Journal of a Sabbatical

March 11, 1999

meow

Wilbur woke me up at 5:00 this morning. He was standing in the bedroom about a foot from the end of the bed, meowing like it was the end of the world. Or like he'd seen the cow he was in love with on the movie set when he worked on The Crucible. Usually if he wants me to get up and feed him, he jumps on the bed and pokes at my face. But even after I began to stir, he just stood there yowling until I got up. He did his "follow me" routine so I trotted downstairs with him. He stood by his food dish meowing so loud I'm sure he must've woken the new neighbor. There was a tiny bit of dry food left in his dish, but it was obviously not to his liking so I gave him a fresh ration on Feline Maintenance Light and went back to bed.

While he champed away downstairs I struggled to go back to sleep. It would have been smarter for me to just stay up. It was 6:30 before I fell asleep again and the alarm went off at 8:00. I was in the middle of some crazy dreams when the radio started telling me the news and the dreams got crazier. I didn't really fully wake up until the news abruptly switched off at the end of the hour. I stayed in bed for what I thought was another half hour in that intermediate state. When I finally got up and looked at the clock, it was 10:30!

I'd seen some blue sky right before I fell asleep at 6:30 but by 10:30 it was totally gray. The weather forecast predicted a light dusting of snow starting some time in the afternoon. Grrr. I slept through the only nice part of the day. I wasn't even dressed yet and had come to the conclusion that the day was irretrievable. Not a nice way to start the day. Plus I had a headache.

Headache and bad mood notwithstanding, I grabbed Waiting to Fly and headed for Starbucks to read over coffee. I know I've mentioned this book several times here and neglected to say that it's about penguins. The author's job is to count penguins in Antarctica. Talk about my dream job! Anyway, it's packed with penguin natural history lore and Antarctic exploration lore. It takes me awhile to digest each page because the content is so thick. But he writes beautifully. He makes getting penguin guano squirted on you sound like a spiritual experience. And my mind is totally blown by the idea that the fossil record shows a penguin that could have been 5 1/2 feet tall and weighed 300 pounds! When I told Nancy about this she wanted to know if there were any 500 pound piping plovers in the fossil record:-)

The promised snow materialized while I was in the middle of my Antarctic reverie. Everyone in Starbucks was looking out the window exclaiming "hey, look, it's snowing!" That's how weird this winter has been. Snow is alien and exotic in March.

They've upped the forecast from "light dusting" to 3 inches by morning. Meow.