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our dogs with other cats
Saturday, January 9 2016
Two of our male friends were partnerless this weekend, so Gretchen invited them over for what others might refer to as a brunch (though it was earlier than typical for a brunch, at around 10:00am). These men were David of Susan & David and Michæl of Carrie & Michæl. Gretchen had made a frittata, which would typically bear too much resemblance to a quiche for me to want to eat it, but before I could say anything, she'd put a slice of it on my plate. When I reluctantly put it in my mouth, I found it delicious. As always with this crew, the conversation lurched wildly from one topic to another, with nothing being off limits. We talked at some length about idea for biomedical cameras that are swallowed so as to get pictures of the gastrointestinal tract. Gretchen wondered if there would ever be a day when such cameras would work without requiring that the intestines first be purged of their contents (via enema and that awful thick liquid they force you to drink gallons of; I'm surprised she knew about that latter one; I remember it well from my Meckel's Diverticulum crisis of 1983). I suggested that swallowed camera-robots could perhaps come with a built-in "shit plow" as well as some sort of water hose to blast surfaces clean enough to photograph. Then it could backfill shit from a section needing to be photographed into previously-photographed sections, repeating the process until the entire intestinal wall had been photographed.
While Michæl and Gretchen talked about something else, David and I had a wide-ranging discussion about tools, starting with what is and what is not a good thing to buy from HarborFreight. Good things: jackhammers and (reportedly) lathes. Bad things: cold chisels (which shatter after a few hours) and battery-powered tools (which are awkward to charge and do not retain a charge on the shelf). David said he'd like to have get a lathe, and then he talked about some machinist videos he'd seen that would be totally boring to most people but which fascinate him. This talk of lathes sent me up the upstairs bathroom to fetch our copy of Prisoners' Inventions, where a prisoner famously fashioned his own lathe from an old tape recorder. (Prisoners' Inventions is now out of print, and used copies can't be bought on Amazon for less than $55.)
This talk of improvised use of materials send me off to fetch a couple rare-earth magnets so I could demonstrate the way they auto-brake themselves while sliding down a conductive non-magnetic surface (such as copper or aluminum). I also told David about my trick of sticking things to walls by pinning them between rare-earth magnets and the drywall screws hidden at regular intervals in most modern walls.
This evening, Gretchen and I had our second social call of the day. This time we drove over to Eva & Sandor's place on Chestnut Hill Road east of Woodstock, and, for once, we got permission to bring our dogs. Eva & Sandor have four cats, but our dogs are generally good with cats, and Eva & Sandor have a plan to eventually adopt a dog, so they thought it might be good to expose their cats to our canines. It all went fairly well, with Piggy, the boldest and most self-righteous of the cats, choosing to hang out in the living room throughout the entire doggy visit. Ramona expressed some interest and came over to sniff a few times, provoking a few snacks from Piggy. But eventually Piggy relaxed, came down from the massive coffee table, and curled up in her basket on the floor. By then, some of the shyer cats were coming out to investigate. There was only one bad incident during the course of the night, and that was when Ramona lunged at one of the shyer cats, at which point Eleanor (who had been studiously ignoring the cats) came running up. (I didn't see this happen, so I can't say what the circumstances were.) In the end, we graded Ramona's behavior a B-, mostly because of that one incident. As for Eleanor, she got an A, though that would have been an A+ had she not come running over during Ramona's lunging incident.
In terms of dinner tonight, Eva had cooked up an American comfort food meal centered around a lentil loaf, which she served with broccoli and mashed potatos. With a little hot sauce (all she and Sandor had was that SharkBite sauce I'd regifted to her), it was a great meal. As for the beer situation, the collection of beers on hand was a little odd, with things like chocolate porter. It being a cold wintery evening, a chocolate porter actually seemed in order; I thought of it as the sort of beverage one might find in the little keg attached to the collar of an avalanche-searching Saint Bernard. The beer I had after that one had a similar thick sweetness as well, but by then I was craving something more like an IPA, though instead of that, I ordered a chamomile tea. Meanwhile, the massive flatscreen kept me mesmerized with its various video screensavers played on a loop. First it was a flyover of the Golden Gate Bridge followed by slow flight from the ocean into a lush, pristine island valley. Then there were repeated journeys up the Thames, starting with a freakishly-lonely pyramidal skyscraper and ending up just beyond the London Eye.
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