TomasiFamily.Org

This past weekend we delivered Julie at Michigan Tech University in Houghton Michigan. It was as emotional as I expected, with a few surprises thrown in.

As we were trying to leave the house Friday, the cat went missing. We searched the house high and low (inside the house and out) for about a half hour until she finally turned up under Liisa’s bed. We’re not sure why she didn’t come running when we were shaking the bag of treats, but I’m glad we found her. Liisa would have had a miserable weekend worrying about her kitty.

Once out of the house, we got caught by the traffic between Appleton and Green Bay for the Packers pre-season game. As we drove north, we got to the town of Wausaukee and found that a tornado had gone through roughly The delays with cat and the Packers probably saved us from a run in with a tornado. As we passed through the town of Wausaukee around 6:00PM we found that an EF1 tornado had gone through about an hour earlier. Pretty scary stuff. You’ll see a picture of the storm cloud in the link at the top of this post.

After a lot of singing “road songs” (mostly by the girls and Donna), We got to Houghton 11:30PM, including the lost hour when we changed time zones. We found our cabin about 15 minutes north of Houghton and settled in. Saturday morning Donna and I went for a little walk around the town of Kearsarge MI and stopped in to an old store and shared some interesting tales. My Mom’s side of the family is originally from that area so it was fun to talk to the locals.

When Julie got up, we made a similar walk and spent some time on the playground. At heart, she’s still my little girl who loves to play on swings.

Once Liisa was awake, we headed back to Michigan Tech to get Julie’s orientation stuff, pick up her book store materials, and start moving her in. We got to meet her very nice room mate Molli along with some of her family. We did a little exploring and spent Saturday evening enjoying one final family dinner together for a while. Julie opted to stay in the dorms (sans Molli who spent it with her family) after doing some socializing.

Sunday morning we packed up the cabin and headed down to spend a little more time with Julie before my parents and Donna’s dad joined us for a family picnic. We did a little more talking and then it was time to say goodbye to our oldest daughter. The drive back was a little lonely without Julie. We miss her around the house and know that if we both keep busy with our respective work, the time will go by quickly and we’ll be reunited at Thanksgiving before we know it.

We’ve redone our website (again). I apologize for the lack of updates for over two years (yes, it’s been that long.) I had lots of news to share and photos but two things got in the way. One was Apple’s iWeb software. While iWeb lets you produce beautiful web pages, it sucks for making quick updates. You have to use the same computer every time. In this case it was our main family computer that had the iWeb software and data on it. That also happens to be the busiest computer in the house. Getting time on it was always an issue. Now that the job has changed, I could have moved the data over to my work laptop or the studio computer, but that leads us to the second issue with iWeb. It’s just plain slow when you want to make updates. There’s no such thing as sitting down at the computer, cranking out a quick 5 minute blog post, and walk away. The blog post gets written, and the whole site needs to be saved, then uploaded. Ouch. That was easily a 20-30 minute task. No thank you. With WordPress, I can create content from almost anywhere – even on the road using my iPhone or iPad!

With WordPress getting more and more mature, we don’t lose a whole lot in the aesthetics department and can make blog posts more recent. Here’s my favorite part, I just found a plugin (add on software to WordPress) that lets me view photos posted to Facebook and create the same gallery in WordPress without re-uploading all the images.

In short, this site just got a lot easier to manage and you can look for more frequent updates.

Last Thursday Liisa got a call from her friend asking if she could take over ownership of her 8 month old cat. It was a bit short notice – the cat had to either find a new owner or go to the pound that night. We talked about it for a few minutes and finally agreed that it would be OK as long as nobody had an allergic reaction to the cat.

Liisa has been asking for a cat practically all summer so we weren’t totally unprepared for this discussion. Within minutes of the phone call, the cat, Holly, was at our house exploring everything she could. Liisa and I went out to get the necessary supplies (litter box, food, collar, ID tag, etc.) while Julie kept an eye on our newest family member. As soon as we got home she jumped in the litter box and took care of business. We knew instantly she was going to fit in just fine.

Holly has quite the little personality. She’s generally likes to be around our family members and will follow people from one room to the other, but likes to spend a few quiet moments on her own gazing out the window at the bugs and birds – even as I write this, she has jumped up on the ledge in the office and is gazing out the window with interest.