September 2006 Archives

Our lungs are still adjusting to the high altitude and we're a bit dehydrated and a bit overwhelmed, but we're here in Denver now. Have you ever flown with cats? It turns out JetBlue lets you take a cat aboard for $50, as long as you have a special small carrier that fits under the seat in front of you. This is one of those things that seemed like a genius plan when we were buying the tickets, then quickly escalated to a kill-me-now situation when we were faced with actually putting cats in tiny boxes and taking them on a seven hour trip. The vet gave us some sedatives to give them, and in my head I imagined the pills would slide down the kitties' throats and they would be out like a light for solid chunk of time. I imagined them dropping to the ground in a sound slumber and shifting their limp bodies into the cages, where they would sleep until we reached Denver.

What really happened was we gave the cats the pills and they ran around like we fed them a tasty treat. Then we had to forcibly jam them into the tiny carriers and jog through the rain to the livery cab, where the cats cried and cried and cried and we made light jokes to the driver (not happy) and murmured completely useless things like, "Shh shhh, it's okay. Yeah, don't I know it, Pinky." Then we got to the airport and the crying stopped for a bit (or maybe it was just really loud). Then: security. I'm not sure what I thought we would have to do, but I imagined the boxes getting wanded or us walking through the metal detector with the carriers. But apparently you have to take the cats out of the box and walk through the detector with the cat, sending the carrier through the x-ray machine. As you might imagine, the idea of letting the cats out of their containments in the middle of the airport struck me as only slightly more appealing than jamming a poker in my eye. After a little freakout, and left with no other choices, that's what we did. I had Pinky and I think she was a bit too mindblown to do much but let me hold her.

Back in their carriers, they continued to cry. Here is what people like to say to you when you have crying cats: "Aww, those are some unhappy cats!" Really? I HADN'T NOTICED. But you telling me that certainly will keep me from doing this for my fun and amusement in the future. We jammed more sedatives down their throats and prayed the plane would be a better environment for them to pass out in.

We got settled and the cats seemed to calm down. Until a crazy guy sitting in the seat in front of me tried to shove some things under his seat and accidentally unlatched Pinky's cage. I was just closing my eyes when I felt J hit my arm and yell, "Pinky's out!" I think I could have won a medal for how fast I unlatched my seatbelt, threw off my headphones, and pounced on the little gray streak making her way down the aisle. It was Cats on a Plane! We wrestled her back into the cage and order was restored. This crazy guy, though, he just couldn't stop with the crazy. He spent the entire flight hitting the screen of the television screen in front of him trying to change the channels, even though the were controls located on the arm of the chair. Which probably didn't make a difference given he wasn't wearing headphones. Then, when I came back from the bathroom, there was a life vest sitting on my chair. J told me the guy pulled it from his seat, seemed baffled it was in his hands, then placed it quickly on my empty seat and sat back down.

The rest of the flight was uneventful, and we got to my parents' house in one piece. One tired, stressed out piece, but okay nonetheless.

The suburbs are quiet. J and I went for a walk to a nearby park before dinner and marveled at the oddities we'd forgotten about: the glittering Aspen trees, the tiny sidewalks, the people who pass you and say "Hi," the lush lawns, the huge sky, the quiet. Nothing's really hit me yet, but it feels good to be here now.

Hi! Remember me? I write on this here blog sometimes.

I don't know what's going on. I went and deleted a whole chunk of my archives yesterday. Maybe it's just that I'm in cleaning and packing mode, but I suddenly wanted to get rid of them really bad. I tossed all these entries I only barely glanced at, so I'm not even sure of their content. J was horrified, saying it was like throwing away all my journals from middle school or something. And it's true: when there's a Cringe 2040, I won't have anything to read.

So, I don't know. I have so much to do in the next couple weeks and I have to figure a lot of things out. If the blog disappears for a bit, don't worry. I'll let you know if I'm getting out forever.

It feels like I've had so many big, monumental things to post about lately that all the little tidbittery that usually makes up this blog has been pushed into nowhere. And honestly, what good is a blog if you aren't telling people things, like your internal war of wills against filled cookies or how you were attacked by skateboards?

Which I totally was. J has his longboard and skateboard hanging by their wheels over the top of the door to our front room. They were put there after we sold our bookcase and promptly had nowhere else in the apartment to store anything, and while they seemed to be in a precarious place, I kept pushing it out of my mind. Which then, of course, caused them to fall on me while I was cleaning up last week. The longboard fell straight down, taking the skin on my elbow with it, and just as I was recovering from that little shock, the skateboard fell on my head. It is quite something to be injured so badly by skateboards when you're not even riding them.

I spent much of Friday afternoon baking batches of Martha Stewart's Chocolate Peanut Butter Surprise Cookies. For some reason when I first made these several years ago, J and I got a big kick out of the "surprise" in the title and took to yelling, "Surprise!" whenever anyone would take a bite of them. (Although, here's a tip Martha: it's not too surprising if the hidden ingredient is in the name of the baked good.) I should also mention that a bunch of us were heading to the Zombie Hut that evening to start Labor Day off right, and the whole time I was baking the cookies I was thinking, "I'll bring these cookies to the bar!" Not until I was done baking them did I remember that people don't bring treats to bars when there is no birthday. What is wrong with me?

So I'm making the cookies and I decide I'll be a little sneaky. I'll put something--something OTHER THAN PEANUT BUTTER--into one of the cookies. Because then there would be a real surprise! Trust me, this was hilarious to me at the time. I searched the kitchen and, after rejecting crushed up Ritz crackers and wasabi peas (hmm, perhaps I was too hasty with the wasabi peas...), I decided on a couple of chocolate covered raisins. Innocuous, but TOTALLY DIFFERENT THAN PEANUT BUTTER! After I decided I wasn't going to be the moron that brought cookies to a bar, I realized J and I would be the only recipients of my surprise cookies, J being the only one who could be surprised by the non-peanut butter. So I spent the rest of the weekend poking at the cookies to determine whether I could discern a peanut butter center (making it okay for me to eat), and yelling at J every time he took a cookie, "Surprise! Is it a surprise?" Which eventually lead to:

J: I think I found the surprise. Was it just chocolate?
L: What? No...
J: Well, I got one that was just chocolate.
L: It was supposed to be chocolate covered raisins.
J: Nope, no raisins.

So the Great Cookie Experiment was a total bust, but on the upside, Kelly and I found a new bar in the neighborhood that has bocce ball. Bocce ball is my kind of bar sport in that, much like darts or shuffleboard, you don't have to exert much effort to perform the basics of the game and there is always a chance luck will step in and give you a really good turn. I mean, you still get creamed by people who actually have bocce ball skills, but it's not too embarrassing to give it a go.

Well, here's the thing: we are moving. To Denver. At the end of the month.

It's something J and I have been talking about for probably a year now: an escape from the big city, having more room to spread out, possibly buying property, being closer to family. It seems the timing is just finally right.

It seems like I spent a lot of my time after college trying to find the right guy, the right apartment, the right job. Now that I have all three, I'm taking the first and ditching the last two. I have faith that I'll re-find them, but it's still pretty scary.

I haven't lived in Denver since high school, and I know a lot of it has changed, possibly enough so that I won't recognize life as I remember it, but that's sort of what I'm looking forward to. I don't think I could go back if I felt like things had stagnated while I was away, but I think things have actually grown. Friends are doing exciting things, the city has changed.

You might think this was mostly my idea, but once J met the Denver crowd, he was just waiting for my go-ahead to make the decision. I think he was ready for this before I was. His desperation for a workshop, a garage, a tool shed certainly factor into his desire to leave the big city.

It's all a bit bittersweet. We constantly refer to living in New York as being in an abusive relationship. When it's good it's really really good, but when it's bad you wonder how much longer you'll be able to take the punches to the gut. I haven't been to the top of the Empire State Building. I haven't eaten at the Chip Shop. There are a million shows I didn't attend, a hundred parades I never saw, a dozen museums I never made it too. But that's part of living in this city, too: ignoring the big attractions in favor of the smaller ones that add up to a life here.