Journal of a Sabbatical

March 17, 1999

green

Note: this entry has nothing whatsoever to do with green or Saint Patrick. 

If it's Wednesday, these must be cats. Either that or they are very strange piping plovers.

Jaguar is in a much better mood today, and seems to want to eat, which he wasn't into last week. He let me pet him for a long time and then begged to be let into his cage to eat. Unlike a lot of the cats, he prefers to eat in his own cage with the door closed.

Joey is taking an unhealthy interest in Samantha. He keeps going up to the side of her cage and hissing at her 'til she hisses back. I put a towel between them so they couldn't see each other and Joey took a swipe at me. Fortunately he missed. I did get him to leave Samantha alone for about half an hour, but as I was leaving I noticed him getting into position again.

The ever cuddly Moses has gone to his new home. Bet he's happy. Simon, the new guy who arrived last week, has already been adopted too. I knew he wouldn't be there long.

All morning Cosmo would run away every time he saw me. I was starting to get a complex :-) Why me? Actually, it was unusual for him to be out and about since he's quite shy of people, so maybe it wasn't anything personal. When I finished washing the dishes and litter boxes, I got out the cat toy that Sadie likes. She showed no interest in it at all today, but Cosmo got really into it. He was leaping and pouncing and chasing it and even getting close to me without bolting. I wound part of the fabric around the pole to shorten it so he'd come even closer. He kept coming closer and closer in his zeal to catch and kill the cat toy until he suddenly realized he was close to a human. He stopped. He would come no closer. Kendra said he'd done that with her too - come closer but not too close. Maybe he's learning to trust people a little.

But the highlight of my day was not playing with Cosmo. What could top breaking my glasses at Angie's Diner? Hitting myself in the head with a chair, that's what. Fearing that the ketchup at Angie's is a solvent of glasses frames, and in the mood for a veggie sub, I went to Angelina's.

The doors were all wide open. All the chairs were stacked up on top of the tables as if they were washing the floors, which they weren't. There were no other customers. A guy was loading bags of potato chips into giant cardboard cartons. The soda machine was empty. There was no one behind the counter. I was starting to think Angelina's had gone out of business and this was moving day. Finally a girl came out from the kitchen and took my order, and asked if I wanted it for here or to go. I really didn't want to eat it in the car, so I said for here.

When my sandwich was ready, I carried it to a table. I reached up to move the chairs off the table so I could eat. The next thing I knew the chairs and my glasses were on the floor and the right side of my head was throbbing. "Did the chairs fall on you?" the sandwich girl asks. I was so embarrassed I mumbled something about its being my fault and sat down to eat the sandwich. Miraculously, my glasses were not broken.

When I told this to Nancy tonight I said I don't even know what decompensate means but I would have decompensated if I'd broken the new glasses.

Two fishermen came in and sat at a table the didn't dump the chairs on their heads. They talked about how the shrimping (or was it scalloping) has gone all to hell this year and there ain't nothin' left to do but groundfishing and maybe clamming. I remembered a guy I worked with about 20 years ago who left the computer business to take up shrimping in Mississippi. I wondered if it would be as easy for these guys to leave fishing and take up software development. I wondered if they could possibly be happy if they did.