For those that haven’t heard, there has been a massive recall on wet cat and dog food.

Symptoms range from the animal throwing up excessively to your pet dropping dead. Menu Foods, which manufactures about 80% of the pet food in the country, switched to a new supplier for gluten which they theorize may have been the reason for the food to be tainted. They have since gotten a new supplier and recalled everything that could be dangerous.

I called my local pet food store to make sure that my cat was safe (or not), and since we usually buy about 3 months worth of food at a time and are getting low we are safe.

According to the woman at the store, there haven’t been any cases involving Nutro foods yet (which is what my cat eats) but it was recalled as well as it comes from the same source that was tainted.

The effected food will be dated for December ‘08 through March ‘09, so if you have something that says it is best by before then, you should be all set. My cat’s food is all dated July of ‘08.

If you have any of the effected foods, call the store where you bought it so that they can verify whether what you bought has been recalled.

Recalled cat foods
Americas Choice; Preferred Pets; Authority; Best Choice; Companion; Compliments; Demoulas Market Basket; Fine Feline Cat, Shep Dog; Food Lion; Foodtown; Giant Companion; Good n Meaty; Hannaford; Hill Country Fare; Hy-Vee; Key Food; Laura Lynn; Li’l Red; Loving Meals; Main Choice; Nutriplan; Nutro Max Gourmet Classics; Nutro Natural Choice; Paws; Presidents Choice; Price Chopper; Priority; Save-A-Lot; Schnucks; Sophistacat; Special Kitty; Springfield Pride; Sprout; Total Pet; My True Friend; Wegmans; Western Family; White Rose; and Winn Dixie.

Recalled dog foods
America’s Choice; Preferred Pets; Authority; Award; Best Choice; Big Bet; Big Red; Bloom; Bruiser; Cadillac; Companion; Demoulas Market Basket; Fine Feline Cat; Shep Dog; Food Lion; Giant Companion; Great Choice; Hannaford; Hill Country Fare; Hy-Vee; Key Food; Laura Lynn; Loving Meals; Main Choice; Mixables; Nutriplan; Nutro Max; Nutro Natural Choice; Nutro; Ol’Roy; Paws; Pet Essentials; Pet Pride; President’s Choice; Price Chopper; Priority; Publix; Roche Bros; Save-A-Lot; Schnucks; Springsfield Pride; Sprout; Stater Bros; Total Pet; My True Friend; Western Family; White Rose; Winn Dixie and Your Pet.

Coming just in time to spoil our plans to leave the state for the weekend, Winter wanted to show everybody that while Spring weather has begun to peek through every few days, it is not quite here yet. I am not sure exactly how much snow we got, since I was out shoveling 6 or 7 times and the wind left drifts everywhere. It was an interesting mix, though. Light powder, that then melted and became slush before freezing into ice, covered with more powder which then began to melt into slush. There was a great layering effect that happened.

I am very glad that we tried finding some snow shovels on clearance in the past few weeks. Our old plastic snow shovels were all torn up at the ends; one of them had lost about an inch and a half all told and the other was all curled and splitting. Our new shovels have a nice metal brace at the end of the shovel to help get the ice up and to keep the plastic from breaking. I also bought an ice pick for the driveway that has already shown us more value than the buck and a half it cost us.

All told, I think that I spent about 6 or 7 hours out shoveling. Thankfully, our neighbor has a snow blower and he did about a quarter of my driveway for me, which saved me about an hour and a half of work. The plows were able to clean up the streets and what was left melted off nicely, which meant that I got a couple of quality runs in this weekend without having to worry about footing.

Having a metal roof is nice, because the snow doesn’t have to be brushed off of your roof.

This is the first time that I have actually been home when it came down, though. It starts out sounding a little like thunder, but then it doesn’t stop for a good 20 or 30 seconds and begins getting much louder. That, and it makes your entire house shake.

I am just glad that I put the plywood over all of the shrubs that are right in the line of fire.

Thankfully, the patio chair in our back yard was already buried under 4 feet of snow, so I doubt that the pressure of all that falling snow will damage it much in its nice little insulated shell. The bowl in our back yard collects all of the drift from the yard and what comes over the water, despite being 4 or 5 feet above the water. I am sure that no small amount of that is what slides off of the roof as well. I don’t plan on using my back door too much right now.