Remembering Feisty

March 23, 2023

Our 2 – 1/2 year old kit­ty Feisty passed away overnight after we rushed him to an emer­gency 24-hour ani­mal hos­pi­tal. He was a good kit­ty and we’re miss­ing him. He was always play­ful, ath­let­ic, and loy­al. He was also quite media-savvy. He liked chill­ing out Frasi­er in the evenings, par­tic­i­pat­ing in our Zoom calls with Theo off at col­lege, and par­tic­i­pat­ing in the kit­ty cat step block­ade with his step-siblings. 

Feisty came to us as a lit­ter of four kit­tens born behind our garage. When the mom seemed to leave them, we took them in and nursed them back to health. There was one who was adorably pro­tec­tive, hiss­ing at us when we came to help and we instant­ly named him Feisty. Of the four one did­n’t make it, two were adopt­ed out, and one — the feisty one — we brought into our home.

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Hammonton 2017 Fourth of July

July 5, 2017

We didn’t see much of the Ham­mon­ton Fourth of July parade this year because once again the kids were in the bike parade por­tion (all except Fran­cis, who had a bad melt­down in the morn­ing and stayed home with mom).

The bike parade was again spon­sored by Toy Mar­ket, the inde­pen­dent toy store in town (sup­pli­er of much of our house­hold’s San­ta deliv­ery). They had a table full of red, white, and blue bunting that we could apply to the bikes. We all had a lot of fun.

Notes for next year: a tan­dem exten­sion on a adult bike looked like fun and then 7‑yo Gre­go­ry will be a good age for this (we should dig ours out from the back of the garage). Also: the parade has a dog con­tin­gent so maybe a much-calmer Fran­cis will be able to be part of that next year (we’re due to pick up the ser­vice dog in 12 days!, eeek!!!)

The bandwidth of memories

April 20, 2017

blankAnoth­er fam­i­ly vaca­tion is com­ing up, which for me means think­ing once more about the pre-nostalgia of fam­i­ly pho­tos. While blog posts are osten­si­bly for vis­i­tors, the audi­ence I care more about is actu­al­ly future me.

Just before a 2013 trip, I wrote “Nos­tal­gia Comes Ear­ly,” a post about mem­o­ries and why I go to the trou­ble to share these posts — as much with my future self as with read­ers (I con­tin­ued this thought lat­er with Recov­er­ing the Past Through Pho­tos).

Every suc­ces­sive fam­i­ly trip cre­ates a mag­ni­tude more data than the one pre­ced­ing it. I have exact­ly 10 pho­tos from the first time I vis­it­ed Walt Dis­ney World, with my then-fiancée in 2001. I have only fuzzy mem­o­ries of the trip. A year or so lat­er I returned back to Flori­da (Key West this time) for a hon­ey­moon with her, a trip that has zero pho­tos. I remem­ber maybe a half dozen things we did but few locales visited.

Con­trast this with a 2013 Dis­ney World trip, for which we made a whole blog, A Spe­cial WDW Fam­i­ly. The focus was trav­el­ing Dis­ney with autis­tic kids. There’s a lot of infor­ma­tion in there. We wrote about meals and rides, small vic­to­ries, and child melt­downs. The band­width of mem­o­ries isn’t just in the num­ber of jpeg files but in the dis­tinct mem­o­ries I have of the events of that week-plus.

We took many hun­dreds of pho­tos over our most recent fam­i­ly vaca­tion in Decem­ber 2015, only a small frac­tion of which went online. In addi­tion, I have Google Loca­tion data for the trip and Foursquare check­ins logged in Ever­note. I know how many steps I took each day. I know whether I had a good sleep. We didn’t make a pub­lic blog but we have a long anno­tate log of each restau­rant and stop, with anno­ta­tion tips to remind our future selves about how we could do things bet­ter in the future. The meta­da­ta is in itself not so impor­tant, but it’s use­ful to be able to drop into a day and remem­ber what we did and see the smiles (and tired­ness) on faces each day.

Wheat planting at Howell’s Living History Farm

September 27, 2016

We’ve got­ten into the habit of vis­it­ing How­ell’s Liv­ing His­to­ry Farm up in Mer­cer Coun­ty, N.J., a few times a year as part of home­school­er group trips. In the past, we’ve cut ice, tapped trees for maple syrup, and seen the sheep shear­ing and card­ing. Today we saw the var­i­ous stages of wheat – from plant­i­ng, to har­vest­ing, thresh­ing, win­now­ing, grind­ing, and bak­ing. I love that there’s such a wide vocab­u­lary of spe­cif­ic lan­guage for all this – words I bare­ly know out­side of bib­li­cal para­bles (“Oh wheat from chaff!”) and that there’s great vin­tage machin­ery (How­ell’s oper­a­tions are set around the turn of the twen­ti­eth century).