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cat versus Catbird
Saturday, June 11 2016
After our weekly coffee ritual (which we had in the living room due to an ongoing downpour), I drove into Uptown Kingston to meet with Alex, one of my old web clients. He was the one who had me build the Lightroom plugin that interfaces with a website. Today Alex was in the company of one of his teenage daughters, who had just taken the ACT test. As always for such meetings, Alex bought me a vegan tempeh reuben (and ordered a non-vegan one for himself).
Not surprisingly, the plugin hasn't been selling, but there might be some other way to monetize all the development work we put into it. A perennial source of interest is a group Alex refers to as "the Italians." They were the impetus for a web-only version of the app (before the Lightroom functionality) that I built over three years ago, but they've never actually concluded any deals. Now, though, Alex is pretty sure they are interested, although it would require adding multi-language functionality to the app, turning off some features, and other things that would require work on my part. The question was: would I have the time. I wasn't sure, although it also seemed unlikely we'd be able to find anyone who could inherit my code (at least locally). I told Alex I'd give it a think and get back to him.
On my way home, I stopped at JK's Liquor in hopes of finding a relatively-inexpensive single malt scotch. While there, a plump woman offered me a taste of a $9 bottle of red wine called 19 Crimes. It was good enough and had a compelling story (something about the corks all having different crimes written on them, one of which, if found, will win someone a trip to England). So I bought a bottle of that and a $26 bottle of McClelland's single malt scotch (which later proved to only be about as good as a good blended scotch). My travels took me out as far as the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I considered one of two vintage ionic air fresheners (the kind in a faux-wood brown plastic chassis) but left empty-handed.
I'd stayed up late last night and had a mid-grade hangover, so back at the house, I took a nap. My sleep was disturbed by an asshole shooting down at the bus turnaround, but I could sleep through that. What I couldn't sleep through was a disturbance down in the living room. I heard a commotion and then the call of an unfamiliar creature. So I ran down the stairs to find Celeste the Cat (aka "the Baby") with a mid-sized grey bird in her mouth. It had either flown in through the open door and she had caught it or she'd caught it in the yard and brought it in. In initially I assumed it was one of the Phœbes nesting atop the light in front of the garage, and there was no way I was going to let her eat one of them. So I ran after her and eventually caught her under a bush out in front. The victim turned out to be a Catbird, which I was able to free by wrenching a finger in between Celeste's teeth. The Catbird yelled insults the whole time (their vocabulary is renown) and then, perhaps after being unimpaled off of one of Celeste's canines, flew away. If it could fly, that was a good sign. [The next day I would see a pair of Catbirds foraging down near the brownhouse, and since it was likely one of those was the one I'd rescued, indications were that no long-term harm had been inflicted.]
By this point, warm weather had returned to the area, and it was much warmer outside than it was in the house. I took advantage of the conditions to do more cleaning in the garage, deciding at long last to throw away a lot of parts from old cheap derelict lamps.
This evening I drove to Woodstock to meet Gretchen (who had worked a shift at the bookstore) and Eva & Sandor at the Garden Café. I'd brought the dogs, which meant they could hang out with us in the outdoor patio area. There was a tiny girl there with blond curly hair who was completely fascinated by the dogs, particularly Neville, and all through our meal she kept running over to pet them, squealing and laughing with delight when they licked her. She was of an age (maybe two or three) where she could have been screaming and howling the whole time and making everyone miserable, but this behavior was completely acceptable.
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