Journal of a Sabbatical

November 3, 1999

my sink runneth over

Adopt these Cats

Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society

Today's Reading: Born Naked by Farley Mowat

Autumn Landscape at Plum Island

The sink backed up again. I really do wish people would not dump cat food in the sink. Not to mention litter. It would take a few seconds to scrape things into the trash can before putting them in the sink, but it would save lots of aggravation.

Giggle Girl did a great job of unclogging the drain for me. She says she's the one they always ask to unclog the toilet at the school where she lives. It's nice to have somebody with some plumbing skills around.

I saved some of my Dunkin Donuts coffee for Chloe this morning, but by the time I got to the cat shelter it had cooled off. Chloe doesn't like cold coffee, only hot coffee. Bob pointed out to me that she drinks hot water out of the tap, so it's obviously the warmth and not the taste of the coffee that she's attracted to.

Roy called in sick again, he's having a relapse of this eternal cold that's going around. I honestly don't know if that's what I have. I constantly feel like I'm getting a cold but it never advances to full blown symptoms. That makes me think it's an allergy of some sort but to what?

In addition to the usual dishwashing chores and cleaning up the flooded floor after the sink stopped up, my mission for the day was to get a picture of one of the cats playing with the Cat Charmer toy for the MRFRS web site. This proved not so easy.

Abbey and Cubby were more than willing to play with the cat toy,but on their own terms. I love this shot of Abbey looking up at the toy, but there was no way I could get Abbey's cute expression and the toy in the same frame.

If I got too close to the cats while Chris was teasing them with the toy, they lost interest in the toy and got interested in the camera, particularly the dangling lens cap. The only way to get a close up was to use the zoom. I wished I could hide the camera in the ceiling or the floor or something. I've always wanted a portable blind - but it would have to be one that kept cats from smelling me and hearing me, not just seeing me.

Jaguar only let me pet him for about 30 seconds today. He wanted to patrol the shelter and sit on top of the air conditioner to look out the window.

The morning felt long. It felt like there were 10 times as many things to wash. There weren't. It was just the usual stuff. Something about the relativity of space-time in November just makes it seem different.

Many new faces today. Mistle is funny looking. She sticks her tongue out like somebody on one of those high side effect anti-psychotic meds. I love her black and white markings though. And she loves the camera. She keeps trying to grab it.

I took two pictures of Jackson and Giggle Girl took one. It was so hard to get him to look at us. Finally, in the safety of one of those covered litter boxes, he gazed up suspiciously at me. I wanted to pose him next to another cat for scale since he is absolutely the biggest cat I have ever seen in my whole life. He is huge. He was not about to oblige me on that though. A mentor of mine used to say that managing software engineers was like trying to herd cats. Now that I've done both, I'm not sure which is the more difficult task but I do see the similarity.

Hunger drove me to give up trying to get the perfect cat playing picture a little after 12:30 and get some lunch instead.

Angelina's cut the carrots for my veggie sub differently - different "chef" today I guess - and I kept dropping stuff out of the sandwich. I ended up with hot peppers all over my hands, and was about to wipe my itchy eye with my hand when I realized that would be an extremely bad idea. I went to use the rest room and wash my hands. They were out of toilet paper. Thank goodness they had paper towels.

Despite the fact that the wind has been blowing at practically gale force all day, I had to do my Wednesday afternoon birding ritual. There were plenty of Canada geese hunkered down in the tall grass eating whatever it is they like there and there were some black ducks huddled in sheltered places on the water. Not a single little brown jobber to be seen until one yellow-rumped warbler got blown out of a tree and took up a lower roosting spot in a shrub.

I took a long walk on the beach. The tide was out so I walked among the rocks at the south end of the beach looking for interesting objects. I walked and walked and walked and had the beach all to myself except for a few herring gulls and four sanderlings. Even the sanderlings took off for someplace more sheltered.

As I walked I watched the patterns of swirling sand and got kind of windburned. The wind blew the clouds away revealing bands of sky in different shades of blue from cyan to deep blue-black. I tried to take a picture of the sky, but the colors just weren't coming out right. I finally took a picture of the clouds clearing over the dancing trees and Photoshopped it into an image that conveyed the scene better than a literal photograph.

I guess I have a lot to learn about photographing both cats and sky.