Yeah, the low cost spay/neuter clinics around me are booked solid and have been for years. I had to book mine 2 or 3 months out, and it wasn’t even a true “low cost” clinic.

Looking at pricing at regular vet clinics, spay can be $500-700, and there’s extra fees if she happens to be in heat or pregnant when your appointment finally rolls around, and it’s not clear from my brief search whether those prices include anesthesia, pre-op blood work, etc. The low cost clinics range from free to $120 for spay.

Awesome! Indoors will help a lot to keep them warm and safe from predators and disease. In my region, most rescues say they have a minimum 2 week lead time to accept any new animals, so if you’re able to get in touch now and let them know you’re willing to foster them until they’re ready for spay/neuter, that often helps a lot to secure a spot in their program, and they might even provide you some supplies.

Sounds to me that you might be a great addition to the local foster team, and then you could take in new kittens once the current ones are ready for homes!

I have a little family of 3 kittens right now also! :) Mine are fosters and probably about 2.5 weeks old.

Have you helped raise kittens before? Since they have their moms, it will hopefully be pretty easy and pure joy for you, but things can still go wrong, and it can happen super quickly, so it’s great to have some emergency supplies on hand. Do you already have spay/neuter arranged for all of them? Happy to help any way I can!

Ugh, I indirectly feel your pain. I don’t have the issue with cold, but just didn’t enjoy the touch controls on any earbuds I’ve tried, so I’m stuck using my older, slowly falling apart earbuds with inline controls. The earbuds have a wire connecting the two buds, and there’s a little lump of plastic along the wire with 3 buttons, but there’s no wire connecting them to the device. Short press turns volume up, down, pause/play. It also has functions mapped to long press and double press for things like next/previous, assistant, and I forget what else.

It’s super hard to find any headphones lately that are Bluetooth, but still have a wire connecting the two ear pieces, and therefore a spot for the inline controls. I have no clue about the quality of these, just linking as an example of the style that has worked well for me: https://www.amazon.com/Scosche-Rechargeable-Bluetooth-Microphone-Isolating/dp/B01KU7EYZO

I really like Thunder, but for some reason it doesn’t display vote counts when I’m using this account. If I switch to my .world account, the vote counts show up, and I can’t figure out why it’s different. I’m using Voyager at the moment, but not satisfied. My preferred Reddit app was Slide, and I thought someone was making a Lemmy version, but I’m not sure what happened.

Maybe this is the intended link?

https://gizmodo.com/new-birth-control-shot-transforms-into-a-long-lasting-implant-no-clinic-required-2000580306

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4B_movement

Would this have the unfortunate side effect of also eliminating the color pink? What about purple and orange?

Pretty much. I was going to buy some shit from a non-Amazon online vendor, then got a captcha on checkout and just left. Saved me some money I guess.

Another commenter shared a link with a guide to create a custom feed, and I definitely see how that can be better. As a new user, I was having too much trouble finding an easy way to create my own custom feed, and wasn’t happy with any of the existing feeds that I looked at… they all seemed to include more “junk” than the equivalent hashtags on Mastodon. I agree that simply following hashtags has downsides, but the logic as to why a specific post shows up in my feed is much more obvious in that case, allowing me to more easily troubleshoot and adjust my follow/block settings.

Thanks! I was looking for a way to build my own feed, but this is the first guide I’ve seen that seems relatively simple to follow. I agree that there’s downsides to simply following hashtags, but I’m familiar with ways to curate my feed based on hashtags, and just wanted to start with something familiar. The curated feeds are probably great for a lot of people, but just really frustrated me, as the feeds I happened to browse seemed to somehow include more “junk” than what I’ve encountered with the equivalent hashtags on Mastodon.

Yeah, I saw those and appreciate the idea, but I didn’t like them, at least not yet. I just want to follow a few cat related tags, maybe some FOSS stuff, and some tags relevant to my local area. I just clicked through a few feeds related to each of those, but didn’t like any of the ones that came up. Each feed contains posts that seem totally irrelevant and I don’t understand why they’re included or how to tweak my feed to remove them.

I’m probably an idiot, but my experience was exactly the opposite. I don’t really feel like following specific users (at least for now), I just want to follow hashtags. Super easy to do on Mastodon, but I couldn’t figure it out on Bluesky.

I never used Twitter, and am not particularly excited about the general format, so I’m probably not the target user, but I check Mastodon occasionally, and gave up on Bluesky after like 2 days.

I actually found myself tempted to say exactly that earlier today. Someone said something about sucking, and my initial instinct was, “That’s what she said!”, but then I thought about the audience and felt like the gender neutral “they” might be more appropriate, but I wasn’t really sure, so instead I said nothing.

As an American living in a region with halfway decent (by American standards) public transit, I feel like I hear more comments aligned with the European side than the American side. If public transit has literally any downsides, that’s justification enough to drive for so many people.

It’s funny how much people differ. I live in a city and feel much more comfortable having my curtains wide open than when I lived in suburbia.

One of the things that sold me on my current place was the abundant south and west facing windows, meaning lots of natural light (northern hemisphere), especially in the evenings. It drives me absolutely nuts when I visit people who live in dark caves. I did finally get some heavier curtains for my bedroom since summer days can be pretty long and the limited darkness was impacting my sleep. I get wanting to avoid direct sunlight, and that you might want heavy curtains available some times, but I literally get depressed without lots of natural light and the whole day/night cycle.

Some classes translate to an online format much easier than others. How do you effectively translate an upper level chemistry lab to be done online? Even if you could do it in such a way that the student gains the theoretical knowledge, it wouldn’t give them the hands on practice that they’ll need for real lab work.

There’s definitely a lot of variables in that decision, so it’s not a “one size fits all” recommendation. A timed release feeder can be helpful if your cat is constantly pestering you for food, but having your cat associate you with food can also be beneficial to your relationship and can be a tool to address some behavioral challenges. If your cat is only pestering you near meal times, adjusting your routines might also work. For example, if your cats are harassing you to wake up in the morning to feed them, then adjusting your routine so that feeding them is no longer the first thing you do will likely help to reduce or eliminate the unwanted behavior since they won’t associate you getting up with them getting food.

Another potential issue is that wet food doesn’t really work with most timed release feeders, and I don’t think there’s any microchip-based timed feeders that are compatible with wet food. Wet food is much better for cats than kibble, so even if you use a timed feeder for kibble, they should also still get wet food regularly too.

Your best bet is to find activities that you enjoy that you can do on a regular basis in an environment where you’ll be around other people who also participate regularly. Sign up for a class, join a sports team, volunteer somewhere, find a local meetup group, or even just become a regular at a bar.

Making new friends definitely gets harder as we get older because people are busy and just don’t have the same opportunities to casually yet regularly interact with strangers any more. As kids, most people repeatedly engaged with the same group of people on a daily or weekly basis due to school, sports, etc., and the familiarity that came with that made it relatively effortless to develop some friendships.

Even when I totally hit it off with people I’ve just met and we exchange contact details, I’ve rarely ever intentionally hung out with them again. The new friendships that I’ve formed as an adult were either with a friend of a friend or with people I happened to cross paths with many times before we ever intentionally made plans together. It’s those repeated, low stakes interactions that have been most successful at forming new friendships.