Goodbye to Milly, last of my parents' cat herd

This morning my parents' cat Milly passed away. She was very old, we think at least 17, and we knew she was on her way out for a while now. She wasn't in any pain and went to sleep and just drifted away, which is the best possible thing to wish for. She lived a good and long life and loved and was loved.

She showed up at our back door when I was about 12 or 13, just skin and bones and purrs. She looked to be just over a year or so old at that point. She never meowed, she said something I can only transliterate as "nyeng," and she said it so softly you couldn't hear her through the glass door, just see her mouth move. We had a cat inside already, Trouble, but my parents can never resist feeding hungry creatures. She was so friendly and obviously used to people that I think someone abandoned her in the woods behind my house, but I have never seen a cat that was a worse hunter. I named her Milly because she looked like one, and because the word Milly looked like her, with the points of the "M" her ears and the "y" her tail. My dad made her a nest on the porch and she was our outside cat for a while until one day we saw that she was leaving a trail of blood. We grabbed her and took her to the vet, and as he palpitated her stomach a dead kitten slipped out of her. I grabbed my little sister and pulled her out of the room, knowing we didn't need to see any more then. The vet said that the kittens died because she was so thin she couldn't support them. She was spayed and got all of her shots and when we brought her home, she was an inside cat.

She and Trouble (was the least amount of trouble of any cat I've known) got along fantastically, though Milly was one of the dumbest cats I've ever seen. Very sweet, but dumb as a rock. She used to get her head stuck in the kitchen chairs, and would jump up on the table onto papers and go sliding across and boom! fall right onto the floor. She loved people food, and would climb up your body for a chicken cheesesteak.

She gained weight for a few years until my older sister moved back home and brought her two cats, Frenzy and Sunshine (the Kitten), with her. Kitten and Milly took one look at each other and a lifetime feud was born. The torn part of Kitten's ear is from fighting with her, and she got Milly back too. Frenzy would defend Kitten and they'd wage very loud wars throughout the house, which were dangerous to interrupt. That's one of the reasons I took Kitten to live with me, mostly because she was such my cat but also because ever after years living together they never got along.

Milly started as kind of my mom's cat, I think, but for the last few years she's been attached to my dad. He has that quality which makes him irresistible to children and animals, he just seems to exude safety and peace. The pic above is her helping him on the computer, as you can see she's very helpful.

Frenzy passed away a few years ago, and now with Milly gone I'm not sure what my parents will do. They have an outside cat, a very friendly marmalade they call Cliffy, but he seems so happy outside I'm not sure they'll bring him in. It does seem hard for them to be without any little furry things around, though.

Some more pics I found when looking for the ones of Mookie. Her sleeping in a box

Trouble being a roundcat

Kitten in a sink

My sister's mini dachshund Toast with pink ribbons on her ears

Frenzy and my dad. He was sitting there and she just climbed up him until she found the spot where she wanted to be. She looks so sweet and innocent here.

It's December, somehow

So Ben and I are celebrating Christmas 3 times this year, once last weekend with his family, on Dec. 26th with my family, and by ourselves when we get home after that trip to NJ. We went up to see his family for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and I got him, modestly speaking, the coolest gift ever.

These are dice modeled on the Deathly Hallows symbol from Harry Potter printed on a 3D printer in bronze. How much more awesome could fit into a sentence?! They're from Shapeways, which is a fantastic site where you can upload 3D models of things and choose a material to have them printed in, or use other people's models.

They are probably not actually usable in a game, I didn't see the model creator say anything about trying to make them actually balanced, but the numbers are distributed correctly and they have a very satisfying *thunk* when you roll them. They're heavy and feel solid in your hand, too.

It was a good thing we decided to give each other gifts at each Christmas this year instead of waiting, I could barely stand to wait this long to give them to him, and he loves them!

The rest of our trip to NE was good, saw his family and friends and all. We went over to Iowa for Thanksgiving and saw most of his cousins and their kids, it was a good trip. For Christmas his parents gave me very warm slippers and a kit to knit a really pretty purse. And we managed to fit everything in our suitcases, yay! It was cold enough to wear my knitted sweater a few times and it got lots of compliments, it's very warm and cozy!

I saw these adorable knitting bags on Etsy and added them to my Christmas list and waited like 10 minutes, but no one bought them for me and I was afraid they'd be sold to someone else and there was only one of each and so I bought myself an early Christmas present :) How insanely cute are these?!

 

Update!

Current status of the sweater:

And of the Kitten:

Cruise!

Last weekend Ben and I went on a cruise for a friend's wedding and it was awesome! We're really excited for them and hope they'll be as happy as we are!

The cruise was from Miami to Cozumel, Mexico and back. We tried to take a picture with Miami in the background, but the window was all reflective and blurry. Oh well!

It took 4 tries to get a pic where neither of us was blinking and my eyebrows weren't doing that thing they do in 75% of pictures of me! But all I have to do to like my smile in pictures is think about how happy I am to be next to my husband, and it works :)

We ended up waiting a little long to book the cruise, we wanted to make sure we weren't going to get laid off before it, so by the time we did all they had left were rooms with balconies. Darn! :) It was really surprisingly inexpensive, I guess because it was kinda late in the season, and we loved it. This is the room with a towel creature I maintain is a sloth, because look at its face! But Ben thinks is a seal or something silly like that :)

The bride was gorgeous!

I wore the same shoes I wore to our wedding, which are these awesome shoes that have a wooden base so they're very sturdy and contoured to the shape of your feet, good arch support, and come with different ribbons you can use to hold them on. I wore them with mint green satin ribbons when I got married, black ribbons to the wedding, and stripy blue ones to the reception. Love them!

We spent most of the first day at sea at the reception and hanging out with everyone. It was cool in that unlike a regular wedding we actually had a lot of time to hang out with the bride and groom, which was nice.

The second day we docked in Cozumel. We actually didn't spend any time there, we went on a excursion to the Yucatan. We took a boat to Playa del Carmen, which like a lot of Mexico alternates gorgeous architecture

right next to empty lots full of rubble. (The rubble was less photogenic.) Also the thing that makes me most aware I'm not in America is when the names of stores lining the street are not in English! It's strange to me for there to be words I can't read!

From Playa del Carmen we took a bus to the Mayan ruins of Tuluum, which was at its height in the 1200-1500s. The tour guide told us Cortez landed there first, and got bored and wandered off when he saw the Mayans didn't have any gold. He went and wintered in Cuba and came back the next year farther south, and found the Aztecs and their small amounts of gold.

Tuluum was gorgeous though! I can't help but love any place with this many palm trees :)

This was their astronomical observatory.

All of their buildings were oriented north-south, with north as defined by Polaris, not magnetic north. Several of the buildings had small holes where the sun would shine through only at solstices or equinoxes.

There were iguanas everywhere, they were like squirrels there!

We even saw some doing push-ups just like the little lizards here, to show off how strong they are! Lizard ladies love that.

The tour guide said that when the ruins were rediscovered in the 1800s, they were easy to excavate because unlike Pompeii, they weren't buried underground, they were just covered in jungle.

You can just see the water through the trees here.

After the tour we had an hour or two to spend there, and it was my favorite part of the trip.

The water was gorgeous and felt just cool after walking around in the sun.

I floated in the water next to my husband, both of us borne up and down as the waves rolled by, and the world was perfect.

After the water, we walked back and had lunch in a little tourist trap place the guide had recommended as clean, quick and good. Chicken and cheese quesadillas with a bright salsa and slices of avocado, rice and beans with salty tortilla chips, perfect after being in the sun for a while. Mexican is perfect summer food.

Unfortunately we had to leave that gorgeous water behind and go back to the boat. I think we ended up sleeping the rest of that day, ha.

We saw some other ships go by and watched birds chase flying fish through the wake.

This is one of my new favorite pics of Ben, he looks so relaxed and content.

This bathing suit cover is my souvenir from the Amalfi Coast in Italy.

The bride and groom decided that they wanted to have a formal water slide event, she wore one of the 4 (!) dresses she brought and the dress code for the gentlemen was ties and swim trunks. It was so funny!

It's hard to water slide gracefully though!

It was a fantastic weekend! We've had a very busy summer this year, though, and it's nice to be home and relax with this creature who thinks she's sneaky.

Update:

Cookery!

For some reason this last week I've had the urge to cook all the things!

Last week we went to visit a friend who just had a baby and so we brought them a casserole, an apple cake, and 2 blankets my mom made. This is the same friend I gave the little blue sweater with the star buttons, if you recall. At the same time I made another casserole and apple bread for us, and so my oven was actually full! I don't know if it's ever been that full before!


This weekend I made another apple cake to bring when we played Battlestar Galactica, only I used Frangelico in this one because I was out of amaretto. It was good but I think the amaretto version smelled better :)

On Monday I spent most of the night making chicken croquettes from my cousin's recipe, because there are several stretches of time where they need to rest. The recipe made 15, so I froze about half of them and we had some for dinner on Tuesday along with glazed carrots (I leave out the parsley and pepper from that recipe) and roasted asparagus. The roasted asparagus was both incredibly easy and good! All I did was trim the ends, roll them in olive oil, sprinkle with kosher salt and a little pepper and roast for 10-15 minutes at 400, but I think they were Ben's favorite vegetable I've made yet! he told me I should have taken a picture, but I was too hungry :)

And yesterday I made adorable little mini meatloves! They were so tiny and cute! That recipe made 6, so we have enough leftovers I won't need to make any main dishes for a week! I served them with leftover carrots and green beans almondine with well-roasted almonds, yum.

I have bananas ripening on the counter which are destined to become banana bread this weekend, and last night I had an urge to make chocolate chip cookies, though I resisted it. I might make some dough tomorrow and just make 4 cookies and freeze the rest, hmm...

I'd almost forgotten how much I love to bake! It's like doing chemistry but ending up with baked goods, it's awesome.

I told Ben I was probably reacting to the change in the weather, fall is coming so I want to make things with apples and stock our larder! He cracked up because by "change in weather" I mean it's down to 92 F (33 C) :)

I am excited though, I think I'm getting better at meal-planning and coordinating side dishes. It's harder than it seems to make a whole meal ready at roughly the same time every weekday! Growing up my family ate dinner together pretty much every night and it's important to me that we do the same, it's a really good bonding time I think, so we are all formal about it, it's fun.

Socks!

I decided these were finished even though the pattern has the "POLICE BOX" embroidered in all the white spaces at the top. But in the course of making these I have discovered 3 things:
1. My embroidery is quite wonky.
2. Related: embroidery is hard yo.
3. I don't enjoy embroidering tiny text on knitting nearly as much as actually knitting.

So they're done! They took me forever because I ran out of yarn just after the second cuff and discovered it was on backorder until August. But luckily there are a lot of awesome people on Ravelry and one incredibly gracious woman sent me more, leftover from a project she'd just finished, and refused to accept any payment or chocolate or anything, even for shipping. So nice!

They also took a while because I made a baby sweater while I was looking for more yarn for these (I figured anyone who worked at NASA had to like stars against a blue background)

And I was getting quite sick of plain knit stitches in dark blue, much as I love it.

But they're done and I got to give them to my sister in person! We went out to see them in New Orleans, it was so awesome to see her and meet Dan! We had a great time and ate lots of delicious food, yum.

And now I get to knit something that's not blue! I'm thinking hot pink, oh yeah.

Travelogue: Italy!

On Friday May 20th we left Houston at 4 pm on an Air France flight that went wonderfully! Shortly after we took off they served us a dinner that was shockingly good for airline food, Ben got chicken and I got pasta, and we both had a little cold niçoise rice salad, roll with butter, dishes of perfectly ripe grapes, block of cheese, mineral water, and raspberry cake for dessert. We didn't get wine (which was included) on the way out, but we did on the way back, and I have never really believed in matching food to wine until then, but man it made such a difference! We had a little quiche type thing for an appetizer then, and I had a bite and it was ok, then I had a sip or two of wine and took another bite and the flavor just exploded, it was so delicious I couldn't believe it! So I definitely recommend Air France and their wine.

We watched Season of the Witch on the way there, with Nicolas Cage (I know, I know) and Ron Perlman (Eee! I really think he's actually a Neandertal, he's so awesome!) and it was really good too! We enjoyed. I knit a bit and then we tried (and pretty much failed) to sleep for a few hours.

As we came over England the sun was coming up, so the flight attendants raised up the windows and served breakfast, which was a good way to reset your internal clock.

We landed in Paris and we saw French bunnies playing in the fields! They were so cute!

But the rest of our time in Paris kind of sucked. The flights had been chosen by Ben's parent's travel agent, and we had about an hour and half between them. But it took us 45 minutes to get off the damned plane and into the terminal, after we took the world's longest and most boring tram ride around the entire airport. After that we ran into the customs line, which we skipped after we begged an attendant to let us jump the line since our flight was boarding, then ran into the security line, which we also jumped for the same reason. Then we ran through the rest of the Paris airport and were the last people to board the plane to Rome, about 2 minutes before they shut the doors. So not that much fun.

The flight to Rome was thankfully short and I blearily tried to sleep through it but with no success. Also they didn't feed us more than a cookie or two, disappointing.

We landed in Rome with no issues, and while I thought I saw Italian sheep or possibly Italian cows on the way in, upon further investigation they proved to be Italian haybales. Bu tit was still exciting.

We had a shuttle to our hotel, so we waited for that while drinking delicious apricot juice, which I ordered after confusing the Italian counterperson a bit, though probably about the same amount as I confuse American counterpeople.

Our hotel in Rome was kind of, frankly, sucky. I wouldn't have picked it. The elevator was extremely tiny and scary, the bed was only slightly softer than the floor, and there was no way to turn on the air conditioning, and by this point we wanted it on. We live in Texas, where it is on inside every building pretty much year round, and it was hot there. We asked the desk people about how to turn it on and they said, Oh, it's controlled by us, but we don't turn it on until June. So that wasn't much fun.

We spent the rest of Saturday trying to sleep and not melt until dinnertime. We'd met up with his parents, who had been traveling around the Mediterranean for 2 week already and had gotten into Rome the day before, and went to a close by place. I had been studying Italian, especially the words for food, and "alici" was not the word for anchovies in my book, so I ordered a panzarotti with them to see what they were. Yeah, they were anchovies, bleh. But you know, I was learning. I also had an appetizer of awesome prosciutto with mozzarella, so it wasn't all smelly fish, at least!

And then we got delicious gelato on the way back, yumm.

Our next day was Rome! His parents asked me what I wanted to see, but there was no question!

The Colosseum of course! It blew my mind to be standing next to this structure that has been standing there for thousands of years, that so many people visited, that so many people fought inside, died inside, cheered inside, yelled inside. Ancient Rome has always fascinated me, they had such advanced engineering skills and citizens had so many rights and comforts that we think are so modern, but at the same time they could be so savage, owning slaves, women had so many rights and still couldn't vote, and reveling in the bloodshed here.

And I can just go there and walk where they did!

Craziness. It was awesome though.

Us in front of the Colosseum!

And the Arch of Constantine.

Our ticket to see the Colosseum also included the location of the Roman Forum and a lot of different temples, the

This is us walking, as it turns out, entirely the wrong direction to get to the forum and those temples.

But it was pretty! We wandered around for probably an hour and half in the bright sunlight, though luckily I had slathered us both in sunscreen before we left that day. Sunscreen is definitely important, we saw some people with terrible sunburns and what I'm pretty sure was sun poisoning later in the trip, but all we got was a slight burn on the front of Ben's neck where I forgot to put some the first day.

We passed the 12 stations of Christ, which is apparently a thing, and lots of honeysuckle or possibly jasmine, it smelled awesome and was everywhere, before realizing we were not at all where we wanted to be, i.e. somewhere where we knew where we were. Indeed.

So, wandered some more and eventually found


A field of rubble!

It was the forum, it's just declined a bit since it was built 2700 years ago.

We were also near the Temple of Castor and Pollux, which I was interested in because I'm a Gemini, so I took lots of pictures of it and played with my camera's zoom, which is rather awesome.



Zoomed out again!

Overlooking the temples, now rubble.

Poppies grew everywhere in Italy.


By then we were getting hungry and quite hot, so we decided to walk some more! Of course. We passed a cat sanctuary in the middle of a city block!


The kitties had free rein to wander among these ruins. They seemed quite sweet.

We found the Piazza Navona,

which is known for the Fountain of the Four Rivers

And also for having lots of restaurants. We were hungry but mostly hot, and here we had our first experience with water in Italy. The tap water in Rome was awesome, tasted great and ice cold, they still use some parts of the original aqueducts to bring in spring water. But you can't get it in restaurants, or it's very rare, at least. When you order water they bring you a bottle of it, a liter bottle, and pour you about 2 fingers width in a little glass. You can pour more, but still, not exactly what we're used to. Also, no ice. I think we saw ice twice while we were there, and both times in an iced tea, which we also saw about twice (it's my drink of choice, I'm not a soda person.) We asked for ice, but the waiter told us the water was cold, it didn't need it. Well, the water was "cool", it had been in the shade, but not, by any means, cold. To us hot and thirsty tourists, anyway.

I had prosciutto and melon, yum, then gnocchi for lunch. I don't remember what everyone else had.

After lunch it was time for, yes, more walking! We walked to a bridge next to the Castel Sant'Angelo, which was apparently the pope's panic building. When you're the pope you get a whole building, not just a room. We walked down and I got to touch the Tiber!

I touched it! I did not fall in, but I slipped a bit and got some Tiber mud on my jeans, but it came off eventually. Upon reflection I think I used the bidet cloths to clean it off in the hotel later, oops.

It was quite nice next to the river though, nice to be out of the crowds for a bit.

This is the Castel Sant'Angelo, though it looks like a barge to me.


It may not be a surprise to hear the pope's panic house is not that far from the Vatican, which was our next stop. Unfortunately the only day we had in Rome was a Sunday, and so the museum, and thus the Sistine Chapel, were closed. But we could still go into St. Peter's Basilica.

Walking there we passed an aqueduct!

You might be able to tell I'm an engineer, huh? I love aqueducts and the Roman skill at engineering amazes me.

Ben attacking the Vatican

It started raining just after I took this picture, so we hide under a colonnade for a while, then went through security and inside the basilica. Apparently we were lucky actually, it only took us about 15 minutes to get it, and we heard later that the line can be 4 hours long on weekdays.

I did not take any pictures inside because I considered it a church, though I think other people were. Oh well. We saw Michelangelo's Pieta, one of his early masterpieces.

It's now behind a glass wall since someone I can't even think of words terrible enough for took a hammer to it in the 70s. I actually really disagree with this, I think a railing or something would have been a better idea. The glass wall is rather far from the sculpture and really cuts you off from it, it's rather remote, especially compared to the David, which has a railing but isn't enclosed, so you can feel much closer to the work, like you're actually seeing the actual piece, not just a picture of it. But then, there are a lot of things the Vatican does that I disagree with.

The rest of St. Peter's is large and in your face saintiness. It was worth much more time than we gave it, but our feet were killing us by then, it was hard to even stand and concentrate on anything else. So we left after about an hour.

On our way back we decided to make one more stop and saw the Trevi Fountain! We threw in coins because his parents told us to, but apparently we did it wrong, or something. Whatever. It was fun.


Aww. Then we took the Metro back to the hotel. I guess we ate dinner at some point in there, but I don't remember now. Hmm.

After that long day, we slept well on our rock bed!