Journal of a Sabbatical

March 21, 2000

incomplete thoughts

Today's Reading: Early Spring in Massachusetts: from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H. G. O. Blake, The Cat Who Robbed a Bank by Lillian Jackson Braun

Until last Wednesday I'd never heard of a degu. Until today I didn't know how to spell it. Now that I know how to spell it, I've discovered they're quite popular pets. There's even someone who keeps an online journal about his.

About the association of song sparrows with juncos, which I mentioned on Friday, I knew I wasn't the first to notice this. A couple of Thoreau's journal entries for March 20 mention mixed flocks of song sparrows and what he calls Fringilla hiemalis, for which the index entry in my Thoreau on Birds says "See Junco, Dark-eyed". He mentions tree sparrows hanging out with them too, but the tree sparrows I saw on Friday were off by themselves.

The title of yesterday's entry has nothing to do with what I wrote about. I picked "independently poor" as the title before I started writing the entry, which was going to be about how I feel picked on when people accuse me of being independently wealthy because I chose to take a sabbatical from "real" work. That came up in conversation with some of the coffee buddies yesterday and I was in a PMS-ish kind of mood already anyway. I think it was one of the M's who came up with the term "independently poor" in my defense. If the Hungarian botanists don't come up with funding to pay me, and I can't get a job doing pet therapy, then I suppose there will come a time when returning to the high tech world will look more attractive. Until then, I'll stay independently poor.

Today was mostly devoted to the MRFRS volunteer newsletter: editing, laying out, getting printed, folding, and stuffing in envelopes. The followup story on the 7 abandoned animals from last Wednesday came in late so I did it as an "Extra! Extra!" insert, which I printed on my dinky little ink jet printer. That took some time but I liked the effect of the colorful insert letting people know the degu, the guinea pig, the rabbit, the two Siamese, and one of the dogs are all adopted already. It takes a long time to fold and stuff 89 newsletters. I was getting punchy by the time I was done.