Journal of a Sabbatical

this will never work

April 29, 1998

Previous Entry Journal Index Who am I? Why am I doing this? What's a sabbatical? When did it start? Who are these people? What do the words mean?	x	x	n	The starlings woke me up at 5:00 again. I looked over to the the air conditioner and watched little piles of dead grasses ooze through the gap and drop onto the floor accompanied by the sound of scratching. It looks like practically the whole nest is in my bedroom in pieces. Turns out, according to my trusty Stokes book, this is a typical stage of nest building for starlings. I can see I am about to learn more about starlings than I ever wanted to know. It goes something like this: Male cleans out whatever material is already in the nest hole - or air conditioner as the case may be. Male brings dead leaves, bark, moss, lichens. According to Stokes: "... he may often be seen gathering material and then just sitting near the nest with it, and then maybe dropping it." This fits with what I saw the other day - lots of nest stuff dropped in the general vicinity. Male brings green leaves and flowers when they become available later in the season - Hmm, haven't seen any flowers but did see some green leaves. Female chooses nest site and male. Female cleans out what male brought to nest and adds grasses that she gathered. Final nest building a week before the eggs are laid. I don't have much time to stop them! Eeek! Nancy suggests I should call the Stokes and ask them how to stop the starlings from laying their eggs there. Either that or see if I can find something on the net about how to discourage them. So once I recovered from the surreal sight of the nest oozing through the gap in the wall, I ate breakfast and went to pick up Rita who decided to come to the cat shelter with me. We discover there are new procedures at the shelter to prevent the ringworm from spreading. The socialization room is now off limits to all but the ringworm cats. The keep-ins (cats who are new and haven't been tested or vaccinated yet and therefore can't mix with the other cats) normally get 20 minutes of exercise in the socialization room one at a time. All the other cats are normally let out as soon as they've eaten and have the run of the main room. But today with the socialization room off limits, the keep-ins are having their 20 minutes one at a time in the main room and the other cats have to wait in their cages until all the keep-ins have had their time. This is not going over well. Much meowing. Much much meowing. Jaguar looks at me reproachfully. He's sure I'll let him out, but no, not til the keep-ins have had their time. He is not happy. The other consequence of this new procedure is that it is forever before Roberta and Bob get the dishes and litterboxes out of the cages for me to wash. They're giving them to me one at a time. I wash, Rita dries, we stand around. I put Rita in charge of the laundry and instruct her not to touch any bag that says "ringworm" on it, that I'll do it later. She doesn't notice the label until it's too late and she's come into contact with the dirty laundry. I send Bob to the ringworm room for the chlorhexadine to disinfect Rita's hands before she touches anything or anyone else. Roberta scratches her leg. Bob and I notice Roberta scratches herself every time somebody says ringworm. I can't resist randomly blurting out "Ringworm!" and watching her scratch. It's always the same place too. One by one I wash the dishes until Dawna brings out the whole batch from the sick room and I get into a rhythm. It seems to take forever to get through all this though. This will never work! Finally, the regular cats can be let out into the main room and the rest of the cages cleaned. Jaguar is much happier up on the counter next to the sink watching me do the dishes. Before I leave I give him a really long petting session and he lets me stroke his chin - a rare privilege. After more phone calls back and forth with Zsolt and with the NSF bureaucrats, still no PIN so we still can't login to the proposal submission system. The clock is ticking... I'm finally putting away and organizing all the Muffy outfits the kids were playing with last week when Kate calls and wants to have dinner. So, dinner at Joseph's Trattoria - mushroom ravioli with vegetables. After dinner, I drove Kate to Butler's Toothpick to see the seals. This is getting to be a theme. I just can't get enough of showing off the mass quantities of seals in the Merrimack River. It was starting to get dark by the time we got there so it was a little hard to see them. It was nice to walk on the beach a little though. Walking back to the car, we heard a killdeer but couldn't see it. It made a lot of noise. The weird thing is I couldn't identify it until much later after I got home. It sounded so familiar and yet I couldn't place it. It was hours before the brain retrieved the name that went with the song. Today's starting pitcher: Tim Wakefield
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