Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Snowflake looks a lot like this

Here are a few recent events I haven't written about but which aren't long enough to make individual entries.

When my dog, Una, and I take walks, we often encounter people we've gotten to know in our neighborhood. They often stop and pet Una and talk about the weather or about how cute and good Una is.

One man we used to run into with his aging poodle mix, whose mouth was always food encrusted because he refused to be bathed. After holding on for many long doggy years, he finally got his ticket to Doggy Heaven.

Now his owner is left with only Snowflake, the cat he adopted before Benjy's death. He's showed me pictures of them snuggling time together, and apparently, he's starting to worry that she's getting lonely.

So the other day, when we passed his house, he retrieved her from inside to show me. The pure white kitty is a healthy weight, similar to our kitty Luke, who would happily be a ball of fur with feet if we didn't carefully control how much he eats.

Snowflake was mewing plaintively, and I thought that she would make a run for it, but she didn't. He brought her over, and I had Una sit. He actually put the cat up for Una to sniff! Now, I'd told him in the past that Una's very gentle with cats, but Snowflake didn't know that. I was surprised that she tolerated it.

He lives next-door to a woman who's been feeding stray cats on her porch, who have annual litters of kittens, of which Snowflake was one. So then he carried her over to that yard to look at the other kitties, which could very well be diseased due to a lack of medical care.

I told him we had to be on our way, and we continued our walk.

Two days later, he did the same thing, brought out the kitty to greet Una. I'm thinking that he must do this quite often, so I suggested that he get a cat harness so that he can take his cat for walks. Luke's foster mother used to do that with her own cats, if not with the foster kitties.

I'm starting to think maybe it isn't Snowflake that's lonely; he probably misses the sense of connection to the community he got from walking Benjy.

Me, sometimes I'd give my kingdom for an invisibility cloak. Don't get me wrong; I find people interesting and most of the time, I welcome friendly conversation. But some days I'm simply in a hurry, getting in the mandatory dog walk before an afternoon crammed full of errands.

Errands such as buying a new battery for our doorbell. After buying chocolate for the trick-or-treaters on Monday, I tested the doorbell and discovered it wasn't working. First, I replaced the size D batteries in the portion that actually rings, to no avail. Then, upon taking apart the buzzer itself, I discovered it uses a very small, strange looking 12 volt battery.

So Tuesday morning, I drove to Home Depot, where we'd bought the doorbell, to look for a replacement. Let me say, first of all, that I hate that store. I can rarely find anything there without seeking help and sometimes I can't even once I've received directions.

Like, for example, on Tuesday. I looked in vain for an aisle containing batteries. You would think, with all of the items in the store that require them, they'd have a big battery aisle with different varieties. No such luck, so I walked up and down the electronics aisle. The only place I found the proper battery was packaged with new doorbell buttons, which I did not need.

Finally, out of exasperation, I asked an employee, who only sent me back to the electronics aisle. I left, muttering under my breath.

My next stop was Kmart, because I figured their electronics department would probably sell a variety of batteries. I asked an associate for help right away, and when she couldn't find them near the cameras, we walked down another aisle where she did find it. I thanked her profusely.

All told, it took me an hour and a half to find one stupid battery. So we did have a doorbell by the time trick-or-treaters arrived.

We only got a handful, which didn't surprise me, because more and more parents take their children only to houses they know. And while there are a number of children in the neighborhood who like to pet Una on our walks, they neither know my name nor where I live. I'm simply "Una's owner."

The first two were a brother and sister pair, a princess and a psycho killer (guess which was which?) Then were another brother and sister, Superman and a witch.

Then there were a couple older kids who also seemed to be brother and sister. I made the mistake of telling them they could take several, since I wasn't getting many trick-or-treaters. They each grabbed huge handfuls. I feared that Murphy's Law would lead to a surge of trick-or-treaters, but I only got one more pair of kids, who politely took two each.

The thing about Halloween candy is that it's difficult for me to resist temptation. This time, I made sure to write down approximately how many extra calories I was consuming, so that I could adjust my intake for the day. But I made The Gryphon take the rest of the candy to his office the next morning.

He has remarkable self-control, and the candy he keeps in a jar on his desk is primarily eaten by visitors to his office. If I had something like that in my office, I'd soon be buying new pants.

In other news, my trapezius muscle seems to be healing. I don't take very much ibuprofen anymore, since it's almost to the point where it was before I aggravated it. That is to say, a mild background sort of pain.

I'm laying off the upper body workouts at the gym for several weeks, and when I go back, I'll drop the weights down a bit and take it easy. In the meantime, I'm focusing on lower body and taking lots of dog walks.

This morning I thought it would be too rainy for a dog walk, so I went back to sleep. When I woke up a half hour later, not only was the sun out but the sidewalks had dried, so we took our normal walk. Of course, the leaves she lives to cavort in are now wet and plastered to the pavement.

Most of this week has been fall jacket weather, but today is winter coat weather. I just bought a new winter coat. The old one still fits me, but it doesn't really fit with the way I've been dressing lately. I'm taking a tip from TLC's "What Not to Wear" and dressing for the position I want, which is to say a professional writer. This is a step up from what I was doing before, which was sort of still hippie college student. The powder blue winter coat works best with jeans or really casual clothes.

I bought a chocolate brown pea coat I just love. Since none of my scarves worked with it, I went to Target and bought an Isaac Mizrahi pea-green beret and matching wool scarf. It's a little itchy, but warm. I think as it gets colder, I'll appreciate it more and more.

Una and I are nearing the end of our dog walk, so I'll also end these ramblings.

Copyright 2006 by Alyce Wilson

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