Journal of a Sabbatical

cat snot, insomnia, and dead plover chicks

July 9, 1997




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insomnia

I was going to call this entry Sleepless in Salisbury but I don't sleep in Salisbury, I just clean up feline body fluids there. Sleepless in North Andover, Massachusetts just does not have that Tom Hanks ring to it. I've just gotta lay off those $20 Coffee Coolatas from Dunkies. They don't seem like caffeine when they're going down - just frigid throat numbing ice that takes one's mind off how hot it is or how loud the thunder is or how wet you're gonna be when you get out of the car. It's gotta be the damned Coffee Coolata I had at 2:30 PM after walking with Joan-east and Priscilla yesterday. But wait, caffeine stays in your system for about 8 hours so that would mean it would be worn off by 10:30 PM, so what was I doing awake at 2:45 AM and 3:45 AM and 4:20 AM?

I tossed. I turned. I got up and ate a few fat-free salt-free cracker-free crackers. I tossed. I turned. I got up and tried to fix Monday's and Tuesday's journal entries again. Then I got cute and tried to redo the journal index page to put the Open Pages thingie back on the journal index page instead of the hack I did to get around some bizarre Netscape behavior. So, I managed to arrange things so the ring navigations were in the middle of the page, not near the dreaded truncation point at the end, and tried to make everything all nice and pretty. I couldn't get the gutter between the table columns to look the way I wanted. Picky picky picky. I am definitely a work addict. I was really really really really really tired. I accidentally deleted the little July calendar. I didn't realize it 'til I woke up this morning.

Wait a minute, how could I say "woke up this morning" when I never slept? Well, I think I might've slept from about 4:30 to 6:30.

A huge thunderclap just sounded as I write this. I should power down the Mac and clean the kitchen while I wait for Kate to come over and go out for pizza. I will return to tales of cat snot and dead plover chicks after the deluge.

cat snot

Cleaned the sick room today. Only 2 kittens in there. They have a URI. Snot everywhere. They were supposed to have been adopted last week but got sick. Good thing the FIP+ cats moved to a nice foster home so we could use the sick room for the kittens. The kittens didn't have names yet and everybody kept asking so I named them Kevin and Kathleen - nice Irish names. Don't know why I thought they needed Irish names, but they did. The have amazing snot projecting powers. They ought to be studied as a potential weapon.

Jaguar has taken up eating with his paw, scooping up exactly one pellet of dry food in his left front paw and delicately lifting it to his mouth like a raccoon.

dead plover chicks

Seabrook, NH cops squashed 3 plover chicks in a chase in aid of the Salisbury police - suspects trying to escape down the beach and 3:30AM and cops in hot pursuit. Meanwhile, in Westerly, Rhode Island joyriders drove around a locked gate onto East Beach and squashed 4 plover chicks. As I said to Nancy, the difference between the cops and the criminals is the cops felt really really bad about it.

Meanwhile, the Newburyport Daily News reports partial beach re-opening at the Parker River refuge , where I do my plover warden thing. The south end of the beach and parking lots 6 and 7 are open. Most of the nests and chicks are nearer to the north end of the beach. The one nest that was at Sandy Point (the southern tip of the island - not part of the refuge) was vandalized over the 4th of July weekend.

And they're doing well at Goosewing in Rhode Island - a Nature Conservancy property. The Nature Conservancy does a similar thing to the US Fish and Wildlife Service with volunteers who watch over the nests.

 

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