Sara, I think Devi and our Byron were separated at birth.

Fwiw, our girl kitty Mia was the most affronted by little boy Seamus at first and would do nothing but growl and hiss at him for weeks. Now they groom each other and wrestle and play and snuggle. Byron wants nothingto do with either of them, though he tolerates their presence.

Barb is doin' it right!

Well, certainly at home it works. However, Jasmine is still a bit of a problem child in that she's a headstrong Lab puppy girl (even though she's nearly two). She's terrible on leash and when she sees new people (or even us if we've been away for anything longer than an hour), she's a complete spazz. The hard part is that 90% of the time, she's actually fairly mellow. It's the 10% which makes life interesting. But we'll get through it. She's the sweetest girl, just... a Lab.

Devi, as much as I adore her, is a case. She's my first cat and is bonded to me but she HATES I got other cat. As in, hates them,not me, luckily.

My two most frequent recommendations for rowdy walkers are:

!) Backpack. Not only can she carry her own water, bags, etc., I have yet to meet a dog who doesn't 'straighten up' when given that job. No idea why. It just works. Extra bonus benefit is that every step taken with a packet of rice (or whatever) on each side, means extra energy is expended. Especially with hyper Labs, a tired dog is a well behaved dog.

2) A very, very short leash. I don't mean this in the negative sense. Bartleby's leash is less than a foot long. My arm is his leash and he does not struggle when it is time to walk seriously. Given that I walk him off leash roughly 80 percent of the time, it's pretty impressive that he takes the "With me" command seriously.

The device I use isn't even actually a leash, it's a short 'car restrraint'.

When we are walking...we are walking. It's not play time. And since he doesn't get any confusing signals from me, there is no problem.

Please remind me to never read comments, ever again. About half of the comments about IsraGaza hell in foreign press I read are confusing legitimate criticism over Israel with antisemitism, which is bloody frightening.

(Not that the comments here have less antisemitism (towards the Arab side) in them, but I know to expect it by now).

confusing legitimate criticism over Israel with antisemitism

This is one of the major problems with US (and to some extent other places -- but I think we're kind of in the forefront here, sadly) discourse about Israel in general, not just in this conflict. Because of certain voices that very quickly take over any discussion on the subject, it's almost impossible to look critically at what goes on there in the way we can and really should do with any ally. If you don't agree with government policy, you're an anti-semite and/or a self-hating Jew. As if things aren't polarized enough over there without the bystanders getting all all-or-nothing about it.

IOW, don't read the comments ever again! What were you thinking?

Never read the comments unless you know you're home.

amych, you're so right, about everything. When did people lost their ability to think in layers (if they ever had it to begin with)? And I hate the 'self-hating Jew' term. Few article were written about this and this only, and... I do not get it. At all. Can't... compute...

If I have learned one thing reading comments, and quite a few other posting boards, it is this:

Apparently, they give free computers and free Internet access to crazy people, prisons, and hermitish freaks and zealots hiding in remote places all over the world.

In my soon-to-be-ex-job, which is in the internet field (database manager in a search engine), we had to deal with a lot of sites. So we reached to conclusion that in order to use the internet, you need to pass a general knowledge exam (written by us, of course), grammar, spelling mistakes and reading comprehension test, and be over the age of 12 (some people suggested 16).

Else, it has been suggested to cut off the hands of those people.