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(mouse over photos for descriptions) My hotel room (minus a couple cards that arrived after I took this shot):
‘Blessed’ is not a word I use often, but I can’t think of any that would be more appropriate. Except perhaps ‘grateful.’ You’ll have to wait for the full pictorial review of my trip to Louisiana, because I forgot the card reader for my DSLR, and then Mark brought it to me when he visited over the weekend, but oops, my work laptop doesn’t have the right port. So here’s the ultra-quick summary thanks to the USB card in my other camera. My Louisiana trip, in a nutshell:
My employer did not send me here to look at gators and eat fried food, but those are the parts of the week that I am choosing to remember. The real reason I came here was to shovel rocks. Expensive rocks, but basically rocks. I have shoveled rocks before lunch, I have shoveled rocks before dinner. I shoveled rocks at 4 AM today in the rain, and I’ll be shoveling rocks at 10 tonight. I think they have a name for this in other countries: prison camp. Actually I can’t complain because the rock-shoveling has taken up relatively little of my time (plus it earns me some street refinery cred), and dining out on my corporate card takes some of the pain away. Maybe ‘dining out’ is too generous a description of picking up fast food, but I had Popeyes for lunch the first day and I was hooked. I’ve had more Popeyes in the last seven days than I’ve had in the last seven years. You can’t come to Louisiana and not have some local food, though. It’s crawfish season and everyone’s got signs advertising theirs. I generally like my food pre-disassembled so I had some fried crawfish tails and they were delicious. Lots of good fried shrimp around here, too. If you drive the 45 minutes to the beach, you can get just-caught shrimp for $3.50/lb. And the gumbo! I love gumbo and everybody serves it. Tonight when I made my Popeyes run, I noticed that the marquee at Hong Kong Chinese Restaurant was advertising chicken and sausage gumbo. I guess that’s what you have to do to compete in Cajun country. Getting sent to Lake Charles generally elicits jeers and pity at my office for some reason, but unless somebody can tell me where to get authentic gumbo in Houston, I think I’ll be looking forward to my next visit. I could even see coming out this way on my own time. Just don’t tell my coworkers I had fun or they might want to come, too. I’ve been on a business trip in the Lake Charles area of Louisiana since Tuesday night. When I left, I wasn’t certain how long I would have to stay — the estimate was about ten days. How do you pack for ‘about ten days’ when you know that everything could be permanently stained, and that you probably won’t want to rewear anything but your jeans? The fortunate fallback is that nobody can smell you in a refinery, and they especially can’t smell you through your Nomex astronaut suit. My family surprised me by helping make my stay a little more homey — my parents sent a card and my sister sent these:
It’s really nice at the end of a long day to come back to a vase of beautiful flowers. The vase itself even matches the room! Is she good, or what? We finally got around to putting our books on the shelves that we had built and installed in February! We had been planning to do it the weekend Julia got sick, and ended up doing it the next weekend to distract ourselves from the stillness of the house after her death. We have a few more things to find/unpack and add to the display area at the top, but I think that’s all of our books. We mixed in some sentimental items, including things I made for Mark and things I commissioned Miss Monster to make. Our living room is a lot more cozy now that it has some personality.
And now that the bedroom isn’t full of boxes of books, we can actually buy some furniture. I told my sister that my upside-down cardboard box nightstand helps me keep touch with the common man, but I think it’s time for the common man to fend for himself. We got home from our visit to the Tidal Basin just when the light is prettiest. My mom started preparing dinner, Mark and my dad sat on the deck and (I presume) talked about manly things, and I took one last stroll around the yard where I spent countless hours as a child:
Doesn’t my mom look like she belongs on a cookbook cover? She made a lasagna from scratch. It smelled amazing and we were all pretty hungry from the two-mile trek around the Tidal Basin. It’s not the mileage that wears you out, but the slow trudge of the clueless at a crowd density of approximately three people per square yard, and double that on the Metro platform where half of the escalators are inexplicably shut down. But anyway, the anticipation of dinner was so great that there may have been some celebratory dancing while the table was being set.
Finally, one last meal in my childhood home:
That house is full of good memories — I hope somebody special buys it. I was ready for a change:
If you need a curl guru in Houston, go see Alan at Traci-Scott! Barring some miracle, Julia seems to be telling us that she is ready to go. We will spend tomorrow saying goodbye, and then our vet (who is fabulous, by the way, in case you ever find yourself in possession of a Houstonian kitty) will make a house call. I told you a little about Julia before, but indulge me and I’ll tell you more. My sister and I found her at Petsmart over the Thanksgiving holiday of 2002, not long after I’d graduated from college. I was living at my parents’ house in VA but had just accepted a job in NJ. Obviously I was going to need a cat, and when we saw her, we knew she was the one. We called my then-boyfriend and bribed him into agreeing to keep her until I moved into an apartment. I filled out the application and heard back from the sponsoring rescue within a day or two. I requested that they groom her before I picked her up, and there was some kind of fiasco that kept delaying it. Finally, she was mine!
so skinny! I think I drove her up to PA that same night, to her temporary home. I visited on weekends until I moved to NJ (my boyfriend thought I was visiting HIM, ha!), and then I brought her over. My apartment was underneath a man who sold drugs and abused his girlfriend. It was not the best environment for a nervous cat (or her owner), but we kept each other company and she kept me sane. At first, she would wait until I was asleep and then climb up onto my hip. Before long, she would go to bed with me and stay on me or next to me all night. There were growing pains, though. Julia is a very particular cat. The food and the litter had better be just right, or you will find out that they are not. As much as I loved her, I had some times of serious frustration. I was encouraged by at least a couple people to start over and try again. My aunt, a big pet lover, said that “there are lots of good kitties out there.” But I knew she was a good kitty, we just hadn’t figured each other out completely. When I bought a townhouse in a quiet neighborhood, she was obviously happier, but some of her issues persisted. I figured things were as good as they were going to get, and learned to work around her. No rugs. No unsupervised bedroom time. I developed the ability to smell fresh cat pee from a different floor of the house (some people have more useful talents, but this one is mine). Mark is a dog person and was never thrilled about living with my neurotic little cat, but his superior housekeeping skills brought some much-needed order to her life. It was like things clicked. They even developed an appreciation of sorts for one another. When we moved to TX, to a much larger home, the transformation was complete. She became a much more mellow cat, comfortable with rules and even interested in visitors. I’m sure Mark will never be fully converted to a cat person, but he has come to love her for who she is, and to appreciate what a cat can contribute to a household. He has taken extraordinary care of her (and me) this week, administering subcutaneous fluids and feedings and even a bath (THAT is love, my friends). When she leaves us tomorrow, it will be with all the dignity that a cherished companion deserves, and there will be a considerable void in our home.
Julia seems to be improving, albeit very slowly, so I am a little preoccupied tonight. I still have the final installment of our DC trip to share, but not tonight. Tonight I just want to share a few shots from our flowerbed. Last year we never got around to planting anything and this year wasn’t looking much more promising, so we decided to go simple. We bought a Texas/Oklahoma wildflower seed mix, and Mark seeded and mulched the flowerbed a month or two ago. They have really taken off, and look better every week. They smell amazing. There’s just something about coming home to flowers at the end of the day that relaxes you. We’re considering getting another bag or two and guerilla-seeding the vacant lot next to us, among other blighted transitional areas of the neighborhood…
This weekend has not gone as planned. We spent today in the emergency vet clinic.
It’s been almost nine months. The cancer seems to have spread to at least a lymph node, which has been enlarged for several months. Her appetite and energy remained as good as or even better than ever. Normally Julia wakes us on weekends by meowing outside the bedroom until we acquiesce to her demands for breakfast. When she doesn’t wake us, it’s almost always because she has had an upset stomach and has left us a mess to clean, but even then she greets us as we come down the stairs. On Friday night she cleaned her plate and seemed completely normal, but on Saturday she didn’t wake us. We came downstairs and she remained where she was. She soon crawled up onto my lap and spent the day there (except while I showered and she sat in Mark’s lap), breathing heavily. We really thought the cancer had finally caught up with her lungs and that this was the end. Suddenly at 10:30 PM, she jumped out of my lap and headed to her litterbox. Then she began the back-and-forth familiar to anyone who knows anything about UTIs. We set out some extra milk and water and kept an eye on her. Today she seemed even weaker, so we took her to the clinic. You meet some interesting people at the emergency pet clinic, like the homeless man who walked in with a dead or half-dead guinea pig. I don’t know where he got it, but apparently he is a regular. Then there was the woman who wouldn’t stop telling her two-sentence story about her dog who appeared to be suffering from little more than living with someone who needs a social outlet. Anyway, Julia got some subcutaneous fluids, some antibiotics, and bloodwork. She was very dehydrated and needs to see her regular vet tomorrow to see if her kidney function has improved with the fluids. They sent us home with an appetite stimulant and we think she may have eaten just a little while we were out at dinner. She is a bit more alert but still pretty miserable, and has nearly worn a rut between her chair and her litterbox. So that’s where we are tonight. If you have a pet, give it a big hug. On Easter morning, my mom got us hopped up on sugar and bacon, and then we all climbed onto the Metro and joined a couple hundred thousand of our closest friends at the Tidal Basin (I managed to crop the teeming masses out of most of the photos). We saw lots of great outfits and a bride & groom. I’m still kicking myself for not getting a shot of the man with the white newsboy cap, pink Peeps shirt, white knickers, and striped pink kneesocks. You’ll have to settle for these outrageously good-looking people and some flowers instead:
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