Peeking into the rock

I made a date with the chicken man. Did I mention his place was waaaay out in the country? Over the county line, and past the road to Las Lomas and Elkhorn Slough. I went there. He did not keep the date. I wrote up the experience, drew a map, clipped the twelve dollars to the note, and told the neighbor I didn't think I could go back again because I have to haul Gloria around with me and it's a drag (because she has to pee every twenty minutes).

Tonight I get a hate letter, almost. She insists that I am responsible for her chicken, accuses me of negligence (I was not the one who put chickens into an urban yard, on a corner, with no fence: I in fact did everything I could to keep my dog inside), insists that I also owe her ten dollars for chicken medicine (not part of the original agreement, something that she tacked on later). Originally she said the chicken was four months old and now she says she took care of it for five months. She uses words like "minimal" and "at least" to hint that I should actually be giving her more than a chicken and this ten dollars she has come up with. She's "perturbed" and doesn't want to drive to Las Lomas anymore than I do.

I personally am quite finished with the chicken story. I have been responsible: it was I who approached her and offered to get her the chicken. I did what I could and when I got to my limit I gave her the money and a correct map to the chicken place (we'll recall that when she passed the phone number on to me she described its location as being about ten miles closer to Santa Cruz than it is -- and also gave me an incorrect phone number for herself).

The only step left is for me to write this up for her and give her the twelve bucks back. I've written an awkward draft but I'm going to stall a couple of days because I want to give her a final draft which is not bitchy -- a consideration she obviously did not take.

On another front, it's been more than a week since the first rain of the season, and the ground is still damp in places, although the rain was barely .1 inch. That means it's winter.

The chicken man's place is really picturesque. It looks totally neglected but the animals look pretty nice, like he's taking better care of them than the buildings. There's a "beware of the dog" sign but the dog -- on a rather short chain, and when I was there, having no water in her dish (I had a water bottle and I filled it) -- the dog is really friendly and sweet and healthy looking. She's not particularly trained, though: she kept jumping on me in a begging way, very gently.

The nice fellow and Frank went up to the City today to see the airplanes racing to celebrate the end of Fleet Week. I had no interest and besides I had promised Emma to take her to get clothes for work and also to get costume stuff. Mostly I had no interest in sitting in a car for hours and hours -- that irritated leg nerve thing is almost gone but not quite. My leg likes walking again, which is good, but it doesn't like long bouts of car.

They brought home City goodies: some new kind of curry paste for Frank to play with, from Haig's: some Bitter, some Italian French bread and some salame from Molinari: and pork buns and custard buns from Red A. And they went to City Lights and the nice fellow brought me back a no-reason oversive book of nineteenth-century city maps. With comparative urban design discussion!

So if you want to know anything about New York, Philadelphia, Boston or any of 37 major European cities in the the 1830's, give me a hoot, and I'll see what I can tell you from the book. I just realized that the Philadelphia map would be very useful in the alt-hist I'm thinking of.

And I also made an impulse buy today. A pumpkin tureen with lid and ceramic spoon (they could totally have left the spoon out of the deal as far as I'm concerned: it will most certainly break soon). It has a maple leaf and two acorns on top and it's whitish, not orange (I think you're supposed to buy all these other pumpkin items, and some of them are orange or yellow or whatever). It's much nicer than it has any right to be. Much, much nicer.

Truffle did think about humping two dogs at the park today, but she didn't do it.

There's only one place selling chickens at this time of year, and it's all the way in Corralitos, and the neighbor lady is now hinting that I ought to also give her ten dollars for chicken meds and I'm not going to do it. Getting her the chicken is the most I will do.