Dentist, Nails and Haircut. Oh, and my Husband's Coming Home Tonight!

I went to the dentist today for the first time since the migraines started. I was really nervous because there were times over the past year that I went for two or three days without brushing my teeth because my head just hurt too badly. I guess I was lucky though, although there was a bit more scraping and polishing than usual, no cavities! I'm really relieved and I went ahead and made my next appointment for six months from now so I won't let it slide.

Another thing I've put off for way longer than I should have is getting my hair cut. That appointment is tomorrow morning with the woman that's been cutting my hair for a number of years. Because my neck is still uncomfortable and weak, I'll be taking a shower and heading over with wet hair rather than leaning back in her washing bowl. I can hardly wait to not have to wear a head band to keep my bangs out of my eyes!

The woman who does my hair is the sister of the woman who does my nails, although I've been getting my nails done a lot longer. Nails were the one thing I managed to keep doing through the migraines, although I ended up canceling an awful lot of times. Now that I can drive myself over, it's a lot easier. This is what we did for Halloween this year:

It's not easy to tell in the picture, but the black is sparkly. The black cats are nail stickers.

I went to see the surgeon today who did my neck ablation. He said my progress was really good and when I asked him about my frozen shoulder, he added that to my physical therapy prescription. They sent a new copy, so I'm hoping to hear from the therapist in the next couple of days. I really want to get started. I'm walking as often as I can, but still only managing to add a house or two to the distance each time. I really want to get back to the three miles a day I was doing before I got sick.

Tonight's the night! My husband is coming back from St. Louis. He should be here in a few hours and I can hardly wait. So many things around the house I want him to do! Just kidding. I just want him home. It seems like forever that he's been gone. I hope everyone has a nice weekend, I don't know if I'll be on much.

Rubber Duckies

I like rubber duckies. In particular, I like devil ducks. We get ours from Archie McPhee's in Seattle. For a long time, devil ducks were our signature item and we left them in every cache that had room. Rubber duckies have been around since the nineteenth century, but Jim Henson and his Muppets popularized them in the 1970s with Ernie's Rubber Duckie song. Now they have all sorts of variations, such as the devil ducks which have horns, ducks dressed for different professions or the dead duck, which is a black duck with Xs for eyes which floats upside down.

Whether it's a river race of rubber ducks for Renton River Days in Renton, WA, Ernie singing Rubber Ducky You're the One or the unconfirmed tabloid story of the Queen of England having a rubber duck with an inflatable crown in her bathroom, (quoted from the Wikipedia article on Rubber Ducks) rubber duckies are ever more popular. I see them everywhere these days, but my favorite remains the devil ducks. They are such a funny mixture of innocence and evil.

Gypsy, my 12 year old Kitten

I received a package today. What it was isn't important. The important thing, at least to my Gypsy is what it was packed in. Bunches of crinkled up paper. Right at the moment she is inside the box with nothing but her ears showing and the most delicious paper rattling sounds are emanating from within. The other cats are coming around, but they're not interfering. You see, Gypsy rules the roost in this house. That wouldn't be amusing except Gypsy is only eight pounds. She's less than two-thirds the size of the male and half the size of the Maine Coon cat. Robin isn't pure blooded Maine Coon, so she only weighs about seventeen pounds, not the thirty a pure blood can grow to. Still, she's a big cat and although she'll haul off and slug Gypsy occasionally, all and all, she lets Gypsy be the boss.

I put out a tuna can a few weeks ago and they all came running. Toby and Robin stood quietly and waited for Gypsy to get done before crowding in to share what was left. I don't know how she does it. She just seems to be a take charge kind of kitty cat.

Although most of our animals are shelter adoptions or we found them dumped on the side of the road, Gypsy is a purebred Bengal. I fell in love with the breed reading about it on line and wanted one so badly that we broke down and contacted a breeder. I've never regretted it. Gypsy is my baby. I  still call her my kitten, even though she's twelve. She's been amazingly healthy and she has the sweetest personality. The only problem she has is she uses her claws if she gets startled. I get scratched a lot. I tell people it's because she's still part wildcat. I don't know, maybe it's true.

The Bengal is a cross between the Asian Leopard Cat, a small wildcat native (obviously) to Asia, and the American Domestic Shorthair. Hunters would poach the leopard cat females for their fur and sell the cubs as kittens in pet stores. Not surprisingly, this didn't work out well for the cubs or the people who adopted them. In the seventies, a woman decided to try to cross them with the American Domestic. She succeeded in breeding a cat with the coloring of the Asian Leopard Cat and the disposition of the domestic. The breed was recognized in the 1980s.  They have several different types, Gypsy is simply spotted.

We'd had her about a year and our son was about eight when we took him to a wild cat exhibition at the Pacific Science  Center. Along with lots of pictures and information about  different cats they had some that had died naturally and been taxidermied. One of them was an Asian Leopard Cat and it looked for all the world like a slightly larger Gypsy. Our son was a little distressed by this.  His eyes were huge.

When Gypsy isn't playing with paper, she is trying to get herself locked in closets. She locked herself in the linen closet this morning. Okay, she ran in and I didn't see her and closed her in. I got home this afternoon and heard her meowing and had to track her down. I knew she was either in the linen closet or my bedroom closet. I was hoping for my bedroom closet, she doesn't do any damage in there. Unfortunately, she was in the linen closet, which means I have to refold every towel, sheet and tablecloth that was in there because she climbed the shelves and dumped them all on the floor. Fortunately, I only have to rewash the ones on the bottom.

Now as I finish this up, she's tired of playing in the box. She's come over and curled up on my arm and hand, making it extremely difficult to type. I guess it could be worse, it could be Robin.

The countdown begins...

My son graduated from the Community College yesterday with his Associates in Science degree. That was the last step before he becomes a full-fledged university student in the fall. He will go up in July for an orientation and to register for classes. Then classes will begin at the end of August.

My son will move to the university at the end of August and chances are pretty good he won't ever live at home again. Oh, he'll come home next summer between his Junior and Senior year, assuming he isn't interning somewhere in Bellingham. But, for the most part, come August, my little boy will be a grown up.

How do I feel about that? Incredibly proud and a little bit sad. I wonder what it will be like to go for days without hearing from him. Maybe weeks. Then I think about all the things he will get to do and I am so excited for him.

Is he ready? Yes. Am I ready? Possibly. I will turn to my mother-in-law to learn how she handles not hearing from her sons for days or weeks at a time.

My husband is a very good man and my son is very much like him. They are so alike that they can get on each other's nerves. Knowing my son has his father's beliefs and values makes it that much easier to let him go.

Weekend Wrap Up

We decided late Friday evening (around 11pm) that we would leave early Saturday morning and drive to Eastern Washington, picking off some of the tiny towns on the Cities and Towns challenge and adding mileage to our little race car. The plan was to spend the night in Yakima, then head home a different way, picking up a few more towns and miles.

The first town we went to was Roslyn, WA. For the Northern Exposure fans out there, it's the town where most of the filming was done. We found our geocache, then ate lunch at The Brick. It has been redecorated since Northern Exposure days, so it didn't look much like The Brick from the show. I did have the best burger there I've had in ages. The Brick is the oldest tavern in Washington state.

From there, we headed on to Leavenworth where my dog fell in the Wenatchee river. Don't worry, just the side part of it. He did get soaking wet though and the car smelled like wet dog for the next few miles. We picked up a few more caches at a few more towns and finally made it to Yakima around 5:30pm.

Have I mentioned that Eastern Washington is a desert? It's hot over there, so we were a little limited on what we could do as far as leaving the dog in the car. We ended up getting takeout Chinese for dinner and eating it in the hotel room.

Sunday we headed out in the other direction, picked up several more caches, including one in a cemetery. We saw a guy with a life size metal elk in the back of his pickup truck. It made me comment that everyone should have a metal elk for their pickup truck. We saw some real elk, a mountain goat and a tiny little lizard on the trip. Oh, and some little teeny fish that Mickey scared when he fell in the water.

After posting the miles we logged for our little racer, we are now in the lead by about a 100 miles. Go Terrible Ts!

Terror at Disneyland

Since this blog is about anything and everything, I can write about whatever happens to be on my mind. This morning I was musing about what is the scariest ride at Disneyland in Anaheim, CA. I've never been to Disney World and I haven't been to Disneyland is six years, so my comments may be slightly dated.

None of the rides at Disneyland itself are terribly scary in the traditional sense. If you want that kind of scary, you have to walk across the way to California Adventure. There you have the Tower of Terror which is a falling elevator. It lifts you up, then drops you over and over. Finally, it opens the window so you can see how far up in the air you are as it continues to lift you up and drop you. Not for the faint of heart, especially those with a fear of heights. Also at California Adventure, is California Screaming, a roller coaster which goes very fasts, twists around, and, of course, turns you upside down. Both of the rides are scarier in the traditional sense than anything they have in Disneyland.

In Disneyland, I guess the closest to that kind of thrill is Space Mountain, a roller coaster in the dark. Then there's Splash Mountain, which is a children's ride right up to the last moment, when it drops you out a log ride type drop of several stories. There is the Haunted Mansion, but the thrills and chills in there are more tongue-in-cheek. I doubt anyone over seven would be frightened by anything in there.

Which brings me to the ride I personally consider the scariest ride at Disneyland. That would be, Small World. It may be the dolls, I don't like dolls. It might be the fear that the ride is going to break down and I'm going to be stuck in one of the rooms for an extended period of time. That happened to me once and I sat in a room in the middle of the ride for over half an hour. Come to think of it, that might have something to do with why I don't like dolls.

I'm not the only one to find that ride a bit horrifying. We were getting off of the Jungle Ride once when the pilot said, "Don't forget your kids. Any child left on the boat will be taken to Small World, their feet nailed to the ground and made to sing that terrible song for the rest of their lives."

And now that song is running in your head, my work here is done...

A Word About Geocaching Challenges

Geocaching Challenges are like dares. They're basically someone saying, "I bet you can't do this..." We have done any number of challenges in our geocaching lifetime, from finding caches that started with each of the letters of the alphabet to finding one every day for 410 days. The last one was easy since it came out after we were past 800 days in a row.

We have our own challenge out there. It's called "The Streak" and it is the cache you earn if you cache every day for a full year. You even get a poker chip with a little naked guy streaking on it. It's in very good taste, of course, this is a family sport.

Right now we are working on so many different challenges I can't keep track. We finished the Island County Thomas Brothers Guide challenge this weekend. That went with a minimum of trouble. We had to completely revamp our route when the ferry schedule ended up two hours behind. We drove around and did the route backwards. We still managed to complete the entire thing by early Sunday afternoon.

We had to hike to a couple of the caches and one of them we almost didn't find, but we managed to turn them all up and we had the final in hand by 1:30pm. So my husband suggested taking the ferry to Guemes Island to add another island to... you guessed it, another challenge called the Island Hopping challenge. We have to get 30 islands in Washington state to get that one. They're specific islands too, not just any islands or we'd have it in a flash, there are a lot of islands in Washington.

Then, since we had another day to spare, we spent Monday driving around the North Sound area getting caches in little towns for the Cities and Towns challenge. The owner of that challenge chose a long list of tiny towns all over Washington and to get the final you have to get a cache in every one of the little towns. We will be traveling a lot this summer trying to finish that one.

Doing all these challenges gave us miles on our little racer anyway. So far we have 500 miles on it and we're in second place! Of course, that's after the first weekend, it's a long summer.