Doh!

Turns out Captain Husband may have gotten my hopes up just a little bit when he said he could be home as early as Thursday...as of right now, the earliest he can be home will be Saturday afternoon. He's still stuck over in the sandbox, holed up in a giant tent with about forty other dudes, waiting for a seat to open up on one of the planes. Unfortunately for him, the military assigns seats by rank, working from the lowest to the highest. Oh well, I guess it just gives me a few more days to prepare!

Holy crap

Late last night, Captain Husband called with some awesome and totally unexpected news; it turns out he will be back a bit earlier then he had originally planned and could possibly be here by Thursday afternoon. As in TWO DAYS FROM NOW. Um, can you tell that I'm excited? It's seriously taking all of my will power to sit still and concentrate at work. CH coming home is a bit like Christmas, my birthday, and a 1/2 off everything sale at my favorite bookstore all rolled into one.

Speaking of bookstores, I was killing some time last Friday and stumbled across this book. I devoured it in one evening; I can not stress enough just how much I enjoyed it, especially since the details surrounding my military marriage and the author's are pretty darn similar (ok, I was never a stripper, but my mom once told my grandmother that I was during Thanksgiving dinner a few years back, but that doesn't really count). Also, I have been starving for a book that deals with the various ins and outs of being a modern-day war bride--believe me when I say books like this one are few and far between. Now if I can only figure out how to get Operation Bombshell to Fort Belvoir...

7 out of 9

Shown here modeling the latest in kitty couture.

Apparently in a past life I was a professional kicker of cats or something along those lines, because that's the only explanation I can come up with regarding my spate of terrible cat issues recently. The latest chapter in my book of cat woes is quite the doozy, but fortunately there appears to be a happy ending. Part of my job entails working at the various antique shows that the gallery where I work participates in; now that Tricia is a diabetic, I couldn't just set up her timer feeders and leave her to her own devices like I have in the past when I've gone out of town. So I decided to employ a pet sitter, mostly to keep Trish comfortable and happy in her own home rather than boarding her at the veterinarian's (and believe me, this cat can hold a grudge).

Well, long story short, Trish got a hefty overdose of insulin...twice in as many days. She's supposed to get 1 1/2 units twice a day, but due to confusion on my part and the cat sitter's, Trish wound up on the receiving end of 1 1/2 syringes full of insulin; and fyi, a syringe holds 20 units. Do the math and, well, that's quite the overdose. On Thursday evening, when the sitter went over to check on Trish for the second time that day, she found Trish hiding under the sideboard in the dining room, passed out and twitching, and immediately called me. Once I heard how much insulin Trish had received and her symptoms, I knew at once that she was in hypoglycemic shock and possibly on her way into a coma. I told the pet sitter to rush Trish to my vet's and that they would know what to do. About an hour later, I get another phone call, this time telling me that due to the nature of Trish's situation, she would have to be transferred to a 24 hour emergency animal hospital where they could monitor her blood glucose levels through the night, something that my vet's office is not equipped to do.

Ok, I know I promised to make it short, so I'll sum up: Trish wound up spending two and a half days in the hospital until she stabilized enough to be transferred back to my vet's to be boarded for the remainder of my time out of town. Remarkably, she seems to have made a full recovery and shows no signs of neurological injury, or as my vet put it, no drain bamage at all. Apparently, Dr. Neff was pretty astounded that Trish has survived the ordeal unscathed, as he's seen many other cats receive much smaller overdoses of insulin and not make it. He does feel that she's probably down to seven out of nine lives after this incident, though. I'll take seven over zero any day!

Happy Easter!

I hope your day is filled with fun and chocolate bunnies!

If I were a rich girl, part 4

I apologize for the small size of this week's installment in pipe dreams and wishful thinking, but it's the only image available so bear with me. I am utterly charmed by this oil on board for several reasons: 1. It's an early nineteenth-century landscape; 2. It's a Philadelphia scene, and 3. It includes a depiction of one of my favorite works by the noted Philadelphia sculptor, William Rush (1756-1833). A hat trick, if you will.

Although the auction house identifies the scene as Philadelphia's City Hall, it's actually the Centre Square Waterworks, which was formerly located where the current City Hall now stands. Hidden behind its neoclassical exterior, which had been designed by the renowned architect, Benjamin H. Latrobe, was a steam engine that pumped water from the Schuylkill River into a holding tank, where it was later distributed throughout the city by gravity via wooden pipes. The Centre Square Waterworks supplied Philadelphia with clean drinking water from 1800 until 1829 at which time it was supplanted by the Fairmount Waterworks. The Centre Square Waterworks was a point of pride for many Philadelphians and its picturesque setting made it a favorite subject for many of the city's artists: John Lewis Krimmel, William Birch, and John James Barralet are among those who recorded its features for posterity.

Speaking of Barralet, check this out:
Look familiar? It's the 1815-1825 print source for the oil on board that I'm currently lusting after! (Ok--I admit it. I'm a dork with way too much free time in the evenings.)

So now that that's all cleared up, on to William Rush, the father of American sculpture and how he's tied up in all of this. In 1809, the city of Philadelphia commissioned Rush to create a fountain for Latrobe's building (Latrobe had originally envisioned a fountain on every street corner, but that was deemed a tad much). Working in the prevailing mode of drawing inspiration from classical antiquity, Rush created an allegorical figure of the Schuylkill River that was based on the Venus de Medici and the Venus surtant du bain (or, Venus after the bath). Unfortunately, all that is left of Rush's Water Nymph, as she is also known, is her head and portions of her hand; most of Rush's public works were executed in wood painted to resemble marble, which was not exactly suited to the rigors of unrelenting water exposure. Oops. Fortunately, though, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), the seminal artist and fellow Philadelphian, painted a romanticised, yet painstakingly researched, depiction of the creation of the fountain in the late nineteenth century that makes it possible for us to enjoy Rush's long lost masterwork today.

The mystery of the abandoned farm house

Because I don't have to enough to think about right now, I've decided to try and figure out this abandoned stone farm house located about 4 miles from where I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. Over the years, I drove past this place every time I went home to visit my family and watched it slowly morph from a charming, albeit a bit tattered, home into the sad state now before you. On my most recent trip home this past weekend, I turned my mom into an accomplice and we went exploring since it was now very obvious that the house had been abandoned. We drove up and poked around for a bit, exploring the now-derelict site. I took a bunch of pictures and then came back home to Virginia and started digging through some books to see if I could identify a bit more about the architecture and time line of the house. What I'd like to do is figure out the family who originally built it and see if I can get it documented for posterity's sake by some sort of Historic Architecture and Building Survey before the whole thing falls prey to the elements. Should be fun!