Something New, Something Old, Something Even Older, Something Hole-d
So goes another Monday here.
The new: Operation Confuse-a-Cat went live last night, and it seems to have worked! To keep the stupid animal from waking me up at 3:30 and mooching for food, I bought an automatic feeder, and after the first night didn't work out, I again set it to open 4-ish, and this time was awake in time to set it out for her in the wee smalls. All I heard at her usual bitching hour was some quiet scraping of her collar against the dish. Best of all, neither of the other animals noticed- and everyone settled down fine after the usual 6 a.m. feeding time.
NOW the question is, will this still work now that she (and probably the others) may knows there's noms in there?
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The old? Well, that's me:P
It's forty years to the day since I, and 600-something of my peers, walked the mock stage on the East Meadow football field and achieved the now-useless distinction of High School Graduate. I remember little of it, other than us conspiring to shut down the speech by the Board of Education President (the board whose chintziness got us a teachers strike in our sophomore year and a no-busing austerity budget a year later)- not by heckling him, but by applauding. Everything. Until he just gave up.
Since then, I've passed on no fewer than 13 reunions of either that crowd or the more frequent (college) and closer (law school) cohorts. High school's too far in place and time; Cornell's are way too rah-rah and overprogrammed for the benefit of the far-out-of-towners; and if I want a UB law school reunion, I can just go to court most days.
Probably I'm close friends with equal (and equally small) numbers from all three groups. It's the oldest that's mushroomed the most in recent years, to a few dozen people I knew from East Meadow, most from my class year. Many of them have proven to be kind, positively politically active, and even mostly Mets fans. So I have taken the plunge and broken my boycott: on the night of Saturday August 5, I will join the Class of '77 for the first time- and face it, we're old, probably the last time- at a Marriott out the Island from where we grew up. The Mets are home that weekend (against the Dodgers- ugh:P), so that will likely work its way into the agenda on either the Friday or Sunday; and much of the remaining weekend will be open, as well.
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Older than me? Well, at least older at heart. Ran into that during the day today.
New York state courts are now increasingly requiring lawyers to electronically file their cases from their offices (as all federal and bankruptcy courts have for years). In mandatory counties and case types, you can only "opt out" if you certify to the court that the attorney is either too poor to afford the needed computer equipment or "lacks the requisite knowledge in the operation of such computers and/or scanners necessary to comply with this section (for purposes of this paragraph, the knowledge of any employee of an attorney, or any employee of the attorney’s law firm, office or business who is subject to such attorney’s direction, shall be imputed to the attorney)." In other words, that you're an old coot who doesn't need no stinkin' computin' machines. I just got my first opt-out served on me on the second ground. He was in my class at UB. And not one of the older students in the class, but just like me on the "fast track from kindergarten."
Maybe I should go to a law school reunion before more of us start croaking. Until then, I'm going to start my first conversation with him concerning this case with the only suitable epithet:
Get off my law.
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And then the day ended- with something, it turned out, that Eleanor and I had in common.
Which is to say, nothing.
Let me explain.
Early in the weekend, Eleanor discovered that the dog had gone dumpster-diving in her hamper and devoured the crotch out of one of her favourite pairs of blue jeans. She was not alone in receiving this high honour, though. Sometime between Saturday morning (when I returned from a workout) and Sunday (when I sealed up my gym bag prefatory to tossing it in the car), the Jaws of Death struck again:
Oh hai! This was not what I had in mind when it was hot over the weekend and I suggested air conditioning. Fortunately, there's a Tarjay near my workout place, so I laid in replacement gym shorts and should be good to go until Ebony's next unscheduled reunion:P