|
|
|
a slide down the guy wire
Saturday, October 28 2017
Neville returned from his morning walk in the forest while Gretchen and I were drinking Saturday morning coffee in the living room. We soon noticed he had some plant matter sticking out of his mouth. It turned out to be a rather substantial chunk of what looked like root stuck between the tiny peglike top incisors. A piece of root slipped out and provided a two-inch target to yank on, but Neville would have none of it. Despite his reluctance to have us fix the problem, the root was clearly driving Neville crazy, and he kept pawing uselessly at his face without the benefit of opposable digits. Gretchen suggested me getting the forceps, which worked great for errant porcupine quill removal, but Neville was not letting that thing anywhere near his mouth. And, truth be known, perhaps yanking in the root would've been bad, since it might've acted like a tooth-extracting string at that angle. Eventually I was able to get my fingers on Neville's teeth while the root was safely in his mouth, and this didn't seem to concern him. All I had to do was scratch the rooty plant matter down out of the gap between the teeth (in the direction of the teeth as opposed to orthogonal to that direction, as pulling the root would've been) and it was free. That was easy!
This afternoon while I added 16 foot two by fours to the four by four corner posts of the new screened-in porch (to fix a measurement problem I hadn't detected before pouring concrete), our friend Kate came by with Missy, a rescued pit bull she's been fostering for months. (It's looking like the fostering will be a "failed" one, as Kate's boyfriend Joe loves Missy and Kate is coming around too.) Gretchen, Kate and all three dogs went for a walk in the forest and then returned. I'd been warned that Missy would freak out about me because I am an unknown man (and rescued pit bulls generally haven't had good experiences with men, particularly unknown ones). Last night Susan (who knows Missy) told me that when I first met Missy I should offer her treats without looking her in the eye. So this was what I did, seated on the steps to the upstairs. Missy is a broad-shouldered dog with a shape and size similar to Neville. Her colors are big patches rich honey browns cut with smaller patches of white. She has widely-spaced eyes and the prominent nipples of a dog who was used as a breeding bitch. She happily ate cat kibble out of my hand and accepted my pets, delighting Kate, who have never seen Missy be so accepting of a stranger. From there, Missy seemed to have a great time, taking various toys from the toy box (she has few teeth and prefers the soft kind). She also kept sexually harassing Neville by rubbing her ass on his face in an expectant manner. Ramona didn't like this and growled at her from the couch and then menaced her when she came too close. Meanwhile Charles the Cat sat regally on a chair near the corner where we put the cardboard and paper trash for starting fires. His approach to Missy was perfect: watching her warily while not actually moving. He knew what to do if she came too close, which she didn't do. I was wondering about the other cats; Janet had apparently scurried up a tree upon seeing Missy, and I didn't want them freaking out. When I went outside briefly to look for them, it must've reset whatever status I had in Missy's brain, because when I came back in she barked at me as if I were a stranger. Kate decided it was best to go at that point. Before leaving, Missy treed Janet again, this time up the large white pine just north of the house, the one with a damaged base that I've supported with a couple guy wires, one from the west and one from the north. That tree grew up in a deep forest and has no substantial lateral limbs for at least the first 30 feet of trunk, and for a time poor Janet just clung to the trunk with outstretched arms. Eventually she settled on a small dead branch, one with a cross-section no bigger than a quarter. By then Kate and the dog had left and Janet could concentrate on somehow coming down. She did so very slowly, yowling in complaint the whole time. It's not easy for a cat to back her way down an enormous trunk with nothing much to stand on. At some point she stood on the vinyl-lined western guy wire, seeming to think it offered a stable surface to rest on. But it was too slippery for that, and when she released with her overhead paws she went sliding down the cable, falling about 20 feet to the ground. She only weighs six pounds and fell into leaves, so she wasn't injured.
This evening I ground up about a tablespoon's worth of female marijuana leaves and used them to make a tea, which I drank over the course of several hours. I'd thought the effect would kick in while I was in the bathtub, but it didn't until after I came out. The effect was mostly to place of patina of paranoia over everything, and was perhaps the perfect mood for watching the last several episodes of the first season of Mr. Robot.
[REDACTED]
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?171028 feedback
previous | next |
