Pantalones Del Fuego

Another year, another year-end meme

2009-12-30T13:18:00.003-07:00

1. What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before?

I did all the flowers for a big fancy evening hotel June wedding, all by myself. Yay!

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I made a few last year, but I'm not going to go into that. I think in 2010 I'll be a little more go-with-the-flow.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Jive Turkey gave birth to Sadie Rose Turkey. That was pretty awesome. Two of my cousins had their fourth and third babies, respectively.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Yes. Petra Cat Kitty died on December 10. That sucked major ass.

5. What countries/places did you visit?

January: Went to NYC and Connecticut, adding two new states (for me).
March: California (Bay Area and LA)
May: California
July: Road trip through Wyoming to Yellowstone, and through Montana on the way back (one new state)
August: Traveled around CO for work; went on a weekend mountain-climbing adventure near Aspen.
October: Road trip to Austin and San Antonio, TX, adding Oklahoma to my new state list.
December: Road trip to CA through Utah and Nevada both ways, though we took different routes (the way back was mostly Nevada and Wyoming)

No other countries. :(

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

A new job in a new state. And a fetus.

7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Obama being sworn in as the president in January was a pretty momentous occasion. Dan graduated in May, so that was pretty good. June 6 was the big wedding I did flowers for. And Petra died on December 10.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Ever-so-slowly learning patience. Also, my little sister and I exchanged teachable Christmas presents: I taught her to knit and she (re-)taught me to drive stick. I plan to actually get good at driving my own car in 2010. Also, with the exception of a small car loan nearly paid off, I became debt-free.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Same as last year (the lack of new job and losing camera), only this time I lost the camera out of my backpack here in Denver.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Thankfully, no, not really. I had a couple of minor colds and some annoying neck pain flareup, but that was about it.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

I didn't buy a lot. We mostly tried to save money and pay off debt. But I found a pair of walking shoes on our recent trip to California that I am thoroughly smitten with and think they'll probably last me a long, long time.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

I don't know if behavior is the right term, but Dan finishing his degree was hella awesome.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

Sarah Palin. Several other "celebrities."

14. Where did most of your money go?

Paying off debt, savings, and vet bills.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

My 30th birthday in March. And doing the flowers for that wedding.

16. What song will always remind you of 2009?

Vampire Weekend, "M79"
Beyonce, "Single Ladies"

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? Sadder for several reasons.
b) thinner or fatter? Fatter. Feh.
c) richer or poorer? We have a lot more in savings, so definitely richer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Travel. Swimming. Wedding flowers. Being content with where I am and not being so impatient about The Next.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

TV watching. We got cable and we have a pretty TV and it's so hard not to take advantage of it.

20. How did you spend Christmas?

With my family in California.

21. Did you fall in love in 2009?

I fell more in love with Dan. 21 months of marriage and we haven't killed each other yet, woohoo!

22. What was your favorite TV program?

Mad Men. Glee.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

I try not to hate. It hurts the hater more than the hate-ee.

24. What was the best book you read?

I read a lot more books than I ever wrote about on here (including three in the last couple of weeks) but I think my favorite was Anathem by Neil Stephenson.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Dan discovered and shared a lot of new music with me this year, much of it local (the Hollyfelds). For some reason in 2009 I got interested in music again. I'd even heard of most of the music at that fateful awards show where Kanye got up on stage while Taylor Swift was accepting an award. Also, I realized I like Lady Gaga. She is wicked talented.

26. What did you want and get?

More social opportunities. We have become friends with quite a few people that we only knew tangentially last year. Having parties to go to is fun!

27. What did you want and not get?

More than I'll go into here. Best not to end the year on a downer note!

28. What was your favorite film of this year?

I don't know if I could choose a favorite. We saw so many good movies this year! The ones that stand out in my mind include Star Trek, Up, Away We Go, and Where The Wild Things Are.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I had a tea party where people dressed up in costume or wore mad hats, and I gave the attendees unbirthday presents. I was 30 years old. My sisters dressed as tea bags, which was awesome.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Petra not getting sick and dying.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?

A hot mess.

32. What kept you sane?

Dan, and liquor, once again!

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

I don't know if anyone really tickled my fancy this year.

34. What political issue stirred you the most?

GLBT rights (again).

35. Who did you miss?

I missed everyone in California from May until I got to see them again in December. I'm never going that long without a visit home again.

36. Who was the best new person you met?

Wombat

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009.

Patience is a virtue, and I often forget to just enjoy what is.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

"It's going to take a little time
While you're waiting like a factory line"
--Vampire Weekend, M79

So, we went to California...

2009-12-29T09:42:00.004-07:00

Hello, internet!

So...we kind of got in the car on Monday the 14th and stayed overnight in a $30 fancy-ish hotel room right off the strip in Vegas and then ended up in the Bay Area on December 15th. I so, so, so needed the break - having not been to California since May, I was extremely homesick. And we both needed to get out of town and away from our sad, Petra-less house. The drive out was relatively uneventful, the first day of which I spent approximately ten hours finishing a knitted giftmas present for my sister and her husband. We did not, as one might expect, gamble, or do anything other than eat and crash in our hotel room in Vegas.

The trip was exactly what I was hoping for - evenings spent visiting with friends and family, days spent visiting our Berkeley and San Francisco haunts. We spent an entire day in San Francisco on the 17th, topped by an awesome dinner at a Burmese restaurant with Monkey, up in NorCal for work. We slept. We attended birthday parties and threw parties of our own (complete with rockin' mamas and wombats); I baked cookies in one sister's kitchen for the other sister's first hosted extended family gathering in their new house. We met new doggies and patted old ones; we got loved up by Linus and drooled on by toddlers and saw some live bluegrass and had actual facetime with so many of the people I love most in the world.

It wasn't a white Christmas. It was green, and sunny, and warm-ish. It only rained on us once. We had sushi; we played games; we went to the movies (Avatar!) and slept in four different houses and opened presents and VACATED. And when it was time to pack up the car, late on Christmas Day, I was ready to come back to Denver, recharged for another little while. The trip back was also uneventful, and we spent most of both days driving listening to Alice Sebold read The Lovely Bones via downloadable audiobook. Dan picked up Loki yesterday and last night the three of us slept in our bed, still missing our sweet girl, but happy to be back together as a little family again.

Ten Good Things about Petra

2009-12-10T11:33:00.004-07:00

1. Due to her origins as a rescued, injured, shelter kitty, we never knew what Petra's breed was. It's possible she was a ragamuffin or a British shorthair - she had a round, pumpkin-faced look, and the softest, thickest fur I ever felt on a cat. She was black and white, but not like most black and white cats. When you saw her fur in the sun, you saw how true black and true white she was - no hidden stripes underneath. She felt like a rabbit when you petted her, and was incredibly docile - she let us hold her like a baby, hold her upside down, and she enjoyed being petted backwards. Petra had perfect kitty eyeliner, a black nose with a tiny pink spot, and black freckles on her white front legs.

2. Petra was a fighter. Despite all odds, at around 8 weeks of age she managed to survive either an attack by an animal or a run-in with a car long enough for someone to find her and rescue her, and for the shelter to remove her leg. The vet who cared for her liked her so much she fostered Petra herself until she was well enough to be adopted out. Then, when she swallowed the needle, the only indication we had that anything was wrong was a couple of days of coughing like she had a hairball and a recurring respiratory infection. As soon as the needle was out, she was back to her normal self again. In this final illness, she lived longer than either of us expected, and even rallied a couple of times toward the end before her final decline.

3. Petra loved to sit in the sun and watch the birds and squirrels outside - we called it the kitty show. She made little "excited, want to hunt" meeshing noises whenever she saw something really interesting, whether it was something on the Kitty Show or a moth or other bug inside or a reflection of light on the wall. Seeing Petra get excited about something was one of my favorite things, ever.

4. From the very first time we met her, it was obvious that Petra loved Dan the most. When she was a kitten, she had a habit of sitting on Dan's chest at 4 AM, purring and making biscuits, and giving him head butts. Dan called it "morning lovey time." The first time we left her for a few days, when we came back, the first night she woke him up with lovey time about 6 times. Her habits revolved around getting Dan to pay attention to her, and he was the one who could calm her down best when she had scary phantom-limb pain episodes.

5. Petra was very particular about things she liked and things she didn't like. Sitting on laps: bad. Throw rugs on the floor: good. She was never much of a talker or vocalizer but there were a few things she said that were unlike the way any other cat said them (brrt moo brrt, for example). The last six months or so, most of what she said was moo. The loudest we ever heard her vocalize was on car trips to and from Dan's parents' house - man, did she ever hate that, and she let us know about it.

6. Our kitty had a great talent for fitting herself into unusual places, whether that be sitting on spiky box lids or finding hiding places where nobody would think to look. Last Christmas we stayed up at Dan's parents' house for several days, so of course we brought the cats with us. When it was time for us to leave, we managed to corral Loki into his carrier pretty quickly, but we couldn't find Petra. We looked in all her usual hiding spots and everywhere else we could possibly think of, multiple times. We knew she couldn't have gotten outside, so we were pretty much at a loss. Finally, I found her hiding up inside an old desk; she had squeezed through a little hole and crawled up behind one of the desk drawers. I don't know how she managed it, but her hour+ of run-around was that much longer that she didn't have to be in the cat carrier.

7. One of the most important things to Petra was cleanliness. She insisted on bathing herself multiple times a day - up to 10 times, maybe, on some days. She also bathed Loki quite frequently; I think part of the reason why he is so soft is because she gave him baths. Bathing was like a meditation for her and sometimes she'd fall asleep right in the middle of one.

8. Along with the cleanliness issue came a distaste for just about anything that she thought smelled bad. If Petra smelled so much as a molecule of poop or old food or something else she deemed offensive, she'd cover it up with the nearest throw rug or piece of paper. We often came out in the morning to find one of the living room throw-rugs folded over because something on it didn't smell right to her.

9. Because she didn't have her left back leg, Petra would often sit with a glazed look on her face, stump twitching, when her left ear itched. Every time we noticed it we told her that she didn't have that leg, and we'd give her an ear skritching.

10. Petra was all about making good trades. She gave us a trick and we gave her treats. We gave her pets and she gave us purrs; it was the best trade we could imagine and we always felt we were getting the better end of the deal. The last few weeks while she'd been so sick, Petra never purred, even when we were petting her, so we knew she didn't feel well. This morning, after we'd made the appointment to bring her in, both of us sat next to her, petting her in all the best places. After a few minutes, she started to purr. It was the best thing she could have given us.

Read more about Petra here.

Radio silence

2009-12-07T15:52:00.003-07:00

This past week has been a scary roller-coaster ride of emotions, primarily when it comes to the cat. She went in for a vet visit on Wednesday and her kidneys were smaller and she'd gained a little weight, which seemed like promising signs. The labs came back on Thursday and the tiny bit of hope we had was dashed to pieces, as they told us that her kidney function has declined significantly (again). (We did manage to get rid of her e.coli infection, so that's something I suppose). She didn't eat much on Thursday or Friday and was lethargic and disoriented, so we had some friends over for dinner to say goodbye to her, since what we were doing, pallative-care wise, seemed not to be doing much for her anymore. She did eat a little bit of rotisserie chicken on Friday, but we didn't have high hopes that she'd ever do much getting out of the little nest she made for herself on the couch.

On Saturday we talked about our options, and made some plans for her end-of-life care that would have put Loki at Dan's parents' house, us in the car driving to California, and Petra in the ground this Thursday. We watched with tears in our eyes as Loki bathed her and kept her warm in her little couch nest. Sunday we saw Dan's parents and asked if we could bury her at their house, and then we went to the same Christmas tree farm as last year and found our Charlie Brown tree. When we got home, Petra seemed more energetic and far less disoriented than she had in days. She actually looked and acted like herself again, going so far as to do her trick for kitty treats eight times in a row last night, eating and drinking, using the litter box, and stretching out on the throw rug in the kitchen. She even begged for some chicken from my dinner plate as I was sitting next to her couch nest while eating last night, something she'd never done before.

The only thing we can think of is that she's rallying a bit thanks to several days of prednisalone treatment, a steroid we're giving her to help control her kidney inflammation. It won't make her better in the long-term but I guess in the short-term it's helping her feel a little better. The form of cancer she has is very aggressive and cats don't tend to live very long; she's already outlived the 4-6 weeks generally cited.

So now we don't know what to do. We want her to have as much good quality of life as we can. We know now for sure that it's renal lymphoma so she doesn't have very much longer at all, and we're (for the most part) at peace with that. But how do you know when is the right time to say goodbye?

So how is Petra?

2009-11-30T20:12:00.004-07:00

Monkey asked a few days ago how Petra was (in response to my "things I am thankful for" post, I believe, where I wrote "healthy pets").

The thanks I was giving was for Loki being healthy. Petra is still sick, and while we have been treating her for a serious e.coli infection, which it's possible it's all she has (and if that is the case, she'll have cheated death 3 times!), it's not likely. She's rallied a bit and put some weight back on now that we've been giving her lots of wet food and kitty treats. The past few days it's been cold, and Petra never acts like she feels very good when it's cold outside. She's always been kind of standoffish in the winter; we think the cold makes her stump hurt. So it is difficult to tell how much of it is that and how much is that she doesn't feel good because she's sick.

We have been continuing to give her subcutaneous fluids and antibiotics and a potassium goop shot into her mouth via large syringe (which she Does Not Like), and recently added a 1/4 tablet of Pepcid AC to help keep her stomach feeling OK so she doesn't puke up as much water. There has still been some troubling behavior, and she finishes the current round of antibiotics on Wednesday, so that's when she'll be going back in to the vet for a recheck.

There is a test that will tell us definitively whether or not Petra has cancer. It is very, very expensive and invasive and is something we just aren't willing to put her through. Because if she does have it, all we'd do is continue what we are doing. And if she doesn't, she'll get better.

The in-between is really frustrating, though. Our holiday travel plans (which we hoped would include going out to California for Wombat's birthday and staying through Christmas) are still on hold until we know more for sure. Neither of us wants to leave a very sick kitty, even with offers of assistance that have come from more than one place. If she doesn't have much longer, we want her to be in her own space and stressed as little as possible, not upset that her humans are gone or being in someone else's space.

I'm desperately homesick right now; we haven't been to California since May (the longest I've ever gone since moving here) and I miss my family and our friends in California fiercely. I am going to be so, so incredibly sad if we can't go for Christmas. And I feel guilty that I'm thinking about that rather than thinking about what is best for Petra. But damn, it's really hard for me right now. Good thoughts appreciated. And for any of you reading this who might reasonably expect a knitted gift from me this year, know that Petra seems to be infusing them with extra love and attention. The past two days she's been curled up in my knitting and it may never look the same.

It's always best to go when it's snowing outside

2009-11-29T22:57:00.007-07:00

Dan and I seem to make it to the zoo at least once every winter. We usually try to go when it's snowing outside, which seriously cuts down on the crowds and screaming children, but yesterday we just needed some exercise and so we decided to walk to the zoo, crowds be damned. It was actually pretty cold, so there weren't as many people as there could have been, and there were lots of cute babies and little kids.

There were also lots of animals. Here are some of the good photos I got.

Peacock looks for forbidden snacks in strollers parked outside the Tropical Discovery building.

Cheetah in repose. Usually he's pacing because there are kangaroos in the next enclosure over but they weren't out that day.

Rhino hanging out right near his paparazzi.

Same with Komodo dragon.

Polar bear feet are REALLY BIG.

Just hangin' out with his giraffe homeys.

Two-headed lion

Funny-looking bird is funny-looking

We spent a good amount of time, as we always do, in the Great Ape area. On display were the two bachelor brother gorillas (rather than the big silverback and his family) and they were amusing themselves. We spoke with a docent who volunteers in the Great Ape area, who told us a lot about the apes that we never would have known.

The Denver Zoo may not be world-class, but it's still a pretty good zoo, and, all things considered, an excellent deal. Plus, walking to and from the zoo is good exercise for us during a weekend of sloth and gluttony!

Loki loves Petra

2009-11-28T17:22:00.003-07:00

Petra decided to hang out with my knitting on the couch, where she almost never goes. Loki decided to hang out with Petra.

How to process a pumpkin: a pictorial essay

2009-11-27T19:07:00.009-07:00

Materials you will need:

1 sugar pumpkin (not the kind you carve)
1 knife
1 cutting board
1 9x13 pan
aluminum foil
oven
large spoon
colander
food processor
cheesecloth

Preheat oven to 400F.

1. Using big knife, cut pumpkin in half across the middle.

2. Scoop out seeds using your hands or a spoon. If you want to keep them, do it over a colander under running water. Separate the seeds from the strands, rinse, and place on a cookie sheet to dry for a day.

3. Use a spoon to scrape out as many of the strings as you can. It's not a big deal if you can't get them all.

4. Place pumpkin halves flesh-side down in the baking pan and add about 1/4 inch of water to the bottom of the pan. Cover with aluminum foil and roast for 45-60 minutes or until flesh is soft when poked with a fork. Let cool.

before

after

5. When pumpkin halves are cool enough to handle, use large spoon to scrape soft flesh from rind. Put 1/4 of the flesh in the food processor at a time. Process until very smooth (the consistency of baby food). Add processed pumpkin to a bowl and repeat until all the pumpkin is pureed.

6. Cut a length of cheesecloth big enough to create a pouch, making sure you have several thicknesses layered on top of one another. Place square of cheesecloth over a colander and spoon some of the pumpkin into the middle.

7. Gather cheesecloth up over pumpkin puree and make a little sack with your hands. Use your hands to massage and squeeze as much water as you can out of the pumpkin without squeezing flesh out the holes in the cheesecloth. This may take a while.

8. Put now-dry pumpkin puree into a different bowl.

9. Repeat steps 8 and 9 until all pumpkin has been dehydrated. (If you aren't in a hurry, you can spread all the pumpkin over cheesecloth in a colander in the sink and let it sit for several hours so the water runs out. I am not that patient.)

10. Voila! You now have at least one pumpkin pie's worth of fresh pumpkin mush. You can rinse out and reuse the cheesecloth for another project. It will dry in a short amount of time and be only slightly orange.

Coming soon: making pumpkin pie from scratch.

(All photos by Dan except the one of the pumpkin seeds, which I took.)

Twenty years later

2009-11-26T22:18:00.005-07:00

Not long after we moved into the new house in the 'dale, Laurel turned three right around Thanksgiving. We didn't know many people her age in town, so most of the party guests were Lissa's friends, the neighbor kids, and their cousins.

L-R Kid, Laurel, Kid, Me, Kid, Lissa, Kid
Also, I just want to point out that whoever took the photo managed to get every one of our faces in shadow! hee.

Mostly I remember that the kids spent a good portion of the party jumping in leaf piles in the backyard. What's a better activity than that?

Happy birthday, little sister. May every birthday be as carefree as that one 20 years ago was.

Things for which I am thankful

2009-11-26T19:28:00.002-07:00

Good food

Healthy family and friends

Healthy pets

Getting to see my family via webcam and say happy birthday to my little sister.

Wine

That I found jeans that fit

That I am capable of lifting 40 pound bags of cat litter

A wonderful, awesome, and loving husband

A job that pays the bills

That I get to see snow fall, and sunny skies, and rain, and everything else that makes each day different from the last

Wrangler butts drive me nuts

2009-11-25T21:24:00.003-07:00

It suddenly occurred to me last week that I had exactly two pairs of functional, fitting jeans, and one pair of pants that weren't jeans and weren't Nice Work Pants. So last weekend, we went in search of new jeans for me (and some for Dan).

Saturday's excursion was singularly unproductive. Every singe pair I tried on, everyplace we went, felt like a pair of tights made out of jean material. Now, I understand that jeans go through fashion seasons and styles just like anything else. In my opinion, jeans are comfortable pants that are acceptable to wear in public. Personally, I don't find tights made out of denim to be comfortable. I'm not "slim through hip and thigh" like every pair of jeans I tried on seemed to be. Even going up two sizes to fit the hip/thigh area created a bizarre waist gap.

Look, I'm not asking for a lot. I want a pair of jeans that look good on my ass, and aren't creating sausage casings for my legs. I want to be able to sit in them and still have circulation. I like a bootcut or flared style to help counteract my enormous calves, and a dark rinse. Once upon a time, it wasn't that hard to find what I was looking for, but Saturday was an exercise in futility. When we came home empty-handed, Dan brought up the idea of a brand of jeans I'd tried on before and never purchased, Cruel Girl.

Cruel Girl jeans are sold at the local cowboy superstore, Shepler's. So on Sunday, we went down to the cowboy store and I tried on about 89983049835 pairs of jeans in every imaginable size, shape, rise, and iteration, and at least 6 different brands. I gotta say, if you're looking for quality jeans at a decent price and a wide variety of brands, Shepler's in Denver is a good place to go. Dan managed to find a new brand of jeans he liked, too, and I found one pair that I decided I had to get. They were 30 bucks and comfy as hell. They weren't Cruel Girl, though, which I decided were just took expensive for one pair. Then, when we got home, Dan found that the brand he liked (Cinch) and Cruel Girl are made by the same company, a local company, that has an outlet in North Denver.

On Monday I took the opportunity to head down the 16th street mall and look for jeans at TJ Maxx and Cross Dress for Less. After several false starts, I found a pair that made my ass look fantastic for $20 on clearance (Seven brand!) so I bought 'em. I wore them on Tuesday, and probably should have washed them first, because they had sizing that made me itch all day and I got welts on my skin around the waistband. (They're in the wash now). And then today I had off (unpaid furlough day, and don't get me started), so we went to the outlet store that sells Cinch and Cruel Girl, and I tried on at least 20 pairs, with several I really liked, while Dan found a pair that look great on him on the clearance rack. But after buying 2 pairs of jeans already this week, and with the expense of having a Very Sick Kitty, I decided against buying any of the Cruel Girl jeans. Maybe next time.

Synchronicity

2009-11-24T21:09:00.002-07:00

Sometimes I get a kick out of little things that other people might not notice.

The other day, I was at the gym, listening to my ipod, doing a cooldown crunches/leg lifts sort of deal after the cardio workout. On my ipod was a medley of Sublime songs. As I started my 100 crunches, I thought to myself how funny it would be if the song that were on, Jailhouse, happened to play the line "Had the '89 vision" when I did crunch #89 (I count them in my head). Then I forgot about it until I got to number 80, when I realized it might happen, and then it did. I did the 89th crunch just as that line played.

It's the little things in life that make me happy.

The things I do for you, Internet.

2009-11-23T10:20:00.005-07:00

Ever since my office moved from a dank basement to the 11th floor of a building that overlooks the Capitol, I've enjoyed some of the creature comforts available. There's a little kitchenette thing that allows me to wash dishes I use, and a fridge in which to store stuff. But my favorite is the area that has somehow sprung up, like magic, at the end of the row of cubes where I sit. It's right by the window, and there's a comfy chair and an end table with a pile of free books.

I've found all kinds of entertaining trash in the free book pile, usually things I wouldn't bother to buy or check out of the library, but things about which I am curious. Like Eat, Pray, Love, for example: I got around to reading it because it was in the free pile. I've read a whole host of whodunit procedurals and other sorts of brain candy/trash in the last year, thanks to the free book pile. But on Friday, I went over to check out what was available, and lo and behold, I hit the motherlode. There, on the top of the pile, were the movie-tie-in cover versions of everyone's favorite sparkly emo vampire trash, Twilight and New Moon.

!

Internet, I never intended to read these books. I have not and would not have sought them out. I would not have borrowed them from the library or paid any amount of cash money to own them, nor would I have borrowed them from someone I know who owns them. But the siren song of the free book pile at work called to me for a reason on Friday, and I knew that I would have to take one for the team and read some sparkly emo vampire trash so that you wouldn't have to, Internet.

I find it difficult to believe that anyone out there who pays any attention to popular culture whatsoever would not know of these books. They're the biggest new thing since Harry Potter, beloved by tweens/teenage girls and middle-aged moms alike. Fans are called Twihards (or something?) and man, are there ever fans, because despite terrible reviews the movie version of New Moon, which came out this weekend, was the 3rd biggest movie opener ever. I knew there HAD to be some reason why so many people love these books, and I decided I needed to figure it out for myself.

Despite clocking in at around 500 pages, Twilight took me about 2.5 hours to read. Maybe 3. It was not the most difficult or deep material, and the plot primarily consisted of Girl Meets Boy, Girl Discovers Boy Isn't Human, Girl and Boy Pine Chastely For One Another, Fin. Which I already sort of knew, just via cultural osmosis. There wasn't anything about the writing style that drew me in. I didn't really like any of the characters very much. Bella, aforementioned Girl, is kind of a whiny melodramatic martyr-ish brat. Edward, aforementioned Sparkly Emo Vampire, is creepy and obsessive. Bella makes up her mind that she will be miserable in her new home (Forks, Washington) before she even gets there, and does everything she can to make her prediction come true. She fends off attention from friends and boys alike, then falls head-over-heels with a guy who spends the first part of their acquaintance either acting like he hates her or ignoring her completely. Later, he admits he's been stalking her to the point where he hangs out in her bedroom while she's sleeping, without her knowledge or consent. Yikes. He falls for her because she's the only person (human or otherwise) whose thoughts he can't hear; she falls for him because he's perfect and completely unattainable, sexually.

Because, yeah. They can't do it. They can barely even touch, let alone kiss. Twilight is written by someone who obviously has a large amount of experience in the "I'm so attracted to someone but we can't touch each other, we're so in love and must stay pure" area. It makes sense that Stephanie Meyer, the author, is Mormon - pious teenagers in that religion (among others; I'm sure pious Musim teens and pious Jewish Orthodox teens are the same way) don't give in to their carnal lusts. Or something. And because I assume she has a lot of experience with it, she's good at writing about it. I told Dan after I finished reading it that I could totally understand why a 12-14 year-old girl would enjoy reading a book like this. It has the perfect imaginary boyfriend: a guy who is dangerous, beautiful, and disciplined enough to look but not touch, an excellent choice for a 12-year-old who isn't ready to handle the idea of sex yet but is all about the idea of romance and love.

I'm less certain about why older women seem to like the books. Maybe because they're easy escapist fantasy, involving something marginally more interesting than Fabio's chest? Or maybe women who are too prudish to be into bodice rippers can get into what's essentially the same thing without any actual ripping bodices? I'm pretty flummoxed on this one.

New Moon was closer to 600 pages, and it took me about the same amount of time to read it. I liked it marginally better than I liked Twilight, if only because Sparkly Emo Vampire isn't in most of it (he leaves because...something something about...I dunno, it's not really explained), which makes Bella, the main character who rarely takes any action on her own, fall into a pit of despair. A few months later she pulls herself out of it, sort of, to realize that her friends don't care about her anymore and she's kind of secretly thrilled about it. Then she makes friends with another boy, with whom she seems to actually have a good relationship, until he turns into a werewolf and treats her like crap for a while. Then the vampires come back. Then SparklePire himself is going to commit suicide by Other Vampire because he thinks she's dead, even though he spent the previous six months traipsing around the world, studiously avoiding her, so she drops everything despite being begged by Wolf Dude (aka Jacob) not to go, and she flies to Italy, and saves SparklePire, and he vows he'll never leave her again.

Apparently, vampires and werewolves are Mortal Enemies so she can't be friends with Jacob and maintain a relationship with Edward. Or something. I liked New Moon better up until Stephanie Meyer decided Edward needed to be brought back into the picture. I liked Jacob until he decided that Bella couldn't be friends with her vampire friends. At least he treated her better than sparkling chiseled marble Edward ever did, and didn't hang out in her room while she was sleeping or anything. I dunno. I guess if I have to pick, I'm Team Jacob, but I don't have much intention of reading the other books (unless for some reason they show up in the free book pile at work) and honestly I can't bring myself to care that much.

So there you have it: my review of Twilight and New Moon. Now, if you've read the books and want to read the funniest review of them ever, click here.

ETA: I found another good review, and this one has visual aids!

Creep

2009-11-22T21:14:00.004-07:00

Three songs with the name "Creep" all came out around the same time when I was in high school. The most well-known is probably the Radiohead song, off their album Pablo Honey. Another is TLC's "Creep", which came out in 1994. And the one that I thought of when I told Dan that I still hadn't written a blog post today was Stone Temple Pilots' "Creep", because I had to learn the lyrics to the song one time.

It was Feb Camp, the mid-winter long weekend version of the camp I went to throughout high school, and some very talented musical friends wanted a girl voice to go with their deep masculine voices when they performed this song at the talent show. I had heard the song, but didn't know the words, so my friend Jesse wrote them down for me and I memorized them. You may know it as the "Half the man I used to be" song, since that's about all they say in the chorus.

Forward yesterday
Makes me want to stay
What they said was real
Makes me want to steal
Living under house,
Guess I'm living, I'm a mouse
All's I gots is time,
Got no meaning, just a rhyme

(Chorus)

Feelin' uninspired,
Think I'll start a fire
Everybody run,
Bobby's got a gun
Think you're kind of neat
Then she tells me I'm a creep
Friends don't mean a thing,
Guess I'll leave it up to me

(Chorus)

Man, I was totally nervous to sing in front of everybody, especially since the other people I was performing with were vastly more talented (Jesse, for example, could (and did) play NINE instruments). But we still had fun. I wish I could remember Jesse's last name, because it wouldn't surprise me if he were a professional musician these days. Alas, Google needs a bit more information than what I can pull out of my brain.

mmm cookies

2009-11-21T19:35:00.004-07:00

I started baking when I was around six years old, helping my dad (who was the cookie baker in my family) stir batter and plop it onto tiny cookie sheets that fit in our large toaster oven (we didn't have a real oven until I was 10). I started baking on my own when I was maybe 8, picking blackberries and then bringing them home to make things like blackberry cobbler. I make a mean pie crust and have been baking special birthday cakes for people since I was 17 or so. When the baking urge comes upon me, I tend to just follow it.

Today, I got the baking urge. It took me a while to decide what to bake, and was thinking for a while I might do something with nuts and chocolate (inexplicably, I have the desire to start baking some of my family Christmas cookies...and it's not even Thanksgiving yet. What gives?) Then Dan said Oatmeal Chocolate Chip and that sounded pretty good to me.

Here's an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie I made up.

1 stick unsalted butter
1 1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1.5 cups rolled oats
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375F. In a medium-sized bowl, cream together butter and brown sugar until thoroughly combined. Add vanilla and eggs, mix. Add flour, baking soda, salt, oats, and spices, mix. Add chocolate chips. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto greased cookie sheet and bake for 8-10 minutes or until cookies are set.

My favorite one for summer is cut grass

2009-11-20T13:28:00.004-07:00

They say that smells and scents are tied up with memories in a way that the other senses can't quite match, probably because the olfactory sense is a part of the limbic system. Apparently, when we're young we tie a smell to a memory of a place, a person, an event, and then when we smell it again we're transported back to the original memory.

I can say without a doubt that this is very true for me. The smell of a burning brush fire or house fire has, in the past, given me panic attacks. There's an essential oil I found one time that is linked in my mind, inexplicably, to my summer camp. Holidays have their own appropriate scents: dead leaves at Halloween, cranberries at Thanksgiving, and evergreen trees at Christmas. A few days ago I was walking home from work and smelled clove cigarettes: either the smoke from someone smoking one in the building I was passing by, or someone on the street who had smoked one earlier. I wasn't quite sure where it came from, but it brought me right back to my freshman year of high school, when my best friend at the time and the other people she hung out with smoked cloves and I hoped fervently that some adult wouldn't happen by to string me up by my toenails for even being nearby when that obviously Bad Behavior was going on. And don't even get me started on the smell of pot smoke, because I will do everything I can to get away from that.

This morning, though.

This morning, I was walking to work, and someone was walking behind me. Eventually he overtook me, passed me, and as he made his way to my left I happened to inhale. He smelled just like The Chef, the guy I dated (briefly) after College Boyfriend and I broke up and before I met Dan. I don't know what it was. The Chef usually smelled like a kitchen (after all, he WAS a chef), but after a shift he'd shower and when we'd go out he smelled like something. A shampoo? a lotion? Knowing him, it was probably some sort of Masculine Cologne or aftershave or some crap like that. I never knew what it was and I never asked him. I haven't smelled anyone else with that same smell in the many years since I last saw The Chef (at an awkward baseball game, about which Dan always teases me because I LEFT EARLY, oh, the horror, but I have tried to make it clear to him that I HAD TO GET AWAY.) I hadn't even thought about the chef in, oh, years maybe, other than to remark on the 3 good things and one Life Lesson I learned while involved with him (1. How to make my own salad dressing from scratch, 2. How to toss a skillet without needing to use a spatula or other implement, 3. How to play scrabble competitively, and Don't Date People Who Used To Have A Drug Problem And Are Also Kind of Intellectually Stunted, respectively) at various times.

One of the things I like about Dan is that he has his own smell. He doesn't cover it up with cologne or aftershave. I like the smell of his shampoo, body wash, and deoderant, plus the smell that is just Dan. When I have to travel for work, I often bring a t-shirt of his with me, one that he's worn for a day and that I can use to sleep in. It helps me sleep, having that smell with me, even though I'm alone in the room by myself. I guess I'm just weird that way.

Are there any smells for which you have strong memories, internet?

Chizina

2009-11-19T22:09:00.003-07:00

A friend of mine recently took a trip to China. The group she was with went to Beijing, Suzhou, and Shanghai, and she posted a whole crapton of photos on Facebook.

In looking through her photos, I suddenly remembered so much about that trip, things I hadn't thought of in a long time. She took photos of things we'd seen, stood places we'd stood, and she was even there at around the same time we were, only four years later. I guess we lucked out, because the weather we had was mostly decent, though it got a little chilly toward the end of the trip. My friend was snowed on for a good part of her trip!

I've never written much about that trip anywhere, and Dan's big trip report post (originally posted on our old message board) is here. You can see his flickr photo set here.

Seeing my friend's photos made me want to go back. I hope someday we will. I'd love to see Shanghai and other parts of southern China.

I wonder if he still has it

2009-11-18T21:30:00.003-07:00

The other day, I was reminded of the most bizarre thing I ever bought at a thrift store.

I was in the store with some of my friends who lived at the big house, including my college boyfriend and my friend Brett. We were shopping around for something, I'm not sure what, and then I saw it.

It...was...frightening. And also, spectacular.

It was a bra. But not just any bra. It was the largest bra I'd ever seen. I didn't think they even MADE bras that big. It was a size 48 HHH.

FORTY EIGHT TRIPLE H.

I was so fascinated with this gigantic bra that I simply had to have it. When we brought it back to the big house, we learned that the cups were large enough to fit a human head inside each one.

Here is some photographic evidence.

I have fervently hoped since that the reason the bra was at the thrift store was because the donor had lost a lot of weight, had a serious breast reduction, or both.

Sadly, I'm no longer in possession of the bra. My friend Brett loved it so much that I gave it to him.

It hung from his lamp for a few years.

The fig tree

2009-11-17T21:14:00.002-07:00

When I was a kid, our "next-door" neighbor (meaning the one who lived closest to us, about 1/4 of a mile away) had a huge orchard. I may or may not have written before about how he used to mow said orchard nekkid, wearing only boots. Anyhow, this guy was a gardener/landscaper by trade and he had an amazing array of plants and trees.

It was really quite awesome that I was allowed to sort of go wherever I wanted within a reasonable distance of our house: around the big field, into the forest beyond, up to the little hill with the creek nearby, or to play in the orchard. It was full of trees: apple, plum, orange, walnut. And there were two enormous fig trees, one that produced a purple variety and one that made green.

The green fig tree was my home away from home when I was a kid. I played in it. I built a fort there. My friends who were part of our babysitting co-op and I played GIJoe there; my sister and I climbed the tree; my cousin and I ate fig after fig after fig. We shared them with the birds, and had to look out before eating a particularly ripe fig to make sure there was no bird poop on it. The tree was gigantic; maybe the oldest and/or biggest in the area. The branches stretched out and then down to the ground, especially heavy during fruit season. This meant that there was the perfect hiding space for a few kids to play and plot and imagine.

One time, when I was maybe 7 or 8, I threw a gigantic tantrum about something and "ran away" from home. This would perhaps have worked better had we lived less than five miles from the nearest town, and even town was pretty wee. So where did I go for those two hours until I ran out of steam and deigned to come home? The fig tree, of course!

We moved away in the summer of 1989, but our neighbor still lived in his old place. The land both of our houses stood on (a cattle ranch, as I think I've mentioned) was sold to a different owner a couple of years later. For some reason, we ended up going up to the old place when I was in eighth grade, so it would have been 1991 or early 1992. I was looking forward to visiting the fig tree, as it was such a huge part of my childhood.

The house where we had lived had been gutted; all the walls removed. We peeked in the windows and saw the different floorings for the kitchen, the kids' bedroom, my parents' room. Everything looked so small. This upset me, to think that this place that had been my home was reduced to four outer walls. Then, things got more upsetting: the enormous green fig tree was dead.

Our old neighbor told us what had happened: the fig tree was so big and heavy that, despite being over 100 miles to the south, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake had caused it to split in half. The tree couldn't recover from a complete split, and died soon afterward. It was then that I really knew that you can't go home again, and things from your childhood are never the same once you grow up. Even though I was probably only 12 or 13 at the time, I felt ancient.

Petra: likes and dislikes

2009-11-16T11:38:00.005-07:00

Things Petra likes:
Dan

Sunny spots
Warm spots
Catnip
The water from a can of tuna
one particular brand/flavor of kitty treats
very small pieces of turkey bacon (sometimes)
being held
being held like a baby by Dan
throw rugs (for flopping upon)
being petted backwards
having her left ear scritched (she doesn't have the left back leg, so she can't scratch her left ear!)
licking plastic (mmmm, plastic)

sitting in unusually shaped containers
warm soft things, especially if they smell like Dan

playing in bags
playing in boxes
sitting on paper
string toys

snuggling with Loki
warm days
watching squirrels and birds on The Kitty Show (aka when the back door is open or when she climbs up in a window)

the blue chair
cushions
moths, mostly to meesh at, sometimes to hunt
reflections or flashlight or penlight on the wall

bathing Loki's head for him
seeing what Dan is doing at the kitchen counter or sink (I hold her up for this)
sniffing flowers and greens
sniffing things in general
fresh water

drinking out of the glasses that the humans are using

the bird that lives at Dan's parents' house

Things Petra tolerates:
Me
being held like a baby by me
dancing around the kitchen with me
being bossed around by Loki

Things Petra Does Not Like:
Taking pills
being jabbed with a needle every day
Flying Kitty
cold weather
being sat upon by Loki
when Loki bites her stump
when her stump has phantom limb pain
the cat carrier
riding in the car, especially on the highway
when there are no rugs to flop on
loud barking doggies
sitting on laps (she seriously Will Not Do This unless she is scared shitless)
sitting on most furniture
being on our bed

Hiking in a winter wonderland (uphill)(in the dark)(in the snow)

2009-11-15T19:16:00.002-07:00

We were invited to a friend's birthday party on Saturday night. He and his wife live in a house sort of up in the foothills outside of Boulder, and we'd never had a chance to go. Also, we knew quite a few other friends would be there, so we were excited about having some social time to take our minds off more sobering subjects.

The difficult part came when, all day Saturday, the weather went from bad to worse. It looked gross early in the day, and started snowing in the afternoon. We were still feeling OK about the idea of going to our friend's party, though, as the snow wasn't accumulating much. We had dinner early (a mock tuna casserole, made with boxed mac & cheese, lots of sauteed veggies, yogurt instead of milk/butter with the cheese packet, and some seasonings) and got ready, then were on our way.

Conditions weren't great. In fact, in some spots, it was downright difficult, even with the windshield wipers going full-speed. The snow came down harder the farther west we got, and Dan had to do some white-knuckle driving at half the normal speed limit in a few areas. Finally we made it to Boulder and headed up the appropriate highway to get to the party. We drove further and further up, and the road got worse and worse, and the snow came down and down. Finally, we arrived at the turnoff, and realized that there was no way in hell that our car was going to make it up that hill, especially with inches of snow on the road.

I knew from the directions that we were less than two miles from our friends' house, and we had our snowboots in the trunk (had not taken them out since last spring's snowshoe adventures). We wanted to go to the party. So we decided to strap on the boots and hike to the house up the road, despite it being quite dark. And despite not having a functional flashlight. And despite not knowing exactly where we were going or how far we had to go because we'd never been there before. And (and this was the clincher) despite not knowing what the road was like.

Let me tell you. We certainly got our exercise hiking up that hill. It wasn't easy, especially when cars would pass up on the way up and not even slow down, let alone stop to see if we wanted a ride. We made it past hairpin turns and steep climbs, and started to get discouraged, especially since neither of us had cellular reception (being in a big canyon). It was dark and cold and we'd been hiking for 45 minutes with no end in sight.

Luckily, just when we were thinking of turning around, someone stopped. And that someone happened to be two people who knew us from having attended many of the same parties and events, and they gave us a ride the rest of the way to the party! So we partied the night away, ate carrot cake and had tasty beverages and socialized and played Rock Band on the wii. I belted out a few tunes and rocked it on the drums, while I think Dan managed to do guitar as well over the course of the evening. He even kindly waited to sing the Rush song until I was upstairs and wouldn't be directly subjected to it.

Our friends had plenty of space and setup available for guests to stay overnight, which we chose to do rather than ask someone to drive us back to our car in the cold dark. We had a room and an air mattress (with plenty of bedding), and this morning we woke up to over a foot of snow covering everything in the canyon. I wish I'd had my bey camera with me; it was spectacularly beautiful. Eventually the birthday boy drove us down the hill to our car, and we cleared it off and drove home on plowed roads, another Colorado adventure under our belts.

3 outfits I loved when I was a kid

2009-11-14T15:54:00.003-07:00

I loved playing dress-up when I was little. (I still do.) Most of our dress-up clothes were things that had been my mom's, or things my mom had made, but some were pieces she picked up someplace or another. We had these two things that were sort of tulle or illusion-type fabric with white lace on the top, and a tie, so they could be veils or capes or shawls, things like that. I liked this one best because the lace was prettier, and in this photo I think I probably styled myself, with the three ribbons tied in my hair (because three is certainly better than one), pink, purple, and turquoise. Not sure how old I am here - six or seven, probably.

I told the story of this dog here (her name was Gracie), but please take special notice of my bright salmon-colored shirt with the cockatoo on it. I'm also wearing some kickass railroad striped black and white jeans, and white high-top sneakers (the only time I've ever worn high-tops; I sprained my ankle while I wore these regularly and never wanted to wear shoes that made my ankles weak again). This was my favorite shirt at the time, and it was most definitely the coolest one I owned in 1986.

Sometimes we got boxes of hand-me-downs from my (slightly) older cousin in San Diego, which I assume is where this Hawaiian shirt and skirt came from. If the previous outfit was cool, this was The Shit, man. And the red netting in the hair really makes it. (If you'll notice, I'm not wearing any shoes and riding my bike. This is pretty much how I rolled. This is why I have scars all over my right ankle.)

Unforgettable

2009-11-13T14:12:00.003-07:00

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

2009-11-12T08:53:00.005-07:00

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

2009-11-11T14:53:00.005-07:00

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.