We got a postcard in the mail today from Troy, from Dubai. And by “we” I mean, clearly, our cats. Oh yes. Wanna see what he wrote on it?

Katy & Lily,
This place is a kitten’s dream! Three words for you:
World’s Largest Catbox
And this time of year, it is purfect!
xoxo,
Papa

If you’ve been following my Flickr photoset 180+ Photos for Troy, and you know that today was Day 179, you might be wondering if Troy is coming home tomorrow. But then you might notice that I added that plus sign to the name of the set.

Nope, Troy isn’t coming home tomorrow. I’m being vague about the actual date because of a little thing called national security. You’d be amazed (or maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know) by the things Troy isn’t allowed to tell me, and the things I’m not supposed to publish here on this blog. You might notice I’ve never mentioned the name of Troy’s ship, for example. I don’t tell you where he’s been till after he’s been there. And I won’t mention the day he’s coming home till he’s here, probably. That’s just the way things are in a post-9/11 world. But don’t feel too bad for us; Troy will be home very soon. The rest of his shipmates won’t be home for a few more months, so we’re actually getting him back early. I’m counting that as a blessing and not getting upset about having to add a plus sign to the name of my photoset.

And very quickly after Troy gets home, we’re up and moving across the country again. We’ll have a few days to relax first. We hope to see most of our friends once more, we plan to take Annalie to Disneyland, we’ll eat at our favorite restaurants. The packers and movers will descend on our house like locusts on a field, quickly and efficiently wrapping and packing and boxing and taping, and taking most of our earthly possessions with them on a giant truck. We’ll follow a few days later: Troy, me, Annalie, my mom, both cats and the portable litterbox, driving across the country in our so-very-worth-it minivan, stopping once or twice to see family and friends along the way.

When we get there we’ll make ourselves comfortable in a hotel or base lodging before we start looking in the local classifieds and online for houses to rent and following up on the houses Troy’s already been researching from the ship. We’ll look at so many houses and neighborhoods in the span of a few days that they will all blur together. It’s all rather crazy but it’s also part of the routine of moving. I’ve been doing this every couple of years since I married Troy, nine days shy of my 21st birthday, and I kind of love it and look forward to it every time.

Of course I’ll miss it here. I’ll miss the sunny, warm winter days when we could go to the park in short sleeves and flip-flops. I’ll miss our fantastic house and the view from our deck and the palm trees and the bougainvillea. I’ll miss our town and our little mall with the pottery studio and all the fountains and the two-level Target. I’ll really miss all the good friends we have around here and I’m trying not to think about that just yet. I want to enjoy my last times with them, to hang out and talk and laugh with them, and not be dragged down by a heavy heart. So I’m putting those emotions off till after we’ve left. They are there, hovering around the edges, but I’m keeping them at bay for now.

And by the time I give those emotions free reign, Troy will be home. I’m pretty sure we’ll be so happy to have him with us again that we won’t spend much time being sad. Aside from being kind and thoughtful and just generally awesome, this is the guy who sends his cats postcards about how they’d like the desert because it’s the world’s biggest catbox, just because he knew it would make us laugh. He’s good at making people laugh, and he does it a lot. Even 3,000-mile road trips are a blast with Troy.

Hey, that reminds me! A while back I painted Troy a mug. He’d mentioned that he would like for me to paint him one, and I told him to let me know what he wanted, and then he got distracted and never did. And then I had a fantastic idea and painted him a mug to send him for Christmas. I never blogged it because I didn’t want him to see it and ruin the surprise, but he’s had the mug for a couple of months now so I think I can post the photos.

It’s a fact: Troy is awesome. I regularly thank him, after I’ve heard stories about someone else’s husband being obtuse or irresponsible or neglectful, for being awesome. I painted this mug half in serious tribute, half as an inside joke. And at least once, when Troy was carrying this mug down a passageway on the ship, someone read the mug out loud as he passed by and he was able to cheerfully say, “You’re welcome!” See? Like I said: AWESOME.

After our morning’s adventure at Sunny Jim Cave and La Jolla Cove, we still had a few hours to kill before they would turn the water back on at our house. So we headed to Balboa Park.

Balboa Park is one of my favorite places in the world. It’s a beautiful park, right in the middle of the city. Our world-famous zoo is there, along with a bunch of museums, gardens, and performing arts centers. It’s a really fun place to explore, and easy to spend a day there.

Tuesdays are especially cool at Balboa Park, because some of the museums are free to county residents and military. There’s a rotating schedule—different ones are free each week—so before we left the house we checked to see which ones were free that week. We almost decided on the Museum of Man, an anthropology museum which is one of my favorites, but since Brenda doesn’t live in the county she couldn’t get in free, and the admission to that one is steepish. We decided the Mingei International Museum would do very nicely instead. It’s a museum of art from cultures all over the world and looked really interesting.

Plus the Nikigator is outside the Mingei. Whee, art that kids are encouraged to climb all over! Even the moms got in on the fun.

That’s a tiny little me, reflected in each one of those shiny marbles. Too bad I’ll be in Omaha during all of the next 7 Days run.

Inside the Mingei (which is well worth the price of admission) the best thing we saw saw this project called Fisch Out of Water. It was a display of wire jellyfish, hung from the ceiling. I especially got a kick out of the fact that some of the jellyfish were crocheted.

There were tons of cool, interesting, unique pieces of art in this little museum. Unfortunately, most of it is tempting to small children’s hands. It didn’t help that some of the art looked a heck of a lot like benches and tables. There were security guards hovering everywhere, reminding us anxiously not to touch the art. It’s not like Brenda and I were ignoring our kids, either, we were right on top of them reminding them to keep their hands behind their backs so they wouldn’t forget and touch anything.

Brenda and Bug and I could have stayed much longer than we did, drifting from room to room and leisurely examining our favorite pieces. Annalie was champing at the bit to get back outside, though. And we didn’t want to end up on the wrong end of town at rush hour.

On the way back to the car we stopped by the organ pavilion, thinking the kids might like to run across the stage. Annalie decided she needed to climb over each and every row of benches on her way to the stage. Okay then.

Bug made a beeline for the stage and sat on the edge, dangling her feet while she watched Annalie climb the benches. Once Annalie got there, the real fun began.

Annalie and Bug danced and ran and chased each other around that stage for a good twenty minutes or more. Brenda and I sat in the front row and enjoyed a break. We stayed until we noticed that the girls had apparently worn themselves out and were having a quiet chat on the stage, then herded the girls toward the parking lot, making vague plans to go back one Sunday for the free organ concert. Not only did we make it home before traffic got too gnarly, but when we got there the water was back on two hours ahead of schedule.

Go see the cave we’d been meaning to see for years? Check. Climb all over festively-tiled giant alligator statue? Check. Crocheted wire jellyfish? Check. Let kids burn off excess energy before going home? Check. Expose children to local geography, wildlife, and culture? Check, check and check. Tourist Tuesday? Win!

I’ve been on a kick of painting these round little mugs lately, they feel really nice to hold. This one is in my Etsy shop for anyone who wants it.

This one, I painted for my friend Jen as a birthday gift.

Annalie and I were sitting outside on the patio today and Katy was sitting at the door, yowling to be let out. Poor cat. She really wants to be an outdoor cat, but when we got her from a shelter in Phoenix she was already declawed, so we don’t feel right letting her outdoors.

Took our Day 98 photo for Troy while we were out there. I keep accidentally taking these off-center self-portraits. I kinda like them.

Not long ago, Brenda introduced me to her favorite pen, the Uniball Signo DX 0.38mm. They’re Japanese gel pens with a really nice stroke and a fine-but-not-too-fine line, and they are awesome. Brenda had only ever been able to find them at a local Japanese bookstore for about $4 apiece. Then we found the fabulous Tokyo Pen Shop, where they sell our favorite pens for half the price we’d been paying at the Japanese bookstore.

We ordered a dozen to get free shipping, and then I noticed they had an offer on the homepage for a free orange pen if you ordered a certain amount of merchandise, which we had. So I wrote a quick email explaining that my friend and I loved the Uniball Signo DX pens, and we’d love a free orange one. I got a really nice email back from one of the website’s owners, saying that she probably would have included that brand, since that was all we’d ordered, but that since I’d written now she knew to include two orange pens. How cool is that!? I will definitely be patronizing their shop again.

More flower scarves! I keep making these because people keep asking me to crochet them. Whenever I start another one I groan a little bit because in my head these are a pain to make, but once I get started I remember, oh right, these are actually pretty fun!

I’ve been thinking about writing up a pattern for a flower scarf and putting it in my Etsy shop, along with the spiral squares and snowball crochet patterns. It wouldn’t be exactly the same as the scarves I make because I make up the patterns for the flowers as I go along, but it would be similar. What do you guys think, should I write up that pattern? Would you buy it for a couple of bucks? (Oh, and these particular scarves are in my shop waiting for OneScrappyGal to go buy them.)

I got a pretty exciting present earlier this week: a new lens for my D40! (Pardon me while I geek out just a little bit.) I’d been wanting a lens with a better zoom, so when my friend Joe (my camera teacher) saw a good deal on a 55-200mm VR lens he told Troy about it. Troy bought it for me, and told me he’d bought me a present that would be coming in the mail, but he didn’t tell me what it was. I truly had no clue this is what he was sending me. I might have actually squealed a bit when I opened the box. Today Annalie and I went to the park, where I tried the new lens out.

It’s much bigger than my other two lenses, but it’s not much heavier thanks to being made of plastic. It’s easy to use, thanks to the autofocus.

I love my new lens! Yay! Thank you so much, guys, for your conspiracy in making me a better photographer. Or at least an amateur with fun photography toys.

This park has a new, modern, colorful playground with deep mulch all around it. Annalie went down one of the plastic slides and then made a beeline for the 30-year-old slide and monkey bars sitting in hard-packed dirt.

These mystery fruits (nuts? seeds?) were on a tree in the park. They were about the size of walnut, maybe a little smaller. I have no idea what they are, but they’re a really pretty shade of reddish-orange.

This photo pretty much sums up Annalie’s attitude about the tall slide. It also makes me laugh.

Love that light, and the girl. And my pens and my new lens. To sum up, we’re all good around here, good and happy.