Thoughts on cats

First,

Sometimes we think of our cats we left behind in Phoenix and miss them. Here are Wilbur and Baby Cat lounging on the wall of our old patio.

Baby Cat was a stray who kind of adopted us along with her mother, Mama Cat, but we had to relocate Mama Cat because Wilbur did not like her and would not play nice. We had adopted Wilbur from the Humane Society and she was a good cat. Baby Cat wanted nothing but to cuddle with Wilbur, and Wilbur tolerated this. And so we had two fur kids.
We never really considered bringing them with us to New Zealand though. Bringing Baby Cat seemed silly because she was just someone who we let hang around. It would have been like bringing the neighbor kid.

Leaving Wilbur behind was a little tougher I thought. She had been 'officially' adopted into our family and we would be pretty horrible people not to include her in our plans. But the cost was prohibitive - we got an estimate of $5,000 for the whole process, including vet fees, travel, storage. Aside from the money though, we worried that an overseas journey would give Wilbur post-traumatic stress disorder. She was not a particularly easy-going cat, and I didn't think she'd cope well. The last thing we wanted was to spend all that time and money to immigrate her and then spend the next 10 years caring for a schizophrenic cat. To be fair, we've never heard of any cats suffering from immigration-related mental disorders, but it could have happened.

So we left them behind, which caused us no small amount of stress. Despite searching far & wide, we could not find homes for them. We ended up surrendering them to the Humane Society. It was terrible and sad. I still feel awful whenever I think about it.

Second,

About a month ago I took a taxi home from the airport after a work trip. As the taxi driver pulled into the driveway, I saw a cat laying in the middle. She did not look up or run away as the cab approached. When I got out and went to inspect, I found the cat was dead. This was perplexing.

About that moment, the next door neighbors came out of their house. We hadn't met them yet. Here's a tip for our readers: When meeting the new neighbors for the first time, a good opening line is not: "Do you guys have a cat? Is it this dead one?"

It turned out it was their cat, and it turned out the little girl had been rather attached. A pretty horrible scene followed. Out of respect for the dead and little girls who mourn them, I won't go into details.

Those neighbors have still not really warmed up to us.

Third,

We read a great article about giving birth by a woman called Tricia Anderson. She compares labouring cats to labouring women. It's called Out of the laboratory: back into the darkened room? Here's an excerpt:

Everyone knows that cats need to give birth undisturbed in a dark, secluded place - perhaps preparing a softly lined box in the darkest corner of the furthest room underneath the bed. And everyone who knows about cats understands that you must never disturb a cat in labour or a newly delivered cat and her litter of kittens. Otherwise the cat's labour will stop or she may reject her kittens. Everyone knows this.

But just imagine that one day, quite a long time ago, a group of well-meaning scientists decided that they wanted to study how cats give birth. So they asked anyone who had a cat, that when she went into labour to bring them to their laboratory - a brightly-lit, noisy, modern scientific laboratory where scientists could study them, by attaching lots of monitors and probes, surrounding them by strange technicians constantly coming in and out with clipboards.... In the laboratory, the labouring cats could hear the sound of other cats in distress, and there were no private dark corners for them to retreat to, but only rows of brightly-lit cages under constant scrutiny of the scientists.

And the scientists studied the labouring cats in their brightly-lit cages for many years, and saw that their labours were erratic, how they slowed down and even stopped, and how heart-breakingly distressed the cats were. Their mews and their cries were terrible. They saw how many of the the kittens were deprived of oxygen and were born shocked and needing resuscitation. And, after many years the scientists concluded: 'well, it seems that cats do not labour very well'.

Then, because the scientists were caring people and wanted to help the poor cats, they invented lots of clever machines to improve the cats' labours, to monitor the oxygen levels in the kittens; they invented pain-killing drugs and tranquillisers to ease the poor cats' distress, and drugs to make labour become regular and stop it slowing down. They even developed clever emergency operations to save the distressed kittens' lives.

The scientists wrote scientific papers which told everyone about the difficulties they had observed and how cats do not give birth very well, and all about the clever feline birth technology they had invented. The newspapers and television spread the word, and soon everyone started bringing their cats to the laboratory in labour, because of all their clever feline technology and of how many kittens' lives they had saved. Looking round at all the complicated technology, people were heard to say: "This must be the safest place in the world for cats to give birth in".

Years passed, and the workload at the scientists' laboratories grew busier and busier. They had to take on new staff and train them in their feline labour techniques, and slowly the original scientists grew old and retired. But sadly the new up-and-coming technicians didn't know about the original experiment; they didn't even know it was an experiment. They had never seen cats giving birth in softly-lined boxes in the furthest, darkest corner of the furthest room - why, what a dangerous idea! They were absolutely convinced that cats do not give birth very well without a lot of technical assistance - why, think of all the years of scientific evidence they had collected - and would go home at night feeling very pleased with themselves for all their clever and good work in saving cats' and kittens' lives.

She goes on to argue that birth is safer at home, and that we need to get out of the "laboratory" and into the "darkened room". You can read the rest of the article here. It really struck a chord with us and affirmed our decision to give birth at home. (Our due date is in 4 weeks and 3 days, by the way. But who's counting?)

Ready for winter

One thing that a lot of immigrants from America and the U.K. struggle with here is the lack of heating/warmth in houses. For reasons that are still not clear to us 10 months after arriving, Kiwis don't put a lot of stock into warming their houses. This seems to be changing, and newer houses will at least have insulation and sometimes double glazed (2-pane) windows. That's great for keeping warmth in, but doesn't really get the house warm in the first place. It's still really common for a house to have no form of heating at all. If that's the case, you have to buy plug-in radiators or install your own heating system. Lots of houses have wood-burning stoves to heat them, but this will only heat the room with the stove in it (usually the living room), and the rest of the house will either be cold or will have plug-in heaters. Central heating seems to be nonexistent in houses.

When we moved into our house in February, the only form of heating it had was a night store heating unit.

It's basically a radiator. We understand it's filled with bricks and weighs about 2 ton. It draws energy at night (when power is cheaper) to heat the bricks, and then slowly releases the heat all day. We've never actually turned the thing on though, and really have no idea how well it works. The quirky thing is that it's located in the dining room - so we could have a nice toasty dinner, and then retire to the living room to freeze. No thanks.

We knew we would need a more comprehensive heating strategy this winter. The answer: heat pumps.

Heat pumps are kind of like window air conditioning units, except they attach to the wall rather than hang from a window, and they blow both hot and cold air. They are the "modern" heating option in New Zealand.

We got in touch with a heat pump installation guy who Gareth knows through his work. He came to the house with his glossy brochures and sold us not one but TWO heat pumps: one for our living room and one for our hallway/bedrooms. We went for one of the more powerful Fujitsu models for our lounge (9 kW), and a smaller one in the hallway.

The heat pump is mounted to the wall on a bracket, and the hoses run to the outside where there's another unit with a fan in it.

We were told this would be a one-day job, but in the end it took 2. There was also some involvement by Action Alarm, after heat pump installer guy accidentally blew a fuse that knocked out our alarm system, requiring a visit from another repairman. But in the end, we got there. And now we bask in the warmth of our giant heat pump.

Autumn is here, and winter is just around the corner. We are ready, winter. Bring it.

A few things

As D-Day approaches, we are less and less interested in what is going on outside around us and more focused on what is going on in my uterus. I think mother nature designed it to happen this way. It can't be helped.

But a few things to comment on this week:

There was a great thunderstorm on Wednesday night, the first one we'd seen since moving here. We watched the hills over our house as a herd of cows rushed to lower ground to find shelter. We were battered with wind and rain. The lightning here was different from lightning we used to see in Arizona. There were no distinct bolts zig-zagging across the sky, but just general light in the sky. Not sure if that's a hemisphere difference, or just a characteristic of this particular storm.

My birthday was also this week, so I had to take part in a new birthday tradition. Here, it seems, the birthday person buys cake for the non-birthday people. This is a new one for me. And I'm not sure if it's a New Zealand-wide thing or just a quirk where I work. I asked around, but no one seemed really sure. It seems the concept is not unusual in NZ, but at my work it has become part of the culture. So the rule is, when it's your birthday, YOU bring some cake or other treat to share with everyone. There is another person in my office who had a birthday this month and who has still not brought in anything to share, and he is hassled about it on an almost daily basis. So I was not about to break this important tradition. I brought a triple chocolate cake. Everyone was pleased.

There is a story in the NZ Herald online today about a Kiwi couple who moved to America and then committed suicide "after growing disillusioned with their US life". Eeek. I don't remember it being quite that bad over there... then again, we didn't live in Utah... (kidding, kidding!)

Of course, the very biggest thing going on this week (bigger even than my birthday) seems to be the U.S. Congress passing health care reform. This story made the front page of the World news section in our local paper. The general sentiment over here seems to be, "what's the big deal?" People here understand this is not universal health care, or "socialised medicine", but just a few tweaks to the existing scheme to make private health insurance more accessible. One woman in my office cornered me at lunch with the newspaper in hand to ask why Americans were so upset about this legislation. It's a little weird being asked to explain how "Americans" feel about something, especially when the view I need to explain is not one I personally hold. Personally, I think health care reform is long overdue and that this bill is only a step in the right direction. It's hard for me to understand those people who are shouting it down, but I did my best. My best is this:

In New Zealand, health care is a basic human right, much like education. But in America, it just isn't. It's something you have to earn.

It seems this is really hard for anyone outside of America to understand. A story published in our local paper (which was actually taken from the Times of London) said just that: Europeans will have a hard time understanding Americans' violent reaction to this bill. (I'm paraphrasing there.) At least in my small world here in Christchurch, that seems to hold true. No one can understand how it could be controversial for the government to ensure access to health care for its people. The rest of the industrialised world has been doing it for decades.

But anyway, this is not a blog about politics, so I'll leave it at that. I'll go back to watching the little man in my belly try to climb up my ribs...

We love Hell

Of course, we're talking about Hell Pizza, the most awesome pizza chain ever. Here, in no particular order, are all the reasons we love Hell.

1. All of Hell's pizzas have clever names like Greed, Sloth, and Lust.

2. Hell's website has little devils running around with pitchforks. You can pick them up by clicking on them, then drag them up to the top of the page and drop them back down again. Ordering pizza online has never been so much fun: try it!

3. The kids who work at hell wear black and have pierced faces. It's what you imagine real hell would look like.

4. This billboard we saw when we visited in 2006:

5. The pizza tastes really good.

6. If there are any leftovers, which is rare unless you have a fetus taking up the space where your stomach should be, you can keep it in Hell's very cleverly designed to-go box. Here is my left over Purgatory pizza in the pizza box. I've started to detach around the perforated edges:
And when all folded up:

A pizza coffin! Love it.

7. We like buying stuff from people who are funny and clever.

For the 'only in America' file

Someone at work brought this story to my attention this week: From New Zealand's news website, Stuff:

Buy Hummer, get free shotgun

By MATT CAMPBELL - SMH

An American Hummer dealership is sending the Hummer off with a bang, giving away a free shotgun with every new car.

An American Hummer dealership will give away a Browning Citori White Lightning shotgun, worth $2,000, with every new Hummer they sell.

Lynch Hummer in Chesterfield, Missouri is one of the highest selling Hummer dealerships in America, and last year they decided to add guns to their showroom.

With the recent ‘wind-down’ announcement from GM (the makers of Hummer) the dealership’s owner, Jim Lynch, says that he wants his Hummers to go out with a bang.

"There is now real reason to believe that the current inventory on hand at dealers may be the last of the new Hummers, we wanted to send them off with something memorable," he says.

"Browning and Hummer are prestigious brands and American Icons - bringing them together is a natural fit.

"The guns have been a huge hit with our Hummer customers and now we are taking the 'Guns and Hummers' concept one step further," says Lynch.

Not everyone who ends up behind the wheel of a Hummer will also get their finger on a Browning trigger, though - buyers will be bound by the same legal requirements as any gun purchaser before they get their gun.

The free guns are only available while stocks last, and a gun rack isn’t included in the purchase price.

It's no wonder New Zealanders think Americans are gun-crazed maniacs!

Bump update

We have rounded a bend and are now in the final stretch - 31 weeks down, 9 to go. At my last midwife visit, she said the boy's head was 1/5 into my pelvis already. He's making his way for the exit!

We had a small meltdown at 30 weeks when we realised how much we still have to do to prepare for the boy's arrival. So we made a list (we're list people). Now we have a long list to look at and freak out about. Gareth suggested we make a smaller list from the list. The smaller list would include things we need to buy, separate from the list of things we need to do. This might make both lists seem more manageable. We could probably spend the next 9 weeks discussing and organising the list(s).

Let's focus on what we have done. The boy's room is painted a nice shade of green now. The hideous light fixture the previous owners left in the room has been replaced with one we like much better. The boy has a cot (crib) and it's fully assembled. He also has a toy box, which maybe was not essential at this stage, but the place selling the cots had nice toy boxes, and we got a deal by buying them together... We have lots of clothes for the boy to wear, thanks to hand-me-downs and the packages of adorable tiny things arriving weekly from my mom in America.

We've bought a buggy (stroller), but we don't have it yet. This is New Zealand, and sometimes you have to wait for stuff. Small economy and all. We wanted the green and black version of the Urban Jungle by Mountain Buggy, but it wasn't in stock, so we ordered one and we now wait for it. It should be arriving any day now. We also ordered the 'carry cot' connection, which will double as a bassinet in the early days.

I break into a cold sweat whenever I think about car seats, so we haven't got one of those yet. But need to do it. Need to do it soon.

We're still planning to do a home birth, so there's lots of extra preparation we need to do for that. Our midwife gave us a list (another list!) of supplies we should have on hand for the birth, which is a little daunting. Towels, wash clothes, hot water bottles, buckets, a container for the placenta... oh yes. We're also going to rent a birthing pool and really should start looking into that very soon. And Gareth has been gathering supplies to make a 'birthing mat' for me to labour/sweat/bleed on. That's true love.

Soon we start our antenatal classes with Parents Centre. These are free. They're 2-hour classes once a week for 8 weeks. The last one is the day before our due date, so if the boy comes early, we might miss out on the last class or two. We're really hoping they front-load the important information...

Avalanche peak

Yesterday Gareth took part in the Avalanche Peak Adventure Race - a 22km running race up to the top of Avalanche Peak in Arthur's Pass national park and back down again, along a long rocky river bed. I'm really glad he took the camera so that I could see what he saw up there - I never would have been able to get there without a helicopter. The climb is 1,178 metres high (3,864 feet), which wouldn't be so bad, except that you have to climb that in just 3km (1.86 miles). Gareth says, "Brutal!"

You don't need a helicopter or legs of steel though. We bring you the goods right here:

(Those are 2 keas - alpine parrots - hanging out in the mountain mist.)

In this last photo, you can just see the specks of runners coming down the river bed. This photo was taken from the finish line, which was cruelly located on top of a hill.