Suzy Says

Clyde and Audrey take a nap

Cats find the funniest places to nap. This is behind my bed in the sleeping loft. As you can see, part of the curved wall is made of corrugated plastic, which makes it warm for napping kitties, but makes rain noisier and is, as you can see, almost impossible to clean. Sometimes it’s so obvious that this house was built by and for a boy.

Clyde has been limping for the past couple of days. I’ve tried to keep him in more often, but it seems really mean to keep a 10 month old kitten in the house on a beautiful spring day, especially when his brother frolics around in plain sight through the sliding glass door.

Megan checked out both his front legs and paws – it seems to be the left front that’s the problem – and couldn’t detect any signs of breakage or injury. He didn’t cry out or anything, so we think he may have fallen out of a tree and landed awkwardly, or something like that. I’m keeping an eye on him, and he seems to be slowly improving.

Also slowly improving is A! She is now in a regular hospital ward, sharing her space with a 38 year old methadone addict with cirrhosis of the liver and a kid in jail and an ancient lady whose only means of communication is howling like a banshee. I imagine A has to keep reminding herself that this is better than Intensive Care, where she spent so many weeks.

I have been calling her once a week now, in addition to my regular silly emails which C prints out and brings her. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to hear her voice. She still has no feeling in her hands and feet, and is learning to walk again with the help of physiotherapists and a walker. She is hoping to be moved to a rehab facility soon. Apparently, it’s like applying to college, with your first, second, and third choices, hoping that the one you really want will accept you. The one she wants is near Sylvia Plath’s final home, though we shouldn’t take that as an omen.

A says she is covered in scars from the tracheotomy, dialysis and so on, and that she bruises very easily now. It seems that spending three months in the hospital is not a beauty treatment. Also, she has lost huge amounts of time. She doesn’t remember anything at all from C calling the ambulance on January 7 to waking up in the hospital around the middle of March. Nothing. Medical comas will do that to you.

She’s in remarkably good spirits, though, and determined to get back to work this summer, maybe working from home starting in June, half a year after her ordeal began. I can still hardly believe it, and she feels the same way. I am so thankful she is alive and has no brain damage. I need to save up my pennies and get over there and hug her!

Well, break out the champagne and cue up the noisemakers: A is finally out of Intensive Care!

After two months!

She’s now in what they call the Highly Dependent Unit, which would sound scary if she hadn’t been in the ICU for so long. Anything sounds good after that.

Apparently she still has the tracheotomy tube, but they’ve put on some kind of speaking attachment. C said that yesterday he heard her voice for the first time in eight weeks. Yesterday was a busy day for C: he picked up A’s mother at Heathrow and received news that his own mother had surgery for a cancerous tumor, though the prognosis was good. He must be beyond exhausted. If A ever gets out of there, Dr. Suzy prescribes a couple of weeks of lying on a beach somewhere.

She is having physiotherapy to help her learn to sit, stand, etc. again. After two months of inactivity, her muscles have atrophied. She still has a long way to go, but I think we can safely say she is out of the woods now.

Hoopla! as C would say.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but A is still in Intensive Care over in London. It’s been six long weeks now, which you’d think would be a record-breaker. It’s been a scary roller coaster, too, with high fevers, sudden blood pressure drops, and words like “fistula” being bandied around (I suggest that you don’t look it up. I did, and regretted it immediately), along with “more surgery”.

The latest is that she is well enough to receive visitors, though the conversation will be a trifle one-sided since she still has the tube in her trachea. On the bright side, she’s off dialysis and hopefully off the ventilator for good. And I do mean good.

I know I’m far from impartial about the British healthcare system. The hospital which killed my father with negligence also has the dubious distinction of having killed my stepmother’s first husband. The deaths were mirror images: Dad’s because they forgot to put him back on blood thinners; Bill’s because they forgot to take him off. All this in the middle of London, one of the most civilized places in the world.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating: the hospital took full responsibility for my father’s death after my stepmother pursued a complaint of wrongful death. They agreed to change their procedures and this has hopefully saved other lives, which is about the best you can hope for.

I’m so glad that A is still alive and is recovering, however slowly, yet I remain convinced that had she been admitted to, say, Stanford Medical Center near San Jose, where my father received excellent care, she would not still be in intensive care and that they would have dealt with the causes of her fever and other symptoms more quickly.

I could, of course, be wrong, but an unofficial survey of American healthcare professionals agrees with me. It’s incredible that she’s still in ICU, and that her husband has had to endure such a lengthy ordeal. She’s going to have to learn to walk again and regain her strength, so even if she came home today, it would be a long road ahead of her. I guess I’m just frustrated and feeling the miles these days.

Tulips beginning to sprout

OK, peeps, brace yourselves for a downpour of excellent news! Are you sitting down? Smelling salts at the ready? Phone poised to call 911? Good. Here we go:

• A month after her arrival in the Intensive Care Unit, A is finally breathing on her own! Yes, she still has a fever and is mostly unconscious, and the hospital is considering charging her rent, but it’s a huge step forward. The most recent email from C, who, bless his heart, has somehow found the time to call or email me every single day of this ordeal, reads as follows:

  “A her breathing is going well, she breathes all by herself now, just gets some extra oxygen.
  Still unconscious most of the time, but I do get a big, big smile every once in a while when she wakes up!
  Also still moving a lot, caused most likely by not getting all those drugs anymore, still fever too. Physiotherapist had her sitting on the edge of the bed again this morning, if she wouldn’t move so much, they would have put her in a chair, but they found it too risky. Love, C”

  So I think she’s pretty much out of the woods now, though she faces a long, hard road of recovery. The worst has to be behind her now. So, yay! And thanks to all of you for your kind thoughts and emails. It really helped.

• I have a new part-time job! It starts on Monday! It’s at a local tourism office. The people are really nice, and I think it will be fun. I’m not exactly looking forward to driving to town three days a week, but after work, I can run errands, meet up with Monica, and maybe even go to the fancy pool. I’ll probably learn about lots of new places and fun things to do. And finally, I can use my make-up and handbag collections!

  On Monday, I’ll get to work at 9:00. At 10:00, we’re all going to a hotel for a social networking class, followed by lunch, a return to the office, and a meeting with a local TV station who is considering partnering with us. Sounds like fun, no?

• The tulips are beginning to sprout! See above. And I keep having to water them, because it has only rained once in the past month. A check of the weather shows a forecast of sunny with highs ranging from 58 to 70 degrees during the day, lows in the 30s (so the orchid is sheltering inside again) for the next ten days. I feel a little guilty when seeing the horrible weather the rest of the country has been having, especially since we’re considering having a barbecue on the weekend.

So there you have it. Things are looking up!

Incredibly, A is still in intensive care, as we approach Week Four. The tracheotomy went well (aren’t operations always a success?), and the ventilator is currently doing less than half of A’s breathing for her. But she remains in her Michael Jackson killing propophol twilight, in which she has been arching her back, grimacing, and repeatedly bringing her hands up to her face, which can’t be easy for C to watch.

Today, the doctors are doing a brain scan, in case this restlessness is due to brain damage, though Megan and a cousin of A’s who is a doctor think it’s the drugs. I hope they’re right.

I also hope that she can start breathing on her own soon. To my non-medical mind, that is the biggest step toward her recovery. Speaking of steps: it hadn’t even occurred to me that A will have to learn how to walk again, her muscles having atrophied during her Rip Van Winkle hospital stay. It’s going to be long road back to A’s becoming once again the girl who bicycled to work and solved the most difficult math problems with ease and grace.

As I walked the muddy logging road yesterday, I was so thankful that I could walk, and breathe, and talk. And I marveled yet again at fate, or chance, or whatever you choose to call it. An unseen virus, sitting next to the wrong person on the subway, or however that bug got into her body, has wrought havoc on A and brought fear and sadness to the many people who love her, all over the world. Is there a lesson here, or is it a simple twist of fate?

Apparently, those of you in Canada and/or the UK have a four day weekend to celebrate Easter (and hopefully, by now, the arrival of spring). Here in the US of A, we rarely, if ever, get a four day weekend, and we don’t get any long weekends from New Year’s Day to Memorial Day, in late May. No wonder people keep going nuts in public in this country.

Oh, well. Easter, like most things, isn’t as much fun when you grow up. Knowing that I’m not going to wake up to a basket full of candy (or a new bonnet, for that matter) on Sunday morning will just make it easier to sleep in, cats permitting.

In retrospect, it kind of amazes me that we could eat candy at 7:00 on any morning, especially when Marshmallow Peeps are involved. Now just looking at displays of them make me shudder and avert my eyes, teeth aching.

When I got home from work today, I discovered that the recycling hadn’t been collected, though the green bin and the garbage bin had been emptied. Clearly the recycling guys have a better deal and possibly even a four day weekend.

The mailman didn’t have the day off, either, since he had left me a surprise package. On investigation, it turned out to be from my former neighbor, who has my kittens’ mother and who often surprises me with little cutenesses. This package had flowers and drawings on it, and inside, there were fabulous things from MAC, including the sold-out Hello Kitty* lipglass in Mimmy.

It was a grown-up Easter basket.

*Yes, I did love Katy Perry’s Hello Kitty top, though not the leggings.

My lovely friend L came to visit, all the way from chilly Toronto. She was accompanied by (or accompanied, depending on how you look at it) her beau P, who was on a business trip. He’s one of those esoteric software guys who do things that are far beyond my limited intellect. We met up at the new and allegedly improved Academy of Sciences on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

As I waited for L & P to arrive, I gazed at the new and allegedly improved De Young Museum*, which is right across the way. It is, to my mind, quite hideous, and I miss the old, neo-classical building. P observed that it looks like a high security prison, complete with guard tower and no windows.

The Academy, on the other hand, is full of windows and light. It also, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, is full of screaming children and their keepers. We peered into the madhouse that was the café, and turned to each other with a single thought: No. P asked the hostess of the Moss Room restaurant if they were still serving. She said no, but he begged her to call the kitchen and see if they’d make an exception. He was so charming that she couldn’t say no, and neither could the kitchen, if we agreed to eat at the bar.

We made our way down the stairs, past the moss wall and into the serenity of the restaurant. We perched on stools and ordered delightful delicacies, such as Dungeness crab salad with Meyer lemon vinaigrette, and sipped organic wine. Everything on the menu is organic, sustainably farmed, and/or biodynamic. What’s not to love about guilt-free chocolate mousse?

Body and spirit rejuvenated, we headed back upstairs. The lines for the rain forest were as daunting as the Powell Street cable car lines at the height of summer, and when you finally get in there, it’s so crowded you can hardly admire anything. We were also disappointed to learn that the albino alligator was on the DL, so the swamp consisted of nothing but two immobile turtles and a dry ice effect à la any metal band you care to name.

I figured the penguins would make up for the missing alligator, and they were delightful, with their funny, rolling walk and ungainly manner of flopping into the water. But the rest of the room they inhabit has the old African dioramas I remember from the former building, and it’s jarring and depressing to go from the penguins’ antics to the dead, stuffed zebras. Sigh. Outside the morgue was a stream with bridges, from which we could admire the graceful rays as they flew elegantly through the water.

We checked out the much-touted living roof,which P pointed out was much like that on his condo in Mississauga, and the aquaria, including the tide pool where we could and did touch the sea urchins and sea stars, which is just as fun as it was when I was a kid.

To be fair, we didn’t see everything, but on the whole, I have to say it doesn’t seem to be worth nearly 10 years and $500 million. But it was great to see L again and meet P – they are a beautiful and charming couple. They gave me a ride to BART in their rented red Mustang convertible, and I was sad to see them drive off into the sunset, but happy to have spent time with them. They love it here, and I suspect they’ll be back.

*There are two exhibits I want to see there, no matter what it looks like: Warhol Live, and a retrospective of Yves St-Laurent’s work. At the still-beautiful Legion of Honor, I’d like to see the Fabergé, Tiffany, Lalique exhibit. So much beauty, so little time!

The good news: Kathleen’s flight was early; she had practically half a plane to herself; she’s making me an unbearably exquisite scarf of delicate red yarn which looks like lace; she was fine with the vise grip shower thing.

The bad news: the landlords did get in touch with their favored plumber, and he set three dates with me before actually showing up, ensuring that I missed dinner with Kathleen on Friday night and drinks afterwards. Not to mention having to cancel various and sundry meetings to accommodate his schedule.

The good news: Plumber Robert was charming when he finally showed up. The kittens loved him, and he has a much more successful Henry situation than I do: he has two brothers and a Henry who he eventually got to live in the house with the existing brothers. I know June would HATE it if Henry moved in, though I think Audrey would remain her unperturbed self.

When Plumber Robert came in, he immediately approved my posters for Vertigo, Rick Nelson, and Warhol’s Triple Elvis. In passing the coffee table, where I have the Vanity Fair with Marilyn on the cover, he picked up my phone and moved it , saying, “You can’t cover her face*. It’s not right.”

The bad news: There may be a leak behind the walls, which Robert is going to report to the landlords.

The good news: Shower is essentially fixed.

Depending on how you look at it: It rained for the first time in say, six months last night. It started around 11:00, when I was in bed, peacefully reading about John Stuart Mill in the New Yorker and wondering what he would have said about the election, when I heard Henry.
The bad news:

I got an umbrella and put on my sneakers and went out to investigate. He was under the porch with his cuddly bed, food and water. I talked to him a little and then went back in. He wouldn’t stop meowing. Went back out and gave him a couple of treats (the girls got some, too, of course). Still meowing. Opened the screen door to the back porch so he could come up and sleep on the little couch there if he wanted to. I called him to see if he’d come up. He kept meowing, but didn’t appear. He meowed for nearly two hours! I felt so terrible. Really hard to sleep last night. He seemed fine this morning.

*Which reminded me, inevitably, of Webster: “Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young”.

Dear Miss Manners,

Help! The politeness is out of control!

When my neighbor went to New York on business*, I took care of her cat and kittens. It’s hard to find a nicer task than playing with kittens, and I was glad to help out, especially since two of the kittens were going to be mine when they were ready to leave their mother.

Eventually, the day came to pick up my kittens. I brought my neighbor a gift to thank her for all the care and love she had given my kittens – all the kittens, really. She gave them a great start in life, and I was grateful. She also refused to let any of the adopting families help with the food bills, so I thought a nice gift was in order.

I gave her this lovely tea set and a pretty thank you card. She seemed to be delighted. Two days later, she turned up with a bottle of wine and a thank you card, thanking me for my “too generous” thank you gift and card. Yikes. Do I need to thank her for thanking me for thanking her? How can I break the cycle of politeness?

Politely yours,

Suzy

*She was staying at the Soho Grand when Kirsten Dunst was robbed, but she had nothing to do with it. I swear! Otherwise, I’d have the Balenciaga bag and she’d have the Marc Jacobs, instead of our usual Chico bags.

Wishlist for the summer:

The Art Institute of Chicago’s special exhibit on Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, put into context by paintings by his contemporaries, such as Monet, Pissaro and Renoir. Not to mention that when in Chicago, I can meet up with Colin, Chicagolimited’s very own unlimited source of knowledge about Chicago’s architecture. I might be lucky enough to take one of his personalized skyscraper tours.

Seeing Wilco while they’re on tour for their great new CD, A Ghost Is Born.

The Art Gallery of Ontario’s brilliant exhibit: Turner, Whistler, Monet. Are they the first museum to put on an exhibit which acknowledges that Turner was the first Impressionist – 50 years before the Impressionists were given that name? And to those of you who think that Whistler is just “Whistler’s Mother” (not the title of that famous painting, by the way – it’s “Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother “) – check out his Nocturnes.

Spending a few days in the Hamptons with my old friend Paul, who also hosted sis’n’Me in Florida in February. Before you start getting any ideas, he does catering for the rich folks, he ain’t one himself. And I can bring down the tone in the tony Hamptons as well as I do in tony Pacific Heights. I’ve had years of practice.

Visiting the fabulous Kathleen in Motown for her birthday!

I’ve been pretty much incommunicada the past few days. My email suddenly got corrupted, as if it fell in with the wrong crowd at school, and is presently at a corruption level equalling that of the N’Awlins police department. Juvenile delinquent that it is, it completely refuses to work at all. So I have to reinstall it at peril of losing saved messages (including some from Dad) and at peril of my technological stupidity, which is at a level equalling that of any member of the Bush family.

Which means I haven’t yet attempted it, and probably won’t until this weekend, so if you have written to me in the last week or so, for once the old line is true and it’s not you, it’s me. Hopefully all will go well and you will find my words of wisdom in your inbox sometime next week.

Apart from tech issues, you also know that we are experiencing Mo’ Mom. In addition to that, my father’s closest friend Colin W (aren’t I lucky to have two amazing Colins in my life?) has been visiting San Francisco for the first time ever, so I have been trying to be the best Tour Guide Suzy ever since Sunday. Being tour guide is quite exhausting, though at least the weather has cooperated and been sunny and bright. Since Colin lives in England, he doesn’t find 50&deg cold, so he’s pretty happy.

He’s also an excellent cook, so I have been on my mettle producing show-off food all week. Colin and I cook together as naturally and happily as Dad and I did (and Colin and Dad did, for that matter), which was a poignant surprise.

Tomorrow my sis & bro arrive here for Thanksgiving – Colin’s first ever! I know it will be an emotional one, and I hope it will be a happy one, too. I have a great deal for which to be thankful, and having all these people I love together in my home is at the top of the list.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, even if you live where it’s not a holiday. To all of you who read my trivialities, offer your support, advice, and friendship: I am thankful for you, too.

Still have the headache. I’m going to have to try some of your very helpful suggestions (hee!) and/or stop by one of those scary herb stores in Chinatown for wing of bat or eye of newt. Maybe Shakespeare was onto something.

I had a call yesterday from my friend Paul. I haven’t seen him since we had dinner back in May. His life has been the usual: full of adventure, mostly good (including a new grandchild on the way), and it was great to catch up. He’s wintering in Florida this year, she said grandly, and invited us to come and stay with him. I just might take him up on it, ending my lifetime streak of never going to Florida. But I’m not going to Disney World, or Disney Land, or any other Disney-related place, whether I go to Florida or not.

So, as usual, it was great to catch up with him. And it got me thinking (so look out). I seem to have quite a lot of male friends. Only one is an ex-boyfriend*, and all the others have absolutely no taint of sex at all. There’s Paul. There’s Richard, who has been my friend since high school. There’s Adrian, an all-around great guy. There’s Randy, who used to be my boss (!), and who now lives near Chicago. He will be the first call I make after room service when I go to our conference in Chicago in mid-January (brrr). There’s Gary, who used to be a client, which makes it possibly even weirder that we remained friends after our professional relationship ended than staying friends with your former boss. There’s Raven, who used to be my sister’s boyfriend long ago. There’s Charles, who is also my jeweler. There’s Lance and Sal and Wade, who are admittedly gay, but boys and friends, nonetheless. And that doesn’t include miscellaneous friends of Dad’s, who have become my friends, too, over the years; or the friends I have through John and my brother, but who are also mine; or the husbands/boyfriends of girlfriends who have won me over in their own right (like Candi’s Brian); or the guys whose blogs I love to read and whose minds and wit I admire.

I wonder why I seem to have so many more male friends than female ones. I generally have a higher opinion of women than men, right or wrong, and feel there is a real strength in the bond between women. But if you look at the facts, I have more male friends, though I wouldn’t confide in the male friends in the same way I would the female ones. Maybe a girl just needs both. After all, when I can’t decide between two things, I just take them both. The “all of the above” category on tests was invented just for me, you know.

*Other than him, I wish there was some planet they could be sent to, so you never have to run into them or hear about them ever again. Especially if they’re hugely successful and much happier without you, when they should be in a hell of terrible, searing regret from losing you, even if you are no longer the slightest bit interested in them.

Did I mention that my stepmother and I took the train down to visit our friends in Suffolk? We were both completely fed up with driving, on motorways and country lanes and anything else in between. The train was definitely less annoying than driving – I do think travelling by train is about the most pleasant way to go anywhere. But (I have one for almost every occasion) it took 3 hours. It seems it takes 3 hours to get just about anywhere. In this case, we took the Underground to the end of the line, changed to a different line, got on one train and then, yes, changed and got on another one. However, I wasn’t homicidal at the end or scared during the process.

Today, it’s more planes, trains & automobiles. Hired car to Gatwick, terrifying plane ride to Amsterdam, train into the actual city, where we (me, my niece Cat, and her friend Claudia) will be met by my old friend Alice. Friend from high school days, former model, and current math PhD. What’s not to love? Oh, and the whole thing will take, yeah, about 3 hours.

John & I had dinner last night with our friend Paul. Paul is practically one of the family, and a great guy. He recently became a grandfather for the first time (his son-in-law is a drum technician for the Red Hot Chili Peppers). He is a Vietnam vet (his fellow soldiers used to refer to him as “Grandpa” because he was the oldest in his unit at the ripe old age of 21), a professional cook and sailor. In the summers, he caters for the rich and/or (in)famous in the Hamptons, and in the winter, he could be anywhere. Last winter, he sailed the Caribbean. This winter, he’s planning to cook on a boat that takes people diving in the Turks & Caicos. So it was great to catch up with him and hear his latest schemes, including one for spending a month in Kabul to buy rugs to sell to the rich folks in the Hamptons.

We had dinner at Le Petit Robert, the charming restaurant affiliated with the French bakery which is the jewel of the neighborhood. I was the bad one and had a Kir Royale to start (it was perfect, right down to the slender lemon peel in the glass), and also had a wicked glass of Sancerre with dinner. John and Paul stuck to Pellegrino to showcase my vice. John had roast chicken and frites, those perfect, tender-crisp fries rarely, if ever, found outside their native France. Paul and I both had PEI mussels in a gorgeous wine broth as an entr&eacutee, but he had foie gras to start (I didn’t say anything, even though it’s right next door to veal in cruelty food), and I had a roasted beet salad with ch&egravevre and spiced, candied walnuts to start.

Just in case you aren’t already shocked by these culinary excesses, I also had dessert, and so did Paul. He had chocolate fondant with espresso ice cream and a tiny cup of lethal espresso, and I had, at last, cannell&eacutes de Bordeaux with tart cherries, cr&egraveme anglaise, and I might as well admit it, a glass of Sauternes, which was liquid sunshine. Aren’t you positively stuffed just reading this?

So Paul’s on his way back to the Hamptons, and his latest schemes. We should see him again in the fall to hear about his latest adventures. In the meantime, I think I’ll go and try to walk off some of that dinner.

Man, it’s hard to go to work in the dark and cold when there are kittens in your house! I spent about 10 minutes playing with the kittens this morning before finally heading out the door. Megan’s husband Rob is coming to pick up all his girls tomorrow, and I’ll miss them.

It was less than 50 degrees this morning, which equals freezing, so I wore my long black coat, and I felt like Angel with it flying out behind me.

It’s surprising how many people in the city either don’t have curtains or blinds, or don’t use them. With the lights on, they are like little stage sets: the guy sitting at his computer, already at work (dang!); the woman feeding a baby; the obviously single guy, walking around his living room in his underwear while eating a bowl of cereal; the elderly woman, already dressed, sitting in a chair by the window. In just a glimpse, you can imagine their lives.

Yesterday, I had lunch with my long-time friend Richard (I am now refusing to say “old friend” because forty is way, way too close* and believe me, “old” takes on a whole new meaning when you get to this stage of the game). We met up at Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store, which is neither a store, nor sells cigars — smoking is illegal in restaurants and bars in California — but is a little sliver of a restaurant in North Beach.

We caught up on each other’s lives while eating delicious focaccia sandwiches (frittata for me; grilled chicken for him, and Orangina for both of us). His romance is going very well and he’s happy, which is great. He asked me for shopping advice for his Mom, who has everything, and his girlfriend. About the only good thing I could come up with for Mama was promising to do something around the house for her, or have dinner with her once a month or something, but she is married and therefore has a live-in handyman. Any suggestions are welcome, just e-mail me!

I’m more confident in my suggestion of elegant/beautiful lingerie for the girlfriend. What girl doesn’t love that? And there are at least two fabulous lingerie boutiques in our neighborhood, so he can get something really special. And after all, it’s a present — or at least wrapping — for him, too!

*Less than 6 shopping months left, kids!

Well, things went pretty well yesterday. Number one, the rain that had been forecast with consistent gloom to be here from Wednesday through Sunday has yet to appear. In fact, the sun even peeped out coyly from time to time. Our stove seems to have recovered from its temporary fit of diva-ness, and roasted the turkey to perfection and turned out several batches of Suzy’s famous cheese biscuits (which, if I could figure out a way to market them, is definitely my million dollar idea).

Dinner was fun and stress-free, and no-one cried. I had my brother, sister and brother-in-law here, as well as my brother’s wonder dog Jed and his friend Carrie, who is expecting her first baby on Christmas Eve. I hadn’t met her before, but I really liked her, and it was a happy and relaxed evening.

Of our four cats, only Hannah was brave enough to approach Jed and smell her curiously. Jack, who thinks she’s so tough, barely looked at Jed for a split second before vanishing for the rest of the evening (later, we found her wedged under the couch). However upsetting this may have been to Jack, it did mean that for the first time since Jack entered our lives, we were able to eat a meal in peace, without her whining and demanding food, or possibly even jumping onto the table, which would have been really embarrassing in front of someone I had just met. So that was good, too.

We left the house at about 12:30 this afternoon with the intention of seeing “Harry Potter”, along with most of the city’s population. Insane traffic snarls, parking problems, crowded theater lobbies, and sold out show after show later, we finally bought tickets for the 4:00 p.m. show at 2:00 p.m., went and had a weirdly late lunch (hey, everyone’s eating habits are all screwed up now anyway) and finally got into the movie. By the way, all the shows up to 11:00 p.m. were sold out when we got back to the theater for the 4:00 p.m. show.

I liked the movie, but they fucked with some plot points for no reason (i.e. Norbert the dragon), and I didn’t like Hermione, but other than that, the casting was great. But Harry’s scar was lame (as my sister said, it looks like someone put it on with eyeliner) and I don’t understand why they didn’t give him green contact lenses when the books make such a big deal about his green eyes and this kid has the standard-issue English blue ones. But, having nit-picked and griped (and you just knew I would), it looked absolutely spectacular and the actors were wonderful. I guess with any beloved book, it’s very difficult to translate it to the screen and win everyone’s approval for how you did it. Definitely worth seeing, and worth seeing in the theater.