Or "Blanket Buddies"
Or "Aja Gives Up"
After nine days, we've gone from total hatred to just complete worn-out acceptance.
I've got to find something else to post on. I was just telling my coworkers this morning I'm really turning into a crazy cat lady with only one obsession. Please, winter, end! I need to get out and hike!
I was sorting through all the pictures we have stored on our camera and found these three random videos that have been taken on accident. The video setting is only a couple of clicks away from the still photo setting, and I think it often gets set there when the camera's being handled. I've noticed that this only happens when I'm behind the camera. Apparently Kevin always checks the settings first, smart guy.
First, there's Aja.
Then, there's Christmas morning at the in-law's.
And lastly, there's Kevin on a hike up at Albion Basin.
Last week I had a wonderful birthday. I had two family parties, two fantastic dinners out, and a lot of fun. Thank you for those who remembered, and for those who didn't know, there's an explanation--I don't like telling people about my birthday or making a big deal out of it. Part of the reason is that it is just a regular day for everyone else.
Kevin really made it a special day for me, and later that night we went out with my parents to Market Street, which is in my top three for favorite restaurants. Then we went out to visit a foster home for kitties. The reason, I'd like to announce, is that we have a new arrival just in time for my birthday week. Introducing Phoebe!
Phoebe is a Maine Coon, like Aja. She's about four months old. Her mother was a feral cat, and the litter was discovered in November. Each night rescue workers put out traps and captured the mother and her kittens. Phoebe was the last to be captured, so she spent a night or two outside in the snow by herself before succumbing to the traps. She'd been at a foster home ever since, and she was the last of her litter to be adopted.
I signed the adoption papers for her Thursday and we picked her up Friday after work. So far it's been a hairy 24 hours. When I initially expressed an interest in Phoebe, the folks at the rescue warned me that her foster people thought she was exceptionally shy. This makes sense since she's been wild, but since I've had lots of cats and experience, I was up for a more challenging adoption. She struggles when we hold her, although she purrs easily enough. Last night she and Aja met. At first they just sniffed noses, then Aja began growling, and then both of them broke into hissing. I think it's going to take a few weeks to calm down these two mad kitties.
Last night we gave Phoebe the entire basement while Aja happily slept up in the bed with us. When we went downstairs this morning to find Phoebe, she was gone. We searched the basement no less than six times over during the day today. We rearranged all our junk in the spare bedroom several times. Finally, I at last found Phoebe after pulling out the bottom drawer in a dresser. As Kevin says, cats are good at not being found when they don't want to be found. Since that time, we've been cuddling with her and trying to get her to eat.
Despite everyone getting used to each other and the little scare today, I'm so excited for this adventure. As I've told Kevin, we've got a good home and a lot of love to give. I'm thinking we can help this shy kitty out where a lot of people couldn't. I'll let you know how it goes!
To an aunt like me, it doesn't get better than this. Unfortunately, you can't hear the reason I took this video to begin with--he was absolutely squealing with delight. It's a crappy mobile phone video, but it's very precious to me. And no, I'm really not bouncing him around like that to try to get him to spit up.
Snow on snow, snow on snow
Quiet farmhouse
Cat in sunbeams
Girl in hat, woman in blankets
Fuzzy, sleepy
Lighted tree
My friend Heidi lives in England, and recently took a trip out to Top Withins. Those of you familiar with the Bronte sisters will recognize the feeling of this place. She took this picture, which has fascinated me since. I could look forever at this tree.
Christina gave a full post to last Saturday night when we got together with our husbands. Kevin and I love keeping company with the Christina and Dave--we always have such fun discussion, complete with good stories and light sarcasm. It was a blast to have dinner, play games, and celebrate Christina's birthday. What's more, these are the first pictures of the inside of our home--you can even see our photograph of Courthouse Towers in Arches, as well as our other friendly visitor: Poe.
I read Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, Eat, Pray, Love a few months ago after Rachel introduced me to it. I didn't intend to do a book review here, but this is the type of book that I've kept with me for months, and after Christina reminded me of it yesterday, I figured that I had to do it.
Read is not really the correct word, as I listened to the audio book read by Gilbert herself. She was amazing, adjusting her sound for the voices of the people in her life, and capturing the subtle ironies that I found delightfully amusing.
Apparently, this book has captured the attention of many women. I confess I don't watch Oprah, and haven't had much of a chance to keep up on how this book has impacted others. But I can talk of how this book resonated with me like a week spent with a cosmic twin turned spiritual mentor. Gilbert tells her story of how she came to spiritual crisis, and how she worked herself out of it (through eating, praying, and loving) over a few years time and exotic journeys. Never before had I heard of a woman being so confessional--so honestly forthright--about the demons that haunt her, and then to have such a clever and witty way of examining them. As a childless woman at an age where everyone around me is desperately "baby hungry" (odd term, isn't it?), I stood refreshed at her confession of not wanting children--at least not at according to everyone else's time table--and the sincerity in which she felt and dealt with the issue. Her coming to terms with God, and with meeting God for the first time (and second, and third), was beautiful to me in its openness and liberality.
Calvin and Hobbes was the comic strip that I felt a special connection to as I grew up. I'm a cat person myself, so there was always a love for Hobbes, and I think the many sides of Calvin are quite reflective of the complex human psyche. My favorite strips, however, occurred in the woods that Calvin wandered, and in which he made his existential ruminations. I envied him for existing in a world where wilderness was so close to his home, as in the Salt Lake valley we usually have a distinction between our wilderness, our foothills, and our residential areas.
On my last trip to Chicagoland (really, they call it that), I stayed in an area that reminded me of Calvin's world. Here small lanes divide up the woods, and houses appear almost randomly throughout the forests. I took the afternoon to drive around and experience autumn here, and I even saw a large owl.
At the home where I grew up, we had our own bits of wilderness. We had a stack of oak trees in the back yard in which my dad made a platform tree fort; there was an old mountain road that cut into the hill above our neighborhood that provided a place for us to get great views and spot wildlife; and there was the mouth of a canyon with all that comes with it: the creek, a reservoir, and an old mill. I suppose that's not a bad start to imaginative childhood wilderness, but when I look at this picture, it reminds me that there's something special to actually living right in the woods.
Admittedly, this comes a little late, but here are our fall pics from Big Cottonwood Canyon. Despite the drought, which drains the trees and dulls their color, we still found beautiful patches this fall. Isn't it odd how it just creeps up in little patches?
I use the grade-level readability tool in Microsoft Word at work all the time. It evaluates my vocabulary and sentence complexity and tells me how difficult a particular document is to read. As I am usually required to design things to reach and eigth-grade reading level, I'm distraught over this new reading rating on my blog. As I teach technical writing at the university level, I believe good writing (technical writing, at least) is very simply conveyed. It looks like I need to work on practicing what I preach, assuming that this tool is real.
As long as I had to dress up at work, I thought I'd do something I'd love.
Happy Halloween!
Thanks to the few of you who told me you were missing my blog. This month has been crazy. This week I'll make my fourth trip to Chicago for work in the last 9 weeks, for starters. I've got the Delta flight schedule memorized between O'Hare and Salt Lake International. I've also been without a decent bedroom for... what is it... three weeks now? Kevin and I have been painting, and today we're getting our floors sanded in both bedrooms. The pale blue carpet in the living room (new when we moved in) is going to have to stick around for a few more years. Even if it is "so eighties."
First, Chicago. Well, if you can imagine how fun it would be to sit next to multi-level marketers for three hours on a plane, then you can start to imagine how fun my last trip was. Combine that with flight delays, exorbitant printer's costs, some unusual client experiences, and 20 minutes of local network news taping me in airport security for their B-roll is what I had to look forward to. I seriously do not like to be taped on camera.
To cope with all the stress and clutter, I made it up Little Cottonwood Canyon Thursday night. The October moon was full and beautiful, and it lit up the snow-covered cliffs. I went all the way to Alta, but of course the road up to the Albion Basin parking lot was closed. I unrolled my windows and let that cold woody air in. I decided I have to get a cabin one day.
I'm in the mood to write today because tonight I'm going to one of my favorite events--the family pumpkin carving party. My brother and sister-in-law host it with their beautiful kids, and this year we'll be joined by my other brother's family and my sister's new baby. Halloween is so much more fun with kids around.
And last, but not least, tomorrow Kevin gets sworn in as an official attorney and member of the bar. I feel as proud as Bridget Jones. Congrats, Kev.
This is something we use in my family for reminiscing. If you can see it, enjoy!
Kevin and Dad with summer wildflowers in front of Devil's Castle Peak at Albion Basin. We invented our own hike up toward the mountain and back toward Cecret Lake. My dad says this is his new favorite hike.
I think this is the last of the Hawaii posts. Kevin bought a disposable camera in a waterproof case for us to take to Hawaii so that we wouldn't ruin our other camera. Here are the highlights from the roll:
Our first snorkel spot by the Aquarium on Maui
Some fish
Angel fish and a rainbow fish
Sea turtles
A playful couple
And...
Some kind of Sea Monster.
We had to plan our last day in Hawaii more carefully, because our flight left at 10:00 at night, and we didn't want to be wearing wet swimming suits home on our red eye flight. Kevin read about a short drive up the mountain from Honolulu that was supposed to be sort of like the Road to Hana on Maui, so we decided to do that. First, though, we stopped by Leonard's bakery for the second morning in a row to get some malasadas diliciosas. Some of the best baked Hawaiian goods are from Portuguese sailors, including Hawaiian bread, but these malasadas were something else: sugar, cinnamon sugar, or banana, coconut, or chocolate filled. Here's a great shot of me and the Leonard's bakery dumpster.
And here we are driving up the road to Round Top, above Honolulu.
And this is what the road was like as we drove around. It sprinkled on us a bit, and the whole place smelled like flowers. I'd love to live up here!
In the afternoon we decided to go to Pearl Harbor. It's free to get in, but Kevin and I decided it was worth it to spring for the $5 audio tour as we went through the museum and waited our turn to see the film and ride the boat out to the Arizona memorial. I think the audio tour was totally worth it. I'm a bit of an NPR-junkie, so I've grown accustomed to learning through listening to compiled audio snippets and vignettes told by those who experienced these attacks over 65 years ago.
I'd been to Pearl Harbor once or twice before, but this time it had a lot more meaning to me. Before I was so young that I accepted history as fact and didn't question why things happened the way they did. But this time I was immensely curious to know why the Japanese thought it would be a good idea to bomb the U.S. (we had stopped selling them oil and had closed off the Panama Canal to them, so they thought they'd take out our Pacific fleet and then quickly take over all of the resource-rich French Asian territories before we had time to regroup), or why we hadn't detected the planes coming in (we thought they were our own planes coming from California), or why Japan joined with Germany and Italy (with the invasion of France, these French colonies were ripe for the picking by Japan).
Here's what remains of one of the gun towers of the sunken USS Arizona.
This was also a neat experience for me because my grandpa served as a colonel in WWII in Asia, and despite that I've always studied and learned more about the European side of the war, and here I got to immerse myself in a totally new perspective.
Going to the North Shore of Oahu was my favorite part of our vacation. My brother and sister-in-law had recommended spending a day on the North Shore, and I'm so glad we did. This place was so great for what Kevin and I love about Hawaii that we decided to come back the second day and basically do everything all over again! So that's why I'm combining these two posts together--the only difference is that the second day my sunburn was so bad (see pictures below) that I wore a shirt and shorts the whole day, and we did a lot less swimming.
This day couldn't have gone more perfectly. We started off by going to a bakery in Haleiwa and then snorkeling at Shark's Cove. I'll post underwater pictures from that later. We then drove past the Beach Boys-famed Waiamea Bay (where in the winter the waves measure 20 feet from the back--that's 40 feet from the front) and went to Sunset Beach, which is our favorite beach. We snorkeled and swam a bit there and then returned to Haleiwa for lunch and delicious shaved ice. One thing we noticed about the North Shore are these stickers, "Keep the country country," which essentially means that they don't want to ruin the lax feeling of the North Shore by building a bunch of uppity resorts. And I think this remote, relaxed feeling, this private beach feeling, is what made Kevin and I love this place so much.
After lunch, we headed to "turtle beach," where the water is a bit more shallow, the water a bit more algae-like, and where sea turtles love to congregate. We saw one on the shore and about seven in the water as we snorkeled around. They're a threatened species, so we couldn't touch them, but we could go right up to them and sit next to them and they didn't mind! The only concern of mine was that a big wave would push one into me.
After turtle beach we decided to grab some picnic dinner at the supermarket--a baguette, pre-sliced meat and cheese, Coke, and an Asian salad--and then head to Ted's Bakery for some famous coconut chocolate cream pie to eat on Sunset beach inbetween wave jumping and watching the sun go down.
