Posts With Photos

My dry cleaning establishment burned.

We went to the evening bout between the home town Rumble Bs and the Gainesville Roller Rebels at the Yaarab Shrine.

Sg,

You have been claiming to be afraid of the dark lately. Sometimes it’s clearly a ploy to gain a few more minutes before bed, and other times it seems legit (usually when you’re upset about something in the real world). Your mother and I take a kind of no-nonsense line when it comes to fear of the dark. I might handle it differently if you hadn’t been sleeping alone in the dark like a champ for nearly five years. But until I am convinced that we have a real, ongoing problem, the door to my sympathies on this issue is firmly closed.

I have been happy to see you take matters into your own hands by establishing a perimeter against things that go bump in the night. In the picture below, you can see the troll spikes that you have been using for the past couple of weeks alongside a new addition – a plush vampire bat named Sammy. Other fierce animals can be found at the foot of the ladder to your bed. You asked me yesterday whether crabs (oddly, one of the very few real-world animals that scare you) could get into your room, and you were relieved to hear my probably-true reply that crabs can scuttle, but they can’t climb.

When we last encountered your bed on this website, the girl-bed relationship was off to a rocky start. It’s not a topic we have revisited, but things have generally been fine.

Your bed is designed to be flipped-turned upside down (much like the life of a certain nobleman) so that the low bed with a canopy frame becomes a loft. AT and I have been wanting to flip it for a while, but we have been holding out for a certain comfort with your decision-making skills. We decided to go ahead anyway.

So we flipped the bed two nights ago. Yesterday, we went to Ikea and bought a bunch of other stuff to go in your room to give you more places to put away all of your junk. Some photos of your room refresh follow. Not pictured is your new desk, which we haven’t really figured out where to put. Maybe under your window? Also, we left the legs for the desk at Ikea.

I don’t understand it, but I love it. Three vignettes from a daddy-daughter day:

Me: Oh, hey, Amy Winehouse died this past week.

Sg: The “no no no” song lady? She died?

Me: That’s right. She had been sick for a long time, and recently died.

Sg: Oh no. [pauses] Did somebody write down her lines?

Me: Did somebody what? What do you mean?

Sg: Did somebody write down all of her notes before she died?

Me: I don’t know, but we have her recordings. So we can listen to the songs she already recorded.

Sg: We can still listen to her?

Me: Sure. [gives a three sentence overview of the pop music economy]

Sg: But I never got to go to her play, and now I can’t go to her play.

Me: You mean her concert?

Sg: Yes. I can never go to Amy Winehouse’s concert now.

Me: I probably wouldn’t let you go to an Amy Winehouse concern any time soon anyway.

Sg: Still, now I can never go.

Me: That’s true, and it is sad. But there are lots of concerts we can go to.

Sg: Yeah. At least it’s a good thing the people who sing “Under Pressure” are still alive.

Me: …Yeah, that is good. [changes the subject]

You made up a word this morning. You do that a lot, but I think this one may have legs:

flə-‘kä-kä - I’m not sure how you’d spell that. I just typed “flokaka”, but that looks horrible.

When I asked you what it meant, you said “horsefeathers”. It has stayed with me all day, but has morphed in my mind into whatever part of speech that one really bad “F” word is. As in “I understand you’re waiting for that parking place to open up, but do you have to do it right in the middle of the flakaka lane?”

Your favorite part of the temporary “mythical creatures” exhibit.

At the natural history museum, there is a book on a pedestal in front of a mural of the Pleistocene era that tells you about the various animals depicted on the wall. You began to briskly flip pages and said in a mocking “voice of authority” tone: “65 million years ago, all the birds were dinosaurs.” This is notable for a couple of reasons:

• When it comes to humor, you’ve so far been more a consumer than a producer. You’ve got friends (I’m thinking of Maddie in particular) who have been knocking them dead for a couple of years. But you have generally been satisfied with wacky. And I hope you don’t feel I’m being too harsh if I say that grownups generally are not amused by wacky for wacky’s sake. If I asked you to tell me a joke right now, I’d get something like “why is there a dinosaur with a suitcase on its head? That’s crazy!” Lately you’ve been adding irreverence to your repertoire, and I love it. I’m not sure who you were making fun of (probably me, now that I think about it), but it was some quality fun-making.
• Nice work on nailing the general vicinity of birds’ splitting from the dino family tree. We hadn’t even gotten to the dinosaurs yet, and I don’t know the last time we discussed the Cretaceous period.

This is Jack, the cat. He lives here. Here are some fun facts about Jack!

Aliases. At various times in his life, Jack has gone by Jackamus, Jacko, Whacko Jacko, Jackie and Moe. His two sisters have been called, among other things, Curly and Larry.

Age. Old. Jack’s presumptive birthday is on April 1, and April 1, 2011 will be his 14^th.

Ocular Plenitude. Not so great. Jack only has one eye (his left). Jack really only had a few weeks with two eyes and seems to get along fine with one. (Good thing about his belonging a predator species, I guess.) The vet left the dead eye in place (eww!) while Jack was growing rapidly during his first year, then scooped, snipped and stitched him into the rakish man of mystery you see before you today.

Origin Story. The year after I graduated, I was living in a house at the beach with some old college chums. One of them was a really wonderful person named Brooke, whose parents were veterinarians with a practice over on Roanoke Island. Jack and his sisters were brought into the vets’ offices, and Brooke decided to help Jack (and eventually one of his sistors) get adopted by bringing them to spend a few days in our tiny crowded shack. Days turned into weeks turned into months, and then suddenly I’m the last one at the house with two cats, so I guess that makes them mine. I was happy about that, by the way. Jack was awesome.

Jack is Awesome. He was so little and cute at first, just hiding and poopin under the end tables and stuff. Awwww. Jack grew up to be really big for a house cat. He purrs like a freight train. You will think that I am exaggerating, but the following is all true. Sometimes I would let Jack stretch out on my head while I was laying on the couch watching TV or something. Sometimes, a particular part of his chest would end up on top of my ear. And more than once, I had to shift because the purring was uncomfortable and left me with a ringing in my ears. It’s a fact.

Jack is a big baby. You know how cats sometimes knead a blanket or your couch our your flesh before they settle down for a nap? This is an inborn reflex, and helps to stimulate mother’s milk flow when they are nursing. I’ll bet cats keep doing it when they’re grownups because of its association with simple comforts. Jack kneads with a fervor and persistence that can only be characterized as pathological. He’s a psycho kneader. Awesome! And when he really gets going, his eye kind of rolls back and he starts to drool. When I type it out, that doesn’t sound so adorable. But sometimes it’s nice to be kneaded.

Jack is not a dog, but is kind of doggy. When we lived in Cary, NC, we used to go for walks around the neighborhood. Jack and his sister would walk with us. Also, Jack will come when you whistle. Well, when I whistle. You can’t whistle, and even if you could you don’t know the special whistle. You may one day recall it as the whistle I use to help your mother find me when I become disoriented in the grocery store.

You are not allowed to sleep with Jack. It is sad but true. We have let you try sleeping with our other cat in your room with mixed results. You just don’t like to go to sleep when there are mammals around you could be talking to and playing with. So Jack’s super purr, his devotion to passionate kneading and the fact that he is a big cat and it really hurts when he steps on your hair and you’re trying to sleep – all of this means no sleeping with Jack for you. I mention all of this just because it’s kind of a shame. But for his old age, Jack is a perfect little kid’s cat – patient, affectionate and docile. (In his outdoor days, Jack was known to bring home dead stuff from time to time, but I’m pretty sure that all of the victims had been snuggled to death.)

Turns out Jack is mortal. Probably. I guess there’s still room to be proven wrong on this. But he has gotten a bit thinner over the last year and a little slower getting up onto the table where we keep the cats’ food. He went in for an annual checkup a couple of months ago. There was nothing in particular wrong with him, but the vet did volunteer some advice on how to recognize a turn for the worse. 14 is old for a cat, particularly when six of those years were spent as an indoor/outdoor cat. So I’ve been thinking about Jack’s mortality and how you may not have very concrete memories of him when you’re older. So I figured I’d write a few things down.

Next up (probably sometime in May, given my blogging pace) we’ll meet Grace before moving on to the canidae. Until then, here are some more pictures of Jack.

Jack and his sister as kittens.

Jack not respecting personal space.

Jack with a shaved butt because he got himself into a fight (or didn’t get himself out of it fast enough). The handful of times Jack had catfight injuries, they were always on his hindquarters.

Jack finding a puppy to be not super awesome.

C’mon dude, it’s a cat with a ribbon.

Jack’s big-ass yawn.

Jack tolerating cousin Claire.

We don’t get much snow around these parts. So when there is more than a flurry, we all bundle up and take cameras (cam:human ≥ 1) and dogs (no minimum specified) outside for a walk. Sophia decided to add to the fun by dressing like a young Kid Rock.