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May 9, 1998
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a morning in MayMore on again off again rain showers. As I'm sitting here waiting for Zsolt and Istvan to arrive so we can start uploading the grant proposal, waves of light rain sort of waft by. I have not seen the starlings at all today but I noticed the male had dropped more nest material in front of the house. I guess he gathers far more than actually gets stuffed into the air conditioner. Nothing new has showed up in my bedroom. I can only hope the female has definitively rejected this nest site. I'm trying to get the house into good enough shape that I won't die of embarrassment at having people other than me and Nancy in it. Not that my housekeeping is all that bad. I'm pretty neat and clean but I have a serious book problem. There was a book quake or a book avalanche on and around my bedside table the other night. Books toppled everywhere. I left them where they are, figuring at least they won't fall on me now. I did try to neaten up the desk in my office so we could have some room to work. I moved most of the books from the desk to a little pile on the floor next to the bookcase. I can't cram another book into those bookcases. I keep meaning to get some built for the hallway and some for my bedroom, but that's way down on the list below getting rid of the starlings, getting the car door fixed, and cleaning the basement. I'm sort of looking at having the bookcases built as a reward for cleaning the basement. Between house-neatening chores, I did things like drop off the laundry and try to get a copy of Misty of Chincoteague for Lizzy. I was reading her the Delmarva peninsula chapter of The Coast and it mentioned the wild ponies of Assateague and specifically mentioned the Misty books, so now Lizzy wants to read them. Andover Bookstore claimed to have it but it was not on the shelf - possibly misfiled. Sue said she'd look for it and call me if she finds it, otherwise she'll order it for me and have it by Wednesday so I can still bring it to Groton on Friday. I also picked up a 20 lb. bag of kitty litter, which promptly broke in the trunk of my car. I salvaged most of it and changed his royal orangeness' litter box, but I have not yet vacuumed the trunk. I need to do that anyway because it's full of sand from Thursday's plover warden duty. I was so wet that sand stuck to everything and when I put my gear (pack, scope, tripod, chair) in the car they just spread sand everywhere. I'm still trying to get it out of my shoes. I just realized I have never asked either Zsolt or Istvan whether or not they are allergic to cats. For some reason, a high percentage of my friends and coworkers over the years have been people so allergic to cats that the could never come to my house or if they did they could only stand it for 10 minutes. I was beginning to get a complex - like there was something wrong with Max and Ada (my previous cats, with whom I shared my home for 16 years). For awhile I stopped inviting anyone to my house at all. I'm still reluctant now that I have Wilbur. What percentage of the population is allergic to cats? I'm supposed to be bringing some cats to Brigham Manor nursing home in June to socialize with the elders and all of a sudden I'm convinced I'm going to cause fatal allergy attacks. Surely the nursing home wouldn't ask us to come if their residents are allergic. Hmm, did I take my antidepressants the last couple of days? I'm thinking like a really depressed person. Hmm. Z & I know I have a cat. The nursing home asked for cats. So I don't' have to worry about liability and guilt. Hmm, maybe the constant overcast is getting to me. Isn't that old saying backwards? Shouldn't it be April flowers bring May showers? way later that same day...
By the time Z & I got here it was after 4:00PM and I was already tired, but eager to get the proposal uploaded. First, I couldn't read the floppy from Istvan's PC. Variously, my Mac hangs or crashes or displays the wrist watch icon forever when I try to read from the floppy. Repeated frustrating tries later, suspecting that the drive just wasn't aligned or something, we called one of their friends who said preformatted PC disks sometimes have this problem so we should reformat the disk and write the files onto it again. This time I can read the floppy and even open some of the files with MacLinkPlus but half of them I can't open at all with any application that I have. MacLinkPlus thinks they are spreadsheets and tries to open them with ClarisWorks' spreadsheet program but they are not supposed to be spreadsheets - they are Microsoft Word documents. I try everything in all the documentation I have. I look at the Dataviz web site to see if there is some advice about transferring Word documents. No luck. Zsolt is getting frustrated and I am starting to feel stupid. We gave up on the unreadable files after talking to another of their friends on the phone who said he would e-mail me the binaries if they came over to his place with the floppy. So, with that as the plan, we decided to work on the stuff we could do with the NSF web site. Umm, that should be thought we could do. I couldn't download the Excel template from the site. First it crashed my system, then it crashed Netscape but not my system. I tried various things with no luck. At the end of all this, I had uploaded exactly one file to the NSF web site in the approved PDF format. After all this struggle, they tell me the other files - even the ones I have managed to read and convert to PDF - are not final and we shouldn't upload them anyway. I did not throw them or my Macintosh out the window. OK, so at least neither of them are allergic to cats. |
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