Lots of news is good news

I'm buzzing with good news I've heard recently.

One of my favorite couples is planning to move to New York, and I can hardly wait to have close friends here in the city.
Another of my favorite couples is three months pregnant. Well, more accurately, she's pregnant, but I think the way we enlightened folks are supposed to talk about it is that they both are, although only one of them wants to vomit if she smells chicken.
A friend who's been hard on the job search accepted an offer for a fabulous new gig in a beautiful part of the country.

And my oh-so-talented hubby has a meeting set up on Wednesday with the illustrations editor at the New Yorker.

It feels like there's good luck dust floating all around our world right now. As Arwulf might say, it's a good day to be in your skin.

Music, man

Our Sunday morning ritual in Ann Arbor was to listen to Arwulf play classic jazz on WEMU. His show is the stuff that preceded big bands, not the jangly experimental stuff that you couldn't tap a toe to if your life depended on it.

Last weekend we were listening to Arwulf thanks to the magic of the World Wide Web, when he gave a shoutout to John's college roommate, Matthew, and his wife, Lisa, who were similarly listening online in Pittsburgh. The magic of technology made the world seem smaller and more interconnected.

To fill in the times when we can't have Arwulf around, have you noticed my Pandora radio stations over to the right? Pseudo-Wulf is like Arwulf's show but without his charming banter, while the other buttons get you to selections for different kinds of moods. Pandora is a fun little toy that helps find music that's like what you already like.

And Friday we went old school, going to see Doc Severinsen head up the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall. Hearing a big band play A Train in the heart of Midtown felt like a truly New York moment.

It'll be just like starting over

I've been in New York for five months and in that time, I've had my hair cut once. The haircut I got was great, but it was also 85 bucks and I'm paralyzed trying to figure out if I should suck it up and pay that kind of money or find another salon.

This is just one of the zillions of decisions vexing me as we establish ourselves in a new city.

John and I had owned our house for six and a half years in Ann Arbor. Before that, we'd both been renters in A2, and before that, John was an undergrad at U of M. When friends wanted the name of a handyman, or plumber, or dentist, they often asked us.

Now we're in this huge city, where the choices are limitless, and it's daunting to imagine how to select from the zillions of choices. The valet in our building offers dry cleaning service but it's outrageously expensive. How to choose a new dry cleaner when there's one on every corner? How many doctors do you imagine do business in Manhattan, or even on the upper west side?

I'm embarrassed to keep asking our same circle of friends and acquaintences here in the city every time we have another need. Do you have a good shoe repair shop, ob/gyn, tailor, travel agent? I imagine their eye rolls as they wonder if we can't just Google our way out of whatever the latest quandry is.

Whole businesses are built around problems like ours -- angieslist.com, insiderpages.com, etc etc -- so I know we aren't alone. There was even a NY Times article earlier this summer about them. (Here it is, for you TimesSelect crowd) But getting a recommendation from a web site, no matter how well orchestrated, still highlights the fact that most of these are questions we haven't had to ask for a very long time.

I loved our doctor in Ann Arbor. Phil Rodgers at Briarwood Family Practice, if you're interested.
My dentist, Doug Hock, has the most gentle, wonderful hygienist ever. If you go, tell Judy I said hi.
We were blessed to be friends with a talented seamstress, Heather Phillips, who designed two of our friends' wedding dresses but would still take the time to put buttons back on shirts, and with Steve whoselastnameIcanneverspell, a hell of a cook and also the most conscientious handyman we could have ever hoped to have paint our house.
I could go on and on, and that's before we even get talking about restaurants.

I think this is part of what makes people homesick. There's such a comfort and ease to knowing who you call to make your life work, and it's exhausting to move from that autopilot mode to putting energy into basic things like learning the layout of a new grocery store or figuring out where the nearest ATM is to your office. Every time something like that comes up, it's yet another reminder that you're new here, and you're no longer in the safe, comfortable, easy place you used to call home.

Anyone got a recommendation on a New York stylist who charges less than $85?

World Series!

The good news: Tigers are headed to the World Series for the first time in two decades.

















The bad news: If it turns out to be a Tigers-Mets series, I won't be around to appreciate it. I'll be in New York for the first two games of the series, played in Detroit, then I head to New Orleans for a big work conference.

Our friends Barry and Carrie were at the Tigers game Saturday that clinched the deal -- the above photo is theirs -- and they'll be in New York next weekend. So at least we'll have the chance to spend some time with them and revel in Detroit's return from truly lousy baseball before I have to leave town.

But then again, it's hard to complain too much about getting sent to a hotel on Bourbon Street on the company nickel. I'm betting I'll be able to find a fun place to watch the game ... and it'll be the weekend of Halloween while we're there.

Thanks to Jim, if the Bless You Boys audio wasn't '80s enough for you, here's the video.

Visiting
And speaking of visits and lousy timing, Lara signed up for a writers conference in NYC and got all excited about getting to visit -- except that John and I will be out of town that weekend. So she and Rob are coming to town a little early so we at least get to have dinner together, then they'll camp out in our apartment while I'm in Michigan and John's in Chicago.
Hurray that I get to see some of my Michigan pals, but boo that I'll have to get on a plane to leave instead of hanging out more.

Michigan gang, mark your calendars: John and I will be back for the holidays the week of Dec. 2-9. Plan is to spend the first weekend in Ann Arbor, then be in Saginaw by the second weekend for my family's big Xmas party. There's much up in the air about the trip, but we hope to see lots of you.

The most wonderful thing about Tigers

What kid who grew up in Michigan in the 1980s doesn't remember the '84 Tigers winning the World Series? The Tigers were all-consuming that year. Stereotypes about girls and sports aside, I remember being at a party with my girlfriends that summer and all the girls were showing off that they could identify the Tigers in a team photo and knew what position they played. The song "Bless You, Boys" got frequent airplay, praising the Tigers.


It's been sooo long since the Tigers have been any good. Back in 1997, a friend who did PR for the Tigers was certain they had the talent to have a great season. He was either dead wrong, or nine years early, because this year is certainly phenomenal.

When the Tigers squeaked into the playoffs, I thought it cruel and unusual punishment to have to play the Yankees in the first round. I hoped that my hometown team wouldn't embarrass themselves too much, so I wouldn't have to slink in shame around an office full of Yankees fans.

Then one of my coworkers, a diehard Yankees fan, issued a bet. If the Yankees won, I had to wear a Yankees hat to work. If the Tigers won -- fat chance, right? -- he'd wear a Tigers hat to work.

I don't have to tell you how that bet came out. Meet Eddie, AP paralegal and rabid Yankees fan.









Living in New York, where it seems mandatory that the Tigers make it to the playoffs and the Mets fans hate them for it, it's been a fun experience cheering for Detroit. We watched the first round games at bars around town, where Yankees fans might sneer a little but Mets fans would smile and high five us because any team that beats the Yankees is a friend of theirs, at least for now.

Here's us out with Jim and Courtney, the Michigan contingent cheering on our team from back home.






Now that the Tigers have crushed the mighty pinstripes, and have two games under their belt for the division championship, we had plans to go watch the game tomorrow evening with a bigger group of Michiganders. But Jim just emailed to say the game's been moved up to 4:30 p.m. Gotta run to find out what the heck's going on with our Friday night plans.

Bless you, boys!

No, the plane didn't hit our building

I'm much delayed in blogging about the fabulous performance of the Detroit Tigers in the playoffs -- more about that later -- but in the interim, I wanted to reassure all my guardian angels out there that the plane that hit a building in Manhattan today was nowhere near my office or our apartment.

Here's a NY Times story about the plane crash and their locator map:

See how the plane crash is almost as far east as you can get on the island? Our apartment is on the west side of Central Park, on the upper west side. That's a good long haul from where we live. And my office is down in the 30s, about 40 blocks south of there.

So thanks all for checking, but nothing to worry about.

Big Guy Tebeau, 1990-2006

Just about anyone who visited our Ann Arbor home will remember our big, fat, loud-mouthed Siamese. His given name, the one he had when we adopted him at the pound, is Guy, but most of the time we just called him Big. (as compared to my foul-tempered bratty cat Haley, also known as Little)

Months after John and I got married in 2000, we went to the pound looking for a kitten. John is a huge cat lover, and since my cat is nasty and unaffectionate, he wanted to have a pet that might actually like him.
While John was off in the kitten room, surrounded by perky little fluff balls, I met a fat, old Siamese coughing and sneezing with an upper respiratory infection, one eye swollen shut and dripping goo. Somehow, through all of that, he was so affectionate, and when I asked to have his cage opened, he crawled out, curled up in my lap and started purring.
John came looking for me, saw that I had this wheezing behemoth in my lap, and knew what was going to happen. I sobbed that they were going to kill him -- an old sick cat at the pound is Dead Kitty Walking, and his position at the far end of the hall, on the bottom, confirmed that -- so John resigned himself to it and said, "Do you want to adopt him?"
"Can we?" I squealed.

We sequestered Guy while we nursed him back to health. Getting him out of the pound and giving him some affection almost immediately improved his condition, but he was always to be a sickly feline. He had a chronic eye infection that required a whole battery of drops and often oozed clear yuck. He had dreadful bowel issues, and would you believe we even took him for kitty enemas?

Though you wouldn't think so after reading that litany, Guy was a terrific pet. He was the people-lovingest, funniest, biggest character you could pack into 15 pounds of furry blubber. He brayed with a full-throated gravelly voice that John described as sounding like an old lady who chain smoked her whole life. He befriended every person who ever walked through our door, including staying under foot when the meter reader would head down to the basement and trying to get in the car of the pizza delivery guy. People who swore they didn't like cats would always ask about Guy.











Haley was less charmed by her roommate, perhaps because he chased her around the house and swatted her while she slept. We became less enamored with both of them when the started what John called excrement wars, Big pooping in numerous spots in the basement and Little peeing on the floor, on rugs, on our bed. After years of the two cats being at war with each other, we finally decided to split them up. One of John's oldest friends, H.T., adopted Big, and they each got to be only cats, as they both seemed to want.

H.T. took fantastic care of Big, ferrying him to frequent vet appointments and buying copious medications and special food to tend to his needs. He reported in after he got a new apartment this summer that Big was the grand poobah of the courtyard, inspiring the respect of all other cats who dared tread foot.

But recently Big's health has taken a turn. His trips to the vet became more frequent, and his improvement was not as marked. It seemed his time had come.

So as I'm writing this, John is booking a ticket to Ann Arbor. He's going to go with H.T. to the vet to put Big down tomorrow.

At times, it's hard to imagine that our Ann Arbor house isn't sitting there waiting for us to return, that we couldn't get off a plane in Detroit, drive west to our house and find everything just as we remember it. It's inconceivable that when we go back to Michigan for the holidays, Big will be gone.