Grand Adventure: family, house building and travel, Pacific Northwest style
Our cats get plenty of attention and Dd, at 1 year 10 months is mostly able to pet them in an acceptable way and he shares his interests with them, such as food and trucks. I know the internet is lacking in cat pictures, so here are a few from this summer.
Also here's a helpful size comparison and a search-and-find activity.
In late September (on the 23rd) we had to say goodbye to our beloved cat, Emo. We had a good nine years together starting from when we adopted her over labor day weekend of 2009. She was a remarkable cat for her small size, seven pounds in her healthiest years, and her extreme affection and sociability. She liked everyone (except 1.5 to 2.5 year olds) and was not the type to hide during a party. Rather than being a lap cat, she was more of an as-close-as-she-could-get-to-your-heart cat. When we got her at age six she was extrememly playful and jumped with impressive athleticism that puts our one year old cats to shame. She remained interested in play until some point last winter. Even as D passed through the phase where he couldn’t touch things without grabbing them she was extremely gentle.
She’s well documented here on this blog. Some of my favorites are the Korat cat from the frat about her probable breed and fancy first home and Emo unleashed which has a video of her exploring outside of my parents’ house. Back before we had D, we also made a fun photoshopped calendar of her.
Like most pets, she was a huge part of our lives and a review of our years together is really a review of everything important that happened to us during those years.
She came in to our lives in our second year in Boston, at a really lonely point in my life. She made me much happier.
In 2010 she helped Jack deliver the final clue in his surprise wedding proposal.
In 2011 we suffered a cross country flight with her (really with the woman in the seat next to us) and we left her in the care of Jack’s dad and step mom for six months during our Grand Adventure.
We were reunited in 2012 and had a few quiet years until D came in 2014. In 2016 we moved in to our house, doubling or tripling her living space. She learned to trust D again and then we introduced the kittens in 2017. They spent a year together and never quite became friends, though she and Luna lay side by side on the couch over the winter and I’m pretty sure I saw Toru lick her face a few times.
This was our first time having to make the decision to put a pet down and it was really difficult. In July the vet said that her blood work almost certainly indicated something major, like cancer. She suffered from some difficult-to-treat ear infections over the summer and lost a lot of weight. The final straw came the night before her last day when her back legs appeared to stop working fully and she seemed pretty miserable. She also spent most of her last few weeks on the roof and we knew that with the oncoming rainy season and new baby she wouldn’t have much attention or sunlight, which were the things that still seemed to bring her joy.
In Boston, including the proposal
Emo and D
In our Seattle apartments
On one of her rare outdoor adventures
At our house
September 2019
Sometimes life is improved by mundane day-to-day changes that are of absolutely no interest to those not affected by them. Let me tell you about one such change!
Our male kitten, Toru, has had a rough few months. Sometime around Christmas he stopped jumping like a normal cat and we assumed he had seriously hurt one of his legs. He struggled to get up on the couch, dragging himself up with just his front paws in a really pathetic way and he was eager to play but wanted to lie down while doing it. It looked like a problem with one of his back legs. We took him to the vet, tried some pain meds and enforced rest. It didn’t seem to help so we even had an x-ray of his back legs and hips, but everything was normal. We decided to just accept the mystery.
Around this time we bought a second self cleaning litter box on craigslist and hooked it up in the basement. Three cats have a lot of outputs. We had to set up a third litter box in the room Toru was confined to and all the cats much prefer to use the labor intensive and smelly traditional box.
We gave up on confinement but then had a trouble with Emo pooping in the basement. Finally we found a good schedule for the two automatic boxes to clean themselves at different times and Emo got back on board, but Toru rebelled. We actually would see him go in to the litter box in the basement and then step back out to go to the bathroom on the floor. We we not happy but figured that part of it was that he was in pain.
Now a few months later, he has gotten a bit better and does jump and play standing up. The bad bathroom habit continued for a long time, but now I’m so excited that we’ve gone over a week with no one pooping outside of the litter box.
This site was very helpful http://www.catexpert.co.uk/cats/how-to-clean-up-cat-pee-or-poo/. It has lots of possible causes and potential solutions. We started small by cleaning up with Dumb Cat cleaner, because if they smell anything they’ll just stick with their old habit. Then I think the magic trick was putting some food in the problem corner of the basement. It has worked like a charm!
Not having a basement [corner] full of poop is such a treat.
We now have one cat per person in our household. Our friend was fostering some kittens for Seattle Area Feline Rescue and we’d been thinking of getting a kitten this fall. It is encouraged to get kittens in pairs so now we find ourselves with three cats. Emo, who is now 14, is not thrilled but I think she’ll come around be glad that they have each other to play with so that she can continue her grueling 22 hour sleep routine.
Toru is black and white and about 33% larger than Luna, the calico. He’s named after the main character of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, which we both recently read. Luna is a character in Harry Potter. They were born June 19 and are still mostly confined to our extra bedroom.
Sometimes we pretend we have four cats!
Last weekend D and I sat on a couch in our building’s cozy lobby and watched the Seattle Marathon runners speed by our window in the brisk morning air. That tradition and all of the holiday events downtown are making me a little be nostalgic-in-advance for our time living downtown. What’s more, as we pick out colors and floors and feel closer than ever to finishing our house, I’m reminded of all the perks of apartment living that we’ll soon miss.
We had a fun birthday (mine) weekend, filled with family, swimming, wading pools, baseball and dogs! D enjoyed the company of seven different dogs and also spent some quality time with Emo.
I was just feeling kind of nostalgic as I thought about the qualities of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes which we hope D will possess. While the comic is smart, sweet, funny, creative and beautiful, the character of Calvin is actually pretty mischievous and somewhat delinquent, reminding us that D will have a mind of his own.
Right now, D and Emo have a lot in common. They sleep a lot and they are quite enamored with me. They enjoy gazing out our new windows and we have to clean up after them. They are also both incredibly soft in different ways and we love them.
(attn: Grandma – do not print this out, it is all pictures, and will look better on the computer screen)
Sometime during our time in Rome, it became obvious to Cari that I had an advantage over her in navigation. Sometimes I just knew where landmarks were and how to get to our destinations, when I had no business knowing. I was forced to concede that although I’d never visited Rome, I had already spent hours and hours scampering around a video game version of it… The same was true for Florence, Venice, and Jerusalem.
Since then this blog post has been hotly anticipated (by Cari). So, I present to you
THE GRAND ADVENTURE ASSASSIN’S CREED MASH UP POST
Assassin’s Creed is a popular series of video games which are set in some of the famous and interesting historical places of the Mediterranean world. So if you are spending 6 weeks in Italy, chances are that your rout will overlap with the Assassin’s Creed world. With the exception of Monteriggioni, there was nowhere that we went specifically because of the games, but for most of our time in Italy (and Jerusalem) I had this weird feeling of digital déjà vu.
The above map (click to enlarge any particular image) shows all of our destinations in shades of blue and green… And then the cities which I have traveled to through the magic of Sony are shown with red arrows. In order of our itinerary, they were:
Showing that they correctly modeled a surviving landmark isn’t that cool; not as cool as finding yourself just knowing your way around between them, but it is an easy likeness to capture with one image. Here we are in front of the Santa Maria Novella Church.
If you had asked me about the façade from what I learned in Architectural history class, I would have said that it was a late renaissance addition to a medieval church… but that would have only been partially correct, because here it is in Assassins Creed in 1499 or whatever. And I trust that they got it right! Early Renaissance it was! No research was performed in the writing of this post.
Here is Cari and Ezio (a character from the game) around the back of the Pitti Palace. No, nothing is exactly the same, but they got the right feeling.
Here’s a view WNW toward the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio. We took the picture from The Piazza Michelangelo.
Same sort of thing. The Video Game City is always much smaller than the real city, but it is so much more real than a map.
There are the steps down to the main square in the center of town. Scarily Similar.
The well in the center of the square where we sat and ate pizza was a historical FACT, just look at the picture of the game! The only thing missing from the game were the 3-4 Medieval Torture museums in this small walled city.
Yup
Whoops, I can’t tell which one is from the game.
Cari took a day of rest in Colle Val d’Elsa and I walked to this tiny walled city- really the only destination inspired by the game. It was the Assassin’s HQ, so how could I miss that? The inside was actually disappointingly dissimilar (with such a small place, I would have though that they could just reproduce it exactly, but they didn’t), but walking up to the south gate felt pretty much the same in real life as it had in the game.
Yup, they did the Pantheon right.
This is me in front of Constantine’s arch.
Here is the view of the NE corner of the Palatine hill (sadly closed when we were in Rome. But- it is so similar! That gets me more than the single monuments (like the Pantheon).
This shows how the virtual version is shrunk down. The Piazza del Popolo has an obelisk in the center and the double churches at the South end. The two pictures show the distance between them… but in the game, it’s a little different.
St Marks Square looking North from the water
Looking East along the South side of the Doge Palace
I actually didn’t play the one featuring Istanbul until after the trip, leaving me helpless as a kitten (of which there were lots) in navigating.
Here is Ezio and Me in the Grand Bazaar
Valens Aqueduct by night.
Here is the Dome of the Rock viewed from the entrance to the al Aqsa Mosque. The game version of the Temple Mount was smaller, but very similar to real life… probably more similar than it was to real life ca. 1192.
Here is Cari and Altair in front of the Tower of David /Herod’s palace around the Jaffa Gate.
Looking South from above the Damascus Gate. I see it.
Looking from the Armenian Quarter East across the temple mount toward the Mount of Olives.
So in conclusion, Video Games helped me navigate some of the cities we found ourselves in as tourists. And all the trips which the computer modelers treated themselves to were not entirely wasted.
