Summer stuff

July 27, 2008 at 10:05 pm (family)
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It’s been quite the stretch since I blogged last. I have been trying to keep myself busy. I am sure for those of you who read this regularly, you are wondering how my sick kitty is doing. She is, for now, holding her own. She is not eating nearly as much as the vet wants, and I have decided to go against her advice and I am not force feeding her. We are doing hospice care now, and I would not force a human to eat against their will, therefore, I will not force my kitty to eat either. I know she is losing weight. She does eat on her own, and I found that she really loves cooked chicken. So we are going to eat a lot of chicken dinners here for a while. She has been outside a few times (normally an inside cat) and she even hunted and killed something under the deck one night. We got some good pictures and even one with the kids, so we’ll have those for when she is gone. She seems to be doing well and doesn’t seem to be in pain, and she hasn’t given me any indication of having given up. So we will go along as we’ve been until something changes. I still hope to come home one day to find that she peacefully passed in our absence. I really don’t want to stress her out with any more trips to the vet.

Our CSA is in full swing now. I have a boatload of yellow wax beans in my fridge and 4 large yellow summer squash, AND 1 zucchini still! I also have beets with greens and some broccoli and lettuce. It is more than we can eat in a week so it is piling up! Fortunately a lot of this keeps pretty well. I am getting creative with the squash. It’s not something I generally eat much of or even buy so it’s been a challenge to come up with things. I will definitely be putting things in the freezer for winter. If I shred the squash, and measure it out, I can take out a baggie for soup or spaghetti sauce or whatever. And the yellow beans should freeze well too. If anyone has favorite summer squash/zucchini recipes, please email them to me!

I have rented my loom and I’ve been weaving!! It’s really a lot of fun and I’m experimenting with different patterns and weft materials. So far I’ve used some sock yarn, some worsted weight wool and some of the carpet warp. It will either be a wall hanging or a table runner and I’m excited to see what the whole thing looks like when it’s done. I need to try to weave every day so that I get the most use out of the loom while it’s here. I can definitely see myself getting into it later on when I have a better place for a loom and when the kids are older. I’ll post pictures when everything is done! (For those of you on Ravelry, check out my page, I have a pic in progress up there.)

We’ve had the kids outside a lot in the evening. Sophie loves playing with water and you can’t keep her away from any of it – mud puddles, pools, even a pan of water on the deck. Will has a big boy bike now and although he will be using training wheels for a while, he is riding it very well! He looks so cute in his helmet. We go for walks down our side street here and he rides. Our neighbor has a miniature horse and we stopped to feed her some carrots tonight. It is hot during the day so evenings are a good time to go outside.

On the knitting front, I just finished a felted bag for a friend of mine. I am working on the second sock of one pair, and after that, I have a lacy scarf I need to finish. It seems like last week I finished up a bunch of stuff that had been undone for a while – I finished knitting the felted bag, I finished TWO socks (not the same pair though), and I finished some dishcloths and scrubbies for my dad. All of these have been updated on Ravelry. The bag is still blocking/drying but when I have it all assembled I’ll take some pictures. Then it’s off to Corpus Christi! I found the PERFECT cardboard box to block it on and I will be saving it just for that purpose.

No big plans for this week. I am sure we will visit friends like we usually do, and I’ll pick up food from the farm on Tuesday. I need to get some veggies in the freezer and keep working on this house. It seems like it’s so messy in here but Sophie is insane. She now throws food with the power of a toddler and she drags things from one room to the other. So I have plastic food containers in the bedroom and her stuffed animals from her bed in the kitchen. I am sure she has thrown away toys. Today she had the waste paper basket dumped all over the living room floor, so I have to put it up again. I remember going through this with Will, and he eventually outgrew it. I think by 2 he was much better. She seems to be sleeping a little bit better and her molars are slowly losing their covering of skin. Sleep is good. I appreciate it!

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My kitty is dying

July 18, 2008 at 9:42 am (family)
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I noticed a few days ago that Kali, my 13 year old calico that I’ve had since she was a kitten, wasn’t eating, or when she did, she seemed like something was wrong in her mouth. I took her to the vet yesterday and she has a tumor under her tongue, right behind her chin. Surgery would be radical and expensive, and I just couldn’t put her through that, not to mention all the tests and things they would have to run, and we would have to take her out of town. At first I thought I would have her put down today or tomorrow, but when we got home, I syringe fed her some prescription food the vet gave me. With her hunger finally relieved, she suddenly seemed SO happy! She ran to her dry food and ate a couple of pieces, licked her lips, and went for a nap. Later we let her outside (we don’t let the cats out because we have semis flying past our house at 55 MPH) and she was beside herself, eating grass smelling everything! Then later she actually ate some soft food on her own. The vet gave her a shot for pain and I think because of that, she is able to move her tongue better. I need to feed her yet this morning and I’ll see how she does.

We decided, for now, to pretty much do hospice care. Treat her pain, help her eat, and try to give her the best life we can for whatever is left of it. Take her out, give her snuggles, give her catnip, whatever she needs to feel as good as possible. I figure I will know when she is ready to go. I don’t want to be selfish, but I don’t want to put a relatively happy kitty down either.

Today we are going back to the vet to check a couple of labs. The pain medicine we want to use is really hard on the kidneys and she doesn’t want to put her into kidney failure. The medication (I wrote down the name but it’s in the other room) is a feline NSAID and can only be given for a short time. But it lasts a long time and I am going to ask her about cortisone as well.

This is the first time that my kids are going to have to deal with death. On the way home from the vet’s yesterday, I had to explain to Will why I was crying, and that Kali was very sick and we would need to help her die. He was upset, of course, and I did the best I could to answer his questions and reassure him. When we saw how well she did with the food, I told him she wasn’t going to die just now, and he said “Five days!”, so I told him, yes, we can see how she is doing in five days. He said he would miss her, and I told him all of us would, but we couldn’t be selfish, and we needed to make her as happy as possible while she’s still with us. (For the record, I also told him that we don’t help people die like we do pets, in case he was worried about that, and I didn’t once use the word “sleep” because he is already a horrible sleeper and we don’t need any more issues there!) Death is part of life, and I don’t want my kids to be afraid of it, yet I didn’t give him a lot of details. I figure if he wants to know more, he will ask.

So this just sucks all the way around. Just as I feel like I am handling things OK, I start to cry again, I just feel so bad for Kali and for the kids and I feel like my pets haven’t gotten the kind of attention I think they should since we had our kids. That makes me feel guilty and sad all over again. I guess the important thing is that we spoil her rotten until she lets me know she is done. Then I start thinking that we should all treat one another this way, since nobody knows how much time we have left, there are no guarantees. What a cheery way to start the day! :(

Just an update – she saw the vet today and she is also in kidney failure.  The med we initially wanted to use is not appropriate for her now.  We are going to try some prednisone and see how that goes.  I am hoping now that nature will take its course and she will pass peacefully here at home.  I really, really don’t want to take her back to the vet, she gets so scared in the car.

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Summer things and my week

July 13, 2008 at 10:15 pm (family)
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I was putting off blogging because I really wanted my last post about the Finnish influence in my hometown to not get buried in other stuff! But then I remembered I could make a page. So I went ahead and did that. Now anyone can find it anytime later if they want. It takes quite a few more steps for me to put pics in my posts so I tend not to do that… but it was kind of nice to have some pictures for a while.

We got our first CSA box last week. Turnips with greens, collards, lettuce, a zucchini and some eggs. I made a frittata and grated up some zucchini for it, and cooked some of the greens with a ham hock. They all came out pretty good, but I need to get busy and cook the rest of the greens, and the rest of the zucchini, AND the turnips because we are getting another box on Tuesday! That gives me 1 day to do all of that. It’s fun though, and it’s been an adventure to figure out new things to do with all these new veggies that I usually don’t buy. I think I’ll do more of the greens in the same pot with the ham hock and maybe sautee the rest with garlic. I will probably roast the turnips with a little balsamic and some olive oil, and not sure about the zucchini. (Is anyone ever really sure about the zucchini?)

This past week, we ran around a lot. We heard a funny noise in the truck right before we left the UP, but it ran just fine on the way home, ran fine all week, then Thursday, we went to a friend’s house, then ran an errand, and when I got home, I stopped to get the mail, stopped to wait for the garage door to open, then when I got out, there was a river of antifreeze POURING out from under the truck! I am not a religious person but sometimes things happen that make me think someone somewhere is looking out for me at times. Because it could have died SO many places that would have been REALLY inconvenient, especially in the heat with two little kids in the car. But it didn’t, it died RIGHT in my garage, RIGHT after I’d done all my post-trip running. It turned out to be the water pump and my husband had it fixed in a couple of days.

I now have a tabletop loom sitting on my kitchen table. It is not fully warped. I have my warp ends all cut and bundled, and they are all through the reed, and I am in the process of putting the warp ends through the heddles. (Google “weaving” and you’ll find glossaries for all of this! I’m too lazy to look it all up and put in the links right now.) Once I get all my ends fully heddled (is that a word?) then on Saturday I will take it back to the shop and she will help me tie my warp ends down. THEN, I can finally start weaving. I’ll keep the loom probably for a couple of weeks, I figure I can make my table runner easily in that time. While we were in the UP, we went to visit one of my mom’s Finnish friends who has a loom. She has made beautiful rugs for her house and she even let her 9 year old son at the time make a table runner. He used all sorts of scraps of yarn/string/fabric and made a really cool one! I am very excited about this and I feel another addiction coming on! I can’t imagine getting a floor loom with little kids around. So I’ve got time to decide and look for a used one.  In case anyone is interested, I’m using a 4-frame loom, and it’s 15 inches wide.  My warp ends are all 3 yards long.  I will post some pictures of it all when I get things ready to go.

This week we have friends coming here and the next CSA box to pick up, and playgroup on Wednesday, and we are going to try to go visit my sister in law (and my kids’ cousins) this week too. (They just live around the corner from us.) It will be fun to have company and I’m excited to see what is coming next from the CSA! So, a busy, but good week, hopefully.

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Finnish influence in my home town

July 8, 2008 at 2:29 pm (travel)
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This is going to be a very picture-intensive post! I haven’t done many of these but I wanted to show some of my friends in Finland just how Finnish my hometown is!

We just spent about 10 days in Hancock, Michigan, where my mother lives now. I grew up in Houghton, just across the lake, but essentially the same area. When I was home this past week, I went around taking pictures of many Finnish things in Hancock. It was fun and the best part of it was that I looked at the town through new eyes. I have been so used to so many of these things that I had to change my perspective for a while to find them again!

For example, there are many Finnish flags flying downtown amongst the American flags. For example, this one is flying near the post office:

And this one, against a stormy sky:

Many of the street signs are written both in English and Finnish. Not all of them, but the ones closest to downtown are!

We have a small diner named after the Kalevala!

They have wonderful breakfasts and bakery. You can get nisu and prune tarts there. Also pasties, which are not Finnish, but Cornish, yet have been popular in the area since the mining days. (It is pronounced pass-tee, not paste-ee, which is something totally different!)

Here is a flower shop. If you speak Finnish you can interpret this sign easily!

There is even a university now that started as a small college:

The university has a Finnish American Heritage Center!

The town even has Nordic ski trails called “Maasto Hiihto.” I don’t know if this is the name of a person or something else, if anyone can translate, please tell me! I have skied most of these trails, and there is one that I only walked down! Pretty scary.

I found a small gift shop that sells many Finnish imports. I somehow justified spending the money on a Marimekko pencil bag for my purse and a pair of socks!

They also sell Fazer chocolates, Paulig coffee, Iittala crystal amongst other things.

My dad has a wonderful wood burning sauna (you say SOW-nah, NOT SAW-nuh) in his back yard and we all took one, except Sophie. It was Will’s first time and he did great! He sat on the lower bench and even took the steam! For a kid who likes it cold, he did really, really well.

Here is Dad’s sauna:

Overall, the trip was good. Sophie slept horribly (even worse than her normal bad sleeping), I think because of being in a strange place, and also because she is getting 3 molars in all at the same time. She fought sleep so much, I was completely exhausted by the time I would finally get her to bed for the night. Twice a day, yelling and screaming and crying for sometimes close to an hour. She was SO tired, yet REFUSED to sleep. It was horrible. There are things that suck about being a mother, and this one is one of the worst. It clouds everything else, really. Many days I just don’t enjoy her, because I am always so mad and frustrated. I don’t know how to break out of this. I need a vacation just to recover from my vacation. Not so good. The sleep by far was the worst part of the trip. I do miss home so much though. Hope to live back up there someday.

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