Lola

So, last year in July I sprained my left ankle pretty severely on a hike (I fell off a cliff! Oops!) What I found out after the fact is that my ankles are extremely mobile, ie: I can bend them a lot farther than I should be able to.

However, I still have a lot of numbness around the bone on the outside, and a lot of tenderness on the inside of my ankle, and often, when I try to take a step, it feels as if the bottom of my foot is about to rip out. Most every step is painful, which puts a damper on things like...walking.

I'm just a bit worried about this, because the sprain and swelling should have subsided MONTHS ago, according to my doctor it was only supposed to take a couple weeks for the pain to go away and the swelling may have taken a bit longer. Every once in awhile, my ankle gets pretty swollen. Not nearly as bad as when I first injured it but enough so that it's noticeable. The ripping sensation and the swelling don't always happen at the same time

I have it braced and wrapped (again...it's been almost 9 months of this crap) I've been keeping it elevated, and the ankle pain I was experiencing a couple days ago has gone away but the ripping sensation remains. Any thoughts? I'm not sure my doctor believes me anymore.

We have a 1 1/2 year old cat who has developed an affinity for eating plastic bags and other plastic based things, or rather eating anything, food or not. The wrappers from the outside of maxipads? LOVES them. She eats them like candy. I was scooping out her box today and dug out a nice pink cat **** shaped wad of maxipad wrapper. Then unearthed a yellow wad. Apparently this has been happening a lot. At this point, I'm just thankful they both passed and I found them.

We trained her how to play fetch with hair ties, and I've also suspected that she eats those too, but I've never confirmed it. I do dig quite a bit of them out from under the furniture, washing machine and fridge, but since I've never kept count of how many she has stolen from the bathroom (or the arm of the couch when I take my hair down and am distracted.) She does have a pretty enlarged stomach but I figured she had just been getting fat from binge eating. Sometimes, she eats her cat food until she gets sick.

She loves to eat paper, chew on cords, it's impossible to get her out of the tub after you take a shower because she's trying to eat whatever hair has collected on the drain stopper before you can clean it.

I'm at my wits end! I don't know what to do with her! I bought a trash can with a lid for the bathroom to keep her out, we've stowed our plastic bags somewhere else, and she's not allowed in the bathroom unless she's supervised. But whenever I get her to stop eating one thing, she starts eating something else. Any ideas? Seems a bit like Pica to me, but then what? What do I do to deter her?

My 4 year old cat has been trying (apparently unsuccessfully) to use her litter box for approximately the last 20 minutes. I have tried to see what she's trying to do during this ordeal and she looks like she's trying to defecate and can't quite do it. At first I thought she was just having a hard time because her box was dirty but I shooed her out and cleaned it and found nothing fresh so she hasn't done anything yet. She goes in and scratches, comes out and plays with our other cat for a couple minutes and dashes back into the box. I'm not sure what to do! We did recently force her out of a life of freedom as an outdoor cat to a confined inside cat, so maybe a change in diet could be to blame? I'm really not sure, she's never experienced anything like this before. Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm worried about my girl! <3

There are some individuals from my extended family, more in particular my grandfather's brother who was killed in a car accident when he was a child. But they lived in a completely different state and I'd really like to do some research without paying for it. Ancestry.com can only get me so far!

Background story, I'm a ghost hunter. A child named Martin started communicating with me, told me that I should actually know him. Asked my mom, met with a shocked look, told me to call my grandmother and ask about Martin. I never knew, I always was under the impression that my grandfather was an only child, however this quite obviously isn't the case.

So call me crazy if you must, but I am desperate to get more information on this "kid" that was speaking to me. I don't want any hard copies of anything, I just want to know dates, how old he actually was when he died and such. Curiosity killed the cat and all that jazz.

Thanks for any and all help! :)

Lola

Hi all!

I need a stereo adapter for my car, one that will plug into the headphone jack on my phone and into the cigarette lighter in my car.

Anyone have any good ones they'd like to share? Thanks in advance, have a great Wednesday!

Hello all!

Took a pretty nasty dive off a cliff (small cliff, no worries) and severely sprained my ankle. Nothing that some ice and some heat and a little bit of keeping it elevated won't fix. If anyone has any cure all ankle sprain remedies, I'm open to those as well.

We have standing plans to go hiking again next weekend, different trail with less cliffs for me to throw myself off of unintentionally, any fellow hikers know of some affordable ankle braces that I could pick up before then to keep that bad boy stabilized while we're hiking? Or even while I'm just walking around the office during the day?

Thanks for any and all help! Happy Tuesday, all! :)

One of my very dear friends had a liver transplant almost 10 years ago and while out shopping, we yesterday, we ran into a mutual friend who notified us this morning that he has developed shingles. My question is, can my friend who has a compromised immune system from transplant be severely affected by this shingles our other friend has developed? Neither of us came into physical contact with him at all, we were in his house for a bit but didn't touch anything or eat anything. I am a seriously phobic of illness, so I want to be sure that my friend isn't going to get sick from this minimal contact.

Thank you all, happy Friday!

Picking out baby names is fun! (sadly I'm not pregnant, but I love to be extra prepared for when it does happen.) Meanings me a lot to me, so I've picked based on what the name means.

It's spelled "Ailyna"

A bit of explanation if you so desire to read it: I intend for this to be a middle name. I had specific desires for the middle name and this fulfills all of them! It means "light" (because my grandfather called me his "sunshine", as a tribute I wanted to incorporate it in some way). It's Slavic, or Irish I've found both, in origin (my other grandfather/grandmother's heritage respectively) it is a derivative of the name Helen. (my sister's name) and is the feminine form of Allen (hubs' middle name) and it starts with an A, so it will keep with my want to have my daughter share her father's initials. If only I knew how to pronounce it! It's perfect! Would love some help, if any of you know how to say it, send it my way!

Thanks all, and Happy Friday!!

I found an article today that said something about "200,000-300,000 homes in the united states." My question is...how am I supposed to feel about that number since I don't know the amount of homes in the united states? If there were only 400,000 homes, that's pretty impressive! (Even though that's not even possible and FAR too low than it could ever really be in reality.) If it's well over several million, yeeaaahhhh, now we're getting a little less impressive. If you can find an "exact" amount (I'm not expecting perfection, here, people. We're all human) that would be amazing! If you can find a ballpark figure, that's awesome too! If you can't find anything, I can't either so don't feel bad! If you can't find it but you know where to look, I'd appreciate that a lot too.

Thanks for your time, happy Thursday, all!

I have an 8 month old kitten who just doesn't seem to get the picture. She is currently dripping water because of her antics. She is not allowed on the counter, and she mostly gets that (cat feet go in the cat box and therefore should not be anywhere around my food.) So that sort of explains the issue with the tables too. Her favorite place to play, much to my boyfriend's dismay, is on top of his flatscreen tv. She climbs on it, walks back and forth across the top and the bigger she gets, the bigger of a panic attack he has whenever he sees her do it and the more the tv teeters back and forth when she's on it. We're both terrified she's going to knock it over while we're at work and hurt herself or our other cat.

She did live with another family briefly before she came to us, and they used the spray bottle along with the "psst!" sound and she responded really well and I'm not sure exactly happened when she came to live with us, but it was almost like a complete backslide into total disobedience. I know she's a cat and they don't "obey" by nature, but still. A little is normal. I've heard that making a lot of noise works to deter them, but I've tried that, and she just gives me funny looks and isn't bothered in the least. Since I got home not even an hour ago, she has been sprayed at least 15 times for climbing on top of the tv. I've literally spent almost 20 minutes typing this because I keep having to go chase her off the television.

I have made VERY sure that we are consistent in her discipline and that she has cat toys (and toys that she has decided are cat toys) to keep her busy and we also have another cat that she loves to chase up and down the house, even though she is generally just met with hisses and not generally very much playtime.

I love my kitten, and I want her to behave and I'm 100% willing to put in the work for the reward, but they just don't have kitten obedience classes and I'm at my wits end.

We have a roughly 14 week old kitten who just loves to get into trouble. Her latest venture includes shredding all of the toilet paper that is on the roll and as much of the paper towels as she possibly can. We have been working really hard on disciplining her against being on the counters and I'm started keeping the paper towels under the sink which has more or less solved that problem (until one of the roommates leaves them out on the counter.) Unfortunately, I have no convenient place to hide my toilet paper. No shelf to put it on, cabinet to hide it in, nada. This creates a pretty big issue, as you can imagine. I've tried tucking the end into the roll because I noticed that the heat vent made the paper move when it came on, possibly making her want to play with it. Didn't work, woke up the next morning to a bathroom full of Quilted Northern confetti. The main issue is she only does this at night when we're sleeping. I read that it could be boredom, I highly doubt that is what it is. She has tons of toys and we have an older cat (who has never done these things, hence why I'm at such a loss.) that she likes to terrorize. I can't teach her that it's wrong if I can't catch her in the act, and I'm not sure how to go about catching her in the act short of staying up all night and camping out in the bathroom with the squirt bottle.

Thanks for any and all help, guys :)

A friend of mine (Lia) moved into a dorm for school a couple weeks ago and told me last night that her room is haunted by a dark shadow. He talks to her roommate and moves things from one side of the room to the other, and from what they've heard from talking to the girls in adjoining rooms, he comes and goes between two of the rooms, always making his presence known and his shadow seen. She said he makes her extremely nervous. I didn't think too much of it, but what caught my attention was when she told me it had said to them "Do not burn sage." Seemed an odd request of your generic, run-of-the-mill dorm ghost. I told her to burn the sage anyway, to ignore the spirit and whatever it does and DO NOT talk to it anymore. She and her roommate were discussing the burning of sage last night, and he appeared in their room and began growling at them. I'm very afraid that this may be a demon.

Problem is, she reminded me that since they live in a dorm, burning things is frowned upon and the plethora of smoke detectors makes that just short of impossible. So I'm turning to you guys for the solution for my dear friend. How can she rid her dorm room of this negative spirit without burning anything? I'm afraid that since they haven't put up much of a fight against him so far, just ordering him to leave won't work. (Has always worked with those sketchy shadows that come into my house!)

Thank you for any and all help.

My boyfriend's brother has an outdoor cat that I witnessed today eating a chipmunk (yuck) but it got me thinking about her rabies shot. I called their mom (her previous owner) and asked about when she had last had a rabies shot. About 2 1/2 years ago, but she is unsure if it was the 3 year shot or the 1 year. I wasn't aware there was a difference. Apparently they gave it to he when she was fixed, so I guess she's about 3 now. How do I go about getting her one, besides the obvious task of calling the vet/making an appointment and such. Can they test whether or not she's had the 3 year or the 1 year? And how much do they cost on average? Just want to be prepared. Thanks in advance :)

A close friend of mine is looking into buying a mobile home, however she and her fiance don't have any credit. They have no money saved so a loan is needed, and they have no one that is willing to co-sign with them on it so that has set them back as well. How could she go about getting a loan with no co-signer and no credit history. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you :)

If you went to the doctors office today and they told you that you had a rare disease that would kill you, slowly and painfully, and in 6 months you would be either skin and bones in constant pain or dead. Would you, if you had the option, choose to end your life by assisted suicide?

(survey for class...thanks for your answers!)

Is it dangerous to take two b/c pills in one day on the first day of your new pack? I skipped the first day inadvertently so I took two on what would technically have been the second day of the new pack. For some reason, I thought this was a good idea but now I'm a little worried...

Thanks for your time

My boyfriend brought me a deli turkey sandwich from his work today while I was working. He made it around 8 and showed up at my work around 10 with it and, at 11:30 I started eating it, not even thinking. I'm feeling fine, it seems fine, the sandwich was still cold but for the hour and a half I had it, it had no refrigeration and I feel like it was in his car in 25 degree weather for the couple hours before I got it. Is that a food safety issue of is it still safe to eat? Thanks guys, have another half that I'd like to eat...

My boyfriend and his younger brother are buying a house and they and the girlfriends have decided we would all like a dog to join us! So far, talking to the three other people involved in this venture, we can not seem to agree on what kind of dog to get. We're planning on getting a shelter dog, but we need a list of breeds that would fit well into our lives. Someone will almost always be around, and my mother-in-law lives right around the corner so someone would always be around during the day and night. My boyfriend wants a dog with a relatively short coat, he's not allergic, just doesn't like all kinds of dog hair all over everything. His brother wants a small dog but the other three of us don't want anything smaller than a spaniel. The girlfriends want a dog that's protective, but not overly so. On occasion, one of us is home alone and the neighborhood isn't the best. I want a dog thats bark is worse than its bite. Another reason for that is, their oldest brother and is girlfriend will be having a baby in a month, and they will be visiting with the baby frequently,so a dog breed known to be good with children is a must. The final thing about our life is that we're all quite active people, hiking on our days off as much as possible, and we've all agreed that we want a dog that can keep up.

If you have an idea about what breed of dog would work best for our little family, please let us know. Thank you so much in advance.

Hey guys, do you know if there is any way to shut off the random animals walking onto your lot in Sims 3 Pets? Those damn horses are freezing up my game and I'd love for it to stop freezing on me.

Thanks guys :)

The one where the baby is stolen from the car? Thanks! Trying to find it on Hulu and can't because I don't know what it's called!