In loving memory of our kitty

Our beloved cat Giselle had to be put to sleep on January 5. We'd noticed that she hadn't been eating as much as usual off and on since Thanksgiving, but she often went through periods of eating less (especially when left at the vet's for boarding or after major changes) then her appetite would perk back up again. I took her into see the vet for a routine checkup, and it turned out she had lost a lot of weight. Giselle, never a fan of any vet, declined to let them take her blood without anesthesia. They took other samples and thought it was just a UTI. I took her back home, doped her up with antibiotics (which she loved!!), and over the weekend she was lethargic and barely ate anything. Back to the vet the following week, where they finally got the blood test and found that she was suffering from end stage renal failure. Our only treatment option would've bought her a few months at best before she declined again, and would've required a stay of at least a week at the vet's, with daily anesthesia so they could give her IV fluids. They usually give cats tube feedings, but they knew that Giselle would never let them do that due to her extremely high anxiety in veterinary procedures. So after much discussion and tears, we decided that the kindest thing to do for Giselle would be to have her put to sleep.

We brought her home for a couple of days, and gave her lots of hugs and cuddling, and all her favorite foods. She snacked on her beloved weed, salmon, tuna, and even ate a little of her normal food.


She actually jogged down the stairs when we put out the weed, which was wonderful to see. It is some consolation that she enjoyed her last few days and is now at peace and free from discomfort. She was a wonderful cat, and we miss her very much. It's very strange to come home and not hear meows welcoming you back (and demanding attention and treats immediately!).

I adopted Giselle (aka Stampey, Gizzard, and Bucky) from Wayside Waifs in the spring of 2004, when she was about 2 years old. She was quite well-traveled, living in Kansas City twice and Ohio, and visiting Toledo and Michigan several times. She earned the nickname "Stampey" because of her habit of running up and down the stairs so frantically and somehow contriving to sound like an elephant rather than a 7-lb. cat. She loved napping, sitting in boxes, curling up with people or fluffy blankets, looking out windows, and batting at fishing toys and ping pong balls.


Stacey once spent a harrowing night in the guest room at my condo, waking up once during the night to find Gizzard staring intently at her from atop the scratching post. She woke a few hours later and found that Giselle was chewing on her hair! It was probably a normal feline attempt to try and groom Stacey, but as I can attest from one of Giselle's subsequent attempts on me, it was quite the disturbing experience!!

Here are some of our favorite photos of Giselle. She had the habit of looking adorable and staring right at you...until the camera came out, at which point she'd totally change positions and refuse to follow any pleas/threats/bribes to look at the camera.

The infamous 'HEY!! Get the hell away from my weed!" picture:

Finding a sunbeam on the condo stairs:


Plotting with Darth Tater:


With Mom & Dad:





Here she is this Christmas, investigating the the dancing robots that Tony sent us.

She looked,

sniffed,
and promptly decided she was having nothing to do with them!


We miss you, dear kitty. Thanks for all the wonderful memories.

A big milestone!

My wonderful car, Henry the Honda, turned 150,000 miles today!

For a belated birthday gift, he will be going to our friendly neighborhood Honda dealership for a brand spanking new exhaust manifold in a few weeks. I got my Civic in fall of 2000 before I left for my internship in Albany, and he has been a very reliable car over the many miles I've driven. What say we aim for 250,000?

An introduction to cookie baking on a massive scale

After a short postponement due to snow and ice, the annual family cookie baking event took place on Saturday. Each year, they make several hundred cookies in two varieties- normal "biscotti" drop cookies, and filled cookies which contain figs, dates, raisins, walnuts, and other stuff. This year we made 3 batches of dough, which required about 27 eggs, 15 lbs. of flour, 9 cups of milk, 3 sticks of butter, 10.5 cups of Crisco, tons of sugar, some baking powder and vanilla. And that's not even for the icing! These recipes have been in the family for several generations, although some tweaking of the recipe has gone on through the years. Dave sent me step-by-step pictures of last year's event, and since this was my first year joining the fray, Jerry & Dave documented it.

The plain drop cookies are pretty simple- you mix the wet ingredients in the pretty commercial-grade KitchenAid mixer:

Blend together the dry ingredients with your hands or a pastry blender. Jerry took care of this part:



Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour in the wet ingredients:


Mix it all together with your hands:


Put them on a cookie sheet by teaspoons and bake for 12 minutes.



The fig cookies take a little more intense preparation after the dough is made. Roll out the dough:

Cut it into thin strips. (I did not like this part so much because of my difficulty making straight lines.)


Use your fingers to make a thin, goopy line of the fig/date/walnut/orange liqueur mixture. This gets very messy!


Flip half of the dough over the fig mixture. Roll the filled dough into a log and cut into appropriate sizes for crescents or wreaths.



Put on cookie sheet & bake!

Dip the cookies in the icing and add sprinkles. Jeff took care of this step.


Divide the cookies into many, many containers and distribute to friends, co-workers, neighbors, and passers-by.




Above all, keep the dog from eating the product!

I swear I am not making this up.

For those of you who just can't wait for Dave Barry's annual Bad Gift Guide, I present you with this suggestion from our coupon section in Sunday's newspaper:


Yes, that's right, it's the perfect gift, guaranteed to make everyone laugh- a remote-controlled farting teddy bear! Furthermore, this is apparently such endearing behavior, that your friends will want to hug the little stinker again and again:


I guess I'd better go rewrite my list to Santa...

Birth of a Landmark, Death of a Lawn

Summer has been hard on the O. household. Not on the O's themselves, mind you -- just on the house. Since June, the kitchen faucet has been replaced, the downstairs toilet has been reinstalled, the deck has been sanded and permanently sealed, copious amounts of rotted window trim and sill have been removed, and a settlement for the defective Masonite hardboard siding was reached. After surviving those calamities, we now get this:

That, in case you are wondering, is what white grubs can do to a lawn. About half of the back yard, half of the yard on the north side of the house, and a quarter of the lawn on the south side are in such condition, and are a total loss. The dead turf will have to be ripped up and the underlying dirt reseeded. Luckily, other than a few patches, the front lawn is relatively intact. Needless to say, Em and I are both ready for things to stop breaking/rotting/dying.

But with death comes rebirth, and while the yard may be gone, downtown Kansas City is making a comeback. After two years of construction, the long awaited Sprint Center is now complete. The city's newest landmark officially opens tonight with an Elton John concert, but its unveiling occurred last Wednesday, when the doors were thrown open and Kansas Citians were given an opportunity to see what their tax dollars had bought. As I work within walking distance of the new arena, I wandered over during lunch, and took a few photos.

In addition to hosting concerts and sporting events, the arena is also home to the College Basketball Experience & National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame , which looks like it will be sufficiently fun and interactive to lure some basketball-loving former roommates to KC for a visit.

From the inside, the arena offers sunlit concourses and 360 degree views of the city; I was impressed with how this connects it to its surroundings.

The seating bowl and arena floor itself are about what you'd expect, with comfortable seating and good sight lines for about 19,000 people, a state-of-the-art high definition scoreboard and ribbon board, and a very loud sound system. The ice hockey configuration was a bit of wishful thinking on the part of the city (though there's still hope of stealing the Nashville Predators for the 2008-2009 NHL season); later in the day, the floor was reconfigured for basketball, and later still, for a concert.


And, perhaps most exciting of all, there's this

Yes, it does charge normal QuikTrip prices. No, it does not have a soda fountain, chips or hot dogs (only frozen drinks, doughnuts, cookies and sandwiches).

Needless to say, I'm excited to attend an event at the Sprint Center, though now that it's complete, I'll miss being able to check on the progress of its construction. But that's okay -- I've already picked the next downtown project that I can track obsessively. Behold the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts!

Lobsterpalooza....well, sort of.

Well, we didn't exactly find striking evidence of Lobsterpalooza on Cape Breton Island. However, our friends ensured that we would at least have something lobster-related when we got home.


It is a tradition among Em's college roommates to decorate the house/apt. of a newly married roommate when the couple is away on their honeymoon. Heather & Jeremy came home from Hawaii to find their apartment strewn with a few hundred leis...some easier to find than others. Sarah & Steve went to England & Scotland on their honeymoon and arrived home to find almost every figurine or stuffed animal in the house wearing its own little kilt (including all the foosball players). They also had a distillery recreated from their hot water heater (complete with stuffed Veggie Tales stuffed toys with drink containers, I believe), the fields of heather and sheep on another table, and Bath, England recreated as a kiddie swimming pool that Heather kept adding food coloring to in order to make it as gross-looking as it apparently is in real life.

We got lobsters.

In other lobster news, some fantastic lobster bibs from Calvin & Kelly arrived last week. They had asked us about sending a mysterious "something" to us while we were in Nova Scotia, but we didn't have an actual address (just a P.O. Box) for the only place we'd be staying at for more than 2 nights.

Photo slideshow!

We will probably get around to doing more posts about the individual places we visited on our honeymoon to mainland and Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. But until we have time for that, here is a slideshow of about 120 pics (yes, it's a little long, but we narrowed it down from 3,000!) with brief info about each place. Enjoy!