Unforgettable

Petra likes string and string toys. This is important for the following story:

When Petra was around eight months old or so, she started making a noise that sounded like a duck quacking. Then, she started sneezing and acting like she maybe had a kitty cold, so we took her in to the vet. She went on a 10-day course of antibiotics, and got better. Then, a few days after going off the antibiotics, she got sick again. On: fine. Off: sick. The last time she was on 3 weeks of antibiotics and got sick within 2 days after going off. I finally bit the bullet, called the vet, and made an appointment for a few days later. In the two days between making the appointment and bringing her in, Petra got REALLY sick. Not eating or drinking, wheezing, sneezing, coughing/spitting up mucus and saliva. Really unhappy kitty. She sounded like Darth Vader all night and the things that had helped before, like putting her in the bathroom and running the shower on hot so the steam could clear her pipes, didn't help anymore. I decided she couldn't wait any longer and we took her in to the vet at 7:30 in the morning. Dan and I were both really worried that she had Feline AIDS or Feline Leukemia or something that was affecting her immune system. We were really scared.

They did X-rays. They did bloodwork.

The vet called me at 8:30 (while we were at breakfast) and said the X-ray showed that Petra had a NEEDLE AND THREAD loged in her windpipe (well, in the flesh around her windpipe). She had SWALLOWED A NEEDLE AND THREAD two months previously, and had been sick from the secondary infection of having a foreign body in her windpipe for two months. We figured that what had happened was we'd had the pincushion out from working on a couple of different sewing projects (each of us, at the time, was sewing something) and she'd probably seen thread dangling from the coffee table. She likely played with it, swallowed it, and the needle it was threaded through came along for the ride.

So he got the needle and thread out, and told me that he also thought she may have a bowel obstruction from more thread that could have traveled further down, and wanted to do exploratory surgery to find out what was causing it. I gave the go-ahead. He called me back and said it wasn't thread (yay! no necrotic tissue! nothing unhealthy in her bowel!), but that she had a bunch of scar tissue that had kind of rerouted her bowel, back from when she had whatever accident caused her leg to get mangled (and the ultimate reason why she lost the leg). He fixed that up, so it wouldn't cause her problems later, sewed her back up, and tells me she was resting comfortably and we could bring her home the next day.

Two months of antibiotics, having a needle removed from her windpipe, and exploratory surgery, was pretty darn expensive. But Petra was only 10 months old at that point, and it was worth every penny to have a healthy cat again. Plus, the vet tech was really excited to have a unique x-ray to bring in to show her class!

* * * * * * * * * *

When we brought the cats in for that exam two weeks ago, it had been a while since they'd seen the vet, and in the meantime he'd switched from one veterinary practice to another. The vet came in the room, asked who he was seeing, and we reminded him of Petra, who only had three legs, and who had once (more than five years before) swallowed a needle. "Oh, yes," he said. "I could never forget that!"

The enemy's gate is down

About two weeks after Dan moved in with me, we went to the Denver Dumb Friends League to find a kitty. I'd wanted one since I moved to Denver, and had purposefully found an apartment that was pet-friendly. But I wanted to wait until Dan moved in, since I knew he was going to, and figured it would be easier to wait until after that happened.

Luckily, Dan was amenable to the idea of kitty-having. So we went to the DDFL and looked at the kittens (I wanted a kitten. Sue me.), but didn't see any that seemed like OUR kitty. A week or so later, we went in again. Our neighbor Paulene was a volunteer there, and when we got there we put our name on the waiting list (for a "hang out with a kitty" room, and the option of hanging out with three different kitties) and wandered around, looking at our options. We saw a few that looked promising; they'd just gotten a couple of big litters of kittens in so we figured we'd find one in that bunch. Right after we came in, a couple with a little girl came in as well, so they were just below us on the list.

We brought in one kitten. It wasn't ours. We brought in a second kitten. Not ours. Paulene came by to see how it was going, since she knew we were there to find a kitty, and she asked us, "Have you seen the little one with three legs?" No, we had not, and opted to visit with her next. She was brought in the room and we were instantly smitten, particularly Dan (I suspect she stole his heart right then and there). "This is our kitty!" we knew, just as that family with the little girl was walking by, pointing at our new friend, saying how that was going to be her kitty.

Sorry, little girl. We were first, therefore, she was ours.



We brought her home and spent the next couple of weeks trying to determine her name. The shelter had named her "Bug" (as in, cute as a? I'm not sure. She didn't look like a bug.) but we knew her real name was something entirely different. Our kitten was strong, a fighter. When she had been a tiny kitten, probably no more than six or eight weeks old, something had happened to her, and someone had found her at the side of the road with her left back leg all mangled and smashed. They brought her in to the DDFL, who amputated her leg. The vet who had cared for her there was so enamoured that she fostered the little kitten herself for the month that it took for her to convalesce and get healthy enough to be adopted out.

Over that first week or ten days when we had her home, we ran through any number of names. Miette, maybe, after the scrappy girl in The City of Lost Children. Or Leeloo, after the character of that name in The Fifth Element. One afternoon, we had our door open and she ran from one of us to another, hiding behind us and other obstacles in her path to get to our neighbor's door on the other side of the hallway. "The enemy's gate is down," I said, and we knew right that her name was Petra, after the girl soldier in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. It was perfect.

Petra charmed everyone she ever met. All of our neighbors loved her. How could you not, with a face like this?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Two weeks ago, we took Loki and Petra to the vet. It was partly because they needed booster shots and a checkup, as it had been a while since their last visit, but also partly because we'd noticed some disturbing things. Petra had peed a few times outside of the box, something she'd never done before. She seemed thirsty all the time, and would get really excited about having her water dish refilled or the tap turned on in the bathroom sink for her to drink from. She was also throwing up water, and seemed like she was losing weight. Thinking maybe she had diabetes or something else managable, yet still scary, we told the vet about the worrisome symptoms we'd noticed.

Loki was given a completely clean bill of health (and later, when his lab results came back, the vet told us that he was about as healthy as a kitty could possibly be...so, yay!)

Petra was a different story. "We'll have to wait for the labs to come back," he said, "but it's entirely possible it could be one of many different things - none of them good." Her kidneys were enlarged, and that on top of her other symptoms pointed to either renal lymphoma or a congenital kidney defect, neither curable. He asked us about her breed background, if we knew anything about it, and asked if she'd ever tested positive for FeLV, since that was a primary cause of kitty lymphoma. At home, we went through her records from the DDFL but didn't see anything that said she'd tested positive for FeLV. The next morning, the vet called with her lab results: an elevated white blood cell count, which could point to a bacterial infection. We put her on a ten-day course of antibiotics and waited to see what would happen.

Nothing happened, except that she got really pissed about having to take a pill twice a day. She didn't get any better. She continued to drink a lot of water, puke water, and lose weight. So yesterday we brought her back in for the news we'd been dreading, the news that I'd had nightmares about all Monday and Tuesday night. The vet said that we could do an abdominal ultrasound, an asperation of the kidneys, a biopsy. But with her symptoms, and the fact that she'd lost almost an entire additional pound in two weeks, and the fact that her kidneys were an additional 25% larger, made it pretty clear. Petra has renal lymphoma.

Lymphoma in cats can be treatable but is not curable. And after doing some extensive research online last night, we realized we had made the best choice about what her treatment will be. Some forms of feline lymphoma respond well to chemotherapy, giving pets an additional five or six months, a year, even two years in outlier cases. But renal lymphoma, especially at the stage where Petra probably is, does not respond as well. We would rather have her for a few more weeks and give her a good quality of life, where she is happy and comfortable, rather than put her on chemotherapy (when who knows how she will respond to it, if it will make her feel worse, etc.), and try to prolong her life at the cost of her happiness. We will be treating her with administered-at-home subcutaneous fluids (to help her kidneys function better) and prednisone, a cortical steroid that will help slow the progress of the disease. But she is not going to get better.

I don't know how much longer we will have with our friend Petra, but we plan to make the best of it. We're going to take lots of photos and videos, give her treats every day, and make sure she knows how much we love her. And I'm going to write more about her, about her other brush with death, about her likes and dislikes, about the things we are going to miss so much when she is gone.

A (free) night at the museums

In honor of Denver Arts Week, eleven museums in Denver were open for free on Saturday night. I thought that going to a museum for free sounded like a good time, so I asked Dan and Scarlett if they'd be interested in going. They thought it sounded like a good time, too, so on Saturday afternoon we picked up Scarlett and walked down to the 16th Street Mall, took the shuttle, and ambled over to the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, a place I'd never been.



One of the nice things about the MCA is that they have no permanent collection - so every time they change up their spaces, it's with new art and new artists. I really enjoyed seeing the different kinds of art on display, some of which were aural in addition to visual, and I think my favorite things were the amazing paper/ink sculptures by Arlene Schechet.


From there, we took the mall shuttle back up and went to the new building at the Denver Art Museum - new, I say, but it's a couple of years old now, and I'd yet to see the inside of it. So we poked around in an area near the Western Art collection that allowed you to do a lot of hands-on things, and then we went up to the Contemporary Art exhibit. I liked a lot of what I saw, especially the way some of the pieces I had seen before fit into the new (unusual, to say the least) space.

"The studio is a different kind of space for adults accompanying children coworkers friends in-laws blind dates who want to make their own souveniers Watch interactive interviews Touch without fear Open unknown drawers Find strangely shaped rooms Discover artists secrets"

My favorite piece at the Denver Art Museum was a painting by a guy in New York who asks local urban kids to pose for him in the style of classical paintings, chosen by them, but he paints them in their street clothes complete with cell phones and bling. I didn't get the artist's name or take a photo of the painting, but I did get a couple of photos of my favorite exhibit, which is called Fox Games.


Denver has things going on all the time, and we usually don't take advantage of them, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get in to places I've never been for free. Nighttime museum-going is something I enjoy, as well, though I can't really explain why. When we went to New York City last January, we went to the MOMA in the evening, and I think it was a totally different experience than it would have been had we gone during the daytime.

Where to next?

It's time for us to plan another trip.

I need another big thing to look forward to. Both of us want to go somewhere new, somewhere big, a Big Deal sort of a trip. No Canada or USA. It's gotta be someplace with a) a different language, or b) a long plane trip (or c, both).

So. Here are some ideas we've floated. We're thinking maybe January, after the holidays, when it's dreary and cold in Colorado and warm in other parts of the world. Among the places we've discussed are:

Mexico (adventure-travel, exploring ruins Mexico, not lounge-on-the-beach Mexico)
Peru/Bolivia
Egypt/Jordan/Israel
Australia or New Zealand
Someplace in Southeast Asia?

So, internet, tell me. Where should we go, to escape the January doldrums and add another notch to our belt?

(Places we have been together: China, Italy)

Twenty years

20 years ago today, the Berlin Wall came down.

The interesting thing about this is that it simultaneously feels like it wasn't that long ago, and at the same time, culture in Germany and in Europe (and in the world, I guess) has changed so much since that happened that it feels like a lifetime ago. It's a weird thing to think about, that 20 years ago, Germany was two different countries, one free, one under Communist rule, and Berlin was two cities, one with the Western ethos, surrounded by Communism. Kind of like Austin, Texas, I guess, being blue in a sea of red. These days it kind of feels like Communism was a blip on the radar, though I'm sure that perspective is one I have from never having lived in a Communist country.

I can't imagine what it was like to grow up on the other side of the iron curtain, but people who are my age now were there and lived it. Someday, our kids are going to study Communism and the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that stuff in school, and they're going to ask us about it, just like we asked our parents about things like the Vietnam War. 20 years ago, Dan's brother (hi, Matt, if you read this!) would never have been stationed in Latvia with the US Foreign Service. 20 years ago, things were very, very different for people living in East Germany and in all those Eastern Bloc countries.

It's hard to believe, since that was what it was like when I was a kid, but the Cold War and Communism as a Western ethos was a 20th century construct, both in the making and in the unmaking. Someday, of course, our kids will ask where we were on 9/11 when the towers fell, just as people in my parents' generation remember where they were when Kennedy was shot. But someday, our kids will want to know about what it was like living with the prospect of nuclear war, knowing that there were so many people in the world living in a completely different sort of society. I was ten when the Berlin Wall fell, but I knew then, even as a kid, that it was a Really Big Deal.

One of my favorite songs comes from the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which takes the story of the fall of Communism and, in particular, the fall of the Berlin Wall, to a whole new level. It's a song about changing your mood by changing your outer persona, becoming on the outside who you want to be on the inside. The entire show revolves around a character who wants to leave East Germany, and in order to do so, has a (botched) sex change operation in order to marry an American soldier he's in love with. Then the wall comes down, and everything s/he's done to change his/her life gets put in a different perspective. See the show, or the movie, if you get a chance, because it is awesome.

A satisfying ending

Three things:

I finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem yesterday. At nearly 900 pages, plus fifty pages of appendices, it took longer than most books I've read recently. It was also the sort of book that I wanted to think about as I read, since so much of it involved really interesting philosophy and mental experiment.

The basic plot involves a different world, with interesting characters and an amazing storyline. The main character goes through a series of revolutions in the size of his world (so to speak), and each time his world expands it begins with a denouement of sorts. I absolutely loved just about every minute of reading the book - I'd forgotten how much I liked Neal Stephenson, maybe, so I am thinking I might go pick up the Baroque Cycle since I haven't read that yet. Anathem is highly recommended to anyone who likes to read, and it's a bonus for those who like science fiction and fantasy or who like playing with words in their head or those who like philosophy of science. Absolutely fantastic, and when it ended I was very sad, because I'd grown to love the characters and the story so much.

Today, we went to see The Men Who Stare At Goats, which was pretty much big dumb fun, with a bit more intelligence than big dumb fun movies usually are. George Clooney and Jeff Bridges got to reprise parts of the roles I've always thought they both had most fun playing (Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother Where Art Thou and The Dude from The Big Lebowski, respectively). Ewan MacGregor is in it as well, and it's definitely worth a matinee price to see it in the theater, though I'm sure it will be just as good on DVD. Overall, it was quite silly and entertaining while being well-acted and a bit unusual at the same time.

And tonight, the season finale of Mad Men, about which I can say nothing but DAMN was that ever good. WOOOOO! Now we have to wait until next summer to find out what happens. ARGH.

The last of Barrett's Privateers

In April of 2001, right around the time I started chatting with Dan online, I went to Toronto to visit some friends who lived there and to explore a new city (and a new country, I guess). One night while I was there, I was out with my friend Mike and some of his friends, and after dancing for a few hours in a club-type place we went somewhere a little more quiet to have a drink and wind down.

We ended up in what I think was an Irish pub in a well-to-do part of town. I ordered a hard cider and my friend and his buddies had beer, and we were happy to learn that there was a live band playing. Near the end of my drink, the band started playing a song that somehow, everyone in the bar knew, and every person in there (except me) began to sing along. It was a rollicking sea-chanty sort of song, and by the end I had gotten a bit of the chorus, and I happily clapped along to the beat. When it was over, everyone applauded and cheered the band. I asked my friend the next day what that had all been about, and he explained to me that the song, "Barrett's Privateers," was one all Canadians seemed to know. The song was originally written by Stan Rogers, a well-known (in Canada) folk singer. I had liked it so much that I bought a Stan Rogers CD in a record store while I was still there, and then after I met Dan I played it for him a time or two. He liked it enough to buy a copy of the CD for himself, so when we moved in together we had two copies of it. Anyhow, we're both fans of Stan Rogers, who died tragically in an airplane accident in 1983.

Tonight, we were out to dinner at a local place called the Irish Snug with Scarlett, which is only a few blocks away. They have terrific French fries and Strongbow hard cider on tap. While we sat on the patio, amazed that less than 2 weeks ago there was a foot of snow on the ground yet it was nice enough tonight to sit outdoors to eat, inside was an Irish folk singer, accompanied by quite a few tipsy people. The longer we sat there, the more he sounded like Stan Rogers, and at one point I remarked to Dan, "If he starts singing 'Barrett's Privateers' I'm going to wonder if Stan Rogers has come back from the grave." Scarlett didn't know who Stan Rogers was, so we told her about him, and I kept thinking that the guy inside sounded just like him.

When it came time to pay, the server was nowhere to be found, and we were getting cold, so we went inside to find her, only to stop and listen to the folk singer for a while. He even had a some songbooks with the sing-along parts in bold, and quite a few people were enjoying singing to the chorus.

I picked up one of the books and leafed through to find the song he was playing and sing along, only to notice that "Barrett's Privateers" was one of the songs in his songbook! I showed it to him, and he agreed to sing it for me. I sang along, knowing most of the words by heart, and the rest of the drunkards joined in on the chorus and clapped along to the sea-chanty beat.

I'll never get to hear Stan Rogers sing, but I had the next best thing tonight at the Irish Snug in Denver.

You can hear the entire song here or watch Stan sing part of it here.

Friday Faff: Because everything else is so sad

Man, the past week or two have been pretty awful on the general scale of people's inhumanity to one another. This week in particular has made my heart hurt.

So, because I don't want to focus on the negative, here's some faffiness that helped keep me from offing myself:

Wombat is walking! And I wish I could be there to see it.

Spats Turkey has teeth!

Dan made some awesome drawings and wrote exactly what I wanted to say about what happened in Maine.

Why I always read the recipe before I begin

When I was in college, I lived in a student run co-op house for two years. It was a great arrangement; your rent went for room and board and in exchange you had to spend a few hours a week working at some assigned task. The house I lived in had 27 residents; it was one of the smallest in the UC Berkeley co-op system.

Breakfast and lunch in the house I lived in were on one's own. There was plenty of food available that one could prepare for oneself, and a full industrial-sized kitchen. But six nights a week, dinner was prepared for the residents who would be around. Each semester, the occupants of my house would vote on when dinner would be served (generally this revolved around when the local Fox network was airing The Simpsons), and to be a cook once a week (always with a partner) was one of the best jobs one could be assigned for one's work hours. There was always a regular meal and a vegetarian option, and one could sign up to have a plate set aside if one were going to be out late and want a dinner waiting up one's return. It was a pretty good setup, all things considered.

The first semester I lived in the house, I was lucky enough to be assigned a cook shift once a week (my other shift was cleaning the oven/stovetop once a week, which sucked ass). As cooks, we had to make up and submit menus to the Kitchen Manager, who trained the cooks as needed, ordered all the food, and planned when each menus would be served. I knew how to cook, since I'd been doing it for 8 or 9 years at that point, and I had a great time trying to figure out how to turn a recipe that would normally serve five into one that would serve 25. (The answer wasn't always to multiply each ingredient by 5, btw.)

My fellow Tuesday night cook was a pretty Persian guy named Bijan, who was used to flexing his muscles and flashing his dimples to get girls to drool over him. He didn't know how to cook, but the Work Manager that year had the hots for him, so she gave him a cook shift. So Tuesdays I taught Bijan how to cook and generally made him do the chopping and other prepwork because he didn't know how to do anything else.

Cooking with Bijan was fun most of the time, but I learned over the semester that I had to kind of watch what he was doing a lot of the time, because he liked to experiment, especially when we were making something that he thought might be "improved". He had a habit of adding Chinese five spice or hoisin sauce to things that really should not have been seasoned or sauced such. One time we were making marinara sauce, and he added several tablespoons of cinnamon while my back was turned "because I thought it might make it spicy." But the most awesome time, oh, the best time, was the Cream Puff Incident.

The dinner we were making that Tuesday night was well underway, and Bijan said he wanted to make something for dessert. I tossed the cookbook at him and told him to go to town, but to read the recipe before beginning. "Of course," he said, since I thought he'd already learned his lesson from previous culinary failures. "I'm making cream puffs," Bijan declared.

Somehow I lost the coin toss and ended up whipping cream by hand with a whisk, because our house didn't have a hand mixer and neither of us wanted to clean the industrial stand mixer. So I spent 20 minutes or half an hour hand whipping the cream while Bijan made the puff parts. They went into the oven and came out a few minutes later, looking great.

Finally, my arm aching, I triumphantly finished whipping the cream for the cream puffs and they had cooled enough for each of us to try one. I cut two in half, filled the middles with whipped cream, and as we bit down on our respective cream puffs we looked at one another in horror as we realized we were eating cream-filled salt dough.

"Bijan," I said, "did you read the recipe?"

"I did!" he swore.

I looked at the recipe. It called for 1/4 teaspoon of salt. No way there was only 1/4 of a teaspoon of salt in my cream puff alone. I pointed this out to him, and he realized that he must have put in 1/4 CUP of salt, not 1/4 TEASPOON.

I do not have to tell you the huge difference putting 1/4 cup of salt in any dessert-type baked good is from 1/4 teaspoon. Needless to say, the puffs were completely inedible. I put the remains of my hand-aching hard work in the refrigerator and we served dinner without dessert.

After dinner, one of our housemates found the whipped cream and somehow decided it would be a good idea to start a whipped cream fight, so the next half an hour involved 10 or 15 people flinging the product of my labor at one another, making a huge mess. I did not assist in the cleanup, since I figured I'd done my part to aid in the fun by whipping the cream in the first place.

I never let Bijan bake anything during one of our shifts again. And that is why I always read a recipe all the way through before I start cooking or baking anything.

a moment

I have a friend that I met at the gym. Her name is also Emily, and we've made dates off and on over the past year to work out together. We walk on the treadmill or around the indoor track when the weather's bad, and we walk outside, from the gym to the park and back, when it's nice. She takes the same weights class, which is where we met.

My friend is a few years younger and in a slightly different place in her life. We come from different backgrounds and have a lot of dissimilarities, but when it's been a couple of weeks or more between workout sessions (usually because she's busy with work), I miss hanging out with her.

Today we went on a walk at lunch. The sun was out, the sky was a piercing blue. The air was cool, but we walked fast enough to stay warm and chatted about her recent trip to Tuscon and our Halloween activities and all sorts of other things. Halfway through our walk we were in the park when she looked up at a huge oak tree and said, "I've found it!"

"Found what?" I asked.

"It's my favorite tree," she said. "That is a beautiful tree."

And it was. It was still covered in giant leaves, and the colors ranged from a dark rust to orange to burnt gold to lemon to green, depending on which part of the tree you were looking at. The colors of the leaves sparkled in the sun, set off by the deep azure sky behind.

"I have a favorite tree at home," she told me. "My mom takes a photo of it this time every year and sends it to me." My friend is from Pennsylvania and usually only makes it home for Christmas each year. "I miss the colors," she said. "Colorado is great, but it's all aspens, evergreens, gold, dark green. I miss the red and orange."

I need to find myself a favorite tree.

Else the Puck a liar call

One thing that I used to do but don't do anymore is perform. Sometimes, I really miss it. My first stage experience was at age 5, my first ballet recital. After that, it was yearly ballet recitals until I got the opportunity to act in a play my mom wrote when I was in middle school (it was called, I believe, "Who kicked the bucket?") After that, I was hooked, and signed up for Drama class when I got to high school (my first opportunity to do so).

When I was a freshman, most of the drama students in the school, including the two who got all the lead parts, were girls. So the drama teacher had to find plays that could accommodate any number of girls (and the few boys she could wrangle into participating). That first year, for the big production I played the part of a French Maid in a terrible play called "Our Hearts were Young and Gay" (so chosen, I believe, because there were two main characters - both female - and almost no male parts).

My sophomore year, those girls were seniors, so of course (again) the big play had two female leads. I played one of the students at the school in "The Children's Hour" and the most memorable moment of that experience was during the performance that I picked up pieces of the broken ceramic cat (part of the plot) and attempted to tape them back together, and in so doing a small shard of ceramic cut my finger, which then bled all over the stage. I clenched my fist closed during the rest of that scene, trying not to bleed all over everything, and had to clean up the stage during intermission. I still have a tiny scar from that.

I was considered an "advanced" drama student by my junior year, and even though I was unable to be in drama class (due to scheduling reasons; I think my math class was at the same time as that class or something - remember, I went to a tiny, tiny school), I was cast as Annelle in the fall/winter production of Steel Magnolias. I loved being a part of this play and can still parrot most every character's lines if I think about it. Each of the other actresses in the play was a friend of mine, or if we weren't friends before the play, we certainly were by the end. I had another memorable stage mishap during a performance; I got sick with my annual Christmas cold (you know, the cold you always get right at the start of winter break while you're in school) a few days early and ended up losing my voice on stage. Again, it was right before intermission, and so I spent the entire 20 minutes once the curtain closed desperately downing hot liquid in hopes of getting my voice back for the rest of the performance. I'm not sure how well it worked, but I still had a great time doing the show.

That spring's play was Charlotte's Web. I was SO EXCITED about doing this play. It was going to work out perfectly: my friend Mishel was trying out for Charlotte, Nancy for Fern, Laura for Templeton, and I was going to be Wilbur. We even all rehearsed and auditioned together. It was in the bag, I thought. But then.

THEN

Then, the cast list was released. Mishel was Charlotte. Nancy was Fern. Laura was Templeton. And I? I was LURVY. Wilbur went to a sophomore who looked, no joke, like a pig. Talk about typecasting. I was PISSED. I was PISSED AS HELL, after years of playing crappy parts because those two girls and their cronies got all the good parts, after Losing My Voice during Steel Magnolias and still finishing the show, I was a junior and ALL MY FRIENDS were the main parts and it was going to be awesome. And because another girl looked like a pig, I didn't get that part.

I declined the role of Lurvy and attended one performance of the show to support my friends. I would have made a much better Wilbur.

My senior year, I was so incredibly busy with everything I was doing that I didn't even consider auditioning for the fall show. I can't even remember what it was, now. But the performance bug wouldn't leave me alone, and when I learned that the big spring production was going to be A Midsummer Night's Dream, I was sorely tempted. It was the first time my school had attempted Shakespeare. Not only that, it was my favorite of the bard's plays. The advanced Senior English teacher was also the drama teacher, and I think she felt bad for what had transpired the previous spring, because she encouraged me to audition for the show. I figured that since I wasn't in the drama class (again, scheduling conflict) and since I had about 10 other extracurriculars going on, not to mention it being my most difficult year academically, I auditioned for one of the small fairy parts - Peaseblossom, maybe. During the audition, one of my friends wanted to try out for First Fairy and she asked me to read Puck opposite.

I thought nothing more of it until the cast list was posted, and I was given the part of Puck (half the performances) and First Fairy (half the performances), my friend and I sharing both parts. My gast was flabbered.

Despite my incredibly busy schedule, I thrived during rehearsals of this show. It helped that there were finally boys involved, so our practices weren't just estrogen fests, and the experience of trying to learn Shakespeare lines while blocking and staging and dancing and singing and, you know, acting, was a fantastic challenge. I loved every minute of it, though I was exhausted pretty much all the time and getting about 5 hours of sleep a night what with all the academic stuff and the other extracurriculars I was doing. Most of the cast were my friends, and we all got even closer during all our preparations. As Puck, I had an awesome costume with really fun makeup and had the real stump of a redwood tree to sit on during much of the show. I got splinters in my butt, but I didn't care.

I only got to be Puck twice (and First Fairy twice); four performances for all the months of hard work, and when I delivered the final speech for the last time, I was nearly in tears. It had been an amazing experience, and I still remember the final speech:

If we shadows have offended
Think but this and all is mended
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear
And this weak and idle theme
No more yielding than a dream
Gentles, do not reprehend
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue
We shall make amends 'ere long
Else the Puck a liar call
So goodnight unto you all
Give us these hands if we be friends
And Robin shall restore amends

Pumpkins scream in the dead of night

Somehow we got invited to two different Halloween parties this year; one a huge event that was attended by hundreds of people at a Masonic temple, and one that was a house party with a theme of The Future.

The first party was last weekend, and we dressed up in the same costumes we had from my birthday party back in March: the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. Sadly, the party wasn't as fun as I'd hoped. The most entertaining thing about it was looking at everyone else's costumes. It was an alcohol-free event, which wasn't so much a problem as there also wasn't much to do other than stare at everyone else. There were some pagan rituals and a band played for a little while and some booths were set up in one place where you could buy standard Ren Faire crap. I was impressed with quite a few of the costumes, and there were about 5 other Mad Hatters there. Plus, we found an Alice.

The second party was on Saturday night. We spent some time at the thrift store, got some fabric, some yarn, and some other supplies, and I knitted Dan a cunning hat and sewed myself up a costume. Then, on Saturday, I spent a couple of hours preparing my hair, since I knew the only way I could get curls to stay for more than a few minutes would be zulu knots, something I hadn't done in years.





Dan made a stencil and painted himself up a Blue Sun tshirt.

I sewed a dress quite a bit like the ones I made for the bridesmaids in our wedding, only I made a long, a-line skirt. My hair was up and curly, I invested in some fake eyelashes and liquid eyeliner, and we went off to the party as Inara Serra and Jayne Cobb from Firefly.

This party was, in a word, awesome. The hosts had spend over a month decorating the entire downstairs of the house, each room in a different theme: the 1950s silver and lights, the post-apocalyptic, when nature takes back over, the mad scientist, the bat room, and (my favorite) the 2001 room, complete with Hal and a monolith in the middle and an animatronic Elvis. Everyone who attended was be-costumed, and there were some mighty impressive ones. The hosts were characters from Alien. Our friends who had invited us dressed as characters from From Dusk Till Dawn. There was a Miss Galaxie 1959, a Buy N Large citizen from Wall-E, Dr. Who, some Terminators, and Dan and I even found some Two By Two Hands of Blue from the same show as our costumes. We had so much fun, especially since all the attendees had made a concerted effort to not only dress up but think of something that went with the theme of the party. Also, the hosts are artists and photographers, and they had a photography studio set up in their basement to take photos of all the attendees. You can see the full set here.









A good time was had by all.

Blop III: The Bloppening

It's November.

We have internet at home, and no plans to travel anywhere we won't have internet access. So I'll be writing at least one post every day in November. I'm actually pretty excited about it, since it'll force me to get out of my blogging rut.

I'll be writing about all sorts of things, continuing my scanned photo series, and taking/posting photos. It's going to be a good month, methinks.

Wish me luck!

Hello, snow.

You have not been gone long enough for me to miss you.

It is October. It is not even Halloween yet. However, you are here, so much so that I walked to and from work with you falling on my head in the space of two hours this morning. "Go home," they said. So I did.

Snow, I understand that you are useful and necessary to the health and well-being of the state. The farmers need you to fall so they have enough water for crops next year. The mountains need you to bring tourists who will spend lots of money while they're here for ski or snowboard vacations. I even love you, sort of, because you allow for us to go snowshoeing and to pelt each other with snowballs and to make snowmen. You make everything beautiful for a few hours or even a few days. You quiet the city, muffling everything. You look pretty when you fall, sometimes, especially the ploofy kind of you.

However, I must object to your early arrival this year. I wasn't finished with autumn yet. I admit, I have been kind of dreading you this year, and there was all sorts of evidence over the past month that you'd be showing up sooner rather than later. But damn, snow. Damn. October 27 (because you began last night, although you also showed up briefly last week, so I guess I could call it mid-late October) is before there should be snow. We haven't even ended Daylight Saving Time yet. (I am going to be soooo bummed when we do, I mean, seriously, why can't we stay on DST all year? We're on "standard" time for less of the year than we are "saving" time, so what makes that standard? I hate short days and no light. Harumph.) It's not Time Yet for snow days and slushy slurry that I have to wade through on my way to work and heavy clompy boots and thick coats. It's time for pumpkins and leaves blowing around and tights with skirts. It's time for pears and squash and candy corn. Snow means Christmas and New Year's and and and...

You're not listening, snow. Here I am, trying to be reasonable. If you could just hold off until maybe Thanksgiving, maybe, it would be allowable. You're early, snow. I'm not ready to think about all the things that you bring in your wake.

It's days like this that I miss California the most.

The Next

Some people are planners.

Some people have ideas, when they are young, about who they want to be and what they want to do by a certain age. I knew people in high school who had already mapped out exactly what their lives would be, and knew even more in college who were the same way. People who would be married by 22, have a kid by 25, be finished with childbearing by 30 ("I want to be a young mom!"). People who would go to graduate school and start on the high-paced career track of an investment banker or corporate lawyer. People who were going to graduate, join the Peace Corps, and work for a multinational NGO making the world a better place.

I have never been that person. I am not a planner. When I was a kid, I was scared shitless of growing up. I remember being in 8th grade PE and thinking that when it became the year 2000 I'd be 20 years old! About to turn 21! My god, I was going to be ancient.

Now, I always had goals, things I worked toward. I got the best grades I possibly could, got into the school I wanted to attend, and even got excellent grades (freshman year Chemistry excepted) there, in case I ever wanted to go to grad school. But by the time the year 2000 rolled around, I had been in school continuously for 18 years. (That is not a typo. I started preschool in January of 1981, before I was even two years old.) And I had no idea what I wanted to study in graduate school, or even if I really wanted to go. So I didn't. I went to Europe, and then the dotcom bust happened, and then I started working.

I was never, however, the sort of person who had age goals. When I met Dan at age 22 I was nowhere near the mindset of wanting to get married anytime soon. Our long-distance relationship worked well for me, until it didn't, so I moved. Living in sin worked well for both of us, until eventually we decided that we wanted to get married, so we did.

Internet, we have a next, now. We have plans. We have things we want to do and goals we want to achieve, and in a way it's a little bit scary, but in a way it's also exciting. The first major goal was for Dan to finish school and finish his internship. Now that's accomplished, and we're working on Stage 2 of our Master Plan. It's taking longer than we thought. I've written before about how patience is not one of my virtues, and Stage 2 is not the sort of thing that has a specific time frame - it will happen when it happens, that Stage 2, and not until it happens.

But I want it NOW. I want these things to happen, I want Next to be Now. The last couple of months have been frustrating for me, primarily because I've been looking forward to what's next for a long time, and Next isn't Now yet. In the last week or two, I decided that it's not going to do me any good not to enjoy what is Now. So I'm taking photos of the fall, and we're going to parties, and last-minute road trips. Things we can only do Now.

And hopefully, before I know it, the Next will happen. And then it'll be Now. And that will be good.

Last-minute road trip, part 4: Old, Older

Sunday we had two main goals: to see the rest of the missions in San Antonio, something I'd never done, and to visit Natural Bridge Caverns, something I hadn't done in many years and thought Dan would enjoy.

The day started off with a rainy breakfast of donuts, babybel cheese, and a giant shared peach in the car, and we found our way to the first mission, Mission Concepcion.

Unfortunately, I didn't get any photos of this mission, but there wasn't a lot to see - the main church part, the best preserved of the four, was closed for renovation, but we did poke our heads into some of the other rooms. Mass had just been held.




We made our way south to the next mission, Mission San Jose. This mission was by far the largest and most complete of the four we saw, and we were able to explore quite a bit, though mass started right after we got there so we didn't get many photos inside the church. My favorite part was the still-functional mill. It continued to rain and my shoes and pants got soaking wet.









Next, we hit Mission San Juan Capistrano, where (again) Mass was being conducted inside the little church. We explored a bit but it wasn't as big or extensive as the previous mission and there wasn't much new to see - other than a priest in vestments going around the side of the building to pee. The lawn was full of giant starlings taking advantage of the rain to eat whatever worms came up out of the ground.



Finally, we arrived at Mission Espada. I really enjoyed this one, partly because the Friary is still used by the Church, partly because they were having a festival out front and I could tell the mission was a big part of the local community. We peeked our heads into the church and walked around a bit but the best part was getting lunch from the stands selling gorditas and aguas frescas. I think the turnout wasn't quite what they had expected, given all the rain, but it was still festive.



Pants and shoes soaked, bellies full, we headed north to the Natural Bridge Caverns and took the original tour through the caverns, seeing all kinds of interesting formations, and going through back passages because some of the rooms on the normal tour were flooded due to all the rain. I wasn't able to get the photos I really wanted to, due to the low light available, but I think I got a few good ones. My favorite part of the tour took us back up from the lowest point we were able to go, and when we got up to the top and looked down it was like seeing something out of Lord of the Rings: being in the mines of Moria or the caves that the army of the dead live in.







It was really, really wet inside the caverns, but since my shoes and pants were already soaked it didn't matter much.

Last minute road trip, part 3: The search for Dan's Bike

On Saturday we drove to San Antonio and had lunch with my Aunt Edy. I was so glad Dan got to finally meet her, though sadly her dementia/memory loss is much worse than the last time I saw her. We told her about how we met and that we were married about 6 or 8 times, and heard the same five stories about her life several times. But it was nice to see her and I kept thinking about what a neat life she's had these past 90 years.
Hello, cleavage.

After that, we drove to downtown San Antonio and found $5 parking, then walked around the Mexican Market, by a big church with dead people in it, and up to the Alamo, where, sadly, Dan's bike was not to be found. I hadn't done these things since I was a kid, and being in the Mexican market especially brought back memories for me - everything looks the same, though I doubt they were selling Lucha Libre masks back in the early 90s.



I had one of these paper flower wreaths with ribbons for YEARS.






They showed dead people (for a whole year!)

Sadly, the Alamo has no basement.

The only blue sky/sun we saw for the entire trip. It lasted about an hour.



When we'd had our fill of downtown, we headed north to my aunt's house in New Braunfels. We had the garage door code, had directions to access the key, but had neglected to ask how to turn the water on - sadly, we discovered it was off in a less-than-ideal circumstance. But I got to show Edy's house and yard and stuff to Dan, which was kind of awesome, and also a little bit creepy to be staying in her house with nobody else around. I even half expected her old dog to bark at us every time we came through the door, even though he's been dead for many years now.

We managed to find our way to a grocery store (HEB) and went to dinner at the Gristmill in Gruene (pronounced Green), home of the oldest dance hall in Texas. Some sort of art and wine festival was going on, so the town was crowded, but we didn't have to wait too long for a table.

After dinner, we drank wine and played strip Gin. And we discovered that at some point, someone had bought a digital converter box, because the TV actually worked, sort of.