he’s a very cuddly rescue that me and my boyfriend took in a few days ago. we can’t settle on a name though! we’ve floated bebop and nico as name ideas but neither seems to fit. not trying to go with anything too on-the-nose for a black cat. his name was yoko until we found out he was a boy!
Hi! Back with an update on my post from the other day about trying to trap a stray cat I was worried about. Turns out it’s a boy! Around 6 years old, only 5 pounds :( poor baby.
I was able to get in touch with a local rescue who lent me a trap (thank god lol, I got shot down by two different rescues yesterday and I was starting to lose hope). I trapped him successfully this afternoon and took him straight to the kitty ER! He doesn’t have any significant tooth problems like I thought, but I’m still gonna get him a jaw x-ray soon just to make sure everything is okay. He’s in normal-ish health, just really skinny because he probably doesn’t know how to find his own food.
He’s also chipped! The vet called his owner but the owner didn’t pick up. The vet has my contact info for if they call back, but no word yet. My suspicion is that this cat may have been abandoned, but I hope I’m wrong.
Anyway, he’s now taking a very peaceful little nap in a big ol dog crate that I borrowed from a friend. My boyfriend is taking him to get vaccinated & tested for diseases tomorrow, after which he’ll be free to roam around my bedroom until we can introduce him to our other cat.
I fed him tonight and heard him purr for the first time 🥺 so that was really special. Gave him lots of chin scratches. He seems to be adjusting really well, especially given how stressful today was for him. I’m so happy he’s okay.
Medford, Oregon, United States
Hi! I live in Medford, Oregon, U.S., and I’m trying to trap this sweet little stray kitty who seems sick. I’m pretty knowledgeable about cats, but I’ve never done anything like this before. It seems like this cat is really in need, but she really doesn’t want to be trapped.
She lives somewhere around my apartment complex and I’ve been feeding her for a week. She’s extremely thin, you can see her spine with the naked eye. She also seems to be in pain when she walks. I think she might have some kind of tooth issue; my neighbors leave out tons of kibble for the stray cats but she only seems interested in soft food. Even when she eats the wet food, she doesn’t chew like any other cat I’ve seen. She has a bald spot under her chin also.
She’s a little skittish but doesn’t seem especially scared of people. We’ve built up a little trust over the last week. She lets me pet her, occasionally slow blinks back at me, and she’ll come right up to my door when she gets hungry. She can climb the stairs to my apartment on her own, which I think is a good sign that I’m not too late to get her some veterinary help.
I attempted to trap her tonight with a carrier I had around. I tried putting the can of food in the carrier, which worked okay, but she didn’t climb in there entirely and started growling when I tried to push the can in further. I tried slowly moving the can closer to the kennel from the outside, but she growled at that also. Didn’t seem interested at all when I put some treats in there. I tried it a few times, but I think I stressed her out. Eventually I just called it quits and gave her the food because I didn’t want to piss her off and make her harder to catch in the future.
Anyway, ideas? Methods? I’m gonna go back with some catnip tomorrow night, but I think the problem might’ve been that the carrier was too small or something? If anyone more experienced with trapping cats has any resources or advice, I’d love to hear it. This poor girl is in bad shape and she needs help immediately.
Edit: took out a section that was way too long about how sketchy my local rescue community is sometimes. tl;dr I can’t give this cat up to a rescue and probably wouldn’t be able to anyway because they’re all full, but I did reach out about borrowing a trap.
——————————————————
Update: Two of the local rescues I called were, predictably, very unhelpful and unwilling to loan me a trap or schedule a time to come here themselves and trap the cat. Probably not their fault, they’re stretched very thin, but still kinda annoying. There’s one or two I haven’t heard back from, so hopefully one of them will loan me a trap.
Will update when there’s more news!
This is more of a vent than anything else but goddamn I’ve been having problems with my news director lately.
Dude gets upset when he has to change anything in my scripts, even though editing them is quite literally his job. I’m not talking factual errors or getting someone’s name wrong, I’m talking stuff like leaving a letter out of one word in a breaking news script I had thirty minutes to write and getting snapped at like I’m some kind of idiot in front of the whole newsroom. I would get it a little more if I made mistakes all the time, but I don’t. He frequently accuses me of spelling names wrong when I spelled them right or insists I’m wrong about something without even checking it himself (again, in front of all my coworkers). I always document this stuff when it happens, but it’s still frustrating.
He completely re-writes my scripts sometimes without even telling me what was wrong with them (and frequently misspells things that I have to go back and fix after his “editing”). I’ve literally watched him re-write my stories by copy-pasting press releases into the script.
Awful taste in stories too, we miss important local issues and hard news stories all the time in favor of whatever fluffy PR thing the police department is doing that week. I’ve gotten positive feedback from him exactly three times in the past year, even though other people I work with have said my reporting is great. I could go on for way longer about all the shit he does, but working with him is exhausting. I have no idea how he’s been in this business long enough to work his way up to a management position.
Anyway, I’m stuck here for a while because of my contract but man I don’t know how I’ll handle this guy for that long. I’m proud of a lot of the work I’ve done at this station, and I love my coworkers, but the way my news director speaks to me genuinely makes me want to walk out and not come back sometimes.
Edit: People are suggesting going to HR, which would be great advice if HR actually protected employees at my station, but it doesn’t. I go into this more in a comment below, but I have reason to believe I’d get fired in retaliation if I complained to HR about the ND’s behavior. Communicating with them will not benefit me in the slightest; I know for a fact I’m not the first person to complain about this guy and his behavior hasn’t changed.
Hi! I’ve been questioning whether I have autism in addition to my ADHD lately and I was wondering if anyone could share their story with me so I can have a better idea of what I’m dealing with. I’m not necessarily asking for an armchair diagnosis or anything, but if you see any similarities between my story and yours, I would love to hear about it.
Background on me: I genuinely had zero friends until high school and college; something about me has always been off-putting to people and I’ve never been able to understand what exactly it is. I often struggle with obvious social cues, although I’ve gotten a tad better at it in recent years after I realized it was an issue. It’s just always felt like there’s an invisible line between me and other people and I can never, ever cross it and be a part of things. When I got a little older, I started to make a few friends (most of whom have autism or ADHD themselves), but for the most part, my social problems persisted. I’ve always felt like I’m on the outside of workplace I’ve been in, every school, every social situation. Dating in high school and college was a nightmare. I currently have a boyfriend, who’s an absolute angel, but even he struggles to understand me sometimes.
People have told me that I “march to the beat of my own drum,” that I’m “quirky.” People have also frequently told me that they thought I was really mean until they talked to me a bit, and I’ve never understood why. I’ve had issues with alcohol addiction since I was a teenager because it was the only thing that helped me feel normal in social situations (thankfully I’m sober now).
Had parents who didn’t believe in autism or ADHD, so I was never evaluated for anything as a child even when several of my teachers literally begged them to get me assessed for ADHD. I finally got myself diagnosed with ADHD at 21 after nearly flunking out of college.
I’m settled in my career now as a reporter (my dream job! I’m so lucky) and I’ve really started to notice again that I just can’t connect with people the way others do. Once again, I’m watching my coworkers make friends with each other, start to hang out outside of work, and a few of those people haven’t worked there half as long as me. It’s just never something I can reach; people don’t want to get close to me. I’ve had trouble connecting on a personal level with sources, understanding unspoken social cues from management, etc. I’m doing pretty well at work, but my boss doesn’t respect me like my coworkers, and I’m 99% sure it’s because of that undefinable off-putting ~thing~ about me.
It doesn’t end with social stuff, although that’s the main thing. I’m very particular about my schedule, textures of clothing, food, and I get extremely burned out after socializing because I feel like I’m always pretending to be someone else. I have very intense interests too, most of which aren’t ~socially acceptable~ for a 25-year-old (I literally own 100+ fashion dolls).
Anyway, has anyone who got diagnosed as an adult felt similarly? I honestly don’t know what’s up with me, but at this point it feels a lot deeper than ADHD.
I moved in with a friend of mine in 2024. We’ve been friends for ten years and I never noticed any hygiene issues before these last two years. His old place was decently clean, he had some light BO sometimes, but nothing out of the ordinary.
After living in the same area as me for a while, he moved to another state for a year or so before moving back to live with me and another friend. We moved out as quickly as we could (about a year and a half later) because his hygiene issues made our apartment absolutely unlivable. He didn’t take care of his cat properly, his room reeked like rotten cat food and months-old litter, he generally smelled terrible (I ran out of the apartment to throw up once after he took his shoes off, it was that bad), and I never once saw the guy brush his teeth. The first post on my profile is some pictures I took of his room when I was at my absolute wit’s end and cleaned it for him so his cat wouldn’t be living in those conditions anymore. Warning: they are absolutely disgusting.
This was pretty shocking to me since, again, to my knowledge he had literally never had serious hygiene issues before moving in with us. I have to imagine he stopped taking care of himself during the year or so he lived in another state. I’m not sure why this happened, he did smoke a lot of Delta 8 over there so maybe that did something to his brain? Idk, maybe just depression. It was so severe that I was worried he was developing schizophrenia or something, my cousin’s hygiene was the first thing to go at the onset of his schizophrenia.
Me & my other roommate tried to intervene many, many times while we lived with him and it seemed like he genuinely didn’t understand what the issue was. Like, just blank face, not even offended when we told him that he stank, said he’d clean but never did. It was really confusing; there was no reaction from him at all and it didn’t seem like he was even sorry that he was making our space unlivable. Again, this was very out of character for him. He didn’t even really react when I threatened to call animal control on him because his actions toward his cat were genuinely neglectful. It was like talking to a brick wall.
After months of him not cleaning, we ended up cleaning his space regularly before moving out so we could have an apartment that didn’t make us nauseous on a daily basis. He did not clean his room when he moved into his new place and we had to do it for him. There was significant damage to the room that ended up getting taken off our security deposit.
Anyway, we moved out and I had some minor hope that things would change once we weren’t around to pick up after him, but his new roommate moved out after less than a month (I wonder why). When I saw him recently, his breath made me nauseous. I was putting all my willpower into not gagging in his face. It’s really upsetting because, despite everything I’ve written here, he’s a very close friend and I seriously think he’s mentally unwell to an extreme degree. I genuinely don’t know what to do or if I can even do anything. I don’t want to cut him off entirely, especially if there’s something I can do to help. He’s important to me, but I don’t know if I can continue being around him when he smells so bad and doesn’t even seem to understand that it’s a problem? I’m so confused about what’s going on in his head.
Anyway, any ideas on what the fuck could be going on? Has anyone else ever dealt with a situation this extreme? This is a severe change in his personality over the last two years and I’m really, really concerned for him. It seems more extreme than just some hygiene issues or depression to me, but I don’t know.
Heya! Early career journalist posting here to ask for advice and maybe just to rant a little.
I covered a story a few days ago about a local town putting restrictions on herbicides. I referred to them as pesticides once at the beginning of the article before specifying that the restrictions focused on herbicides in particular.
I woke up to local Facebook calling for my head because, according to our audience, herbicides are not pesticides. Except… they are? Every source I’m seeing says that herbicides are a type of pesticide. If anyone around here is more knowledgeable than me on herbicides, just let me know if I’m misunderstanding something, because I’m still very confused about the whole thing. People were very confident that it was a factual error, so maybe I’m wrong about this? I do think that saying “pesticides” at the start of the article was too vague and I’ll accept responsibility for that; I know I still have a lot to learn.
I got messages on Facebook saying that I should be fired, that I wasn’t qualified for my job, there were comments on the article calling me out by name, saying that I was an idiot, that I didn’t do even basic research, etc. It got very personal and confrontational. I’m a little insecure about my skills as a journalist since I’m still early in my career, so all of that stuff really stung.
I asked my editor about the potential error and got the go-ahead to replace the usage of “pesticides” with “herbicides” because it seemed like people were really spun up about it. I didn’t have to post an official correction, but it was pretty embarrassing to see people coming for me like that online.
Anyway, how do veteran journalists deal with stuff like this? I’m trying to let it slide off my back, but it’s pretty difficult. I know I could just not look at the comments, but I’d still like to know how my work is being received, so I don’t know if that’s the solution.
If anyone has advice on moving forward I’d really appreciate it. I know the solution is likely just to forget about it and be more specific with my wording in the future, but ever since then I’ve been so anxious posting stories and doubting my comprehension of basic facts to an extent that’s probably unhealthy.