Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2000 > Late July 2000 Edition
A visit to the doctor (who found no bacterial cause of my GI problem) and a week's worth of an antibiotic called Flagyl has made my GI tract feel a whole lot better. I will still have to watch my diet, though.
I got new tires for my car, as it reached the 50,000-mile (80,000-kilometer) mark. The ride feels a little odd, but the car handles better now.
During the month of July I am house-sitting for a sister who is on sabbatical in Texas. Well, as close to a sabbatical as a middle-school science teacher gets.
Two of the cats are young and rambunctious. The other is older, sounds like a puma, and is grouchy for having share life with the two runts. Ironically, the older cat's name is Baby.
One of my first tasks upon moving in is to clean the house and make it livable. My sister does not keep a tidy house, and the two cats make things worse with their capering. I vacuumed two rooms before the sweeper bag became full. Yeesh!
It is good that I like cats, because in this house it is difficult to avoid them. The house has no interior doors (except to the john), so there's no way to escape the cats except outside. And even out there, the neighborhood is full of them.
Anyway, it also affords me some exercise because I walk from her house to mine (a kilometer round trip) to get my mail and check my answering machine.
I also get to watch my niece's animé collection. Not that I have much choice now: the television cable has been severed for non-payment, and the house has no antenna.
Finally I have more time with my computer. At first I tried using my Linux machine, but there are no e-mail clients in Linux that allow access to more than one account at a time. Finally, I had to fetch my Windows box from home.
The need for e-mail became acute when Lycos found my newly-reinstalled Caitlin Clarke site. I got two appreciative messages about the site, and one of those was from a cousin of Ms. Clarke herself. That spurred me to scour the Web for more Clarkeiana. Indeed, I have discovered that Ms. Clarke, during her final months in the musical Titanic, served as an "teaching artist" for a theater project at a New York public school.