October 7, 2003

• Cannot find server

  
  

  Isn’t that cute?  A link to my own Xanga site with its own built-in error message.  For some reason, I can’t access my site, but can get xTools.  I cannot help wondering if this will post, and of course won’t know until I can access my site….

  
  

  I can’t wait for winter.

  
  

  The weather here is the color of my title text:  coool slate.  Election day locally, and the three of us, my Old Fart Greyfox, kid Doug, and I went up the valley to the high school and voted for the next borough mayor, our borough assembly and school board members, and some bond issues. 

  
  

  I had the thought that maybe I should join the League of Women Voters to get some younger blood in there; after all, I’m only 59.  Every poll worker there is a member of my mother’s generation.  I guess, at least in our neighborhood, that sort of public service has gone out of fashion.  Either that, or the younger women are just waiting for the older ones to die off before they move in to replace them en masse, so there will be more interesting conversation during those interminable hours at the polling place.  I think I’ll wait until a few of them do that, for that very reason.  I DO listen to their chat as I’m marking my ballots… yawn.

  
  

  And then again, maybe the League won’t have me.  The DAR won’t let me join because we can’t document great great great great grandpa James Abraham’s (or Abraham James’s–he’s the one who crossed the Delaware with Washington and there’s some uncertainty of the order of his names) marriage or his wife’s name, and I might be the descendant of illegitimate issue, heaven forfend.  Ah, well, who cares?  It’s just some idle speculation on a gray and rainy day.

  
  

  Doug and I need to do a water run.  I’ll have to check the last remaining jug and see if we can put it off another day, on the hope of drier weather.  Of course, there’s no guarantee that tomorrow won’t be wetter than today.  I know that the whole goal of these trips to the spring are to get water… that’s drinking and washing water, in jugs.  We go to get water, not to get wet; not unless we must.

  
  

  When it gets a bit colder and the rain turns to snow, then that chore won’t be so bone-chillingly wet.  And the scenery will be more picturesque.  I’m thinking about taking the camera along as usual, but why bother?  I could just post one of the pics I took this time last year and nobody, not even my family, could tell the difference:  bare trees, muddy ground, rotting leaves scattered around.  But, you never know what might turn up at the spring, such as a neighbor, or something inexplicable such as those potatoes someone scattered on the path last winter.  I’m still wondering if someone thought they would enhance our traction on the ice.

  
  

  A touch more COLD out there would also make a touch more localized WARMTH in here where I can use it.  The big cast-iron woodburning mug warmer that sits behind me when I’m sitting propped against the arm of the sofa in Couch Potato Heaven playing the PS2, is barely alight, just glowing with a few embers, not flaming.  It has a thermostatically controlled draft.  In just cool weather like this, it keeps the house warm but does not get hot enough on top to keep my coffee at drinking temperature.

  
  

  And then there is that dripping sound.  It has been a wet summer.  I’ve been listening to water drip far more than I enjoy… if I ever did enjoy it at all.  Too little rhythm to it, too random to be really enjoyable or even to induce a trance.  It’s just noise.

  
  

  Do I sound depressed here?  It just hit me that I might be giving that impression.  Wrong impression, if so.  I’m feeling peaceful, happy to have not only gone to vote, but got some stuff done that needed doing.  We took a new 20 pound bag of cheap cat food to the old place across the highway and left it open in the shelter of the porch, for the nutrition of the feral cats over there.  As I was approaching the steps, Doug reminded me to go quietly (he had already opened the bag of food, and I was going in to see what else I could find to salvage and bring over here–still moving after five years here) because there were cats.

  
  

  I slipped silently around the end of the trailer there and one silver long-haired half-grown kitten bolted into a hidey-hole.  Three more black ones were next to notice my presence and scatter.   The last semi-kitten remaining at the food bag was a beautiful short-haired black and white “tuxedo” pattern cat, the color pattern we call “dink”.  That is taken from Dickie Marcinko’s books, named after a class of recurring characters, his collective nemesis, the “heel rocking, pocket jingling, pencil-dicked diplo-dinks.”  When we say “dink” it is said with love.  My Pidney is a dink, and her nephew Webley my all-time favorite cat, was a dink.  This new dink in the feral population means that the genetic heritage of Fancy, Tux, and D’Artagnan (the fourth Faluter) lives on.  Faluters forever!

  

  • 6:37 pm
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