Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

When Mark acquired the role of living-in-the-same-house-as-my-cat, he requested that we take certain measures to minimize the spread of disease and cat hair. One of those measures was to bathe the cat regularly. Since I had this cat since before she could legally be adopted (i.e. I was her foster mother. [ Ok, technically my friend Kelli and I were her foster mothers. In different apartments. It's complicated .]), and had bathed her as a kitten, I figured this was doable. And usually it is, although Ruby the Cat does NOT like it. I take the precaution of trimming her claws before bath time because...you know... claws . The interpretation of "bathe regularly" varies, but before we went on our Christmas vacation, we decided to get her all Clean so that, theoretically, we would come home to less cat-hair infiltration. So Mark cuffed her (as in held her by the cuff of her neck. It reduces wriggling) while I took nail/claw trimmers to her paws. It was going pretty well u...

Recently at work, I took care of quite the character of an old man. He'd been in the hospital for about a month, which is never good for sanity, let alone senility. He knew who he was, where he was, what season it was, who was president, who was going to be president, etc. but something was still off. He told me rather chipperly that the doc said he was getting blood today. But the next time I went into his room (which was not infrequent. He had about 10 pills, and only took them if halved or quartered, and only 2-3 pieces at a time, so I basically lived in his room.), he told me he felt weak. "Well, you are anemic. You need blood." "I do?" "Yes. That's why you're getting blood today." "I am?" "Yes" "But I feel sick." "Well, it looks like you might have pneumonia." [wide-eyes] "I have pneumonia!?" "Probably, yes. You'll notice you're coughing up some gunk out of your lun...

Every once in a while (approximately half of the time, actually) I go to Sunday church meetings, but it has been a long time (several years, I think) since I have been able to go to area-specific church conferences that are held a couple times a year. It seems like every time they roll around, I am scheduled to work. So it was a lovely surprise for me to realize that today was the Day I Am Going To Stake Conference, made even better because I Am Going With My Husband. We took our seats quickly, because we arrived right before it began. I noted with interest that the handout with the hymn lyrics was in both English and Spanish (our area covers a Spanish congregation), and had fun singing the Spanish version of "Joseph Smith's First Prayer" while Mark sang the English version. I had supposed that we wouldn't see anybody we know, since the conference had over 450 attendees, and both Mark and I are bad at name-and-or-face recognition. But as I looked around, I saw th...

Don't let the idiom-allusion in the title mislead you--this post is not about love. Well, not directly anyways. It deals more with position. As in standing up, sitting down, etc. I had a moderate tendency in childhood to black-out if I stood up too fast. It happened less and less as I got older, either because a) I got older; or b) I got smarter and tried to drink more water and not rapidly change position. But in the past few months, there's been a spike in black-outs. I only share this because  oh, they are good . Mark, after preparing for several months, took a language proficiency test in German, which was his last hurdle before crossing the finish line into Master's Degree. I was sitting down when he got the news on the test results--and at this point I would like to say that maybe it is better to take news standing--so when he shouted excitedly that he had passed, I jumped up exuberantly to hug him...and slumped to the floor. Fortunately I had g...