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Journal of a Sabbatical |
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July 11, 2001 |
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cats, cats, and more cats |
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Adopt these cats at Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society Today's
Bird Sightings: Today's Reading: A Conscious Stillness by Ann Zwinger and Edwin Way Teale Today's
Starting Pitcher: The Lists The Photos |
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Roy has taken to calling Kendra
Deirdre or Cassandra and now can't remember her real name.
His under sink reorganization from last week seems still in
place - nothing is sticking out and tripping us as we do the
dishes. There seem to be way more litter boxes than usual.
Maybe they are reproducing. Or maybe there are way more
cats. I can't believe this is my last Wednesday morning shift! I haven't achieved spiritual enlightenment through washing litter boxes yet! Kendra summons me to the conference room where a rich chocolate cheesecake inscribed "Good Luck Janet " commemorates this historic event. Leaving that is, not enlightenment. Roy says he's going to charge me to come to my office and give back rubs. I am going to miss the humans and the cats. To paraphrase the late Douglas Adams: So long and thanks for all the shit. The old salts are on the topic of unsafe Middle East ports again. I'll miss their analysis of current naval disasters. Guess I'll have to call them whenever there's a threat of tragedy at sea.
The two black skimmers I saw last night are nowhere to be found. I had kind of hoped to see them feed as their lower mandibles are sort of their main claim to fame but all they did last night was stand around with their heads tucked under or sometimes wake up and look around but not fly or feed. There is a cluster of birders at the salt pannes evidently waiting for the skimmers to come back. Mostly there are a helluva lot of short billed dowitchers. I lost count at 59 but there are obviously more than that. Most of them are feeding in that pump-like or sewing machine like way they have. It's quite a spectacle to see dozens of them in action at once.
If I had any doubts about going back to work, they're gone now. I just checked the stock price. Cosmodemonic's stock dropped 35% today. And that's on top of 12% yesterday and 11% the day before. Eek! |
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Copyright © 2001, Janet I. Egan |
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Sandy
got adopted! Sandy got adopted!! Sandy got adopted!!! Hooray
for Sandy who gets a nice home with a young guy and
no other cats. For Savannah this means control of the
big yellow bucket and Roy's pockets. For Seamus this
means having to find somebody else to pick on. He doesn't
seem interested in the big yellow bucket without Sandy on
it. While Savannah is enjoying watching all the action from
the bucket, Seamus is gallivanting around harassing anybody
he can find.
Cats,
cats, cats all over the place. It's kitten season and there
are grillions of them. Lots of new full grown cats too. Umm,
do people not realize that kittens grow up to be cats? I so
wish it were not so hard to convince people to spay/neuter
their cats. Overpopulation causes so much suffering! End of
mini-rant. Back to our cats already in progress. The kittens
are adorable. I didn't take the time to photograph them for
the 
Red
(formerly Red Head but somebody copied over the card wrong
and everyone has been calling him Red since) is taking on
Seamus, much to Seamus' surprise. Much to our surprise Red
is winning. They segue from fighting to playful wrestling
with Seamus in the submissive role. Now that's a
change!
For
some reason, I am not hungry immediately on finishing with
the cat photography. Could that be the cheesecake? I decide
to get a cup of coffee at Fowle's and go play drive-by
birding before lunch. The traffic in downtown Newburyport is
unbelievable. After not moving for several minutes, I
finally turn on the first available side street and bypass
downtown heading directly for the refuge without the coffee.
With all that traffic in the downtown I half expected the
refuge to have the same bumper to bumper lines, but
fortunately it doesn't.
I
finished reading Return of the Osprey last night
(after midnight, which explains my tiredness today). So, of
course, the osprey young in the book have fledged and flown
off south. But that's Gessner's 1998 ospreys. Now in 2001 in
local osprey time it's still only early July. I watch the
nest at the Pines Trail for awhile. Two heads pop up above
the rim of the nest. Then wings appear. Two chicks stretch
their wings and flap as if practicing for flight, or more
like trying to figure out what their wings are for. The
chicks are sort of mottled looking, not the smooth black and
white of the parents. I don't see the parents anywhere
around. One chick seems to get a little hang time - a few
seconds - above the nest before it flops back down. I could
actually see its talons above the edge of the nest. Watching
them I get the same feeling I got from reading the book:
ospreys are way more charismatic than piping plovers. You'd
never see a bumper sticker claiming ospreys taste like
chicken or it takes six to make a meal or whatever... I
can't help but think that the reason the ospreys have made
such a terrific comeback in Massachusetts is simply that
people like them.
I
guess I'm experiencing a tiny bit of regret at not having
come up with a book about the piping plover in all my time
off from the high-tech grind. That's not to say I won't ever
do it, just that I haven't done it. I was whining to Ned
yesterday that I hadn't accomplished much on my sabbatical.
He pointed out that nobody said the result had to be a book.
That was a notion, not a plan. He came up with a term for
what I've been doing "living responsively", which really
gets to the core of the cats, piping plovers, Hungarian
dendrologists, and all that. And who's to say that Sewage
Outflow and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, Sadie's
Kittens and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, and the
Binoculars of Enlightenment (with or without the
Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch) won't get written
eventually?