Cat update (you were too polite to ask)

We have brought our cats with us to Europe for four months. Because we are crazy people. Because two transatlantic trips with a cat were not enough for one lifetime—we needed to add two more, this time with TWO cats, just to keep things interesting. Because I have repressed most details of the first time around. (Although I do have a hazy memory of walking the mewling Bossy Cat (in her carrier) up and down the plane aisle like I'd seen mothers of fussy babies do. Possibly that was a dream?)

You may remember the Bossy Kitten from such posts as this and this (#tbt). Man, was she adorable. And still is…in her way. But also very bad. She bites with what feels like increasingly sharp teeth, she swipes at us as we walk by, we have to cover her claws so she doesn't destroy the furniture (we figured this out too late for our own stuff, but just in time for subletting, yay), she hisses at children. Also, on a road trip this summer, and I can tell you this now because we already sold our car no questions asked to a Kia dealership, she emptied her apparently very full bladder in the way back, staring panicked into my eyes as I screamed for her to stop. That was a rough day. We have grown fond of referring to the cats as The Fat One and The Bad One. My mother tells me this is not good parenting.

One thing that helps on the plane: sedatives. For the cats, too, haha. We have now mastered the art of scruffing the cats and shoving a pill down their throats. Although one thing I don't recommend, if the pill wears off and the kitten starts crying, is teaming up with your husband to take her into the tiny airplane bathroom together, letting her out of her carrier, and trying to do the whole scruff/pill shove maneuver a second time in there. Also I don't recommend flying with your cats to Europe via Istanbul, where your second flight will probably be delayed, and which is technically not even on the way to where you're going, although it is on the way to everywhere when you fly Turkish Airlines, which is the airline where they give you Turkish delight almost the minute you come on board.

After we got through the TWENTY TWO HOURS of travel time to get here, it took the cats a while to settle into their new life in Vienna. We had to try a few different kinds of food before we found one they liked, we got them a toy that has become their obsession, we invested in this magical substance, and after about ten days all was back to normal.

But in the past week, The Bad One has transformed into a whole new cat. A BED cat. In Houston she used to sometimes sleep on CM in the mornings, but now she's in bed through the entire night, often curled up on or against CM (someone's a daddy's girl...). If I sit in bed during the day (it's the warmest place in our chilly apartment—CM calls it my "office") she sits in CM's spot and falls asleep. I've taken to sending picture messages to him at work practically every day: "Look who won't stay out of bed!" "Somebody's a sleepy bed cat...." etc. I don't know if it's because she's rarely been cold in her life (Texas girl) or whether she's just enjoying being where we are, but it is the cutest thing that has ever happened since this. Sometimes we're both in bed with a cat on each of our respective chests, and we just look at each other and laugh and say THIS.

Because we are crazy.

Here is a grainy shot of the Bossy Kitten sleeping in the crook of my knees. Couldn't you just die?

Lazy day

Today's our free day (last one before I leave in a week!!), so of course we've spent the whole day in workout clothes. A trip to the recycling center (yes, we're very exciting), then IKEA, then Argo (so great!), then the first step for the barrel-aged negronis (approximately 4 weeks until they're ready), then the end of Homeland Season 1 (holy stressful amazingness). CM's grilling us a gorgeous steak and we're whiling away the evening.

Oh, and then there are the cats.

Sigh. I'm wishing I never had to leave.

Bossy kitten update—2 weeks!

I took Lola to the vet yesterday for her first shot, and the vet pronounced her in perfect health and told me we were doing a great job (cat mommy gold star!). Also, she weighs 1 pound, 5 ounces, which is more than TWICE what she weighed at her first visit 2 weeks ago. She's a big girl.

She loves all cat toys, and also she thinks everything is a cat toy. Particularly cables, nice shoes, and other things we don't want her to touch.

She goes up and down the stairs now like it's no big deal. She's also figured out that she can climb anything made of fabric (beds, couch, chairs, pants) by clawing her way up.

This is why we can't have nice things.

The Bossy Cat is getting used to her. There's still a bit of hissing going on, but not nearly so much. She's very interested in the idea of playing with the kitten, but she isn't quite sure how to do that yet.

I think we'll keep them.

All photos by LMB or CM

Bossy Kitten update

Lola has been living with us for a week, and it's hard to imagine life without her now. She is the cutest, and sometimes when she's doing something amazing and adorable our hearts get full and we look at each other and say, “What's it going to be like if we have a baby?” Surely a million times worse (better).

She's getting stronger and smarter every day, and she's a curious little monkey. She knows how to jump off the bed to get to her food, and when she's in the right mood she can go down the stairs with a lot of coaching and encouragement. She's too little to go up.

Because she's so young, and really too little to be away from her mama, she can't eat regular kitten food yet. So we warm up cat milk replacer (basically baby formula for kittens) and mix it with baby cat food. For the first few days she was putting her front paws in the dish every time she ate and then tracking milky footprints all over, but she seems to have learned not to do that. She's very good about using her litter box.

She spends a large portion of the day sleeping, and when she gets sleepy she will happily fall asleep in any position, particularly next to or on top of a warm body. She loves getting under the covers in bed. For the first few nights we kept her in the guest room and switched off sleeping with her there. Then we left her in there alone for a couple nights (we missed our bed), and she slept through the night tucked into a blanket without making a squeak. On Saturday she was hanging out in our room around bedtime, so we decided to try having her in there, and she slept on the rug next to our bed without waking up until morning. (The Bossy Cat sleeps on that rug as well, but as far away as possible from Lola). We'll keep her with us at night for the foreseeable future.

As for the Bossy Cat, she's starting to relax, but she decidedly does not like the kitten. She can tolerate Lola being in the same room, as long as she doesn't get too close. When the kitten gets too curious, she gets hissed at (and once, swiped at). The Bossy Cat is a bit of a bully. It's getting better, though, and we're holding out hope that eventually they'll be friends. In the meantime, we're mostly keeping them apart, and marveling at how enormous Lucy seems compared to Lola.

It's going to be hard to say goodbye to my sweet little family in a few weeks, so I'm trying to enjoy every moment of being home.

All photos by CameraMan

Happy weekend!

Friends, what are you up to on this first weekend of the year? CameraMan is going out of town for work, so the Bossy Cat and I will be on our own to entertain ourselves. I'm making plans: a dinner party tonight, some quality Shelby time tomorrow (she'll be 3 this year!), and a 30-minute run on Sunday (without CM—we'll see how that goes).

Some links for  your Friday:

The Bossy Folks introduced me to this. If you come to our house any time in the next month, we will probably make you watch it.

I love this! So true—#24 especially made me laugh. (via @rahree)

Now that I'm running, I can eat whatever I want, right? Well, I want this.

Because I wasn't missing Vienna enough. Thanks a lot, NY Times.

I wish these people were our friends.


I took this picture at the zoo this week:

Remind you of anyone??

Here's hoping your weekend is full of sunshine, clementines, and cashmere! xoxo LMB

Photos by LMB

Happy weekend!

What are all you lovely people doing this weekend? Something romantic? My weekend is filling up fast: a preview for a Broadway show tomorrow (no, not that one), a German-speaking coffee date with my friend OperaDaddy on Sunday, followed by a proper catch-up with My Gay Husband. I'll also be attempting to sleep in later than 5am, the time at which I have snapped awake the past 2 mornings, and moving back into my sweet UWS sublet (a good thing considering my Met ID and office keys are still there—oops). Oh, and fondly remembering last year's kick-ass V-Day weekend (Red on Broadway, Brooklyn Bridge at sunset, dinner at Jack the Horse, night at the Empire) and wishing for another.

Next week I'll be back with pictures and stories from Florence as well as a new Home on the Road interview!

In the meantime, some links for your weekend:

Yes, please. I will have 10.

I'm trying not to get too excited about the new Anthropologie wedding line that's launching Monday. It's not working. I'M SO EXCITED!!!

Amen, sister.

I've been following this series about how couples manage their money with great interest. Coupled readers, what do you do? I'm fascinated.

I am a recent convert to the glories of Aperol, so I loved this post over at Orangette.


Here's a picture of my blinky Bossy Cat on the bed. I'm missing her like crazy.

Hope your weekend is filled with romance, peppermint hot chocolate, and cozy sweaters! xoxo LMB

Schönes Wochenende!

Good lord, it's Friday, and I think I slept away the entire week…EXACTLY as I planned. What's on tap for the weekend, dear readers? CM actually has the whole weekend off, which is so exciting. We're going to do some wedding planning (I'm just starting to get in the mood for it) and wander around the city. Oh, and tonight I'm going to experiment with strudel baking and Aperol cocktail mixing. I'll let you know how that goes.

In the meantime, some links:

Did you hear about the Zodiac signs changing? Well, thank goodness it's been debunked! I don't even believe in that stuff, but I DO know I'm a Libra through and through.

I have fallen in love…with an eyeliner. I highly recommend you immediately buy it in every color it comes in (like I did).

Modern Family this week was SO good! It's definitely my favorite show on TV these days.

Today we passed a café selling cupcakes (in Vienna!), and they all looked amazing. I'm dying to try half the recipes at this cupcake site.

I'm thinking this list would make a good project. I've embarrassed to say I've only seen 9 so far, but CM got me The Bandwagon for Christmas, so we could start with that.

I'd also like to leave you with a picture of my adorable Bossy Cat chillaxing on the radiator. Isn't she cute/ridiculous? Incidentally, this picture WAS taken while I was supine on the couch. Score.

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Hope your weekend is filled with long walks, lazy mornings, and pastries! xoxo LMB

Puppy love

I'm having cat withdrawal something fierce. Oh, there are the occasional adorable pictures (although whatever happened to Caturday, am I right?) and Skype sightings of the Bossy Cat, but none of it is enough to fill the cat-shaped void in my heart.

So I'm transferring all my love and affection to friends' dogs. Turns out, although I am by no means a "dog person," when the dog is cat-sized or smaller, it'll do in a pinch.

Enter Millie.

Isn't she just the cutest thing you've ever seen (since the Bossy cat, obvs)?!? She is the new puppy of two of my friends, and let me tell you, she is ready for her close-up.

She's lovey, playful, she has the best ears I've seen, and she will sleep on anyone and everyone.

She even dressed up for Halloween, as Suzuki. Her friend Oscar (pictured here with WienerLover) was Cio-Cio San, of course.

 

 

What? We never claimed we weren't opera nerds.

In which we switch continents

Here I am, coming to you live from Wien! So much has happened, it feels like a year has passed since we left the Trap Wednesday afternoon. We're close to being settled into our beautiful apartment (pictures or maybe video(!) to come), and we've mostly beaten the jet lag (we don't have an awake in the middle of the night problem, but we I still have an asleep in the middle of the day problem). We've already been very productive: CM is officially a resident, he has a bank account, and he's discovered his visa application was incomplete (wah wah). We've eaten Eis every day and sipped Kaffee in cafés. We've shopped in 2 different grocery stores, and I think we're ready to move into one of them. We're attempting to speak German whenever possible—it's going pretty well so far, but we're not getting cocky just yet.

One more post about the Bossy Cat and I think this blog will be veering dangerously into Mommyblog territory, so I promise that this will be it for at least a little while, but I know you want to hear how she did on the transatlantic crossing, right? Yeah, I thought so.

We had grand plans to sedate her, after the craziness at the vet, but by the time we got close to leaving, she was so freaked out that she had absolutely no interest in eating the wet food with the pill crushed up in it. After much coaxing, she ate about half of it, and then she actually got into her carrier by herself, which all boded well for the trip, I thought. We were a little worried because we'd seen online that our flight to Copenhagen was delayed 2 hours—we were going to be cutting it extremely close to make our connection to Vienna. We got to Dulles with 5 suitcases, 2 bags, and a frightened cat, gladly paid for Skycap service, and then stood in a long ridiculous line. On domestic flights, people know what they're doing—lines run smoothly, people have already checked in online, everyone has their ID—it's civilized. I don't know why, but it's always mayhem in the international terminal. Nobody knows what line they're supposed to be in, 9 family members have come to see them off and insist on standing in line with the people traveling, people are repacking their giant suitcases in the middle of the floor…it's chaos.

By the time we got to the front of the line, my heart was pounding in my throat and I was having the kind of anxiety I've rarely experienced since I stopped singing. I was SO nervous about the cat. What if we hadn't gotten the right documentation? What if she leaped out of my arms as I walked her through security? What if they wouldn't let her into Austria, or there was a problem in Copenhagen? I was a wreck. But the minute we got to the ticket counter, everything turned around. They didn't check her papers. They didn't charge us for our seriously heavy suitcases. And best of all, they asked if we would "volunteer" to be rerouted…on a direct flight to Vienna that would arrive 4 hours earlier than our other flight. Ummm…YES.

Going through security was completely fine. Turns out, the Bossy Cat was not that interested in running through the airport, like she had been in all my nightmares. We waited tensely for about an hour, and then our names were called and we were put right on the direct flight. Oh, and to repay us for the "inconvenience" of being rerouted, they gave us 600 euros of travel vouchers. Thanks, SAS, you rock! We're already planning our Copenhagen vacation.

All was well. We were ensconced in our seats, eating snacks and drinking wine, and we had individual TVs with a choice of movies! I watched Date Night in German. Every once in a while, I would unzip the top of the BC's carrier to pet her head, and she seemed to be okay, just a little bit in shock. She was sleeping a lot with her head buried in the corner of her carrier…until she WASN'T. Half asleep in the darkened plane, I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye, and then all of a sudden she was climbing up into my lap, clearly very much awake. Apparently I had been a little lax with closing her carrier—oops.

We fed her another sedative, and this time she was so hungry that she gobbled it right up. Its only visible effect was to make her eyes weird and glassy. She stayed wide awake, and meowed pretty much constantly for the remaining 3 hours of the flight, taking 10 minute breaks every once in a while, during which we would almost fall asleep, only to be immediately awakened by more crying. It was rough.

Luckily, this (extremely long) story has a happy ending. After we landed, went through passport control (where we were asked not a single question), picked up our luggage (which had miraculously made it onto the new flight), went through customs (where I forced someone to look at our hard-won cat documentation, just for fun), took a taxi to the apartment, waited 30 minutes for the housekeeper to let us in, and climbed 2 flights of stairs with all our heavy suitcases…we were here!!! And the Bossy Cat has never been happier. She loves this apartment, she loves her Austrian cat food, she loves our bed. She is a loving, snuggly version of herself—no sign of the Devil Cat.

Actually, all 3 of us are pretty happy. It's good to be home(!).

The Bossy Cat & Mr. Hyde

Okay, first of all, let's just get this out of the way…I haven't blogged in an epically long time. Plenty of time, in fact, for all loyal readers to either find a suitable LMB replacement or just lie around pining for a post. Well, pine no longer (and COME BACK!!), for I have returned. The thing is (and isn't this always the way?), just as my life was getting really blogworthy, I had absolutely no time to blog. It's been an exciting couple of weeks. We opened our incredible show (I am planning more on this in the future, but in the meantime, do read our kick-ass review in the Times. I'm proud.) Also, the Bossy Folks came to visit me in Santa Fe, saw the show twice(!), learned the difference between red and green chile, and gawked at the gorgeous sunsets. That was fun. And then I made almost the entire drive to Houston in one long day, caught up with friends, and tried not to die from the fatal combination of heat AND humidity. Yesterday I flew back to DC and reunited with CameraMan, and that pretty much brings us to the here and now. Phew.

The here and now is a wild and crazy place, I have to tell you. We are in full on FREAK OUT PANIC mode, all because we are leaving WEDNESDAY. For VIENNA. I'm sorry, but we are in an all caps world right now, people. Also in a multiple exclamation points world. !!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm feeling it, CM is most definitely feeling it, and although it wasn't immediately clear to the naked eye, evidently Bossy Cat is feeling it too. How do I know? Because during a routine check of her vital signs at the vet's office this morning, she transformed into what can only be described as a Devil Cat. What? you ask incredulously. How is that possible? This Bossy Cat? Umm…YES. That sweet beautiful face is hiding a monstrous demon who has lain dormant for 4 long years, just waiting for the right moment to emerge and scare the sh*t out of her mother. It started with hissing, moved on to growling, followed by unholy banshee screaming and the grand finale of biting me hard on the hand. After muttering "She frickin' hates me" and calling in an assistant who shall henceforth be known as the Cat Whisperer, the vet wrapped up the examination as quickly as possible. Was it my imagination, or did he seem relieved, even EAGER to sign the documentation allowing Bossy Cat to leave the country? Also, he gave us extra cat tranquilizers, "just in case."

On the bright side, having to speak German on a daily basis is no longer the most stressful thing about this move.

Opera Girlfriend

To get you up to date (and scroll down if you don't care about the minutiae of my schedule), I'm in Virginia keeping CameraMan company for the next month. Then I'm flying back to H-town (I know, I know, I JUST left), picking up my car and getting my hair done, and driving to Santa Fe, where I'll be spending 5 glorious weeks making a new opera and rooming with The New Oregonian. And consuming huge quantities of guacamole and margaritas, obvs. Then it's a hop, skip, and a jump back to Houston, where I'll ship some boxes to Vienna (the one in Austria—are you still with me?), fly back to my CameraMan, and we'll have 3 days before we cash in our one-way ticket to Europe. Phew. I'll save the rest of the year's schedule for another time (but, quickly, I'll be here, here, and here).

For the moment, I'm enjoying a few weeks of sweet, sweet vacation. The real kind, with no boxes to pack, no belongings to organize, no deadlines to meet. I'm prepping for my next few shows and studying a little Deutsch, but my main task is being Opera Girlfriend. CM is already hard at work—that boy never gets a vacation. So I'm busy setting up house in our corporate apartment, driving him to and from work (we're a "one-car family," as he likes to say), and cooking along with all the jobs that go with it: meal-planning, grocery shopping, etc. We have cocktail hour and appetizers after CM gets home, and then I've been making real, honest-to-goodness dinners. Last night was Toasted Pita Salad and Baked Salmon with a White Wine Marinade, with Fresh Peaches and Yogurt for dessert (everything sounds fancier with capital letters, doesn't it?). Tonight: Crispy Baked Drumsticks (we had too many appetizers to eat a salad with it—oops), with Lemon Sorbet and Berries for dessert. Who knows how long this attack of domesticity will last, but for the moment I am loving my life of leisure.

The first few days in a new place are always a flurry of activity, as we stock up on the essentials and figure out where everything is. Usually the Bossy Cat is very adaptable, sniffing every corner and quickly sussing out her favorite spot to lounge. This time, for some reason, her favorite spot was under the bed. Oh, she'd come out to eat or use her litterbox or snuggle for a few minutes, but then she would dive right back under the bed. I was starting to get worried—would she stay there all summer? Then finally this afternoon she emerged, and she's been happily exploring (and sleeping on the balcony, the armchair, and the carpet) ever since.

Yes, we're settling in quite nicely here at the Trap, thank you very much.

Oh, what a week

As usual, just when lots of blog-worthy things were happening, I had no time to blog. The past week has been one of the most jam-packed on record: we put on a show, we packed up all our belongings, we moved said belongings into storage, and we drove from Houston to Vienna... Virginia.

There's at least a week's worth of material in there. I could tell you about how a week that I dreaded for months turned out to be incredibly rewarding, exciting, and generally great (surely there's a lesson in there somewhere). About how, despite all my questions and quandaries about what I want to do with my life (or even the next few years), I was reminded that this job is something I love and something I do very well. Or about sitting on the lawn during Saturday night's Tosca performance listening to the whole audience erupt in cheers when Tosca killed Scarpia, and the woman behind me who yelled, "You GO, girl!" I could fill you in on all the details of our highly organized move, but I don't have the words to tell you about the most important detail of all: our amazing friends, who turned out (in shifts, no less) to help us pack and unpack the moving truck, bringing with them laughter, support, and (of course) muscles of steel. I could tell you about the tears that came as I stood with CM in our empty apartment, the first home we shared. Or about inadvertently dropping off our apartment keys early in our hurry to get out of town, and almost being stuck outside with the Bossy Cat stuck inside.

The road trip could provide plenty of blog fodder as well. There was the carefully researched town an hour outside of Houston where we spent our first night, only to discover it was a pizza no man's land, when pizza was all we wanted. There was the Bossy Cat, who roamed all over the car looking for a good spot and wound up on a pillow between us in the front seat. There was some quality time spent with Papa Melear, who just moved to Tennessee a week ago and is already more settled in than we ever were in a year and a half of living in our apartment, and the incredibly Southern pancake house he took us to for breakfast, which had a waitress whose accent and voice have to be heard to be believed. There was the novelty of being in the same car with CM after 2 years of making the same drive in separate cars, and the relief on arriving at our fantastic apartment in Tysons Corners.

It's too much. I'll never get through everything. How about I just show you some pictures instead?

Scarpia, Tosca, Maestro CameraMan, and me

Empty apartment

The whole family in the car



CM's Tennessee biscuits and gravy



The Melear men

Princess Lucy

The Bossy Cat has a new pillow/throne. Of course, when I say "new" I actually mean recently sprung from a box in storage, where it's been languishing for the past several years. It came out of the box and landed on the floor next to the front door on Sunday, and since then it has been occupied pretty much 24/7. The first night, she actually didn't come to bed because she wanted to sleep on it. There's almost nothing I love more than waking up to a sweet sleepy cat curled up at my feet, so now we're putting the cat pillow on the bench at the foot of our bed at night. Works like a charm.

This morning, the Bossy Cat was lounging and I was having my a** handed to me by Jillian, when all of a sudden Lucy bolted up off the pillow and pressed her face against the glass of the front door, tail wagging like crazy. I paused my workout and looked out the window to see what all the fuss was about.

There's this stray cat that hangs out in our courtyard a lot. She's purry and sweet as can be, and about a week ago (we think) she had kittens. Only nobody could find them. We've been out of the neighborhood loop on this one, what with being out of town all the time and hardly ever using our front door, so the first I heard about this was a few days ago. One of our neighbors is organizing to get the Mama Cat spayed and find a foster home for her and her litter, should they ever turn up. I've been worrying about those kittens ever since I heard about them.

Lo and behold, what did I see when I looked out the window, the thing that finally got the Bossy Cat to move off her precious pillow for a few minutes? I saw Mama Cat running down the path with a mewing kitten dangling from her mouth. I was so excited that I lost all sense of decency and darted outside in my shorts and sports bra (I'm usually SO not that girl). Apparently, the Mama has been periodically going into our neighbor's apartment, and today when she went in she scoped out the place and found a good spot to keep her babies: inside a big armoire full of clothes. Then she went and got them from the bush they were in, one by one, and brought them inside. The kittens are so little their eyes haven't even opened yet and they have those teeny pink kitten paws. CM and I invited ourselves inside the neighbor's apartment so we could look at them and pet their silky bellies.

I'm not sure exactly what's going to happen to these kitties, but I do know that a trip to Vienna with us is sadly not in their future. I'm just so relieved that they're all safe and happy.

The Bossy Cat seems to have finally recovered from the adventure. And the pillow has already been added to the "To Bring" list.

Happy weekend!

Can you believe it's already Friday again, dear readers? What do you have going on this weekend? It's my last couple days in New York, so I'm trying to make the most of it. Tonight is the last Hamlet, and then I will officially be unemployed for the next glorious month. I'm so ready! Tomorrow My Gay Husband and I are going to be tourists. We wanted to climb the Statue of Liberty, but we didn't get our tickets early enough, so instead I think we're going to take a Circle Line cruise. On Sunday I'm going to the Whitney Biennial with The Banker, and then it'll be time to leave—back to Houston Monday afternoon.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Here's some linky goodness for the next couple days:

I know I'm coming late to this, but I just started reading Julia Child's My Life in France and I'm loving it so much. She had such a love of life and all its pleasures. I'd like to be more like that.


Did you hear about Scrabble's rule change? I'm outraged. No, seriously.


I enjoyed this article in the NY Times about people who post photos online of everything they eat. If you are one of those people, you should also read the interview with Andrew Scrivani here and here about how to photograph food well.


If you're in Houston, check out today's Groupon, which is $99 for $225 worth of services at White Salon. If you end up going, ask for Caroline. I've been going to her for about 4 years, and she's amazing!


If you're NOT in Houston, you should subscribe to Groupon in your city. They'll email you a coupon for something different every day. I've bought restaurant coupons, and yoga and pilates classes. I also bought a facial here in NYC, and when the salon couldn't fit me in before I left town, Groupon gave me my money back. How's that for service?


And something a little extra: I came across this photo from a couple months ago when I was uploading pics from my camera the other day.



The Bossy Cat loves doing score work.

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We tried out a new Houston restaurant, the Broken Spoke Cafe. Moules frites and a Stella…delicious!





My first night in Chicago, just taking in the breathtaking view from my 36th floor apartment window. I think I can handle this for a few months.





And then I forgot to take a picture. So I'm changing it up a little. Instead of a self-portrait of me looking ashamed for missing a day, here's a bonus pic of the Bossy Cat in the car. I miss my baby.

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A trip to Houston always has to include a trip to see Caroline at White Salon, the best hair stylist I have ever had (do you live in Houston? Go see her!). This visit, it was time for a change. Et voila: the new, improved LMB.





I was only home for a few days, during which I attempted to fit in visits to all my favorite restaurants. Drinks and nibbles at t'afia hit the spot. Here's CameraMan with a very pink drink inexplicably named Come to Daddy.





Nobody was happier to be home than my sweet kitten, here seen in a joyful reunion with our amazing couch.

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My boys: the chorus men of Cenerentola. I miss these guys.





The road trip back to Houston got off to a rough start with the Bossy Cat getting sick, but by the second day she was feeling just fine. In fact, we drove 15 1/2 hours on Monday.





By Tuesday, she was taking her turn driving.