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fleas and leaks
Saturday, September 20 2008
Normally I'm the only one who drinks coffee in our household, but I think of coffee as a social drug, so I'm always happy when our guests want coffee too (though sometimes we have guests who don't). Sarah the Korean is a big coffee drinker, and she also seemed to enjoy the banana waffles Gretchen made for breakfast. "Do you always have breakfasts like this?" our guests always ask. The answer to that is no; normally my breakfast is a bowl of cereal and Gretchen doesn't usually have breakfast until lunchtime, and then it's usually some savory leftover from last night.
Soon after Sarah left, David showed up with more firewood for me. It was mostly hemlock and other less-than-ideal fuel types, but it's important to note that a large fraction of a fuel's value is how convenient it is. If it's dropped off at your door then it's convenient no matter what it is.
I'd been noticing a few fleas on Stripey the cat, and this morning when I ran a flea comb through Eleanor's coat, she was festooned with the little suckers. It was a crisis I could no longer contain on my own, so soon enough Gretchen and I were lathering up first Sally and then Eleanor with flea shampoo. Later we applied Frontline to all the cats and dogs, and then I went on a vacuuming-and-flea powder jihad.
As I was doing this, I noticed evidence of a roof leak on the one part of roof sheathing that is exposed on the interior of the house (in the place where one roof ridge intersects another in the teevee room). At some point, water had streamed in and left stains on the white paint. In a state of controlled panic, I went outside and inspected the valley between the intersecting roofs for signs of damage but saw nothing. So I climbed up on the roof for an even closer inspection and again I saw nothing. In the end I was forced to conclude that the leaks must have happened during an unusually powerful thunderstorm, one with winds strong enough to force water up under the shingles.
This evening Gretchen and I attended a benefit for the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary at the Colony Caf&eactute; in Woodstock. There would be two performances by vegan entertainers: the first a slide-show based standup routine by Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizaro comic strip, and the other Nelly McKay at the piano. We were only there for Dan. He's a funny guy, and the funniest of his stuff tonight was about religion, not animal rights. It was refreshing to see a comic wear his atheism so flamboyantly. He showed us a cartoon featuring women in burqas posing for a photograph, with one asking a stranger to please take the picture so they could all be in it. (Har! Har!). Then he asked the assembled if any of them had an imaginary friend. No hands. Then he asked if anyone believed in any God. There was a smattering of hands, typical of a gathering of the lefty coastal elite. Dan's punchline was something like "Need I say more?"
The woman acting as MC tonight fancied herself a comedienne, but she couldn't even get the crowd to laugh at a Sarah Palin joke (though it was an unnecessarily mean and unfunny one, something like, "You think Barack Obama is a funny name? How about Bristol, Track, Willow, Piper, and Trig?")
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