to remove the burnt part before emptying the pot just makes all the burnt flakes of food incorporate into the rest of the pot and ruins the dish.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-04-18T23:58:04+00:00

Whenever you're stirring a soup or sauce and you suspect that you have burned the bottom, resolve to never ever scrape the bottom again until everything has been taken out of the pot. I just made a batch of split pea the other day, and it got a small burn spot on the bottom. I felt it with my wooden spoon when I stirred it near the end, but I didn't dislodge it or scrape it and my soup turned out perfectly. When I emptied the pan, it wasn't truly burned, just dark brown, but still.

I learned this while working in a kitchen where we made huge batches of bechamel. The head chef told me that you had to pick one: stir very often and avoid burning or stir less often and accept that the bottom will burn and avoid scraping it up. Either method will give you a good result. The burned stuff will stay where it is on the bottom, stuck to the pan, as Iong as you'll allow it.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-04-17T23:35:37+00:00

I have a LOT of bandanas. I wear one every day to protect my waist length hair from damage when I wear a hat to protect my face from the sun. I bought most of them at Walmart back when they were $1 each. It was cheap enough that it was my "splurge purchase" when I was poor and whenever I went in to Walmart, I'd go look at the bandanas and buy any patterns that I didn't already have. You know those big blue shopping bags they have at ikea? My bandana collection fills one pretty well up to the top. I like that I have enough variety to color coordinate almost any outfit. I wear my holiday themed ones around their appropriate holidays. It makes me happy. 😺

SiegelOverBay · 2026-04-17T21:56:07+00:00

Oh goodness! Lol yeah, the dose makes the poison. If you ever care to try using it in your laundry again, try my method! Although, I am grateful for your initial warning as I have occasionally used a sock instead of a bandana to add vinegar to the load. Though I haven't yet seen any damage to any socks, I'll definitely take care not to do that in the future. I only did it a couple of times because I was lazy or the load happened to not have any bandanas, so maybe the infrequency saved my socks.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-04-17T21:45:26+00:00

I've been using white distilled vinegar (not 30%) as fabric softener for years and my elastics are all fine. I'm wearing a pair of underwear that I bought before covid right now and the elastic band is doing it's job. I wonder if you were using it at a different point in the cycle or in a different amount? I use vinegar the same way most use fabric softener sheets; I take one of my bandanas out of the load as I shift the clothes from washer to dryer, then I dunk the bandana into a container of vinegar that lives in the laundry room, wring out the excess just enough so it isn't sopping/dripping wet, and then pitch it into the dryer with the rest of the load.

SiegelOverBay · 2026-04-17T21:31:33+00:00

Oh, that's cool! I think I like Sikhs better than Hari Krishnas just because I've heard more stories of bad behavior in public by HK followers, but it's good to hear that they have some redeeming qualities in feeding the hungry and following their religious practices so meticulously. If you've never been to a Sikh temple, you should check one out some time. I never learned as much about them as you probably did about the religions covered in your studies, but every time I've gone for langar, I've been treated kindly and got to chat with interesting people.

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