Club Biscotti

I like to shop at the local warehouse club store for cat litter because it means a better price and the large size containers mean that I have to shop for it less often. So, what is available there is a big part of which brands I tried. The three brands are Fresh Step, Tidy Cat and Arm & Hammer. I didn't look closely at the price. They seemed to be with in a reasonable range of each other. The most important thing for me was to find a cat litter that performed well. The reason I went through three different brands is that Fresh Step , the first brand I tried, was causing problems. It was odd how long I had been using it before I realized it was an issue. Maybe the company changed something about the litter, I don't know, but, I started noticing a couple of issues with it. This brand is very dusty. My cat is a Siberian, which means long-haired and thick fur. What I started to notice was that there was kind of a film, a residue, on her fur. I would have to wash my hands ev...

Sometimes two people can be in the same situation and come out with two different stories and two completely different experiences. Most of the time it's subtle and the stories mostly match up. Other times they're so different the two of you might as well have been on different planets. What happened, or from my perspective what didn't happen, is an incident I was present for (or was I?) but only found out about second hand. As the story goes, I was riding on the T (Boston subway) and an old friend of mine, who I hadn't seen in about 15 years happened to be in the same car. He saw me but, I didn't see him. However, he thought I saw him. He thought that I looked right at him and then looked away. He thought I purposely ignored him. Now, since I didn't see him, I certainly did not ignore him. In fact, I had no idea it even happened until nearly a year later when I was at a party with some mutual friends. He had told them all the story of how I had coldly, blat...

It's been a crazy winter this year. Weekly snow storms, endless shoveling and collapsing roofs all over the news making everyone worry. As I understand it, the weight of the snow is not an issue for the typical pitched roof home. There is a potential problem on the roof however... ice dams. All those icicles hanging from the edge of the roof are pretty but they're also a bad sign. What they indicate is that ice is forming at the edges of your roof. This ice forms because the temperature at the edge of the roof is colder than the rest of the roof. This may mean that you need more insulation in your attic to keep heat from rising up and creating this temperature variance. Ideally your attic is close to the outside temperature. Although I've been hearing that this year the conditions have been extreme enough that even homes with very well insulated attics are not immune to this problem. So, what happens when you get a build up of ice along the edge of your roof? The snow o...