Feeding Squirrels On My Way To Work

Thursday, September 29, 2005

After looking at this Yahoo! Pick - a site about Metros around the world, I wished two things: 1) that Seattle had a real Metro, and 2) that I'd visited Rotterdam when I was in Holland ten years ago.

I skipped Denise's yoga class yesterday evening. Phillip had stayed home sick, and I chose to stay home in order to feed Gladden and let Phillip sleep.

Phillip got up a little before eleven o'clock, so Gladden got playtime with both of us. He seemed a lot happier than the previous night.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

I'm scared. Gladden was up and ready for breakfast at 7:50 yesterday evening. That's ten minutes early, according to his new, self-established schedule. It's 40 minutes early, according to what feeding time has been for the past ten years. He was jumpy - jittery - he wouldn't come near me. Last night, I took his house out of the cage for playtime. He was beyond crabby. He was angry. He snapped at me several times. This morning, he was even more jumpy than he was at breakfast time. If either Phillip or I approached the cage, he'd run - up the walls, behind the exercise wheel, anywhere to get away. The slightest movement of my hand would send him into a panic jump. This isn't right.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Recently, I wrote about the puzzling practice of people showing up on our out-of-the-way floor, looking for directions. Today, I noted another curiously common practice that may be a key to understanding the earlier mystery.

It goes like this: A person gets on an elevator. There are other people on the elevator, and other people get on the elevator behind the person. The person pushes a button, as do other people. A little while later, the elevator stops, and the doors open. The person, apparently not noticing the lighted number "2" on the interior panel of the elevator, both of the raised number "2"s on the sides of the door frame, and the three-foot-high number "2" painted on the opposite wall, steps off the elevator and asks a passer-by, "What floor is this?" I suppose that if there wasn't a passer-by, the person would continue wandering the floor, lost.

I don't mean to be insensitive to the visually-impaired, but this happens far too often to attribute it to that.

You know what? People, in general, just don't read signs.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

I returned to church this morning. My mind wandered throughout the service. I didn't stay for Coffee Hour.

Phillip and I scouted out a location for our next cache hide. It still needs some planning. Then we went to Christie Park to check on our cache there. Phillip suggested that we drive past and see if anyone was in the park before deciding if we wanted to stop. No one was in the park except for a man sound asleep on the upper bench, out of sight of where we would be, so we stopped. We confirmed that the cache was missing. We sat down at the table and completed the details on new cache container we'd brought, just in case.

We completed the new cache container, and were just about to put it in the hiding spot, when a young man arrived and asked if he could sit with us. We'd planned on making it a quick stop (we'd even left the virus scan running on the computer), but neither one of us is rude enough to tell the guy no. We'd both seen this guy in the park before, practicing pseudo-Tai-Chi. The young man talked to us at length about the band Yes, Eastern philosophy, religion, alcohol and other drugs, a balanced life, and on and on. He was quite a talker. At first, we both tried to discourage him by not being very responsive. He was, however, a very polite and interesting fellow. We couldn't help joining in at various points in the conversation. Meanwhile, two other fellows showed up to play some basketball.

Eventually, the young man thanked us for listening, apologized for talking so much, and went on his way. The two guys were still playing basketball, but Phillip told me it would be safe to replace the cache. While I did so, I did some stretches against a nearby wall to disguise my movements.

On the drive back home, Phillip said that he couldn't understand why someone would take a cache - something that's worthless to anyone - What did they hope to prove? When we got home, Phillip didn't seem to be in any hurry to re-enable the cache listing, and eventually left the task to me. I realized that he's taking the missing cache issue harder than I'd originally realized.