▲ 22 r/catsaliveandwell
My three cats posing at the window for me.
Meowmittens(Grey Tabby), Coco(Middle Orange) and Sam(Right Orange)
u/jharish — 5 days ago
u/jharish
r/danglers r/cats r/longcats r/CinnamonRollCats r/Bondedpairs r/CrimeCats r/Incense r/sploot r/Amaro r/catsaliveandwell r/DCCTV r/OneOrangeBraincell r/ikeacats r/kittyhasaquestion r/CatsOnCats r/AnxietyCats r/BigIsland
▲ 706 r/catsaliveandwell
Trying to increase the content here because I'm tired of mourning posts.
These boys are alive and well, adopted during COVID from a closing shelter. They came as a bonded pair. Sam on top and Coco on bottom, getting groomed while he sleeps.
u/jharish — 5 days ago
▲ 133 r/ikeacats
WTF?! I seem to be missing a part!
Worst part is I live in Hawaii where there isn't an IKEA I can return this to. I had it shipped over from Seattle.
u/jharish — 2 months ago
I was told he belongs in here
Looks like he might be missing something. Either that or he's dreaming he's in class.
u/jharish — 2 months ago
▲ 44 r/AnxietyCats
A day without using the computer is a good day. Thanks Coco Banks!
Coco likes to let me know when he thinks I'm too stressed to do any work.
u/jharish — 2 months ago
▲ 9 r/Incense
Request to the makers in this sub
Hello, for those who know me, I've been haunting the sub recently. But now I have a request.
I'm working with ARC of Kona, a non-profit that helps families care for their mentally disabled members.
This request is for a special girl named Ana. She loves working with her hands. She loves picking things up and smelling them. She loves process and procedure. She is 18 years old and when she turns 22, she ages out of the school system that has been supporting her development.
She is incapable of speaking but is deeply creative. She took some paper towels and some glue and created textured dresses for two dolls by mixing the towels and glue together and shaping the resulting pulpy mass into a fabric and then molding them into dresses on the dolls.
I've been speaking with her therapist and teacher and I get to care for her between her getting out of school and before her family gets home from work, so 2-4 hours a day during weekdays.
My idea is this - Makers! Please tell me if there is a problem with this or if any of this might be toxic. But I think she might be perfectly aligned with making agarbatti.
I've bounced the idea off her speech therapist and they got really excited about it.
So what I'm asking here is 3 things.
Is this going to be safe?
What ingredients do you think would work best for this kind of activity?
Where are you sourcing your agarbatti making materials? (I'm assuming we need bamboo sticks, charcoal, wood powders, resin/halmaddi/makko/binder of some sort and perfume.) I have a budget to buy things and I want to make sure I can get all the materials inside the budget.
I'm open to all responses, criticisms and other things as I want to vet this idea with people here and make sure I'm not just having a 'pie in the sky' moment thinking that agarbatti making might be something we can get Ana to do, and if she enjoys it, something we might even be able to sell.(providing the ingredients we get are good enough to enjoy the finished product.)
Lastly, if you're a maker who has back-burnered your project and have a bunch of incense making supplies gathering dust in the back of your closet, I can happily accept donations and even provide a tax-deductible receipt.
u/jharish — 3 months ago
▲ 25 r/Amaro
Hawaiian Amaro Update
Hello! Thanks for the feedback from my previous post about making something locally sourced.
I'm sharing a pic of what I ended up with after the following recipe:
2 Bags Oribe Hibiscus Mamaki Mint tea
60g Mamaki dried leaf
60g Lemongrass (dried)
20g Ginger (dried)
20g Toasted Oak
744g alcohol 190 proof
After 10 days maceration I strained and added to the biomass:
+1 Teabag
1000g boiling water
+500g water added to herbs after 3 days of water extraction(to water down final product)
I combined both alcohol and water extracts after filtering out the biomass and let it sit another week and filtered out particulates with a finer filter.
Results: The Lemongrass is the bitter, and I did not sweeten it as I looked up all the herbs and realized everything lends itself to lowering blood sugar so this becomes a great thing to take after some sweets.
This mixes well into rum for a cocktail 75% rum and 25% "Hawaiian Amaro"
I am still workshopping the name but for now I'm happy with the results and may start tweaking it with locally grown stevia leaf and other added botanicals to increase the flavor profile. The nice red color comes from the hibiscus in the tea bags. My next batch I'll probably ditch the tea bags(they come from a local company but I can source everything in it and maybe increase the hibiscus and mint profiles). The huge amount of lemongrass/mamaki I added seems to make for a really great medicinal end product as I have several people claim they didn't feel the effects of sweets on their blood sugar after taking it and one person with one of those blood sugar monitors showed me a 30 point reduction in blood sugar after taking a shot of my Hawaiian Amaro.
u/jharish — 3 months ago
▲ 2.1k r/cats
Meowmittens, the cat that taught me how to love cats.
I've always "liked" cats. But I grew up with allergies and so never really loved a cat. My parents were dog people and so I grew up with dogs. Well, fast forward 40 years and this little starving princess shows up at my door, skin and bones. I didn't have cat food handy so I took some roast beef and cut it into bits her tiny mouth could handle and brought it out to her.
She sniffed the food but then head-bonked my hand and wanted pets more than food, despite the fact she was literally skin and bones. At the time, I was renting a home in a part of Hawaii where there is a fish farm and the fish farmers shot cats on sight. I imagine that one of the gunshots I heard the previous day was her mother getting shot because she didn't know how to feed herself.
Regardless, I quickly adopted her, took her to the vet, got her fixed, got her shots, and seven years later, I have 4 cats(one is a adopted feral who is camera shy and refuses to come inside, the other two have been showing up in my posts in other subs. She taught me to love cats.
She got her name from my cutie-name I would use for any cat. "Hey meow mittens, want some pets? Want a butt scratch, meow mittens?" Well, I used it so much around her I realized she was responding to the name and it became her name, despite my plans to name her many other different things.
u/jharish — 3 months ago
▲ 429 r/CinnamonRollCats
TIL I have a CinnamonRollCat. Meet Coco Banks.
Coco is part of a r/Bondedpairs and my third cat. I called him 'the swirly one' when people asked how I tell him apart from his brother who has spots.
u/jharish — 3 months ago
▲ 1.3k r/Bondedpairs
Sam and Coco being together
These two were adopted at the beginning of COVID as kittens from a shelter. When I went to the shelter, I was planning on getting a cat to keep my single cat, Meowmittens, company but ended up with two when these guys jumped into my arms in unison while the rest of the cats were cowering in the back of their cages.
u/jharish — 3 months ago
▲ 176 r/longcats
Coco Banks is my longcat.
This is Coco Banks, my orange cat around the house. He prefers to hang out in his longcat stance.
u/jharish — 3 months ago
My two orange danglers.
This is Coco and Sam. Coco has the swirls and Sam has the spots.
u/jharish — 3 months ago
▲ 5 r/Incense
What does it mean to you when something calls itself 'all-natural'?
I've been struggling with this for a while now, because I think of it as a marketing term. But several incense creators are placing this on their labels when it's completely untrue.
Technically, the word 'nature' is suspect because it is one of those words that create a division. Like somehow humans and all the things humans do aren't natural? What about bitter almonds containing cyanide? All natural cyanide? Or the volcano I live on gives off all natural sulphur dioxide?
One of the recurring posts I've seen here over the years is the 'is incense harmful' and 'is natural incense less harmful' and those have always been problematic to me because I know people are doing harm reduction.
My current thought is that we should instead ask for things to be placed on a 'harm scale' where 1 is least harmful in moderation and 10 is most harmful even in moderation. Like sulphur dioxide and cyanide would be a 10 and most incense would be a 1 or 2 while living near an airport would be a 5. Drinking half a shot of whisky would be a 2 but drinking a whole bottle in one sitting would be a 9.
u/jharish — 4 months ago
▲ 25 r/BigIsland
I've not been enjoying the servco takeover of Big Island Toyota. I'm on my third truck and I'm starting to wonder if there is anyplace else that does better service than these guys? $400 for a oil change. $900 for a 'transmission check-up?'. The customer service is way worse than it used to be when it was just Big Island Toyota and not Servco Toyota.
So what I'm wondering is what are my alternatives? Are there good certified service places that won't charge you? Should I just use the local guy down the street and get used to the 'maintenance' light being on for the rest of the car's life? (He can rotate my tires and change my oil for $50, 90 if I use synthetic oil. But he can't reset the maintenance light)
u/jharish — 4 months ago
Sam is always looking for ways to increase his caloric intake, including crime.
u/jharish — 3 months ago