Fertile No More

Today was the day that Duchess said goodbye to her womanly parts (as Dale puts it). She has gained a little more weight (5.5 pounds) and we got her in just in time: the vet said she was about to go into heat! That would've been confusing for my neutered boys. She also had a loose tooth pulled - apparently kittens have baby teeth, who knew?
So I picked her up and the vet told me to keep her isolated and stop her from jumping on things. I thought, have you MET my kitten? First of all, whenever we isolate her, she goes to the bathroom. Outside the litter box. In fact, right NEXT to the litter box, just so you know that she's doing it on purpose. So I currently have her isolated from the other kitties in my office with me. That will work until tomorrow morning when I leave the house. :) Now, as to the jumping, that's just crazy. The first thing she did when she got home was to run around the house and start jumping on things. The 1 inch incision doesn't seem to bother her one bit. I guess we could try and keep her from jumping on the bookshelf, but I have to say the odds aren't good.
But none of that really matters - she's home and healthy and jumping around!

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

Today our church announced the December Movie. This is one of the perks of meeting in a movie theater (a perk Dale and I, and I'm sure others, will sorely miss when we move into our new building). We get to watch 2 free movies per year! So our movie this year will be Enchanted. This is a good thing, because Dale and I were unable (due to budget constraints) to go see Enchanted with David and Sallie over Thanksgiving. And now we get to watch it for free! Having been duly warned by them, we plan to watch carefully for all the Disney references hidden throughout.

Unilever

The most bizarre thing happened to us as we were traveling home from a U2Charist the other night. If you don't know what a U2Charist is, you can Google it. We were stopped at a traffic light behind a minivan, and suddenly, a woman got out of the driver's seat and started walking towards our car very purposefully. She was a typical suburban Baby Boomer. One of our passengers joked, "she doesn't have a gun, does she?" We laughed, but she was definitely holding something behind her back, or so it appeared. When she got close enough to see us, she suddenly said, "Oh sorry," and turned back around, revealing that there was nothing behind her back, not even an arm. As she got back in her van and the light cycled from red to green to yellow to red again, we processed whether we had, in fact, just seen a one armed lady. As the light turned red, she drove off, leaving us behind. She didn't wave goodbye.

Creamy soups

I have heard that married people, after a few years of marriage, stop having meaningful conversations. I'm pleased to discover, after 3 years of marriage, that this is not true. Just last night, Dale and I had a deeply meaningful conversation about soup. We were discussing cooking with Campbell's Cream of ______ soups. I was talking about eating the soups, and Dale said he didn't think that people actually eat Cream of _____ soup. I said I didn't think that Campbell soup made soups just for cooking with. But then Dale pointed out that if Campbell's intended us to eat it, they would've called it Creamy Mushroom/Celery/Chicken soup, not Cream OF _____ soup. I had to concede his point.
This is the point at which we would normally consult the iPhone, but since we were already in bed, that was put off for later.

The topic that doesn't go away...

I found this great poem on a blog today and had to share it.
"Did the woman say,
When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
'This is my body, this is my blood'?

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hilltop,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
'This is my body, this is my blood'?

Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
Brocaded robes belying barrenness,
Ordain that she not say it for him now."

by Frances Croake Frank

While I am well settled in my own theology on this issue, I am still working out how I feel about those people and churches who disagree with me. On one hand, I know that I want to work somewhere where this is not an issue: I want to be able to go to work each day without facing major opposition based on my gender, at least not from within my community. On the other hand, churches which would reject me immediately based on my genitals are part of God's kingdom and I will need to work with them at times. Do I just smile and agree to disagree? Do I fight the fight? Do I refuse to address the question?

Duchess, Wild Cat or Lap Kitty?

Duchess had her last set of shots this week. She weighed in at a whopping 4.7 pounds! It appears that in addition to the world's fattest cat, Dale and I now have the world's smallest cat. (Which we're ok with. She's so cute!) Anyway, the vet asked if her personality was as sweet as she is beautiful and I had to laugh. Images of Duchess looking me in the eye and jumping up on the counter flashed through my mind. I told the vet she was incredibly aggressive about food, and the vet treated me to her theory about cats. She asked if Duchess were a stray, which she wasn't, but apparently her mother was. The vet believes that the closer a cat is to stray life, the more aggressive its survival skills are. And it's true that Duchess is quite the little huntress. Maybe we should've named her Diana... But back to the point. Which is that the longer a cat's line has been domesticated (think of Persians here), the less their survival hunting and food aggression skills are. Which I guess means that poor old fat Pip is also very close to being a stray. Hmm, maybe I'll just go feed Pip a little more...

Halloween for Old Childless People

Now, let me say up front, "old childless people" refers to Dale and I. We are not qualitatively old, but in comparison to many of our friends, we are old. And I'm ok with that.
So anyway, what do "old childless people" do on Halloween? Besides answer our door and throw candy at small children, of course.
We spend our evening installing track lighting in the living room, of course! I'm using an adorable photo of Duchess trying to be just like her daddy.

And just a couple of Halloween thoughts:
1) In a neighborhood with a large number of children, if the parents are out with the kids, who's at home manning the door? Is it a matter of one parent staying home and the other going out? Do you flip for the right to go out? Which is more fun, staying in or going out?
2) Why are kids not saying Trick or Treat any more? We had maybe 10 kids, and I think I heard 1 Trick or Treat. Now, I did hear a lot of thank-yous, so it's not that the kids aren't polite. Are they shy? Am I just inherently so scary that kids are frightened into muteness and forget to say it? I didn't think I was that scary...