Ali

My eight year old dog, Raven, has been having health problems lately. She isn't gaining any weight because every time that she eats, she runs off and throws it up. We'd like to find out what is wrong with her and possible treatments before we take her to the vet because the bills are extrememly expensive, and I'm about to head off to college, which is taking most of our money.

She's a rottweiler/labrador mix. She's always been an over eater, and still gets excited and begs for food when we have it, but as soon as she's finished eating, she throws it back up. This does not include treats or small things that we toss her (as far as I know). I just see her do it every day after she eats her daily meal.

Any hints about what might be wrong with her would be appreciated!

I'm not pregnant or planning to be for a long time, but the name Aubryn is one of my favorites, which is strange, because my favorite names are always very classic and elegant. However, I think that Aubryn is an absolutely beautiful name. The reason that I'm asking for the opinions of others is that I mentioned the name to my father and sister, and they think that it's extrememly ugly and trashy. I'd like to use it as a baby name one day, but who knows. My tastes might (and probably will) change, or maybe my husband won't like it.

Anyway, I'd just like to know what other people think of this name. (It's pronounced Ah-brin, if that isn't clear by the spelling.)

I'm not pregnant or anything, but I've always liked the name Chloe. I also like the spelling Chlowie, but does that just look dumb? I ask because I've been kicking the name around in my head for years, so the spelling seems normal to me, but is it strange to everyone else?

I'm currently co-writing a trilogy of novels, and while we have our characters perfect in our heads, we thought it would be fun to make a 'cast list' for the movie that might be made one day. It's just for fun, and especially since neither of us can draw, we'd love to see them all standing next to one another.

So is there some sort of actor database or something? Anywhere that we can look through pictures, or maybe narrow them down by basic features? We tried googling things like, 'brown hair, green eyes actor' but we just got a bunch of famous actors and we're looking for someone virtually unknown.

It's just for fun, since we're writing a book and not a movie, and we definitely aren't basing our characters of the actors/actresses. Does anyone know a good way to find these types of pictures?

My dog, Uno, is very special to me. We spent $1100 on vet bills after he caught parvo (one of our dogs died of it, and we had him vaccinated, yet he still got sick), but he came home alive, and I praise God for it! Ever since he's been a little...slow. Not physically--the dog catcher says he's never seen a faster dog, and he can't physically catch Uno, even after the time he shot him with a tranq! But he doesn't understand basic commands some times, and punishment does nothing to him, he just continues doing wrong. Despite being (and I fully believe this) mildy retarded, he's always been very sweet to me and my family.

As a young puppy, he would climb over our gate and sit on our doorstep. He literally climbed up the fence until he reached the top, then dropped to the other side. Now that he's bigger, he jumps right over the fence! He doesn't take a running leap, he just sits as close to it as he can, hunches down, and goes right over! At first he'd jump into the neighbors yard and then come lay on our porch, but now he runs around town. He leaves for days at a time and comes home randomly. We tried punishing him, but it honestly has had no effect. We can't keep an eye on him 24/7, so at first we would chain him up for a few hours as punishment, but he didn't care. He'd slip his collar and leave just the same. If you leave him alone in the yard he takes off. We tried chaining him up and putting him in a harness instead of a collar but he literally slipped out of it in under five minutes. He can run over 20 ft with the current chain he's on, and reach most areas of the backyard--just not the fences. Though he has been known to break a chain and escape with it around his neck--he even crossed a major highway with it last time, before getting caught on some man's tree! When I saw him missing from the backyard, with his chain, I must have cried all day.

Recently, he's been a bad influence on our other dog (his mother), Raven, who was extremely well-behaved for five years. She never did anything wrong after we'd corrected her on the behavior. One day she started leaving with him, and that's when we started having problems with the dog catcher.

The dog catcher lives in the house behind me, and he grew up in the same neighborhood as my father. They couldn't be called friends, though they played together as children, but this man was kind of a social outcast as a teenager. He's known our dogs for as long as we've had them. He had one altercation with Uno before--the tranq dart incident, in which he shot my dog in the butt, yet still couldn't catch him, so he came to our house (knowing it was our dog) to tell us about it and wait for Uno to come home so that he could get the dart out. The first time he caught Uno and Raven together (and the only way to do that, he told us, is to catch the slower Raven and wait for Uno to come over to try and help her) he let them sit in the pound for an entire week without telling us, even though he knew they were our dogs, AND my phone number was written clearly on both of their collars. It cost us over $200 to get them out. This happened another time as well, though he claimed to have come to our house before dropping them at the SPCA, which is completely untrue. He's written us several tickets for our dogs, even though there is NO leash law where we live--they get picked up in the city, same spot every time, where there is a leash law, so he uses that as a technicality. It's cost us hundreds of dollars, and my dogs have NEVER harmed anyone while they're out. They just like to run around and explore things. The police have even called the dog catcher's vendetta unfair, and everyone in this small town has a horror story about something that this man did to an animal. I think that part of the reason my dogs are so harshly punished is not only a personal, childhood vendetta against my father and the dog catcher, but also because they're a lab/rot and a lab/pit.

We now have to keep them both chained up. I spend at least half an hour with them outside--letting them run around in the morning--every day, and even more in the summer when I don't have to attend school. Then I let them run around in the yard until they get so tired of playing that they lay down and go to sleep. They have 20+ ft of yard to run in when on the chain and even more when not. They're properly fed and have fresh water. They are very loving dogs, and it isn't as if they don't listen to us--the only command they've ever disobeyed is to stay in the yard. I mean, we even let them off of the chain, leave the gate wide open, and stand in the front yard and they WILL NOT go out of the gate unless we urge them several times, and even then they're weary of the idea. They have plently of toys, and have each other for stimulation. We got Uno neutered in hopes that it would fix the proble

I see all of these 'Name my baby!' questions, and 'Is this a good name?' and I really want to know what names people absolutely hate, because I'm cringing most of the time when I read those things.

The boys name that I hate the most: Maddox.

It's just...ew. Yuck. It's stupid, and trendy, and sounds like an STD medication. People say that it sounds strong, and that's because it's the words Mad and Ox! Angry oxen are quite strong, but they are not something that you want to name your baby after!

There are a lot of names I don't like, but none that I feel quite as strongly about as Maddox. I don't like most trendy names either.

Chapter 2: I go to the bowling alley, and Vincent's friends are already there. Greg tells me to play a game with them, and my goal changes (it now says something like, 'Play a game. To do this, click and empty lane and select play. I try to do this, but I'm unable to even get into the bowling alley. An action appears in the corner, a picture of Greg with the caption, 'Be asked to join casual group.' This takes precedent over all other actions, but it never gets done. I can't bowl on the empty lane, nor can I even take a step! Did anyone else have this problem, or know how to fix it?

I've been trying to figure out this chemistry problem for a week now, and I'm just not getting it. Please help me! I don't just want an answer, but an explanation of how you found it too, please, so that I can learn. I've gotten this far:

1 mol of basketballs x 6.022x10^23/1 mol basketballs

Then you multiply it by the basketball dimensions, but I can't figure those out. It doesn't matter what kind of basketball, either. Can someone please help me? My brain is hurting...

I had to reinstall Windows XP onto my computer, but first copied most of my files onto another hardrive via another computer. But when trying to copy everything from my desktop and favorites, it came up with the access denied message. This is because it's an administrative account not set up on the second computer, and therefore it wouldn't allow me access. I have everything reinstalled and all on the right computer, but still can't access it. Does anyone know how?