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bored out of her mind
Thursday, May 15 2008
Gretchen and I have a friend whose life is completely committed to the non-profit operation she runs from her house. She left a message on our machine the other day saying, "I need to get away from this fucking compound." "Compound" is a word she uses to refer to her home environment, mostly because of the comedic qualities that have attached to it after years of having been used to describe the homes of zombified cult members. For members of real cults today, "compound" has become taboo, and they prefer terms like "farm" and "ranch" (although George W. Bush has singlehandedly done much to attach comedic value to the latter of those as well).
Like our friend, periodically I need to get away from this fucking compound. I try to time the satisfaction of this desire to coincide with an occasion when Gretchen is home, otherwise she'll never get any fucking "alone time." Today after Gretchen returned home from a day at the prison was a perfect time for me to cure my compound sickness and grant my wife a brief couple hours in the house by herself.
I actually did Gretchen one better, taking the dogs along with me. It's hard to experience true solitude when you have an eager-eyed Sally following you around with a squeaking multicolored fabric bagel in her mouth, bored out of her mind. By contrast, Eleanor is always content with the here and now and never seems to be asking, "Is this all there is?" If something fun is happening, she hates to be left behind. But she never seems especially bored.
Usually when I go into town I have a list of things I need for whatever project or projects I happen to be working on. Today was no exception; what I needed more than anything else was three or four 3/4 inch ball valves for my new solar panel serial/parallel switching system. The other day I'd scratched out this crude drawing to help me plan the system.
"OLD" means the homebrew panel, "NEW" means the two panels I bought (which are still attached to each other serially under this new system). The hatched-out pipes are the new ones for this project. Circles with lines in them are new ball valves. Red circles with lines in them are new ball valves that are useful but not essential, and red triangles are boiler drains (for adding or releasing air or fluid).
Crazy as this sounds, I found myself referring to this simple diagram frequently today as I planned the errand to get parts and also later this evening as laid out the parts on the laboratory floor prior to assembly.
On the way home, I stopped at the bottom of Dug Hill Road and walked the dogs in the State Park lowlands. Sally soon established a chipmunk mine and Eleanor wandered over to the one sketchy house nearby, the place where the owner had once assumed she was a (presumably overweight) stray and given her food.
When I got back to the house, Sally was behaving strangely, pawing frantically at the sides of her face. I jacked open her jaws to see if she'd been quilled by a porcupine or something and saw a stick jammed sideways across the roof of her mouth, a connecting bridge between molars bypassing the canines and incisors. I tried to tug it loose but it was jammed in so tightly that it didn't budge. I had to go fetch a pair of diagonal clippers to snip the cursed thing in half. After I was done, I looked in Sally's eyes for an indication of gratitude or even just relief, but she'd already returned to an attitude of, "okay, what are we doing next?"
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