Close Call

I went outside to pick up my mail. A woman was walking her big lab on the other side of the street. We waved at one another, though I have no idea who she was.

I turned back to my driveway, looking through the junk mail. I heard a dog barking furiously, so I took one step into the grass of my yard and leaned over to see if it was the neighbor's dog.

It was. He/she was going crazy with the barking and had been tied to what looked like a coiled, wrapped wire. He rushed out at me but the wire held. For a moment. Then the stake came loose from the ground, and he ran toward me.

I froze, though I was telling myself to move! move! move! I remembered the young black woman telling me he wouldn't bite anyone, that he was very friendly. But this creature flying toward me and barking didn't look very friendly. He was running so fast that his feet didn't even touch the ground. The neighbor's dog noticed the other dog while he was about three feet from me, so he headed off toward the woman and her dog who were now on the corner, watching in horror. This entire event took maybe thirty seconds.

I ran to the neighbor's front porch and rang the bell about 4 times. The man came to the door (I noticed he wasn't that old and was, in fact, pretty good looking).

"Your dog has gotten loose and is chasing me and that other dog," I said, pointing to the woman who was pulling her dog away. The neighbor's dog was just barking but not making any threatening moves toward the woman and her dog.

"Come here, Champ," the black man called. He came outside and headed to the corner.

"I'm sure he's friendly," I said, "but it's scary to have him chase you like that."

"Come on, Champ," he called again. We didn't speak further.

I went on into my house and tried to get my blood pressure back to normal. I've never been attacked by an animal before, though I've been bitten. It was a horrible feeling.

Schedule at Vermont

Several people have asked what it was like at Vermont as far as the conference went. Here's the basic schedule:

7:30 to 8:30
Breakfast (kitchen closed at 8:30, but you could linger in the dining room)

8:45 to 9:45
bookstore open (most of the time and at other random times)

10:00 to noon
workshops

Noon to 12:30
Lunch

1:45 to 2:45
lectures or private conferences with faculty

3:00 to 4:45
lectures

5:30 to 6:00
Dinner

7:00 to 7:45
participant (student) readings

8:00 to 9ish
faculty readings (with wonderful brownies and apple cider)

or

8:00 to whenever
hosted parties or ice cream socials, etc.

9ish
If you had a car and/or willing friends, go downtown to Julio's to drink beer and eat nachoes. Otherwise, go to your room and collapse on the bed, declaring you're going to get some sleep tonight only to lay awake until 1 reading one of the books you've bought at the bookstore.

Multiply by six days.

No TV or newspapers or radio around in the dorms, and would be unwelcome even if they were around. Some of us got news from CNN.com in the computer lab; most of us didn't care what was happening in the world. Each day felt like a week, literally.

Most everyone in my workshop stuck together; we all tended to get up early and have breakfast together (along with other folks, of course), then sit together for lunch and dinner, and sit together if we attended the same lectures.

Last Vacation Day

Last vacation day for awhile. Tomorrow I have to go back to that Evil Place and shuffle papers. Oh well, things could be worse.

I feel a lot better than I did earlier. Just needed more sleep, I guess.

Heard from DF today; haven't heard from him in a long time. He's doing well, and we both promised we'd do better about staying connected. The sad thing is that we both really, really mean it.

I thought I heard the dog next door barking Thursday night, when I got home, but I haven't heard it since. Or seen it. I hope they're keeping it inside, not letting it run loose in hopes it'll run away and no longer be a problem for them. Maybe they don't know what happens when a dog ends up in the pound. Cute dog, too; kinda boxer and mutt mix -- loud bark but very friendly. People who don't take care of their animals are not people I want to know.

Finished maybe half of The Gift, and I highly recommend it to anyone with any amount of creativity whatsoever -- which means everyone. It's about, as Baron put it, the anthropology of poetry, but it's about more than that. It's a way of understanding and learning to live with what is valued in our society and what is not -- without diminishing the two.

And I am still trudging through The Art of the Personal Essay by Philip Lopate. It's in choronological order, and around about RL Stevenson I skipped ahead. The language in the earlier English stuff is too ornate for me, though I appreciate its value within its own time. I liked Seneca and the early Greek works.

I dread going back to work and seeing the English language butchered by people who truly believe themselves to be great editors and writers. When in reality they don't have a clue. Take capitalization, for example. The title of a job is NOT capitalized unless it's directly attached to the person holding that job. Chief medical officer is not capitalized unless it's Alice Doe, Chief Medical Officer. Yet these poor souls capitalize stuff like that repeatedly. More suck-up value. They don't capitalize nurse or technician or manager (and consistency is the first thing you learn as an editor). And when I refuse to capitalize non-proper nouns I get told I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about and to just do what the ignorant tell me to do. I refer them to any book on basic grammar, but of course, they already know everything and don't need to look it up.

I've heard people say that any noun preceded by "the" is automatically a proper noun and should be capitalized. And any title is a proper noun. Where on earth do people get this stuff?

A lot of it is stylistic, based on who makes the most money. Nurse isn't capitalized because they're mostly women and don't make as much as the male chief medical officer. It's as simple as that.

Earlier this year I came across a blog about Humphrey the parrot. His last entry was about being moved from England to America, and about being sick after quarantine. At least once every week or so I'd check on the blog to see how he was doing, but there were never any updates. The latest issue of Bird Talk reprinted some correspondence about a woman adopting a special needs bird of the same species as her parrot Humphrey, who had died six days after the last date of the blog. I wrote Bird Talk to forward a note to her. It was obvious from the blogs how loved and cherished Humphrey was, and when the owner said he was the light of her life and that his death devastated her, I knew she wasn't exaggerating. I'll take his blog off my bookmark list now.

I decided, at 10:47 am, to go to the movies today. It always feels so decadent to go to the movies during a work day. I went to see Brideshead Revisited, which I haven't seen in decades -- so long ago with Jeremy Irons that I'd forgotten what it's about.

Why is it that great literary works of art nearly always involve dysfunctional families?

Settling Back In

Went out for breakfast again; I got up too late to make the Farmer's Market and avoid the crowds. So after breakfast I went to the Good Foods Coop for some eggs and bread and bacon. I also got two bottles of melatonin since I put my usual bottle away somewhere "safe" (where I'll never find it again) and a half gallon of Newman's lemonade. I also got some homeopathic Boiron rhus toxicodendron for joint pain that improves with motion, 12 power. I don't know if 12 is stronger than 20 or not. Wouldn't it be great if I could get off piroxicam for pain altogether?

I haven't felt as perky as usual since I got home. Sore throat at night, dizziness during the day, continuing bad balance, exhaustion. I have a three-inch circle bruise high on my left shoulder, from the fall at Ellen's. Probably the airline air and change in routine and not getting enough sleep.

I received both The Gift by Lewis Hyde and The Art of the Personal Essay by what's-his-name from amazon.com, so I've been reading, without the TV. In fact, I only turned on the TV last night to watch Legally Blonde, just for fun and because I was tired of reading.

TV is okay, but it's too easy to watch it or have it on all the time. I've been keeping it on during the day for the birds, so when I get home I automatically plop down on the couch and before I know it, it's eleven o'clock. Lately I've been leaving the TV off on weekends and just having NPR on. The weekends feel longer and better to me when I do that. So I think I'll just leave the radio on for the birds while I'm at work.

Home Again, Home Again

I unlocked the front door and took a few steps into the front hall. "Is anybody home?" I asked, as I often do.

Silence.

I took a few more steps into the living room and looked at the cages. "Isn't anybody here?"

Stunned silence for maybe a full 20 seconds, then an alarming amount of chirping and calling.

I made a big fuss over seeing them, then went out to the car to get the rest of my stuff. They called after me, loudly, as if I might not come back.

Charli, I think, has been most affected. She's been watching me and hanging upside down, and also making a big show of eating a grape. She'll stop whatever she's doing once in awhile and just stare at me with those big dark liquid eyes.

Sugar keeps looking at me and chirping, while running back and forth.

The Bobbsey Twins, though chirping, don't seem to care one way or the other.

Got the shuttle yesterday morning at six; Leslie Ullman and another woman were passengers,too, so we talked about living in Taos, this other woman retiring as a physician, and me as a parrot behavior consultant.

The airline trip home was the usual wretched experience, but all the flights were on time.

Stopped by Wal-Mart this morning to do the one-hour photo delivery (I slept a good solid twelve hours last night), but their machine is broken and it may be a day or more. Then I went to one of my favorite breakfast places for an omelet. Instead of the usual home fries, I substituted fruit -- which turned out to be a bowl of red grapes (which I don't care for) and two tiny scraps of pineapple and three tiny chips of cantelope. I insisted on a better balance of fruits, and got it.

Had my first iced tea, unsweetened, no lemon in seven days. My life can continue now.

Stopped at Kroger's. Got a box of pre-washed mixed lettuces, some carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, apples, mushrooms, and grapes for me and the birds. Got some fresh blueberries, raspberries, and strawberry halves for Charli -- she loves fruit and the more expensive the better.

During one of my calls back home to L, she said the humane society left a big red warning tag on my door about my dog being unlicensed and wandering around the neighborhood, that a complaint had been filed about it.

I don't have a dog.

I knew, of course, it was meant for the neighbors. Their dog got out once and I told the young black woman who lives there; she apologized. I said I wasn't complaining, but I was sure she didn't want him running all over the place.

So when I got home yesterday, I marked through my house number and wrote in theirs. I rang the bell once since the big copper-colored truck was in the drive, but no one answered. So I left it hanging on the door handle. About an hour later I noticed it was gone. This morning there are two new cars in the drive. What on earth goes on over there?

Gotta go start dealing with all this dirty laundry!