The gift tally

Really good holiday this year (by which I count my birthday and the Christmas days together), with good gifts but especially with family and good friends. My birthday was fairly low-key, with just the family and a boozy theme: a gift card to the Brew Shop, a giant bottle of Jack Daniels, a magnum bottle… Continue reading The gift tally

A new kitten

Friday, after much hand-wringing and debating and questioning sanity (almost entirely by my wife), we adopted a new kitten from the Humane Society. He’s about seven weeks old and has that full-on kitten rambunctious flexibility that all the good kittens possess. Kittens like that are like crack for some people. Thankfully the first night was… Continue reading A new kitten

Mortality

One year and two weeks after we lost our first cat, we lost our second cat today. We had to have him put to sleep, the same as before; he was essentially end-stage advanced urinary tract disease. We’d spent the last two weeks doing everything we could for him. This was our cat Lucifer. He… Continue reading Mortality

Pets are expensive

Our Labor Day weekend itself was decent enough overall, but Sunday night we had to take our oldest cat to the emergency pet hospital because he’d been acting weird all day, and by the evening was seemingly in serious pain. Turned out he had stones in his bladder and was all blocked up. Since our… Continue reading Pets are expensive

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Life is what happens when you’re making other plans

Yeah, that headline there? Totally saccharine and goofy and pointless. Yes, I know it’s cribbed from John Lennon, so what? Anyway. The “life that happened” was a sudden and unexpected gall bladder removal for my wife last week. Yeah, I know—Wha?!? She went to the doctor on Wednesday, confirmed that she had gallstones, and they… Continue reading Life is what happens when you’re making other plans

Post eye surgery

The eye surgery went very well, our daughter has been recuperating marvelously all weekend (it wasn’t a very eventful weekend because of this), and things are more-or-less back on track. Saturday morning we did make a Costco run, largely because I had an eye exam of my own at the optometrist there. It’s been probably… Continue reading Post eye surgery

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My brother’s garage sale

A promo-note to any garage salers reading: my brother and his girlfriend are having a garage sale today (Saturday the 15th). Among other things, he was planning on selling some of his older video game systems (Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo), with games, and we took a toddler mattress over there for them to sell ($45… Continue reading My brother’s garage sale