There are times when I feel a grudging sympathy for whoever dumped Zoe.
I may be behaving a bit irresponsibly myself, booting up the ‘pooter. We got no sun at all yesterday, and the night before last I definitely broke the rules by staying up and watching movies till late. GC Guy had some I hadn’t seen before: The Bourne Supremacy, a really good chase movie if you like that sort of thing, and The Avengers, simply the best superhero flick ever made. But I paid for it. The batteries were down below 12 volts yesterday morning for the first time since I brought them home, and not above 13 when I got home from making arsenic caps.
Now and then I get bouts of insomnia, which I don’t mind in summer but which in winter make for a night about a million subjective years long because it’s too cold to do anything but huddle under the covers and wish for unconsciousness. I’ll go right to sleep, dream vividly, then wake up before midnight and never really get fully back to sleep again. Last night the weather and Zoe conspired to make sure I never got back to sleep at all.
The promised storm arrived in the middle of the night with Lair-shaking wind gusts and what turned out to be very little snow. It’s supposed to snow again today, but when I came downstairs it was to see the last of the clouds disappearing over the horizon. So I hope the batteries will get a little charge before they return, which they almost certainly will.
The wind finally died down in the wee hours, but Zoe was awake and wanted to play. Since nobody wanted to play with her, she went out and captured her own playmate. And brought it into the bed. “You did not,” I muttered hopelessly, “bring a live mouse into this bed.” Oh, yes. She did.
I shook out the covers to send it flying somewhere – anywhere – else. I will say this for her, though: She disposes of them far more neatly and completely than Click ever did. Then, five minutes or an hour or three later, as the horizon had begun to light up and I had found some small measure of unconsciousness, she bounded up into the loft from wherever she’d been off to and made a tidy four-point landing directly on my head. Off flew the covers again. “Get the [bleep] off my [bleep]ing head!” I unfortunately shouted, which assured all the other animals from the dogs to the chickens that Uncle Joel was now open for business and ready to deal with their various lists of demands.
Another day. Arsenic caps. It wasn’t so bad when GC Guy’s company wanted 200 of them a month. Making them is very tedious, but 200 is a manageable number. Now they’ve increased the quota to 300 a month. The money’s welcome. The tedium is really not. But at least the building’s warm.
Shutting off the computer now.
I know that there are two sides to every coin-it’s boring work,but it’s nice to have the money.I’m the same way,I need all those extra dollars that I can scrounge up.At least you can enjoy the warmthb that somebody else pays for.A note on the batteries-I probably don’t need to lecture you,but you know if a battery gets down to a low enough charge,the acid will freeze,and sometimes split the case.I hope you have some insulation,or a method of keeping them warm enough not to freeze.Be careful is all I’m saying.
Bill
Yeah, I’ve seen many a frozen/split battery. Mine have never gotten low enough to worry TOO much about that, but extra insurance never hurts. Since you jogged my conscience on that issue, I did go out this afternoon and pack the battery space with fiberglass R-19. Which is what I currently have a lot of. That should capture enough of their waste heat to protect them from danger. Good thought.
Long ago my cat Gus dropped a live mouse into a makeshift bed we put together for some friends that had embibed a bit much for driving home. Not wanting to alarm them over nothing at 5 am on a hangover I gingerly picked up the corner of the blanket to see if it was what we thought it could be.
The male of the pair under the blankets casually remarks, “Dude, the remote is on the couch.” My reply of “there may or may not be a live mouse in there with you,,,,” was enough to sober them both up instantly and cause them both to levitate to opposite corners of the room, as far off the floor as they could get.
2 seconds later the mouse ran across the room and under the tv stand. As they were grabbing their stuff and heading out the door I remarked that at least it wasnt a false alarm.