Monthly Archives: January 2013

Thanksgiving and Christmas Preparations

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Catching up on the last couple months, we’ve posted some pictures from Thanksgiving and the weeks leading up to Christmas.

This Thanksgiving, for the first time ever, we used our dining area (calling it a room seems more than a tad generous) for an actual meal. This tremendous step was made possible by the removal of the kids’ train table, which Julie gave away via Craigslist. Not having babies and toddlers and their associated detritus lying around the house sure is convenient! In fact, a couple weeks ago, we also disposed of the kids’ play kitchen in the same fashion. It’s a good thing that part of our lives is behind us.

Thanksgiving weekend, Julia’s Girl Scout troop headed to Christmas in the Park to decorate a tree for the second year running. The girls did most of the decorating—with a little help from some of the younger brothers—and then we headed to Downtown Ice, an outdoor ice rink set up by downtown businesses in San José. Julia had been ice skating with her class the previous year; but Joe had never tried, and I hadn’t skated since sometime around the last ice age, so things were a bit dicey for a bit. Mostly, I held Joe’s hand as we slowly made our way around the wall at the edge of the rink.

After skating, we went out to lunch, where Julia was honored as the troop’s top cookie seller for 2012. Considering the angst having to sell candy bars door to door for the Cub Scouts engendered in me when I was Julia’s age, it was a relief to see her do so well. That’s at least one area in which she’s already surpassed me.

As the season wore on, we went on a couple outings with Pierce, one of Julia’s friends from school. We decorated gingerbread houses at the San José Woman’s Club—personally, I was gravely disappointed that we didn’t get to actually eat the various treats we attached to the cookie houses. The next weekend, we went to have breakfast with Santa at the Fairmont Hotel in San José. Unfortunately, the presence of Blinky, the official mascot of Christmas in the Park, left Julia terrified, at least for a bit, but she got over it quickly enough. For some reason, there were also two guys in Star Wars stormtrooper costumes. Presumably, they were Santa’s security detail: in the post-9/11 world, it’s impossible to be too careful.

Consumed by the spirit of holiday giving, Julie and I both managed to get $40 parking tickets during the breakfast. Never let it be said that we aren’t concerned with the welfare of our fellow citizens.

Meet Stanley

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In case adopting Felix and Honey wasn’t sufficiently crazy, we decided to up the ante by adding yet another cat into our home.

Meet Stanley (his pictures are at the end of the album). He’s a three or four year old Ragdoll who was having a little trouble finding a home: Stanley has asthma and requires daily medication, which makes adoption a bit of a long shot. Julie had gone to see some kittens at a foster home for 13th Street Cat Rescue and ended up getting acquainted with Stanley instead. In fact, she spent more than two hours visiting with him and was thoroughly smitten by the time she left.

In the days that followed, we ended up getting Honey and Felix—the kids weren’t going to be denied their kittens—but Julie never gave up on Stanley. She reminded me of Ogra, a cat we saw a few times at pet stores before we were married, back in Champaign in 1998; we never seriously considered getting her because of Maggie’s highly developed sense of territory, but Julie pointed out that she still remembered her, some fifteen years later, and that it would be the same thing with Stanley if we didn’t adopt him. I found it difficult to refute that logic. By the time we called the foster home back about Stanley, the woman caring for him said that she was surprised she hadn’t heard from us sooner, given the degree to which Julie and Stanley had bonded.

As an aside, everything worked out fine with Ogra: sometime after we moved to California, spurred by Julie’s fears that something terrible had happened, I called the rescue organization back in Champaign to check up on her. She had been adopted by a nice family and was, as far as they knew, happy and healthy.

Stanley is on Flovent, which he takes through an inhaler once or twice a day. He’s not especially fond of it—we have to press the inhaler to his muzzle and hold it there for twenty seconds, which makes him a bit squirmy—but he tolerates it reasonably well. His reaction is consistent with what seems to be his overall personality: extraordinarily mellow. He spends most of his time hanging out in the back of the house, sleeping in our bed or Julia’s. He doesn’t seem to mind the kittens at all; if anything, he might be a little intimidated by their energy. I’ve never seen him move faster than a slow amble, and he almost has a slight tendency to waddle.

Felix and Honey, on the other hand, have had slightly stronger reactions. Both of them were pretty unnerved when he first arrived, despite the fact that we kept him confined to the back bathroom for the better part of his first day here to help them acclimate to one another. Over the last few days, Felix seems to have adjusted fairly well: I’ve caught him following Stanley around, trying to sniff his tail, on more than one occasion. Honey, however, still hisses when she comes face to face with him, which isn’t too much of a problem except when everyone is back in our bedroom getting ready for bed. There hasn’t been any bloodshed yet, so I’m hopeful that everyone will figure out how to get along in time.

Felix and Honey

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We’re back from an exciting trip to Chicago for Christmas, and naturally we have pictures to share and tales to tell. For now, however, the news of the day is that we’re cat owners once again.

It seems like just a couple weeks ago that we said goodbye to Maggie, but to my surprise—I had to look back at old photos to check—it’s been five months. Before Maggie died, Julie mentioned to the kids that we might think about getting kittens sometime after she was gone, the idea being that Maggie was too old to deal with energetic youngsters looking to romp and play (and she was never big on company to begin with, if we’re being completely honest about the old girl). As a result, both Julia and Joseph looked at Maggie’s illness and eventual death with a strange mix of curiosity, sadness and anticipation, with the last of those feelings unnervingly dominant. From their perspective, they never really knew Maggie in the prime of her life, when she chased about the house snarling at Loaf and chattering at birds; nor did they know her when she was a kitten, always more than willing to distract Julie and me from our homework back at Rice.

As an aside, one of my favorite memories of the last few weeks of Maggie’s life was when I enticed her—with no small amount of effort—to play an old game in which I teased her with a pen hiding under a sheet of paper, just the way we used to back in Baker. It only lasted a few minutes, but everything about it, from the way she held her paw, poised to strike, to the tilt of her head, was just the way I remembered it.

The kids, then, have been growing more and more excited about the idea of kittens. The earlier, vague conversations about doing something after Maggie died became more concrete, with Julie eventually landing on a schedule that called for us to adopt kittens right after the holidays. She wasn’t kidding around, either: we arrived back in San José on Monday, she and the kids started visiting cats on Tuesday, and we had new housemates on Saturday.

Our new friends are Honey and Felix. Naturally, we have pictures. They’re a brother and sister pair from a litter of six kittens that was left at a shelter to be adopted out or euthanized. Luckily, the folks at Unconditional Love Animal Rescue bailed them out. Honey and Felix were the smallest of the bunch by a wide margin, so they were separated from the rest and sent to a foster home together. They’re about nine weeks old, but they’re still pretty small and still very much kittens.

Unsurprisingly, they were a bit nervous when Julie and the kids first brought them home. We weren’t sure how they would react to the house or the kids; nor were we sure how they’d do with respect to the litter box, so we penned them up in the front bathroom with a baby gate on their arrival. We expected to keep them there for a day or two to help them acclimate, but Honey scaled the gate and escaped within the first few hours, and that was that. They spent the night in bed with Julie and me and managed to avoid being crushed, so they seem to be blessed with decent survival instincts.

Julia and Joe are positively ecstatic. Julia loves picking up Felix and carrying him around, whether he wants to be carried or not; Felix has been surprisingly tolerant of this new treatment. Both cats love to play, and they’ve been exceedingly accommodating of Joe’s particular style, which involves swinging a stuffed snake in the general direction of their faces in the hope that they’ll jump up and grab it.