Journal of a Sabbatical

September 22, 1999

the community litter boxes

Link du jour:

Birgitta Jonsdottir's Womb of Creation

Today's Starting Pitcher: Pat Rapp

Today's Reading: Danube by Claudio Magris

After another restless night, I was slow to get out of bed so I just pulled on jeans and T-shirt and stumbled into the car without so much as a drop of caffeine or crumb of food. As I started to wake up, I realized I'd probably better get a little something at the Dunkin Donuts on the way to the cat shelter. The dialog was like something out of Seinfeld:

Me: "I'll have a small Cafe Blend, black, and a coffee roll."
DD: "We don't serve Cafe Blend in the afternoon!"

Long Pause while I look at my watch and the clock in the Auntmobile to determine if I've lost several hours since leaving the house.

Me: "Umm,..."

DD: "We just threw it out, we don't serve Cafe Blend after noon."
Me: "I'll have a regular coffee."
DD: "Regular coffee?"
Me: "yes"
DD: "We don't got any coffee rolls."
Me: "Oh, forget it."

I guess if you work at Dunkin Donuts, 9:30 in the morning is after noon. The people at the cat shelter seemed to think it was still morning when I arrived even though I was late, so I'm less concerned about having suddenly developed multiple personality disorder or having been kidnapped by aliens - the most popular explanations for the lost time phenomenon. Do you think I can go on Oprah now that I've found a new way to account for lost time? Never mind the aliens, it's the clock at Dunkies!

Washing dishes without coffee and food in my system proved manageable but slow, especially with Chloe helping. I've seen cats drink out of the tap before, that's not news. Chloe, however, insisted on drinking hot water. She was lapping it up like she'd been in the desert for 40 days! This made it kind of hard to rinse anything.

Someone donated one of those big covered litter boxes to replace one of the community litter boxes, which are in pretty sad shape. My first choice for which one to replace would have been the pinkish colored one that I have not been able to get clean despite soaking in bleach and scrubbing. But that one is clean now! Roy, who used to have a ceramic tile business before he retired, had a brainstorm. As he put it, urine is alkaline so acid should neutralize it. He used to use muriatic acid in small concentrations to clean ceramic tile, so he knows how to use it without injuring himself. Sure enough, a tiny amount of acid in solution just lift those sunken in feline body fluids right out of the plastic. Without dissolving the plastic. So the pinkish one is all set. The blue one in the closet however is so scratched up that evil things embed themselves in the scratches and resist washing. Roy and I cast our votes for throwing out the blue one. This proves a popular choice so Roy carried it down to the dumpster and then put the new one in the closet. I'm sure the cats appreciate a pristine litter box for them to destroy.

We've got new cats of course. As soon as some get adopted, more come. We never have enough room. As you can see from the pictures, the new faces are adorable. Mama and Baby are Siamese. (Thomas, you are not reading this, you have enough Siamese already.) They're really pretty. And there's Rebecca with the broad face (above) who's a sweetie. And Trina who arrived earlier in the week and came with us to the nursing home on Monday. Some days I want to take them all home! Not that Wilbur would tolerate that for one second. He can't bear to share me with Nancy or my computer, let alone another cat. He can't even stand to have another cat within a five mile radius (I exaggerate - but he did have a problem with the Beans of Egypt Maine's cat when they lived next door).

I'd put my backpack with binoculars, bird book, and scope in the car in case the weather cleared up enough to look for birds, but it was raining pretty hard when I got done with the litter boxes, so I headed into downtown Newburyport with the intention of getting coffee at Fowle's and maybe browsing some books or something before going home to work on the Purrfect Companions brochure and Zsolt's latest Windows 98 problem (remind me why people think they have to buy Windows when they could get something that worked reliably or at least failed in comprehensible ways?). I say intention because the intention was never realized.

I was turning right onto State Street and slowed to yield to a car coming from the Water Street direction. I inched forward waiting to let it merge and just as it was safe for me to go and I went to step on the gas another car hit me from behind. Apparently she'd been watching the other car and thought it was safe for her to go, forgetting there was a car in front of her - namely mine. The damage was exceedingly minor - one broken pane on the left taillight.

We exchanged information and I drove off to cocoon at home in a mild funk. The woman just drove right into me! Grrr. So I skipped all activities, settled in at home with a pot of coffee (fortunately I'd bought a half pound of French roast the last time I was at Fowle's and still had some left). I had my hands full with the digital camera and the remaining newsletters, which I'd intended to fold, stuff, and mail at the shelter, the mockup of the brochure and stuff. I left the birding equipment in the car, as I often do 'cause I figured I'd just go right out with it again tomorrow.

I stayed in the remainder of the day reading huge chunks of Danube, which I am really enjoying. This guy is very funny in a literate, sarcastic, overstated sort of way. The English is strange. I can tell it was translated from Italian as opposed to French. Something about the sentence structure just screams Italian.

No wonder I read so slowly. Three pages of Danube yielded the following words unfamiliar words:

factious

1. producing or tending to produce faction; causing dissension.

2. causing or characterized by faction.

captious

1. made for the sake of argument or faultfinding, as a question, objection, etc.; sophistical; tricky.

2. fond of catching others in mistakes; quick to find fault; quibbling; carping.

otiose

1. at leisure; idle; indolent.

2. ineffective; futile; sterile.

3. useless; superfluous.

lucubration

1. a lucubrating; laborious work, study, or writing, especially that done late at night;

2. something produced by such work, study, or writing; especially a learned or carefully elaborated production; hence-

3. any literary composition; humorous usage suggesting pedantry. (often in plural)

farrago

a confused mixture; jumble; medley; hodgepodge.

cyclostyled

couldn't find this in the dictionary but I think it means created with a cyclostyle, which is in the dictionary

cyclostyle

an apparatus for producing a number of copies of a writing or drawing by means of a stencil in which very small holes are cut with a small toothed wheel on a stylus.