On Saturday I stayed in bed until noon or so and then went out to buy the day’s selection of cat food and a stack of plates to serve it on, so I don’t have to wash plates constantly. In the thrift store, I ran into Emma Victoria Glauthier, who was in The Censor. I told her I thought the play was incredible and that she was wonderful, and we had a brief friendly chat.
On Sunday, David and Lisa and I went to see the San Francisco Mime Troupe in a park in
Much shopping lately for new kinds of cat food, serving cat food, scraping rejected cat food into my compost tub, washing cat-food plates, and emptying my compost tub into the building’s compost bin.
Tuna is not good for cats to eat, but for several days, it was the only thing Thelonious was enthusiastic about. I called the vet and they said if that’s all she’ll eat, then so be it, though they also recommended AD, which is specifically for cats who won’t eat.
Sunday night I was completely miserable, and then woke Monday to find Thelonious seeming just like her old self, frantically grabbing at the pulls for the blinds, which is a long-standing favorite hobby. I went to work thinking maybe she was feeling much better but came home to find she’d left a lot of tuna untouched.
I tried a new canned food then and new dry food, both of which she seemed to like. I’d also stopped at the vet’s and gotten a couple of cans of AD, but I think I’ll save that as a last resort.
I tried a food yesterday morning that was some fishy flavor, chunky style, and was mildly disturbed to see it contained recognizable fish parts with the skin on and whole shrimp. I suppose that’s good, but it was kind of disgusting-looking. She seemed to like it.
Last night I tried “mackerel in jelly,” which was even more disgusting. For one thing, it contained an entire potato bug, minus its little legs, which must not have survived the jellying process. Unfortunately, she liked it a lot.
As of last night, I owned 18 different kinds of cat food. Sometimes she really likes a certain kind of food, so then I rush back to the store to get more, only to find her ardor cooling two days later.
Last night I also went to my second NERT class, which covered the various places to turn water, electricity and gas on and off. We saw a film on structure fires and a live demo of various ways to put out fires.
Most people who are killed in fires die of smoke inhalation, not from being burned. Smoke rises and gradually sinks toward the floor as a room fills with smoke, so it’s safest to stay near the floor, crawling if necessary. Even in one’s own house, one can become completely disoriented in black smoke and not be able to find a doorway that is six feet away that one has walked through thousands of times. It’s good to plan two routes out of each room in advance. If you wet a rag and put it over your mouth and nose, you will breathe steam into your lungs, which is not good. Use a dry rag instead.
Before you go through a door, feel it to make sure it’s not hot—if it is, don’t open it—but do that with the back of your hand, not your palm, because a hand in pain will reflexively clutch, and you don’t want to clutch at something that is extremely hot.
Folding ladders you can hang from your windowsills aren’t very good, but in a pinch, they’re better than nothing. (They usually have nothing keeping them from hanging right next to the building’s outer surface, so when you climb down, you may have only the merest toehold.)
If you live in a building that, besides fire extinguishers in the common areas, has a folded hose attached to a water supply, that’s good, but if you pull part of the hose out and turn the water on, nothing is going to come out, because when the folds of the hose fill with water, it will become completely blocked. Therefore, even if you need only eight feet of hose, pull the entire hose out. The hose has to be fully extended for water to be able to get through it.
Oh, here’s kind of a cool thing: the rule of thumb. How far should you be from a hazardous materials release? Once you’ve made sure the wind is blowing the smoke or fumes away from you rather than toward you, get far enough away that if you hold your thumb out in front of your face at arm's length, you can block out any view of the incident.
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