In case you were wondering who's *really* in charge around here.

A while back, I had two dogs beds since before I had Sasha, there was Zoe and Penny. Well, the beds had removeable machine-washable covers, and when Sasha was about four or five months old and in her chewing phase, I took the covers off to wash them. Sasha tore one of the beds while the cover was off and got the stuffing everywhere. The bed had to be tossed out, and from then on she and Penny had one bed to share between them.

Today, I happened to see a nice bed that was big enough for both dogs at Wal-Mart and opted to bring it home. I set the bed down next to the old bed, which is where Penny was laying. Not two minutes after I put it down, Prissy the cat ran over to the bed and promptly laid down on it, claiming it for her own. Keep in mind this bed is big enough for Sasha, who at this point weighs fifty or more pounds. Prissy can sit on my shoulder and weighs less than ten pounds. That's a whole lot of bed for a cat her size.

The funniest part about the whole thing is that neither of the dogs challenged this. Penny continued to snooze less than a foot away on the old bed, only giving Prissy a casual glance while Sasha took one look at her and flopped down on the floor to enjoy the rawhide bone I got for her. Yes, they know their place.

It's been about an hour since I first put the bed down. Penny has spent about two minutes on the bed, but as soon as she got up, Prissy reclaimed it and is now resting peacefully on it while Sasha has curled up on the old bed. Penny has moved to the floor next to Sasha. (I'm trying to get a picture of this, but Sasha hears it when I turn on the camera and gets excited and runs up to me.)

I forsee myself purchasing a small cat bed just for Prissy. I also forsee that this will probably do nothing to change the fact that she has proclaimed herself queen of the big fluffy bed.

Though I do have to say I am very happy that the dogs and the cat can lay literally inches from one another without causing an incident.

Having problems with your userpics and/or LJ scrapbook?

Don't panic! LJ is doing some maintenance.

Hey LJers,

I just wanted to let you all know that we are going to be performing some mogilefs maintenance over the next few days. We will be upgrading our current version to latest stable as well as changing some db config information to better handle the amount of files we are currently hosting. This shouldn't cause a big impact on site stability, but you may see some minor delays with userpic / scrapbook images appearing or other requests associated with our mogilefs. We would love to not have that happen, but unfortunately with some of the steps we need to take we have to cause a delay with images. I figured this was a better solution than taking down all of LiveJournal because well lets face it, we all need our daily LJ fix ;)

Thanks,

According to the comments, everything should be back to normal by the end of this week.

I'm posting this because I was trying to upload pictures earlier (I wanted to post photographic evidence of feline superiority) and the pictures wouldn't upload, even when I switched browsers. Then, I noticed none of my scrapbook pictures were showing up. Fortunately I saw the link on the LJ homepage and thought I'd pass on this information so fewer people panic like I did.

Boosting the Signal

LJer gehayi needs financial help.

Ginmar has the details:

Do you guys all know gehayi? A longtime friend of mine and a good peson, she has struggled against illness for her entire life, and needs help and advice. She is paying off $40,000 in medical bills related to a hospitalization a few years back---on a monthly disability check of $998 per month. She needs help---financial if you can get it, practical if not. I am quoting her, verbatim, with her permission.

(Click the link to read the post.)

Having experienced a harsh Maine winter for myself, I know how much more expensive it is just to stay warm during the winter months, and the dilemma of "Do I buy bread, or oil to heat my house?" And all those programs that lend aid to people either have a million hoops to jump through, or have their resources drained so fast that they can't meet the demand. Also, having a parent who survives on a disability check, I know how difficult it can be to make ends meet (my mother, however, also has the benefit of drawing a retirement check for her years spent as a teacher working for the state; I honestly don't know how she'd survive without that - and she still pays out the wazoo for medications each month, even with prescription drug benefits from Medicare and another insurance).

I plan to give, but unfortunately I'm switching banks right now, and it'll be a couple of weeks before that massive headache is sorted out. (It doesn't help that one reason I'm switching banks is because I don't like the majority of people at my current bank, and I'll have to go through closing out my account, and blah, blah, blah first world problems, blah, blah.) Until then, can you guys pass this along? This is the least I can do.