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Clarence gets a bell
Tuesday, May 24 2016
There had been a rain last night for the first time in a rather long time, giving some much-needed energy to the mostly-neglected garden. I went out on my morning run to the brownhouse but was surprised to find our neighbor Andrea in the driveway. It seems she had dropped by. So I had to delay my morning business to deal with such social matters. This was Andrea's first meeting of Neville, and he impressed and delighted the way he always does. For her part, Ramona was not as poorly-behaved as usual. Andrea did report, however, that Clarence has been stalking her bird feeders and killing birds. She's found piles of their feathers (but not their corpses), and the victims have mostly been Blue Jays. It's possible Clarence hasn't been killing the birds (in fact, I think it unlikely; he tends to not eat what he kills), but to make Andrea happy, Gretchen outfitted Clarence with a blue collar with a dangling little bell. She also clipped his nails.
Yesterday Gretchen had filled the new Subaru with trash and recycling, and so, before work (while Gretchen walked the dogs in the forest), I went on a rare dog-free run to the Hurley transfer station. Gretchen has been on something of a cleaning jihad of late, and I was surprised to find she was throwing out all the DVDs I'd ripped of movies she'd liked back when we used to get deliveries of Netflix DVDs (not all that many years ago). These days, of course, if Gretchen likes a movie, I usually download it using Bittorrent and it ends up as a file on a NAS server on our local network. Though they don't take up that much space in a DVD wallet, Gretchen evidently feels the need to move beyond that era of technology. I agreed with her that the DVDs themselves should go (the guy at the dump said they couldn't be recycled) but kept the wallets; I still use them to organize boot CDs and DVDs for various computer operating systems.
As usual for a Tuesday, I got out of work three and a half hours early and went to pottery class (Nancy picked me up). It was to be the last of our pottery classes. Nearly everyone else in the class (including Susan, David, and Julianna) immediately continued into another class (their third or fourth), but this must be because they have more free time than Nancy and me, and pottery might just be a little more fun for them. Since it was our last class, I focused initially on trimming a few pots I'd already made and then Nancy and I glazed a few pots that had been fired. The last time I'd glazed anything was probably in the early 1990s, and I'd forgotten how the bisqueware sucks the water out of the souplike glaze, forming a thick layer ready for the kiln. When I returned to my trimming, the instructor Rich was showing the class how to make a bottle, a delicate procedure that, as a prerequisite, requires mastery of cylinder making (which I haven't been so great at). To help him shape from within the bottle, he was using a wooden rod that ended with a sphere, a device that didn't seem to have a name but which I dubbed "the monkey's paw." I have a feeling that name is going to stick.
Today was actually a make-up class resulting from a snow day back in April, so it was also the first day of class for new students. But the class's only such student was a young college-age woman requiring individual attention to learn procedures such as centering clay on the wheel.
As always, after class our group of friends went out for Chinese food at the Little Bear. This time, for the first time, I also ordered something to go for Gretchen (the poetry class she'd been teaching on Tuesday nights had come to an end, so she'd actually had alone time tonight), but of course I somehow got the wrong thing.
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