I Need My Tiny Special Blanket

“And I need my tricycle and my sled and both teddy bears and my alligator doll.” So says Frances in A Baby Sister for Frances, by Russell Hoban, when she is being tucked into bed by her parents.

I bought a copy of this charming children’s book at Stacey’s today, since, ahem, my mother declined to give me her lovely vintage edition when I was visiting in June. That’s OK. The only thing that’s different about this one is the colors on the cover, plus the paper is not quite the same. The words and pictures are all there.

I also bought cat food (of course), work gloves, a pry bar, little white plastic tips that go on the end of a door stop, and seven packages of 1/8” elastic for use in the waistline of baggy pants. The pry bar and work gloves are for my NERT homework.

I guess I hardly need to say that the food Thelonious likes the most, after the kind with bugs in it, Whole Foods had only one can of. I have a couple at home, though, and they said they’d have more tomorrow.

As for the door stop tips, some months ago, I noticed this white rubber thing on the floor and threw it out. Then I saw the denuded door stop and realized what it was. I guess I should have realized that my carpet wouldn't suddenly have sprouted a tiny rubber thimble.

I picked up prints at Walgreens, an entire roll of pictures of Thelonious taken with my Nikon FG and, if the picture was taken at night, speedlight. The ones without the flash are nicer-looking.

That FG has given me years of excellent service. It was a gift from my father some 20 years ago. He bought one for himself and my mother at probably the same time, but theirs died years ago. A couple of years ago, I thought mine had finally succumbed to old age, as well, but it turned out it just needed cleaning. Something rubber inside had sort of melted and gotten sticky.

My father also gave me a sturdy Bogen tripod, which I will probably use soon to make some cat-and-mom self-portraits. If I had a scanner, you could see them. That is, if I had a scanner and also had a PC with more than 31 Kb of storage space remaining, or if I got a burst of energy and installed more storage. But since it can take a year for me to choose a pair of socks, don’t hold your breath.

It drives my mother, who built her own PC, crazy that mine is eight years old. “Eight effing years!?” she emails me. I don’t like the thought of landfills piled up with PCs and Chinese workers getting cancer from all the deadly substances in computer equipment.

I like the idea of having an abacus and a cage full of homing pigeons.

Yesterday after work I looked around and found where the electricity for my unit is shut off (or turned on), the electrical shutoff for the whole building, the per-unit gas shutoffs and the main building gas shutoff. Everything was nicely labeled, and there is a wrench attached to the gas shutoff. I didn’t see the water shutoff, which might be in the basement.

I showed Tom all of this, and also showed him how the ladder on the fire escape works, which he had not taken a look at before. He realized there is a big object in his apartment in front of the window he’d need to climb out. We considered the various routes out of the building.

I’ve been eating absolutely everything it crosses my mind to eat, which is fine and which is, after all, a time-honored method of coping with crisis, but I guess I’d like to put a bit more attention on whether I’m actually hungry and what my stomach (as opposed to my mouth and brain) actually wants. It’s sometimes tricky to do that without it feeling like a diet, but I’m starting to feel kind of not well-cared-for.

I emailed the cat food people and told them about the bug, and they wrote back immediately and offered to send more bugs, but I told them that, being an environmentalist, I didn’t want to cause three ounces of cat food to be shipped halfway across the state, though I did appreciate their speedy response and the offer. I’ve already bought more of that food. What can I do? If the cat likes it, that’s that.