Our grey cat has decided that her favorite cat toy is a crumpled up piece of yellow, 5 X 7 note paper. It has just the right heft and battability. She swats the balls back to me when I toss them to her, and they are easy for her to carry around the house in her mouth. She loves the sound as I crumple up the paper, and positions herself in ready position to shag the balls I throw. Who needs fancy cat toys? What a good deal!
Tell about some good deals you have found lately. What do your animals like to play with?
Trail Baboon 
You can’t beat a tennis ball for amusing dogs. Tennis balls are almost indestructible. You can get them for free if you live near a tennis court. The size is just right for most dogs. A $10 flinging launcher lets you sling a tennis ball a good distance. Now they even have machines that throw tennis balls so a dog can load the machine then run down the ball without human intervention. The furry surface of a tennis ball loads up with slime and stink, which also appeals to dogs. The perfect dog toy.
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It was always fun at our house when you were forced to move furniture. Inevitably, since that sofa or whatever hadn’t been moved in months (or years), moving it uncovered enough lost tennis balls to fill a bucket.
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We find lots if shiny foul balls under the stove.
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*foil
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When they are under the stove, they are foul foil balls.
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Pens and pencils make such a lovely sound when they hit the floor after they are knocked off a table or counter. That is pretty cheap entertainment.
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The cigars I smoked for years had cellophane wrappers. When I removed the wrapper and crinkled it into a ball, our cat would come thundering in no matter where he had been snoozing. And then he would spend minutes slapping the wrapper, carrying it from spot to spot and doing experiments with gravity.
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I got a pretty good deal on cyber monday on down pillows and a comforter. Daughter and daughter in law asked for pillows, and we treated ourselves to a new comforter. There was a lot of down crisscrossing tbe country
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Regular gasoline is at $2.05.
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2.13 here
trump is my hero
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Our family recently moved to Port Huron, a small town about an hour north of Detroit. One distinctive quality of the local culture is that people here are extremely keen about discounts and good deals. When your server in a restaurant does the spiel about the daily specials, he or she describes the best bargains, not the best food. At a supermarket the woman at the cash register offered me a discount card. Not sure I would be returning, I declined. Or tried to. She absolutely insisted that I get the card until I saw that declining her would cause a scene. The obvious inference is that my last two homes (in Saint Paul and a tony suburb of Portland) were affluent in a way this region of Michigan is not. Getting a good deal is a big deal here.
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I never could get too excited about “all you can eat” deals at restaurants.
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I don’t get my money’s worth from those, as a rule. I can maybe eat one plateful.
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I get free artwork from Twin 2 quite often.
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I do love a good deal but I’m fairly lazy about going after them. If it takes too long to find a better deal than the one in hand, I often quit. I do not have the shopping gene. But when I do get a good deal I enjoy it – found some silly gifts for this year’s white elephant. very very good pricing. I’m very happy with these choices.
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On our other topic of pet toys I have a very difficult time. With four different animals with different ages and completely different mentalities it’s almost impossible. My old cat, Zorro, has never been a playing cat. There is nothing that entices him. The young cat likes a lot of crinkly things and catnip mice but the minute she abandons them, they just become dog fodder. My old dog, Rhiannon, likes soft toys but she mostly just likes to be in possession of them. She doesn’t actually play with them. And that leaves YA’s dog, Guinevere, who is a toy murderer. She can disembowel a stuffy toy in 5 minutes and we haven’t really found anything except the Kong toy (which she doesn’t like very much) that she can’t destroy pretty quickly. If I actually had more disposable income, I would buy 31 stuffed squeaky toys every month. And give one a day to Guinevere because in that five minutes before she kills it, she is in heaven.
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My cats loved the small plastic tops of spray bottles.
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I had a cat that loved to chew on plastic. I still have random objects like the top of a plant mister, and the plastic pieces that dangle on the ends of the cords that raise and lower the blinds, that have little teeth marks in them.
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memories
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For cats – I’ve never laughed so hard as when we first introduced the teenage kitten to the ping pong ball.
I’ve probably mentioned the Cat Dancer before – tuft of cardboardy stuff on the end of a flexible thin wire… bobs up and down as kitty paws at it…
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The only cat I had as an adult was Pippin, a tuxedo cat who was insanely athletic and quick. One of his favorite toys was a ping pong ball. Put Pippin in a dry bathtub, then throw a ping pong ball in. He would chase that thing round and round until I expected a Little Black Sambo meltdown!
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Ooh, I never thought of the bathtub – what a hoot, Steve!
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I remember a Peanuts Sunday strip where Linus were going door to door, trying to sell these crumpled-paper-ball-cat-toys, Renee! Wish I could find it…
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How odd – my cat ignores all cat toys, and only like crumpled up yellow legal pad paper, too! Back in the days of using tinsel on Xmas trees, my cat would sit below the tree and suck them up like spaghetti noodles. Perhaps that’ why he live to the ripe old age of 21?
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O/T: My Lyft rides were so ridiculously low cost because I was on a 10-trip promo which took $5 off each use. I’d just accepted the loss of night driving and/or driving in the snow or rain, and felt so greatly relieved to have an alternative that discovering the real cost flattened me. Here I’d planned the rest of my life around not having to drive much.
My kids asked what I’d like for Christmas. For once I knew exactly what their joint gift could be: a one-year “subscription” for Lyft rides!
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Perfect!
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add $5 and it’s still nothing
justcdobit
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For me it’s too much. Paying $10 to go up 4 min to get groceries and $20 to go to the gym five days a week is way, way beyond my financial reach.
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My first cat, Franny, loved to vandalize the Christmas presents. She would leave teeth marks in each of the bows on the wrapped gifts underneath the tree. I learned to wrap everything and leave the bows to be affixed on Christmas morning just before the gift were given.
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How cats train their people.
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my critters don’t play on command
well the dogs do but it’s out in the yard after a walk i take off the leashes and raise my hands and yelll yaahhhhh. and they go berserk playing bulldozer tag where they chase each other growling and head butting while doing flying wolenda rolls to reposition and attack again. they burn off more energy in the post walk blow out than during the walk
i’ll see if i can figure out how to youtube it sometime
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the cats lay lazily until it occurs to them to chase something up the stairs or around the corner full speed skidding and careening into walls and furniture
i never see it coming and the duration is random. when they are done they are done
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They are little mysteries wrapped in fur.
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