Cold (Cleveland) and Colder (Wisconsin)

I want to start this entry on a bit of a sad note. Well, I don’t really want to, but I am going to anyway. Thursday marked a very sad day for the Winns, as the family cat of over a decade had to be put down. Chewie was an old cat, and recently seems to have suffered from kidney failure, which means that he had definitely lived with the right family. Chewie was a stray who was found by Jarom’s neighbor in the parking lot of a Costco as a kitten. As was the case with all the other cats that the Winns have had, Jarom sort of took majority ownership and spent more time playing with him than anybody else. They loved to wrestle, and over the years messing around with Chewie became a fun part of coming home to visit Delaware. He would always come running up from the backwoods when Jarom would call his name from the back deck. Sadly, we are in Cleveland so Jarom was unable to go with his mom to the sad appointment. Mostly I am sorry for Nancy, who doesn’t handle these sorts of things well. It is hard enough for her to say goodbye to her kids at the airport. I guess it is a good thing that he was a good enough cat that tears were shed when it was time for him to go. Anyway, we will certainly miss him, but he had a good run.

RIP Good Buddy

This week was Jarom’s first at his new job and he spent it on the road. He had several days of training in Madison, Wisconsin, learning the computer system that the hospital in Richmond uses to manage patients. The training was nice enough, but the weather was awful. Usually Jarom doesn’t mind a little cold weather, but this was a whole new level of chilly. The temps got up to around 20 in the middle of the day and down below zero at night. One evening Jarom walked to a TGIFriday’s that was about 2 blocks from the hotel and almost didn’t make it. As he considered the possibility that he might freeze to death in an office parking lot a hundred yards from central heating, all he could think about was how on earth the Green Bay Packers play football games in this stuff in the middle of January. Brrr.

Jenna, sitting up in one of Lix's favorite outfits, and in her first "big girl bath"

But he did make it back, and even brought a new company laptop with him, which I am using to post this. He got back to Cleveland on Thursday night, just in time to spend Friday helping Jenna get better. Alixa had a little cough/throat malady last week and she seems to have transferred that on to her darling daughter. What a great mom, eh? Thursday evening Jenna began to make a wheezing sound when she breathed. They went to a local urgent care facility, and she was diagnosed with the Croup Virus. There isn’t really much that you can do for it, but she continued to get worse during the day, so they made a second trip, this time to a pediatric ER nearby. They treated Jenna with some steroids and a nebulizer, which seemed to help. It was at least enough to allow the poor girl to get some sleep (and her parents and me). She seems to be recovering nicely today and even felt well enough to go with her mom to the local tennis club to watch her dad and opa play in a tennis tournament. They performed at an alarmingly mediocre level, finishing 3rd out of 5 teams.

The ER had cute penguin gas masks, but Jenna still didn't really enjoy the experience

The only sad part about Jenna’s recovery is that she has stopped making her cute raspy barks. We have tried to get a recording of it, but have yet to be successful. The best analogy that I can make is that she sounds like Copper from The Fox and the Hound, at the point where he meets Todd. It’s hilarious. The remaining Hegewalds are starting to arrive, with Abe showing up today and Zak and Sam landing on Tuesday, so the house is going to be filling up for Christmas. Hopefully everyone is enjoying the snow that seems to be falling all over the place. Merry Christmas!