So I got a haircut over the weekend. I haven’t had short hair in at least four or five years.

Before on the left, after on the right.

Yup, he definitely would.

Ashley hand sewed the WordPress logo onto Riley’s hoodie. Like a boss.

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The bulk of the photos are of Riley. He is a two year old bug, a breed of dog that is a mix between a Boston Terrier and a Pug. He’s cute.

There is also a picture of Indie in there too. She’s slightly older than Riley, and I actually adopted her first, so I couldn’t leave her out of this gallery.

All photos here were taken by the very talented Destany Maddox.

Originally I was supposed to arrive at 4:00pm Monday in Indianapolis. Instead, my connecting flight in Denver, Colorado was delayed by about one and a half hours to de-ice the plane. I wasn’t upset about it, since I enjoy the airplanes I’m in staying airborne. But while we originally thought I would be back in time to make the drive back up to Fort Wayne before the big storm hit, the delay put us kinda sorta right in the middle of it.

Ashley and I made it just outside of Indianapolis proper before the ice really started coming down. The central part of the state was supposed to see the ice, while the northeast (or Fort Wayne) was to see large amounts of snow. By the time we hit Noblesville, about 90 miles from Fort Wayne, we decided it would be best to rest for the night and get moving again early in the morning.

This is the fun part. Just by chance, we pulled off and found a Cambria Suites hotel for an easy $99/night. We hadn’t heard of the chain before, so were a bit weary of trying it out. It turns out the place is awesome.

I later found out that Cambria is a relatively new chain of hotels, only a couple of years old, and has a very modern style. We would definitely stay there again.

The ironic part is that after our safety plan sort of backfired when we slid off the road this morning into snow in the median on 69 south. We were pulled out by a tow truck and made it back to town a couple of hours later than intended. But hey, we’re home now right? Survived another winter experience.

Luckily she’s only in intensive care. She’ll come out of it okay, just a bit of a repair needed.

My cat had ran out when the door was open.

Lucky for me I was only figuring this out when Ashley came back from her classes, so it wasn’t as though she was going to freak out or anything (riiiiight).

For the next 5 hours or so, a lot of things seemed to happen all at once.

1. I didn’t get any work done for the rest of the day, pretty much. I spent most of the rest of the daylight hours (and a little bit of the night time) searching for Indie.
2. Ashley made the most of her time, mostly by sitting by the window, looking out, and being sad. Way to go.
3. Justin made up a few LOST CAT posters for me to slap up around the neighborhood. He even put a couple of them on white stakes for us to punch into the ground. I guess the front of my apartment just wasn’t white trash enough for Mr. Jones.
4. A couple of Indie’s belongings were placed out on the curb in order to help her find her way back. By the time night fell, it was her monkey (something she drags around all over the place) and a scarf of Ashley’s she likes to lay on, tied around the outside of the doorknob.
5. Finally, a call was placed to the local humane society, just to put a bug in their ear. Alas, the line was busy for over an hour, and we gave up on them. Time to adopt some newer technologies, maybe, humane society?

As the night came to a close, we were both finally able to get to sleep, with the mindset of getting up nice and early to go out looking for her again.

Around 3:30am the next morning (probably only a couple of hours before another search would have begun) a loud meowing sound came from the other side of the front door, and there stood Indie, hungry and tired.

Ashely gave her fresh food and water, and stayed up with her for a little while before collapsing again. Indie proceeded to sleep throughout the rest of the day (a little over 24 hours of napping, in total).

Oh, but there was one part of the day that she wasn’t able to sleep through. Her bath. See, something about being at ground level in an apartment complex gives a small animal the distinct smell of gasoline.

So Indie’s gift for for coming back to us after about 12 hours of being away? A nice bath, complete with humiliating pictures of her as a wet cat.

Turns out wet cat is also pretty hard to photograph well.

Turns out Ashley did a way better job getting a shot than me.

After a few hours of licking herself, she was ready to calm down. So we threw a towel in the dryer and wrapped her up in it. She liked that, and didn’t move for another few hours.

Yeah, I think she was pretty glad to be back.

Thanks to Justin, Dad, Hannah, and everyone else for the moral support!

Honestly, though, probably the most memorable part of the night was when we arrived at Granite City, a cool little brewery/restaurant here in town, and Ashley let us know that she had forgotten her license. Seeing as how a big reason for going out there was for her to enjoy ordering some alcohol, this was a big setback. So the night started a little later than we intended as she ran back home to grab it, but we all had a nice laugh about it.

Be sure to open the full post to see all of the photos.

It turns out there was some video and a few pictures that were all captured by various means during the 24th of December, two thousand and eight, that I never uploaded anywhere. Finally added the video to Vimeo, uploaded the photos here, and now we’re set to go.

Also: an alternate view of the sledding sequence above can be seen over on Taylor’s YouTube page, where she used a sweet Flip to capture the angle from the bottom of the hill.

Commence photos:

Indie is much bigger now, so climbing the tree proves more difficult than it used to.

I'm probably wondering how the hell I'm going to get her down.