The random thoughts & events in the life of an animal-loving, peace-loving vegetarian.
I can't promise to write regularly. And I can't promise that it will be interesting when I do.
I ran across some pics from our visit six months ago. Most of us look about the same but Kai, being the youngest, has changed the most. It was really fun to look at these; I don't think I'd ever looked at them after uploading them!
Yum - breakfast!
Mr. Blue Eyes still in his high chair, still with just peach fuzz for hair...
... and still just using sign language for "all done."
Notice all the tissues on the couch and floor. Winter = runny noses for kids.
Also notice that Kai appears to be reading to Gabriel.
Satin joined the nice warm laps.
Dragon Boy
Lookit Baba - it's Dragon Boy!
Cats and dragons everywhere!
Earl with his mommy.
Getting some fuzz therapy while talking with Tita.
I usually just remind you to click on a pic to enlarge, but this just had to be posted as big as possible!
I plan to watch this tonight and tomorrow night. As I watch the trailer I wonder if there's anything in it that I don't already know, but I am overweight and will watch it because I should. It's on tonight at 8 PM on HBO (parts 1 & 2) and then again tomorrow night (parts 3 & 4) at 8. Here's the trailer.
The fact that Obi is sleeping in the chair of choice for all creatures upstairs both human and feline, means things are going well. No one chased him out of the prime location and he snoozed for a couple of hours. He even got up to eat, use the litter box, and went right back to sleep again. Yay!
Lupe was snoozing on our bed.
And Banu was taking a bath in her favorite look-out-spot bed.
In fact now that I think about it I remember waking up Friday morning with Obi lying on our bed near my feet. He still sometimes asks to go back to his regular side but he has made peace with his new location.
I finished another audiobook titled, The Lonely Polygamist. Not long ago I blogged about us finishing the series, Big Love, so you may be thinking that I have a thing about polygamist Mormon families, but I don't. It was just another NYT Bestseller available from the audiobook section of our library.
Golden Richards, the husband of four wives and father of 28 children, is about as unlike the patriarch of Big Love, Bill Hendrickson, as you can get. Bill Hendrickson is charismatic, strong-willed, domineering (usually in a good way) and very capable. By contrast Golden Richards is passive, unsure, and incapable of leading is family in the right direction. As Udall lays out the story of Golden trying to survive the demands of his many children and particularly dominant first wife, I experienced passages that either made me laugh out loud or pulled me into the painful life of a man who suffered as a boy and continues to live through unbearable sorrows. It is both heartbreak and comedy.
What's interesting to me is how both this book and Big Love make polygamist families feel "normal". The first few chapters/episodes feel shocking but in no time I end up focusing on the human elements common to all families, the issues of need, love, and belonging. It's almost as if polygamy is just another ethnicity, another flavor that makes the family different from mine, but not so much that I can't relate.
Also interesting is that I almost didn't finish listening to the end. At first I couldn't really tell where Udall was going with this story. And then as he highlights certain characters, one, a 13 year old son named Rusty, is obsessed with things that are either offbeat or related to body functions; the humor of body functions is any thing but funny or interesting to me, but I soon realized that Udall was letting me inside Rusty's head and heart. I ended up falling in love with this weird kid and cried when (spoiler alert) when he died. I'm glad I stuck with The Lonely Polygamist and give it a thumbs up.
First read Shirin's comment on the previous post and then this picture will make sense as to why I posted it this morning. They were definitely checking each other out but this is what came next:
Those are my new uniforms you see strewn across my bed. I was unpacking them and I think Banu liked the smell of the new fabric and Obi, as always, was attracted to the plastic.
Look who jumped up on the bed together this evening:
That's Banu on the left and Obi on the right. They're not exactly best friends but they were both up there for about five minutes. This would have been unthinkable two weeks ago.
Monday evening the Yousefians invited us over for dinner to see Saba, Neda, and Neda's German boyfriend Fredrick, before they all scattered to their respective locations. (Sorry, no pictures.) Saba is leaving next week for a three-year residency program in Pennsylvania in her path towards an MD degree and Neda & Fredrick have already returned to UC Davis where they are earning their Masters in ?sustainable agriculture? They have proposed a project in Cambodia and are waiting to hear if it's approved, so that may be where they head next.
Saeed and I wouldn't have missed this gathering for anything. The Yousefians are like family and Neda and Saba go way back with our girls. We feel so proud (not that we had anything to do with it) that Neda and Saba are such awesome people and are developing into such accomplished women. I really liked Fredrick too.
Unfortunately I paid the price of seeing them by getting to bed late on Monday night and getting up at 4 am to work with a doctor in Ballantyne on Tuesday - maybe five hours of sleep. And the work on Tuesday was taxing - 10 stressful hours straight without so much as a five minute break to eat lunch. Needless to say I was a zombie when I got home. Fortunately I'm married to someone who has retired from one job and hasn't started the next one, so he's picked up my slack.
So if I was supposed to do something for anyone out there in blog land, I'm sorry, I probably forgot! I'm eating my lunch right now at Earth Fare and am starting to feel human again. I need to be 100% by this weekend since we're going to Athens to celebrate someone's 4th birthday! (and kiss a little broken hoofie)
This day has not come quickly. We've been working on getting Obi accustomed to Banu and Lupe's side of the house for many weeks now. Saeed has been unhappy that Frosty's been shut inside the computer room, but he has also been unhappy with the way his room began to show signs of a cat living there. He convinced me that we had to get Obi comfortable with living on the other side of the house so we could let Frosty back out. I was resistant at first, remembering how Banu had bullied Obi in the past. I didn't want to make him the target of another kitty, albeit a gentler kitty than Frosty. Eventually I relented; it was worth a try.
We chose to start with Obi and Lupe getting used to each other, knowing that Lupe doesn't have a mean bone in her body and gets along with everybody. We decided that if that worked we'd move on to tougher customers.
The first time on the other side Obi checks out Lupe...
... who is feigning nonchalance. Good girl.
He decides she's OK and relaxes.
Pretty soon they're hanging out together, Obi in the sun.
Soon Obi goes upstairs to check out every nook and cranny, even the bathroom drawers, while Lupe watches.
This is where Banu was kept, behind a screen in our bedroom.
The next step was to get Obi and Lupe comfortable in the bedroom where they eat. A little catnip lured him in:
Soon they were hangin' out without too much trouble:
I don't have a picture of it but at some point a couple of weeks after these pictures and videos were taken I let Banu out of my arms when Obi was upstairs. It was chaos; she went straight for him in an all out attack. Fortunately Banu is all "lunge and chase" and no" bite or scratch." We let a couple more weeks pass and tried again. Much better this time. Cautious slinking around each other, some chasing, but general tolerance. That's when I snapped this picture which you've seen already.
So that brings us up to today, the day Obi moves over to Lupe and Banu's side more or less permanently. We agreed that since Frosty does like the computer room we may let Obi come back from time to time to visit Tippy and Chappu, his two love muffins. So what were the boys doing this morning?
Frosty was looking bored in Saeed's office. (Actually he looks really comfy.)
Obi was at the saloon with a babe on either side. It was time.
First Obi went over to the other side:
For some reason he loved the smell of the rubber wheels of the dolly we brought in to move his potted plant into the piano room. I think that's what he was smelling in the carpet:
Then Obi came over to check out Banu on the bench. You can see how tense she is:
Lupe watched it all from a safe distance on the stairs.
Then it was Obi's turn to feel tense as he ran under the dining room table to get away from Banu. I think it will still take several weeks, months even, for them to coexist comfortably.
Now it was time for Frosty's release. I called Saeed in from working in the yard to enjoy the moment.
My dirty yard boy.
Frosty had to check out every nook and cranny to refresh his memory. I love Chappu's reaction.
Frosty can't believe his eyes as he looks toward the open window.
Soon he was checking out some of his old toys.
Frosty finally relaxes, see next video.
(it's yellow because of no flash)
Frosty began to settle down, so I went upstairs to process these pics.
I went down an hour later to find him fast asleep in his favorite chair...
... and Chappu sleeping a few feet away, smiling.
Say a prayer for Obi to be happy in his new location.
ADDENDUM
It has taken several hours for the videos to upload, enough time for it to be dinner time for Obis Obis at his new kitchen table.
Lupe (left) and Obi (right) eating some yummy Fancy Feast wet food. Banu only eats dry food so she...
...just hung out in her favorite spot.
After dinner Lupe took a bath and...
...Obi went down to his laundry basket in the dining room while Banu rolled around and stretched a few yards away. No problems yet!
This is the view out the window of my office where the coffee maker is. As I fix my coffee I look out onto Herlong Avenue and the brick wall that cars keep crashing through. See that pile of rubble? I'm not kidding. A few years ago a truck crashed through the brick wall and into our office exactly where I was standing when I took this picture. The front of the truck crashed into the wall of the next room and came to rest on Dr. Garcia's desk.
Anyway, this post is not about that wall (that they won't fix because someone will just crash into it again) it's about my Dr. Seuss bush. Yes, my Dr. Seuss bush. Look at that bush to the left, and notice the little tuft of hair on the top. Here it is enlarged...
Now I ask, does it not remind you of the types of characters Dr. Seuss drew in his crazy books? This picture is from If I Ran The Zoo. Look at the PREEP on the left. Don't you think he has hair like that bush? A tuft on top of a stem?
This is only one of the many ways I entertain myself at my place of employment. :-)
I just finished listening to this book, We Were The Mulvaneys, on my iPod. Although I get a lot of books from Gabriel and Shirin I downloaded this one from my library. I don't often read long family sagas but I like variety and was in the mood for one. We Were The Mulvaneys is not a new book (1996) and was an Oprah book in 2001. It was made into a movie in 2002. It wasn't my favorite book ever but I liked it a lot.
The plot in one sentence, not easy to do as this book is 464 pages long, is that a nice family - parents, three sons, one daughter - living an idyllic life in the beautiful farm country of upstate New York in the mid-1970's, suffer the consequences of an assault on the daughter. Oates does an amazing job of character development both before and after the incident. I felt that I knew these people very well, cared about them, and agonized as they fell apart. It was simply the story of the disintegration of a family, and we watch the total self-destruction of the father who felt that he should have been able to protect his lovely daughter.
Wow, that sounds depressing. At times it was, especially when the father begins a downward spiral of behavior that totally destroys the family (you just want to scream at him) and the mother who doesn't call him on it or try to rein him in (she expects the children to understand his pain and accept his behavior as she does), but ultimately the individuals (not the father, who dies) recover. The family is never the same of course, that would be fantasy, but 12 years after "it" - as the family refers to the incident - they regather and form new family bonds that are satisfying and realistic.
It made me think about how one event in a person's life can change it forever, and how it can radiate out to others and change their lives as well. I kept wanting to shout at them, "GET SOME HELP!" but some people are just too proud to seek help and these were strong pioneer-stock people unlikely to admit weakness. And this was the '70's, before the era of self-help books and commonly getting therapy. I was the same age as the teenaged characters and remember that reaching out just wasn't done like it is today. So instead it took them 12 agonizing years for the resolution to naturally evolve... Darwinian time. Remember, Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most
intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to
change."
