More first days of school

We've been having some problems with Ginger and separation anxiety. If we have to leave her alone for longer than an hour or two now, we send her to doggie daycare at Main Street Pet Resort in Platte City. She has a nice time playing with the other dogs, and we don't have to worry about coming home to puddles (and no, it's not a UTI--we had her tested). The cool thing about the daycare is that they have a bus that comes on post and picks up dogs in the morning and drops them off in the afternoon. Here's Ginger getting on the bus this morning so that I could go to Kansas City for a day of shopping:



Speaking of first days, here's a picture Mike snapped a couple days ago on the first day of school at Florida State:



Hard to believe he's halfway done with college already! He has signed up for a lot of science courses this semester, because he has decided he wants to go to physical therapy school after college (assuming he can get an educational delay from the Air Force).

Look who's a senior!

I got all nostalgic and inspired after dropping Annabelle off for her first day of senior year yesterday and created this:



It looks like it should be a pretty good year! She finished up her fourth year of English at the community college this summer, so her academic courses are AP Calculus, AP Biology, and Physics. She's also got a semester of Web Design and a semester of Psychology to finish off general graduation requirements. Best of all, she's got 3 hours of the arts: A Capella Choir, Band, and Jazz Band.

Welcome home, Mike!

Mike spent 4 weeks at Field Training this summer as part of his AFROTC scholarship. He graduated on Monday, August 6. We weren't able to go, but his girlfriend, Sarah, did, and she sent me some photos:



We were on hand at the airport the next day though to welcome him home:



I can't believe he's already been home a week already! He says Field Training was the "most fun [he] never wants to have again."

Annabelle goes back to school tomorrow, and Mike leaves to go back to Tally on Sunday. This has been a great summer, but it has gone by way too fast (except for those 4 Field Training weeks)!

An Olympic moment

I had a couple of thoughts last night watching the coverage of Matt Grevers winning gold in the 100-meter backstroke. First I thought, "Damn, he's cute!" And then I thought, "Why does he look so familiar?"

This morning it hit me! Grevers was one of the coaches when Mike and his high-school swim team attended a swim clinic at the University of Louisville in September 2009:

Florida report

I spent this past week on the Florida diet: Cuban sandwich and Spanish bean soup at the Columbian, hot roast beef and cheese sandwich and manicotti at Bellini's (2 separate visits), pancakes at the Sugar Mill in DeLeon Springs, chicken tikka masala at Memories of India, and of course my faves that my mom makes (lookin' at you, Laredo and banana pudding!). I didn't lose any weight, but I smiled a lot.

Annabelle and I flew down to Orlando last Tuesday. We were greeted by my sister, who took us over to Sarasota, where we toured New College the next day. We were very impressed with what we saw. The academics sound amazing, but it's hard to get a feel for a campus in the middle of summer when it's empty. We might have to visit again, maybe in, say, February:



For most of the rest of the visit, when we weren't eating, we were cuddling cats. My mom is very involved in her local trap-neuter-release effort, and she had caught a kitten a few days before our arrival. He wasn't old enough to neuter yet, so they were keeping him temporarily, but now they're attached, so he will not be released. His name is Rocky, but mostly we just call him Baby. He's too adorable for words:



He can haz cheezburger:



Last night, we moved to a hotel near the airport in preparation for our 6 a.m. flight today. (WHY do I keep booking flights at these crazy times???) Annabelle got to catch up with her friend Matthew (formerly of Fort Knox but currently living in Germany) at Downtown Disney for a little bit:



Long-time readers will remember Matthew as "Sweeney Todd" to Annabelle's "Mrs. Lovett" for Halloween 2007:



No matter how long I stay, my trips to Florida never feel long enough. There are always more people I would like to see (and more food I would like to eat). Can't wait to go back!

Catching up

I swear, I feel like I spend half my blogging time apologizing for being so behind! Why should today be any different?

I have pretty much healed from my cat bite injury. The bite itself finally healed just this past week, which was much longer than I had expected. I finished off the series of rabies shots (we got word after the second one that the cat had tested negative, but I finished the series anyway) and am officially declaring that whole chapter to be closed. So yay for that!

This month has been crazy busy, which seems to be our M.O. for this summer. Here's a glance at our calendar. You might want to go get a snack to have on hand; this is going to take a while.

Thursday, July 5: Fred, Annabelle, and I said goodbye to Mike at the crack of dawn and flew to Columbus, Ohio, where we rented a car and drove on to Pittsburgh.

Friday, July 6: We toured the University of Pittsburgh, which was quite nice. The Cathedral of Learning is without a doubt the most unforgettable college building I've ever seen and also makes for a good point of reference when you're lost in the city:



The chapel is also pretty:



Here are the Litchfield Towers, which house mostly freshmen:



We had a great visit at the study abroad office and then at the Honors College. Our Honors College meeting was a little bit smooshed because we were in a lobby that was way too small for the group. Turns out that this was because they had half of the cathedral off limits because President Obama was speaking just down the street at Carnegie Mellon!

After Pitt, we set off to find the clinic where I would get my third rabies shot the following day and to do a little exploring at Carnegie Mellon.

Annabelle and I thought this was the happiest lost/found cat poster we had ever seen:



We also liked the dinosaurs. There was a colorful triceratops at the School Board building:



This fellow in front of the Carnegie Museum sported a dapper beret:



Here's a pretty cool sculpture on the Carnegie Mellon campus:



Saturday, July 7: We started off our day with a good breakfast and a rabies shot and then went back over to Carnegie Mellon for the information session and tour. Annabelle has taken them off her list for a host of reasons that have nothing at all to do with the tour, but I have to say it was the most ridiculously large tour group I have ever seen. At first I thought maybe they had an unexpected number of visitors or that the other 10 guides called in sick, but judging from how well our 2 guides did, I have to think no, that's just how they do business there. I mean seriously:



Is that crazy, or what?

There were a couple of cool things though. The fence was still painted from the president's visit the day before (apparently painting the fence is a huge tradition):



Annabelle said I was a tremendous creeper for taking this next one, but I'm sorry--the robot has ears and a tail. How am I supposed to just walk right by that without taking out my camera?



After our tour, we grabbed lunch and hit the road back to Columbus.

Sunday, July 8: In the afternoon, we dropped Annabelle off at Ohio State for her week-long linguistics camp, and I took Fred to the airport to fly back to Kansas. I spent one more night in Ohio before heading off to Kentucky where I would pass the time that she was at camp by visiting friends and eating all my favorite Kentucky foods.

Tuesday, July 10: Mike left for his 4 weeks of Field Training at Maxwell AFB in Alabama. I'm not sure if Fred got any better pictures. Mike sent me this one from his phone:



Friday, July 13: I drove back up to Columbus to pick Annabelle up from linguistics camp and fly back to Kansas. She had a great time! Here she is with her group:



Wednesday, July 18 - Friday, July 20: Annabelle was over at KU for the Youth Civic Leadership Institute. She was one of 2 kids from her high school chosen to go, and there was a nice little write-up in the summer newsletter about them (click to make it bigger if you want to read it):



Here she is with her group in a photo that I stole from her Facebook page because--as we established earlier--I'm just creepy like that:



Saturday, July 21: Mike turned 20 at Field Training, and we got our first letter from him. It sounds like he is doing really well! The anticipation of FT has cast quite a shadow over much of the last year, so it's nice to hear that it isn't as horrible as he had expected. He's almost halfway through and will be home (briefly, before going back to Florida State) before we know it!

Poor kitty

Friday night we were at a porch party at a nearby house when some children found an injured kitten. It had its head tilted to the side, and its right front leg was dragging uselessly. It hissed and ran, but one of the teens at the party and I were able to corral it. I scooped it up and took it to my house where we set it up for the night in an extra dog kennel in my basement. We gave it some food, which it ate as best it could given the odd angle of its head and the inability to bear weight on that right front paw.

First thing Saturday morning, Annabelle and I took it to the vet, who quickly figured out that the head and leg problems were not orthopedic but rather neurological.(Apparently the kitten's pupils were also of unequal size.) He told us "it" was a "she" and found a pretty nasty open wound on her neck in the fold created by the head tilt. He gave her shots of fluids and antibiotics, cleaned the wound, and pulled a bunch of ticks off of her. He said the paralysis could be a result of the ticks or a result of the infection on her neck or possibly even tetanus from the wound. With either of the first 2 options, there was a chance it might reverse, so he sent her home with us along with oral antibiotics and orders to fatten her up. We knew then that her prognosis was not necessarily good, but we had hope.

When we arrived home, I sat in the basement cuddling her on my lap while Fred and Annabelle went to the PX for a flea comb and some proper kitten chow. They got back and we put her back in the kennel with some dry food. It was frustrating to watch her try to eat; the head tilt and leg paralysis kept her from being able to go nose-first into her bowl, so she was pushing more food away than she was getting in her mouth. I decided to try to hand-feed her and thought I would have better luck with wet food. So I popped open a can, scooped a dollop of food onto my finger, and presented it to her.

Big mistake.

She chomped into my fingertip and refused to let go. She was growling, and I could feel her chewing on my finger. I scratched my thumb on the other hand trying to pry her jaws open, but she wasn't giving up. Annabelle ran for Fred, but by the time they got back, I had managed to get loose and was just sitting on the floor crying.

I knew I needed to go to the ER for a tetanus shot, but I was worried about what would happen to the kitten. I called the vet, and the receptionist said we could take her there for a 10-day rabies hold. Fred put on some gardening gloves and transferred her back to the travel kennel, and we took off.

When we arrived, however, the vet said that while he would indeed hold an otherwise healthy animal for observation, the fact that this kitten was already displaying neurological symptoms made that impossible. He essentially decided for me that there was no time to waste in having her tested. I was beyond distraught, feeling like my stupidity had signed her death warrant.

The hospital visit was unremarkable. The nurse cleaned the wounds (puncture on the top of my finger, more like a slice underneath) and gave me a tetanus booster. The doctor discouraged me from getting the rabies vaccine, saying that it would be just as effective if started 48 hours later. I went home and took a nap and then started having second thoughts about passing up the vaccine. I called my friend who is the nurse-midwife who delivered Annabelle and her response was unequivocal: "Go get the shots, Bonnie!"

So we went out to dinner and then back to the ER where I saw a different doctor. I got the first of 4 rabies vaccines (a painless shot in the arm--if they were ever really giving rabies shots in the abdomen like they told us when we were kids, they're not now), as well as a whopping 10 cc of the rabies immunoglobulin, divided into a shot in the arm, a shot in each hip, and a couple units injected right into my finger, which would have been quite traumatic had they not numbed it well first.

I'm glad I went back to start the shots (got my second one today in fact), because it is now more than 72 hours since I was bitten, and we have yet to get the test results.

I still feel horribly sad about the kitten. I know that I rescued her from an awful, certain death outside and that her prognosis was not the best even with good medical care. I also know that with me trying to give her oral antibiotics twice a day, I stood a fairly good chance of being bitten anyway. It's still a disappointment though that she never got a chance to get better.

Let's all learn from this: Help the strays of this world because God knows they need it. Just be smart about it!

Jazz cat

What a musical summer this is turning out to be! We had a day at home to decompress after Interlochen, and then Sunday Annabelle started jazz camp at UMKC. Each student was assigned to an ensemble, and then on Thursday the ensembles did their recital. Here is Annabelle's group (her solo--improvised!!! which totally blows my mind--is in the second number):





I wasn't able to snap a photo of her group all together, so I'm stealing this picture of her with a couple of her jazz friends from her Facebook page:



This concludes the musical portion of Annabelle's summer. Still to go: visits to University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, a week of linguistics camp at Ohio State, and then a few days at a leadership program at KU. Oh, wait, and then band camp. So I guess the musical portion of the summer ISN'T over after all!

The cat is alive and well!*

When I arrived at Interlochen last Thursday afternoon, I saw Annabelle briefly before the final recital. We agreed that she would save most of her stories for the long drive home the next day, but she did tell me that she thought the week would go down as one of the best experiences of her high school career. So yay for that!

First the group divided up into quartets, with each quartet playing something different. I wish I had had sufficient disk space to record all the quartets, because each was amazing in its own way. I also wish I had remembered to take my monopod to the recital, as my video is a little bit shaky, but oh well. Here is Annabelle's quartet:



After the quartets, all the players assembled into one enormous bassoon band and played several more selections. Star Wars fans will recognize this one:



Here is the second selection (I don't have my notes with me and can't remember what this is):



They played "Somewhere" from West Side Story. It's a beautiful piece, but this video cracks me up. Watch the woman right in front of me and see if she doesn't sprout Yoda ears at the end:



Here is their fourth piece, and once again the name escapes me:



Here's the whole gang right before the recital:



And Annabelle saying goodbye to her cabin:



She's already talking about maybe returning next summer. This week though, the bassoon has been put away, and she is doing a daily jazz camp at UMKC on the bari sax. It's a very musical summer!

*If this doesn't make sense to you, go back and read my previous post.

Schrodinger's cat goes to camp

Annabelle chose not to take her cell phone with her to camp, a decision that I initially applauded. How nice, I thought, for her to have a week without the Internet/Facebook/texting monkey on her back, a week for her to focus on her music and to read a book or just stare at the lake during the quiet times. What I didn't count on was how cut off it was going to make ME feel.

I'm dying to find out if she's having fun. Is she learning a lot? Has she made friends? Did she pack the right clothes? At any given moment, she may be happy or she may be miserable, but I won't know until Thursday. I'm reminded of the story of Schrodinger's cat, which is best explained by Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory:



Over the past couple of days, I've become somewhat of an Internet stalker detective, trying my best to get a peek inside the box. I've been following the Interlochen weather reports (thunderstorms! hail!), which is child's play. But I've also been checking Twitter and Tumblr, media that I haven't used much in the past, to find updates from her fellow campers who didn't leave their phones with their mothers.

GoBassoon Reeds has tweeted a couple of photos from workshops, but I haven't gotten a clear view of Annabelle yet. I THINK that the person to the far left in this photo might be her (red sneakers, pink water bottle), but without a head it's kind of hard to be sure:



Until I open the box on Thursday, I'll just have to hope that this photo I snapped on my way out of camp is representative of the overall experience:

The school that's fun to say

Annabelle and I began our journey to Michigan last Thursday by driving to northern Indiana, stopping for the night, and then proceeding on to tour Kalamazoo College the next day. Really she was just humoring me regarding the tour, as she hadn't been terribly impressed by the school's website. All that changed though on the tour, and K'zoo is definitely going on her applications list for next year.

I kind of suspected it might be a good match when our guide turned out to be Annabelle's 4-years-older doppelgänger, wearing a similar dress and similar hairstyle and boots that I just knew Annabelle was secretly coveting. The similarities continued though when we found out she was majoring in theater and minoring in French and sociology. I managed to get a photo of the 2 of them without appearing too creepy (I hope):



Kalamazoo is a pretty campus, set into a hillside in the city of the same name. This is their performing arts center:




The stained glass as seen from inside:



We were quite impressed that such a small school (1400 students) would have 3 separate performance venues--a black-box theater, the recital hall, and the main theater:



Annabelle was favorably impressed with the dorm room we went into. It's a nice, large room with plenty of storage:







Also, each dorm has a wonderful lounge area and full kitchen:







After the tour, we did a little bit of exploring downtown. We had an amazing supper at a restaurant called Food Dance and talked about some of the highlights from the tour. Annabelle was really taken with K'zoo's flexible curriculum. Beyond the foreign language and physical education requirements (the latter of which can be fulfilled through classes such as Stage Combat), there are no other general education requirements, which makes it easier to double major. Kalamazoo also has a huge emphasis on study abroad, with something like 85% of the students going overseas at least once.

I'm glad she has another school for her application list that she feels really excited about!

Whoops!

I keep forgetting I have a blog. Sorry 'bout that!

Mike came home a week ago, and we've been enjoying having him around. A couple of shots from the airport:





Fred went down to Alabama last weekend for his family reunion. It was ACT weekend for Annabelle though, so we didn't go along. He had a nice visit. A couple of shots (stolen from Facebook) from the reunion:





Annabelle and I are taking off tomorrow for a little 2100-mile roadtrip. She is going to bassoon camp in Interlochen, MI, with a stop along the way to tour Kalamazoo College, and I am going to hang out with a couple friends while she is at camp. Way to break in the new car, eh? I'll try to take lots of pictures while I'm away.

New wheels!

I've been aware for some time now that I really needed to be getting a new car. My poor old van was still running fine, but it needed a lot of work: the check-engine light was stuck in the on position, and I could no longer direct which vents I wanted the air in the front to come out of. Little things like that, but they would have been expensive to fix, and we were up over 250,000 miles.

I knew what I wanted: something with great gas mileage that we could pay off within a year. As much as I loved my van (and the Honda Accord I had before it), I did NOT love several years of high car payments. Oh, and I also wanted some cool bells and whistles--heated seats, XM radio, on-board navigation, that kind of thing. We compared the Toyota Corolla and Nissan Sentra, and Sentra came out the winner (although it was really close), just like it did last year when we bought Mike's car.

Here's the new baby!



And here's the proof that the old baby was getting pretty long in the tooth:



I have to admit I cried a little bit when we said goodbye to the van. My kids grew up in that van!



I think we'll be quite happy with the Sentra though. Just as soon as I figure out how to work out all the gadgets!

You gotta have "Friends"

My neighbor is fostering a litter of 6 black kittens, and I thought I would pass out from an overdose of cuteness the first time I saw them. Said neighbor just went out of town for a few days, so Annabelle and I stepped in to help out.

There are 3 boys and 3 girls, and they have been named after the characters on the TV series Friends: Joey, Chandler, Ross, Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel. Each wears a different color collar, and there's a list on the door telling which one goes with which kitten. It seems like just when I was starting to get good at kitten identification, our kitten-minding gig came to a too-early end. Tonight is my first night since Sunday without a kitten fix, and I think I'm having withdrawal.

I took my camera over a couple of times and got some pictures, which was harder than you might think. Every time I went to get a picture of one, it seemed I had another dangling from my camera strap or climbing up my leg. Frankly, they reminded me a lot more of the title characters in the movie Gremlins rather than Friends.

Annabelle has a conversation with Monica:



Chandler likes to sit on heads:



Annabelle with half a litter:



The whole litter:



Rachel wants to whisper a secret in Annabelle's ear:



I told you Chandler likes to sit on heads:



I'm not sure which one this is:



I've got my hands and lap full:



We even convinced Fred to go over once for some kitten therapy:







Joey likes to make trouble:



Phoebe says, "Please take me home with you!"