Meet the Kittens!

So Adam's Uncle is an attorney and most unusually runs a kitty cat rescue out of his law office. Well, one of their clients found these two 4 week old kittens at one of their construction sites, they'd been abandoned. Well, they need a bit more care than they can do easily so I have offered to foster them. I haven't decided if we will keep them or not. The cool thing about fostering is that it leaves me free to help other kitties in the future. Right now they're called Salt and Pepper but that may change. We'll see. I believe the white one is a boy and the dark one is a girl. Right now they live in a very large dog kennel when not being loved on. 

Its very sad- someone broke BOTH of their tails. Pepper's break is just a little kink towards the end of her tail but Salt's tail is like nothing I've ever seen. Its like a U-bend. The poor thing. But the markings on his head crack me up. Its like he's got a toupee. 

Gabby!

So for those of you who might not know we adopted a kitty cat the first week of March this year. Her name is Gabby and she is WONDERFUL. But since she's a rescue kitty and she's a long hair cat, her fur was all matted when she was rescued and she had to be shaved. So she had one funky hair cut when we got her. So I've decided to do a picture post of her progress thus far. The first two pics are the day she came home. The little blue t-shirt is b/c she got cold without her fur. 

This was the day she took her t-shirt off. Since she didn't shiver or nothin' I just left it off. 

You can see here she's finally starting to look more orange and less pink/white. And getting some tufts of hair. Its goofy - she got her belly fur FIRST and then seemed to grow in tufts from front to back. 

Last but not least this is from this evening. She has STRIPES! WOW....

The Shower Saga

So in our master bathroom there is no tub only a floor to ceiling glass shower stall. Right now there are only 2 things I can say about it that are positive:

1. The water pressure out of the shower head is pretty good.

2. The steam feature (it is also a mini steam room) will come in handy come the cold and flu season. 

So our home inspector noted that the water went from cold to hot to cold. We requested that the sellers have a licensed plumber come out and fix it. They agreed. Our realtor stuck his arm in the shower during our final walk through and said that the water got warm. Like an idiot I took his word for it and didn't investigate further. 

Well he's right- it does get warm - IF it is the first thing of the day to be used. B/c first you get the cold water that has been sitting in the air conditioned pipe, then you get the warm water thats been sitting in the pipe outside, then it goes back to cold and it STAYS THERE. 

So for the first 2.5 weeks of our home ownership the only way to take a shower and not catch a chill was to turn the steam on and jump in and out of the cold water. I'm sure there is a spa somewhere that will tell you thats healthy but its NOT what I want when I'm tired and want to relax. The reason we don't just use the hall bath is:

A. There's no shower bar in there and shower bars are surprisingly expensive and since we just bought a house we're a tad broke right now. 

B. Right now the cat box is in the hall bath tub b/c its out of the way and that way humans can actually use that toilet with out having to straddle a litter box. 

So upon realizing the shower was NOT repaired I called my realtor, who called the sellers realtor who gave me the name and number of the plumber who was supposed to fix the problem. So I talk to this guy and he sounds very nice and apologizes and says that the hot water was off when they were testing so they just replaced the valve seals and didn't check for temperature. He say's they'll be there Weds (LAST Weds) at 9:30 am to fix it. 

Wednesday at 9:10 am he calls. The last call of the day on Tues turned out to be major and they have to go back this morning. He'll call me around 1-2 pm and give me an update but they will definitely fix my shower by 6 pm tonight. 

5 pm Weds. No call. I call him and get voice mail and leave a message.

I call Thurs, leave message. 

I call Friday, voicemail is now full. I call my realtor and start screaming. I also start hunting for this guy and his business online- he's no where to be found. His company can't be found with any search engine and the only listed number under the same name isn't him (allegedly)....

Saturday, the phone now goes direct to voice mail, which is still full. 

Sunday night he calls me back. Apologizes profusely. Says he went out of town and assigned me to one of his lackeys who apparently flaked out. Swears he will be at my house personally Monday morning at 9:30 am. 

Monday, he's here at 9:10. Jumps right in. Works for nearly two hours at which time he calls me into the bathroom to present to me hot water coming out of my shower. SWEET. I ask him what was wrong- he explained that one of the post needed to be cleaned so the hot water valve was getting stuck shut. He cleaned the post and voila. 

The catch: He tells me that my valve is a $1000 piece but that its so old they don't make replacement parts for it and that its been re-vamped so many times that there's no more brass in the thing to sand down so the next time it dies it will have to be replaced. He also says that the reason its dripping after shutting off is b/c the shower head collects water and it should shut off (or thats what the guy who replaced all the seals told him). I buy it b/c yeah it does drip for a bit and then stop.

Well now it drips constantly. Nice RAPID drip too. Hasn't stopped yet. I've even fiddled with the handle. I called and left a message with his voicemail today about it. He hasn't called me back.

So this evening I go to step into my long awaited luxurious warm shower....... to discover that yes the water does get hot now. In fact it gets scalding. It also gets ice cold. It does NOT get anything in between. So instead of my lovely warm shower I got alternating blasts of hot and cold as I struggled to rinse my hair in the 2 second intervals of warm water between the boiling and the freezing. 

WOW. I am SO AMAZINGLY not happy right now. I'm going to raise holy heck first thing tomorrow morning b/c I am NO HAPPY RIGHT NOW. 

They say having children opens your eyes. Well, one of my nieces is severely visually impaired. She is about to turn 3 and as far as we know she can see some bright lights and possibly colors. Every day she opens my eyes to a part of the world I knew virtually nothing about. 

When we first found out she was blind, my initial reaction was something along the lines of "Well that sucks but we can deal with that. After all mom and I are half deaf." I had NO CLUE just how much MORE impaired a blind child is than a deaf child. And more than that - I had no clue just how completely screwed up the world of VI child support is (VI = visually impaired).

For starters: in the USA there are no VI specific speech therapist. They just don't exist. And ALOT of the techniques you use on a sighted child to teach speech DON'T WORK on a VI kid. There are almost NO TOYS for a blind child. She needs things that have cool textures and make noise, and move and flash bright lights. Things that just sit there or you look at are boring. Do you know how few toys there are out there that fall into that category for kids past the 1-2 year mark?

OH! and get this: My niece is blind but otherwise she has no other impairments. She is developmentally delayed but that is b/c she's VI, not b/c of any sort of mental shortcomings. So prior to age 3, all of her various therapists have come to my sister's home to work with my niece. Well, as of her third birthday she has to start attending the local elementary school to receive services. 

As part of her intake evaluation to start at the school they administered an IQ test. Well based on the results of this test the school wanted to label my niece as mental retarded. Needless to say the family and her previous therapists were outraged. The measure used to determine her IQ used questions like "Can she interpret facial expressions?" and "If you throw a ball at her can she catch it?" which have ABSOLUTELY no bearing on the intelligence of a BLIND child. Can you believe it?? 

My brilliant sister was able to sway the panel in her meeting today by asking the person who was arguing for the MR (mentally retarded) diagnosis  to: 

"Please close your eyes. Okay, thank you. Now I'm making a facial expression at you. Can you tell me what the expression means? Now I'm going to throw a ball at you. Catch it. Oh, I'm sorry you were unable to do either of those tasks, I'm afraid we can't ignore your low score. You're now mentally retarded." 

Some how that managed to get the point across.  

I can't decide which all of this makes me want to do more- hit a whole bunch of people upside the head with a clue-by-four, become a lawyer so I can sue their hindquarters into providing the same caliber of services they do for non-visually-impaired children, go into politics so I can help revamp the process to make it easier for these people to get the help they need, continue in psychology and specialize in research on therapies and implications of disabilities on development and hope I can learn stuff there to help. 

I almost forgot

I need to give kudos to Allie Brown for her AMAZING layouts! There are so many gorgeous ones to chose from for FREE so I might just be changing the background on a regular basis. 

Check her out: http://alliebrownslayouts.blogspot.com/

Painting the Office

So the wonderful guys that helped us move stacked all of our book boxes in the office on the wall where the book cases need to go. So after a couple days of shifting the towers of boxes and getting all the book cases in place I took a minute to take a breather before I started unpacking the book boxes. Thats when I realized it- If I EVER want to paint this room- I have to paint it NOW, before I unpack all the boxes. So we rearranged the room - AGAIN - and painted the two walls that the book cases will go on. Then we'll move everything back and unpack the boxes and then we'll be able to paint the OTHER two walls. So yeah. Progress. 

Of course the largest wall in the office is painted brick. I've never painted brick before. After yesterday I'm not sure I ever want to paint brick again.... This is a pic of me and my fearless friend Rebecca who helped me paint the brick-wall-o-doom. Note that I am covered in paint and she's painting with a baby (don't worry its non-toxic low odor latex paint) and she's spotless. Don't ask me how she does it. 

For those who's monitors may be off the wall color is robins egg blue. The trim got painted bright white today!

Welcome!

Hi Folks!

So I've decided with the purchase of our new home that the Flei Family needs a FAMILY blog. Adam and I both have individual blogs that get used more or less occasionally, but I wanted something for both of us that is directed at our family and friends (read: I want an easy way to post pictures for my Mommy). 

So here it is! Flei Paper (pronounced Fly Paper) is now here! We'll see how well we keep it updated.