My View From Here photo series has gone medium-time.

I took a stealth trip to Fort Worth, TX back in October and did my usual View From Here schtick, taking a picture of the room as I walked in…

…and another picture looking out the window…

…and then I uploaded them to my View From Here flickr set, as usual.

Someone from Schmap, who I guess was assigned the Fort Worth beat and thus was obviously on someone’s shit-list, saw them and asked if they could use them in their new Fort Worth Schmap. Being the publicity whore that I am, I said yes. So now my Fort Worth pictures can be seen by Fort Worth-curious travelers around the world — as long as they’re curious about the Homewood Suites by Hilton ® Ft. Worth-North at Fossil Creek in general and Room 702 in particular. Check it out.

I’m a little concerned about their presentation of that exterior shot, though. It lacks clarity; I think it’s misleading. Is that the Homewood Suites in the picture or is it the view from the window of the Homewood Suites? We know that it’s the view out the window, but there’s nothing to indicate that to Frau Blücher from Stuttgart, who might decide she wants to stay in a motel with a small parking lot and park right outside her room and would be disappointed once she gets there and finds the parking lot is actually quite spacious and that it’s a hotel, not a motel, and she’ll have to actually park her car in and go inside the hotel and walk down a carpeted hallway and maybe even take an elevator to get to her room. It’s a minor quibble, but it’s important to me that my work be presented with accuracy and integrity.

All concerns aside, though: Woo hoo, go me, I’m a professional photographer! (If by “Professional Photographer” you mean someone whose throwaway snapshots of an obscure hotel that very few people will ever even stay at, let alone be interested in, is used without payment on a web-based travel guide that very few people will ever see.) Next stop: Pulitzer!!!

Zoe’s little cat Ebi died this morning.

Ebi was a sickly cat from the moment Zoe found her out front, tucked behind the saddlebag of one of my motorcycles. She had some kind nasal obstruction that prevented her from breathing properly, so she could only mouth-breathe and always sounded like she was snoring. Except, for her, snoring was never really an option because she never ever really got to sleep — she had to have her head tilted a certain way to breathe clearly, and if she deviated from that then she simply didn’t breathe. So when she fell asleep and her head drooped, she’d stop breathing, and she’d wake up gasping for air about a minute later. This poor little kitten suffered from extreme sleep apnea her entire life, and she also had developed some kind of mucus build-up thing that made her breathing challenges worse, and it was getting worse and worse toward the end.

And then this morning she choked while eating her breakfast. We feed the cats on top of the washer/dryer and I had just given Ebi her breakfast — a fried egg, because we were trying to find a food that didn’t contribute to the mucus problem. A few minutes later I heard a thud — she had fallen off the dryer and was convulsing on the floor, struggling for air. I tried to give her some kind of mouth-to-mouth, trying both to blow air into her lungs or suck out whatever the obstruction was, but it was no use. She never took a breath and her heartbeat slowly faded and her pupils dilated until she was gone. It was a horrible, horrible way for her to go.

She was a sweet little kitten and deserved a more peaceful end. Watching her go out like that was really hard.

Zoe’s at school now. She’ll be devastated when she gets home and finds out.

Ebi and Zoe when Ebi was new to us.

The last picture we have of Ebi. This is from mid-December.