Cassie is a beautiful long-haired gray cat who has been at the shelter for several weeks now. She is friendly and affectionate, and may have been overlooked because of all the kittens (most of them have been adopted) or maybe because her fur is so lush. Cassie is a nice cat who would love to get back into a real home as soon as possible.

Cassie is spayed, microchipped, and vaccinated. She is at the El Dorado County Animal Services shelter in Meyers, along with many other dogs and cats who are waiting for their new homes. Go online  to see photos and description of all pets at the shelter.

Call (530) 573.7925 for directions, hours, and other information on adopting a pet.

For spay-neuter assistance for South Tahoe residents, go online.

By Jennifer A. Kingson, New York Times

Many of them have carpeting, heating and air-conditioning, indoor and outdoor lighting, elaborate music and entertainment systems. Some are even eco-friendly, with solar panels or planted green roofs.

Take, for instance, the Palladian-style mini-mansion that Glenna and Ed Hall bought at a charity auction three years ago for about $300. With Jeffersonian columns that match the ones on their home in Roanoke, Va., the two-foot-tall doghouse makes a perfect accent for the garden. No one seems to mind that the garden is off-limits to Maggie May, their 28-pound whippet-borzoi mix — least of all Maggie May.

“We bought the house because it looks a lot like our house,” said Mrs. Hall, 66, a retired interior designer. “Maggie’s never been in it. She’s a house dog.”

Traditionally, doghouses were where dogs actually lived, separate from the family. But now that dogs are increasingly considered members of the family, their homes are becoming more like second homes — and in some cases, they’re entirely ornamental. Sure, there are still plenty of doghouses built for dogs to live in. But there are also an impressive number built the way Christian Louboutin makes shoes: you can walk in them (sort of), but clearly that’s not the point.

Read the whole story

By Mandy Kendall

The wonderful summer weather brings a welcome opportunity to have social gatherings and to be outdoors. Unfortunately there are also often unwelcome guests who can invade the party.

Mosquitoes are not only irritating they can also be dangerous to your health. According to World Health Organization, a million people a year die from malaria, a mosquito transmitted disease. Although malaria is not thought to be a public health concern in North America, there are other diseases transmitted by mosquitoes in the United States that warrant concern, such as West Nile Virus, LaCrosse encephalitis and Western equine encephalitis.

Although incidents of these diseases are fairly rare in the U.S., any strong and prolonged flu like symptoms should not be ignored if you have taken ill within two weeks of being bitten by mosquitoes.

So, avoidance of mosquito bites is equally as important as knowing how to take the sting out of a bite should you get one.

Below are some tips to avoid being bothered by mosquitoes in the first place and how to minimize the irritation if you do:

1. Oils. A study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture compared four synthetic mosquito repellents and eight natural mosquito repellents and found that lemon eucalyptus was the most effective repellent, even more than a 7 percent DEET repellent. To make your own natural repellant put 2 or 3 drops of an essential oil, like eucalyptus or tea tree, into a cup of water and then spray onto the skin. Also, combining the essential oil with a carrier oil like olive, almond or jojoba can help repel unwanted biters. Eucalyptus and citronella make a nice, effective combination. Pay special attention to covering parts of the body where the blood vessels are close to the surface, e.g. neck, armpits, ears, wrists etc. (Please follow manufacturer’s directions about dilution of essential oils as some can burn the skin if not diluted sufficiently, especially on young skin.)

2. Fans. Apparently, mosquitoes can only fly about 8 mph so if you can place yourself in the path of a fan you’ll become a less desirable landing strip.

3. Garlic. Garlic will exude from our pores if we eat enough of it and mosquitoes don’t like it. It’s also great rubbed on the skin (mixed with a little olive oil to take out the sting) but can make you less desirable to everyone else too!

4. Avoid. Sugar revs up the metabolism and make us a sweet treat. Also avoid perfumed personal products and laundry detergents that will make you alluring to all the wrong creatures. Avoid being out at dawn and dusk when mosquitoes are most active.

5. Welcome. Dragonflies, bats and purple martins put mosquitoes are high on their list of favorite foods.

6. Remove. Pools of stagnant water such as planter pots, sprinkler system and puddles as these are prime breeding grounds.

7. Smoke. Candles or a smudge box will deter mosquitoes from hanging around.

A mosquito bite itches and swells as the result of an allergic reaction to the anticoagulant in their saliva. Alternately compressing and releasing the bite can help the toxin to disperse. If you’ve been bitten, try one of the following:

1. Vinegar. A small amount directly onto the bump may help reduce the irritation. If you’ve got a lot of bites you may want to take a hot bath and add 2-3 cups to the water.

2. Aloe. Fresh gel from the plant itself works wonders (just cut an inch from the end of the leaf and squeeze out the gel straight onto the inflamed area) or you can buy aloe gel at most health shops.

3. Baking soda paste. Make a thick paste of baking soda and a little water and apply directly to affected area

4. Honey.  Take a small amount of honey (local honey if you can get it) and apply directly to the bite. Honey also has anti-microbial properties that can help prevent infection.

5. Essential oils. If they didn’t help prevent the bite in the first place they can often take the sting out afterwards. Just mix a drop with some water and dab onto the bite. (Again, please follow manufacturer’s directions about dilution as some oils can burn the skin if not diluted sufficiently, especially on young skin.)

6. Fabric softener sheets. Pin several fabric softener dryer sheets to your clothes when you are outside. The sheets apparently have a repelling effect on mosquitoes.

7. Soap. Rubbing dry soap gently on the affected area may help provide temporary relief from the itching. Wash off when the itching fades.

8. Toothpaste. Apply a small amount of all natural peppermint or neem- based toothpaste and allow to dry.

If you have any tried and tested home repellants or remedies I’d love to have you share them below.

Until next time.

Mandy Kendall operates Health Connective in South Lake Tahoe. If you have any questions, would like some advice, or would like to request some Qwik-e tips on any health and wellbeing topic, please feel free to drop me an email at healthconnective@gmail.com, visit us on Facebook, or keep an eye out on Lake Tahoe News for regular Qwik-e tips on how to make healthy changes one Quick and Easy step at a time.

By Robert Rupp

Most of us live an active lifestyle. But sometimes we forget about the long-term effects of our exercise programs or sports. We may pay attention to our backs, knees and shoulders, but the hip is a vital bone that sometimes gets ignored.

Hip pressure and pinching of the ball and socket through range of motion can cause hip impingement, a condition that involves extra bone formation around the hip joint.

Robert Rupp

What does hip impingement feel like? People who have hip impingement often report pain in the front of their hip or in the groin region. This pain is usually aggravated with prolonged sitting or walking or rotation of the hip. Occasionally the pain can involve the side of the hip and radiate down the thigh. A click or catch in certain positions may occur in the hip joint, especially if the cartilage labrum, which functions as a seal surrounding the hip socket, becomes torn through injury.

The cause. A normal hip joint has a round ball moving in a round socket, but a hip with impingement has an oval shaped ball moving in a socket with an overhanging bone spur. These abnormal bone shapes cause injury to the joint cartilage, and the wear and tear process can lead to hip arthritis and pain, breaking down the normally smooth cartilage coating and protecting the hip joint. Our bodies do not repair or replace the cartilage.

It is not known why some people have this extra bone in their hip joint that causes impingement, but it is thought that it develops during childhood or after trauma.

Diagnosis. X-rays or an MRI scan of the hip, in addition to an evaluation by a physician, can be used to diagnose a hip impingement condition.

What happens if I have hip impingement?

Treatment starts with activity modifications, medications and therapy. Hip injections also can be used to treat joint inflammation and pain. If symptoms persist or if the impingement process is destroying the joint, hip arthroscopy is an option.

How can I get “hip” with arthroscopy?

Hip arthroscopy is an outpatient hip joint through small skin incisions using a camera and special surgical tools to treat any injured tissue and remove excess bone. Reshaping the hip to a normal round ball or removing loose fragments stops the destructive process of hip impingement and usually improves hip pain.

Don’t ignore your pain. If hip impingement continues without treatment, the result can be an arthritic hip with a bone-on-bone condition that requires a hip replacement for pain relief. Hip arthroscopy can stop the process of impingement before it leads to arthritis.

People living with chronic hip pain might be ignoring progressive hip injury and the development of arthritis. Hip arthroscopy is not successful if the arthritis process becomes too advanced. It is important for anyone with hip pain to have an accurate diagnosis by a physician experienced in treating hip conditions.

Call (775) 589.8950 to learn more.

Robert Rupp is an orthopedic surgeon at Tahoe Orthopedics & Sports Medicine.

By Laura Hambleton, Washington Post

Maureen Michael likes food. Most days, she has three or four meals, and on occasion she eats yet another in the middle of the night. But she rarely worries about her weight, and at 5-foot-8 and 155 pounds, she looks quite trim.

“I eat anything, and I eat a lot,” the 51-year-old District resident said. “I like large portions. I have one of those metabolisms, I guess.”

Just the other day, Michael ate a salad and two large helpings of spaghetti and meatballs for dinner — after having a hearty bowl of ice cream. For breakfast the next morning, she ate two scrambled eggs, half a package of Polish sausage, English muffins and orange juice. For lunch, she consumed a 12-inch seafood sub and some Doritos, and that night’s dinner featured two pork chops, potatoes and broccoli.

That Michael’s weight remains steady even though she eats whatever she wants and does not exercise interests scientists studying the nation’s obesity epidemic. By looking at people who are near their ideal body weight, these reseachers at the National Institutes of Health’s Metabolic Clinical Research Unit in Bethesda hope to figure out what causes so many others to be overweight or uncontrollably fat.

Michael is among the one-third of American adults who are at a good weight relative to their height and build. Another third are overweight, and the rest are obese. Unlike Michael, very few people keep their weight in check without paying attention to what they eat and being conscientious about physical activity.

Read the whole story

By Frank Partnoy, Salon

Our society is obsessed with productivity and efficiency, and we despise procrastination. The early Americans imported the Earl of Chesterfield’s admonition: “No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” They read Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Procrastination, or The Sin and Folly of Depending on Future Time.” They built on the Puritan work ethic, which wasn’t much fun, but became a major part of American culture. Over time, the admonitions from Chesterfield and Edwards seeped into everyday life, along with the biblical references that Edwards peppered throughout his speech, especially Proverbs 27:1, which advises, “Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.”

And then, beginning in the 1970s, the do-it-now anti-procrastination industry burst onto the scene. Managers began following Peter Drucker, the consultant, who advised, “First things first; second things not at all.” Jane Burka and Lenora Yuen wrote a best seller about how to avoid procrastinating, and their “Procrastination Workshops” became popular. Self-help guru Stephen Covey told us that highly effective people do “first things first.” David Allen coached us to “Get Things Done.”

Over time we began to feel terribly guilty about procrastinating, yet we did it even more. The percentage of people who say they procrastinate “often” has increased sixfold since 1978. Students report spending over one-third of their time procrastinating. According to some studies, nearly one in five adults is a “chronic” procrastinator. Our focus on procrastination is relentless. America really has become a “Procrasti-Nation.”

Read the whole story

By Claudia Buck, Sacramento Bee

For some, summer travel means going no farther than the backyard with a blanket and a book.

For others, it’s a whole lot more complicated, involving planes, trains and automobiles – and a lot more gear.

Whether you’re heading on a road trip or flying to your desired destination this summer, we’ve gathered some trusty travel tips to save you time and money.

Read the whole story

By Christopher Smith, Los Angeles Times

How was that little vacation you took? You remember. It cost you almost nothing, it burned some calories (or, after that ice cream cone, added a few) and briefly immersed you in quintessential California.

It was that walk on a pier, those structures that stretch out like a gateway into the Pacific. Perhaps we don’t think about them much, but they’re part of what has made California California: Piers (or wharfs as they were called in the mid-19th century) once were the primary way of moving food, cargo and travelers on and off sailing vessels. After having walked 75 of California’s finest piers in the last year and a half, I also found they were the best way to move…me.

During my jaunts up and down the coast, I skipped some of them. I didn’t do military piers (not open to the public); I eschewed commercial business piers (too dull). I ignored the un-touristed reaches of the San Francisco Bay, particularly leading back into the freshwater Sacramento Delta. And I blew off the state’s thousands of private and public boat docks (a pier has pilings, a dock has none), leaving those for some other pilgrim.

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By Drake Bennett, Bloomberg

Technology and etiquette don’t move in lockstep. Just because it’s possible to whip out your smart phone and connect from anywhere doesn’t mean you should.

Text during a meeting and you risk offending your boss, e-mail during family dinner and you risk displeasing your spouse, peruse your MP3 collection during church and you risk disappointing your pastor (and any supernatural arbiter whose ear he may have).

A device being developed by engineers in Germany, however, promises to liberate smart-phone addicts from the strictures of social opprobrium, making it easier to work their devices sneakily under the noses of those who might judge them for it. The gadget is called ShoeSense. It’s a motion sensor that, indeed, mounts on a shoe.

Facing upward, it allows a user to control his phone through hand gestures performed at midriff level, even when the phone is still stored away in his pocket. Pinch index finger and thumb together and move your hand slightly forward to answer the phone or hang up, touch one hand to the other forearm to send a prewritten text, hold out a number of fingers to communicate whom on your speed-dial list to send it to. A person using ShoeSense looks a bit like a theremin player.

If the ShoeSense user is sitting at a desk, however, or a conference table, he looks as if he’s not doing anything at all and instead paying you his undivided attention – even as, sub rosa, he’s semaphoring his phone to send out a text about happy hour.

“It is quite discreet,” says Gilles Bailly, a computer scientist at Technische Universität Berlin and Deutsche Telekom who is one of ShoeSense’s creators. “Say you are in a meeting, you want to indicate that you are going to be late. You’ve already defined the gesture for this, and you perform the gesture under the table. The system on your shoe can recognize it, and nobody at the meeting knows that you performed the gesture.”

Read the whole story

By Susan Stellin, New York Times

As airlines try to persuade passengers to pay for Internet access at cruising altitudes, more airports and hotels are offering it free on the ground.

Half of the busiest airports in the United States now have free Wi-Fi, including Denver, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Phoenix and Houston. Dallas/Fort Worth plans to join that list in September, teaming with AT&T in a service that will give travelers 40 minutes of free Wi-Fi in exchange for viewing a 30-second advertisement.

That type of sponsored access is one way airports are balancing consumer pressure for free access to Facebook, Twitter and e-mail accounts with the cost of providing a bigger pipe for growing data needs. As devices demanding Wi-Fi proliferate, airports and hotels are also turning to tiered pricing models: offering limited Internet access free and a faster premium service to customers willing to pay.

Denver International Airport, which has offered free advertiser-supported Wi-Fi since 2007, is switching to a tiered pricing model this week. Working with Boingo Wireless, the airport is upgrading its network to give travelers free basic Internet service or more bandwidth for a $7.95 day pass (for a laptop) or $4.95 an hour (for a smartphone).

A business traveler sending a large file to a client is the type of customer who may opt for the premium speed.

“If you don’t see it going fast enough, you’d have that option of upgrading to the paid service,” said John Ackerman, the airport’s chief commercial officer. “Is your time or your money more important to you? That’s a personal choice we’re going to allow you to make.”

While the free service will still require viewing a 15- to 30-second commercial every half-hour, Ackerman said passengers should see improvements in the speed of the complimentary service, which has been a source of complaints.

The Boingo contract guarantees the Denver airport a minimum share of the Wi-Fi revenue — more than $500,000 over three years for the airport — with the potential for higher earnings as advertising opportunities evolve.

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