| Dec. 24th, 2007 @ 12:59 pm Behold, the 11-day weekend! |
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Current Music: Later with Jools Holland
(This is day three.)
My original hope was to just stay in bed for the 11 days, waking each morning to the church bells at sunrise, rather than the piercing mini-sirens of the alarm clock at 4 AM. I can still do this, for the most part, but I can't just stay in bed as much as originally planned. There are (now) two family dinners to attend, and there's the need to be on standby for work emergencies. And I have a barebones computer and CPU still in boxes — I need to set that up with my pre-existing (and soon-to-be-backed-up) hard drives, and install some form of Linux. And what about food? What shall we make? Do we have all the ingredients?
Most importantly, the missus and I have to hash out What To Name The Dog:
( The Dog, name to be determined )
He's a young Pekingese, found by my father-in-law, who volunteers at an animal shelter down in Florida. We're headed there in a few weeks to do the adopting; the in-laws are fostering the pup until we get there. His name at the shelter was Chewbacca (or Chewy), but we're keen on doing a renaming.
(This process actually began in Jersey City, where we'd adopted a Havanese named Fuzzy Wuzzy from Liberty Humane Society; the adoption was voided due to the fact that he (uncharacteristically) bit somebody the day before the adoption was to take effect. But we'll be back at the LHS shelter in a couple of months, in search of kittens.)
I can't remember all the names we'd come up with (and discarded), but here's a sampling, leaving out the Havana-inspired ones for Fuzzy...
C. Everett Poop
Topo Gigio
Eli "Lucky" Thompson (though I actually see a slight resemblance to Ben Webster)
(Randall) McMurphy
Murphy (Brown)
His current name is Charlie Murphy (pronounced CHOLLY MURPHAY!, as Dave Chappelle's Rick James might do it), and we'll likely stick with that, out of Name Fatigue.
The desire to augment the animal population at home is actually a desire to replenish it — our two cats, Samina and Monkey, have passed away in the last 14 months, Samina last October (kidney failure) and Monkey last month (stomach tumor). I still have the occasional Samina dream — for she was the one on whom I perfected practiced my cat-whisperer skills; it wasn't until recently that I stopped "seeing" Monkey, always mistaking a crumpled gig bag on one of the dining-room chairs for her.
We did, briefly, have a kitten. One Saturday in early August, I heard some tiny meows coming from the bushes near our back porch. I thought, "Cool! More kitties." Our back yard tends to attract sunbathing cats and kittens during the summer, and they do their part to help fertilize our cannabis plants grass; it's a lot of fun to watch groups of kittens playing back there.
The next morning, there was an insistent bird noise out back, little squawks or shrieks every few seconds. It wouldn't end. I went out to investigate, as did a neighbor, since the sounds turned out to be emanating from her driveway. The sounds were coming from a kitten, all by his/her lonesome, no sign of a mother or siblings around. One thing leads to another, and I've coaxed the kitten into my arms (quieting him/her down), and into the house.
( The Kitten, Squeaky )
We were able, after a few hours, to get him/her to eat and drink without the need for a teat; we made little progress in effective litter box training. Monkey wasn't too thrilled by all of this — she'd run away in fear (of fleas?) at the sight of little Squeaky. The vet wasn't too thrilled at seeing a(n approximately) three-week-old kitten; he wanted us to bring him/her back in a few weeks — Squeaky was too young to be given shots, and was apparently too young to show evidence of being definitively male or female.
It was all a bad idea: we were leaving for Nova Scotia in a couple of days; our last-minute attempt to find a shelter or pet-hotel to take him/her in for a few days failed, and we were reduced to putting Squeaky out in the back yard, with a few days of food and drink in a carrier. Since then, we've seen what looks like Squeaky, back in a posse with the mommy and siblings.
At least we still have the fleas. |
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