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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