0
Monday: Amarok Endorses…
Posted by shana on Apr 6, 2009 in Monday Product Endorsement
1. Napping
2. Winking
3. The awesome new quilt my mom made us
Happy Monday.
Chicago vaycay
Posted by shana on Mar 19, 2009 in Chicago Thursday
I don’t even know if that’s how you spell “vaycay,” since that word’s intentionally not part of my normal vocabulary, but it seemed somehow appropriate tonight… the deal is, Chicago Thursday is taking a personal day and not showing up for this week, since our impending trip to a different city, Washington DC, has me too busy to write anything. You try preemptively thinking of everything two cats might destroy in three days and then getting to it before they do!
looks so innocent
Video Sample!!
Posted by mac on Mar 17, 2009 in Tech Tuesdays
Here’s a little video with a bunch of random clips I shot today with our new Canon Vixia HG20. There’s nothing special here, I was just trying to get an idea for how the camera performs under different conditions. Enjoy!
Endorsement: safety first
Posted by shana on Mar 17, 2009 in Monday Product Endorsement
Tragedy struck at the Merriweather yesterday evening as Mac was preparing not just pictures, but a video, for the Monday endorsement, which was to be of “throwing wet noodles on the wall for your cats to jump at.” Things were going along very happily until Rohn, in a moment of wet noodle fervor and zeal, accidentally attacked Mac’s hand instead of the noodles themselves, rendering Mac both in pain and disinclined to endorse an activity he now saw as potentially dangerous.
Shoot.
What, I'm picking out a book.
I didn’t get home from work until after midnight, and now here we are, Tuesday morning, with nothing to endorse but safety first: no need to sacrifice your own personal well-being for the sake of the blog, no, not even for the sake of the blog…
Gold Stars! Rohn’s Choice
Posted by shana on Mar 13, 2009 in Friday Gold Stars!, making friends
I don’t know if we’ve mentioned this before, but Rohn (né Julius) was a rescued cat.
We got him through Feline Friends, a really great cat rescue organization in Chicago with volunteer foster families that take care of the rescued cats until they get adopted. I dare, dare dare you to click on that link and then not get a kitty. They are so cute, so completely, captivatingly, heart-breakingly cute.
We spent a lot of time looking at this website, and Mac spent a lot of time on the phone with Toni from Feline Friends (they’re pretty much bffs now), to find not only the perfect cat, but the perfect match for our little family.
And we found him:
Those eyes, that face… and when we met him in person, we knew, because wow, what a personality. And over the last two months he has proven to be exactly everything we ever hoped for. Even Amarok would have to agree…
buddies
We’ve often wondered, though, about Rohn’s past. Amarok is also from the streets, and was rescued as a very tiny kitty at a very very young age – we’ve often thought of this as a good bonding point for the two boys. Unfortunately though, we don’t get in on these conversations, and we’re left to wonder, Where did our little Rohny come from? How did he come to be abandoned? How was he rescued? What was he like, in those early days?
So imagine our surprise and our delight when we awoke this morning to an e-mail from Catherine, our new friend and Rohn’s Choice for this week’s Gold Star… because Catherine was Rohn’s rescuer.
In a brief e-mail, she told us how, with a just-rescued dog already in the car one day on the West Side, she first spotted Rohn:
Yep. That’s sounds just exactly like our little guy.
In fact, it sounds so much like him, that we’ve already adopted that phrase for every day use. For example, “What? I jumped in the sink!” Or, “What? I’m playing with pink feathers!”
Yes, the Gold Star this Friday goes overwhelmingly to Catherine, both for rescuing Rohn so that he could eventually come to be part of our family, and for sending us this e-mail so that we can know a little more about our little guy.
This post is a glut of pictures of Rohn in honor of her receiving this prestigious award. Congratulations! 
‘Rok & Rohn vs. The Blog
Posted by mac on Mar 10, 2009 in Tech Tuesdays, blog status
“What if we were to advertise this humble little Chicago blog?”
That’s a question I’ve been pondering lately, and I’ll address it shortly, but first, allow me speculate a bit on why we blog.
We started sharing all these stories, photos and randomness from our lives mostly for the benefit of our family and friends. I think it’s fair to say that maintaining this blog helps us, and reportedly our readers, feel a bit more connected. My father lives in Portland, OR and my mother in Washington, DC. We talk on the phone with a healthy degree of regularity but being able to share all these photos and thoughtful stories seems to really deepen that dialogue. So, while it’s a whole lot of fun for both Shana and myself to work on this blog, I think the real reason we continue doing it, everyday, is because we receive such positive feedback from all of you.
Now, let’s talk about “gas money” (just bear with me here). I don’t know about you, but we could use some extra “gas money” now and again. I use the term “gas money” loosely because we don’t actually have … a car … per se … but it still seems like the right metaphor because we do have bicycles and I sure have felt a bit low on fuel lately. This is where that whole advertising idea I mentioned early comes into play. The basic idea being that if we could drive enough traffic to our site and gain a wide enough readership we might be able to slightly augment our income. It wouldn’t be much, but we wouldn’t be looking for much — just a little gas money.
Finally, to get to my point in all of this, I really like the idea of this blog getting more exposure, but I don’t want to change the way we write posts, or to feel like we need to censor the photos we share, or otherwise suck the life out of what we’re trying to do here in an attempt to accommodate a more generic readership. This blog is for you — not some generic “everyone.”
It’s with that balance in mind that I created our first ad (you might need to refresh the page to watch the animation!):
We are probably going start advertising the site and trying to bring in more readers, but we are not going to betray our original and intended readership–our friends, our family and, perhaps most importantly, our cats.
P.S. The banner ad above was made using a brand new SaaS (Software as a Service) application called BannerSnack. It takes all of the work out of creating cool flash web banners by providing a easy to use point and click design interface as well as generating all the code needed to share your new creations with the world. And with that now said, I’m totally counting this as my Tech Tuesday post.
Rohn and Amarok say hi
Posted by shana on Mar 6, 2009 in our family
They also say, “oh my god, can you give us a break with that camera???”
Yes, and more cats…
Posted by mac on Feb 23, 2009 in photo shoot
Despite my post from this morning, I now find myself compelled to post more cat photos. I took this one, of Rohn, about half an hour ago:
Cat on a Shelf
And I took this one, of Amarok, a couple days ago:
Cat on a Chair
That’s all for now. 
… two days in a row…
Posted by shana on Feb 19, 2009 in our family, photo shoot
(he’s practically asking for it)
We now promise to post something that’s not just pictures of our cats.
hey, while you’re up, can you grab me another beer?
Posted by shana on Feb 18, 2009 in photo shoot
It’s really not fair to post glamor shots of Rohn and then post… this… of Ammy. But I just couldn’t resist. In my defense, he did freely put himself in this position, and he did remain in this position while I went looking for my camera, and he did look directly at me and hold still for the duration of the shot…
We’ve been laughing at our cats a lot lately. Rohn, for his part, has been known scoop food out of his food dish onto his paw and eat it like that, which is hilarious. And he’s become obsessed with the filter/drain in the shower, so much that he pulls it out and runs around the house with it and chews on it, which is good for neither the drain nor his little teeth. Mac and I had to start taking it out except for when we’re showering, which has led Rohn to actually jump in the shower while it’s on a couple times. And yesterday Rohn picked a whole bag of chocolate covered pretzels up off the coffee table in the living room and ran down the hall, through the kitchen to the pantry and put it in his food bowl (a not too subtle hint?).
You know, I do think this picture of Amarok exemplifies just how chill he’s gotten since we moved to Chicago, and just how extra super chill he seems now compared to Rohn, who’s just a little crazy. At least Amarok is teaching Rohn how to jump… though Rohn is teaching Amarok how to get us out of bed in the morning by clawing at the walls…
If we wanted boring cats, we sure missed the mark. But if we wanted cats with huge egos and way too much personality, we hit the mark right on the head.