Still Exhausted

Cats doing well. Teaching going. Paper submitted with a copy on the arxiv. More work to do. Much more work to do.

Cats and Teaching

With some help the cats -- mom and two kittens -- were caught Saturday morning.  One of the kittens for reasons unrelated to the trapping needed immediate attention from a vet. They're in my apartment bathroom getting acclimated to regular food, and people. Mom was once a domestic cat and either ran away or was abandoned, in either case she should have been spayed and wasn't. 

First day of teaching went well -- no discount racks of women's handbags involved. Now I am completely exhausted. I still have to submit my paper... and get the cats spayed, mom is yowling and I need to get her fixed right quick. 

No Joy

I didn't get to submit my paper. I have to wait until Monday. 

Brain Crazies

I feel wound up. I've had too much coffee today, that and...

The woman who responded to my note and I are going to try to trap the cats tomorrow morning. I went to the pet store last night and bought a pile of cat stuff -- litter box, litter box liners, litter, food, etc. 

I've ditched ATT in favor of Speakeasy. The installation has not gone smoothly. It isn't directly Speakeasy's fault. Speakeasy has no option but to contract out to have ATT do line work, so the DSL circuit was installed by an ATT tech. That part went fine, what wasn't so fine was that another ATT tech cut the circuit two days later. I called Speakeasy, Speakeasy called ATT, ATT sent out a tech who, instead of fixing my DSL, shut off my phone service and reported that the problem was solved. Speakeasy sent me a nice e-mail back saying that everything was rosy. I got home, the DSL modem was down, I went to call Speakeasy, but my phone line was out. Luckily the wife and I have cell phones. I called Speakeasy and they said another ATT tech would be out, but that I didn't need to be home. Today I get a call from Speakeasy telling me I need to let the tech have physical access to the jack. I go home, tech does some stuff, and says everything is good. My laptop is at school so I can't verify this. The thing about having an ATT tech make a visit to your house, invited or uninvited, is that it's like buying a ticket in Borges' Lottery of Babylon. You never know the result.

Oh, and I'm about to submit my first paper in a few minutes. 

Less of a Conundrum

A woman responded to the note that the wife and I left. She's been taking care of the family for a month, thinks she can trap them and is looking for a home for them. She was delighted to get our note and wrote us back right away. There are still some issues to resolve, (e.g. what to do if we only trap a kitten) but the wife and I might be taking care of a family of cats in the next week or so.

A Conundrum

This morning I went fishing with a friend. I hate fishing, but I enjoy hanging out with my friend, and fishing is nothing if not an excuse to get up before the sun and enjoy a peaceful non-sweltering part of the day. We got to the section of river where we were planning to fish at 5:45 and found that it was closed to the public until 6:30. While we were waiting I saw what looked like a kitten dart behind a road barrier across the street. With nothing else to do, we went to explore. Behind the barrier was the entrance to a storm drain. Going down hill took us across the street to another storm drain, and then down to a two foot wide opening to a culvert that allowed runoff to flow into the lake upstream of the river. Right at the opening of the culvert was one of the cutest, littlest, skinniest, hungriest looking cats I've ever seen. Someone had left a plate of canned cat food (mostly eaten), a bin full of kibble and an open container of water inside the opening of the culvert. 

Several questions came to mind. Did someone own this cat? If yes, why was the cat living in a storm drain? If no one owned the cat, who was bringing food and why? We figured that the cat had once been owned by humans because she would let us pet her, but that she had been abandoned. Perhaps someone who couldn't have her in an apartment was feeding her. We mulled over the situation and then we saw a kitten. It was teeny-tiny, with a great big head, and great big close-set eyes. The kitten walked as if balancing that disproportionally huge head was an unmastered skill. We began to understand. We, or anyone, could probably grab the mother, but the kitten was so skittish that there was no chance of getting the mother and kitten and the kitten would surely not fare well on its own. 

Someone came by and granted us access to the river. My friend suggested that we take away the food, go fishing, and, by the time we came back, the cats might be lured out of their hiding area with food.  After about fifteen minutes of fishing and hoping that I didn't catch anything, I told my friend that I was going back to see how the cats were doing. When I got back to the culvert, mom was out and walking around. She seemed a little leery about me being too close to her, but didn't bolt, merely scooted a few feet away anytime I tried to approach. 

I got in the car, drove to the nearest gas station and convenience mart and bought three cans of cat food -- two small ones and a large one. I drove back to the culvert opened a can, dribbled some of the juice on the ground at the entrance of the culvert, and then placed the can maybe five feet from the opening right next to me. Mom came out first and circled me several times meowing. Hunger won out and she approached to eat. As she ate, I would pet her. At first she would back off, but finally she let me rub her unbelievably bony back. Two kittens appeared at the entrance of the culvert. I wanted them to see that it was OK for them to come near and eat, but nothing doing. Any motion or any sound, such as a cell phone flipping closed after I texted the situation to my wife, would send them running back up into the storm drain. Mom finished eating and went maybe two feet back into the storm drain and the kittens began to nurse.  So the kittens are not going to be tempted by food for at least a few weeks and they really need mom to stay with them. I went back to where my friend was fishing and after some discussion we concluded that unless we could get both kittens in the car, there wasn't much we could do. I opened the second can of cat food and left it inside the opening of the culvert. 

When I got home the wife assumed that I would have at least one cat with me. When I explained, she decided she wanted to go see for herself. So, before heading out to do our weekly shopping, we drove back to the culvert -- it's right by a super busy road. I am seriously worried about these cats -- and found that someone else had come by and provided more food. We moved the food out from the opening of the culvert, mom came out and the wife pet mom while she ate. Mom purrs when you pet her, so I figure this was a good thing. After a few minutes she went far back into the culvert and didn't come out again. We put the food back and left a note for whoever else was taking care of them. 

Tomorrow I'm going to call up the local humane society and ask what I can do. Perhaps I could set a live trap, but I'd probably only catch mom. Further, I'd have to leave the trap and it's in a public place and I worry that the trap would get stolen. I am more than willing to pay for all three to get spade when they're old enough and pay for whatever shots they need. Mom looked like she had a slight eye infection in her left eye. 

So I'm going to try to sleep tonight thinking about this family of cats living in a storm drain by a busy road. The wife and I are already planning a trip early in the morning. 

Taking a Second to Realize What Happened

This is pretty funny. Not sure why I didn't see it earlier. (found via boing boing)

Teaching Dreams

Maybe you have those dreams where you're back in college and it's the end of the semester and all of a sudden you realize, "Holy Fuck! I haven't done any of the homework for, or attended a single class meeting of (choose one: french/calculus/western civ)!" For me it was french. In the dream the teacher would say "Ja blue blah bling blang?", everyone in the class would stare at me, and I had to respond appropriately or my efforts to graduate would all come to naught. I would wake up in a sweat and realize that my degree was awarded years ago.

I'm slated to teach freshman calculus this fall, and I've started dreaming about it. The dream is, in some sense, a perfect mirror of the I-haven't-gone-to-french-class-all-semester dream. I'm in a lecture hall that is long, narrow and curving. Many of the desks are placed around a corner so the students -- none of whom are more than three and a half feet tall, and all of whom wont stop talking while I lecture -- can't see the blackboard. The blackboards are small and extremely crappy. I keep trying to explain something, every time I pick up a piece of chalk to write on the board the chalk breaks, or worse, I think that I'm picking up white chalk, but instead I'm picking up the colored chalk that can't be erased. I keep making mistakes at the board and since I can't erase I begin running out of board space. 

When I finally do run out of chalkboard space I notice the discount rack of women's hand bags. nearby. I throw out the hand bags and grab the plastic bin in which they were stored and attempt to write on the bottom of it. I hold up the plastic bin for the students to see. None of them are paying attention to me. Finally, I give up and tell them to come back tomorrow. As they swarm out of the room, the two professors who were observing the class approach me shaking their heads in disappointment. 

I Want One

For various reasons I watched this without sound, but it looks amazingly cool.

Old School Boating

The following footage of a descent of the Niagara Gorge was, I thought, striking. In particular:

1. Those are some seriously long boats and the cockpit entrances are frighteningly small. The possibility of getting those boats pinned (and the boater pinned in them) is much higher than it would be in a more modern creek boat. In the intro clip of the guy going off the waterfall, observe the assistant giving him a shove. I'm sure that was to help prevent the boater from dropping vertically over the falls.
2. The boaters did not have lightening fast rolls, they looked like they just came from a class on eskimo rolls. The comment that preparing for such a run included practicing holding one's breath didn't make me feel overwhelming confidence in these guys.
3. Check out those sweaters. 
4. When Carrie Ashton starts her run the announcer is all like, "Carrie starts out on a bad line. Maybe she's too scared." The announcer doesn't know jack about good lines vs. bad lines. Further, the announcer didn't say anything about the fact that Ken Lagergren got flipped, lost control of his boat and ran much of the rapid backward.

It was some impressive boating through huge water.