Posts Tagged ‘cats’

It is my turn today to do the Day­dreamz WeBlogIt project and this weeks theme is pets.

I am a bit funny when it comes to pets, I really dis­like dogs, no mat­ter how many peo­ple tell me they are amaz­ing, they are just not for me. Now cats, cats and me go together so well, I totally and utterly adore cats and every­thing about them.

When I was lit­tle I use to have two cats — Kitty and Ming, quickly fol­lowed by Lucy (my very first pet) and her four kit­tens only one we kept Mar­malade.  We had these cats until their old age, then I met my hus­band who funny enough has the same view on dogs as me, he also had about a total of four or five cats grow­ing up, we could not get cats straight away as we lived in a rented flat and they wouldn’t allow ani­mals but we did have four ham­sters which are no replace­ment for a cat even if they are cute minus the fact that one of them ate the other but that is a whole other story.

We brought our house two years ago, moved in on the Fri­day and Kather­ine and Arthur came to join us on the Sat­ur­day, they were given to us by a cus­tomer at the local store where we use to work, I wanted another gin­ger boy like Mar­malade but we were given two female grey tabby’s.

Now after Arthur got a boys name because as I said before I wanted a boy kit­ten so when we were given these girls, I thought what the hell, she is a cat she won’t care, my brother has a girls name and he doesn’t care.  Kit is the big­ger cat and she is very vocal is the only way to put it as she meows all the time, about any­thing and to argue with you when she is doing some­thing naughty, nor­mally at the hus­band. Kit is my hus­bands cat and Arthur is my cat, she is so pretty and very friendly but only when she wants to.  Arthur didn’t meow until she was over a year old and now she is copy­ing her sis­ter and won’t be quiet which is fine, I love hav­ing vocal kitties.

They are now two years old and about a year ago, I passed my first year at uni­ver­sity and I found these kit­tens for sale, told my hus­band who always wants more cats and I really wanted my boy gin­ger cat.  So when to look at them they only a black kit­ten who was a boy and my hus­band really wanted him so we brought him, the peo­ple that had him did not look after him and he had fleas and worms

But he is back to nor­mal health now and the house after many many attempts is now flea free, thank god for that.

His name is Onion and he is such a typ­i­cal boy, he is naughty, he is lov­ing, he eats things he shouldn’t, he play fights with his sis­ters and he is just lovely!   It took ages to get the girls to play nice with Onion, he had to be locked in the office on his own for ages while the girls warmed up to him and there was a stage when I thought this was never going to work,  but after a month and a lot of hiss­ing they were all put together.  Onion has to be told off quite a bit by Kit who is such a mother cat and is huge, Onion gets hissed at by Kit all the time but jump­ing on her and attack­ing her, but Arthur and Onion have hit it off and tear up and down our house play fight­ing and chas­ing.  We think this is because Kit went through heat and the other two didn’t so they are very much kit­ten like and she is our grown up cat.

I think the thing I fig­ured out about cats is they are the most lov­ing ani­mals and they don’t try and lick your faces… well unless you are my mother’s stu­pid cat… I would like one more in this size house and when I move maybe we will get a few more I adore my cats more than most peo­ple or so called friends out there at least they are loyal.

Post for Mar­malade the most stu­pid­est and lov­ing cat and all the other many cats I have had

Long await post about being green in the kitchen, this one is more than likely going to be a long one as I can think of so many way of being green in the kitchen.

Dishwasher

Now I know a lot of peo­ple worry that using a dish­washer is worse than hand wash­ing but I have researched this in depth, and it turns out that no using a dish­washer on a ECO wash is cheaper and uses less elec­tric­ity than hand wash­ing.  But I would like to men­tion please remem­ber to turn the plug off while not using it as this is use wast­ing energy that doesn’t need to be wasted.

I found this arti­cle which works out how much energy and water you will use in a dish­washer vs hand washing

Water use, energy use, and car­bon foot­print
There are three big fac­tors we’ll con­sider: water use, energy use (for heat­ing the water, largely), and the car­bon foot­print that results — we’ll save things like soap and dish­washer cook­ing for another post. And, of course, fol­low­ing energy-saving tips like run­ning the “light” cycle and turn­ing off the “heated dry­ing” option will change the way the num­bers work.

Built-in dish­washer effi­ciency
The aver­age dish­washer uses 6 gal­lons of water per cycle; the aver­age Energy Star-rated dish­washer uses 4 gal­lons per cycle, and their energy use ranges from 1.59 kWh per load down to 0.87 kWh per load. Using the Depart­ment of Energy’s car­bon diox­ide emis­sions num­bers of 1.34 pounds of CO2 per kWh, that’s 1.16 to 2.13 pounds of car­bon diox­ide emit­ted per load, to go along with 4 gal­lons of water.

Energy Star assumes each load in a “stan­dard” dish­washer (usu­ally 24 inches in size) has “a capac­ity greater than or equal to eight place set­tings and six serv­ing pieces,” so we’ll go with that when con­sid­er­ing how many dishes need to be washed by hand.

Can hand wash­ing be as effi­cient as dish­wash­ing?
The short answer: maybe. First, let’s look at water usage alone. The aver­age faucet flows at 2 gal­lons per minute, so if you can suc­cess­fully wash and rinse eight place set­tings — plates, bowls, forks, knives, spoons, glasses, etc. — and those six serv­ing dishes that your dish­washer can han­dle with­out run­ning the faucet for more than 2 total min­utes, then, you might be bet­ter off hand-washing. Assum­ing you’re wash­ing 54 pieces of dish­ware (that’s 48 pieces of dish­ware — 6 pieces per set­ting — and 6 serv­ing dishes), you’ve got about 4.4 sec­onds of wide-open tap water per piece, or about 9.5 ounces of water to wash and rinse each dish.

Impacts of heat­ing the water
Let’s assume you use warm water for both wash­ing and rins­ing — half hot water and half cold water. Heat­ing 2 gal­lons of water with a gas hot water heater (from about 60 degrees as it enters your house to, say, 120 degrees, set by the ther­mo­stat on your hot water heater) takes about 960 BTUs, or about 0.9% of one therm (100,000 BTUs), assum­ing 100 per­cent effi­ciency.
Gas stor­age tank water heaters
Gas water-heaters are usu­ally more like 65 per­cent effi­cient, so it really takes 1477 BTUs, or about 1.5 per­cent of a therm, to heat that water. One therm emits 11.7 pounds of CO2, accord­ing to the EPA (pdf), so heat­ing the water with gas for each 2-gallon load emits about .17 pounds of car­bon dioxide.

On-demand (or tan­k­less) water heaters are closer to 80 per­cent effi­cient, which changes the num­bers a bit; it works out to about 1200 BTUs, or about .14 pounds of car­bon diox­ide.
Elec­tric stor­age tank water heaters
The story is a bit dif­fer­ent when con­sid­er­ing an elec­tric water heater; while most elec­tric water heaters use between 86 and 93 per­cent of their energy for heat (com­pared to between 60 and 65 per­cent for gas), elec­tric heaters aren’t as effi­cient at heat­ing water. It still takes 960 BTUs to heat that much water; it just takes about .28 kWh (since, accord­ing to the EIA, 1 kWh equals 3412 BTUs) to heat 2 gal­lons of water at 100 per­cent effi­ciency, or about .30 kWh at 93 per­cent effi­ciency. Each kWh emits 1.715 pounds of CO2, on aver­age (thank you, EPA), so heat­ing water with elec­tric­ity for each 2-gallon load emits about .51 pounds of CO2.
Built in dish­washer vs. hand-washing: And the win­ner is…
These num­bers indi­cate that it’s pos­si­ble to be more effi­cient when hand-washing, but it’s pretty tough. Can you suc­cess­fully wash and rinse a soiled din­ner plate in just over a cup of water? If you can keep the water use low, equal to an effi­cient machine, you’ll require less energy, but doing an entire load of dishes in 4 gal­lons of water is roughly equiv­a­lent to doing them all in the same amount of water you use in 96 sec­onds of show­er­ing (using a show­er­head that emits 2.5 gal­lons per minute).

So, as long as you don’t often run your dish­washer when it’s only half full of dirty dishes, or unless you are very miserly with your water use (or have an old, inef­fi­cient dish­washer), the auto­matic dish­washer is likely to be more effi­cient. That is to say, it’s pos­si­ble to use less water and energy by hand wash­ing your dishes, but it’s not easy. Of course, if you do it just right, it might just be a wash.

More infor­ma­tion at treehugger.com

Clean­ing Products

Now I have men­tioned this before down in the being green in the bath­room but clean­ing prod­uct are an large impact on the world, using more organic, more nat­ural prod­ucts is always best, the only issue that gets me if the price, I under­stand why that have to be more expen­sive because it is not just chem­i­cals like the cheaper brands but I wish they would bring it down a lit­tle bit as not all of us have money to burn.

Pet related

This one is a tough due to the fact it has taken me for­ever to find cat lit­ter than is not going to kill the envi­ron­ment, I have tried loads of cat lit­ter for one I hate the clump­ing ones as they take for­ever to clean (which wastes water, clean­ing prod­uct and not to men­tion it smells), I have gone for a one at the  moment which is lit­tle tubs of old wood shav­ings, the think I like about it the most is the fact when the cat goes to the bath­room the lit­tle tubs dis­ap­pear a leave what I can only describe as saw­dust (kind of like a ham­ster cage lin­ing) but it does have a nice pine smell and lasts longer so you don’t use as much sav­ing money and sav­ing time.  If you can go for an eco cat lit­ter it is nicer for the cat and for your noses.

Cat food tins wash out, I know it is a huge pain but if you have one cat or three like myself you will end up going through at least one tin a day, with mine it is two tins a day (I swear Onion steals every­one else’s food but I can’t prove it!), I did try putting these through the dish­washer but every­thing smelled of cat food so now I have to hand wash them with bleach as well as wash­ing up liq­uid, please use a dif­fer­ent wash cloth as it is not nice otherwise.

Also check out Eco-Me Cat Kit Nat­ural Tool Kit, you can make your own cat lit­ter and flea spray, also cat treats, I might have to give this one ago.

Recy­cling

I am huge on recy­cling, lucky for me my coun­cil pro­vide me lit­tle pink bags which I put out every week, what I have found is a lot of items can be recy­cled, in my house­hold we have one bin for rub­bish and one for recy­cling, my mother is even bet­ter and has a bin for veg­etable ends, egg shells and other organic food mat­ter which she puts in her com­post down at the end of the gar­den.  I haven’t got a huge gar­den more like the size of postage stamp but I could fit a small one in my mother informs me.

Hav­ing two bins really saves me the headache of hav­ing to keep the bag some­where, since recy­cling (I even have my hus­band doing it who told me it was a waste of time) we hardly but out much black bin bag rubbish.

Grow­ing your own Vegetables

See I tried this last year but only man­aged to grow a cucum­ber and some herbs, my mother on the other hand split half her gar­den into her veg­etable and fruit patch and grew so much, loads of leeks (I love leeks), but this year I am going to grown my own car­rots, pota­toes and leeks plus the nor­mal amount of herbs, I’ll have to update you about this later in the year.  I think grow­ing your own veg­eta­bles doesn’t take a lot of work but it is so pleas­ing to see them grow even for me grow­ing any­thing makes me happy and I suck at gar­den­ing in gen­eral, I get the hus­band to do it for me.  Even if you don’t’ have a gar­den just a small bal­cony you could grow new pota­toes in big pots.

Gen­eral Tips

• Don’t over fill the kettle
• Don’t waste food
• Bulk cook where you can
• Make your own lunches
• Re-use items where you can
• Turn the lights off when you leave a room
• Re-use pack­ag­ing
• Use energy efficient
• Only wash full loads this goes for the wash­ing machine, dish­washer and the tum­ble dyer

Next week I am cov­er­ing female prod­ucts and make-up   Sorry I haven’t been around so much uni has me all tied up.

Oh this is just so annoy­ing, so as I have said before, my hus­band and me are on the sav­ing goals till June 2010, I did this to our white­board:
Well today I paid in my Christ­mas money and the sav­ings is now £360 and my car fund is £330, that is great, really pleased.  I updated my gas and elec­tric read­ings and I now owe then £220!!! Seri­ously!! They owed me £360 and now we owe them money, I hate it, I keep try­ing so hard and I get this.

This pissed me off, as long as they don’t put up our direct debit then we should be fine as we always have loads of money own­ing after the sum­mer, the funny thing is that it was not the gas (which I thought would be huge!!) it was the elec­tric… Hmmm maybe hav­ing two fridges isn’t a good thing… will have to get rid of one..

Okay enough of my com­plain­ing, I am chilled But I did get to page rank three on google, it took me 3 months!! But I am so happy.

It snowed on New Years Day, the cats were going crazy!! Also I have start 365 again, will have to pay for my flickr account… this is my first pic­ture

Onion and Arthur watch­ing the snow

Any­ways I am off to Scot­land on Mon­day  to see my daddy and that side of the fam­ily so I will be away for a week but I am tak­ing the lap­top so I should be able to update

Updates I did man­age to get some sleep after my noisy annoy­ing neigh­bours shut up the other night, haven’t heard any maddness since Tues­day night, thank god for that!  I fin­ished my Net­works assign­ment and it half works which is amaz­ing for me when I am such a rub­bish pro­gram­mer   I com­pleted what I could with 600 lines of codes, biggest piece yet.

I have some pic­tures from last week­ends show, they are not amaz­ing but bet­ter than noth­ing, it is a real shame that I didn’t get any with just me, my dad and brother but oh hum, my brother will be back in two weeks from his first term at uni and I am hop­ing to go up to Scot­land to see my daddy and that side of my fam­ily after New Year that reminds me I so need to book my ticket!

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks for your sup­port, yeah I did e-mail my lec­turer and my sup­port offi­cer and even stu­dent sup­port but I only got an e-mail back from my lec­turer who told me to prac­tise java more and no model answer, pfft!!!

So I ordered two books on java for dum­mies so fin­gers crossed I’ll start from the very begin­ning again! I have been cre­at­ing a server and client ftp today for my net­works class so far I have my server half set up and it is cre­at­ing a new file but as I haven’t done the client bit it is a blank file but still it is being cre­ated!! I am so pleased!!! I am now try­ing to do my com­mands so when you type in trans­fer it starts the trans­fer and when you type in exit it closes the con­nec­tion

I’m only gonna do the basic of pass­word and file trans­fer, if I have time I will add more but I have 7 other assign­ments out at the moment so one thing at a time… what ever I can get cred­its wise would be lovely and I can make up the rest in the exam, not the best idea but I haven’t got time to spend too much time on one thing. This net­works assign­ment is due in about three weeks and I have a pro­gram analy­sis assign­ment due in on Thurs­day so I have to start that asap!!!

Other than that I brought a new lit­ter tray with is really high and as a cover to stop cat lit­ter being all over the bath­room floor at the moment it feels like my bath­room is a giant lit­ter tray.… Onion wasn’t impressed with the hover and when I picked him up to move him to the other room while I hov­ered the bath­room he got my wrists now they are sooo painful!

Back to try­ing to get these com­mands to work and make some meth­ods might make it eas­ier to read…