Our old cat, Juno, died last month. It was difficult for the family, particularly my youngest daughter, who was the cat's favorite. Juno spent most of her time in my daughter's room, sitting on her lap, laying right next to her head while she slept, and so forth. So, when the cat was gone, my daughter was pretty upset.
A few weeks after the cat had died, my daughter came downstairs looking a little rough, and my wife said, "Are you okay? You look like you've been crying."
"Oh, I was just thinking about Juno," was her response.
We have another cat, named Jupiter, but she's not nearly as cuddly as Juno was for my daughter...or anyone else.
She likes to play and run around, but hates being picked up, held, or even to sit next to somebody. That may change when she gets a little older, we only got her a couple of years ago, but for now, that's her temperament.
My wife thought a good plan would be to get a new kitten to replace Juno. After all, she says, we're a two cat household now, not a one cat household. I wasn't so sure that we needed to remain a two cat household. I like Jupiter a lot, and am happy with her, but I like my daughter even more, and I'm willing to do whatever I can to make her happy, so I agreed.
On Sunday, we got the new cat from Somebody who lives out in Spring. It's a pretty cute cat, but it is painfully skittish. It's so nervous that you can't as much as clear your throat without sending it running, and reaching toward it to pet it is the most scary thing it can imagine. It spent the first several days hiding out under our bed. We gave up and put its bed under there, and it laid on the bed under the bed for the first 24 hours or so.
I wasn't even totally sure what it looked like. When we got it from the woman, it had been in the cat carrier, and wouldn't come out. We had to dig it out and then drop it into our cat carrier to take it with us. As soon as we opened our carrier, it fled under the bed. My son got a few pictures while he was sitting next to the bed, reaching in under to pet her.
He had to use the flash for the picture, because the cat wouldn't come out of the protective dark under the bed.
It wasn't until Monday morning that we were finally able to coax the cat out with a toy that interested her too much to turn down.
She stayed right at the bed's edge, though, and retreated back under it if anything made her nervous at all.
While I was at work on Monday, my daughter and son managed to get the cat to feel a little bit more secure. They decided on the name as well. They were torn between the name Nyx and Freya, thinking both were cute, and wanting to see which went better with the cat itself. It is now decided that the cat will be called Freya.
Days in now, and she's a little more adventurous, but not a whole lot. She still spends most of her time hiding, and we often have to turn our couch upside down and dig her out of the space she's climbed up inside of to hide. Somehow she manages not to just hide underneath, but actually goes up inside the back of the couch. It's a nightmare.
We've tried introducing the two cats, but it hasn't gone very well. Jupiter growls and hisses when she sees the Freya. Apparently, that's the standard, and you have to keep them apart to where they can see each other but not interact with each other until they get used to the idea of the other cat and then you can bring them together.
I hope it happens. For two years with Jupiter, Juno did nothing but hiss at her any time the two were near each other. I hoped that Jupiter wouldn't act that way because of her past experience, but no, I guess cats are just that way.
All I can say so far, is that I prefer Jupiter. One of the main reasons I didn't like Juno was because of how much of a scaredy-cat she was. She ran from me every time she saw me as if I had kicked her over and over. That really rankled after a while. My wife insisted it was because I was just the loudest person in the house, and it made the cat nervous. I just hated getting treated like a monster without even getting the joy of being a monster to deserve the treatment.
Now, we've got another skittish cat. My wife keeps saying that I just need to be patient, coax her out, give her time, and so on, but I don't have the time to do all that. I've got all sorts of crap taking up my time, and I can't spend it all sitting around waiting for a cat to feel comfortable enough to come out from under the bed long enough to be touched.
I fear that this cat will always dislike and fear me, and maybe it's my fault, but I'm not sure if I care enough to change that.
This struck me as particularly sad. We have two little stockings that we put up on the mantle for the cats next to our four human sized ones. This morning, I noticed that one of the two had been pulled down and set aside.
I don't know who removed it or why.
I fear that it's because if they see it up there, it will move them to tears. For me, seeing it not up there made me feel like crying. I hope everyone in the family is doing alright adjusting to life without Juno.
Just
had to put my cat down. That was really tough. She was with us for 15
years, and my daughter loved her desperately. It was really hard to be
there with her until the end while my daughter cried away. We'll miss
you, Juno.
I eat meat all the time, and it's doing me a lot of good. I have become much more healthy since I started doing that.
Of course, there's some hazards...no, I'm not talking about cholesterol. That BS was a theory that has proven to be completely untrue. No, I'm talking about this:
Yeah, that's my cat Juno. Every time I sit down with some food, the cat comes and stares me down like this, waiting for me to pitch some of my lunch her way. Every single time. If I was eating cereal or broccoli, I don't think I'd have to deal with this. So, keep in mind if you're thinking of trying it out, that there are some hazards.
In my last cat post, I mentioned that we were taking Juno to the vet, because it was acting really sick, and I was a little afraid that it might be curtains for the old cat, who is now 14 years old.
The vet ran tests, and they, of course, came up inconclusive. Could be this, could be that. It was looking bad. The vet was talking a lot about trying to make Juno comfortable. I'm sure she would have done whatever we were willing to pay for to keep the cat alive, but we couldn't afford to break the bank to string a very old cat along if it's reached the end of its ability to stay alive on its own.
She gave us a few medications that we had to give Juno, and hopefully that could help her to stabilize. One was an anti-nausea medicine. The second was an antibiotic. The last was a pain reliever. One came in pills that we had to hide in her food. The other two were liquid that we had to get down the cat's throat somehow.
We were not looking forward to that. The vet had barely been able to examine Juno, because she's so cantankerous that she wouldn't allow her even close without hissing and slashing at her.
My daughter had paid attention, though, and noticed how they'd used a blanket to shield themselves from danger, and adapted that strategy. Since the cat trusts her much better than a stranger, she was able to pick up the cat and wrap her in a blanket, immobilizing the threat before any of us could suffer any grievous bodily harm.
Pinned down, we were able to get that medicine in, though she did foil us a time or two by thrashing her head at just the right moment. She has her share of cat medicine stuck in her fur now, but most of it got in her mouth.
The very night after we left the vet, the cat started eating again. She didn't puke for once. She ate again, and again. She was getting her strength back and quickly. And now, the cat is looking much, much better.
I don't know if it's just the medicine, though. Has she stopped puking constantly because she's on anti-nausea medication, and as soon as that stops, she'll go back to it? Or was she just sick, and because she's 14 years old she doesn't have the immune system to fight it off by herself? It's up in the air. I guess we'll see. But for now, she's doing much better, and has lived to fight another day.
It has been long documented on this blog about how much our old cat, Juno, hates me. She refuses to be around me if she has any choice. If I enter a room, she runs out of it as quickly as she can.
I tried to prove the old proverb that a cat loves the one who feeds them the most, but I proved it false. She came to me each day at feeding time and meowed and rubbed against my legs, but if I reached to pet her she skittered away. Then she came back to beg for food again. Once I fed her, she disappeared for good, and didn't return until the next feeding time.
All of that is why this was so weird.
Sunday morning, Juno jumped up onto my bed, then walked up onto my lap and laid down on top of me. She sat there happily as I pet her for probably ten minutes at least. I grabbed my wife's phone, because it was in the bed next to me, and took that picture. Then I took some video.
I had to have proof that this had even happened.
And of course I promptly dropped the phone. When I scooped it back up, it had switched to the wide angle lens (something that only my wife's phone has, not mine), and I got some more extended video.
Juno is fourteen years old now, and my kids often joke that she has cat Alzheimer's. Sometimes she'll sit in front of her food bowl and beg for food, even though there's still food in the bowl, although she's probably just saying, "I'm not going to eat that slop, it's old. Give me new food."
Then there's things like this, when she seems to forget how much she hates someone, and sits on their lap purring while the hated individual pets her. Have you gone senile, Juno?
We're afraid it might be something worse, though. This might have been an early indication of a problem, because she has been getting progressively sicker ever since then. Sunday, she puked again and again. We kept finding new places where she'd left a little puddle of bile for us.
Then she took to hiding underneath the big chair in our bedroom. She only comes out to puke again, but she has enough of her mental faculties to go to the last remaining places on the ground floor that have carpet and puke on that. So, she might not be that far gone.
I don't know. She's not eating much, and if she does eat, it comes back up quickly. I'm going to take her to the vet this morning, and see if there's anything that can be done for her.
My wife has been preparing the kids for the possibility that there isn't. We can't afford to spend a ton of money to keep a really old cat around a few more months, not while we're in the middle of all this home renovation stuff. Juno picked a bad time to get sick, I guess.
All I know is that if this is the end, I'm glad Juno chose to come to me Sunday morning and act like a nice cat for me one time before she goes. I'll be able to remember her much more fondly for doing so. If only she'd done this all along, I'd consider myself a cat person by now.
Another year, and I'm working on Thanksgiving Day again. I don't know how often that happens, but it seems way more often than it should. The worst thing about working this Thanksgiving is that I probably didn't have to. I asked for Christmas off this year, so I left Thanksgiving to the other editors...but none of them ever asked for Thanksgiving off, so we had all three editors at work this year for no reason. I guess the extra money might help pay for Christmas presents or something.
Anyway, you may wonder why I titled the post "An Early Thanksgiving." Well, it's not because we celebrated it the day before. Instead, my wife decided to have everything ready so that we could have Thanksgiving dinner by noon, since I had to leave for work at 1:00 PM.
Weirdly, we all wound up sleeping in later than usual despite our need for an early meal. My wife said she got out of bed at 9:30 AM. I remember her leaving, but I didn't know how late it was, so I went back to sleep, and then at 10:30 AM, I woke up still feeling sleepy.
I checked my phone before going back to sleep though, and my eyes bugged out when I saw the time. There was only an hour and a half before we were supposed to eat. Surely my wife needed some help. I'd better get out there.
Turns out it wasn't that desperate, however. My wife had things pretty well under control. She let me help here and there, but mostly she beat that dinner like a boss.
I did get to do some important stuff though...like giving the cats some turkey cat food in honor of the day.
The kids helped me clear off and set the table.
Then my responsibilities mostly consisted of taking pictures of all of the amazing dishes that my wife made for us to stuff our faces with.
She used the air fryer that she got me for my birthday to cook the turkey this year.
It came out wonderfully, and she says it's the best turkey we've had in years. My daughter insisted that we have ham as well, so here's the meat platter for Thanksgiving:
We also had homemade mashed potatoes and gravy:
Which were super tasty. There were green beans fried with bacon, and, my wife's favorite, the homemade cranberry sauce:
She made a big dish of stuffing:
And a huge tray of sweet potato casserole.
We sat down to eat, and it was very apparent that there would be a lot of leftovers.
It's weird to have so few of us left. Ever since we moved to Houston, holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas have been much smaller affairs, but this is getting ridiculous. Last year, my older son came to visit at Thanksgiving, so we had the whole family to eat that big meal. So, it's a much more noticeable drop from last year with both a daughter and son now gone. It's hard to handle this slide toward an empty nest.
Had been anything like the new kitten we have, Jupiter:
I don't think I ever would have disliked cats at all.
She is so fun and crazy and playful and entertaining that it completely counteracts Juno's horrible personality. I guess it's an important lesson. Don't judge every member of a group based on one member of that group. Everyone is different. For every Juno, there's also a Jupiter.
We’ve been slowly trying to introduce Jupiter (the new kitten) to Juno (the crabby old cat), so that they can live together with us. We started with the kitten closed up inside our bedroom for a few days, so Juno could start realizing that there’s someone new.
Today, my wife put the kitten in my den, because there’s doors with windows in them, so Juno can see the new addition without being able to attack. I guess we’ll do a couple of days of that.
Juno hisses at Jupiter whenever she sees the kitten. I believe that’s normal. Today, she sat outside the den, keeping guard I guess.
That's Juno through the window, sitting on the rug and keeping watch. And this is Jupiter causing a ruckus in my den,
Any suggestions or advice on introducing cats that I need to know?
We've been thinking about getting a kitten for my youngest son that could be his special pet. We've had a cat for a while named Juno.
We got her back in 2008, so she's getting pretty old. Which makes her pretty uninterested in playing the kinds of things a nine-year-old wants to play. On top of that, she's old enough to remember when he was born, and the crazy things he tried to do to her when he was still a toddler.
And let me tell you, Juno knows how to hold a grudge.
So, we got a new cat for the boy today. It is super cute, and a lot of fun to play with. Here is the new cat, Jupiter, sitting in my son's lap.
Looks like this might work out...although Juno really seems to dislike the new arrival.
My wife called me at work to let me know that Juno, our cat, had caught her first mouse and brought it to her. This was a big deal. Juno is almost 13 years old, and, as far as we know, has never caught a mouse.
Back in 2012 we had a mouse in our house, and it got so brazen that we all saw it out of it's hidey-hole several times, but despite owning a cat that was young and spry, we only got rid of the mouse through the use of judiciously placed traps.
So when my wife saw Juno come in the house with a mouse tail hanging out of her mouth, she was proud of Juno for her achievement. Problem was that Juno didn't bring the mouse to my wife. Juno brought the mouse inside and then ran under the couch with it.
My wife was not looking forward to disposing of its body, but she wanted to get right on that before something gross happened, like the cat spreading entrails all over her floor or something.
Strangely, Juno came back out from under the couch, but did not have the mouse in her mouth anymore. She circled the couch, meowing constantly at it.
At last, my wife got some help from my daughter, and they lifted the couch to where they could see underneath it...and there was nothing there.
"Oh, no," my wife thought. "The mouse wasn't dead after all." Juno had brought a live mouse into her house, and now it was somewhere inside her couch.
They upended the couch, and that's when they got their first look at the mouse. It had climbed up onto the frame of the couch, but now that it was exposed, it wasn't going to wait around to be a cat treat.
It ran out of the couch, and scrambled across the room, looking for an escape route. They pursued it, and managed trap it in one corner of the room. The two tenderhearted girls couldn't bring themselves to off the mouse, so rather than smack it over the head with the broom, they grabbed the cat and threw her into the fray.
That was a pretty bad idea. Juno just isn't qualified for a job like that. Her resume would immediately be trashed if it came across the desk of someone looking for a good mouser.
Juno was willing to give it a shot though. She charged in after the mouse, which evaded her attack and ran over to the fireplace, climbed inside, up the chimney, found a crack where the top of the firebox is, and slipped back behind it.
Juno meowed and sat in front of the fireplace for the rest of the night, but there was no way to get after the mouse. It was stuck in there. It couldn't really get out, unless it wanted to die on the claws of a cat, and we couldn't get it out without a shrink ray.
Juno caught her first mouse, and was so inept that she didn't kill it. Instead she brought it alive into our house, and now it was loose in our house. Thanks so much cat. All that food we've been giving you over the years has been totally worth it.
There is a happy ending to the story though...but not for the mouse. Juno (and the rest of us) kept an eye on the fireplace over the next few days.
I even lit the fire one time, assuming that the mouse would come out rather than cook to death inside there, but either way it would work in our favor. Didn't work that way though. I think the position the mouse had found was protected from heat by the firebox, so nothing came of my attempt to flush it out of its hiding spot.
After two days hiding in there, though, the mouse finally got hungry or thirsty enough to risk making a run for it. Juno had heard it making rustling noises, and pounced on it the second it showed its whiskers.
She ran under the couch with it again, but this time, I came out and had my wife and daughter upend the couch. Juno wasn't tearing into the mouse under there. Instead it was standing on the ground in front of Juno looking like the two were having a conversation or something. When I caught sight of the mouse, however, I used a wiffle ball bat to dispatch it.
So, in a way, you could say that Juno caught her first mouse, but you could also say that she's just as worthless as ever.
Since
you all love Juno more than me, I’ll give you another picture of her.
Here she is in her favorite spot of late, hiding under the couch.
She
used to only go under there when thunderstorms hit (which, granted, in
Houston is pretty often), but now it’s pretty much a daily thing.
She probably just goes under there to avoid me. My wife thinks the cat hates me because I'm the loudest person in the house, so therefore the scariest. I'm apparently as bad as a thunderstorm.
We've only been in Texas for two years now. We came out in June of 2017. While we were still living in a hotel, we got some of the effects of Tropical Storm Cindy, but that one was mostly out in Alabama and Mississippi. Two months after we moved into our house, Hurricane Harvey descended on Houston, and this was a direct hit. That storm left our city reeling and devastated.
2018 was a quiet year, and a good thing too. We didn't have the wherewithal to deal with anything like that in Houston in 2018. Now it's 2019, and it seemed like it was going to be another quiet year. There had been little talk of hurricanes or tropical storms so far this year.
Monday, that changed in a hurry. There were a bunch of clouds just off shore in the gulf of Mexico that looked like they might coalesce into something dangerous. It wouldn't be a big wind event, not a hurricane, but the way it was acting made it look like we might have a major flood event. Our weather guy was warning us all, it should hit on Wednesday. Our managers sent out emails telling us to put our affairs in order so that we could be prepared to cover this thing around the clock. Twelve hour shifts were likely.
I packed up the car with a couple changes of clothes, a blanket, a pillow, my toothbrush, and a comb. I was hoping it wouldn't be that bad, but just in case. In the back of my mind, was the specter of the day I spent stuck at a Walgreens because of a big storm that hit our neighborhood in May. My car was not going to make it through any flooded streets, as demonstrated by that experience. I had no idea what might come, so I wanted to be ready. I brought a bunch of food in and put it in the fridge at work to get me through if I needed to stay the night at work for a day...or two.
Tuesday, the storm formed and earned a name. This was now Tropical Storm Imelda. And it came early. Not Wednesday, but Tuesday it hit. It didn't take long for it to disappoint, however. It moved faster than expected across the Gulf of Mexico, and therefore didn't gather as much moisture to dump on us. It was raining like crazy, and flooding in some flood prone areas, but mostly we were high and dry. I had to stay until 1:30 AM at work, just in case something happened, but nothing did...other than me earning three hours of overtime pay.
It rained pretty good on Wednesday morning, then started to peter out. My drive to work was pretty easy, and by the afternoon, things looked like this outside:
Suddenly, at about 5:00 PM, things changed. The skies darkened up, and thunder started rumbling outside, and we could hear the rain pounding on the roof. The newsroom started buzzing with activity. The storm was taking a turn for the worse again. We needed to get our resources in place to cover it. There was a new tornado warning in east Harris County and west Chambers county.
Thankfully, when things like that are happening, it doesn't pertain all that much to me. I edit the recorded video, but when things are happening live right now, there doesn't tend to be recorded video. Instead, they point the camera and transmit live stuff. But this story pertained to me a little more than I expected it to.
My phone rang, and it was my wife on the other end of the line.
"Is there a tornado warning right now?" she asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"Where is it for? Is it in Baytown or Mont Belvieu?"
Sadly, I didn't know. I hadn't paid that much attention, because the newsroom commotion usually doesn't pertain to me. They were organizing live crews in the field, not editors sitting on their can in front of a computer screen. I had to jump on the internet and look it up, and yes, east Harris County and west Chambers County could most definitely be Baytown or Mont Belvieu.
"Looks like it is right there next to you, baby. You might want to hightail it out of there as fast as you can...but also, see if you can't point your phone at it and get some video we can throw up on the news too."
Well, she did hightail it out of there, but didn't manage to get any video. It was already receding into the distance by the time she had called me, so the only way to get video would have been to go all storm chaser, turn around and head right toward the tornado, which would have been contrary to the first set of instructions.
Other people were closer, and got pictures and video that we used on our news. A guy sent out this tweet, where you can see the tornado that was chasing my wife. And here are some stills that I found on the internet:
She made it home okay, calling me about an hour later to report in and put my mind at ease, and again, it seemed like the worst was over. Imelda must have been done toying with us, and had moved on to bother the folks north of us in Nacodoches or Tyler or Shreveport or something. My drive home from work was pretty uneventful. It was barely raining anymore, just a light sprinkle really.
After I got home, I messed around on my computer editing my Journey to One-derland update video for a while, and I could hear the rain strengthen and start pounding again, but I dismissed it. That strengthening and weakening rain had been going on all day. I still thought we were done.
My first clue that something had changed was that at 4:00 AM, our kids' school district finally decided to cancel classes for the day. I missed that notification, however, because I was fast asleep.
Instead, in the morning, I awoke to thunder, lightning, and rain like I had yet to see since the storm arrived. Our house was being pounded relentlessly by Imelda. She wanted us out of this existence and was doing all that she could to see us gone. Look at this crazy video:
A few minutes later, I went back out in the backyard to get some more video, because the thunder had stepped it up further. It doesn't come across as well, because I believe the phone adjusts the audio automatically, but that thunder was loud enough to make a person jump out of their skin each time it hit.
Our cat disappeared under the couch, and didn't come out for a few hours she was so scared.
I didn't realize how bad things had gotten, despite having stood there taking video of the deluge. My wife went and looked out the front of the house, and then shouted for us all to come look. This is what we saw:
That's our street, our front walk, the front edge of our lawn, all underwater. When I saw that, I freaked out.
We never saw anything like that even with the catastrophic storm known as Hurricane Harvey, which flooded nearly the entire neighborhood I live in, along with the rest of the Houston area.
Yet here it was. The street under a foot of water.
Because we'd never flooded in Harvey, I assumed we were untouchable. If Harvey couldn't sink us, then what else possibly could, right?
But maybe not after all. This hadn't happened before but the rain was still falling hard, and the water was so very close to our front door.
We still don't have flood insurance, because, after all, we were untouchable. Even Harvey couldn't get us.
How ruined would we be if it came up the lawn any further?
I really wanted to get on the phone and get some flood insurance coverage, but it was too late. They don't cover you starting the day that you call. It takes two months before it kicks in.
So, yeah, I was really getting scared seeing this flood on our doorstep.
Here's a couple videos of the flooded street as well if you want an even better look at how it was.
What could we do? Nothing really. It was too late for insurance, too late to leave town, too late to leave the house at all. None of our cars could get out of the driveway at all. We just had to hope and pray that the storm would move on and let us be. So, that's what we did, and that's what happened.
The rain kept falling, but not as heavily, and the steady flow of the street river eventually emptied our little tributary out. It lowered little by little. The guy who had his car parked on the street was finally able to safely move it off the curb and up on the driveway. And, as the day wore on, it was time for me to leave for work.
They really needed me to be there, because my chief editor had picked this week of all weeks to take vacation. That meant that we were already working with a skeleton crew. If I didn't make it, then one editor would have to do it all by himself, and work hours of overtime to boot.
I didn't want to do that to my coworker, so I went out on the roads, despite my wife's objections, and gave it a try. I didn't even make it a full mile from the house before I came to an intersection that was still flooded out. Jacked-up trucks were still splashing their way through, but I wasn't willing to test my Ford Fiesta in the same way. I was going to have to wait a little longer before I could get out of here.
I called my boss and gave him the bad news. He told me that it wouldn't have done me any good even if I could get out, because the traffic on the roads was so bad I'd be in bumper-to-bumper for hours. I'd never make it there as it was. He told me to hold tight for a while, and try again in an hour or two.
I turned back around and went home, grateful that I could still make it back, and wouldn't be spending hours at a Walgreens like I had in May. My wife wasn't at all surprised to see me back. We got to have a little more family time while I waited to try again.
After an hour passed, I gave it another shot. This time I almost made it four miles before I came to the spot where a stream that usually flows under the road was now flowing right over the top of it. Here, even the jacked-up trucks weren't risking it. When I saw them turning tail and running, I didn't even consider it. I did stop to get a picture, however, and I texted that picture to my boss, telling him I wasn't able to make it out yet.
I mentioned the stalled out car that was stuck halfway across, just for a little added emphasis. He told me to stay safe, and to try again in an hour or two.
I said I would, but I was pretty sure that I wasn't ever going to make it to work. I felt really bad for my poor coworker who was going to have to do it all himself, and work a twelve hour day while doing it. That really sucked.
When I called my wife to let her know I was coming home, I was passing the McDonald's, and I asked if she wanted me to pick up some dinner while I was out. She was game for that, so I pulled into the parking lot, but some guys in yellow vests out front waved me on through. Apparently the McDonald's was closed. I had seen that the grocery store was still open though when I passed it a while ago, so I decided to go there instead.
It wasn't as crazy as it had been back in 2017 when we visited the store during Hurricane Harvey, but the place was definitely jumping. Of course, this might be its usual situation at this time of day. I wouldn't know, because I was usually at work at this time of day.
Something about the energy of all the humanity teeming inside this Kroger made me really want to do something fun. I walked past the soda aisle, then turned back and went down and grabbed a few bottles of soda for the kids. I wasn't going to drink any, I've finally learned my lesson with that, but they still love it. We could have a bit of a party, a Tropical Storm Imelda party. We were all home for the day. I could call the kids down out of their rooms, and we could have some fun together.
I grabbed some chocolate chips, because what is more fun than making cookies together? I got us two frozen pizzas, and a carton of ice cream...and some enchilada sauce that my wife wanted for a recipe she was making later in the week, because why waste the trip right? And I headed home with an instant party.
I called the kids down, we put on some music, and we had some fun together. We whipped up the cookie dough together, and got the pizzas started cooking. When they finished, and everybody dug in, and we sat down together to watch a movie. The girls had been watching their way through the Firefly TV series, and now the only thing left for them to watch was the big feature film finale Serenity. I didn't need any encouragement to join them, of course, Firefly is one of my favorite all-time things. So, we sat down together and watched the movie.
I did have to leave before the film was finished, though, to give it one last try. I didn't expect to be able to get to work at this point, and now that it was getting dark, I wasn't going to be willing to try a fourth time if this one didn't work. It was treacherous enough out there in daylight. If I couldn't see the flooded street before I hit the water, then I'd be in real trouble.
I drove the four miles out to the same spot where I was thwarted before, hoping that the water level had lowered and I might be able to pass freely, but it looked mostly unchanged.
The only real difference was that now there were two stalled out cars out in the middle of the water instead of just the one that was there before. I took another picture, texted it to my boss, and asked him to tell my coworker that I'd hung out to dry that I was sorry to have to do this to him. Then I went home, and we watched the rest of the movie together. Then we had some ice cream with cookies that we'd made. I even had a breakdown and ate a cookie myself. I guess it was a bad idea to bring home the chocolate chips. Watch my update video that's coming up for more on that story.
I found it to be a pretty enjoyable evening with the family, and was glad that A) we didn't have any worse problems to deal with than the inability to get to work and B) we were able to turn the negative of the storm into a positive time together with each other. Imelda wasn't all bad...at least, not for us.
I'm sure there will be a decent amount of damage around the area, and people that we know will have had their homes flooded and ruined and will need some support. So, there will be need for help from us and the rest of the community, but for now, I'm just going to enjoy the time we had together, and leave the worries to tomorrow.
Some birds have been trying to build a nest...INSIDE MY BARBECUE!!! I've taken their pile of stuff out twice, the second time I burned it with the barbecue, figuring that would keep them from coming back a third time, but I was wrong. This morning, they were in there again, piling up weeds to make another nest. This time, I'm going to leave the lid open, so that they don't feel protected inside. We'll see how that works. Also, my cat is sitting in the window right beside the barbecue, maybe that will help, but probably not. My cat is really useless.
