LA trip, plus some sad news
Jun. 29th, 2012 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunasarielFor the first in my whirlwind o' trips to SoCal, my mom, my sister, and I came down to visit my maternal family. It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing, so I have a sneaking suspicion the volunteer coordinator at the animal shelter isn't too pleased with my "I'm going to be gone for the next three weeks except for one Tuesday two weeks from now kthxbai" email. But, not much that can be done about that.
We started the drive down on Sunday afternoon, which was more leisurely than usual. Usually we try to burn through the whole thing (which usually amounts to eight hours or so) in one go, but my mom had just gotten back from her mini-vacation to Chicago with her now-official boyfriend RG a couple of days prior, and I'm not sure she entirely trusts me with her shiny new Prius (which, BTW, I really, really want to drive. It's awesome!). So we spent the night at Harris Ranch, a restaurant/hotel about halfway down that we've used before. It can be very hit-or miss: the first time, they seated us and literally left us there for an hour and a half before anybody showed up, so we left. The next time, dinner was great, but our room was right by the freeway, so nobody could sleep. This time, though, things went well. We had both dinner and breakfast there, both of which were entirely too good and almost certainly wrecked the excellent "under 118 lbs" streak I had going. Our room was also nice, especially considering it was in the pet wing (we were travelling with our extremely elderly terrier), and our dog Moocher miraculously avoided any accidents, even when we were out of the room.
Monday wasn't terribly exciting. We arrived at Granny's house around 1:30-ish, and spent most of the day unpacking, catching up with various relatives, and just generally puttering around. Granny has a new dog, which she hasn't named yes, and it's...quite a change. All my life, she's had a string of big, thumpable, workmanlike German Shepherds, capped off by Xena, who I still maintain was part lizard. This new dog, referred to as Little Man or Pet (or Hey You or Dummy when he gets too yappy) is a Maltese/toy poodle mix, and is the quintessential yappy little lap dog that was clearly never, ever intended to survive in the wild. It's interesting to see the contrast between him and Moocher, who is also rather on the smallish side, but bred that way to hunt rats. Moocher is a stocky, sturdy little fellow, but more than that, he's always supremely confident in himself. He knows that he's exactly the perfect size, and doesn't have the least hint of that Napoleon complex that little dogs sometimes get. Little Man, though, has it in spades. He's very aware that he's a Little Dog, and even gets defensive around Moocher, who's roughly the same size as him. He adores Granny, though, and if you can get him to stop yapping at you and then running away, he makes an excellent lap dog. We also caught up with the M3 family, who I don't think I've seen since shortly after New Year's. It was pretty much business as usual for them: Aunt M hates her commute but has been enjoying the hell out of Game of Thrones (the show, not the books, which she hasn't read, although she is taking the first one with her on vacation, for which they left on Wednesday), Uncle M has a new tattoo for his dojo and made turkey tacos, Cousin M is sweet and extremely hyperactive, and their dog Buster attempted to joyfully bodyslam all and sundry.
Tuesday was as close to a perfect day as I've had in a long time. I slept like a log Monday night, got up at a decent hour, gave my iPhone's Personal Hotspot function a workout, and just generally puttered around and chatted with Granny for most of the morning. For the past few weeks I've been contemplating getting my ears pierced, and while I was down there I decided to just go for it. Aunt M also got her ears pierced late, as in only a few years ago, so she recommended a place to me. It also turned out to be the same place that Uncle M got his tattoo just about a year ago, so he could vouch for them, too. The place was called Think Ink, and I was in and out literally inside of 10 minutes. I'm a pain wimp, so I had this crazy irrational fear that getting holes poked in my head would, y'know, hurt, but it honestly only hurt because I knew what was happening. Otherwise, it objectively didn't hurt more than, say, getting pinched. That piercer (or "body modification technician," as it says on their website) wasn't too chatty, which was nice, and I ended up with two cute little hoops with what she called aurora borealis stones (basically not-diamonds that refract/contain many different colors, the closest I could get to my usual rainbow moonstones) in them. It'll still be about eight weeks until I can wear any others, but I'm pleased as hell with the ones I have now, and with the whole process in general.
We got celebratory Panda Express after that (this trip hasn't been good for anyone's diet), went back home to collect Granny, swung by Cousin M's summer camp to pick him up, and then went off to see Brave at a swanky cinema with really good wheelchair seating. Cousin M was a little over-excited after running around at camp all day, and got a little obnoxious (he especially got on A's nerves, who is usually a handful herself), but after he ran off some energy, he was a little more manageable. We got to the cinema complex, like, an hour and a half early, so we stopped in at a nearby Cheesecake Factory for snacks beforehand. This made me worry that we wouldn't make the movie on time, especially since this cinema, the Arclight, has a policy of not letting latecomers in, even during the previews, but we made it in decent time. I had some baked mac'n'cheese (which was much better than I expected: the crust wasn't too oily or crumbly and, surprisingly, it wasn't molten on the inside, as cheese tends to do) and a concoction called a Coffee Mocha Chip Shake (which, as far as I'm concerned, is about as close to the perfect frozen drink as human culinary skill can achieve). While we were buying our tickets for Brave, the Jason and the Argonauts theme music came on over the PA, which surprised me. Jason was one of those movies I watched on at least a bi-weekly basis as a kid, and I still remember it fondly. It was one of those 60s jobs with stop-motion special effects by Ray Harryhausen himself, and the music was by Bernard Herrmann (yes, the Citizen Cane and Psycho guy), so I recognized it more or less right away, which gave me a happy little glow of nostalgia.
Brave itself was nice, and I would definitely recommend it! I agree with the critics who say that it's not one of those groundbreaking movies we've come to expect from Pixar, but it's by no means bad. It ain't no Toy Story 3 or Finding Nemo, but it doesn't have to be. It was visually stunning, of course (the rumor is that it took more time and/or money to animate Merida's hair than to make the entirety of Cars 2), and I'm a sucker for Irish-ness/Scottish-ness/Celtic-ness in general (yes, even after taking a long, hard look at why in Celtic Romanticism last semester). Genuine surprises were few and far between, and I could see the twists coming a mile away, but it had a lot of heart, it had the right blend of different kinds of humor (lol kilts!), and I loved all the characters, especially the dad. Hell, even the eeeevil berserker villain got a sort of gravely dignified moment of redemption, or at least acknowledgement of humanity, at the end, which impressed me. Despite the comparative predictability, it was very thrilling, and got my pulse pounding at all the right places. The music was lovely (or maybe I'm just biased), and the choreography was surprisingly expert. There were even a few Miyazaki-like touches in the way the forest was almost a character itself and the will-o-the-wisps acting as slightly eerie guides. That's not to say it wasn't issue-free (the inescapably twee little brothers kind of grated, I felt bad for Maudie the perpetual butt monkey, I'm glad they didn't hammer in the horse as the standard funny animal sidekick too hard, because that's a trope I've had about enough of), but on the whole, I give it a solid 8/10.
After taking Cousin M home, we all decamped back to Granny's, where it turned out that the first disc of Game of Thrones s1 had come in the mail, so my mom and I sat down to watch it with her, and, surprisingly, it wasn't horrifically awkward. Yaaaay! I mean, it has pretty much everything GoT is known for: murder (lots of murder), rape, incest, children in decidedly non-child-friendly situations, bewbs, zombies, dead animals (a major stumbling block for all of us animal lovers), drinkin', whorin', and fightin'. We were all pretty tired by that point, but I think she liked it okay. She did mention that she had kind of a problem with young women being treated badly/brutalized, and I forgot to warn her about the whole Dany/Drogo thing, but I think she got through that okay. I'd forgotten just how creepy that intro was, though. Ice zombies and beheadings and body parts, oh my! And Jamie is even more Mal Reynolds-esque in that first scene with Cersei in King's Landing than ever. So, all in all, Tuesday was a win.
It turns out the one thing nobody tells you about newly pierced ears is that you'd better not try to sleep on your side, because ow. I normally sleep only on my sides, so Tuesday night/Wednesday morning wasn't a terribly restful one for me, and led to some unusually vivid dreams about my mom and grandmother fighting over money. I was awoken around 10 AM in preparation for the day's trip to the Huntington, a library/museum/series of gardens of renown, but Those In Charge mistakenly thought it was open until 9 PM, not 4:30 PM, so we didn't even leave until 1:30 or 2, giving us only an hour and a bit of change to spend there. My mom, Granny, and A opted to go through the art gallery, since it was about 90°, albeit breezy, while I was lured in by the gardens. Whoever designed them had a real eye for space, and new and gorgeous vistas kept opening up every time I turned a corner. There was plenty of shade, as well as interesting nooks and crannies, so it was my kind of garden. I started out at the rose garden, and I have now revised my opinion with regard to roses: if I'm going to receive roses, I'd rather have them be the kind of red that reaches out and punches you in the face, or at least be some interesting color, like purple or cream. Pink roses, I've decided, are like frosting: good adornments and accents, but nowhere near enough to form the meat, if you will, of any given arrangement. They're so...half-hearted, it seems to me, like they couldn't decide whether to be red or white, and couldn't decide on either. Of course, this only goes for straight-up pink. Roses that fade from one color to another, whatever those colors may be, will always be interesting to me. After that, I moseyed on down to the lily ponds, taking pictures all the while. I love streams, ponds, fountains, or other watery things as elements of gardens, and these, while slightly too lily-choked for my taste, were lovely, especially for this time of year, when pumping in enough water to keep said lilies afloat must be a job and a half. There were interesting little bits of (largely Greek) statuary scattered all throughout the gardens, and I made sure to take pictures of my favorite arrangements. Of special note was a statue of St. Francis of Assisi standing benevolent over a koi/turtle pond that I snapped a few shots of for Granny (she was raised Catholic, and although she's not especially religious now, she still likes St. Francis, the patron saint and protector of animals) and a long lawn/promenade lined with Greek statues and terminated by a large fountain in an arbor, which I'm not at all sure my photos managed to capture the grandeur of. So even though it was waaaaay too hot for this NorCal girl and I do wish I had time to go through the art gallery and library (a Gutenberg Bible! A Canterbury Tales manuscript! An autographed Walden! Squee!), but I was extremely pleased with what I saw of the gardens, even though I didn't even finish going through them.
After the Huntington closed, we stopped for dinner at a rather tasty nearby teriyaki place, and Starbucks next door for those of us who needed a pick-me-up (read: me). When we got home, we found out that Grandpa M had returned from taking care of Idyllwild, his ancestral cabin up in the mountains, where he'd been for the past several days, hence him not getting mentioned a lot here. Grandpa M is a steak-grillin', rock-climbin', German Shepherd-ownin' man's man, so I get the feeling he's none too fond of Little Dog, who is the quintessential yappy little lapdog. He's also rather on the taciturn side, though, so I didn't talk to him much. Instead, my mom, Granny, and I watched the second episode of GoT, most of which I got through by replaying the Purple Wedding in my head. I still felt both Renly's and Ser Barristan's losses, though, since Ser Barristan is kind of categorically awesome and adds a touch of classy badassery to any scene he happens to be in, and Renly's snark about a nine-year-old girl disarming and thoroughly thrashing the great and brave Crown Prince Joffrey and his mighty Lion's Tooth was sorely missed. Oh, well, at least Cat was enough of a badass to make up for it. Seriously, that assassin picked the wrong little boy to try and kill: first he gets mauled and cold-cocked by an unarmed, 110 lb woman, and then gets various important bits dislodged and/or by a wolf of approximately the same size. Haters, as they say, to the left.
I slept better on Wednesday night, but Thursday was a bit of a downer. As I've mentioned, milady Cassie has been very sick, and I found out on Thursday that she had died on Tuesday. My mom and I had discussed what to do In The Event before leaving Sebastopol, and I asked her not to tell me unless I asked her to, since I imagined it would cast rather a pall over our visit, at least for me. But on Wednesday night/very early Thursday morning, I had a feeling, and my mom confirmed it the next morning. It's not like I hadn't had time to prepare myself; as you may have noticed, Cassie has been getting very elderly and very sick for a while now. I don't quite know what I'm going to do without her, but in a way, I'm also relieved. Watching her fade away, losing another few ounces every day, that slow, inevitable slide, was definitely the hardest part, especially because it created the illusion that she could get better. There was always the sense that if I could just convince her to eat, if I could just find the right treatment, the right food, she could go back to the way she was, and I just wasn't trying hard enough. The vet called on Monday, and it seems that Her Majesty was inscrutable to the last: they tested for everything (kidney disease, pancreatitis, white blood cell count, etc.), and nothing came up, so now they're saying it was probably cancer, which, given her age, certainly isn't out of the question. She's frozen at the vet's right now, and when we get home we'll probably have her cremated, and there are a couple of places I'm thinking of putting her ashes, like the top of her bookshelf, from which she liked to dive-bomb me when I didn't get up early enough to feed her, or my shelf o' pretty, that contains a collection of beautiful/interesting/valuable (whether actually or personally) things, all of which have some sort of significance to me. I've certainly had time to get used to the idea of my pretty lady (if you can't tell, I have a lot of nicknames for her) not being around anymore, but it's definitely going to be weird not having her around anymore: no more keeping one eye and one ear out for when she decides that she doesn't want to use the litter box, no leaving things on the floor to provide attractive targets for her, er, ire, no more getting my face walked across at 4:00 AM when she decided she wanted breakfast, no more her walking right up and demanding attention while I'm reading or on the computer, only to decide that, no, she doesn't want attention after all, and saunter away. But that also means no kitty crawling under the covers with me when it gets cold, no-one to complain at me when I'm gone for a long time, no-one to know when I'm feeling down and curl up on my lap or by my head purring. At least I told her I love her and spent some quality time with her before I left.
And now, prepare thyselves for incoming cat picture spam! You have been warned...
This is the first picture I have of her on either my camera or my phone. She had such beautiful gold-green eyes; I love how they reflected the light here!
She knew perfectly well the Power of Cute had over me, and the dreaded Paw Hiding Nose always got me.
Yeah, I don't know why it's sideways. Anyway, Her Imperial Majesty, holding court.
My gorgeous lady was told very often how beautiful she was, and, of course, accepted the praise with grace.
Paw Hiding Nose strikes again! Combined with her curled up into a ball o' fur, 'tis a lethal combination indeed.
You may be detecting something of a theme here...
If any cat could roll her eyes, Cassie could. Even so, the disdain is palpable.
Cassie Having Words with Apollo, one of our other cats. They did not get on.
Just look at this pretty lady! She only had one patch of white on her, about the size of a dime, on her chest. And it was beautiful.
A rare candid photo of milady. One of her many and fascinating health issues was that she basically only had her back teeth, which I'm fairly sure led to some loss of feeling in her tongue. Sometimes it would just hang out like this, with her (as far as I could tell) completely unaware of it. The best part was always the utterly serious, "How dare you laugh at me, wench!?" deadpan look she would give me.
The rest of Thursday was relatively low-key. Granny and A got their hair done, we all reconvened at Home Base, A, my mom, and I went out for lunch and Borders (s6 of Doctor Who, what I hope is the good film version of Northanger Abbey, the Ian McKellen/Judi Dench version of Macbeth, and a copy of The Hobbit to stay at Granny's house, since it's a book that no house should be without, and it's my go-to pick-me-up for when I'm feeling blue, which I definitely was), and then off to dinner with an old friend of my mom's and her daughter, who was just about exactly my age. This was fun, as both mother and daughter were definitely cat people, so we spent what probably amounts to a couple of hours showing each other pictures of our cats on our phones and swapping stories. Tracy, my mom's friend, as it turns out, runs a cats-only vet (well, they also take armadillos. Of course.), and we got a tour of the place, as well as a meet'n'greet with some of their patients/boarders before we left for dinner. It was good to get my kitty fix, especially since it helped alleviate some of my Cassie-related angst. I didn't talk all that much to Tracy, since she and my mom were pretty deep in conversation the whole time, so I spent most of my time talking to The Daughter instead. The Daughter and I don't have a lot in common, but she's a very nice person, and pretty much the embodiment of Death from Sandman. So that was fun.
Friday has mostly been taken up with duty visits: we went out to lunch and to see Brave a second time (he is/was one of the old-school animators, so he has Views on computer animation, but he seemed to like Brave okay) with my (biological) grandfather, who sometimes didn't seem all that aware of what was going on around him (well, no more so than usual), which was okay, if sometimes a little draggy/confusing. We were also supposed to go to dinner with my indisputably awesome but very shy and distant uncle, but he ended up being a no-show. I mean, we didn't have a time nailed down or anything, but it's about 7:30 at the time of this writing, and he lives a 45 minute drive away, so I'm guessing nothing is going to happen. This especially sucks because he's, basically, who I want to be in 30 years: a published playwright (although I'd rather publish prose, in this perfect fantasy world of mine) and research librarian at an awesome library. The only problem is that he's always seemed rather distant, especially to us younger members of the family, and even though he lives relatively close, we rarely see him, so this would have been a good opportunity.
We're technically staying until tomorrow, but we're going to be trying to get an early start, since I'm supposed to be back up in Sebastopol for a 4 PM D&D game, but we'll see how that goes.
We started the drive down on Sunday afternoon, which was more leisurely than usual. Usually we try to burn through the whole thing (which usually amounts to eight hours or so) in one go, but my mom had just gotten back from her mini-vacation to Chicago with her now-official boyfriend RG a couple of days prior, and I'm not sure she entirely trusts me with her shiny new Prius (which, BTW, I really, really want to drive. It's awesome!). So we spent the night at Harris Ranch, a restaurant/hotel about halfway down that we've used before. It can be very hit-or miss: the first time, they seated us and literally left us there for an hour and a half before anybody showed up, so we left. The next time, dinner was great, but our room was right by the freeway, so nobody could sleep. This time, though, things went well. We had both dinner and breakfast there, both of which were entirely too good and almost certainly wrecked the excellent "under 118 lbs" streak I had going. Our room was also nice, especially considering it was in the pet wing (we were travelling with our extremely elderly terrier), and our dog Moocher miraculously avoided any accidents, even when we were out of the room.
Monday wasn't terribly exciting. We arrived at Granny's house around 1:30-ish, and spent most of the day unpacking, catching up with various relatives, and just generally puttering around. Granny has a new dog, which she hasn't named yes, and it's...quite a change. All my life, she's had a string of big, thumpable, workmanlike German Shepherds, capped off by Xena, who I still maintain was part lizard. This new dog, referred to as Little Man or Pet (or Hey You or Dummy when he gets too yappy) is a Maltese/toy poodle mix, and is the quintessential yappy little lap dog that was clearly never, ever intended to survive in the wild. It's interesting to see the contrast between him and Moocher, who is also rather on the smallish side, but bred that way to hunt rats. Moocher is a stocky, sturdy little fellow, but more than that, he's always supremely confident in himself. He knows that he's exactly the perfect size, and doesn't have the least hint of that Napoleon complex that little dogs sometimes get. Little Man, though, has it in spades. He's very aware that he's a Little Dog, and even gets defensive around Moocher, who's roughly the same size as him. He adores Granny, though, and if you can get him to stop yapping at you and then running away, he makes an excellent lap dog. We also caught up with the M3 family, who I don't think I've seen since shortly after New Year's. It was pretty much business as usual for them: Aunt M hates her commute but has been enjoying the hell out of Game of Thrones (the show, not the books, which she hasn't read, although she is taking the first one with her on vacation, for which they left on Wednesday), Uncle M has a new tattoo for his dojo and made turkey tacos, Cousin M is sweet and extremely hyperactive, and their dog Buster attempted to joyfully bodyslam all and sundry.
Tuesday was as close to a perfect day as I've had in a long time. I slept like a log Monday night, got up at a decent hour, gave my iPhone's Personal Hotspot function a workout, and just generally puttered around and chatted with Granny for most of the morning. For the past few weeks I've been contemplating getting my ears pierced, and while I was down there I decided to just go for it. Aunt M also got her ears pierced late, as in only a few years ago, so she recommended a place to me. It also turned out to be the same place that Uncle M got his tattoo just about a year ago, so he could vouch for them, too. The place was called Think Ink, and I was in and out literally inside of 10 minutes. I'm a pain wimp, so I had this crazy irrational fear that getting holes poked in my head would, y'know, hurt, but it honestly only hurt because I knew what was happening. Otherwise, it objectively didn't hurt more than, say, getting pinched. That piercer (or "body modification technician," as it says on their website) wasn't too chatty, which was nice, and I ended up with two cute little hoops with what she called aurora borealis stones (basically not-diamonds that refract/contain many different colors, the closest I could get to my usual rainbow moonstones) in them. It'll still be about eight weeks until I can wear any others, but I'm pleased as hell with the ones I have now, and with the whole process in general.
We got celebratory Panda Express after that (this trip hasn't been good for anyone's diet), went back home to collect Granny, swung by Cousin M's summer camp to pick him up, and then went off to see Brave at a swanky cinema with really good wheelchair seating. Cousin M was a little over-excited after running around at camp all day, and got a little obnoxious (he especially got on A's nerves, who is usually a handful herself), but after he ran off some energy, he was a little more manageable. We got to the cinema complex, like, an hour and a half early, so we stopped in at a nearby Cheesecake Factory for snacks beforehand. This made me worry that we wouldn't make the movie on time, especially since this cinema, the Arclight, has a policy of not letting latecomers in, even during the previews, but we made it in decent time. I had some baked mac'n'cheese (which was much better than I expected: the crust wasn't too oily or crumbly and, surprisingly, it wasn't molten on the inside, as cheese tends to do) and a concoction called a Coffee Mocha Chip Shake (which, as far as I'm concerned, is about as close to the perfect frozen drink as human culinary skill can achieve). While we were buying our tickets for Brave, the Jason and the Argonauts theme music came on over the PA, which surprised me. Jason was one of those movies I watched on at least a bi-weekly basis as a kid, and I still remember it fondly. It was one of those 60s jobs with stop-motion special effects by Ray Harryhausen himself, and the music was by Bernard Herrmann (yes, the Citizen Cane and Psycho guy), so I recognized it more or less right away, which gave me a happy little glow of nostalgia.
Brave itself was nice, and I would definitely recommend it! I agree with the critics who say that it's not one of those groundbreaking movies we've come to expect from Pixar, but it's by no means bad. It ain't no Toy Story 3 or Finding Nemo, but it doesn't have to be. It was visually stunning, of course (the rumor is that it took more time and/or money to animate Merida's hair than to make the entirety of Cars 2), and I'm a sucker for Irish-ness/Scottish-ness/Celtic-ness in general (yes, even after taking a long, hard look at why in Celtic Romanticism last semester). Genuine surprises were few and far between, and I could see the twists coming a mile away, but it had a lot of heart, it had the right blend of different kinds of humor (lol kilts!), and I loved all the characters, especially the dad. Hell, even the eeeevil berserker villain got a sort of gravely dignified moment of redemption, or at least acknowledgement of humanity, at the end, which impressed me. Despite the comparative predictability, it was very thrilling, and got my pulse pounding at all the right places. The music was lovely (or maybe I'm just biased), and the choreography was surprisingly expert. There were even a few Miyazaki-like touches in the way the forest was almost a character itself and the will-o-the-wisps acting as slightly eerie guides. That's not to say it wasn't issue-free (the inescapably twee little brothers kind of grated, I felt bad for Maudie the perpetual butt monkey, I'm glad they didn't hammer in the horse as the standard funny animal sidekick too hard, because that's a trope I've had about enough of), but on the whole, I give it a solid 8/10.
After taking Cousin M home, we all decamped back to Granny's, where it turned out that the first disc of Game of Thrones s1 had come in the mail, so my mom and I sat down to watch it with her, and, surprisingly, it wasn't horrifically awkward. Yaaaay! I mean, it has pretty much everything GoT is known for: murder (lots of murder), rape, incest, children in decidedly non-child-friendly situations, bewbs, zombies, dead animals (a major stumbling block for all of us animal lovers), drinkin', whorin', and fightin'. We were all pretty tired by that point, but I think she liked it okay. She did mention that she had kind of a problem with young women being treated badly/brutalized, and I forgot to warn her about the whole Dany/Drogo thing, but I think she got through that okay. I'd forgotten just how creepy that intro was, though. Ice zombies and beheadings and body parts, oh my! And Jamie is even more Mal Reynolds-esque in that first scene with Cersei in King's Landing than ever. So, all in all, Tuesday was a win.
It turns out the one thing nobody tells you about newly pierced ears is that you'd better not try to sleep on your side, because ow. I normally sleep only on my sides, so Tuesday night/Wednesday morning wasn't a terribly restful one for me, and led to some unusually vivid dreams about my mom and grandmother fighting over money. I was awoken around 10 AM in preparation for the day's trip to the Huntington, a library/museum/series of gardens of renown, but Those In Charge mistakenly thought it was open until 9 PM, not 4:30 PM, so we didn't even leave until 1:30 or 2, giving us only an hour and a bit of change to spend there. My mom, Granny, and A opted to go through the art gallery, since it was about 90°, albeit breezy, while I was lured in by the gardens. Whoever designed them had a real eye for space, and new and gorgeous vistas kept opening up every time I turned a corner. There was plenty of shade, as well as interesting nooks and crannies, so it was my kind of garden. I started out at the rose garden, and I have now revised my opinion with regard to roses: if I'm going to receive roses, I'd rather have them be the kind of red that reaches out and punches you in the face, or at least be some interesting color, like purple or cream. Pink roses, I've decided, are like frosting: good adornments and accents, but nowhere near enough to form the meat, if you will, of any given arrangement. They're so...half-hearted, it seems to me, like they couldn't decide whether to be red or white, and couldn't decide on either. Of course, this only goes for straight-up pink. Roses that fade from one color to another, whatever those colors may be, will always be interesting to me. After that, I moseyed on down to the lily ponds, taking pictures all the while. I love streams, ponds, fountains, or other watery things as elements of gardens, and these, while slightly too lily-choked for my taste, were lovely, especially for this time of year, when pumping in enough water to keep said lilies afloat must be a job and a half. There were interesting little bits of (largely Greek) statuary scattered all throughout the gardens, and I made sure to take pictures of my favorite arrangements. Of special note was a statue of St. Francis of Assisi standing benevolent over a koi/turtle pond that I snapped a few shots of for Granny (she was raised Catholic, and although she's not especially religious now, she still likes St. Francis, the patron saint and protector of animals) and a long lawn/promenade lined with Greek statues and terminated by a large fountain in an arbor, which I'm not at all sure my photos managed to capture the grandeur of. So even though it was waaaaay too hot for this NorCal girl and I do wish I had time to go through the art gallery and library (a Gutenberg Bible! A Canterbury Tales manuscript! An autographed Walden! Squee!), but I was extremely pleased with what I saw of the gardens, even though I didn't even finish going through them.
After the Huntington closed, we stopped for dinner at a rather tasty nearby teriyaki place, and Starbucks next door for those of us who needed a pick-me-up (read: me). When we got home, we found out that Grandpa M had returned from taking care of Idyllwild, his ancestral cabin up in the mountains, where he'd been for the past several days, hence him not getting mentioned a lot here. Grandpa M is a steak-grillin', rock-climbin', German Shepherd-ownin' man's man, so I get the feeling he's none too fond of Little Dog, who is the quintessential yappy little lapdog. He's also rather on the taciturn side, though, so I didn't talk to him much. Instead, my mom, Granny, and I watched the second episode of GoT, most of which I got through by replaying the Purple Wedding in my head. I still felt both Renly's and Ser Barristan's losses, though, since Ser Barristan is kind of categorically awesome and adds a touch of classy badassery to any scene he happens to be in, and Renly's snark about a nine-year-old girl disarming and thoroughly thrashing the great and brave Crown Prince Joffrey and his mighty Lion's Tooth was sorely missed. Oh, well, at least Cat was enough of a badass to make up for it. Seriously, that assassin picked the wrong little boy to try and kill: first he gets mauled and cold-cocked by an unarmed, 110 lb woman, and then gets various important bits dislodged and/or by a wolf of approximately the same size. Haters, as they say, to the left.
I slept better on Wednesday night, but Thursday was a bit of a downer. As I've mentioned, milady Cassie has been very sick, and I found out on Thursday that she had died on Tuesday. My mom and I had discussed what to do In The Event before leaving Sebastopol, and I asked her not to tell me unless I asked her to, since I imagined it would cast rather a pall over our visit, at least for me. But on Wednesday night/very early Thursday morning, I had a feeling, and my mom confirmed it the next morning. It's not like I hadn't had time to prepare myself; as you may have noticed, Cassie has been getting very elderly and very sick for a while now. I don't quite know what I'm going to do without her, but in a way, I'm also relieved. Watching her fade away, losing another few ounces every day, that slow, inevitable slide, was definitely the hardest part, especially because it created the illusion that she could get better. There was always the sense that if I could just convince her to eat, if I could just find the right treatment, the right food, she could go back to the way she was, and I just wasn't trying hard enough. The vet called on Monday, and it seems that Her Majesty was inscrutable to the last: they tested for everything (kidney disease, pancreatitis, white blood cell count, etc.), and nothing came up, so now they're saying it was probably cancer, which, given her age, certainly isn't out of the question. She's frozen at the vet's right now, and when we get home we'll probably have her cremated, and there are a couple of places I'm thinking of putting her ashes, like the top of her bookshelf, from which she liked to dive-bomb me when I didn't get up early enough to feed her, or my shelf o' pretty, that contains a collection of beautiful/interesting/valuable (whether actually or personally) things, all of which have some sort of significance to me. I've certainly had time to get used to the idea of my pretty lady (if you can't tell, I have a lot of nicknames for her) not being around anymore, but it's definitely going to be weird not having her around anymore: no more keeping one eye and one ear out for when she decides that she doesn't want to use the litter box, no leaving things on the floor to provide attractive targets for her, er, ire, no more getting my face walked across at 4:00 AM when she decided she wanted breakfast, no more her walking right up and demanding attention while I'm reading or on the computer, only to decide that, no, she doesn't want attention after all, and saunter away. But that also means no kitty crawling under the covers with me when it gets cold, no-one to complain at me when I'm gone for a long time, no-one to know when I'm feeling down and curl up on my lap or by my head purring. At least I told her I love her and spent some quality time with her before I left.
And now, prepare thyselves for incoming cat picture spam! You have been warned...
This is the first picture I have of her on either my camera or my phone. She had such beautiful gold-green eyes; I love how they reflected the light here!
She knew perfectly well the Power of Cute had over me, and the dreaded Paw Hiding Nose always got me.
Yeah, I don't know why it's sideways. Anyway, Her Imperial Majesty, holding court.
My gorgeous lady was told very often how beautiful she was, and, of course, accepted the praise with grace.
Paw Hiding Nose strikes again! Combined with her curled up into a ball o' fur, 'tis a lethal combination indeed.
You may be detecting something of a theme here...
If any cat could roll her eyes, Cassie could. Even so, the disdain is palpable.
Cassie Having Words with Apollo, one of our other cats. They did not get on.
Just look at this pretty lady! She only had one patch of white on her, about the size of a dime, on her chest. And it was beautiful.
A rare candid photo of milady. One of her many and fascinating health issues was that she basically only had her back teeth, which I'm fairly sure led to some loss of feeling in her tongue. Sometimes it would just hang out like this, with her (as far as I could tell) completely unaware of it. The best part was always the utterly serious, "How dare you laugh at me, wench!?" deadpan look she would give me.
The rest of Thursday was relatively low-key. Granny and A got their hair done, we all reconvened at Home Base, A, my mom, and I went out for lunch and Borders (s6 of Doctor Who, what I hope is the good film version of Northanger Abbey, the Ian McKellen/Judi Dench version of Macbeth, and a copy of The Hobbit to stay at Granny's house, since it's a book that no house should be without, and it's my go-to pick-me-up for when I'm feeling blue, which I definitely was), and then off to dinner with an old friend of my mom's and her daughter, who was just about exactly my age. This was fun, as both mother and daughter were definitely cat people, so we spent what probably amounts to a couple of hours showing each other pictures of our cats on our phones and swapping stories. Tracy, my mom's friend, as it turns out, runs a cats-only vet (well, they also take armadillos. Of course.), and we got a tour of the place, as well as a meet'n'greet with some of their patients/boarders before we left for dinner. It was good to get my kitty fix, especially since it helped alleviate some of my Cassie-related angst. I didn't talk all that much to Tracy, since she and my mom were pretty deep in conversation the whole time, so I spent most of my time talking to The Daughter instead. The Daughter and I don't have a lot in common, but she's a very nice person, and pretty much the embodiment of Death from Sandman. So that was fun.
Friday has mostly been taken up with duty visits: we went out to lunch and to see Brave a second time (he is/was one of the old-school animators, so he has Views on computer animation, but he seemed to like Brave okay) with my (biological) grandfather, who sometimes didn't seem all that aware of what was going on around him (well, no more so than usual), which was okay, if sometimes a little draggy/confusing. We were also supposed to go to dinner with my indisputably awesome but very shy and distant uncle, but he ended up being a no-show. I mean, we didn't have a time nailed down or anything, but it's about 7:30 at the time of this writing, and he lives a 45 minute drive away, so I'm guessing nothing is going to happen. This especially sucks because he's, basically, who I want to be in 30 years: a published playwright (although I'd rather publish prose, in this perfect fantasy world of mine) and research librarian at an awesome library. The only problem is that he's always seemed rather distant, especially to us younger members of the family, and even though he lives relatively close, we rarely see him, so this would have been a good opportunity.
We're technically staying until tomorrow, but we're going to be trying to get an early start, since I'm supposed to be back up in Sebastopol for a 4 PM D&D game, but we'll see how that goes.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-30 07:32 pm (UTC)Sounds like your LA trip has been good on the whole -- hope the drive home is not too onerous.
I don't have my ears pierced, so when L (who doesn't either, though she loves shinies of all sorts) periodically asks me about what is involved, I'm never any help. :P
no subject
Date: 2012-07-01 09:49 pm (UTC)Thanks! It's very weird not having her around, but, like I said, it had been a long time coming, so at least it wasn't too much of a shock.
hope the drive home is not too onerous.
Eh, not too bad. We hit both the morning L.A. and evening Oakland traffic, which, ow, but otherwise nice and fast! And, I'm sure, nothing to compare to your drive through, like, three countries. XD
L (who doesn't either, though she loves shinies of all sorts)
Heh, I can imagine her with pierced ears! I remember going O.o when the piercer cracked what looked like a pair of industrial needle-nose pliers out of a sterile wrapping, but it turns out that they were for the earrings themselves. XD The piercing itself was done with what looked pretty much like a normal sewing needle, if a large one.