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June 18,1998
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If a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward state, does that mean yellow caution tape is a sacrament? After all, it is an outward sign of a state of emergency. Bird Brain 4.0 came today. Yahoo! Complete with World Birds Database. This is like several orders of magnitude better than the National Audubon Society CD. For one thing, you can add the World Birds Database. The NAS one only has North American birds. Not a big deal unless you are restless like me and end up in strange countries with strange birds. I need a list program that can handle the fact that I've seen all but 2 of the 14 species of Darwin's finches - that's not something one wants to forget as one ages. Actually, I think it's not age that's fogging my memory, I think I breathed the new mite poison last night. Anyway, I am tempted to spend all of today entering my life list into Bird Brain and then backing it up (oh, yeah, the thing I really hate about the NAS CD is there's no way to back up your list - so if the darn thing crashes it's bye-bye list). So, like, this state of emergency flood warning thing is supposed to be over but it's not. Thunderstorms are still in the area. Flood warnings are still in effect for the Merrimack and various other rivers. Grrr. Some disasters foster a sense of community - everybody in this together - and everybody gets to feel good about surviving. This however seems to be a bunch of individual personal disasters. Life goes on as usual unless you happen to be one of the folks having your own personal disaster. There's no one big "Flood of '98", there's thousands of small ones. I've read reports in the newspapers of free floating docks coming down the Merrimack from up north and hitting boats along the way. There are supposedly dock wranglers out there catching the docks and anchoring them. I haven't seen any of this personally but I find the whole idea funny. Docks on a rampage! I meant to write a longer entry yesterday about the usual cats and bleach and sinks and stuff but when I finally managed to connect to world, I figured I'd better just send over what I had while I had the chance. I'm not sure why I am having so much trouble connecting. I don't think the floods or the thunderstorms should be having this much effect on whether the modem numbers that are local calls for me answer or not, and I know they shouldn't be affecting the network performance once I do get connected. Anyway, I remembered that Eileen who works at the shelter has or had a pet parrot so I thought she might know about bird mites. Bingo! They sell a poison for bird mites and a repellant for bird mites at Petco. So after washing more than the usual number of litterboxes and dishes on account of no one did the sick room or rabies room stuff yesterday and they were sealed in plastic bags under the sink waiting for me this morning, I headed home to changed into a dry non-bleachy shirt before heading for Petco. Once I changed, I decided I needed to have some coffee before I went to Petco. I ran into Tom on Park St. across from the sign that used to say "Giant Burgers, 18 Different Beers" and he hadn't had coffee yet either, so I offered to buy. We had our coffee, talked about various poetry matters, and went our separate ways. He did mention to me that his students have been complaining about the same type of unshakeable headache I've been suffering from all week. Must be the weather. Much later, I came home with the new mite poison and mite repellant. I sprayed the poison, took many mite lives, and frittered away the rest of the day. So that's it for yesterday. Today, I notice fewer living mites but there definitely are some. Today, flood warnings are still on. Today, Bird Brain 4.0 came. Today, I still have a headache. I did go to Starbucks but didn't encounter any of my friends. |
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