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first katydids of 2017
Sunday, July 23 2017
Oscar, the most wet-food-obsessed cat in this sector of the multiverse, didn't show up for breakfast this morning. This convinced me that he'd been killed overnight, possibly by a coyote but more likely by that car that had hit something in the road last night. I went out to the road to look for evidence of Oscar roadkill. Even if he'd survived long enough to crawl into the bushes, the accident scene should've been covered with his fur. But I found none of his fur anywhere, and his corpse was not under any of the nearby bushes (I checked). As I sometimes do when I get up early, I decided to take a nice long hot bath. When I got out, there was Oscar, alive and well. Despite how overweight he is, I gave him a nice big lump of wetfood. He's not the best cat in the world, but every day I keep the cats alive is a good one.
Today I started on the project of installing a fancy $300 dual-fan pivoting ceiling fan in the teevee room (Gretchen and I had seen such a fan at the Tiny House Festival near New Paltz and then I'd bought one online). I soon realized that I couldn't hang the new fan complex from the electrical box; that box was on a slanting 45 degree ceiling and the pole descending from it could not be made to hang vertically (this had also been true of the existing fan, which had hung maybe 10 degrees off of vertical). So I installed a tiny collar tie (measuring only 23 inches long) to hang it from. I then spackled all the popped nails and irregularities in the wood. That was as far as I could go today.
Meanwhile, our friend from Portland, Oregon, Gilly, had arrived in Manhattan either today or yesterday, and today she rode a bus to Woodstock, where she met Gretchen near the end of her bookstore shift. The two did dinner at the Garden Café and arrived back here in Hurley a little on the late side. There was much oogling of Janet the Kitten (who now feels comfortable throughout the upstairs but has yet to venture down to the first floor). At some point I noticed there were three or four bright green katydids gathered around the light above the stairway to the upstairs. Is it already katydid season? I even heard one making a half-assed version of the "cha-cha-cha-cha" sound that heralds the beginning of the end of summer. I will never stop writing about how ominous that is.
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