u/alsotpedes

My nearly nine-year-old cat is the younger of my two rescue cats by two years. The shelter I got him from eight years ago said that he was FL negative, but he tested positive for feline leukemia in April after losing about five pounds, down to 10 lbs. from 15+ lbs. — he's a sizeable cat — over three months. At that time he had an infected gum and a URI that cleared with antibiotics.

However, I've noticed over the past month and a half that he clearly is eating less. I have both him and my other cat on kidney diet food since his renal function was pretty bad in April, and he's gone from finishing off his wet food the first few weeks to ignoring the wet and slowly eating at the dry food a little bit a few times a day. The cats generally use separate litter boxes, and he clearly is defecating far less. I saw no urine and no feces in his box for three days earlier this week, then finally about half the usual amount of urine for the past few days and a little bit of poo once.

He's still moving around, still affectionate, and still clear-eyed. However, he's moving very slowly, and when I weighed him today, he is down to six pounds. He also looks scraggly in the way that all of my cats over the years have looked once they're at the end of their life. He had some congestion and sneezing yesterday morning, which was the tip-off for the April vet visit. Finally, his getting down to what is 40% of his healthy body weight is just hard to take; he is incredibly frail.

In the past, my late partner and I always held on until our cats were clearly suffering before having them euthanized. I don't want to do that this time, especially after having seen my partner through hospice three years ago. I will be out of town most of next week, and while my cat could bounce back for a bit, my vet told me that frequently cats from feline leukemia often will get sick and decline quickly. Having that happen when I'm not here would be devastating, not to mention hard on the pet sitter.

We have a local vet who does home euthanasia, and I've made an appointment for Sunday (tomorrow) evening with the idea that I will cancel if it doesn't seem appropriate. I guess this post is my talking myself into seeing it as appropriate.

I've run across mentions of Stereolab in r/ambientmusic for as long as I've been subbed there, and I probably tried to listen to Dots and Loops a few times without it clicking. Then, I ran across the performance of "French Disko" on The Word, which I listened to several times because I tend to get into bands based on what they do live, and discovered from there that they tick a combination of my boxes that rarely all get ticked at once:

– motorik drumming – on my first listen of some songs, I exclaimed, "Neu!"

– little loops of hooky melody layered with fuzzy, fuzzy droning

– pulsing bass

– vocals as sound. I generally like radical politics more than the next person, but let's face it—given her level of intelligibility, Laetitia might as well be singing in Kobaïan (though thankfully without Christian Vander's crypto-fascism).

They are definitely original, but at the same time it's also clear that they've absorbed things from not only Neu! but also Faust (they quote "Meadow Meal" in a song title), Can, and, maybe oddly, Wire. One video comment I read said that "They're great listeners to music," which I think makes a lot of sense.

All I've listened to so far is Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements and Refried Ectoplasm, and I prefer the latter (although I'll admit that I haven't tried "Animal or Vegetable?" yet). My favorite songs on it shift around among "Mountain," "Revox," and "John Cage Bubblegum." Given that, where should I go next to get more like this, and where do I go to get songs that are adjacent but different? Also, is there a live album or just bits and pieces of live stuff on YouTube? I get the feeling that their sound is too thick to come off well without some really intentional live recording—you can't really hear the synth on the recording from The Word until the very end.

I'll be retiring to Minneapolis within the year, and I've been looking at one-bedroom condos for a while now. Generally, the ones I like are south of Franklin and north of 38th between the lakes and the river. I really like the neighborhoods there, and I'm enough of a lefty that strong neighborhoods, co-ops, and generally funky places attract me.

However, I'm wondering if there are other places outside of this core that will have both the neighborhood vibe I'm looking for and good transit links while having places within my $105–135k price point: St. Louis Park, Richfield, Crystal, others? Suggestions are welcome.

ETA: Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I think I honestly oversold how much I "don't like" dogs. I guess I was comparing it to my partner's way of liking dogs, which was to let them lay on him while petting them, sleep in the bed with him, chew up pillows, dig up the yard, and fetch balls in the house (resulting in broken furniture and picture frames). I do like this dog—I talk to him like I talk to all of the animals and make sure to greet him when I come in and say goodbye when I leave. He and the cats are buddies, which is important. I just don't understand him and get easily frustrated when I can't seem to figure out what he needs or do the right thing to tell and show him what I want.

After communicating with the board and train trainer and seeing videos of their operation, I am going to go with them. What I see is that dogs are not crated and have play and socialization time. I also will have at least four hours of one-on-one with my dog, with two of those being halfway through the four-week boarding session and two one-hour sessions after he's back home.
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tl;dr – Ill-mannered and reactive dog needs to be less so. Does it work to have someone else board and train a dog for a month, then work with the owner for a few hours to teach them how to work with the now-trained dog? What about e-collars?

My dog is about 6 1/2 years old and was a rescue mixed breed (55% some variation of pit bull/Staffordshire bull terrier). He's about 60 lbs., tall and long, with a very pittie smile. My late partner and I got him primarily for my partner, as I don't really enjoy dogs.

I did training with our dog at the local big pet store but never really got beyond "sit" and some minimal leash manners. My partner refused to do any of the training with him (he always just let dogs do anything), and since I was working 50-60 hours a week, I just let it go.

My dog has good qualities. He loves the two cats. He's never had any housebreaking issues. He generally likes everyone except children, whom he barks at if they're outside. He's fairly low-energy. That may be just because I merely let him out into the fully fenced back yard instead of walking him (not only because I don't like doing it but also because my advancing osteoarthritis makes it increasingly hard). However, he seems happy to just sleep much of the time.

However, he has gotten more reactive over time. I tried to muzzle him today with a soft muzzle to go to the vet because he snapped at the vet a few visits ago during a particularly aggressive exam, and he worked himself into such a state yanking at the leash and trying to pry off the muzzle that I just gave up on the appointment rather than risk injury to my vet. I also am concerned about how much he may bark when I'm not here, which obviously won't work in an apartment.

Training is obviously the solution. There is a well-established business in my area that does boarding training for dogs, starting at four weeks for around $1000.00 a week. I follow a number of rescue groups, and this business has an excellent reputation and apparently has done very well with dogs who probably are much more challenging than this guy. Although I barely can afford this, the reality is that I don't want to and don't feel suited to train my dog (I get angry and yell); instead, I want a trained dog [ETA] that I can be trained to work with. Even if I were to rehome him eventually, I don't want to rehome a problem.

So, all that for the question: Does it work to have someone else board and train a dog for a month, then work with the owner for a few hours to teach them how to work with the now-trained dog? Have you done this or do you know someone who has? Also, have you worked with Educator Collars (E Collars), and what do you think of them?

I'm starting my Saturday by listening to Butthole Surfers, Locust Abortion Technician. If I had kids, I'm sure I'd embarrass them.

What harmless things do you like that horrify people of the generations after us?

I'll be retiring and getting Medicare Advantage right after I move to Minneapolis next May. Who has a decent plan with local in-network providers?

(BTW, this is not an invitation for people to DM me or try to get me to sign up for some BS. I get enough erroneous and deceitful "You must get a plan from us now or Medicare will make you pay $100s in penalties" spam as it is.)

Well, I didn't have "find a work colleague dead in their home" on my bingo card for this weekend, but here we are.

I'm stunned, of course, and worried about my late colleague's two cats, who had been without fresh food or water for what looks to have been nearly a week. I saw one cat under a bed but not the other, and I left food and water upstairs and down. I'll go over a couple of times a day to keep them fed and watered until I can coax them out (I hope both of them are still alive) and into carriers to go to the rescue.

My colleague had one living relative two states over and no friends close enough to come check any sooner than I did. Moreover, my checking essentially was a fluke. We both were feeding/watering another colleague's cat, and I realized that my late colleague must not have been there the past two days as scheduled when I showed up this afternoon to find both water bowls and both food bowls empty. Otherwise, given our work schedules, it could have been multiple weeks before anyone might have realized something was up.

So, for those of you who are single and have pets, what have you done to make sure that when you die, someone will care for your animals right away? I have in my will that someone will care for the animals, but I don't have anything covering an immediate response. Moreover, I'm going to be moving out of state when I retire, and I won't know anyone where I'm moving to for a while. If you're in a similar situation, how have you worked out those contingencies?

ETA: I didn't explain this very well, likely because I was still a little freaked out. The real question is what those of you with pets have planned to do so that if you die unexpectedly, someone knows to get into your residence and take care of your animals right away. Those who have daily contact with relatives likely are fine, but others, not so much. It almost makes me want to consider some kind of daily "wellness check-in," although the privacy issues around such a practice are nightmarish.

I'm not bored with the mechanics of playing at Tier 1 (OK, level 1 and 2 can be frustrating, but you don't play there for long). What is boring me now is that our game is in a setting with a lot of deep lore, some of which is common knowledge in-game, and many possibilities… and at level 4 we're doing what is basically a slightly elaborated sewer crawl.

Adding to this, I've never played with this DM before, and it's an expensive paid game. The good part is that he's clearly experienced, always prepared, and runs sessions smoothly. The bad part is that the game so far is pretty simplistic, and he's not really engaged beyond running it. He's not very responsive outside of sessions, and while he wants us to say what we liked at the end of each session, he never says that he liked anything. I've played with paid DMs before, but never with a paid DM in a campaign who seems to approach it as just a job he does well. (My expectations are different for one-shots.)

But, I know that Tier 1 almost by definition is a grind, and I'm wondering if I just need to trust that there's something beyond the grind once we go to Tier 2. It also has been a long time since I've played this level, so possibly I'm just impatient. However, I could buy a new pair of Merrell hiking shoes for what I'm paying a month for this game, and those shoes are starting to look more attractive.

Before someone reads that as sarcastic, it's not. I just had my third session with the tattoo guy whom I've decided is my tattoo guy, and I was thinking about the things he has said that, along with his work, made me have confidence in him.

• "I'm really grateful that [my last shop] took me as an apprentice. I learned a lot from them." (For context, he's in his mid-20s.)
• "Getting tattooed hurts. Anyone who tells you it doesn't is full of it."

People tend to talk about red flags, so here are some green ones. What are yours?

The last time I got a primary checking account was twelve years ago, when I opened an account at a local bank (actually, a credit union) just like I've done every new place I've lived since the 1970s. I also have a strictly-online savings account with Everbank, which I got when TIAA sold off its banking business or whatever it was they did, and a "checking" account with Capitol One that I sometimes deposit money in when I want to use that debit card while traveling.

I'm getting ready to retire and move in the next year, and I'm wondering if I really need to bother with getting a local bank account in the new city. The only times I write a check any more are to my plumber and my lawn guy who don't yet use cash apps, and I get cash from the ATM to pay my barber. For everything else, I use a credit card and pay the statement balance in-full online each month.

While I suppose that with a local bank I might avoid any fees associated with depositing checks electronically, I've deposited a check in my account maybe once in the last three years. Everything else is directly deposited, and that's what I'll do with my Social Security, my retirement account, and the pay from any part-time work I do. If someone pays me cash for something, then I will have cash in my pocket.

How has your relationship with "the bank" changed from the time you started managing your finances? How do you do things now?

I associate tai chi with old people in parks doing slow forms in unison. Now that I'm an old person and moving somewhere I likely can find instruction, I'm considering it.

However, I'm not only old and mostly sedentary, I'm also clumsy to the point of being dyspraxic. At least once a day, I catch my foot on a smooth floor and stumble, and I generally need to lean on something when standing in order not to lose my balance after about 30 seconds. So, while I may be able to learn and practice tai chi, I might need more instruction than normal.

Does anyone here do tai chi? Did you start it at an age when you had to start to have balance and movement issues, and how hard was it to learn (or to continue if you already knew it before)?

1. I got my first tattoo when I was 62. Actually, it was two tattoos. Then, a third. Now it's four years later, and I will have full sleeves on both arms by the end of this summer.
2. Today, at 66, I started to get the lawn mower out of the garage, stopped, looked at my yard, and thought, "I've always hated yard work." Two hours later, I shook hands with the guy about 45 years younger than me who is going to clean up the yard and then come once every two weeks to keep it tidy.

I'm buying a condo for retirement in another city and am working with a buyer's realtor there. As the title indicates, I know about a number of the possible pitfalls: roofs that are 10+ years old, other mechanicals needing work, current assessments for maintenance and repair. (I'm also not interested in renting or buying anything other than a condo apartment for lots of carefully thought-out reasons that aren't part of this post.)

What I'm not sure of is the best way to find out about such things and what sorts of things generally are possible to discover without walking around the building or the neighborhood and talking to people. I'm also not sure that I can rely on my realtor to find these things out because 1) I'm eight hours away, and 2) I'm not spending a ton of money. That realtor seems both nice and competent, but I would think there likely is more incentive to find things out if I'm buying a five-year-old $500k house than there is when I'm buying a $100k condo that was built in the 1920s/30s.

Are private condo HOA agreements, financials, and so on publicly accessible? Are they something I can find, or should I just politely insist on looking at them and let the realtor locate them? Maybe I'm just suspicious, but I want to look at these things before I even ask the realtor to take a video of a condo unit.

About 20 years ago, when there was "internet radio" on iTunes that was free, I discovered a station that played a lot of what I at the time called "space" music. (I didn't really know to identify it as "ambient," but I had listened to "Hearts of Space" on public radio infrequently.) This station, which I later found was Russian, played a number of tracks that were identified only with single Cyrillic (or Greek?) letters. This ring any bells for anyone?