Creative outlet

Because I look at numbers all day, I don't feel like my creative side ever really gets to come out at work. I slightly envy people who get to combine a career with creativity. One of the main ways I try to offset this problem is through cooking. No matter how tired I am when I get home from work and finish working out, tending to pets and doing laundry, I still love to cook dinner. Sometimes this is frustrating, because I'm not good at judging how long a dish might take. Many recipes give you an estimated cooking time, but I never remember to look at this important figure before embarking on my cooking journey. We usually don't end up eating dinner until 8:00 or 8:30, which I know is very unhealthy. I've tried to just do canned soup or something simple, but this just doesn't do it for me. I enjoy a show on The Food Network called "30-Minute Meals" with a perky little hostess named Rachel Ray. She makes everything look so easy! She just grabs things from her refrigerator and pantry and Wham Bam Boom - instant Mushroom Risotto, Baked Clams and Chocolate Hazelnut Cheesecake. Yeah, right. If I had a staff that only stocked whatever I needed for that night in my refrigerator and pantry, and pre-washed all the vegetables and fruits, I'd be perky too!!

My brother has also developed a love for cooking, and we have long conversations about his homemade tarter sauce and version of Nana's (our grandmother's) potroast, or my smoked turkey sandwiches with roasted red pepper pesto and caramalized onions. When we talk like this, my Mom looks at us like aliens abducted us at some point during our childhood. She has never really gotten into cooking (even though after my brother moved out,she always managed to make a big home-cooked meal for him if he came for dinner). This causes us to ponder over whether there is a "cooking gene" that maybe skips generations. Whatever causes it, it will keep driving me to stand in the kitchen for an hour every evening, with my head bent over a cookbook, chopping and stirring in my non-perky way, but to my heart's content. Thank goodness my husband is sweet enough to do the dishes every night (even without a dishwasher).

The miracle of Henry

Henry is our blind cat. He wasn't blind at first. He and his sister had been abandoned at the EHHS fieldhouse and were very dehydrated when someone rescued them and took them inside the school. At the time I only had one cat and one dog, and was considering getting another cat. My Mom told me about Henry (named after Henry Aaron, because of my love for baseball and the fact that he was found near the fieldhouse) and someone else at the school took his sister home. Both cats were very dehydrated, and the prognosis wasn't very good. He made it, but his sister didn't. When he was about nine months old, I noticed that he wasn't jumping up on things like Bones, my other cat. He also was slower to move around, and just didn't seem quite normal. I thought maybe he had suffered a little bit of brain damage due to the dehydration. But one day, I was playing with a string with him, and noticed that if you hung it in front of him and moved it around, he didn't follow it. But if you dragged it on the floor, he would pounce on it every time. It finally dawned on me that he couldn't see. He was taken to a specialist, but nothing could really be done.

Because I hadn't realized he was losing his sight, I had treated him the same as Bones. He has never considered this as a significant loss. He adapts to anything - new pets in the house, moving furniture around, new husband (although this change took a little more time for him to accept). He goes outside, in the back where he can't get out of the yard, and hunts bugs and runs after Bones and loves to chase balls. He has spatial sensibility of where everything is in our yard. He knows where every fenceline, tree, and any other obstacle is because of the map he's made in his brain, using his acute senses of smell, hearing and touch. He can run at top speed chasing a bug, leap in the air and catch it - and never run into anything. He knows where to hide behind trees so that I will not find him and bring him inside. He also has this gift inside the house, and has hidden in some pretty amazing places - causing me many panic attacks because I think he somehow got outside.

The vet told me that blind animals don't like to climb or go up to high places. Henry didn't get the "How to be Blind" guidebook, apparantly. We brought a new 6 foot tall scratch post, with little levels for the cats to sit on. By the second day, Henry was in the top bed. I put him on our mantle, which sits about 5 -1/2 feet up, to be in front of the window so he could listen to the birds. I intended to come back in a while and help him down, but he jumped down on his own while I wasn't looking. He got under the house once, and wouldn't come out because it was winter and all of the hibernating toads were under there to chase. When we've moved furniture around, the other cats hide under the bed. He explores and climbs all over everything, then remembers exactly where it is. He paces like a tiger when he can't go outside, and loves to sit in our laps, purring and slightly drooling, for hours.

Every day, he shows me his courage. Each moment he lives life to the fullest. He is fearless, and I wish I could be more like him.

Henry hanging out in Jav's lawnmower bag. 

Harbingers of spring

Every spring since I've lived in this house, I have been lucky enough to hear whippoorwills at night. There has been so much development around here that I was worried they would not be back this year. But tonight I heard one. It has to be one of the most peaceful sounds on earth. I love sleeping with the windows open and falling asleep to the lullaby of their calls. Because hopefully, a mate will begin answering from another tree. And I hope that each year, they are making little baby whippoorwills. And I hope that maybe one day if I am truly blessed and lucky, I will get to hear the sound in a different house, and the lullaby will put me to sleep again.

http://www.centurytel.net/hummingbird/whipporwillsound.wav

Give me rainstorms, too

We watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this past Sunday. What a great movie. I am not a Jim Carrey fan, but I like him when he does serious roles. And Kate Winslet was terrific. Would you want to erase any and all bad relationships from memory? You can't grow as a person if you don't let yourself feel pain. I have my very good friend Audrey to thank for that life-changing piece of advice. Otherwise, you keep going back to the same type of person over and over again. Experiencing pain is just as much a part of life as having joy. In a strange way, it made me think of alcoholics, or any person addicted to a mood-altering drug. Any sign of pressure, there's the crutch to help you through. Any sadness, just pour another one and it will all be better. But they are not really dealing with life. This topic really hits home with me, having been married to someone for seven years who didn't want to deal with life. To quote another great movie, Parenthood, "give me the roller coaster!".

Next post will not have any movie references, I promise.

Finally, a chance to write

I have tried to keep diaries in the past, but never seem to have time to sit down and write every day. I hope to try to keep up with this, but make no promises. Many people I know are starting blogs, so I have crawled up onto the bandwagon. My main purpose here, though, is to write. I don't really care if anyone else reads this - but I'll be glad if someone does. (Hopefully I can at least count on my Mom). I have pretty crazy observations come into my head at all hours of the day, and I intend to share them here. I will probably be sharing alot of crazy pet stories also, and I might even learn to post pictures if the right mood hits me.

Here's my first observation. We watched Saturday Night Live last weekend, and Tom Brady was the host. I had never really paid attention to what Tom Brady looks like, especially since he's usually in a helmet. Well, first impression was that he's pretty darn good looking. But as the hour wore on (watching an athelete try to act can wear on your nerves) I began to think that his good looks are sterile. Boring, even. He reminded me of a male Stepford Wife. This thought led me to think about other people who have boring good looks. I think Tom Cruise has boring good looks. I also started thinking about people who aren't really attractive, but are interesting looking. I was watching one of my favorite movies, Summertime, with Katherine Hepburn, and someone in the movie tells her she is interesting looking. Would I rather be told I was attractive, or interesting looking? I think with all of the plastic surgery and cookie cutter ideals of what "attractive" is these days - I'd pick interesting.