Week in Review

Its hard to not love Washington at this time of the year. The only thing I still have trouble wrapping my mind around is the fact that many people here think that the months of miserable weather, are worth it, just to be here for the approximate 2 months of nice weather in the summer. I can't argue with the fact that its beautiful here in the summer. I just think I'd rather take a vacation here in the summer instead of suffering through 10 months of miserable rain, fog, gray skies, 9:30am sunrises and 3:30pm sunsets, just to be here for the nice summer (which isn't 2 full months of niceness - if you look at some of the pictures I'm posting in this blog, you'll see that we're actually in jackets and sweatshirts in some of them).

I'm always amazed at the fact that whenever Mr. V leaves for a while, I go through the same pattern. First, I'm miserable and lonely, but then I quickly get into a new routine. Since he's wasn't the only one from the squadron gone, the other wives and I are always quick to make ourselves busy, which is easy to do during a beautiful Washington summer.

Sunday: The week started out on a scary note. Finding a black widow spider in my bathroom on Sunday morning was not how I thought my day was going to start, so that thoroughly freaked me out. Now I just have to hope that there aren't more of them living in my house, and that the cats will stay away from them if there are.

Monday: Monday was pretty entertaining. Several weeks ago, a friend of mine had her Ipod stolen out of her car, that was parked in her driveway. Within a few nights of that happening, several other people in her neighborhood also had Ipods and GPS systems stolen from their cars. The neighbors all reported the thefts, but the cops that came to check up on things didn't seem to be too interested in catching whoever was doing this, so no one thought anything would come of it. Well, it turns out that the kid who was stealing from cars, got a little too confident and decided to try shoplifting from the Kmart in town, which got him arrested. From what we can understand, he was arrested because of his Kmart shoplifting, and then they figured out that he was also the Ipod thief. So my friend and her neighbors had to write victim statements, and deliver them to the county courthouse if they wanted money for their stolen property. My friend also wanted to go see this kid's arraignment, and I went along with her so I could take her 18 month old son out of the courtroom if he started to get fussy. She didn't want to miss a minute of this guy's testimony.

The entertaining part of the whole day was juvenile court itself. We were shocked at how these kids came dressed. Apparently, its appropriate to show up in court wearing pants that are falling off your butt, with your boxers showing. Because, you know, thats clearly going to make a good impression on the judge. Thats pretty much what every kid looked like, minus the one and only kid who showed up in a suit and tie.

Not only were the kids inappropriately dressed for court, but the Ipod thief was arraigned on several charges, all of which he pleaded "not guilty" to, which definitely irritated my friend (her Ipod was her first ever mother's day gift, so aside from it being expensive, it also had sentimental value to her).

I think the final kicker of the day was the conversation we heard outside of the courtroom between the prosecutor, a juvenile delinquent, his mother and his lawyer. The prosecutor was explaining what was going to happen in the courtroom, and the mother kept interrupting saying "my son is NOT guilty" in a voice way too obnoxious to ever be taken seriously. Then when the lawyer told the kid to spit his gum out because the judge didn't like people chewing gum while talking to him, the kid said "Oh its ok. The last time I was here I just hid it under my tongue." Something about the mother's attitude, the fact that this kid nonchalantly admitted that this was not his first time in juvenile court, and the fact that the Ipod thief, with piles of evidence against him, pleaded not guilty to all accounts, just made it a very entertaining, yet disturbing, day as a whole.

Tuesday: Tuesday was pretty uneventful. I spent a lot of time working around the house, and playing with my new dustbuster, which is a purchase I should have made years ago. I no longer have to lug around an entire vacuum clear just to suck up some stray cat fur and litter tracked outside of the boxes. Mr. V likes to do things cheaply, and so do I, so he's fine with lugging the large vacuum cleaner around if it saves us some money. I finally decided that he's the one who is always gone, and I'm the one who cleans the house most of the time, so I didn't care if I had to spend more money. I was buying the dustbuster to make things much easier to accomplish for me.

That afternoon, I brought Moe, back to my friend's house. Remember my foster kittens from last summer? If you go back to that blog post, Moe is the little one climbing up my leg in one of the pictures. When I had the foster kittens, I also had Larry, a cat I was babysitting for the length of the deployment for a friend, while she went home to Indiana. Larry loved Moe. He followed him around and mothered him, and was pretty obsessed with him, so when the kittens went up for adoption, my friend adopted Moe so that Larry would have a friend.

Fast forward to several months ago. Suddenly Moe decided that he had had enough of Larry and started violently attacking him, in the vicinity of my friend's 8 month old daughter. My friend obviously didn't want her baby injured, so she panicked a little, and I took Moe back from her. This was around the time when Moe had reached the age of needing to be neutered, so I took him and got him neutered for her, and we hoped that his hormones would calm down a bit, and it would be possible to reintroduce him to Larry.

The first reintroduction didn't go well. So I kept him longer, in the hopes that we could reintroduce them as two new cats, instead of cats that already knew each other. The idea was to try to make them forget about each other, then let them hiss and growl at each other for a few days, then hopefully they would adapt, and Larry would start to stand up for himself a little more. This is the point we're at now. So far, the second re-introduction hasn't gone well, but we're giving it a few more days before giving up for good, and just letting Moe come live with me for the rest of his life.(He looks sweet and innocent doesn't he?)

Wednesday: Wednesday was one of those days that I love in Washington. Absolutely perfect beautiful weather. So a group of friends and I headed to one of the beaches in town to hang out. Even though the weather was nice, the beaches here aren't really swimming beaches. Most of them have rocks instead of sand. A few beaches have sand, like the one we went to this day, but the water temperature is still way too cold to actually swim in it. The ladies who had dogs, brought them along, and we spent a while just playing with the dogs and soaking up some sun. I actually had a slight sunburn when I came home, which was slightly shocking, because I think its the first time I've been burnt like that since moving up here. Typically, I burn pretty easily, so that should tell you something about the lack of sunlight here and/or the lack of nice days that I can spend outside.

Thursday: Thursday was spent on my new favorite hobby - geocaching! Apparently, this is something thats been pretty popular for years now, but the first time I ever heard of it was a week ago. Our spouse club set up a geocaching hike, which I went on, because I was bored and it sounded interesting. If you haven't heard of it before, basically you get coordinates, and use a GPS to locate a cache at the location given. The caches range in size from micro to large, and they have been placed there by random people. There is an official website - Geocaching: The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site - where you can look up your area and find where the caches are in that area. So last week, I went on my first geocaching hike, and this past Thursday a couple friends and I set off to find the caches that we couldn't find the week before.

(Melanie with a micro cache - the cache was the size of a finger nail and this piece of paper was rolled up in side of it for people to write their names on.)

(Allison and Karin [and Elaina]) with another cache)

Thursday afternoon was the highlight of my week. The week before I had gone with a friend to look at a dog at the local animal shelter. Everyone who knows me knows that I love cats, so of course, when I walked into that shelter I wanted to take every single cat home with me. I resisted though, until we walked into the 2nd shelter (there are 2 locations on the island). There I found a little gray kitten that looked and acted just like Cledus, my kitten who died from leukemia about 3 years ago. I've truly believe that if an animal is meant to come into your life, they will. So while looking at all the cats, I felt sorry for all of them, and I wanted to save them all, but I didn't feel a strong connection with any of them until I saw little Emily. When I went to pet her, she started purring loudly, and she screamed for me when I eventually walked away. I obviously know that she's not Cledus, but she is just so much like him, that I actually cried when I left the shelter. Mr. V was gone, so I texted him to tell him about her. I expected an argument from him, but instead he texted back "Go ahead and adopt her". Even from far away he could already tell that there was something special about her! So I adopted her the next day, but I couldn't take her home until she was spayed, which is why I picked her up on Thursday afternoon. She fit into this house instantly, and Mr. V fell in love with her as soon as he walked in the door yesterday. She's exactly like Cledus, and its almost scary. She definitely has her own personality, but there is so much Cledus in her, which I can't help but love! We changed her name to Angelina, because she's like an angel of Cledus :-). Some people are probably going to think that we're crazy for getting another cat. But we realized a while ago that we have the means to take proper care of 10 cats, and when Meepers died back in April, that left us with 9. Mr. V had said at the time, that we'll know it, when we're meant to have another cat, and I truly believe that little Angelina was the cat that was meant to fill that empty spot in our home!

(the resident cats checking out the new arrival)

(Angelina - her ear is green because its ink from a tattoo that is now wearing off. She wasn't so sure about this house at first, but it only took her about 10 minutes before she was bouncing around like she owned the place!)

Friday: Another geocaching day! This time we went to a park up in Anacortes, the town on the island just north of Whidbey. It was freezing on this day though, but we still had a lot of fun.

(The first cache we found)

(View from Washington Park)

(View from Washington Park)

(Karin and me where we found the 2nd cache. We thought this was pretty cool - this area was carved by an ancient glacier.)

(The 2nd cache of the day)

(Our self portrait of us with the 2nd cache)

Saturday: We ended the week on a fun note. The show Deadliest Catch is pretty popular around here because some of the boats are based out of Seattle, and 2 of the guys from the boat the Northwestern live in Anacortes (again -the town directly north of where I live). I have to admit that I don't watch the show, other than stopping on it while I channel surf occasionally, but my friend is obsessed with the show, so when she heard that some of the guys would be at the Market in Anacortes signing autographs as part of a fundraiser (Jake Anderson's father disappeared several months ago and they were raising funds to continue searching for him), we of course had to head up there to meet them.

(Nick Mavar,me, Karin & Elaina, Captain Jonathan Hillstrand, Jake Anderson)

And that concludes my week! Very busy, but very fun!