Cage Fights!!! (aka Thank You NASA)

Well, those of you who have been reading this blog know that the kittens (aka Flatt & Scruggs) love to wrestle and in fact, were auditioning for CWF (Cat Wrestling Federation) a while back. Well, they have decided after a stint in the CWF that they are ready to move on to something a little more challenging: Cage Fights!

Normally, I would be the last person to endorse cage fights - at least the human variety. I think they are over-testosteronized excuses for barbarity. However, kitty cage fights are a little different as you will see.



Chris & I just purchased a new memory foam mattress topper for our bed (Thank You NASA for that wonderful new space-age polymer that has made our lives more squishy!!!) and this is the box bottom that it came in. This box was sitting in our bedroom while we laid out the topper and of course the girls immediately jumped in it and started wrestling - so Ta Da! A new cat sport was born (I feel the need here to include yet another nod to NASA without whom this new sporting event would have never come to pass).



We have since moved the box into the living room where the box can be both ugly AND unsightly, but the girls can have better access to it. After all, we aim to encourage our kids on whatever path they choose for their lives...

Additcted to Square Dancing?!?

There was a square-dance last night at church. I hadn't square danced since PE class in elementary school and I'm not sure that Chris had ever square danced. There was a caller and live musicians... and a pot-luck dessert for when you needed that little extra burst of energy to keep going! There was a really good turn-out of people of all ages from a little older to really little. Many of the teens & young adults showed up and even a couple of our priests came. Fr. David, pictured above was one of the organizers of the event. (Fr. David's wife pictured in the white sweater below was, alas, the only priest's wife who came.)The caller did such a good job of explaining the dances and the "calls" associated with the moves. He was also really good at being patient with all the little kids who were dancing in the squares to make sure everyone got the opportunity to do the dances and have fun.

And it was fun. In fact, it was a lot of fun. I think even Chris was genuinely surprised at how much fun he had. He had been somewhat hesitant to go and was doing it primarily because I wanted to go and also because he and a friend of ours had a "pinky pact" that if one went, the other one would agree to go too.

There's already talk of the "next" square dance at church. Yippee and Yee Haw!

Scruggs has locked on her target... can you guess what comes next???

Yep, you guessed it. It doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist...

Over a week old and still going...

I received some beautiful roses from my sweet husband last week for Valentine's Day. And my mom had this great idea for making them look good a while longer... cut them much shorter, this gives the roses a fresh drink of water and packs the heads in much tighter. This keeps them from looking so over-bloomed & unruly. Here are the results: Thanks Chris for the beatiful roses! Thanks Mom for the great idea!

Our Matrimonial Icon

In Orthodoxy, a matrimonial icon is an icon that is painted (we call it "writing") of a husband and wife's patron saints. It does not matter if they lived in the same centuries as they are now outside of time. Chris & I just receieved ours after over a year of waiting. A very talented friend from church wrote it for us. See it on my other blog here.

Croc-ing Up

Ok, I don't usually mix my Orthodox blog postings with my standard family postings, but this time, I couldn't resist. Back in December, during the Disney trip, my mom and I were on a quest for Disney "Crocs" shoes. You know, the ugly rubbery clog thingys that are soooo comfortable. Well, neither Mom nor I emerged from our DisneyWorld excursion victorious with souvenir Croc's emblazoned with the mouse ears where the holes should be. So my fervor for the super comfy uglies kind of faded a bit.

My mom on the other hand, has continued her Croc quest, trying to decide what style she likes and what color. She called me yesterday to tell me that Costco has them available in most colors and for a very reasonable price. OK, so my Croc quest might be heating up again... we'll see...

In the meantime, I was cruising Orthodox blogs this afternoon and came across this posting by Fr. Michael Reagan who is the priest at St. Barnabas Church down in Southern CA. Fr. Michael writes a great blog called "The Abandoned Mind" that is not only educational, but also interesting and fun to read. Most of the time his blog is focusing on some aspect of Orthodoxy, but I stumbled across this one from last year that didn't... Fr. Michael had me "Croc"-ing up... so to speak. So I thought I would share it.

Croc-ey, mate!
Yeah, so I tagged along with my wife as she went clothes shopping the other day. Generally she will do nearly anything to avoid my company on such excursions, since like most men I utterly fail to grasp why it can take a woman nearly an hour to decide between two virtually identical shirts whose only alleged difference is a color variation so imperceptible to the naked eye it would likely require something as sophisticated as a NASA computer to tell them apart. If she feels rushed by me during her selection process she will invariably pick the wrong shirt, which won’t be discovered until she is wearing in front of her mirror at home with that “I should have gotten the other one” look on her face.

After many years of careful observation I have finally come to the conclusion that shifting back and forth on my feet like a spoiled five-year-old boy and whining, “I gotta go pee!” only annoys her, and thus I have tried to find better ways to amuse myself during her grueling selection process. With precious few possibilities available to me in a woman’s clothing store, this usually boils down to me grabbing some particularly gaudy and ridiculous item of apparel off the rack to try on right there in order to strike a silly pose for her and ask, “Does this make me look fat?” With an appropriately goofy hat or sweater this can often provoke a small chuckle from her. That makes it all worthwhile and I’m good for at least another several minutes as I revel in my own comedy. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that this stunt has also resulted in my being banned for life from every store in the entire Victoria’s Secret chain. It would appear that people who work in women’s lingerie shops are not as fun-loving as one might otherwise be inclined to imagine.

At any rate, on our most recent shopping adventure, and with no lace-lined, liquid-filled, super push-up brassieres to converse with (Clerk: “Sir, why are you talking to the bra?” Me: “I’m complaining to upper-management. Get it? Upper-management? Har!”) I cast my bored eyes around the store and spotted a small display of Crocs sandals.To the uninitiated, Crocs are a sort of rubbery-resin clog-type sandal that is available in a wide range of colors, none of which you would particularly want to display on your feet. Here is a small sampling of some of the colors they come in:

Feeling fairly certain that donning a pair of these loopy loafers would produce the desired comic effect without requiring yet another call to my bail-bondsman, I slipped on a pair in so-called “Army Green” to model for my better half. The instant my feet found themselves inside these sandals, my mouth involuntarily exclaimed, “Whoa! These things are comfortable!” I’m not kidding; I have never tried on a pair of shoes that felt more heavenly than these. They make your favorite and well-worn bedroom slippers feel like a two-sizes-too-small stiff pair of rental bowling shoes by comparison. Of course Crocs aren’t as attractive as most rental bowling shoes, but hey, you can’t have everything. I left my own shoes behind on the floor and walked around the shop in the Crocs for a bit just to see if my first impression was mistaken. If anything, they felt more comfy the longer I wore them. My poor feet were practically singing for joy. I was in fact so caught up in my bipedal rapture that I failed to notice my wife had walked up to eye the grotesque things on my feet. “Nice shoes,” she observed dryly, “Are you going to get them?” “You actually like these?” I asked in astonishment, stupidly oblivious to her sarcasm. “Well they’re a bit different, but then so are you,” she said, and with that the deal was done. I left the shop $29 poorer, but with tootsies feeling like a million bucks.

I wore those Crocs for two days straight but then had to set them aside to wear something more appropriate for Wednesday night Vespers. My feet were quite unhappy to leave their comfortable new home, and so the next day they carried me back to the shop to buy another pair in “Clergy Black”, or at least that’s what I call this new color. I wonder if I am the only priest to wear a cassock and Crocs to church. This much I know: if word gets out about how gosh-darned comfy these ugly sandals are, I probably won’t be the only priest to wear them for very long.

Get a pair, mate. Croc-ey, you’ll love ‘em!

Chico

I was looking through a bunch of miscellaneous pictures that I have stored up in a "misc" album on my computer today and ran across this picture.

Many of you probably don't remember or may not have even known us at the time. Chico was the cat that Chris had when I met him. He had rescued Chico who was a foster cat living about a block away, but would spend most of his time hanging out under the porch of the house Chris was living in at the time. He would come over and Chris would feed him when he hung out under the porch, so eventually Chris decided to adopt him and take on his care full time.

Chico was always a very independent and slightly "unbalanced" cat - I'm guessing from living so long on his own without being able to know where his next meal was coming from. Still, once in a while, especially when it was cold out, he would come inside and hang out with us. Most of the time, though, even when he was inside he was an independent cat.

One of the "unbalanced" things he would do is every night when he was inside we would be able to lay in bed and watch him pace from the bathroom to the living room and back, meowing the whole time. Back and forth, back and forth. It was never just a single stroll, but genuine pacing. At first I thought I was imagining things, that a cat wouldn't really pace like this (OK, maybe caged lions & tigers do this, but a cat, that has a whole house to roam through?), but then I saw this behavior on more than one occasion and Chris saw it too... even when I wasn't around... so we know that he was doing this intentionally but for what reason, we could never really figure out.

We lost Chico about 3 1/2 years ago to some kind of ailment in his lungs that he never really recovered from. This is one of the only pictures we have of him. I'm really glad now that Chris took it.

Oregon Fauna

I had never heard of nutria before moving to the Pacific NW... I'm sure they have them in other regions, but it was something unknown to me previously. Here in Oregon, they're pretty much a rodent pest similar to raccoons. In fact, they are similar to raccoons in many undesirable qualities; I have heard of them taking on cats in a fight... and winning, they can often denude a pond of its stock of fish, and I don't know for a fact, but my guess is that they can also carry many of the same diseases as other rodents.

My reason for writing about them at this time is that for about the last month or so, every time Chris & I come home from work we both see nutria out in the green space down by the creek near hour house. Sometimes its not just one, but sometimes two or three of them all out munching on whatever they can find in the grass. I have never seen them in our greenspace before this year and now we see them every day. I'm not sure what in their local eco-system has changed, but it's not a change I'm especially fond of - I fear for the neighborhood cats.

From a distance a nutria looks similar to a beaver - OK, kinda cute, but then when you get up closer you notice one big difference: Nutria have giant, bald, rat-like tails. Ewww!!! Nutria can get up to 25 lbs - about twice the size of a normal house cat - no wonder they can take them on and win. When I used to live in Texas we used to always talk about rats the size of small dogs... here in Oregon, we actually have them! And see them in our green space every day!

Irving High School

I spent a little time this afternoon in a nostalgic fog. I went looking for a link in an old email account that I never use and found an email from a high school friend telling about a HS band reunion that was going to take place on Jan. 3. He sent the invite back on 12/31, with only 3 days notice, so even if I had received the notice in time, I would have been hard pressed to go. Anyway, I did see that someone else on the link had pulled a bunch of friends names from the Irving High School alumni pages from Irving High's website, so I went there, registered and then surfed around for a while. I found lots of familiar names in the alumni list and I looked at pictures of the school and all the activities going on there. My old high school has changed some, but there's a lot about it that is still frighteningly familiar.

I don't have as many great memories of this school as I'm sure some people do; I was transplanted there in the middle of my Sophmore year and had to make new friends - which I'm not especially good at, since I'm pretty shy around strangers. Still, I do have some good memories of this school. Being a band geek and hanging out with all my band geek friends, my first date, working long hours on the yearbook, a few excellent teachers and some friendships that have lasted me to this day.