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plastic fluff of its innards
Sunday, December 20 2015
This morning I returned to the site of the recent near-miss with a widowmaker and salvaged yet more of the tree that came close to falling on me. Combined with a few other pieces, there was enough to assemble a 101.1 pound load (to which I added 0.35 of accumulated cardboard).
This afternoon, my software development mentee came over for a two hour session. This time I had him play around with Photoshop on his laptop to solidify lessons for our last session. Happily, he was even applying aspects from that earlier lecture that I'd touched on glancingly at best.
Towards the end of the mentoring session, Q, N, and Q's stepbrother appeared to drop off the dog named Coach Eric Taylor. Eric would need to be dog-sat while his parents watched the new Star Wars movie (The Force Awakens) in 3D on an iMax screen up in Albany. Coach Eric Taylor had never been left anywhere by his human parents, and for awhile he was perplexed by his abandonment. But eventually he decided that I was a cool guy to follow around and occasionally whine at. Meanwhile, Ramona was industriously chewing on the toy N had brought to make Eric feel more at home. It was a sort of caricature of a monkey with limbs made of stout, tightly-braided rope and a body containing a squeaker. Eventually Ramona managed to breach the monkey's hull and soon had the plastic fluff of its innards strewn all over the living room. By then, the squeaker had stopped working, and Ramona (who had been growling at Eric every time he approached) was finally willing to socialize.
The two would engage in energetic play until Q & N returned to pick him up. In the course of all that rumpusing, they managed to move the living room couch about fifteen feet northward, to the foot of the stairs.
There was also an evening stroll that I took them for up and down the Farm Road. (I was worried Coach Eric Taylor would be a frequent user of the facilities; N had instructed me to feed him twice during his five and a half hour stay.) And then there was an episode where Ramona and Eric disappeared into the darkened forest east of the Farm Road for five minutes or so, which would have thrown N into an overprotective meltdown had she been here.
Meanwhile, our cats made surprisingly-rapid adjustments to the presence of a strange rambunctious young dog. Julius (aka "Stripey") was the first to calmly stroll across the floor in front of him while deliberately avoiding even a side-eyed glance. And later Celeste stood nearby as Ramona and Eric rough-housed. Not long after that, they met in the dining room and benignly sniffed each others' noses.
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