Looks like it’s well and truly winter, even though, astronomically speaking, we’ve got to wait until December 21 to be legit.
Weather adventures already! Power went out Friday morning somewhere around 3:00 a.m.–the increasing chill in the house woke me up–and stayed out until about 9:30 a.m. Coulda been worse : Ohio Edison told me when I called that they were experiencing weather-related outages and the power should be returned by 11:00 a.m. Whoa! The indoor temp got down to somewhere around 59 degrees–brisk indeed. I’m not sure who else was out but I saw no lights on in the immediate neighborhood. Nor did I hear any buses go by outside; I went through practically the whole morning thinking that there was no school. Oops! Not so. Bet there were some tardy scholars from Park Ave.
There were also some ticked-off cats here. Both the indoor inhabitants and the porch kitties were not pleased with this disruption in their routines, especially the food-in-the-bowls part. Nobody got anything until I got out of my warm bed, which took longer than usual, interrupted by calls to Ohio Edison and brief inspections out the windows just to see if my house was the only one to be in the dark. Anyway, this brought back memories of an outage a number of years ago that lasted nearly a week. Oh, man! On the, oh, I don’t know, fifth day of that, my having to sleep and shower and dress in friends’ facilities, and having to go to work right up the street–where there was power–and having to put up with accusatory looks from the cats (a different crowd at the time) when I showed up to feed them, I was walking home and saw no lights on in the house after all that time, walked into the house, and came about THAT CLOSE to just bursting into tears. However, even as I walked into the living room, the lights came on, the radio sounded and the situation came to an end. Whew!
Not so bad this time, but the communication with Ohio Edison is definitely less satisfactory. Getting any information out of an automated system is a fool’s errand; doesn’t help that my phone and internet are both gone when the electricity disappears. Being instructed to go to their website is irritating, resorting to the cellphone is not a whole lot better. Besides, the system doesn’t give out any information about the semi which took out a transmission pole or the ice-covered wires that went down or the other neighborhoods that are also cold and dark. That was one thing about the old partyline…you could get information (You could BE the information sometimes too) on just about any situation.
Speaking of porch kitties (I did, didn’t I?) they’re happy to have their freeze-me-not water bowl and are apparently pleased with the new flavor of catfood that’s on offer. Whatever the indoor sybarites don’t like goes into the big bags of ordinary munchies that fills the bowls on the porch. The standard-issue for the insiders every morning is a half-cup measure like the wet stuff comes in, only they get the dry kind (speciality types like Rachel Ray’s Indoor). We’re trying to avoid the “fat cat” syndrome and keep their fantastic feline figures. Well, somebody must have figured how to order take-out to be delivered because there ain’t no “lean and hungry” cats (a la Caesar’s assassins) hangin’ around here. How are they getting an unhealthy dose of avoirdupois on one half cup of dry kitty kibble? Every time that I go downstairs they all rush pell-mell down the steps as though they were starving –STARVING–and I have to put out more food before they perish from starvation. Well, I’m not that hard-hearted, so one more half-cup gets distributed among the four of them…and I don’t go downstairs that often…so why are they looking like Weight Watchers wannabe’s? Maybe they’ve learned to cook. Gotta start keeping an eye on the pantry to see if the tuna is missing.
All right, we’ve had goat yoga, psychological support animals of all sorts, here’s the latest, courtesy of ?The Week ?:
In upstate New York, the stressed-out denizens of the Big Apple can head to the Mountain Horse Farm, where they can spend $75 on an hour of “cow cuddling”. The farm’s website–they would have one, wouldn’t they–says that a sense of calm results from 60 minutes of cuddling a 1000-pound bovine because the cow eschews judgement, agenda or ego and accepts a human’s fear, anxiety, sadness, thereby relieving these impairments. They also know happiness when they feel it ( They probably don’t do “high fives). My experience with cows was not all that uplifting, frankly. I’m wondering if any of the “cuddlees” get to muck out the stalls too. Now there would be an uplifting experience!
