Every year that we lived there, we would made the 16 hour trek up to either Goodland or Leavenworth to spend Christmas with my Dad’s brothers and sisters. And as my Dad is a stubborn, stubborn man, hotels be damned! We would drive the entire way in one go.

I don’t remember much about the actual family time from those 5 trips. The clearest memory I have is of one of the drives home. It was New Years Day and Nathan and I were sitting in the back of Mom and Dad’s car while Dad drove. Being the stubborn man he is, he had decided to completely forgo driving through Austin. Sure, the back ways consisted of more miles, but hey! It was a small price to pay to not be stuck in traffic for an eternity. *

Somewhere between Austin and Corpus Christi, after  I finally managed to nod off for a little while. I woke up to my Mom and brother prodding me and telling me to wake up. It was about 2 am and we had entered a small town about 80 miles away from home. The town consisted of a square and some houses surrounding it. Not a single house or office light was on. There was absolutely no one on the streets except for us. You would think that this was an abandoned town from how quiet everything was.

Until you looked around. Every single house, every building in the square was covered in thousands of Christmas lights. Even the trees were covered in them. The town sparkled as if there was snow covering it. We circled the small town for what felt like an hour until we realized what time it was and that we needed to get home.  And then we circled it once more for good measure.

To this day, I’ve never seen anything like it. We don’t remember what town it was, or even how to get there. For all we know it was a hallucination that we all happened to experience because we were so tired and all we had to eat for hours was some crummy Whataburger. But it will always be one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

 So what does this have to do with Celine Dion? Not much. That was the year Dad got her “Let’s Talk About Love” cd. We innocently gave it to him early so he could enjoy it on the way to Kansas. Little did we know we would spend the ENTIRE TRIP BOTH WAYS listening to that cd. And ever since, whenever I see Christmas lights, or drive through Kansas, Oklahoma or Texas, or do anything involving a car, I think of her. And I think of wanting to shove the cd down her throat.**

*True Facts: A few days after my Mom died, Dad and I decided to go to Corpus for the weekend to visit some old friends and give them the news in person. We got to Austin at about 8pm. We didn’t leave Austin until about 1am. Going straight. On one road the entire time. Because traffic was so congested that we couldn’t get to the exits. The only thing keeping us awake was a Kelly Clarkson cd on repeat. Over and over and over and over. It was hell on wheels. We finally got to a hotel at 2am and paid $80 for the privilege of sleeping there for 4 hours. Best. $80. Spent. Ever.

**Which is hilarious now because the love of Celine has rubbed off on me. The horror, the horror!

When I was just about 13 years old, after years and years of nagging, my parents finally gave in and let me get a cat. I was determined to get one with black fur, because, y’know, I was totally goth. When my Mom took my brother and I to the Humane Society to pick one out, we had certain criteria to obey. We were to pick up one, and only one cat and it must, for the love of all that is good and holy, be male. No clue why on the male thing, but whatever, I was getting a freakin’ cat!

We wandered the halls and Nathan found her. Or rather, she found him. They locked eyes and we knew instantly that we would be breaking both rules that my Dad had laid down. And then I found him, a tiny two-pound black kitten with gigantic yellow eyes and a bit of a snaggletooth. He was exactly what I wanted. I tried and tried to think of a name. And then I had it! I was obsessed with Titanic, so of course it had to be Jack!

Naturally, of course, Jack would be terrified of the outside world and would claw the living crap out of my neck the second we started our trek to the car. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And then we broke Dad’s rules again when I flipped him over to give him belly rubs and discovered that Jack was actually a Rose.

Her weirdness (and gut) would continue to grow through the years. Despite the introduction of yet another (female!) cat, she continued to be her Momma’s girl and follow me around like a puppy. Any room that I was in, she had to be there too.

I lost track of how many times she rolled off the bed. Rose caught a squirrel once and had no idea what to do with it. After wrestling for a while, it finally espcaped and spent the next half an hour screaming at her from our roof. At some point, she lost one of her canines. I had no idea until she yawned from the back of the chair I was on and I happened to look back at her.

She was fiercely jealous of other pets and people getting my attention and was extra predetory when it came to the other pets even trying to come into my room.

As much as she would snuggle with me, she rarely showed affection towards other people.She did, however enjoy snuggling and immobilizing people’s arms if they annoyed her. My buddy David chased her around a room once to try to get her to excercise. The result was Rose smooshing herself into a corner, tearing up and sniffling and eventually crying like people into my elbow for a good hour or so. Months and a new apartment later, she finally got her revenge when he was DMing a Dungeons and Dragons game. She crawled into his lap, and spread out over his arms, preventing him from rolling his dice or flipping through his books.

I think one of the reasons we got along so well is that we both lived with depression. At one point she was almost put on a cat version of prozac because she kept tearing out her fur and biting herself. Thankfully, the threat of wearing an e-collar put a stop to that behavior.

Through the years, we lived in two different states, 3 different towns and 7 different houses together. Bonita eventually went to live with my brother and his wife. The other cat, Molly came along with us for the ride.

Rose passed away yesterday after 13 years of being a ball of tubby weirdness. The vet thinks it might have been a stroke, but whatever it was, it broke my heart and left a huge hole in my life. Rose spent half of my life with me, and I was with her for all but 2 months of her’s. She was with me through my teenage rebellion, when I finally graduated highschool a year after I walked and through my 3 attempts at college. She was there for me when we lived in Leavenworth and I had no friends. She loved me unconditionally when I was suicidal, before I was finally diagnosed with depression and got the help I needed. Though she never liked being held, she let me hold her and cry for hours when my Mom passed away.

Thank you, Rose, for the years of love and snuggles and laughter. And thank you to whoever was banging on my door at 2:30 am, from the bottom of my heart. Without that noise, I wouldn’t have woken up. She was there through all of my hardships, I would never have forgiven myself for not being there the one time she needed me most.

Rest in peace, Rosie. I hope someday we can meet again.

It had to be done. There were no more options.

I had to make a TARDIS cake.

So, wtfh IS a TARDIS, anyway? Fans of Doctor Who will know, but for the unindoctrinated, TARDIS stands for “Time and Relative Dimension in Space” and is the Doctor’s spaceship. It can take him wherever he wants, whenever in time he wants. Its shaped like a blue police phone box and is much, much larger on the inside.

So how does one go about making this monstrosity of a cake?

First, you throw everything you know about cake baking out the window. Just throw it all right out. Pretty sure I was brain dead when I was making this thing.

Second, find a recipe. I used Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Fudge Cake recipe. This was the best part (as I had hoped it would be). It was incredibly moist and delicious.

Third, add chocolate chips to an already hyper-chocolatey cake. This was also a delicious decision. Too bad it was the wrong decision for a layer cake. Because they were interspersed randomly througout it, the cake didn’t hold up as well as it should have. Pieces fell off and I had to glue them in place with buttercream. Which leads to…

Fourth, frost and hold the layers together with a way too sugary buttercream. Buttercream is amazingly delicious, don’t get me wrong. But I think I used a bad recipe. Or screwed it up somehow. Either way, that stuff was born of demon seed. We had to scrape around it to eat the rest of the cake because it was so sugary sweet that our teeth hurt and we were having instant sugar highs.

Also, because the cake had fallen apart and I had to “glue” it in places, the TARDIS was kinda lumpy, which made decorating it a pain in the rear. I also only had a couple of sizes of piping tips, neither of which worked well for the purpose I needed them for.

But, in the end, it was just the thing we needed to start our evening. After we ate it (or at least tried to) we took Kassia to Kansas City to go swing dancing. Which actually made the sugar highs kind of helpful. And to top it off, we got a great story that we still giggle over. Not everything that we view as a disaster will seem that way in the long run. While I thought I had ruined her birthday, what actually happened was that I helped create a memory that has brought joy to all of us in the year since.

Maybe I’ll try again this year. Or I could, y’know, just be lazy and make a normal sheet cake.