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And here’s my nephew Jonah being adorable:
And here’s my nephew Jonah being adorable:
My nephew is cuter than your nephew. Nolan is one month old and just a cute little peanut!
See?
OK, I’ll admit it, I’m hooked. I’m obsessed. I’m addicted! I *love* threading. Love it!
What, you may ask, is threading? It’s an ancient Indian art of hair removal using… thread, imagine that. 🙂 It’s very quick, mostly painless, and much more precise than waxing. It doesn’t irritate or burn your skin like waxing can. It’s also typically cheap, under $10.
If you don’t live in a big city, it may be hard to find a salon that offers threading. If you live somewhere like that (like here in Raleigh), your best bet is to start asking Indian women where they go to get it done. You’ll likely find a woman who runs a salon out of her basement or extra room in her house.
Shilpa, the woman I go to, used to have this sweet salon set up in her basement but got tired of all the traffic in and out of her house. She recently opened up a real salon in a little strip mall on Chatham Street.
If you like meticulously groomed ‘brows and think you might like to try an alternative to waxing or plucking, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Go visit Shilpa’s website: http://www.trianglesalon.com/
I picked up this purse at an art festival in Holden Beach, NC a few weeks ago. It’s a hand-crafted fabric purse – very good quality fabrics and nice stitching. The best part? It was $15. You can’t get a bag from Target for this price, and so many of the purses you see out there these days just look so unattractive.
Interested? Her name is Carol Langer and though she doesn’t have a website, she does have the old-fashioned phone number: 910-232-7887. She’s out of Wilmington, NC and I bet she’ll make you a custom bag you’re sure to love!
It’s funny to me how I mark the signs of my adulthood. Some of the things that have made me feel very grown-up in the past are obvious: managing my own money and purchasing a house, for instance.
But what about the other things, the less obvious ones? Getting up for an early morning run because it’s the right thing to do. Spending 1% of your income on charity. Becoming emotionally attached to your best friend’s baby. Washing your grandmother’s bedclothes while she recovers from a bout of stomach flu. All those things that were never on my radar when I was younger, but are responsibilities I’ve taken on as part of my adulthood.
Today, I think I did the most grown-up thing I’ve ever done. I took my mom’s cat, Molly, into the vet to have her euthanized. Molly has been sick for some time. She had a tumor, along with her ear canal, removed last year. More recently, she had a cancerous tumor removed from the area near her ear, and most recently she had her left eye removed. She was quite a handsome kitty, she even looked cute with her eye missing!
After all that money out of mom’s pocket and pain and energy on Molly’s part, she was doing pretty well. She was getting around OK with her limited vision and still wanted love and affection and turkey (her favorite). Unfortunately, she had a little stroke about 2 weeks ago and had been going downhill ever since then. She seemed to have lost the use of the left side of her body. She was pitiful to watch.
Mom and Gene couldn’t take it anymore, and really felt like her quality of life was in the pits. I spent time talking with both of them, and providing input from the vet and Tracey, our cat sitter. They decided they didn’t want her (or themselves) to suffer any more. I felt like it was my duty to take Molly into the vet. I didn’t think they could do it, and I thought the only thing I could offer them beside condolences would be this act of kindness. As I type this, my felineforeverfriend Cayce is on the desk next to me, gently squeezing his eyes open and shut and breathing in and out. I hope he keeps on breathing in and out. I expect him to be around for another 5 years or so. I don’t know what I’d do without him and I don’t know if I could take him in to be put down. Maybe one day, not at all in the near future, Mom can repay the favor for me.
So I made an appointment this morning and took her in at 2. Mom said goodbye before she left for the airport this morning, and Gene said goodbye when I picked her up this afternoon. Everyone in the vet’s office came in to pet her and say goodbye as well; it seemed she was a favorite there because of her sweet, gentle personality and her ultrasoft fur. Everyone was crying, even the girl at the front desk that I didn’t know.
They gave her a shot to make her sleep and left me with her for a few minutes. I used that time to kiss her whitewhite belly as much as I could. She laid her head down on my wrist and sighed a few times. They came in about 5 minutes later and then gave her a shot of something to stop her heart (“overdose of euthanasia” is what they called it). You could tell when the shot took effect because everything that makes a kitty a kitty just… disappeared.
There were physical changes. Her inner eyelid relaxed and half-closed. Her tongue, in mid-lick, stuck out of her mouth cutely. Her chest no longer rose and fell. But the spark of life was so obviously gone, in a way that was different from all these other signs, that you couldn’t feel too sad anymore. She’s up in kitty heaven with Pookie and Corky and Floyd and all the other cats who have passed over the Rainbow Bridge.
They wrapped her up in a towel and took her in the back. I cleaned up my face and came home. We’ll get her ashes in a few days, and Mom can scatter them where she will.
Here are some pictures of Molly, one of the sweetest, gentlest cats you ever knew.
Mom playing the ever-entertaining “bunny ears” impression game. Molly’s back legs were so long she resembled a jackrabbit, so this look isn’t too far off base. It was not one of Molly’s favorite games, though. 🙂
Here’s me trying to convince Molly that it’s OK to be held and cuddled. She remained unconvinced.
Molly taking a nap, curled up into a little ball of warm soft fuzzy. Or maybe she’s hiding from the Paparazzi.
If you know me, you know I love V for Vendetta. My husband got me the DVD for my birthday, and it came with a special edition miniature Guy Fawkes mask. How cool is that?
I made Cayce wear the mask. 🙂
Saturday night we went to visit the Vulcan at Vulcan Park. We were trying to get there at sunset but missed it, so it was totally dark out when we went. According to the website, “Vulcan Park is home to the world’s largest cast iron statue and features spectacular views of Birmingham. ” Here’s the statue from the parking log, with the moon in the background.
The best part about the Vulcan is that he’s sort of on the edge of a cliff, facing towards the city. (More on this to come in a minute.) If you stood beneath the vulcan, facing the way he does, you get a lovely view of the city like this:
The second best part of the vulcan is that he is on a pedestal that is 124 feet high. The third best part about the vulcan is that you can ride an elevator to get to the top of the pedestal where the vulcan resides.
If you put these three best things about the vulcan together, you discover that the brilliant engineers who constructed the elevator had no choice but to place the elevator shaft at the rear of the monument. So what do you see when you step off the elevator?
Smokin’ hot, half-naked Vulcan Butt. Oh, did I mention that the fourth best thing about the Vulcan is that he’s wearing a little apron and not much more? Poor guy, he’s the butt of a lot of cheeky jokes around town.
Here’s Amy’s artistic rendering of the Vulcan Butt.
See, Birmingham has lots of fun things to offer!
We went to Ali’s cool, funky apartment. It’s lovingly decorated with lots of fabulous little touches. I still think Amy’s apartment wins for best decorated, but Ali’s is a close second. We also got to meet Miss Kitty! She’s so soft, sometimes I think white fur is softer than any other. 🙂
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