As you may or may not have noticed, my blog entries are always just about 850 words long. As of today, I abandon that constraint, simply because my story about Emily was longer than that. Letting go of my own rule will be my homage to Emily.
You may also have noticed that some entries don’t have the date at the top. That’s because the HTML that generates the date does it per day, or something like that, so if you post more than one entry on a day, only the top one will show the date. It’s fixable, I gather, but I don’t have time to mess with that.
(Mom! Why don’t you get a blog, solve this problem and let me know the answer?)
When I was riding my bike on Valencia the other day, a big red pickup pulled up next to me and the woman in the passenger seat asked where there was a Kinko’s. I thought, but couldn’t picture one, so they drove off. I was thinking that I’ll bet my neighbor Molly knows where one is (I think that because she once told me she worked at a nonprofit), and I actually sort of looked around, in case Molly should be strolling by, which of course she wasn’t.
When I got home, some blocks and a couple of turns later, there was a big red pickup in front of my apartment and Molly was talking to the person in the passenger seat. When she was done, I said, “They wanted to know where Kinko’s was,” which she knew, of course, and I told her that I had seen the same people over on Valencia and that I had thought “I’ll bet Molly knows where there’s a Kinko’s,” and we marveled at the weirdness of that, that they had ended up getting to consult the very person I had thought of.
Hammett is also psychic: Though his cat sitter, Pat, hasn’t been here since November, he must have picked up her vibe due to my talking to her on the phone in the past couple of days, because he rushed to the door when he heard a noise in the hall last night, hoping it was her. I know he hoped it was her, because she’s the only person he knows and likes besides me. (He knows Tom, but doesn’t like him very much.)
I will be going away on vacation a few times in the coming months and so have been pondering Hammett’s care. He eats only wet food now, but I’m not sure Pat could give him wet food, because she wouldn’t be here to move it somewhere else once the ants found it.
I called Dr. Press and he said if Hammett suddenly switches to dry food while I’m gone, it could cause an attack of FUS, particularly coupled with the stress of my being gone, but he said “You gotta do what you gotta do,” and that it would also be OK for Hammett not to take his glucosamine while I’m gone.
Lately Hammett has been smelling a little butty (butt-juice-like), and I got to wondering if expressing anal glands is something a cat owner can do herself. The Internet says it is, though I didn’t have immediate success when I tried it yesterday, with the latex glove and all. One of these days I’ll take him over to Mission Pet Hospital and have someone there show me how they do it. Maybe it’s something one person can’t do alone.
Then I also got to wondering if Mrs. Internet knows how to keep ants out of cat food, and it turns out She does. (Capital S for a deity.) I tried this last night and it worked perfectly: I put some water in a shallow baking pan, put a couple of drops of dish soap in the water to break surface tension, and put the bowl of food in the corner of the pan, though not so near as to touch the sides. There were ants on the floor and on the rim of the baking pan, but not one made it to the food bowl, so Pat will be able to give Hammett wet food while I’m gone after all.
Last night I saw The Italian Job, which I loved. I have resisted putting it on my list because I thought it would be one of those murky crime dramas whose plot I wouldn’t be able to follow, full of a bunch of guys I wouldn’t be able to tell apart. How wrong I was! It’s beautiful, first of all, set in Venice and Hollywood, and the music is great, the story was easy to follow (except for something about Ukrainian cousins later on) and was audaciously delightful at several points, the extremely pretty Charlize Theron is in it, and so is Mark Wahlberg, whom I like a lot, and for goodness’ sakes, so is Jason Statham, looking very, very cute, because that’s just how he looks.
I loved this movie! I called up Tom afterwards to ask why he didn’t tell me The Italian Job was the best movie ever—it turns out he doesn’t think it is—and then I watched almost all of it again right away, rewinding all of Jason Statham’s scenes to watch them three or four times in a row before going on.
When I go to a movie theater these days, my remote-holding hand twitches in vain: Wait! I want to see that again!
No comments:
Post a Comment