Sunday, March 23, 2014

March MADNESS!

Can you believe this month is already nearing an end?  Where did it go?  It's been such a great month.  The weather in Phoenix has been phenomenal, the basketball has been exciting, and we added to our family.  



March through May are the most perfect months in Phoenix; the weather is warm, the smell of orange blossoms fills the air, the cactus are blooming, people are enjoying their yard work and their bike rides.  It's a little piece of heaven.


Also with March comes the NCAA college basketball tournament!  Watching these games and filling out brackets has been a tradition of mine for years, thanks to my friends, Greg and Blair, who got me addicted!


I do miss my Indiana friends during this time, as we would all sit together at our favorite sports bar, Average Joe's.  But Eric and I are making our own memories.  Last year it was Vegas, this year we found Blue 32 and Cold Beer and Cheeseburgers...both fun places to watch all the games.

 

And also this month we adopted Hemingway.  It's been quite entertaining to have her as a new addition to our family!  She is FULL of life and energy!  She chases our 3 year old kitty, Grace, up down and all around the house; and that makes our 10 year old dog, Cyrus, curious so he chases the both of them!  I just sit back with my camera and enjoy the show.


Grace is still trying to get used to not being the only cat in the house.  This is how they currently interact:


Hopefully I'll soon have some cuddling photos to share!!  Fingers crossed!

Finally, a big thank you to "our" cousin, Adam.  We received a box full of coffee that came from the coffee business he previously owned!  Eric went out today and bought a coffee grinder and we're looking forward to starting our week out with fresh ground coffee in the morning!   Kismet, Honduran, or Sumatran?  Decisions, decisions!


 


"I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees.  I am going to close my eyes and listen."  ~Anne Lamott

"Great players are willing to give up their own personal achievement for the achievement of the group. It enhances everybody."  ~Kareem Abdul-Jabbar





Sunday, March 16, 2014

Reflection

Reflections 

This has been a week of reflection for me.  Those are nice from time to time, I find.  A big reason for it this week was due to the fact that I lost my voice.  Completely.  I learned how difficult it was to communicate without words.  There was a lot of gesturing, a lot of "loud" whispering, and a lot of just listening. 







During this time of silence I also read a book from cover to cover in 2 days (haven't done that in a while!).   And this book pushed me to do even more reflecting.  The book was The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  It's a book about life and death, youth and love, words and writing.  It's a book about that horrible, awful 'C' word.  Cancer.  It will sit with me for a while.



























Like many of you, I'm sure, I also reflected upon Flight 370 and the unexplainable loss of all of those people.  How do their families even begin to reconcile this?




Finally, last night I was able to focus my silence on photography.  After a lovely dinner with a group of fellow photographers, I attempted some night photography of the Chihuly exhibit at the Desert Botanical Gardens.  Chihuly's work is beautiful. And how ironic that this master glass sculptor lost his eye to jagged glass in a car accident.





 
My voice is fighting it's way back again, and while it's certainly nice to be heard, it was also a nice quiet time of reflection.

Happy Sunday and Happy Birthday to my BFF Lisa!!


























"By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is bitterest."   - Confucius


 

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Family of FIVE!

I've been wanting to add on to our little family for about a year now.  So when I heard there was a large adoption event going on yesterday Eric and I got in his new Jeep and headed to the Pet-wonderland that they made of the beautiful Franciscan Renewal Center.

View from the Franciscan Center

It was a gorgeous morning and the event was quite crowded with people looking to adopt.  And boy were there some cutie-pies that needed good homes! 

Healing Garden at the Franciscan Center

I was in the market for a new kitten, but I fell in love with a number of dogs!  Just look at some of these faces!









This guy was blind due to the way he was bred






Big guy trying to make friends with a little girl!


They even had bunnies!  




There were a few cats up for adoption, but I had my heart set on a kitten.  So we said goodbye to the sweet animals at the event and started looking at animal shelters across the valley.  Just like when we adopted Grace, we looked at several places for "the one".  And we didn't find her until our last stop...which also happens to be where we found Grace in 2010. 

As soon as I saw her face I knew she was the one.  I fell in love immediately.  Her shelter name was Emma and they brought us all into a little room to meet one another.  She was an immediate cuddler purring non-stop!  I cuddled with her for a bit and then I sat her on the floor and noticed that she has 6 toes on each of her front paws!!  A Hemingway cat!!  It was meant to be, as he's one of my favorite authors!


All the kitties looking for homes    

So we started the adoption process with little "Emma".


Her former home with the adopted notice hanging up 

 That's when we learned her story.  It seems that our kitty was a police rescue.  She is 6 months old now, but in January when she was about 3 months, she was rescued from the hands of some kids who were banging her head up against a telephone pole.  The police saved her and brought her, bloodied and beaten, to the animal shelter.  They shaved her entire body to check for contusions and injuries (her hair is growing back slowly).  She had injuries to her head and her lungs were filled with blood, but she had no broken bones and no "severe" injuries.  They nursed her back to health and yesterday was her first day up for adoption.  She was fixed on Friday, microchipped yesterday, and spent the night in her new forever home last night.  She's been through a lot in her first six months of life.

Meet our little girl, Hemingway:



The tough part right now is we have to keep her quarantined from Cyrus and Grace for 7 to 10 days in case she has a cold (which they all pretty much do when coming from the shelter).  So right now she's living in Eric's office and our other two are lying outside the office door wondering when they can meet their new sister!


You can kind of tell how thin her fur is right now where they shaved her body

She doesn't meow very much and she LOVES to cuddle. I think this little polydactyl kitty is going to be very happy here!


It's not easy trying to take a one-handed picture of a 6 toed kitten...but you can kinda see her little thumb here

"A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not."
Ernest Hemingway (author, For Whom the Bell Tolls)


Papa and one of his many cats


Sunday, March 2, 2014

Arizona Falls / Cloudy Day Bike Ride

Today Eric and I drove to the Arizona Falls at 56th and Indian School and biked over to Old Town Scottsdale, down to Papago Park, up through Arcadia, and back. 




I'm trying to watch the hysterical Ellen host the Oscars so I'm going to make this a short written blog and let the pictures tell the story. 







Eric on the greenbelt trail...headed towards Old Town

Action Shot!  Biking and shooting.  Papago Park

Camelback Mountain

Clouds in Phoenix

O.H.S.O. viewed from the greenbelt

Thanks to the mud...my life was in danger!  See how close this klutz was to falling into the canal!!!!

Breaking her in!