Animals and Everything

Week four? of Shelter in Place.  We continue to work and study from home.    I drive the car some place once a week just to keep it moving.  We walk place or hang out outside when it's nice.   What I do notice when I drive, is that traffic is very light, but that there's two or three instances of loopiness from other drivers making interesting choices or random pedestrians crossing the street in random fashions.

Stuck my head out of the window this morning (Wednesday), thinking that I might see the Lyrid meteors, but it was raining.  The last few days have started out overcast, but have cleared by mid-afternoon.  The snow

Some time in the night, a bag of dog treats had spilled -- I suspect a midnight snack raid -- and there was about 2/3rds of a cup of treats on the kitchen floor.  If I had been more properly awake, I would have swept them up -- but the dog was happily hoovering them up.  Later, it crossed my mind that maybe the kibble wasn't proper dog food.

On the Writing Front:  did a final pass on a 6900 word story by having the computer read it back to me.  I've been polishing for a while, so the process caught only a few odd places where there was a missing "the" or some other word-o.

I should put more stories into the mail.  One of the last items, which I thought had been in the slush for 90 days, apparently had been rejected after 5 days and the reply was stuck in my spam filter or something.

On the Gym Front:  Did my Power Walk, only without music this time.  On the plus side, the music keeps my tempo up; on the minus (?) side, having the soundtrack makes me pay attention to the surroundings differently.  I am unsure if having the soundtrack makes me more engaged with the neighborhoods I walk through (because I'm compensating for not hearing soft sounds) or if the soundtrack engages the woolgathering part of my mind that pulls me out of the world when I walk.  Came home and did some free weight work; looped an elastic loop over a cherry tree branch and did some cable pull-downs.

On the dream front:  I haven't exactly been having the intense dreams that some folks have been having because of COVID19 lockdowns.  I did have an intricate "back at Reed, failing Physics, freshly-discovered missing attendance" anxiety dream, which I'm going to attribute to an unsettled stomach this morning.  I had an intense advising meeting with Del Rhodes--who in real life was the head of the Psychology Department, but in the dream was a perky Physics Professor.   I can't recall the conversation verbatim, but she said something ambiguous, which I took the wrong way, and replied with a pointed remark, but after some back-and-forth, we ended up on the same academic plan.

On the animal front:  Aoife and Smokey just now had a nose-to-nose meeting.  Smokey was in the windowsill.  There was no growling, barking, howling, snapping, or claw swiping.  Mark says Cicero made some kind of wailing noise from outside the window (which I think I heard from the next room) along the lines of "Oh, Smokey! You're gonna die!"   There's apparently a second meeting going on in the Cat Sanctuary, so I better go see what's going on.