Courtney and I had so much fun renovating the dining room in our new house back in August that we decided to spend part of our Christmas break doing more renovation. This time, we set our sights on the half bath downstairs. Here’s what that bathroom looked like when we moved in:

Certainly it didn’t look bad, but it just wasn’t our style. For one thing, the wallpaper had to go. That, as it turned out, was much more difficult than either of us had expected.

When we renovated the dining room, we actually had a relatively easy time taking down the layer of wallpaper that was glued to the wall as it came down in giant sheets with just a tug. The half bath, however, made us earn every single square inch. On the first night, it took me two hours to pry off a few square feet of wallpaper with a scraper and a spray bottle of vinegar and water. Courtney joined the struggle the next night, but it was still slow going. We turned to Google for help, but it wasn’t exactly comforting when the title of one of the first articles in our search results read “Patience is a virtue.”

It was then that we decided to get a wallpaper steamer. After just a minute with the steamer, we were both ready to profess our undying love for Peter Ravenscroft Wilkins, the inventor of the device. We were also kicking ourselves for not getting the steamer the second we realized that the wallpaper in this particular room wasn’t going to come down quietly. We could’ve saved ourselves a lot of time and effort. With the steamer, we peeled the walls in the entire bathroom in about the same amount of time as it took for us to chip away a few patches the previous two nights.

Even after the wallpaper came down, it wasn’t done tormenting us. Because we had to use a lot of moisture in removing the wallpaper, it had caused wrinkles in patches of the drywall — patches that couldn’t be just puttied up and sanded down. So we had to cut away the wrinkles, prime, prime again, putty, sand, and prime again (and sometimes repeat the whole process) to fix the troublesome spots.

After about four days’ labor, the wall was finally done. The rest of the bathroom renovation came together pretty quickly in comparison, as it only took a couple hours to put the vessel sink, vanity, and faucet together.

The fruits of all that hard work: A light blue bathroom with a touch of Asian sensibilities:

By the way, we now have a spare white porcelain pedestal sink and an ornate wooden-frame mirror, both in good condition, if anyone is interested :-)

I started the Master of Arts in Technology and Communication program at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication back in late August, and I’ve managed to survive to the midway point of the first semester. “Survive” really is the apt term here; just ask the brain cells that didn’t make it through the past two weeks as I trudged through the literature review for a research project in one of my classes. I’ve spent probably about three hours a night on most nights doing class work since school started. I’ve even had a couple nights where I’ve written or read until I fell asleep in my chair. I’ve been so busy that I’ve hardly watched any TV in the past two months, which is actually one of the pluses so far. I find myself missing television less and less. Now if only I can just get the ESPN and science channels a la carte.

Even fall break isn’t a complete escape: One of my classes is off this week, but I do have assignments in the other class, though the professor has granted the class a partial reprieve by extending the due date on one of the assignments. Still, I’ll be spending the rest of this week plowing through 70 pages of readings about statistical analysis so I can lead a Blackboard discussion on it. The very thought of it makes what remains of my brain cells scream out in pain (and I was actually good at math back in my high school and undergrad days).

However, I already feel like the labor has not been in vain. One of my two classes this semester is a real hands-on course while the other is more conceptual. The hands-on class, Writing for Digital Media, covers mostly either things that I’ve done or have at least a passing familiarity with, so for me the course so far has been more about reinforcing and fine-tuning my existing knowledge and skills than picking up new ones. That doesn’t mean it’s dull, though. On the contrary, the VERY lively discussion boards for that class have been my favorite part of the MATC program thus far, as I’ve not only gotten to know my fellow classmates, but also have learned much from their respective expertise and experience. Also, I find that the course has given me a renewed commitment to, as George Orwell put it, defending the English language when I’m writing or editing.

The more conceptual course, Research Methods and Applications, definitely is the one that’s taking the heavier toll, not just on me, but probably on everyone else in the class as well. The difficulty has come in part from my total lack of familiarity with the subject matter and the methodical pace at which I read. There is a ton of reading for this class, and some of it can be quite dense and jargon-heavy (which makes it an interesting counter to the writing course, where the emphasis has been on simple and clear writing). It seems like each week I’m blitzed with an onslaught of new research-related terms and concepts, and there have been times when I’ve stared at the discussion prompts on Blackboard and thought to myself, “I’ve got zero insight to add to this conversation.”

Despite the difficulties, though, the research class has also been immensely rewarding because I feel like I’m learning so much that I never knew I never knew. For instance, I now know what makes research valid and how to evaluate its validity, so the next time I see anything that says, “a study shows …”, I’ll know the right questions to ask to judge how much stock to put into the findings. I’m learning how to design experiments. I’m learning how to use the library’s databases to find research papers (and one good thing about the literature review was that along the way I came across a bunch of articles relevant to my work).

What’s more, the class has given me a small taste of how researchers work, the processes they follow, the ways in which they see the world, and the principles and ethics that govern how they operate. To me, this has been as useful as anything else I’ve learned in the program, especially since I work with researchers. I’m hoping the new insights will help me communicate better with them.

So in short: A lot of work, but feeling like I’m getting a lot in return as well. Now, back to sampling distributions and Z-scores (I use those terms as if I remember what they mean).

Our church held a “blessing for the animals” event yesterday, and we decided to take Bingley, one of our cats. If there ever was a cat in need of some blessing (and absolution), it’s Bingley, whom we affectionately call Brattus since he seems to always know exactly the brattiest thing to do at any particular moment. Ooh, humans are folding clothes? Let me go flop on top of the laundry pile. Hey, humans are home. Let me go scratch on the couch until they pay attention to me by scolding me. Humans are petting the other cat. I’m going to go chase her off …

There was a pretty good turnout for the blessing, which was held just outside the church. There were mostly dogs, including lots of adorable little ones. We only saw four cats including Bingley, and one of them was the same color as Bingley, right down to the little patch of white on his chest. There was talk of someone bringing a sheep, but alas, there were no exotic animals beyond your usual dogs, cats, birds, and hamsters.

With all the canine around, we decided to keep Bingley in his crate. However, even from there, he managed to make himself the center of attention. He meowed throughout the ceremony, including the silent moments of prayer. He also drew quite a crowd of little kids. Bingley also got a couple visits from dogs, including a big black lab that got so excited that she knocked over the crate. Bingley survived unscathed, but that didn’t stop him from milking it for sympathy and treats later.

A couple updates:

The new house: We’re about two-thirds unpacked, but haven’t done any more painting since a few days before we moved in. Still, the house is starting to feel more like a home than a fortress of boxes. The cats have found new favorite perches on the staircase. The room that has undergone the biggest transformation has been what used to be the dining room, which is now Courtney’s office. It’s amazing what some nice furniture, a new coat of paint, and three days’ worth of blood, sweat, and guts can do to a room.

Before

After

Of course, the work is not done yet. We still need to replace the old chandelier with a Shoji-style flush-mounted overhead lamp, and eventually we’re going to get some nice sliding Shoji doors to replace the temporary curtains on the two entrances to the room.

The master’s program: I’m finishing up my second week in the Master of Arts in Technology and Communication program through the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. It’s been a lot of work so far, and way more reading than I’ve done at any point in the last 10-plus years. However, it’s also been very interesting as I’m already learning a lot about things like research methods and what George Orwell thought about Marxist writings. I’ve enjoyed the discussion boards for the classes. The biggest downside so far is that I’m still searching for the right balance between class and life and trying to keep myself from thinking about classwork all the time. Nonetheless, I’m enjoying the ride, and I’ll probably enjoy it a lot more after next weekend, when I expect to have finished work on the old house and gotten it listed on the market. That’ll free up a little more time for me to sit back and catch my breath in between work, class, and working on just one house (and maybe writing something for this blog).

In the mean time, enjoy the writing I did for the first assignment in my Writing for Digital Media class.

Courtney triumphantly rips down a sheet of wallpaper, only to discover that the battle has just begun.

If you’ve noticed that I’ve been kind of scarce on my blogs and Twitter feed lately, it’s because my brain has been fried from focusing solely on house-related stuff. We just closed on a new house last week and are moving in this weekend, so we’ve been spending our non-work hours this past few days doing pretty much nothing except painting in the new house.

We started out with great ambition, aiming to at least paint the outside of a half bath, the dining room, and our master bedroom before we move in. We began with the low-hanging fruit: the half bath, which is attached to the foyer, which is attached to the living room, forming one giant, two-story-high space. Given the enormity of this connected space, it was going to be a pain to paint the whole thing a different color, so we decided to leave the existing light color paint for the most part but give the space a splash of vibrant red on the outside of the half bath. That only took a a little more than an hour from start to finish, and we were pretty happy with the end result:

Before

After

The momentum from that easy first step, however, quickly fizzled when we moved into the dining room, which we are converting into an office for Courtney. The previous owners had cloaked the walls of this room with a layer of fabric that, while cute, was not our style (though I’m sure our cats would love to sink their claws into it). We yanked off the fabric easily enough, only to discover a layer of batting below that and, beneath that, a layer of regular wallpaper with a pattern that mimics the look of fabric.

Before

During

The outer layer of fabric is about off, but the batting and inner layer of wallpaper remain.

During, continued …

So what lies beneath the layer of fabric? Why, a layer of wallpaper that looks like fabric, of course.

When we started removing the outer layer of fabric, we noticed that it was held in place by staples, many many many many many staples, with one about every quarter of an inch along the top of the walls and around every trim. Fortunately, a good number of them came out when we pulled the fabric off. Unfortunately, because there were so many staples to begin with, we were still left with a bunch that needed to be removed after the fabric was gone. It took four of us — me, Courtney, and my parents — a good two hours prying and digging on the walls with screwdrivers to get all the staples out.

The battle, however, was still only just beginning at this point. Where there were once a million and one staples, there were now a million and one staple holes that needed to be patched up, along with a strip of exposed drywall — where there used to be a chair rail, we guessed — all around the room that needed to be dealt with. So we spent another couple hours over the course of two nights patching up the wall.

Then it was on to sanding the putty we had slapped on. After Courtney and I spent a half hour smoothing out one little corner by hand at the end of one night, I realized this was going to require some mechanical power if I didn’t want to spend the next three days sanding until my arm fell off. The cheap power sander I picked up worked like a charm, but it also made a huge mess, spewing out white dust that covered the floor and even drifted to other parts of the house, leaving a thin layer of dust on the counters and hardwood floors (which we still need to clean up).

Still During (!!!)

The post-sanding, pre-painting dining room wall

After sanding the wall last night, I was packing up to leave, but by then I could see the end for this project crawling over the horizon, so I thought, “What the heck! I’ll start painting.” Another two hours later, I stood admiring my handiwork. Hey, it may have been midnight and I may have been standing there with my hair matted in dust, my body covered with patches of paint, and my hands feeling rough and sandy from all the putty I had been handling the last couple days, but by golly, man has triumphed over wall, and I’m done with painting until after we move in!

P.S.: By the time I got done painting last night, I was too tired to even think about taking an “after” picture of the dining room. That’ll have to wait.

I haven’t blogged much the last couple weeks. The reason is that we’ve been busy and obsessed with house-hunting, a venture that, I’m happy to report, looks like it’s drawing to a fruitful conclusion. During the process, we got better acquainted with the Chancellors Ridge community on the border of Durham and Chapel Hill. I had always known that community existed, but it wasn’t until recently that I actually paid more attention to the streets in there. We took a drive around that neighborhood today, and hilariously and somewhat sadly, the streets and the houses seem like brick-and-mortar manifestations of the worst stereotypes of the academic mentality.

Most obvious are the street names: Chancellors Ridge Drive, Tenure Circle, Professor Place, and so on. More hilarious (and a little creepy), though, is the fact that the values of the houses also seem to be stratified according to the names of the streets they are on. The homes along Chancellors Ridge Drive, for instance, are generally in the upper $200,000s, with many in the $300k range. The residences along Professor Place, however, are in the more modest low- to mid-$200k range. Stumble into Sophomore Court and Senior Avenue, and you start finding houses valued below $200k (the house values came from the neighborhood map on Realtor.com). Go a bit farther down the road and turn into the Student Place neighborhood — which, by the way, contains a street named Intern Way — and you’re greeted with swaths of identical townhouses.

All of this had us wondering: So do people living in Professor Place upgrade to, say, Tenure Circle when they get promoted (or tenure, if they are actually in academia)? We didn’t spot any Dean Boulevards or Provost Avenues, but maybe they’re building Administrators Manor farther down the road, away from the humble abodes of the rank-and-file. Also, I wonder where Adjunct Corner, TA Alley, Non-Faculty University Employee Loop, or Housekeeper Row are. While driving through this socially stratified neighborhood, I couldn’t help but be reminded of when Homer went to work for Scorpio and the Simpsons moved into 15201 Maple Systems Road.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, no, we’re not moving in.

To be honest, part of me never thought I would go to graduate school for journalism. In fact, part of me was kind of dead set against it for the longest time. I was fortunate enough to land a newspaper job before I graduated from college, and after graduation, it seemed that practical work experience would mean much more to my career in journalism than an advance degree (which was my stock reply to my parents whenever they asked if I had any plans on going to graduate school).

Then a funny thing happened in 2005, about six years into my journalism career: I didn’t want to work in journalism anymore. At that time, the newspaper I worked at and loved had just undergone an ownership change for the worse and laid off a big chunk of its staff. After the initial tremor subsided, it was clear that the work environment, while still tolerable, had started to deteriorate and would likely continue to do so. I started looking around for other jobs. There were some potential opportunities at other newspapers, including some pretty reputable ones, but when I looked out on the media landscape, it was clear that what had just happened at my newspaper was already happening at other media organizations and it would only be a matter of time before it swept across the entire industry, and I didn’t want to put myself in a situation where I would have to experience again and again what I had just endured. As I started looking around for a way out, graduate school was an obvious option, one that was serious enough that I even took the GRE in December 2005 (I wrote about Bob Dylan in the essay portion of the test).

However, I didn’t want to go back for a graduate degree in journalism. While there are pros and cons to journalism graduate school — some of which are laid out in the HuffPo piece I linked to above – for me my resistance ultimately came down to a couple things:

1. Alternative sources of learning: For many of the skills that I would be interested in learning through a graduate program — such as programming, Web design, multimedia, and photography — there are numerous online sources for learning them on my own, for free. As for the conceptual side of a graduate curriculum, anyone following the online discussion about journalism realizes that there’s no shortage of theories and ideas floating around out there these days.
2. Benefits vs. cost: This was really the overriding factor. It’s obviously a significant investment to take a two-year break from my career to go back to school, not to mention adding a five-figure expenditure during those same two years. Given the state of the journalism job market, and the fact that the market will almost certainly continue to contract in the foreseeable future, it seemed the cost-benefit ratio is too far out of whack for me to take that plunge.

Also, I was ready to leave professional journalism, the only work I had known up to that point. I had always wanted to explore other fields of graphic design, but when I was 25, I could still see myself happily working in journalism until I was 30 before trying my hand at other lines of design and eventually picking one to settle into — possibly back in journalism. A little more than a year later, however, not only did I feel like I needed a break from journalism, I increasingly suspected that when I do leave it, it won’t be a temporary detour. It would be for good. The instability in the industry was part of the cause for this change of heart, but just as influential was the daily toll. Even in good times, journalism is a demanding mistress, which is fine when you are young and your friends are equally young and unoccupied with old-folks concerns like family and can hang out with you despite your oddball schedule. When you start to get a bit older, however, you start seeing less of your friends as they get married and have kids, and you feel more isolated and start to wonder, “When the heck am I going to do that?”

So if not journalism, what would I go back to graduate school for? I was working as a newspaper designer then, so going back to school for a design degree seemed like a natural option, and I even started an application to the College of Design at N.C. State right around the time I took the GRE. However, before I finished the application, I got an offer for a non-newspaper design job that seemed to be a great fit for me,  and in the end I chose getting design experience over getting a design degree because I felt that the point of my pursuing a design degree was so that I could land jobs where I could gain non-newspaper design experience, and here was one of those jobs, there for the taking.

In retrospect, I’m glad I made that choice. That job, and the one that followed, not only gave me some valuable experience and portfolio stuffers, but also helped me realize one thing: As much as I love design, I’m not enthralled with the agency setting in which most commercial non-editorial design is being done. Also, in the past few years, I’ve realized that what I am at heart, ultimately, is not so much a designer, a writer, or a programmer, but a storyteller, and that my interest for each of those other crafts stems from the desire to use them to help me tell a story. So the reason I learned Photoshop, the reason I am picking up photography, and the reason I’m trying to hack my way through a PHP book, is not so much that I want to be a pixel jockey, a professional photographer, or a code ninja, but that I want to use all of those skills to weave together rich, in-depth, multifaceted stories about people and things in this world. From that standpoint, I’m glad I didn’t invest tens of thousands of dollars and two years of my life for a masters degree in graphic design before realizing that I probably won’t be happy designing ads in an agency the rest of my life.

Still, in the past few years, I’ve been feeling the on-and-off urge to go back to school for a graduate degree. Among the reasons:

• The devaluation of a bachelor’s degree: A basic college education costs a whole lot more than it used to but isn’t worth what it used to be. Plus, with the recession, there have been more people going back to school or staying in school longer to try to wait out this mess, which means when the jobs do return, I’d be competing with more people with advance degrees in the job market.
• While I can learn skills and concepts on my own that might exceed what one might expect from someone with a bachelor’s degree, it’s more difficult to convey that on a résume sent to an HR department reviewing hundreds of résumes looking for reasons to quickly eliminate all but a handful of them. One thing I like about journalism is that it’s a very inclusive field as far as educational backgrounds go, as you don’t need a particular degree for most jobs in the industry and your portfolio means much more than your résume (at least from my experience). However, in making my career leap away from journalism, I discovered that’s not necessarily the case in other professions, where I’m seeing a greater emphasis on job applicants’ educational background and stricter adherence to requirements on that front. A number of communications-related job postings I’ve seen either require or prefer people with an advance degree, even though that hardly seems necessary from the job description.

However, I had trouble figuring out what program I would want to go back to school for that would be worth the investment. I knew I didn’t want a PhD because of the time and financial commitment involved and because aside from teaching, I wasn’t exactly in love with other aspects of a career in academia. Besides, my wife, upon successfully defending her dissertation, had declared that that’d be the last time anyone in this family goes after a PhD :-). I had already ruled out a degree in graphic design because I couldn’t see myself enjoying the agency setting long-term. I’ve always had a keen interest in science, but not enough to want to do that for a living. For the briefest moment, I toyed with the idea of getting an MBA, but then quickly asked myself, “What the heck are  you going to do with an MBA that you would want to do?” and couldn’t come up with a good answer (nothing against MBAs. It’s just not for me).

Then last fall, I heard that the UNC J-school was going to start offering an online masters program geared toward mid-career professionals, and all of a sudden, the cost-benefit equation changed — the cost side just went down significantly. The curriculum was designed to allow people to keep working while completing the degree, so I won’t be bringing in zero income for two years. Also, since I work at UNC (and hopefully will still be during the coming two years, steep state budget cuts notwithstanding), the program’s total cost after tuition breaks for university employees would come in around $10,000, a great bargain for a masters degree from a J-school with a strong national reputation at a great university. After doing the math, it felt like I would have to come up with an excuse to not take advantage of this opportunity. This was, in many ways, the kind of program format I had been looking for — one that recognized that while many communication professionals would like to go back to school to freshen up their knowledge and skill set, many cannot afford to take a couple years off mid-career to do so. Personally, I think we need more educational programs structured like this, especially when technology has made it much easier to pull off than ever before.

Of course, cost was far from the only motivating factor in my decision to apply to this particular program. For one thing, the curriculum focuses on emerging aspects of communication (not just journalism) that I’m very interested in and will need to understand for the rest of what I hope will be a long career in this field, regardless of whether I work in journalism or other communication-related professions. Also, the lines between journalism and other types of communication are blurring, and there are increasing crossovers in the skill sets needed for various communication professions, so I felt that this curriculum would be beneficial to me no matter which of those professions I end up pursuing. Besides, I’m a big believer in lifelong learning anyway, so this program would fit right into that. While it’s true that I can learn skills and soak up concepts on my own — and have been doing so ever since I left college — I know from experience that a more structured environment will definitely help accelerate my learning, and having a support system and experts and classmates with whom I can discuss ideas and questions was certainly a big selling point as well.

So come August, I’ll be one busy man, juggling family, work, and the journalism graduate program that at one point I figured I would never pursue. In chatting with Rhonda Gibson, the faculty member directing the program, she emphasized that this is not going to be a walk-in-the-park, diploma-mill-type program. I think her approximately exact words were, “We designed this program so you can do it while working 40 hours a week, but you’re not going to be able to do that and much else.” That did sound a bit scary at first, but after giving it some thought, I decided I would be able to make that commitment. Besides, if these next two years go by as fast as the last few have, I’ll be done before I know it.

And what will I do with that masters degree after I get it? I haven’t decided yet, but I’m looking at this as more of a career-booster than a career-changer. I’ve always remained passionate about journalism, but I can’t see myself returning to it fulltime, at least definitely not to the world of journalism I was in before (if that world even exists at all in a few years). There might be things I want to do that are journalism-related, but right now, I still feel that this is a great time to be in journalism as long as you’re not making the bulk of your living from practicing journalism. I don’t know if I’m built for a career in PR, though the last few years have certainly changed a number of misconceptions I had about the field. As I said, I’m a storyteller at heart, so whatever I do in the future will likely revolve around that.

Gypsy 2001-2010

Our cat Gypsy passed away from cancer of the jaw last week. She was a sweet, gentle little girl with a remarkable stubborn streak, and our home isn’t quite the same without her.

A few weeks after I moved into my first apartment, I decided I needed a cat and answered an ad in the Herald-Sun. A Carrboro cat lady introduced me to two kitties up for adoption. They were former ferals from a colony of 40-plus cats that had been living under an abandoned trailer, she said. They were still very shy around humans, but she was sure they could be socialized.

I peered under a futon and saw a pantherlike black cat wedged into the farthest corner, glaring indignantly, and a sweet 7-month-old kitten gazing at me with frightened green eyes. The shy kitten let me pet her head, and I got such a good vibe from her that I decided to adopt her and “foster” her mother.

Nine years, one doctorate, and two moves later, I still had both cats. Gypsy never was a lap cat and stuck out her claws in abject terror whenever I tried to pick her up, but she grew to love attention. She purred loudly when petted, and relaxed so much that she slumped over on one side in a signature “Gypsy flop” when I skritched the sides of her face. She was responsible for my de facto adoption of her mom, Savannah, as she looked so cute and content when curled up with her hissy, temperamental mother that I never had the heart to separate them.

When I started dating John, the cats hid under the couch whenever he came over, but he softened them up with treats and playtime. He came to feed and care for them every day when I had mono, proving to me he was a great guy and to the cats that he would make an acceptable human slave. They, in turn, made John into a cat person. Now he’s the kind of guy who takes in stray cats and tries to rescue lost kittens by the side of the highway. Shortly after we got married, we adopted a third cat, Bingley.

In July of 2010, Gypsy’s arthritis started getting worse, even though she was only nine years old, and one night I noticed her drooling. John took her to the vet, and later that day I got a call: The vet had found a lump on Gypsy’s jaw and diagnosed her with cancer. We decided to take Gypsy home, treat her with painkillers and antibiotics, and spoil her rotten for the remainder of her days. The vet was not optimistic: “You’ll know it’s time for euthanasia when she stops eating,” he told us. “It’ll probably be sooner rather than later.” We went home thinking we’d have Gypsy for only a few more days or weeks. Little did we know that this tough little survivor would be with us for six more months.

As the weeks passed, Gypsy grew very thin, and drooled almost constantly as her tumor grew larger. Yet she retained her ravenous appetite, peppering us with meows whenever we opened the pantry door and muscling Bingley and Savannah out of the way when we put food down. It was impressive to see two big, healthy cats give way to a cancer-stricken waif half their size.

But then, Gypsy had always been the alpha cat when it came to food. She had a passion for “people food,” and would sometimes snatch it off our plates if we weren’t careful. We got into the habit of putting our plates on the floor for her to lick after we were finished, and she would clean them as thoroughly, if not as sanitarily, as any dishwasher. Her favorite human food was raw hamburger. At one point during her illness, she choked on a pill and stopped eating for two days. We got worried, thinking it was her time to go. That night, I made galumpkis—cabbage stuffed with hamburger and rice. On a whim, I offered Gypsy a smidgen of burger. She chomped it down and let loose with an earsplitting “MRRROOOOOOAAAAW!” It was the loudest sound I’d ever heard any feline make—and that includes the lions at the NC Zoo. Relieved, we gave her plenty of burger, which she dug right into.

Gypsy also insisted on getting up on the couch, no matter how hard we tried to keep her (and her stinky drool) off it. We barricaded the couch with pillows, and she jumped onto the arms, her rickety, arthritic legs wobbling, and dragged herself up with her claws. Scolding her did nothing. I started picking her up and putting her back on the floor, and she even got used to that. Eventually—after removing her from the couch and having her re-climb it five times in a row– we decided it was easier to cover the couch than to keep Gypsy off it. She spent most of her last few weeks atop the couch being groomed by Savannah.

A few days before Christmas, Gypsy seemed to grow worse. Some of her fur had gotten matted, and she had stopped using the litterbox. Yet she still had that ravenous appetite, and ran around in excited circles when we brought home Christmas duck. We called the vet on the 24th, but the office was closed for the holidays. On the morning of the 27th, Gypsy sniffed at her food but wouldn’t eat it. We petted her and asked her if it was time, and she purred in response. (Meanwhile Bingley, ever the self-centered one, meowed for attention from the other room.) I called the vet’s office, and was told that Soren, our preferred vet, wouldn’t be in until the next day. We thought Gypsy would be okay until then, and persuaded her to eat a little burger. Fittingly, it would be her last meal.

The next morning, John woke up and found Gypsy passed out. We knew what we had to do, and brought her in to the vet’s to be euthanized. I’ll always worry that we waited too long, but a part of me was glad that we gave her every last bit of life that we could. Maybe that’s what our little burger-chomping, couch-scaling girl would have chosen for herself.

We miss Gypsy, but are happy her suffering is over. Bingley and Savannah miss her, too—the former enemies even curled up together on the couch last night. They seemed to want to comfort one another. If there is a cat heaven, we know Gypsy’s there right now, munching ethically raised burger and sleeping in the laps of the angels.

Note: This post is cross-posted at Coffee Cat’s Ephemera.

Courtney playing in the early January snow

Kids with their sleds after the January snow

Wickham shows off his teeth

Hummingbird at the North Carolina Zoo

Adorable girl with painted face at the Chinese New Year Festival in Raleigh

Dancers at the Chinese New Year Festival in Raleigh

Grooving to the beat at the Turkish Festival in Raleigh

Syd gets into a grooming mood while in Courtney’s arms.

Inverted Mona Lisa made of thread spindles at the new N.C. Museum of Art

Courtney fends off a refreshing glass of corporate brainwashing at the World of Coca Cola in Atlanta.

Giant bee Hummingbird moth at the North Carolina Zoo (thanks to Jim’s comment below for the correct ID)

Butterfly resting on a flower at the North Carolina Zoo

A crucified duck hanging in our bathroom as part of the preparations for making Peking duck

The hauntingly quiet and beautiful grounds of Tintern Abbbey in South Wales, UK.

Courtney and me in Regency-period attire at the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, UK

Courtney at Stonehenge at sunrise. The 4:30 a.m. wakeup call was well worth it.

Panoramic view of England from Glastonbury Tor, one of the unexpected highlights of our UK trip (click to see full size).

One of innumerable picturesque spots in the Cotswolds

The Globe Theater in London before the start of a performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor

An ad painted on the side of a building on the banks of the Thames in London

Saturday, August 7, 2010; evening

It has been several hours since I made it over the fence and away from my god-forsaken former residence. I hear my lo’taurs calling my name and begging me to return, but I have no intention of doing so. I had to get away from there. The lo’taurs’ servitude continues to be unfit for a regal creature such as myself. Bingley, the zebra-skunk-panda-owl hybrid that dares to call himself a cat, has been getting on my nerves as usual. And on top of it all, I just found out my daughter has a tumor on her jaw, which means she’s going to demand even more maternal attention from me than usual. Seriously, I gave birth to you. What more do you want from me? I won’t have to deal with this whole mothering thing if girl lotar hadn’t brought me home along with my daughter nine years ago from the cat colony where I was on the verge of building an empire.

Nonetheless, I have finally escaped my gilded cage and left behind that horrifying, demeaning life of sunbathing, canned food-eating, and human-administered grooming. What’s next? Hmm. My catnip patch is flourishing again. Perhaps I will take this opportunity to expand my nip-dealing business. I’ve seen those neighborhood cats eyeing my patch from a distance. Off I go on my new business venture.

Sunday, August 8, 2010; mid-morning

Just received a visit from my lo’taurs while I was taking a nap in their neighbors’ flowerbed. Girl lo’taur seemed relieved and happy to see me. Can’t say the feeling is mutual. Can’t a cat take a nap after staying out all night without having groveling humans looming over her? The lo’taurs said something about not wanting to pick me up. I see the scratching and hissing have finally gotten through to them. Perhaps they are not as dimwitted as they look (though I admit I do find humans’ inferior intellect to be … amusing). I heard them say something about waiting for me to return to their slave cabin on my own. Little do they know that I have no intention of doing so. The open air is doing me good, and I am enjoying taunting the neighbors’ cat masters through their sliding door, rolling in their flowers while they look on. Perhaps tomorrow I will come back and tease them with some nip.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010; evening

From my hideout in the woods I spied my lo’taurs going door to door handing out flyers with my likeness on them an hour ago, trying to elicit the assistance of their fellow lo’taurs in locating me. The fools! Given the utter failure of their search thus far, I don’t know why they don’t just give up. I’ve looked on with amusement these past two days while they stumbled through the woods looking for me. Girl lo’taur even almost fell into a dry riverbed when she foolishly tried to cross the chasm on a few fallen trees. I overheard them saying that I must still be in the vicinity. I wonder how they knew, considering they haven’t caught sight of me for two days. Somebody must have squealed. I bet it was that black cat with the red collar from down the street. I’ll fix her good. There isn’t enough room in this neighborhood for two black cats.

Friday, August 11, 2010; night

I remain unshackled from the burdens of lo’taurs and ailing daughters. The lo’taurs continue to search for me every evening, all with the same futility. Yet they keep leaving food out for me on their patio at night. Humans are so born to be a slave race. Even as I continue to scorn their love through my prolonged absence, they grovel and beg for a hint of affection from me in the form of allowing them a glimpse of my magnificence. Boy lo’taur has even pointed some strange contraption at the patio. I think it is an image-recording device meant to capture my movements should I get desperately hungry enough to insult my palate with the wet food they are offering as a token of their everlasting obedience to … Hey! What’s that tabby cat doing?! … How dare he eat the food the lo’taurs have offered up to me?! He has just earned himself a spot on my blacklist. HISSSSS!!

Saturday, August 11, 2010; early morning

Blarrgh! I’m still wet. What kind of incompetent lo’taur accidentally sprays a god while watering the lawn? Stupid neighbor! Here I was, minding my own business, catching some early-morning shuteye in his bushes. Next thing I know, I’m being assaulted with a garden hose. And to think, I did him the honor of staying in his yard for two nights last weekend.

Saturday, August 11, 2010; afternoon

The lo’taurs just left. I think I heard them talking about going to church. It amuses me to no end how pathetic humans keep praying to their false idols. Haven’t they learned by now that there’s only one true god — me? Go ahead, lo’taurs, pray to your “Lord” to send me back to you safely, but we all know I’m the only one with the power to do that. Your “god” zero, me one.

Sunday, August 12, 2010; evening

Uh oh, my cover might’ve just been blown. I was out for my evening scavenging meal when one of the lo’taurs’ nosy neighbors saw me. I think he must’ve recognized me from those damned flyers the lo’taurs were handing out a few days ago. Good thing my lo’taurs are away or … wait, what’s that? Oh no, the lo’taur’s car! Quick, must hide.

…

Ah, this car should provide sufficient cover. What’s that neighbor doing? He’s approaching my lo’taurs … he’s talking to them … and pointing in this direction. You better not be tattling on me, human! I knew you were trouble from the minute you moved in. Anyone who owns two barky Scottish terriers is bound to a shady character. Uh oh, lo’taurs heading this way.

…

Girl lo’taur, stop invoking my name in vain. No, I will not come home. Hey, stop reaching under the car. Fine, I’ll find myself another hiding spot. What’s this? Oh, the lo’taurs and their treacherous neighbor are trying to trap me. Ha! Good luck! What’s this? More lo’taurs showing up? I don’t like the looks of this …

…

[Pant pant] Stop … [pant] chasing me … [pant pant] lo’taurs!! How dare  you!! You shall be eternally punished for your insolence. Ooh, I see woods beyond that fence. SANCTUARY!! Quick, over the fence. Hey, what’s this blanket doing over my head? Ah, I’m falling …

…

To make the steppingstones, we followed the instructions from this video.

After our first attempt, we realized that because our tiles were all former pots, their curved surfaces were allowing the concrete to seep through, so we hit up the Scrap Exchange in Durham and raided their stash of flat tiles. We used those to make a steppingstone mosaic of my parents’ two cats as a Mother’s Day present for my mom.

Mom, of course, loved it. In fact, she likes it so much that she couldn’t bear to put it out in the garden and expose it to the elements, even though we told her we had put concrete sealant on it to protect it.

I had a lot of fun making these first couple steppingstones, and now I’m itching to make more. It’s so easy and cheap. A $6 bag of quick-dry concrete can make about 10 steppingstones, and it only takes a couple days to dry. We’ve been talking about making some more for the garden, and I’m even contemplating making our own concrete tiles to cover the grounds of the yard in our next house.

This bike rack allegedly exists, but we didn’t see it.

UPDATE: Since durhambikeracks.com does have a listing for this location, I decided to go back after work today to take another look. I walked around the plaza for a little bit and lo and behold, BIKE RACK! It was hidden away in an alleyway between two stores and well-concealed behind a couple rows of hedges. Not exactly easy to find, but it’s there. So I hereby recant everything I said below about the absence of said bike rack. However, I think the sentiments in the last paragraph still hold true — we still have a long way to go before we have the infrastructure in place to make it convenient for people to use alternative modes of transportation. Oh, that and the fact that biking to Adam & Eve is hilarious.

There’s a grocery store about a 20-minute bike ride from our house. It’s in a plaza that sits on the trail where we bike several times a week, and we usually ride out to the edge of the plaza and then turn around. I keep wanting to ride to that grocery store on the weekends. I can get my grocery shopping done, get in my workout in the process, and do a teensy bit to help the planet by using a bike for at least one of my regular errands. I even went online last night to look for a bike basket for holding groceries.

There’s just one problem: There is no bike rack in front of the grocery store or really anywhere near it. The only time my wife and I rode out to the store, I had to stand outside and guard our bikes while she went in to pick up a couple items. That’s just not going to work if we’re to do this on a regular basis. We drove around the plaza yesterday evening trying to find a bike rack and came up empty, even though according to durhambikeracks.com, there is one (did we just miss it? Anybody know?). It really is surprising, considering this is a busy shopping center right off a major bike trail. It sits in front of a big apartment complex, where I can see people’s bikes sitting in their balconies. Yet, no bike racks in the plaza. Not in front of the grocery store. Not in front of the Starbucks. Not in front of any of the restaurants.

Ironically, we did see one bike rack on the distant fringes of the plaza property — in front of an Adam & Eve. So if I wanted to ride my bike to get some groceries, I would have to ride to a sex-toy emporium (“No, really, I’m just here to pick up some spicy Italian sausage for dinner …”). Who would’ve thought that living an Al Gore-approved lifestyle would be so naughty and titillating.

This case just underscores how far your typical American town is from being ready for its residents to leave their cars at home and use greener means of transportation. Whether it be the insufficient number of bus routes or the dearth of sidewalks and bike lanes, the infrastructure just isn’t there yet to make alternative means of transportation practical or convenient for people. Until that changes, you’re going to have a hard time convincing people to give up their cars. I mean, look at my example above. You undertake the costly project of building a major bike trail that conveniently goes by a shopping center, yet you neglect to do the much easier and cheaper thing — putting a bike rack in the shopping center — to make that trail useful as an alternative means of transportation. Without a bike rack, the trail will always only serve a recreational purpose. Lots of people will bike on it every day, but when it comes time for them to get groceries, most of them will still climb into their cars even if they, like me, want to bike there instead. The same holds true for making people walk a mile to get to the nearest bus stop or spend 45 minutes on public transit just to accomplish regular daily tasks.

I hate mowing grass, but I do enjoy working in the yard on flowers, shrubberies, and vegetables. My big gardening project this spring is rebuilding my vegetable garden. While I’ve had some pretty good harvests of Chinese long beans and cucumbers every year, maintaining the old garden was a pain. It was was lined with low, ground-hugging bricks, which didn’t do much to keep out weeds. One of my biggest problems during the growing season the last several years has been clearing away overgrown grass that engulf my vegetable vines. This task is made doubly hard by the fact that the old vegetable garden was built right up against the fence between my yard and the neighbor’s, meaning I can’t get on the other side to get rid of weeds on that side.

Two weekends ago, we built a small, raised, stone bed for tomatoes. That went pretty well and got my landscaping juices flowing. So this past weekend, we bought some wood boards and a few bags of soil and compost and set about redoing the entire vegetable garden. I started with digging up the bricks that formed the old one, then leveling the ground. The frames for the new beds were pretty easy to make — just drill a few holes on each board and hammer in a few nails to join them in a rectangle. We put the frames flat on the ground, covered the existing soil inside with a couple layers of newspapers to kill some of the old grass, and dumped soil, compost, and mulch on top. The new beds are about a foot and a half away from the fence, just enough room for me to get behind them to easily weed and harvest vegetables.

We christen one of our new beds with zucchini seedlings, though we planted them way too close together. We’ll have to do some transplanting this week. We planted 12 seedlings in a 2-by-6 bed, only to find out later in the day that you should leave three to four feet between each plant. Oops!

She was probably right. And then a day later, I went and did this:

So, here are the blogs I’ve got going right now:

• Matters of Varying Insignificance: Running since 2008 (though the early months of the blog were lost thanks to a hacked server), this is my first and still primary blog, where I write about anything and everything, but mostly journalism and travel since those are two of my main interests.
• WYSIWYG: A photo blog I started last year as my interest in photography grew. I update this sporadically, usually right after a trip where I take a few hundred pictures.
• JZ’s Posterous Potpourri: An odds & ends blog I started last month as a way to acquaint myself with Posterous. The platform quickly grew on me, and this blog has replaced the Odds & Ends section on Matters of Varying Insignificance, primarily because it’s ridiculously easy to post tidbits to Posterous.
• The Zhus: A blog I started a couple months ago when I decided to start working on a book about the extended family on my father’s side. I wanted to start the blog as a way to keep myself on track with the book. This actually started out as a Tumblr blog before I discovered Posterous, and again, I loved Posterous so much that I decided to move the blog to that platform instead, though the old Tumblr blog remains and still gets an auto update when I post to Posterous.
• Chicken Feet & Clam Chowdah: The aforementioned cooking blog, which sprang to life from our fondness for cooking and eating.

So there you go, five blogs, and somehow, without spending every waking moment blogging, I manage to post to these sites pretty regularly, with the exception of WYSIWYG, where the posts come in spurts (by the way, the feeds for the other four blogs are all in the right sidebar of this blog).

For me, part of the reason for all this blogging is that it’s fun. But it’s also about exploring various platforms and learning more about the way information is distributed, discovered, and shared on the Web — an essential part of my work. I don’t know if my blogging efforts are fragmented to the point where it hurts each individual effort, but I do know that I’ve been learning something with each one. I started this blog two years ago to learn about blogging, and the experience has taught me a ton about the craft and about attracting readers, working with CMSes, designing WordPress sites, promoting your work, constructing my digital presence, and grooming some semblance of an online community.

Notice how my blog-creating pace picked up considerably after I discovered Posterous. I know I’m sounding like a shill for the company, but the platform really has impressed me with its ease of use. It’s so easy to post stuff that I don’t even have to think about it; just send a quick e-mail or click the bookmarklet in my browser and it’s done. Heck, it’s even easier than Twitter since you don’t need to sit there boiling everything down to 140 characters. That’s why I’ve written before that I think it’s going to be platforms like Posterous that will make blogging truly ubiquitous among the general population.

Now, somebody take my keyboard away before I start another blog!! (Hmm … I could do a blog about our pottery making …)

I’ve started working on a book about the history of my father’s side of the family. It’s an idea that I’ve been toying with for a few years now, and our trip back to China in 2008-09 convinced me to do it. I’ve started a Tumblr blog to post updates about my progress with the book, and I’m hoping having to post to that blog on a regular basis will help keep me on track with the book. I don’t know if the book will have mass appeal or not, though I’m writing it for a broader audience than just my family. In any case, even if my family and I are the only people to read it, I would still want to do this. I’ve put up an introductory post on the Tumblr blog giving more details about the book and why I want to write it. I’m going to add a widget on the side of this blog to pipe in the updates from that blog. Stay tuned for more.

We also took some video of the snow, including a couple clips of our cats tentatively venturing to the edge of the snow:

A clip of our yard covered in snow and a giant icicle that formed on our gutter:

Bongo decided to flop down in front of the door after his walk one afternoon and refused to budge. Our walks were always … adventuresome.

A week before Christmas, I found out that my friend Ryan’s beagle, Bongo, had lung cancer. I found out last night that they had to put him down on Wednesday. Bongo wasn’t my dog, but Ryan and I shared a townhouse right after I had graduated from college when he adopted the beagle, so I helped raise him for a couple years, and I certainly had a strong attachment to him.

One of my earliest memories of Bongo was the morning after Ryan brought him home. I had gone to work shortly after he brought Bongo home the evening before, so I saw little of the beagle. The next morning, while I was still fast asleep, the beagle pushed open my door, darted into the room, jumped onto my bed, and stuck his nose in my face to say hi. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, though it took some doing for the beagle and me to get comfortable with each other. Bongo was the first large pet I lived with, and it took a while for me to adjust to him. Before that, my strongest memories of dogs was being snapped at by one on my first night in the United States and being chased by two of them while at a garage sale when I was young. After we got Bongo, I had to learn to beagle-proof the house (he loved getting into trash cans and looted the pantry on multiple occasions when we didn’t close the door all the way). He wasn’t exactly the smartest dog, he frequently tried to steal food from your plate when you weren’t looking, and we didn’t exactly get off to a great start as he was quite territorial for a while while trying to declare himself second-in-command of the house behind Ryan.

Our walks were almost always adventuresome, as ol’ beagle tended to follow his nose and pay heed to little else. On one of the first times I took him out for a walk, someone had thrown out a Bojangles bag in the middle the road with a biscuit still inside, and the moment Bongo caught whiff of that crack-seasoning goodness, he made a bee line for it with such determination and will that he dragged me with him, and I simply couldn’t pull him away from the bag. Eventually all I could do was stand there and greet passing vehicles — which had to veer into the other lane to go around us — with a sheepish grin. Yet, over time, Bongo and I grew close, and even years after I had moved away, he was always excited to see me whenever I visited.

Finding out that Bongo had cancer left me stunned, and though I had accepted that the probable end was likely soon to come, it still doesn’t make it any easier to lose an old friend. I hadn’t had a chance to touch base with Ryan since the holidays, and now I wish I had gone to see Bongo sometime in the last couple weeks. At least I can find a little bit of comfort in knowing that he is no longer suffering from his ailment, and that he led a very pampered life after he was adopted. Ever since I lived with Bongo, every time I see someone walking a beagle while I’m driving/biking/walking, I can’t help but smile and think of my old beagle pal, and it’ll be even more so now.

A few more Bongo pictures from over the years:

From left: JC, Ryan, Bongo, and me after a few drinks, circa 2006.

Bongo loved his  milkbones.

Here’s the front, back, and inside flaps of the dust jacket for the book:

On Sunday, we drove to Salisbury to visit the Old Stone Winery, which we’ve been wanting to do for a few months since getting a taste of their sweet muscadine wine at a relative’s home. We did a wine tasting and sampled nine varieties, and that was just their sweet wines (they also have 10 dry wines). We ended up taking home six bottles. If you like wine and are driving past Salisbury, this place is definitely worth checking out.

Picking Grapes Pictures

Old Stone Winery Pictures