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Bruce the pit bull visits for the weekend
Thursday, January 26 2012
Late this afternoon I drove into town to get supplies, especially a reup of my laboratory liquor cabinet and a one by eight (0.75 by 7.25 inch) plank for finishing the new hole connecting the living room to the upstairs bedroom. While I was out, I went to P&T Surplus (in the Rondout) for the first time in months. I was still entertaining the idea of perhaps closing the new hole with a drawbridge for cats to sleep on, so I was looking for some mechanism with which to pay out and wind up cable. And while P&T Surplus had several first-generation LCD iMacs, a Mac Plus, and even a Commodore 64 (only $20; I was tempted!), it had no systems suitable for cable winding (unless I wanted to repurpose a clever mechanism from an old waveform generator).
Soon after I got home, Ray came over and dropped off Bruce, his brother's big-headed pit bull, who has been living with Ray and Nancy for the past three weeks. Ray was going down to the city for the weekend and taking care of Suzy (who is getting old and frail) was enough for him to handle. Bruce is about the nicest, most ernest dog you could ever hope to meet. Gretchen later figured out what makes him so compelling: he resembles a beast from Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. (The other big Maurice Sendak reference in our life is Gretchen's description of my feet.) Bruce adapted quickly to his temporary home, helping me watch teevee my stretching out on the couch beside me and resting his anvilesque head on my thigh. He expressed interests in any cats who happened by, following slowly behind them in hopes of sniffing them, but on this first day the only cats he managed to convince of his benevolence was Clarence.
I've decided to be proactive about getting exercise, at least until such time as certain trousers fit me once more (or I find some project to do that demands real physical labor). I've been doing 50 situps a day, which are easy to do in the laboratory because I can anchor my toes under the lowest step of either of the two laboratory stair cases (one goes up to the teevee room and the other goes up to the window out to the laboratory deck). I've also been doing ten to twenty pushups a day. This may not sound like an arduous workout regime, but a few days ago when I was just getting started and only doing 20 situps a day, the next day my stomach muscles were so sore that I had to use my arms to help me get up from sitting in front of the computer.
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