We all spend the day sleeping and/or feeling terrible. All three girls eventually end up sleeping in our bedroom, which ends up serving as an infirmary.
Angela has to miss work. Jan’s particularly disappointed, because today he was scheduled to take a Japanese proficiency test. The Japanese Ministry of Education conducts this test only once a year in the states — and today is the day. Jan’s in no shape to take the test, and will have to keep studying and try again next year.
It turns out the norovirus we got in San Francisco didn’t just affect the five of us, it also nailed the whole group of us who had celebrated the weekend together, including Chris, Julie, Skye, Jared, and Lyn.
By the end of the day, the worst of the symptoms have passed, and the five of us manage a weak dinner of broth and saltines.
Everyone finally is back to normal, and the girls return to school.
Bree is surprised at the beginning of the kindergarten day when the day’s “Mystery Reader” comes in: Jan. He reads aloud to the class a chapter from “Anna Hibiscus”, a fun book he and Bree have been reading at home about a girl who lives in Africa.
For Jan’s birthday, Anya creates a puzzle hunt for him (returning the favor from the puzzle hunt he created for her birthday back in October). Like the one she and Liya created last year, this one ranges all over the house. The trickiest part turns out to be a physical challenge: one clue is hidden in the backyard treehouse. The catch is that the rope ladder that goes up to the treehouse is put away for the season, so Jan has to scramble up to retrieve the clue. Jan’s puzzled how Anya managed to get the clue into the treehouse in the first place, then discovers that she simply wrapped the clue around a ball and threw it up into the treehouse.
Nutmeg’s last day. For the past two months, our cat Nutmeg has been struggling against a recurrence of breast cancer. She had fluid in her chest cavity, and we’d been told it was likely the fluid would eventually increase to the point where she could no longer breathe. We’d been giving her a chemotherapy drug since early October, and it gave her another two good months with us. Late last week she suddenly lost most of her appetite, and then yesterday her breathing became rapid; she was having a hard time getting enough air.
A morning visit to the animal clinic confirms that she’s dying. Rather than let her suffocate to death, we decide to have our local vet euthanize her. The decision is hard because she’s still alert, purrs when petted, and is happy to sit on our laps. At lunchtime, we buy a small piece of roast chicken, her favorite food, as a treat. Jan finds her at home sitting on the dining room heat vent. (She’s lost some weight and needs help staying warm.) He opens up the chicken, and the second she smells it, she instantly becomes alert and begins to purr. As he walks to put the chicken in her food bowl, she follows him and meows for the food. She only eats a tiny bit, but it’s clear she likes the treat.
All three girls come straight home from school so we can talk together about what to do, and so we can all have some final cuddles with her. Anya and Bree don’t want to be there when she is put down, so they stay at home while Jan, Angela, and Liya gather up Nutmeg and walk the short distance to the vet’s office. The office technicians do a sensitive job setting us up in a room with Nutmeg. When we’re ready, our vet — the aptly-named Dr. Katz — gives Nutmeg a sedative to put her to sleep, and she becomes completely limp. A final overdose of anaesthesia, and then she’s gone.
For such a tiny little animal, she held a large presence in our home. Here are some of the things we want to remember about her:
Nutmeg was born on January 20, 1997. Jan’s sister, Skye, got her from a breeder. Nutmeg was an ocicat, a relatively recent breed distinguished by its spotted coat.
Skye showed Nutmeg at cat shows. At a cat show, a judge will do this odd thing: they’ll pick up a cat, and stretch out the cat’s body as they hold it up. A cat has to be trained to tolerate this, which Nutmeg did. When Jan held her up like this, she looked like flying (and slightly put-out) supercat.
Nutmeg was a lap cat. When Skye was at school, Nutmeg often spent the day on the lap of Jan’s mom, Lyn, while Lyn wrote at her desk.
Nutmeg was bred with another ocicat, and had four kittens.
She came to our home somewhere around early 2001. Lyn brought her out to Seattle on the plane, and Nutmeg settled right in. Whenever Jan worked at home, she would crawl into his lap and fall asleep.
When we got her, she had not yet been spayed. The first time she went into heat, she yowled for several days straight. As soon as she was done, off to the vet we went to fix that problem.
We read a book about caring for cats that gave this sensible advice: 1) keep your cat indoors, 2) put a name tag on your cat’s collar, and 3) the tag should say, “Indoor cat — I’m lost!” on it. If someone finds a cat outdoors, they might look at the collar, but the tag usually gives no indication of whether the animal belongs outside or not. So Nutmeg’s collar always said, “Nutmeg: I’m an indoor cat — I’m lost!”, on it. This amused many people.
With one exception, Nutmeg exhibited little bad behavior. She didn’t scratch the furniture, didn’t scratch, and didn’t bite.
She did do one bad thing, which we referred to as, “The Nuclear Option”. If she was angry about something — if, say, we did not change the litter box quickly enough — she would pee on our bed. We tried many, many things to change this behavior, but mostly we just needed to make sure we stayed on top of the litter box.
Nutmeg usually slept in our room. Originally, she slept with us, and we trained her to sleep on a blanket at the foot of the bed. In an effort to get her to stop peeing on the bed, we banished her from the bed. We got a cat bed and put that next to our bed. Every single night, she would jump up on the bed, and every single night, we would put her on the floor. She would then get into her own bed.
One thing that made Nutmeg angry was when we left her alone on vacation. If we shut the sliding door to our bedroom, we discovered that she would tap on a corner of the door for hours, jiggling it, until she finally was able to get her paw in the door and force it open. She would then employ The Nuclear Option. For years, the last step of preparing the house for a vacation was to make sure Nutmeg was out of our bedroom, and then barricade our bedroom door.
Our longest-serving catsitter was a woman named Jessica. Jessica would write a daily cat journal for the time we were away, writing about how she imagined Nutmeg perceived the passing days.
Sometimes when we traveled, we left Nutmeg with Lyn. Nutmeg’s favorite place in Lyn’s home was a high shelf that could be reached by hopping up to the counter, then to the top of the fridge, then to the shelf. Lyn’s dog Charlie and Nutmeg became friends. When Nutmeg arrived, Charlie would follow her from room to room.
When we returned from vacation, Nutmeg would scold us for several minutes, sharply meowing over and over as if to say, “Where have you been?”
When Anya was a baby and began crawling around, she had more interest in Nutmeg than Nutmeg did in Anya. If Nutmeg was in the kitchen, and Anya began to crawl around one side of the kitchen island, you would quickly see Nutmeg leaving the kitchen via the other side of the island.
To keep baby Anya from tipping over Nutmeg’s food and water dishes, we moved the dishes to a shelf about two feet off the floor. She used this shelf as her feeding station for the rest of her life, long after baby girls represented a threat to her food.
She was originally very shy whenever strangers came to visit. As soon as someone walked in the door, Nutmeg would slink away and hide. Sometimes, we’d have a visitor in our home for hours and then suddenly they would spot her and say, “Oh! You have a cat!” In later years, Nutmeg became calmer about strangers, so visitors got to see more of her.
Nutmeg never got up on our kitchen counters or dining room table. She knew that, if she did, she might receive a blast from “The Finger of God”: a little plastic squirt gun we kept for this purpose. This was highly effective.
Her absolute favorite food in the world was roast chicken or turkey. She would get excited any time we had it, and would hop up on a dining room chair and sniff at the table over and over again. Her love of roast poultry was the only thing that would force her to break the prohibition against hopping up on a counter or table. If, say, we went for a walk after Thanksgiving dinner without having put away everything first, we would return to see Nutmeg looking up at us guiltily, with a piece of turkey from someone’s plate in her mouth. She’d then leap off the counter and run away with her prize.
We had this little fur toy on a string that completely captivated her the from the second she first saw it. If you dragged the fur toy along the floor, she would follow it and hunt it. She loved to hunt around corners. Jan played with Nutmeg using this fur toy every night before going to bed. He kept the toy in his office closet and, in the evening, Nutmeg would eventually walk up to this closet and wait. If Jan didn’t get the hint, she would meow for playtime.
Nutmeg was terrified of vacuum cleaners. Whenever our housekeepers showed up, Nutmeg would slink down to the basement laundry room and hide in a crawlspace under the stairs. The housekeepers would invariably close the laundry room door before leaving the house. Later in the day, when Jan realized he hadn’t seen Nutmeg for a while, he would go down to the laundry room and set her free again.
Nutmeg occasionally escaped outside, most often to explore the interesting backyard, but we’d usually find her at the back or front door a few hours later waiting to be let in.
One evening a number of years ago, Jan realized that he hadn’t seen Nutmeg for a long time. We checked the front and back doors, but she wasn’t there. We looked all over the house, but couldn’t find her. Jan was about to go to bed, but thought he’d check the basement one last time. He was just about to go back upstairs when he thought he heard the faintest possible sound. It was so faint, it was hard to tell where it was coming from, or if it was even a sound. It took many minutes of walking back and forth to isolate the sound to the basement guest room. A glance at the room could reveal that Nutmeg wasn’t anywhere in it, but that’s where a faint meow could be heard. After more minutes of listening, Jan pinned down the source of the meow to behind the wall. At the time, we were remodeling our kitchen on the first floor. Behind one of the cabinets there was an empty space left behind when an old, unused brick chimney had been removed. Nutmeg had apparently gotten behind the cabinet and fallen down the empty space, ending up behind the drywall of the guest room in the basement. Jan drilled a hole in the wall, and Nutmeg’s nose appeared. He sawed at the hole to make it larger, and finally a very dusty, tired Nutmeg emerged.
As she grew older, she increasingly sought out warm places to sleep. When Jan wasn’t in his office, a favorite place to sleep was the top of Jan’s laptop. If Jan failed to close the laptop cover, she would type long documents with the same letter repeated thousands of times.
Nutmeg grew to welcome attention from the girls, especially as they were able to give her love and affection through petting and treats. When Jan would read to one of the girls in her bedroom, Nutmeg would come in and hop on their bed, wait until storytime was over, and then follow Jan out of the room.
She was 16 when she died, just a month short of her 17th birthday. That’s a pretty good old age for a cat.
We’ve never been to a cat show, but it’s our understanding that when a judge identifies the animal they have selected to be the winner, they hold up the cat and say something like, “This is my first ‘Best Cat’”. Someday, we may have other cats come into our lives, but Nutmeg will always be our first Best Cat.
We attend a baby shower for our friends Angel and Leah, who are expecting twin girls. Angela’s knitted a nice purple blanket for one of the girls. (She’s still working on the other one!)
We go to Trinity Tree Farm in Issaquah to cut down a Christmas tree. The girls assign names to all the possible trees we might pick. For some reason, many trees are apparently named “Pebble”. The Grand Fir tree we eventually pick has the designation Pebble 72.
Tree (and girls) up on the car roof
When Angela’s unloading a home delivery of groceries that were cooled with dry ice, she shows the girls how putting dry ice in a bowl of water can create fog. The girls have fun observing the effects of the dry ice on the water. Jan plays around as well.
Liya and Sabriya participate in the church’s annual Christmas pageant. Now that Liya, who’s asked to play Mary for a number of years, has finally gotten that role, she decides she doesn’t want to do it. She finally relents and does a fine job, as does Bree as an angel. It’s particularly nice to watch Bree shepherd some of the younger angel girls out to center stage and back for their various appearances.
After 2 years of braces and jaw surgery, Angela finally gets her braces off. She’s delighted to be able to eat hard, crunchy things and chewy, caramelly things again.
Merry Christmas!
We spend Christmas in Seattle. Lyn comes over on Christmas Eve and stays through the morning of the 26th. It’s a nice quiet holiday. Sabriya’s excited to get a page-a-day calendar with kittens on each page, and starts counting down the days until 2014 when she can start tearing off the kitten pictures and put them on her wall. Liya’s favorite gift is a pair of Heely skate sneakers She puts them on and begins to happily, if somewhat unsteadily, skate around the first floor. The gift Anya is most interested in is Liya’s pair of Heelys.
For Christmas dinner, we have a turkey dinner with all the sides. After struggling to carve the turkey for a few minutes, Jan eventually works out that Angela has cooked the turkey upside down.
We weren’t planing on going anywhere for Christmas break, but the alumni association at Angela’s seminary calls her to offer us tickets to the Rose Bowl. The seminary’s main campus is in Pasadena, and apparently they have a block of tickets. Since Angela’s undergraduate alma mater, Stanford, is playing in the Rose Bowl, they thought she’d be interested. Angela happily accepts the offer.
While we’re in Southern California, we’ll also get to visit Angela’s family south of L.A. We fly down and head to the home of her brother, Johnny. The girls and their cousins Anthony and Brian are happy to be reunited, and run screaming around for a couple of hours.
We have a big Chen family brunch at a place overlooking the Pacific, and afterwards hike down to the beach. Anya and Liya practice skipping stones, and they’re both happy when they each manage to get a rock to skip.
Johnny takes us down for a morning visit to Redondo Beach. Angela goes for a run along the Strand while Anya and Jan go for a ride on borrowed rollerblades. Bree and Liya play in the sand with Anthony and Brian.
Shoe delivery. After rollerblading for a mile down the Strand, one of the rollerblades Jan is using breaks: the whole wheel assembly just breaks clean off. Anya heads back on her own, while Jan begins a long walk back. About halfway back, he’s met by Anya – she brings him his shoes!
We have a Fuller brunch in one of our hotel’s ballrooms, meet the school’s new president, and go on a tour of Fuller’s campus. It’s quite beautiful, with a lot of old palm trees and schools building converted from stately old homes.
We grab a light breakfast in downtown Pasadena. The girls want to visit the Barnes & Noble bookstore, but when we get there, it looks boarded up and closed for good. The girls are crushed. A store manager opens the doors and says the store is actually open – for one last day of business.
We take a picture of the interior so the girls can someday show their children what a bookstore looked like.
The bookstore employees have already begun to clear the shelves, but there are still enough books for the girls to browse. They’re very happy to pick out some books, especially because they’ll have something to read during the rest of the day: a full program of various adult-oriented events at Fuller Theological Seminary.