I Guess I Told Her

Last weekend I saw Rendition, and Tom and I saw Michael Clayton. Both were good.

I made Deborah Madison’s garlic mayonnaise and it was dreadful, worse with each passing day in the fridge, maybe due to using unrefined peanut oil instead of refined, and garlic that had been minced instead of mashed into a paste in a mortar.

Hammett’s switch to wet food is requiring much patience. Some days he eats what seems to be sort of enough, and other days hardly anything, though his vets assure me I am not going to starve him to death. His little pot belly is going away, but he seems full of pep. Maybe he’s full of pep because his little pot belly is going away.

The Internet advises warming up food that has been refrigerated, so I was doing that, but on a hunch, I tried food straight out of the fridge one day, along with some that had been reheated, and he ended up eating all of the cold food and none of the warmed food, which was great. I’d thought I was going to spend the rest of my life reheating little dabs of cat food.

In the past day or two, I realized that Hammett is mainly licking his wet food and was trying to figure out what I could do to get him to bite into it, but then came upon something online that advised mixing water with wet food so it becomes something the cat can slurp up. I was asking myself the wrong question.

Note that a cat who eats wet food always needs an abundant supply of fresh water, too. I accidentally killed two or three pet mice when I was five or six due to confusion over something related to this: My mother said that mice can extract a certain amount of water from their food, so I quit giving them water; or else I got it backwards and thought they would extract nutrition from their water, so quit giving them food, one of the two.

Then one day I looked into the cage, which was in my bedroom, which my parents entered rarely, if ever, and saw the mice were dead. I felt terrible about it, of course, and to this day have a bad dream now and then that I’m sure pertains to this, about coming upon several tanks full of enormous silver fish in my parents’ basement and seeing that the water has completely evaporated in some of the tanks, and that some of the fish are near death and others already dead and starting to rot. The fish are so big that they nearly fill their tanks, like cows wedged into too-small pens.

My mother has gotten cell phones for herself and my father. My mother loves her cell phone. She likes gadgets. We had a genteel argument over the merits of the cell phone versus the landline. She was on her cell phone, but I could still make out most of what she was saying. Heh.

“So, were you saying your landline costs you $23 a month, while the cell phones are, what, a hundred bucks?” That’s for the phones and wi-fi and all those things you can have if you don’t mind reading instructions, which I can’t do in my fragile condition.

“The cell phones are more expensive, true, but if you drive your car into a ditch and you’re upside down far from home, your landline is not going to do you that much good. That’s where you’d want a cell phone.”

She added, “Now, if you drive into a ditch in your own backyard, then I suppose you could crawl into your house and use your landline.”

I countered, “A landline is a nice thing to have if, say, there’s a tornado and you happen to have a stroke during it.”

“How likely is that?”

“Not very, but do you not put your seatbelt on when you get into the car because it’s not very likely you’ll get in a crash?”

“What if I do have a stroke? I’m not saying you should get a cell phone, but if you did have one, then if I did have a stroke, I could call you.”

Here I made a mental note to get a cell phone, but not wishing to appear a pushover, I said that I can’t hear anything anyone says to me when I’m on a cell phone unless I’m inside a quiet room, anyway, and in a room like that, there’s usually a nice robust landline.

My mother said that even if I can’t hear her on my cell phone as I cycle up Market St., at least I could see that she had called, and when I got home to my landline, I could call her back.

But if I’m going to do that, I could just as easily be apprised of the fact that she had called by my Radio Shack TAD (telephone answering device).

I’m sure you can easily see who won this argument: everyone on earth besides myself.