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Cheeto The Cat

Earlier this year my family got a new kitten and she’s very silly so I wanted to talk about how we got her.

On May 29th, my dad stopped by a 7-11 on his way back to work. He noticed a small kitten peeking out from under some wooden palettes outside that are used to hold things. My family really cares about animals so my dad wanted her to be somewhere safe. He tried catching her but she kept hiding out of reach so he needed another plan.

He came home to get a cage that would trap the kitten once she stepped inside. I was home at the time so when he told me about the kitten, I was really eager to come along and help catch her. We have never been able to successfully catch a cat with that cage so while I was hoping to catch her, I thought the chance of actually doing it was slim.

When we got there, we set up the cage right where she was hiding, placed some food in it, and waited. She poked her head inside occasionally but did not go far enough to activate the trap. The main problem was every time she came out from hiding, a car or a person would come up to get something at the 7-11 and it scared her.

Then eventually, two people were interested in what we were doing and tried to help. They had good intentions, but they kept hovering over the cage which made her too scared to come out of her hiding spot. One of them tried luring her out with a lanyard to see if she would try to play with it, but it did not work. It kind of made me frustrated that the two people were hovering so close to her instead of letting the kitten take her time to walk into the trap. The two of them eventually had to go home which finally gave us a better chance to catch her.

At this point it was almost 11:00pm and my dad said we would need to go home soon if we couldn’t catch the kitten. Then finally about 20 minutes later, she poked her head out and stepped into the cage enough to activate the trap.

We took her home and I assumed we were going to bring her to a shelter the next day, but my dad said we would keep her. We already had 8 cats so the more the merrier. She warmed up to us a lot faster than expected and we eventually learned from the cashier working that night that someone had left her there a few weeks before we found her.

We wanted to name her something related to 7-11 so it was going be be food themed. After a lot of deciding, we stuck with the name Cheeto because the orange on her face looks like she was eating Cheetos.

My Thoughts on forest fires

The big project for this class requires that I look into some aspect of structure fires. Therefore, I was not able to research forest fires, so instead I will discuss them in this blog post.

Forest fires are an interest of mine because they are surprisingly beneficial in many ways. Despite the fact that they can be very damaging, forest fires help the environment to thrive better.

To start, some plants need fire in order to reproduce and help with growth. The heat helps to release seeds and stimulate germination. Additionally, forest fires help burn away dead plant matter which allows for new ones to be grown and it releases nutrients back into the soil, acting as fertilizer. While plants get burned in the process, forest fires can help reduce invasive plants in an area because they aren’t adapted well to withstand fires, as opposed to native plant species.

Relating forest fires to human activity, people have been doing everything in their power to prevent them from happening even though its a natural process. since fires normally decrease the amount of plant matter in an area, preventing them leads to an excess amount. However a fire is bound to happen, so when it does, it uses all of the plant matter for fuel and leads to a much bigger fire than there should have been under normal conditions.

Overall, fires may be destructive, but they are essential to certain ecosystem, so with the help of controlled burning of forests, it can help lead to less damage to humans and the animals that live in those forests as well.

I visited Washington state over the summer and took this is a picture of smoke from a forest fire there. Unfortunately there was a hiking trail we wanted to go on that was right by the fire, so we were unable to do that. I did some research and it seems like the fire was completely contained only a month ago.