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femur ball from a cow hip
Saturday, November 9 2002
Today I built Gretchen a bookshelf using the materials I'd bought at Lowes yesterday. I made the shelf only 32 inches high so it would fit beneath a window in Gretchen's office, but I also made it six feed wide. To support six foot spans of books, I had to screw a piece quarter inch plywood to the back. When I was done, I took it down from the attic (where I'd been building it) and presented it to Gretchen and Katie (the latter was visiting from Saugerties). What could she say? It was a perfect bookshelf. Unfortunately, though, my labor was worth only about $30. A new bookshelf like this one costs $75, and building one had cost me $45 in materials alone. The only advantage to building your own bookshelf is being able to customize it to fit a particular space.
By the way, Gretchen has had a little problem with Edna using her office as a personal urinal. This has something to do with the nature of the carpet, which is a sort of dark blue shag. Despite her cuteness, Edna has been mostly banned from the study, although Gretchen will allow her in when she is around to supervise. As for the musky pungency of accumulated cat urine, Gretchen has resorted to a variety of chemicals advertised as capable of erasing pet odors. Success here has not been total, but the fragrance of her office has improved over what it had been a few days ago.
As afternoon grew long in the tooth (something that seems to start at about 3pm EDT at this time of year in this part of the Eastern Time Zone), Gretchen, Katie and I took advantage of the warm weather (the first since we moved here) to take a walk in the forest behind our house. While we were out, Sally found the femur-ball from a cow hip and she carried it with her the rest of the way into the woods and then back out again, running ahead of us to buy enough time to lie down and chew on it for awhile. Meanwhile Katie and Gretchen were walking side by side and talking and I couldn't really make out the conversation over the crunch of the leaves, but I didn't care.
Later we made a mad dash to the Hurley recycling center just before it closed. As we dragged our cardboard to the cardboard dumpster and threw our trash in the trash dumpster without bothering to pay the required seven cents per pound, Sally ran around inhaling the delightful and varied scents of garbage. As usual, one of the staff guys threw her little doggy biscuit, and this time she humored him and ate it.
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