Happy 50th anniversary

Today, my folks have been married 50 years! That’s a pretty big milestone, and one worth celebrating.

My sister Amy reached out to me about what we might be able to do for them, and honestly that was a puzzle. I knew getting everyone there was going to be essentially impossible—we’re pretty far flung and for one of us, tickets would be prohibitively expensive. Plus my brother’s at his annual training for the Army, and this is also the busiest time for me with my job. And a vase or picture or what have you didn't seem to be appropriate either.

So what to do?

We live in the digital age, and my parents are most definitely not Luddites. In fact, they're pretty up to date with technology. So I reached out to my brother and sisters and also my sons and said, look—if you’ll record a video of congratulations and send me pictures of our folks across the years, I’ll make a video to celebrate this significant anniversary.

And that's what we did. Here it is:

Congratulations, Mom and Dad, with love from all of us!

I'm a little slow

On their grand, cross-country road trip last spring, Mom and Dad brought us two pictures. One is a Charley Harper print they've had for years and that I've always loved. The other is a pastel drawing of my mother when she was 12 years old. I'd always told her she wasn't to throw it away, that if she got to the point where she didn't want it any more, she should give it to me. So she did.

Here they are in new frames, which go better with the rest of our pictures:

Of hidey-holes and accommodations

First, the hidey-hole. Wally has struggled to find his super secret safe hiding place here in the Little Yellow House. He's a cat who truly needs that spot where he can go to collect his kitty thoughts. In Boston, he had a couple of places in closets way up high, where the other two cats couldn't/wouldn't venture. In our apartment, he loved to get in the under the sink cabinet in our bathroom. He's tried a couple of spots here, mostly the cabinet under the kitchen sink (and believe me, it's rather startling when a cat pushes open a cabinet door at your feet and leaps out).

Today he found a spot he clearly likes in the second bedroom closet. He doesn't know yet that this won't be his safe place because we keep those closet doors shut. I just haven't had the heart to make him move yet.

As far as accommodations go, well I hesitate to post this but I will anyway. To help reduce the growling and hissing, we've had to move the litter boxes out of the sideboard I showed you a couple of weeks ago and even go so far as to put them in separate rooms. If we didn't do that, poor Eddie would never have been able to use the litter box because Wally tried his darndest to block him from getting to them.

Right now, one is on the floor in the office, so it's pretty close to where we had it before. The other one? Is in the tub in the guest bathroom. Apparently the cats like the pink tile in there too, because that box is the one they're using the most. Don't worry, Mom and Dad -- I promise we'll disinfect that tub before you come visit.