21 July 04
Nellie
On Sunday, we had two tasks. One was to take the two remaining kittens to Petco to try and get them adopted (we failed-hooray!-, but saw Fernanda who ended up adopting a young adult Siamese cross, Roux, of whom we’ve grown quite fond, and also Virginia and her daughter Alexandria who was visiting and who had babysat the kittens when we first got them and given them names). The second task was to buy a car. (The kittens were MUCH more stressful.)
My ‘86 Subaru hatchback is still running fine but having spent a good ten years in New England ice and snow (and salt), is a bit the worse for wear. It was getting so that I was not feeling comfortable going on long trips—or even relatively short ones out of the way, such as going to Bodega Bay. Blue was my first car, and I bought her for $700 from my roommate back in 1995. Yesterday I sold her to a coworker whose car died a couple of weeks ago and who needs a reliable commute car, which Blue is.
So—this evening we picked up a new Honda Element at the Davis Honda dealership, which was surprisingly low-pressure and even pleasant. This car is the butt of many jokes as being the ugliest thing on the road; it’s fondly known as a toaster, an elephant, and worse. But you can hose out the inside, you can sleep in it, and we can fit our tandem INSIDE. We’ll be rigging up all kinds of gizmos for hitching things in there and are-finally-able to go on a delayed honeymoon for our first anniversary. If only Nellie were a hybrid…
13 July 04
Older Bloggers
In March of last year Numenius posted about Samuel Pepys’ blog. We had only just started Feathers of Hope at that point; looking over these older entries is a bit like peeking over someone else’s shoulder.
Now it seems Thoreau has his own blog too. (Thanks to Dave of Via Negativa for alerting us to this.)
11 July 04
Bye Bye, Louie
Louie got adopted today by a sweet girl called Jane. He was her sixteenth birthday present. We’ll miss his lively chirruping around the house. What a change he is from the poor little huddled creature one May Wednesday morning in the carport…
8 July 04
Octarine Kitties
Diego and Charlie are here playing with the magic wand that Pica’s sister sent her a while ago as a gift. Fortunately, no permanent damage resulted, though we did have some difficulty retrieving the storage box after it levitated to the top of the ceiling.
[Postscript by Pica, Friday, July 9: I’ve added a few more photos to the kitten gallery.]
25 June 04
Worse for me than thee
I took the kittens in this morning to be spayed and neutered… from starving them to the fear that Babette wasn’t quite big enough, through their yowling all the way there in the car, I was a basket case by the time I got to the vet’s… I got chastised for having them in boxes not carriers, which didn’t help much.
All day I worried about them… I was told not to come back until 5-6. I called, at around 3:00pm, to check up, but there was no answer. I had to content myself with watching a juvenile Swainson’s hawk nail, and then eat, a juvenile California ground squirrel. So it goes.
Got the kittens home, cringing all the way (different yowls this time, yowls of pain?) and first thing they did when they got out of their containers was basically purr up a storm. Purr around food, purr around each other, purr around the blanket I had put down for them. They were purring when Numenius walked through the door from Bozeman. They’re fine, leaping about in an unseemly fashion. Purring.
Now, I can get some sleep.
21 June 04
Another Goodbye
This time, Denny’s hanging up Book of Life to devote himself full-time to writing his book. We’ll miss his quiet wisdom, his delight in creatures (especially birds), Kathleen’s photos. Stop by and leave a comment if you feel so moved, but get in there before June 30… the blog goes offline then.
For the cat people out there (and Denny’s definitely one of them), I posted some kitten photos today here.
19 June 04
Gearing Up
We took a jaunt to the Sacramento REI this morning with Richard, who needed to find a replacement hat for the one he borrowed from a colleague for our Salton Sea trip.
REI is like a dream palace for outdoor gearheads. Anything you could possibly want on a backpacking, camping, canoeing, or bicycle trip has been thought through, designed, produced, produced again but smaller and lighter and more expensive, and is available for top dollar on shelves of attractively packaged things. That nobody really needs. Or maybe they do, but they’re easy to make or improvise or really just do without. (Does the world really need twelve different grades of polartec?)
I was REALLY tempted by a cotton-lycra-knit hat-cum-neck-gaiter that, well, I don’t really need, except it was interestingly draped around the cardboard cutout of a woman’s head, well designed and pushing hard. It would take about twenty minutes to make such a piece of clothing, but then what would you use it for? I exercised RESTRAINT.
We settled for some dark chocolate Toblerone that Richard kindly bought and ordered some things online later on in the day from the much more reasonably priced Campmor.
18 June 04
Verticality
The kittens are moving up in the world. This morning Pica found Diego, the biggest of the four, on top of the bathroom counter, the first time any of them have been able to get up there. And they are being increasingly agile at climbing on our tandem bicycle, as Babette at right is demonstrating.
Perhaps we need to build a house for them like this one.
17 June 04
Commencement
For the past four years I’ve been the Graduate Studies Commencement Coordinator. Tonight was this year’s ceremony; I spent the evening at a friend’s house, where she was giving a party for her own graduation as a vet (that ceremony is tomorrow evening). I assume everything went swimmingly.
While I enjoy watching the students receive all the honors that are due to them for their hard work, I must say I’ve really enjoyed my spring, this year.
One of the greatest things I think I can learn as I grow older is that nobody, at all, is indispensible. Certainly not a commencement coordinator. It’s very liberating.
24 May 04
Independent Learning
The final in my Spanish class is tomorrow evening. I’ve put in a few hours studying both yesterday and today. I definitely know a lot more Spanish than when I began, but it’s a slow process, learning a language. I plan to take the next two semesters of Spanish as well, but the next class doesn’t begin until fall (end of August, actually).
It’s been interesting to get back into the habit of studying. Back in grad school, ages ago, we were encouraged to get done with our coursework fairly quickly, so it’s probably been ten years since I’ve had a final exam. And grad school coursework was always very focused on providing background skills for research. General study wasn’t part of the picture.
My independent studies these days include Spanish and statistics. I’ve started working through a somewhat mathematical (translation: a bit hard for me, but hopefully not too) new text on statistics (All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference, by Larry Wasserman) that starts with basics of probability and ends reaching some quite recently developed techniques. It will take me a few months to work through the book. But as with learning Spanish, I appreciate that many studies simply take a long time, and the best approach is to keep plugging away.