Haleigh wasn't there today and Rebecca was busy with the vet and with office stuff for most of the day, so I was pretty busy. I did, lessee.. Jodi, Sumira, Hershey, Mira and Bhutan, Chip, Lilly, Witchita, Socks and Zera, Casey, the pack, Shenzi and Chinook, Frosty, Lilly and Jilly, Rodney, the Guardians, the Spice Girls, Junior, Pandora, Belle Fille, Sassy, Max and Mercury, and Tilly. 21 cages (not counting Chip, since I was feeding him while Isaiah was taking care of the rest of the hybrids. But nothing much noteworthy. Chip was trying to change his name to Karen, he had a decent looking freezer meat steak but he was very unimpressed with it, he seemed to be trying to send it back to the kitchen. Shenzi was only interested in being petted a little. Chinook was being very shy; I got her to take a couple of bites of food from my outstretched hand but she wouldn't come closer. Getting her treats didn't keep Frosty from being very rude when I let her into her small part for her food. Between how mad she gets and how wobbly the chain link fence of her ancient cage is, it's a good thing she doesn't have claws.

At the end of the day, Pandora was a very good girl and followed the script perfectly, which I hadn't expected since she'd just gotten a deer head not that long ago. Tempt her with a little treat, she takes it suspiciously, give her another treat, she's more eager, give her the meds, she thinks they're a little sus but swallows them, and gets another little treat as a chaser. Hershey was acting happy but with slightly ambiguous behavior, so I backed off to look at the Squinters, and when I came back she was happy to see me some more. The hybrids were very excited to see me, and directed their excitement into fighting each other. First it was gang-up-on-Mousse again, and then when I managed to separate Cookie and Chunk (the main Mousse-bullies) from the rest, Cookie decided to start beating up on Chunk. So I lifted the slide gate again, and everyone else wanted to beat Chunk up too. After a bit, they were back to picking on Mousse again, and I got her alone in the small part, and Calypso and Cookie got into beating Chunk up again. I know it's mostly a lot of noise when they're fighting -- nobody was getting hurt -- but they were getting worked up enough that I didn't want to try to go in with them until they calmed down, and they seemed to be calming down many times, only to get going again. Calypso was being very bold through the fence; she was sticking her nose through the fence to sniff, and actually let me touch her a couple of times. Unfortunately, she also tended to jump on whichever of her children I was trying to socialize with. When you're the smallest of your pack by a good margin, you have to make up for it by grabbing any opportunities to dominate the rest.

We still do not have final results for Eurydice's necropsy.

We lost Smudge; her necropsy said that she'd been in severe renal failure for a long time, but we didn't realize it. Ryggs seemed fine and then dropped dead on us, and her necropsy came back as hemorrhagic pericardial intrusion -- a big buildup of blood in the membrane around her heart that degraded her heart function. They'd seen labored breathing one day, and she was gone the next day. The vet says that it's a rare condition and you'd have to catch it right away when you could see symptoms. Which I doubt we would, we haven't seen it before and if an animal seemed to be having trouble breathing one day we'd be watching them closely but wouldn't expect to need to intervene immediately. Unfortunately, you can often see the symptoms in hindsight, but you also often see an animal looking down one day and back to normal the next day.

Somehow, our problem employee last week was out of jail and back at work today. I guess they have a huge problem with overcrowding in the Vigo County jail and have to let a lot of people out. I guess we just have to hope he doesn't get drunk and do worse.

Jerri's cat went to her vet last night. She was diagnosed with esophagitis, and they have a regimen of treatment that involves giving her medication half an hour before she gets food and keeping her vertical so that her esophagus points straight down for the duration. And it's unfortunately a bad prognosis, but we wish her the best. (The treatment could work. But it's likely it won't.)

I signed in at 9:10 and met Jerri and Haleigh at the Spice Girls, where the drain hole  on the big water tank had stripped out and the plug would not stay in. The guys ended up taking the tank and trying a quick welding job, but it leaked. I don't know if a less quick welding job would have done better; I don't know anything about welding. Then the keepers wanted to take the tank that wouldn't hold water out, because the tigers were likely to use it as a toy, but Joe (who'd barely been willing to allow the welding) said no.

On to the clinc, where Shenzi was very exuberant and fun, but being pretty well behaved with her teeth. Unfortunately, she seems to completely unerstand how the door works now. She knows she can pull it open. She even recognizes that the lock is what keeps it from moving when she sticks that pointy little snoot through the wires to grab and pull. She's also really quick and pretty sneaky. I was trying to get the pile of stinky straw I'd collected out, and zip! she was out in the main clinic building. Fortunately the outside doors were all closed, so she got to run around the large area for a couple of minutes before they herded her to where I was able to grab her and put her back. Rebecca told me later that she does get to have play time in the big area frequently and I shouldn't be too worried about it, but I still see it as a big fuckup on my part even if everything is OK in the end.

We did the field first. Nobody had bone, we were feeding turkey, and we were trying to hurry, so we were just throwing food over the doors. Except that when I was feeding Rose, I did have the cage unlocked... and then after I put the food in, I locked up and then opened the slide gate without being OKed. Again, no actual harm done; I had locked the door, and even if I hadn't, locking the door after the cat had come in wouldn't be a problem in Rose's case. But again, a fuckup on my part, and something I have maybe done once or twice since we started having a supervisor check locks like 10 years ago, but not more than that.

I managed the rest of the day without doing anything terrribly dumb. Despite aspirations of finishing early, it was around 3 when I finished cleaning Starlord and rejoined the others as we got to Pandora. We paused a minute to fetch meds so that Pan would get her meds before she ate. Apparently she's been bad lately but she took them just fine for me. I cleaned the Magic Sisters, who were much more cooperative about all coming in than they used to be, assued Belle Fille that she's a good girl since she'd already been fed, and had Nemo walk in through the chute when I came up, Chloe follow him, and then Chloe leave before I could get the slide gate down. She came back pretty quickly, but it should be noted that she was the difficult one today and Neems was a very good boy.

We got back to the building around 3:45 and I got a call that turned out to be mom's new broker, telling me that her old broker is retiring and that there were a couple of issues to take care of. (That sounds sorta sus when I put it that way, but she knew far too many details for there to be any question that it was real.) Still, it took long enough to turn that into scheduling another call for tomorrow when I'm at my computer that I missed all of the West. I got there in time to tell Kimbo he's a good boy and say hi to Zoe as I walked by.

Then I rode along as Jerri went to give Ana her meds and take care of Paws, and spent some more time being coyote furniture (without letting her escape this time). I got to visit Hershey for a bit, and then we were closing up and leaving, but when I got to the office, we had a crisis because Ginger, one of the office cats, was missing. After turning the building upside down looking in every place we coudl think of, Rebecca finally found her -- in the stove (!). Apparently there's no back panel on the stove, so she can get into the pan drawer -- and has done so before, so maybe they should have checked there sooner?

I have jury duty next week, so unless I don't have to actually come in Tuesday, I will miss next week. I'm planning on coming Sunday the week after, but I already had plans for this weekend before I even found out that I have juiry duty.

Here's today's look into the bachelor cooking brain.

The question of what to cook always starts with "what's in the fridge I ought to use up?" This week I actually considered it while I was at the store on Thursday. The principal answers were smoked sausage and cauliflower. A little odd together, but I could make it work. Once I get a couple of ingredients, the next question is, "What goes with that?" Here's where I sometimes feel the urge to get creative, because after 30+ years of my bachelor paneroles there's a certain sameness. (The core tenet of bachelor cuisine is to use as few pans as possible. It all goes in the one big pan, unless pasta is called for. These concoctions might well be called casseroles if they were baked, but a secondary tenet of bachelor cuisine is that the oven is a scary mystery where we don't go. I use my oven as a liquor cabinet. I've tried to figure out what to call this kind of dish for almost as long as I've been cooking without being satisfied with an answer. Today I'm going with "panerole". Who knows what tomorrow will bring?) This week's thoughts were apple; (apple goes well with cauliflower); a bit of carrot (adds a little color, and I have some carrots too); and it's been a while since I've done anything with couscous (a couple of years ago, it occurred to me that always using rice or macaroni as the bulk starch is a little repetitive, so I'd challenge myself to try some other things); and to complete the unusual combination I'd season with ginger (ginger goes with apple, right?)

( recipe inside )

My cooking adventure for tonight:

Saute 1/4 lb or so of round steak diced very fine with onion, a little garlic, a little salt
Start 1 cup minute rice+1 cup water in another pan
In the first pan again:
1 can petite diced tomatoes, drained as well as possible
1 tsp or so Thai red curry paste
Stir it up and let it cook a bit
Remember the cream of onion
Add 1/2 can condensed cream of onion soup, stir until everything is mixed and hot
Add the now-cooked minute rice to the pan, stir until the rice is mixed in
(I guess normal people would serve the stuff over the rice instead of mixing it together)

4 servings, tasty enough to remember the recipe

In my fridge, I had one large zucchini that I forgot I had when I should have used it a couple of days ago, 2/3 of a chicken breast I kept out when I froze the rest of the package, and half a can of Cream of Jalapeño soup. (I bought the soup on a "let's see what we can do with this" whim. The soup is a disappointment, it has almost no heat but plenty of the flavor of jalapeños, which I don't much like.) Add to this the fact that I'm trying to experiment with quinoa in my culinary travels, and I came up with this:

Caramelize 1/4 cup of chopped onion
Add 4 oz finely diced chicken breast
Add some salt, 1 tsp or so
Add 1 chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, chopped as finely as possible
When the chicken is cooked, add the zucchini, sliced
Simmer until the zucchini is mostly cooked
Add 1/2 cup of quinoa, rinsed in the strainer I just bought
Add 1/2 cup water, bring to boil, simmer 10 minutes
Add some more water until it looks right
Simmer another 10 minutes, quinoa should be done
Add 2 oz. shredded sharp cheddar cheese
Add 1/2 can condensed cream of something soup (will try cream of onion next time I think)
Stir until thoroughly mixed together

Serves me 3 times.

Whenever you make an old fashioned snail mail contribution to almost any charity, you get put on a list where you will receive several more requests for more money from that charity. Thank you gifts, membership renewal requests, emergency donation requests, and reminders that you haven't contributed in a while years later. Worse, many legitimate-seeming charities will sell your name on to other charities and you can get dozens. The larger the contribution the more further appeals you receive. It's just the way the fundraising business works.

This is a terrible waste of the charity's resources, the donor's time and attention, and the environment that has to be burdened with all that trash. The last one is particularly ironic in the case of environmental causes.

I believe I have a solution to this problem. Imagine there was a service you could send your donations to. You would specify what charity the donation was for, and they would collect all the donations to that charity that had come in every couple of months and send it on anonymously. The charity would pay a very small surcharge, which would be far less than what it costs them to send out all that follow-up spam.

The donor could easily set up a recurring donation, and in any case could opt in to a single annual statement listing the charities they had donated to.

The main question I have about this would be whether the tax laws would allow it. I have heard that a 501(c)3 can make donations to other 501(c)3 organizations. This would allow the donor to retain the tax benefits and make it easy to account for them with the IRS. Even if the aggregator were a 501(c)4, the current tax law means there is no benefit for most taxpayers to donate to a 501(c)3, but I suspect that if the aggregator had to operate as a regular company it wouldn't work financially.

I would be interested to have someone with more knowledge than I comment on how far this could fly legally. Ideally such a person would be a lawyer, but I'm in no position to pay a lawyer for official legal advice.

I was just listening to the news and there's an item that says the Census Bureau is behind schedule hiring workers to perform the 2020 census.

Given the Trump administration's intentions, already demonstrated with the citizenship question, to distort the census for political advantage, I am troubled that they are "behind schedule" because they don't actually want to have the workers in place to do the job right. When they are criticized in 2021 for not really counting everyone, they can plead that they did the best they could with the workforce they had.

What can citizens do to see that the census really counts everyone despite an administration that doesn't want to?

For a long time I have been thinking about writing. I ought to write, but whenever the thought comes to mind that I should sit down and write something I come up with mental excuses not to.

I spend a lot of time with my own thoughts, especially on walks. I walk every day, usually for 40 minutes or so. I go through lots of ideas that I want to share, but I never actually get around to writing anything.

Today I'm resolving to spend a little of the time I spend vegetating in front of my computer actually trying to turn some of those thoughts into words on the screen. As of right now, if I do work on fiction I don't plan to post it, but I will plan to post other stuff. Topics may include politics, society, game design, math, science, or whatever else coalesces in the chaos of my mind long enough to pin down.

Encouragement will probably help me keep at it. If anyone is reading this, and I write something interesting, please leave a brief comment.

It's National SAD Day, the day we switch to Daylight Wasting Time. Because nothing says "we love you" to people with Seasonal Affective Disorder like throwing away an hour of daylight just when the axial tilt is making it so precious.

It's OVFF time! If any of the three people who read this care, I will have EFRC calendars available as usual; if you tell me now you want one, I'll make a point of finding you at the con.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone, hearing lots of music, as many hugs as possible, and painful choices for the Pegasus awards!