Two Days Late

Inspired by the Day in History project (thanks Richard), where British bloggers were encouraged to produce an account of their day on October 17th, and amazed at the few accounts I’ve seen so far (humdrum isn’t uninteresting, it turns out), I thought I’d try my hand at one myself.

17 October 2006

Charlie-Cat woke me up well before dawn, kneading me for breakfast and attention (Diego, his brother, waits patiently). I get the kettle on for tea after giving them food, leaving Numenius to doze for another hour and a half. I get online (we’re still on dialup) and check the baseball score from the NLCS of the previous night. I do my round of email (two accounts) and RSS feeds, look at the BBC news site and Google news. It’s dark these days until about seven, and I drink lots of tea before sunrise. It’s Lipton loose-leaf tea, strong, with lots of milk.

We have indoor cats but we take them outside on a leash. They’re interested in the white-crowned sparrows that have been back for about a month. There’s a fairly strong north wind and the “gate” (held in place with a straw bale) has blown over at my vegetable garden. Charlie drags me in there after a sparrow and ends up grazing on grass, growing from the discarded straw which must still have some wheat in it. I need to spread the pine needles I gathered from work to discourage the weeds…

I’m always late for work. ALWAYS. This is bonkers because I live within five minutes of my workplace. I have a short shower today thinking I really need to scrub the shower (we’re on a well here; our water is even harder than tapwater in Davis, and it makes for a disgusting grunge on the walls and chrome). Breakfast is, as always, cooked nine-grain cereal with dried fruit and nuts, which I eat with non-fat yoghurt (Numenius has his with milk).

I hop on my bike (a green Giant Iguana mountain bike with front shocks, ludicrous overkill for flat Davis but essential when my bike commute included a three-mile downhill dash in Santa Barbara), having put my bike-basket on the rack, and pedal into the wind over the bridge and in to work.

Work, today, is mostly about reformatting a bunch of modules for a training course on how to deal with Avian Flu. It’s tedious but oddly satisfying, transforming ugly Word files into something more useable and graceful. They are going to be available online and should have been there a month ago, so it’s a mad dash as usual. I’m trying to wean myself off web and email at work but I’m addicted and in particular I find myself checking on baseball news, even though I know there won’t be any. I have an RSS feed set up at work for blogs that are image-heavy (we’re on dialup at home, as I said). I try to scan them before I’m ready to settle in for the day, having made my cup of green tea (loose leaf straight into my mug, which I top up all day with hot water).

I bike home for lunch (which I rarely do) and get a load of whites done and hung. It’s great drying weather.

I get home around 5:45 pm, feed the cats, get frustrated by my inability to find a lid for a container for the stock I made on Monday. Numenius gets home half an hour later and we head out to buy some more tape for the labeller (we’re on a huge organizing binge), catfood, and groceries at the Co-op. We don’t buy much because the 11% sale is coming up this weekend, meaning we’ll be stocking up on 25 pound bags of things, cans of tomatoes, olive oil, and toilet paper.

Dinner is salad with leftover brown rice, a yummy black tomato I found at the Coop, an avocado, a vinaigrette I made with mustard, olive oil and balsamic vinegar, some jalapeño-cheese bread, and a glass or two of a cheap Argentine Cab. We have no TV and radio reception of the Mets-Cards game is poor after dark, so Numenius keeps me up to date with check-ins on the Web. I go to bed early as usual (around nine) and read a few pages of Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done before turning off the light.