Journal of a Sabbatical

March 22, 2000

left gloves

Today's Bird Sightings:
Plum Island
short eared owl

Today's Reading: Early Spring in Massachusetts: from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H. G. O. Blake

No rabbits or degus under the porch today. We're free to focus on cats. Cats, cats, and cats. This one is Frisco. He's a little scared, but oh so cute. He's the only one in the place that I haven't photographed before.

Now to get started on the dishes. I grab a pair of yellow gloves hanging over the sink and slip on the left glove. I go to put on the other one. It is also a left glove. No problem. There's a pile of gloves on the shelf above the sink. I grab another one. It too is a left glove. And another left glove. And another left glove. Altogether I try 7 left gloves. That makes 8 if you count the one already on my left hand. Where are all the right gloves? Have we been robbed by somebody with 8 right hands? And no left?

Fortunately there's a box of brand new pairs of gloves still in their plastic wrappers in the laundry room. Kendra manages to get it down off the top shelf with the broom handle and find a pair of large gloves. I am finally in the dish business.

Meanwhile, Roy has arrived and exclaims that the buckets under the sink are multiplying again. Sure enough the space underneath the sink is jam-packed with empty white plastic buckets. Everybody choruses: "I thought we got rid of them!" Evidently not. At least these are clean so we don't have to wash them, just shuffle them out of the way periodically. I didn't think to count them. If there are 8 of them, we know what happened to the gloves. :-)

Besides the missing gloves, today's big surprise was a visit by Jaguar. I was coming back upstairs from the bathroom when Kendra asked "How does he look?" "Who?" "Jaguar. He's downstairs in the parking lot. I thought that's where you were coming from." I immediately reversed direction and went out to the parking lot. Jaguar's foster person had brought him to the vet underneath us for blood work. He hates blood work so he wasn't in the best of moods, but he let me pet him under the chin. I sang the song I used to sing to him in the shelter, and he seemed to recognize it. He's reputedly deaf but after that time I took him to Brigham Manor and he freaked out when one of the residents set off an alarm, I've seriously doubted the deafness theory. Besides, he always did like my song.

It felt good to see Jaguar again. He looked a little pale but otherwise in good shape. Considering that he's had kidney failure for something like 2 years, he's amazingly robust. I had such mixed feelings when he went to his foster home. On the one hand, I'm thrilled that he gets to live in a house with a person and sleep in a bed with a person instead of living in a cage at the shelter. On the other hand, I kind of felt like this placement was an acknowledgment that he doesn't have much longer on the planet and I want him to live forever. But he definitely does not look like he's a death's door today. Go Jaguar!

The plan for the afternoon was to meet Martha at the shelter and head over to Brigham Manor with Stacy and her daughter to visit Buddy and Mrs. L. and to do the pet therapy thing with one of Stacy's foster cats. Pyewacket, the foster cat, got adopted in the mean time so Martha decided to bring the other Buddy. He looked like he was a death's door when he went home with Martha - Martha's house being sort of the hospice care. Well, he doesn't look like he's at death's door anymore. The thin hyperthyroid Buddy who lives with Martha has put on weight and looks fantastic.

The fat Buddy Brigham who lives at Brigham Manor, has lost weight: down from his high of 21 pounds to 17. This is also good news. He was so fat he had trouble getting around and is on a special reducing diet. Living at Brigham Manor instead of at the shelter he gets way more exercise. Even though he tends to stay around Mrs. L's room - making the other residents a wee bit jealous - he walks the halls at night following the night nursing staff on rounds.

Two Buddies and a kid is great fun. Stacy's daughter, Rachel, was as bigger hit than the cats.

Everybody is asking me about Antarctica. They've been talking about it since I left. I'm supposed to schedule a slide-illustrated talk, which I will call about next week. The only thing is I have no idea how to do a slide show with digital photos and conventional prints. I didn't take slides. I probably have to get special equipment to hook up the computer to a projector. I guess I'd better figure that out before I schedule the talk.

Once again I observed that they bake the elders here. It's so hot I'm drenched after a couple of trips up and down the stairs. This used to be a mansion so has enormous sweeping staircases and chandeliers and other stuff kind of incongruous with its present use as a nursing home, but it does make it feel less institutional. Hot, but not institutional.

I took a bunch of pictures hoping to get one I can use for my article in the newsletter. That would be the "real" newsletter as opposed to my volunteer newsletter. The "real" newsletter goes to people who give us money as opposed to people who clean the shelter. Anyway, I wanted a nice picture of a cat interacting with someone at Brigham for my article. A couple of women agreed to be photographed with Buddy-2. One woman wanted to be photographed but didn't want to go near the cat, which sort of defeated the purpose. I took her picture anyway and I'll print it out for her as soon as I get a new printer cartridge tomorrow.

It was a relief to get out into the cool air. After going back to the shelter to get my jacket, which I'd forgotten and didn't need - it's that season when I keep leaving jackets everywhere - I got me a cup of coffee at Fowle's and went to look for birds. I was pretty tired and there weren't a lot of birds around in the obvious places except for the short eared owl who was hanging around the clam flats. It landed in the spartina grass and swiveled its head around looking for voles or whatever it eats, giving me a great view of its face. I can see why people used to think owls were wise.

Despite the coffee and the cooler air I was dragging by the time I got home. I met the UPS man on his way to my unit with my long-awaited copy of Summer from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake. I am overjoyed. It took me ages of unsuccessful searches on all the major used book engines to find a copy of this that I could afford. It's the scarcest of the 4 volumes. The cover is pretty scuffed up but otherwise it's in great shape. This volume has a map of all the places mentioned in the journal so now I can figure out where he's going on these walks I read about and where all those song sparrows are.

But wait, this is weird. Summer starts on June 1 in this volume. Spring ends on April 11. Where's May? Apparently H.G.O. Blake considers May a separate season. However, there's no May volume.

So I poked around on the Thoreau Institute's web site where I found that the journals from 1855 to 1860 are online. The earlier ones are not. My new project is to compile an April 11 - May 31 compendium grouped by day like Blake's volumes, so I can continue my daily reading project for the full year uninterrupted.

Maybe once I figure out how to do a slide show I'll do one on places and species mentioned in Thoreau's journals. I don't think there's anybody at Brigham old enough to have known old Henry David personally...