burtlikko

My cats are naughty and are constantly jumping up on the kitchen counter to scour it for food. This bothers me because I want a clean kitchen, and an animal that walks around in the litterbox is not welcome on the same kitchen counter where I prepare food.

I clean my kitchen well, so there is rarely anything there other than smells, but they will try and lick the drippings off of the stovetop or dig down into the garbage disposal (obviously, it's not running) to fish out bits of leftover food. Any plate left over from a meal put on the counter to await washing or in the sink becomes a target almost instantly.

They seem to do this the instant my back is turned on them, and scamper off to safety as soon as they see me walking towards them being naughty this way. I want those cats to stay off the countertops! It is a source of nearly daily irritation to me. Obviously I don't want to use a cruel training technique like swatting them, but what can I do to get them to not behave like this?

I've recently found it's easier and cheaper to cook food for my dogs -- I grind carrots, celery, and ground beef together in roughly equal proportions, cook it in the slow-cooker, and it's cheaper than canned food and my dogs seem to like it better. I feel better knowing that my animals are eating all healthy stuff.

Can I serve this same homemade animal food to my cats? I know cats need to have a diet rich in animal protiens, so for them I would increase the proportion of the ground beef. But are the carrots and celery going to give my cats an adverse reaction?

We've got one or two nights to spend in Ravenna while on a trip to Italy. I'd prefer the equivalent of a bed and breakfast place, or a small but elegant hotel. This side trip will be for my anniversary, getting away from the rest of the family for a day or two. I'd like a place that is within walking distance of the churches with the famous mosaics.

My friend is from Durban, South Africa and she lives here in the USA. She has asked my wife to host her bridal shower, and my wife has volunteered me to be the caterer and bartender.

I would like to come up with a few dishes that will remind my friend of her home. We live near Los Angeles so pretty much any kind of food is available if we look for it, but I don't know any recipes or very much about food from South Africa.

The guest list will be about a dozen women, ranging in age from their 20's to their 50's. About half of them are from the US (mainly California) and about half of them are her friends and family from South Africa (mainly around Durban and Cape Town).

I assume most of the guests will eat meat, although I will certainly want at least one vegetarian dish anyway. By way of booze, I'd like ideas for cocktails that incorporate Amarula to supplement the Stellensbosch wines I'll have available.

I take two kinds of OTC medications regularly (generic for Claritin and generic for Prilosec), both in the form of pills. One set of pills (the generic Claritin) comes loosely packed in a bottle. The other (the generic Prilosec) comes in blister packs with each pill individually sealed with a plastic and metal foil backing. I'm preparing for a two week trip abroad, and would save some space in my baggage and inconvenience in the airport security line if I remove the pills from a blister pack and dump them in with the other medications in a small bottle. If I do this, do I risk degrading the quality of the medication?

I already know that China's Grand Canal is the longest canal in the world.

What I'm looking for is a list of, say, the world's ten longest canals, measured from point of entry to point of departure, including both natural and man-made components.

If there is a web page dedicated to that piece of information, I haven't found it on my own yet.

TIA

I am preparing to teach a business law class at a career college. My experience teaching undergraduates is that they can't write worth a hill of beans - even if they're smart, their written skills are so poor they look like idiots. (Examples include sentences lacking verbs, inability to conjugate verbs, 400-word-long run-on sentences that last three pages.)

So I switched to all multiple-choice questions, from a test bank written by the author of the textbook. The problem there is that the students quibble with every question. "It's not answer 'B' it's got to be answer 'D'!" I wind up devoting an entire class to the students' angst. I've tried editing the questions to make them simpler but it seems that no matter how much I dumb the test down, there are still massive protests about objective tests.

So if anyone knows of some other way I can grade my students to measure their understanding of the material, aside from objective (multiple choice or true-false) tests, or term papers, I'd appreciate the suggestions. Please bear in mind that these are undergraduates, not graduate students, and that they're also working adults (most employed in the aerospace industry).

Specifically, I'm wondering about roadside cross monuments to commemorate slain police officers in Utah -- a court in Utah has held that the crosses are generic symbols of death and burial. In a place less dominated by Mormons, I would be very skeptical of a claim like that, but I have heard that crosses are not used by Mormons and this makes me want to learn more so I can put the judge's decision in that case in its appropriate context. Any help, from LDS members or others, is much appreciated.

What is the name for a 2,500th anniversary? Or, for that matter, the 5,000th of something?

What's so cool about Google's new browser that I should switch from Firefox?