All posts by Dona

Why I am not going to Munich

Travel

Several months ago, just when the Sequester was being enacted, Dean mentioned he’d been invited to give a talk at a conference in Munich in August. Unfortunately one of the ways his part of the government was handling the Sequester was to restrict all foreign travel unless the other guys paid for it. He was bummed about it because he  would have loved to go to Munich.

A couple of months later he told me that he was going to be allowed to go because the other guys agreed to pay. He also asked if I wanted to go. I was on the fence. Munich was not necessarily a place I wanted to go back to. I liked it okay when we spent a few days there in 1985 on our “grand tour” of a honeymoon, but there was nothing there that I really wanted to see again or do. I said I would think about it.

Thinking about it involved posting a status on Facebook mentioning the opportunity. Several of my FB buddies encouraged me to go. When Mali mentioned the slight possibility of meeting up in Munich since she and her husband were going to be spending a few months in Italy, I decided that maybe I would go. I doubted things would work out and I’d get to actually meet Mali, but the slight chance that would happen changed my mind.

I’ve been researching Munich and its surrounding area, online and in a book I purchased at Barnes and Noble a month or so ago. I also downloaded an app to my phone and began learning a few basic German words and phrases.  Dean and I would talk, briefly, about what to do when we left Munich. We settled on a hotel. He sent me a list of things I could do while he was at conferences. I told my supervisor about the trip and even said I would work 4 hours a day for 4 or 5 days while I was gone so I would not end up with negative vacation/sick time hours.

I was set to go, but not excited about it. In fact, I was dreading it. Flying to a city I really didn’t want to fly to, working in a hotel on a small screen instead of on dual screens, missing Andrew’s departure to Oberlin, missing many of the last few days with Clare before her Great Adventure. But I was going to go anyway.

Then, last week, Clare told me she wanted to leave Maryland on August 23 — the day after we were scheduled to leave for Munich. She would drive Andrew to Oberlin and head West.

What? I wondered? I won’t be able to say goodbye!

Mom, you can say goodbye before you leave, she reasoned.

But who will take care of Halloween?

A neighbor? she suggested.

But…but…but!

It went downhill from there.

A few days later Clare told us that she had a week off in August. Dean immediately began thinking of what we could do as a family that week.

You guys can do something, I said, I need to save up my vacation time for Munich.

That night Dean told me he had not bought my ticket to Munich yet and said that if I didn’t want to go he was okay with it. After some thought and feelings of guilt I said I’d rather not go. He understood. I think. Now we can do something as a family.

Halloween

Spoiling the Cat

Pets
Halloween

No, as far as I know that is not a euphemism.

I am spoiling our cat. She is elderly, mostly deaf and going blind. She’s got a constant runny nose that was finally diagnosed as asthma a few years ago. We recently had a bad scare  and thought she was dying as we helplessly watched.

Long story short — an emergency vet visit brought up the probability of cancer and an emergency animal hospital visit said no cancer, but she has pancreatitis.

Apparently a cat with pancreatitis will eat, but the food he or she eats is not absorbed well. It can be a spell of pancreatitis or chronic. It can lead to diabetes. The vet said to feed her whatever she wanted to eat. Hence the spoiling.

She began turning her nose up to the Science Diet canned food for mature cats, so I bought Royal Canin because she liked the sample the vet gave us. I also gave her some low-sodium tuna in water — the kind people eat — and she liked that. We also give her the skin off the salmon we cook because we don’t like the skin and she loves it. It seems to make her chipper.

The other day she began turning her nose up to the Royal Canin food and I suggested to Dean that I buy fish for her and cook it and freeze it. He shook his head and said that at some point she would only eat caviar from the rarest of sturgeons in a country that does not trade with the U.S.

Okay, he really didn’t say that but I bet he wishes he had.

I did buy some inexpensive frozen fish and will cook it for her — but she seems okay with the Royal Canin again. Dean says she’s got me trained. I think he’s right.

What we did on our summer vacation — Days 5 and 6

Travel, , , , ,

Monday

After the busy weekend we took a bit of a break from activities on Monday. We were scheduled to get our photographs taken Monday evening by a professional photographer I’d gotten to know via his blog a few years ago, so we didn’t want to do too much during the day. We had lunch at Portillos where Jill* works because I’d heard that their Italian beef was better than Beef Villa. It was very good, but there is something about Beef Villa I prefer.

Then we drove to Sycamore to go to Farm and Fleet (a friend of ours once called it “Farmer’s Feet”, so that’s what we usually call it too). Bought some stuff we didn’t need (including a colorful pair of gardening clogs that I will wear the .001% of the time I actually garden).

We stopped by and said hi to my dad and grandparents on the way back to Elgin, then headed to the kitty farm** for our photo shoot.

Dad's grave
Patrick Grandparent's grave

Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate that day and we had to reschedule the photo shoot for the next morning — early the next morning since we had plans to visit Chicago later that morning.

Tuesday

Bright and early Tuesday morning we headed back to the kitty farm and met up with James Jordan who made us look fabulous with an old barn as and equally fabulous backdrop. What you don’t see in the photos below are the occasional dead critters in the straw. Dean’s brothers (The Twins) stopped by for a visit and got in on the photography fun.

After the photo shoot we picked up my mom and Brandon and headed to Chicago where we first visited Millennium Park and photographed the “Bean”, then visited the Art Institute. Unfortunately a considerable amount of time was spent waiting to be seated for lunch in the Art Institute’s courtyard cafe, waiting to be waited upon, and waiting for our bill.

Oh yeah, it was Dean’s birthday.

Dean modeling his new t-shirt from his robot-making buddy, Tal.

That evening we celebrated June Birthdays in the Follmann family at Sue and Dennis’ house in Sycamore. Then we went home on Wednesday.

The end.

———————-

*Jill is my ex sister-in-law who lives with my mom
**The kitty farm is the farm where Dean spent his formative years and where his brother, Danny and his family lived for many years. They always had dozens of cats running around — and that is where we got Joe and Halloween.