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.

Update: for those interested, the burnt orange color in my office is a Sherwin Williams color: SW 6347 Chrysanthemum.

First of all, I have to thank my girlfriend and her parents (+ grandma) for helping me paint my apartment. I really hate painting, and they made the experience so much more enjoyable for me, since I only had to finish up the last few walls. Thanks, guys.

I grew up with nearly all of the walls in my home being white. So I can’t stand white walls. Every quiet wall in the apartment (anything I wasn’t excited about coloring) became a nice neutral tan color. The dining-room-turned-office (since I don’t dine) has a brilliant burnt orange color that really sets my desk off from the rest of the room. My bathroom is a bold green, and my bedroom is a soothing (and slightly feminine) baby blue.

The Painting Experience

Since everything is an experience anymore (note an implied gag reflex) I have to say that painting is one of those things that always turns out to be more anticlimactic than I would expect. I’ve only ever managed the painting of (notice again, I don’t like to paint) one other room of mine, and that was the office I established at my dad’s house a year or so ago. I believe, and Ashley can attest to this, that it took me about 15 seconds in Lowe’s to determine what paint scheme would be donning the walls. I did take a bit longer to decide what to do in my apartment, although I tend to take an only-so-serious approach to it all. I’d like to chalk it up to me being decisive, but I think it just has to do with my being exhausted by running too many different scenarios through my head.

I don’t think it’s visible in any of the pictures, but right above the bathroom door, to the left of my office, is a section of wall where the paint didn’t quite sink in. I’ve told myself “that shouldn’t be hard to touch up, just a matter of getting out the step ladder and a paint brush.” If I had to guess now, it will never happen and will just become one of the character points of my place.

Hanging Books

One of the more exciting parts of this whole painting project was the chance to finally hang up some of the invisible shelves I’ve been sitting on for some time. You can see them in the pictures of my office wall. The books sit sideways on a small metal hook and make it appear that the books are floating on the wall. I love this simple effect as it makes decoration out of something I already love (my paperbacks) and frees up some more room on my bookshelf in my room.

The shelves I’m talking about are on Amazon, and I would suggest considering them if you’re looking for a nice accent piece for an office. It is a bit of a chore finding a book wide enough to serve as the bottom book, and hardbacks are probably best there, but anything is technically workable.

Some Tips for Minor Home Renovation

I save these here for myself as well as anyone else silly enough to read my blog. A couple of these are purely my own taste, and might not work for everyone.

• Save all paint colors. I wish I would have done a better job of documenting all of the paint samples I spent time with from the beginning, but saving the ones I ended up using is the next best option. I use Evernote (a topic worth getting into some other time) so it was quick to snap a photo with my iSight and drag them into Evernote where they were named and saved away for whenever I may need them again. A simple search for “apartment + paint” will bring up the swatches and color code, should I ever need to revisit them again.
• Get it done all at once. I discovered that leaving things in disarray led me to panic pretty quickly. Focusing on finishing all of the paint, all at once, was really the only way for me to return to sanity. I don’t like to see things drag on, so once the paint cans came out they didn’t go away until everything was done. And we were able to finish 4 rooms and five colors in 48 hours. Not too bad.
• Piecemeal furnishings. I’m convinced now more than ever that the way I purchased the stuff for my apartment was the right way. I nabbed all of the essentials the first week: couch, desk, bed, bookshelf (my essentials, not yours). After that I picked up more as needed. Just this week I found the right lamp for my desk, which also happens to accent the orange of my office well. I may not have made the right choice if I had jumped the gun 6 weeks ago. I’m still looking for the right coffee table (far from an essential, for me), end table, and a floor lamp or two to fill out the rest of the space. Moving one piece at a time has made the whole process much more organic and fulfilling.
• When painting, stash the cat. We learned the hard way last year that keeping a cat around while painting can lead to, well, white paw prints on the carpet. This time the kitty was shuttled away to a resort that we affectionately call Grandpa’s house.

Speak of the devil, here she is nesting beautifully on my desk.

It feels good to get an update out here, since I’m sure anyone visiting was tired of looking at my terrible Hulk movie review headline. I hope to return to video blogging soon, as well as another medium or two before the year is out. More on that soon. Right now I’m trying to manage my life on all fronts and slowly take steps toward adding a bit more.

Thanks for reading.

Oh, and we captured the whole thing with my new Flip video camera.

Some of the more notable events of the day included:

• Purchasing Ashley her very own web camera. Hopefully we will see her doing some video blogging.
• Watched Hancock, which was actually a pretty good movie. Honestly, plot wasn’t that great. With any other actors it would have been so-so, but with Will Smith it was fun.
• Picked out bathroom accessories, deciding on colors for my new apartment.
• Great meal at Flat Top.
• Fireworks in Roanoke.

As a side note, we had a lot of fun video blogging the day on my new Flip camcorder. The little thing can capture some decent video. It should go without saying that the quality on YouTube is degraded from the version sitting on my Mac. After normalizing all of the audio in iMovie, it really was pretty nice.

Finally, Ashley’s favorite photos from the fireworks. Only minor problems getting the camera to work right for it, but I’m happy with how they turned out.