Hiawatha: Birds And Creatures II

Another video from the opera. This is Catherine and friends second appearance as the birds and creatures of the forest. This time is also a lot shorter (under a minute I believe). As for life at home everyone is still sick. Ginger apparently didn't get whatever it is since she's feeling mostly better at this point. Luckily I haven't gotten whatever it is either. Although maybe I'm silently carrying it and spreading it around at work, who knows. But none of the people I work with normally have been getting sick, so I don't think I've been a carrier.

Hiawatha: Villagers

More video from the opera. Quinn's one of the villagers in this one. One the home front Quinn ended up staying home yesterday with the same symptoms that Catherine has. So now he's sick also. They're both showing partial flu symptoms (headache, running fever, stomach ache). Luckily I don't believe there's been any throwing up yet. Ginger's said she's not feeling too good either, so it might be spreading. Ginger's been looking over the CDC website at their guidelines for the flu. They're a lot stricter than I would have thought. They basically say you shouldn't go back to school or work until 24 hours after the symptoms are gone *or* 7 days after the onset of symptoms, which ever is longer. They also imply that since the kids are sick I shouldn't be going in to work either. For now though Ginger and the kids are just hanging out at home all the time playing the Wii when the kids feel up to it (apparently everyone like my new game de Blob).

Hiawatha: Birds And Creatures

Much like the previous video, this one is from the dress rehearsal. This time it focuses on Catherine's part as one of the creatures (she was a rabbit and on the far right when they're all up front). It's shorter (under three minutes), but again, probably only interesting to family members (or people in Catherine's fan club).

And today Catherine ended up staying home from school with what appears to be flu like symptoms. I'm wondering if it's that whole swine flu that's been all over the news. I guess this shouldn't be too surprising considering the kids just spent the last week in close proximity with all the kids in the school in rehearsing for the opera. Since Catherine was home though that meant I got to go pick up Quinn from school. As I was bringing him home I told him that Catherine had been allowed to play the Wii some (which she had before getting tired and quitting) and this of course brought out the "That's not fair" response. This seems to be his go to argument these days, the fairness of something. It's hard to argue with it. But there are times where he'll violate the fairness principle himself, so in those cases it's not as hard to argue.

Hiawatha: War Chiefs

Some video from the dress rehearsal of the kid's opera. This is the section where Quinn is one of the war chiefs. It's long, and not that amusing for non family so be warned. The only reason I included the singing after the dancing is because there is a small part of smoking a peace pipe after that (which there's the message I want the kids coming away with, that smoking is okay).

Opera Recovery

We spent most of the day after the opera just hanging out and resting. Both Grammy and Nana had spent the night and Grammy left to return home earlier today. Nana stuck around for a while though and her and the kids were out riding their bikes for a while (the pictures are from Nana's camera). While they did that Ginger and I did some weeding around the bushes. Which really means Ginger did most of the weeding and I kept finding excuses to do other things (like get out the moon bounce, put away the moon bounce after kids gets bored with it after only about 15 minutes, etc).

Hiawatha Opera

Tonight was the big night. The kids performed their opera based on the story of Hiawatha. They relaxed rules from previous years. Before they used to say no photography or video recording. This year it was just don't use flash photography. So I snapped some pictures when I could, but it was tough getting a good view since this dude's head was right in front of me (and he wasn't a small dude either).


The kids had done a dress rehearsal earlier in the day and I had been there for that. I took some pictures of that also and I suspect those probably turned out somewhat better (because I used the flash occasionally and because all the lights were on so it wasn't as dark). I haven't had a chance to check out those pictures yet, but I have these from the actual performance.


The kids got some extended family to show up for their performance as Grammy and Nana both came to see them. Pop Pop couldn't make it because someone had to stay in Richmond and take care of Ginger's grandmother, luckily they make and sell a DVD of the performance, so I'm sure he'll get to see it eventually (and I have some video from the dress rehearsal that I might try and put up at some point).


Quinn was on stage several times in different roles. His first role was as one of the war chiefs. And after laying down their arms they smoked a peace pipe. Because that's the lesson you want to leave the kids with, smoking is good.




Catherine was one of the creatures. She was a rabbit sans rabbit ears because her ears broke before the performance.


After that Quinn reappeared on stage as one of the villagers. For some reason none of the villagers recognized the fact that one of the former war chiefs were among them.


After that the Catherine and her birds and creature companions made another appearance.


This was from Quinn's two (or three) line solo part. He played the sun. I was told later than he forgot to put on the headband they had made to further reinforce that he was the sun, but I'm not sure he needed it.


And then just like that it was over and all the kids were on stage taking their bows for their performance. Afterward Ginger and the kids headed home while I stuck around and helped with the stage tearing down the stage. Taking it down went even faster than putting it up, but the hardest and longest part was rearranging everything back into the exact positions they had been in prior to us revamping the stage (I've heard the church can get a bit upset unless everything is put back exactly the way it was).

Rabbit Proof Fence

I watched Rabbit Proof Fence the other night. It's a movie that takes place in Australia in the year 1931. The story seems utterly unbelievable in that the government is taking half-caste children from their Aboriginal homes to "civilize" them in hopes of integrating them into society and breeding out the black over generations. The children get sent to what amounts to a rehabilitation camp in which they are prohibited from using their native language and forced to learn aspects of the white culture. In this story one of the girls that is taken decides to take her sister and cousin and return home (a 1,500 mile journey) and she has no idea of where she is or how to get back. All of it sound preposterous, but then you get told this is a true story based on actual events. It's a bit disheartening to realize that people could do things like this. What's worse is the conviction the people who are responsible for doing this have that they're doing the right thing. You keep telling yourself that things like this couldn't possibly happen in today's world, but then you only have to look at some of the genocide that's occurring in hot spots across the globe and realize we still have a long way to go. The film is pretty basic, no special effects or anything and there's limited character development, but I found the film worth watching just for the history lesson alone.

Out For A Spin

Quinn got a chance to try out his new bike today. He likes it so far. Mostly because of the kickstand and the fact that he seems to think he can go faster on this one than he could on his old one. Catherine on the other hand doesn't like the hand me down bike as much as her old bike for the opposite reason, she's convinced it doesn't go as fast as her previous bike did.

This Is Us Economizing

So after we talked to our fiance finance guy about our plan to refinance. His advice was we needed to start economizing. I found this amusing since last Friday we had just bought the new Wii game Disney's Dance Dance Revolution. And on Saturday we had bought a new bike for Quinn (which I picked up today and brought home). But still, for the time being we haven't really adjusted our spending habits much at all during the current recession. That's not to say that we live extravagantly, since I really don't think we do (I'm too cheap as anyone that knows me will attest). And considering we don't really spend a lot on a regular basis, Ginger was a tad insulted about being told we need to start economizing.

And speaking of that new bike, when I brought it home tonight it was too late for Quinn to give it a test run, but he was really excited about it. What was amusing was the reason he liked it so much, it was because the bike had a kickstand. That apparently is the pinnacle of bikes.

Opera Setup

Tonight I had to go to the school to help setup the stage for the school's opera the kids are putting on Friday night. There were less of us doing to the setup this year, which means I graduated to finally being allowed to play with the power tools (whirrr whirrr). The funny thing was even though there were less of us this year, it took significantly less time (previous years had taken up to three hours, we were just over an hour and 20 minutes tonight). I guess we've all done it enough now that we know what we're doing. That and one of the guys that was there is a professional contractor who installs cabinets for a living, so he knows a thing or two about woodworking. In case you're interested the opera this year is going to be about Hiawatha. Catherine is in it this year, and Quinn actually has a solo (it's only a couple lines, but he still doesn't know all the words to yet, so that could go either way at this point).

New Bike

A couple weeks ago we noticed that Catherine has just about completely outgrown her bike. If you look her knees are almost hitting the chin bar. When we originally bought them bikes we got Catherine a 16 inch wheel size and Quinn an 18 inch wheel size. It's looking like it's time to change. And rather than buy two new bikes, our current plan is to buy Quinn a new one and Catherine can take over Quinn's old bike (even though it's a "boy" bike, it's blue and Catherine's favorite color is blue these days). Thankfully she's out of the whole Princess phase at this point (although just my luck she'll end up wanting a Hello Kitty bike). We decided not to get something from a bike specialty store and instead just bought Quinn a Schwinn Spitfire from TRU. We went with the generic bike because the assumption is at some point in the future they're still going to outgrow the bikes again, so there's not a lot of point in spending two to three times as much for something that in a year or so we'll be discarding anyway.




The new bike won't be assembled and ready until Monday though, so we still needed to kill some time today. And since it's such a nice day out we decided to head to a park for a bit. I've been really impressed with both kids on the monkey bars. I know Quinn used to have a really hard time with these, but he seems to have built up enough upper body strength to do them now.






Apparently not even Ginger is immune to the siren call of playing with a lightsaber.




I think my camera still has some hairs or dust or something on the CCD, I really wish there was an easy way to get rid of that. I've seen the "How to" info out on the web, but the consequences of doing something wrong are so high that I've been reluctant to actually try and mess with it.

Time To Refinance

So we've been talking about refinancing our mortgage since rates are currently so low. That coupled with the fact we currently have one of those subprime interest only loans (you know, the ones that got the whole country into this crazy financial mess in the first place) and it just seems like it's a good idea to get that out of the way. We still have three years before our ARM kicks in, but with rates as low as they are right now there might not be a better time in the next three years. So we're currently looking at going away from the whole ARM thing and getting a fixed long term loan. Now we just have to hope the bank feels like lending money at this point.

Where's My Pizza?

After feeding the kids and getting them to bed, Ginger and I still hadn't had dinner yet. So Ginger ordered a pizza online to be delivered. An hour later it hadn't arrived. I just figured it's Papa Johns, that's about par for delivery time for them I thought. Ginger thought it was abnormally long though, so she went to check her order. Turns out that the last time we went down to Richmond we had taken Ginger's computer (so she could work on the slide shows for the school auction) and she had ordered pizza while there and had it delivered to her parent's house. And sure enough, this one that she had just ordered had used that last order as the delivery location and the pizza had been delivered to Ginger's parents down in Richmond. Ginger called them to find out if they enjoyed the free pizza, but it turns out they had refused the order. Ginger called the store and they didn't act overly upset and said they had credited the order back to her card. Still, I wouldn't want to eat the next pizza they order from Papa Johns down there since I'm sure that didn't sit well with the driver or the store manager.

Emily Is Much Improved

I'm happy to report that Emily has been doing much much better in the past couple of days. Tuesday morning she was still needing to be hand fed, but by late Tuesday she was eating some on her own and able to lift her head and look up (something she really hadn't been able to do since before Sunday). The potassium supplement seems to be working at this point, but now we have another cat that requires daily medication. The potassium supplement is a runny gel, kind of like that hairball medicine for cats but less viscous. Currently she's requiring 3 teaspoons a day of stuff, which is a large amount of it and it's not something that tastes good either (at least that's my assumption from the fact that she doesn't like taking it) so getting her to eat it can be challenging at best.

Emotional Rollercoaster

Just to let everyone know, there's been some good news on the Emily front, but it took a while to get there. The day started off with a serious flaw in our plan. I took the kids to school and once there I (and one other parent that was there with their kids) realized the school is apparently closed today. Not sure how we missed that. One would think with Ginger being the co-president of the parent committee we would know these things, but you would be wrong. So I ended up taking the kids home. We still had a vet appointment scheduled because Emily hadn't gotten any better and if anything was showing signs of being even more lethargic than she was yesterday if that's even possible. We had wanted to have the kids avoid that, but no such luck.

Even though I knew what we were going to do was the right thing if Emily wasn't eating or drinking, it was still emotionally tough to deal with and I apparently wasn't up to the task of being the strong and stoic throughout this process. Making the decision is excruciatingly tough, but can at least be viewed and decided upon rationally. That actual acting on that decision is simply emotionally brutal. The amusing thing about it is the kids seemed to be just fine, and it was only me and Ginger (and mostly me) that we having trouble dealing with it. I think a large part of this is because the kids simply believe the vet will be able to fix whatever is wrong, so in their mind there's nothing to be concerned about.

Anyway, as we were having the doc (same one as from Sat) look over Emily even she was concerned about the fact that Emily was just lying there. She wasn't trying to get away or move or anything really. And they suggested running a lot more tests, but I had decided at that point I didn't want to put Emily through that anymore. Luckily we decided to at least run a blood test. The blood test came back and showed an extreme potassium deficiency. Normal potassium levels for cats are suppose to be between 3.5 and 5.1, Emily was showing 2.1. Apparently it had been on the low side on Saturday, but had only been 3.4 at that time so they had discounted it since it was so close to being within the norm.

The medical term for it is Hypokalemia. The symptoms match exactly what we're seeing in Emily. So they suggested we inject fluids into her again and try to add some potassium to her diet by giving her a supplement for the next couple of days. There's still the matter of whatever is causing the potassium deficiency is still there, but it didn't feel right not to give this a chance. So we brought her home again and started making her take some of the supplement (no easy task).

The good news is even though all the texts I've read on the subject say it can take weeks before you see an improvement from the supplement we actually saw some improvement by the end of the night. She was standing and walking a bit (just a couple steps here and there, but that's light years better than she was just this morning). She also started to eat some. Now admittedly I have to hold the food in my hand and up to her mouth so she doesn't have to bend over and try and hold herself up, but again, that's the first thing I know of that's she eaten since at least Saturday if not before. So for now, we're cautiously optimistic. We had yet another vet appointment scheduled for Wednesday in case there was no signs of improvement, but for now things seem to be good. And as I said earlier, whatever it is that suddenly caused this potassium imbalance is still there, so realistically she probably doesn't have a lot of time left (she is 17 years old after all). And in case anyone is wondering, I took the picture above on Saturday before we went to the vet (since at that point I wasn't sure I was going to be able to take anymore pictures at all).

Happy Easter

So everyone got on their Sunday best and we headed off to church. It was an interesting in that our normal Sunday school class only had four of us in it for a good portion of the class (and Ginger wasn't one of them since she was off acting as a helper in Catherine's Sunday School class). So I was able to let loose with a lot of issues I've had. I know, why wait until no one else is there. Well, two reasons. One is our classes teacher is the youth pastor for the church, so it's interesting to get his opinion on things. And the second reason is I know for a fact some of the people normally in the class have a drastically different interpretation of some scriptures than I do, and since that's generally a matter of personal opinion I don't like the idea of getting into a back and forth where I know neither side is necessarily going change their opinion in a larger group environment.




And Ginger was scheduled for the toddler class during normal church service, and since it was Easter (which means attendance was larger than normal) there I believe close to a record number of toddlers in the class. Since it was just her and a kid assistant I ended up getting drafted out of the service to help with the class. So neither of us got to actually hear the service.


And after what seemed to be a minor miraculous recovery at the vet yesterday Emily has taken a severe turn for the worse. Today she just hasn't been moving at all. The most she's done is try to stand up but only be able to get her front legs up and then after about 10 seconds or so basically fall down again. She's sleeping almost constantly and doesn't (or can't) really move. We've been moving her around to keep her near us, and we had her with us as we were watching TV. The plan is tomorrow Ginger and I will take her to the vet again while the kids are at school so they won't have to deal with it since she's clearly not getting any better and I don't think it's fair to let things continue since she's not eating or drinking.

Rain Or Shine

It's time for our church's annual Easter Eggtravaganza. We were going to meet Ken and Amanda there, but before we could go we had to take Emily to the vet. Honestly I was going in expecting pretty bad news, because she was seeming even a bit more sluggish than the night before. But somehow after being at the vet for a bit, she perked back up a bit and was able to walk around the examination room. Which made Ginger and myself look like we had no idea what we were talking about as we continued to say stuff like "Honestly, she wasn't able to even walk earlier." They said she's suffering from high blood pressure, and could have had a stroke. So they sent her home with us and some medicine and we're suppose to monitor her for a few days. After we dropped Emily off at the house we headed over to the church.


Today's even was a rain or shine event, and it was a lot more rain than shine. From everything we heard, having to take Emily to the vet let us miss the worst of the rain (they said it had been pouring at one point). Luckily we got there just in time for the last egg hunt for the 6-8 year olds. And it was only mildly raining at this point.




Quinn continued his yearly winning strategy of ignoring all the eggs at the start and just running to the back of the lot. This seemed to work out pretty well for him. You can see Quinn up above as the lone kid running towards the back.


Catherine initially followed the crowd and just picked up eggs near the start. Eventually she ran out and joined her brother (I don't know whether this was because of coaching from Ginger or something she just decided to do on her own).


Here's the thing though. With the rain it certainly reduced the normal event attendance. And since there were 5,000 eggs per hunt, the number of eggs to kids ratio was pretty large this year. In fact, well before all the eggs had been picked up Quinn told us "I'm done. I'm good to go." And he was, his basket was completely filled to the brim with eggs.




As I said though, since attendance was low, Catherine eventually ended up with as many eggs as Quinn did, it just took her a bit longer to collect that many.


After going through their eggs and extracting all the candy, they tried some of the games, but the weather really wasn't cooperating, so they didn't do that for long. Nor did they use the moon bounce / inflatable slide. And we didn't get to do the pony ride either. Figured all that stuff in the rain just wasn't worth it.


And then just as we were getting ready to call it quits, they opened up the last egg hunt to everyone that was still around. It was suppose to be only for the older kids, but there weren't that many older kids around, so they just made it available to everyone. Catherine used the go to the back first strategy on this one and made out since there were a slew of eggs "hidden" in a tree trunk.


It didn't take Quinn long to realize Catherine was on to something and come over to "help" her out.


Ken and Amanda had left before we got there so Ken could take Amanda to show her the townhouse he was going to be moving into. They had planned on getting back for the last 6-8 egg hunt but had missed that one. Luckily they were back in time for this last one though. Amanda didn't have a basket though, so she was using Ken's camera bag.

Ginger And The Kids Are Back

Ginger and the kids returned home today. The brick video apparently was only mildly entertaining. There were two comments I got on from the kids that really summed it up for me. The first was "How did you make it talk?" Apparently there's no question about how I made the eyes and made them move, even though that was the hardest part. They just wanted to know how I made it talk. I suspect it's because they think the eyes are similar to the Noodle's eyes, but I have no proof of this. The second comment came from Quinn, and it was along the lines of "Why was it so short, it was only about 20 seconds." I tried explaining that those 20 seconds took a long time to create, but I'm not sure he really got it.

And on a sadder note, Emily has been acting odd. And before there are any comments she's acting odder than usual. She's having a lot of trouble walking, as if her back legs are having trouble (she's definitely favoring one side, and the other side seems to almost collapse if she puts too much weight on it). Add to that she seems disoriented a bit and isn't that interested in eating. And we've never known Emily to not be interested in eating. So we'll be taking her to the vet tomorrow, but I'm not hopeful about the outcome. Unless I've done the math wrong, she's at least 17 years old, which is really old for a cat.

Brick Lives!

I refuse to comment on how long this took to make, especially for how short it is. But, with Ginger and the kids in Richmond for this past week during the kid's spring break I felt like I had to keep with the tradition (although now that I think about it, I don't even know if the kids realize this is a tradition or if they even look forward to this type of stuff anymore). If nothing else I expect to get lots of "How did you do that?" questions from the kids. It was created using POV Ray and using their animation features. I had played around with POV Ray years ago, but I completely forgot how to use it so I basically had to learn it all over again. I cheated and used a real image in the background, so the whole scene isn't raytraced. After that it was just a matter of creating all individual animation sequences and combining the ~600 resulting images into an AVI file.

Eggciting

Ginger and the kids have been busy filling Easter Eggs with candy for the church's yearly Easter Eggstravaganza event. Ginger made sure to buy candy that's safe for Catherine so they can snack on it some while they're filling the eggs. I think we have 500 eggs we have to fill. The whole event will use about 30,000 eggs I believe, so there's a lot of other people filling eggs with candy also.

Catherine's Ice Skating Video Roundup

The above is some video of Catherine at her last ice skating class. I think the progress she's made since that first time out is simply phenomenal. That's not to say she never falls (as is evidenced at the end of the video), but she's made huge improvements. It's a long video (~5 minutes), probably only family are going to want to watch the whole thing (sorry John, I didn't make a super fast version of this one).