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June 16, 1999 |
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meaningful work and
cedar waxwings |
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June 16, 1999 5 snowy egrets
Today's Starting Pitcher: Brian Rose Reading: Before the Dawn by Shimazaki Toson, Eugene Oregon by Alexander Pushpin (just kidding, see yesterday's entry)
Copyright © 1999, Janet I. Egan |
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When I think of "real" work, I think of physical labor. Not that programming or writing or management isn't work - it sure is. But , especially with management, it's hard to see concrete results and relate them to physical reality. Somehow, being able to touch what I just did makes it feel more meaningful. Now if only Joey would get off the lid of the big yellow bucket so I can put some litter in the community litter boxes I just washed. He's being weird today, luring you in with that cute rolling over on his side thing and then chomping when you give in and pet him. Some people came in looking for a cat of their dreams to adopt and they thought Joey was adorable until he nipped the guy. The woman still thought he was cute and said she likes feisty cats. They left to think it over. Joey is a little beyond feisty, but if they really like him I think he could respond to them. It's Giggle Girl's last day for the summer. Her job coach came to pick her up and gave the shelter a plaque for participating in their job program. She did her Titanic sinking impression at least 7 times, and she got into splashing bleach water on my shirt again. I'd brought a dry shirt to change into so I had half a mind to just take the shirt off and give it to her, but I thought better of that pretty quickly. Somehow I figured encouraging her was not such a good idea. I certainly would never have encountered a coworker like Giggle Girl in high-tech. Of course many of the software engineers I worked with were significantly more emotionally disturbed than Giggle Girl, they just got paid extra money for rather than getting stuck in "youth home".
Kingbirds are just really cool looking. Also bold and easy to photograph. Egrets are cool looking and large, which makes them easy to photograph too. There were plenty of both kingbirds and egrets around, as well as a wealth of species of gulls. A heck of a lot of species of gulls. In fact I probably didn't identify all of them because they were all together in a huge group with some cormorants squabbling, preening, and making a general commotion at Hellcat. As I was walking up the path to the dike somebody said to me "There's lots of stuff there. You'll have fun." Man, he was not kidding. Sorting out the Bonaparte's from the laughing gulls and keeping a lookout for common black-headed gulls among them could easily have taken the whole afternoon. I was apparently standing fairly close to a redwinged blackbird nest while I was sorting out the gulls. I saw a female redwinged blackbird with insects of some sort in her beak landing in some grass near the dike. The male swooped down over my head a couple of times with clear intent to run me out of town. I might have stayed longer to make sure I'd identified every gull species, but I really thought the blackbird was going to dive bomb me any minute. So I left and headed further south. A little ways down the road I braked hard - thank goodness there was nobody behind me - for a deer in the road and 3 cedar waxwings in a tree. The deer took off like a shot, its white tail sticking straight up like a plume. The cedar waxwings were munching out on something but I couldn't tell what. They looked gorgeous with their brown crests and black eye masks and the jaunty yellow tail stripe. I associate them with fall because I usually see them in August, so I had this brief wave of that "summer's over already?" feeling. Technically summer hasn't even started yet, but I felt intensely how short summer really is. When I got home, I looked up Thoreau's journal entries on cedar waxwings. He calls them the cherry-birds. His sightings are in mid-June (14th, 16th, and 21st) so they obviously didn't signify fall to him. Thoreau calls their song a "fine seringo note, like a vibrating spring in the air." I don't know what seringo means, but the vibrating spring is right on as a description. It's definitely a sound you notice. |
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Surrounded
by clean dishes and clean litter boxes awaiting drying, I
had a sudden intense feeling of accomplishment. Even before
I dried them and put them away, I had the sense of having
done something concrete and meaningful. That's a good
feeling, and one I didn't get very often in my brilliant
career. There's something satisfying about cleaning that I
just don't get from "knowledge work".
I
was driving down Water Street toward Plum Island after lunch
when I glanced out the window at a commotion on the sidewalk
just east of The Tannery. Somebody was yelling and gesturing
at three other people who were varying distances away from
him. I couldn't tell if the people knew each other. The
yeller turned toward the street and I recognized him
immediately as