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Journal of a Sabbatical |
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March 13, 2000 |
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bright day |
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Today's Bird Sightings: Today's Reading: Early Spring in Massachusetts: from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H. G. O. Blake
Copyright © 2000, Janet I. Egan |
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There was robin hopping on the grass outside my front door this morning. I guess this means it's time for robins to give up their secret winter life of eating winterberries in the dunes and resume their hopping on suburban lawns.
Wasted another gorgeous bright blue day. The kind we'll never have anymore of ever. The last nice day there's ever gonna be. Hung around home trying to connect to the Internet so I could see if I had any further email from the person who is helping me with the Purrfect Companions brochure, check the status of some books I ordered from alibris.com, see what birds are being reported where so I could plan some birding time before the Purrfect Companions meeting. None of that proved possible. Then wasted two hours trying to get Now Contact to print the volunteer list with shifts worked and rabies vaccine status all on one page. This almost worked. I don't think Now Contact works on Windoze so I'll have to migrate the whole thing again, but at least I'll be migrating from something current as opposed to the ancient and obsolete Touchbase. Remind me again why I'm doing this? Oh yeah the office reorganization involves throwing away the Mac and replacing the PC with a Windows 95 one (it's an old Windows 3.1 or whatever it was called) - not that anybody but me ever touches the volunteer list... but so long as I can find something non-Microsoft that works for me and for whatever they put in the office I can avoid being indispensable.
I really want to know how anybody can spend enough hours online to substantially reduce social contact or anything else. I get about enough time to do one search on yahoo and look at one of the sites it comes up with or enough time to search for one book on bibliofind and maybe order it, before everything slows to a crawl and suddenly nothing has a DNS entry anymore ... I wait a few minutes and try again with no luck and give up. Maybe all these socially stunted people the media loves to worry about just sit and stare at the screen for hours even though they're not not getting a response? Me, I want to throw the entire Internet out the window on days like this. Can't even get my bleeping e-mail half the time. Grrr! Forget staying online long enough to upload new journal entries. Maybe some day.
I did manage to make enough time to look for birds and/or go for a walk on the beach before the Purrfect Companions meeting. It was surprisingly windy on the beach and I wasn't really dressed for it, so thought better of a walk. Surprised to see 5 killdeer in a little flock in the north field, close to the road, foraging around for whatever killdeer forage for in the grass. First killdeer of the season. Saw two short eared owls at Salisbury Beach. That was cool. One was by the boat ramp and the other was over the dunes between the state park entrance road and my brother Donald's house.
I blundered into the sick room tonight, right past the sign announcing it was a sick room again, and then slipped into the office accidentally letting Cubby into the sick room. I caught her fast and don't think she'll catch the URI that's going around just from those few seconds, but I felt stupid. Last Wednesday it wasn't a sick room. Today it is. And it's full of cats with URI. Makes it kind of hard to use that as a conference room. So we met in the office, with people sitting on desks and on the floor as well as on the three chairs. Martha was giving Ace IV-fluids while she was chairing the meeting. Astonishingly, we managed to accomplish a fair amount of Purrfect Companions business. Maybe we should meet under such adverse conditions all the time. It keeps you focused on the agenda. |
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