It was a busy latter half of the year for me. I still have the same job and still live in Denver - or, at least, the greater Denver area - but otherwise lots has changed. I bought a house at the end of November, and have escaped the roasting oven of my downtown apartment. Moving with me to Wheat Ridge (northwest Denver) was the visitor of the previous entry, J., now no longer a visitor. Completing our little winter huddle is our cat Marley, whom we adopted about three weeks ago.
He was the unexpected cat - we saw him in our nearby branch of PetSmart, a big chain of pet supply stores which have adoption areas that can be used by local shelters, but he wasn't the cat that either of us had in mind. Still, we kept going back to see him while we tried in vain to adopt cats from other places. The strangest of these was Adams County Animal Control, where they told us they had some astounding number of cats - 380? - but where they seemed very confused about which cats were ready for adoption and which weren't (we were told that the one we'd gone to see, advertised for adoption online, was in the "storage area" and not available. "It has ringworm. You wouldn't want it."), and where finally they refused to let us adopt the pair of kittens we chose. One of the two was semi-feral and was going to need a lot of attention, but it was a lovely little playful and curious tabby and we decided to take it and its similar-sized and better socialized black playmate. Initially we were told we couldn't have either because they were on medication (this in spite of the large signs posted on their enclosure - "We are available for adoption!"), then told we could put a hold on the black one until it finished its treatment and fill out forms to apply for the semi-feral one. Three or four days later they phoned and told us we could have the black one but not the tabby, because the person in charge had doubts that I had enough experience to deal with it. I'm still astounded that she wouldn't bother to talk to us herself to find out if we knew what we would be getting into or to ask more about our circumstances - just got one of the receptionists to phone us and tell us we could come and pick up the black one and would we like perhaps to choose a different one to go with it? I withdrew my hold on the black one, and gave up on the place entirely. It was a big drab concrete facility in the middle of nowhere, with hundreds of cats in little rooms or individual cages, and they didn't pursue the chance to have us take two of them. A huge machine efficient at sucking in furry bodies, but with malfunctioning apparatus for spitting them out again. If you start imagining this multiplied across the country, all of those unwanted and abandoned cats...
Later that day we went to visit Marley again, arrived conveniently at the time when a representative from the shelter was there to unlock the cage and let us meet him properly, f illed out the papers, and took him home. I'd worried when we'd seen him in his cage in PetSmart that he was somewhat unresponsive and perhaps wouldn't engage much with us - he was described on his paperwork as "shy and retiring" - but once he was home and had managed to get over his fright and come out of his carrier, he turned out to be extremely sociable and playful. He's a delight to have around. We've been cat-sitting too for the past couple of weeks, so it's been quite lively here.
Below is a picture taken of the inside my house, toward the dining-room area. In the winter, at least, we have beautiful warm light coming through that window in the morning and in the afternoon. In fact, it was what swayed me to buy the house (which, like Marley, I had to see on several occasion before I finally made the decision to take it - mostly because I wanted a much bigger kitchen, but these seem hard to come by here, at least in my price range).
The time before moving was hectic with trying to finish up the quarter and close on the house; and the time since has consisted largely of trips to large hangar-like stores on soulless highways to get a never-ending list of necessities; but I managed one more 14er hike in the autumn up Pike's Peak. Nice hike at the beginning, from Crags Campground; miserable slog up the peak itself, to find a big flat concreted summit with visitor centre. A road and a cog-railway go up there. It might have a nice view, but we were too tired and cold to care much by the time we got to the top, and too concerned to find a ride down the first part so that we'd be out before nightfall. Now it's ski season, not hiking season.
Christmas in our house was nice - we had Christmas stockings, a new puppet friend from my brother's family, and a wonderful parcel of goodies to open from my parents. I made pizza, and we drank White Russians. On Boxing Day (not that there is such a thing here) we went to the cinema to see The Day the Earth Stood Still - the recent remake, not the 1950s original. Not my choice, obviously, but I watched the trailer and thought it looked bearable (and it looked so much more attractive after I'd seen the trailer for Valkyrie). It had pretty terrible reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but to my own surprise I thought it was quite good, though marred by a very clumsy end - the premise in this version is that aliens are going to intervene on earth because we're destroying the environment and are apparently incapable of changing; we're saved when the representative alien sees our "other side" - but the scenes in which he's made to change his mind are horribly clunky and unconvincing, and the acting seems to go downhill as if they all know this.
Later that day we went to visit Marley again, arrived conveniently at the time when a representative from the shelter was there to unlock the cage and let us meet him properly, f illed out the papers, and took him home. I'd worried when we'd seen him in his cage in PetSmart that he was somewhat unresponsive and perhaps wouldn't engage much with us - he was described on his paperwork as "shy and retiring" - but once he was home and had managed to get over his fright and come out of his carrier, he turned out to be extremely sociable and playful. He's a delight to have around. We've been cat-sitting too for the past couple of weeks, so it's been quite lively here.
Below is a picture taken of the inside my house, toward the dining-room area. In the winter, at least, we have beautiful warm light coming through that window in the morning and in the afternoon. In fact, it was what swayed me to buy the house (which, like Marley, I had to see on several occasion before I finally made the decision to take it - mostly because I wanted a much bigger kitchen, but these seem hard to come by here, at least in my price range).
The time before moving was hectic with trying to finish up the quarter and close on the house; and the time since has consisted largely of trips to large hangar-like stores on soulless highways to get a never-ending list of necessities; but I managed one more 14er hike in the autumn up Pike's Peak. Nice hike at the beginning, from Crags Campground; miserable slog up the peak itself, to find a big flat concreted summit with visitor centre. A road and a cog-railway go up there. It might have a nice view, but we were too tired and cold to care much by the time we got to the top, and too concerned to find a ride down the first part so that we'd be out before nightfall. Now it's ski season, not hiking season.
Christmas in our house was nice - we had Christmas stockings, a new puppet friend from my brother's family, and a wonderful parcel of goodies to open from my parents. I made pizza, and we drank White Russians. On Boxing Day (not that there is such a thing here) we went to the cinema to see The Day the Earth Stood Still - the recent remake, not the 1950s original. Not my choice, obviously, but I watched the trailer and thought it looked bearable (and it looked so much more attractive after I'd seen the trailer for Valkyrie). It had pretty terrible reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but to my own surprise I thought it was quite good, though marred by a very clumsy end - the premise in this version is that aliens are going to intervene on earth because we're destroying the environment and are apparently incapable of changing; we're saved when the representative alien sees our "other side" - but the scenes in which he's made to change his mind are horribly clunky and unconvincing, and the acting seems to go downhill as if they all know this.
