ELSEWHERE

I have an old computer backup subscription that's storing stuff from a computer that bricked in 2018, and I've been meaning to get all the files off it so I can cancel that, for years. And, well, it's time for it to renew, and I can't really afford to renew it, so.

They do have the option to pay for them to send me a hard drive with all the files on it, and I have considered that but it's outrageously priced ($100!) and you have to send the drive back or they charge you another $130, which is just, again, outrageous. To top it off, their website is So Bad and it is such a pain to get files off it, which is why it's taken me this long to do it. But I need to get it done now before they delete all my files for non-payment.

Ideally I'd just set it up to download them all to an external drive, but I can't find my external drive even though I just did something with it a few months ago. I was sure I put it in the computer room but I can't find it in there. So I'm downloading files a folder at a time, then uploading them to dropbox, deleting them from the computer, then rinse and repeat. I have so far managed to do one (1) folder this way because, again, the website is very bad and keeps error-ing at me. It's almost like they want me to keep paying for their shitty service so they're trying to keep me from taking my files and putting them somewhere else.

Wonderful, seems their website has stopped working entirely now. Still didn't get any more than that one (1) folder downloaded.

At this rate I'm going to have to either write all those files off as a loss or shell out the $100 to get the drive shipped to me.

I'm gonna go take a walk for now and see if anything is working better by the time I get back

There's a little Japanese food place up the road and I've been meaning to go there since we moved in. I'd really like to do more, in general, of walking to local food places and getting lunch, but it can be really hard to justify spending money on that, especially lately with how prices are. But today I finally did, got some shrimp tempura with steamed vegetables and rice. It's a nice little place, looks very comfortable, and the food is pretty good. Unfortunately, it smells like steamed broccoli. I will probably go back to try some of the other dishes, but unless today was an outlier I wouldn't want to eat in, even if we weren't still in the middle of a pandemic. It was empty inside (though the drive-thru seemed popular), so I might not be alone in that.

And if you're curious, no, the site still isn't working

I've gotten a few things downloaded, but it definitely seems like it's failing on files any bigger than 500 MB or so, which is. Problematic.

Much cat issues. Last night Cael scratched Oz in the face -- he was almost definitely just playing and took it too far, but it is nonetheless extremely upsetting. Also, Oz is fine, mostly. Another step back in them getting along, of course, but doesn't appear to be in pain about it or anything.

I've bought a feliway, which is a, like, glade plug-in air freshener except instead of smells it dispenses one of several pheromone options, of which the version I got is supposed to encourage cats to get along -- it's a pheromone that mother cats put out while nursing to stop fighting between kittens in those cramped conditions. Science is still out on whether or not it actually works, but a lot of people have good results from it, so maybe? Hopefully? This can help?

I'm a little weirded out by the concept, honestly, of fucking with my animals' brains to make them behave more like I want them to behave. That seems a little fucked. On the other hand, it's kind of like a person with anxiety taking medication to make their brain be different and less anxious. On the other, other hand, cats can't consent to taking medication like that. Like, I also have negative feelings about people getting their pets high with weed, because animals can't comprehend what's happening to them and can't consent to the experience

Not that this is super comparable to people getting their pets high. And maybe it'll help, and if it helps the animals be less stressed, then that's worth it, I think

Loki also has been coming into my room lately to harass Oz, which is also frustrating. I'm not sure why he's decided he doesn't like Oz, now, except just a general being displeased by recent household changes. He's gotten ok-ish with Cael, I think, after he got fixed, but now he's turned that aggression onto Oz instead.

Meanwhile, Cael is almost definitely eating the other cats' food, enough that he's not eating enough of his own food, and I don't want him to get himself sick or stunt his growth by eating non-kitten food. Plus his poops are extremely smelly and frequent on the other food. But I'm not sure how we can stop him without causing problems with the other cats, because obviously they need to be able to access their own food

I've successfully trained him away from Oz's food by--

Christ, I just found both Loki and Cael trapping Oz in the litterbox

--for Oz's food I scold him if he tries to eat it, spray him with water if he ignores me, and (at first consistently, now infrequently) give him a treat if he leaves it alone. But I can't do that with Ivy's or the other cats' food because I'm not where it is. And even if someone nearby was reinforcing that, there's a solid chance he'd just take away the lesson that he can't eat their food when someone is nearby, and that when no-one's around it's a free-for-all.

What I am doing is going to start locking him in with his food for a while at meal-times, and hopefully that encourages him to eat more of his own food and be less interested in seeking out other foods to eat. I do not think this will solve the problem entirely, though, and I am not sure what else can be done about it. In six or so months, he won't be on kitten food anymore and it won't matter so much if he eats the other cats' food, except for the stealing aspect of it, but in the meantime I would like him to not.

Okay, well. I'm out of options. Every file larger than a few hundred MB is going to be lost, and every other file I'm going to have to copy by hand

I guess an alternative would be to renew the subscription, then get a computer their program would be willing to restore files on to (so, one with enough room on specifically the C drive, because it refuses to put them anywhere else, please refer to previous rants about programs refusing to let you choose which drive you want to install things on to). Then restore the files on to that computer. I think probably there's nothing in here that I'm heartbroken enough to lose that I'm willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for it -- anything that I need or want that much I'd have already gotten downloaded by now.

Anyway, it's midnight, now, so I'll get started getting everything I can, downloaded tomorrow.

Okay, here's the plan. I need an external drive anyway, so I'm going to get one because they're on sale right now. That will hopefully arrive before my renewal grace period is up, and then I try using that to download all the files. In the meantime, I go through everything by hand and grab anything I super particularly want

Rough couple of days for the cats, including Loki attacking Oz and getting part of his claw stuck in her face just below her eye. She was very freaked out immediately afterward, but by the time I'd come back from running off to get some cheese to calm her down with, she was already calmed down. Gave her some cheese anyway, got the claw out of her face

(When I say 'part of his claw' I mean that what a cat would normally shed off of a claw, had shed off in the attack and become stuck. So like, a whole, but hollow, claw)

And looked her over. She seems fine, not squinting, no blood, she's not hiding herself away or anything. Still, that's not an acceptable situation, so we put some thought and effort in to how to prevent that happening again, which is on top of some other thoughts we'd made about the general observation that Loki was seeming dissatisfied with things (see earlier post about Loki harassing Oz, now). We've come up with some theories for why he's acting out -- Cael has been eating the other cats' food and using their litterboxes, and has been spending a fair amount of time in ash's and Erik's bedroom, and we think Loki is feeling pushed out of his spaces and so feels like he needs to claim different space for himself. ash offered to switch his cats' food to the same brand Cael is supposed to be eating, so hopefully he goes back to pooping less often and less heinously, and we've also got some steps in place to try to stop him from eating that food (he's not allowed in the office unsupervised). And we're limiting his ability to go into ash's and Erik's bedroom, so Loki (and the rest of his cats) can feel more secure that that space is Theirs. If the feliway I got seems to help, we're also going to get a couple-few more to put around the house. If it helps.

tbh cheese would calm me down, too