My mystery scene is absolutely, positively not from Watership Down. It's not from The Wind in the Willows, or the Narnia Chronicles, either. I reread the first book, I looked up a similar scene in the second, and I know the latter by heart. I am trying to get hold of Fred Patten's Anthropomorphic Bibliography, suggested by Kim Huett, which is a compendium of talking animal stories. I'll let you know if I ever track the thing down. It's a fascinating treasure hunt.
Continuing the animal theme, Michael and John and I went to the San Francisco Zoo today. It was fun to see the new spaces filled with animals as the zoo moves to open air exhibits instead of cages. The capybaras were moseying along next to the Baird's tapir in the South American area, two portly warthogs snuffled happily in the grass next to a herd of nyala over in the African savannah, and a flock of guinea fowl made a terrible racket which the blackbucks and dikdiks ignored. We saw a polar bear climb a tree and try to shake something loose. We watched the gorillas play with the baby of the group, who is now a year old. We admired the thick, furry tails of the snow leopards snoozing next to each other, and laughed at the ring-tailed lemurs' antics. I never get tired of observing animals up close. I had a good time, even though it was pretty chilly. Michael wasn't bothered, since he's from Boston with several winters in Madison to toughen him up further, but I get chilled when it drops into the fifties, effete westerner that I am.
"If these are seagulls," Michael said, eyeing the gulls perched on top of the penguin rookery, "then are the gulls on the other side of the water Bay Gulls?" I laughed involuntarily. I'm not a fan of puns, but I liked that one.
Back home, the pets came round to be petted (Dixie), chucked under the chin (Natasha), and sink their needle-like claws into human flesh (Keiko). After Michael left, Dixie and I took a ride over to the Pet Food Depot where I purchased two buckets of sand-like cat litter. I'm still trying to get a grip on Natasha's unfortunate and inappropriate urination problem. Recently, I've decided it's because she doesn't really like gravel cat litter. I know she loves sand and dirt. I'll see if I can make her litter box more attractive. I'm going to put out the second one as well, just in case second time's the charm. Meanwhile, we've been comically relentless about leaping up and investigating any ominous sounds of wall scratching (she can't cover the rug after she pees in the hallway, so she tries to scratch the wall). I've been known to wake up shouting, "NaTASHa!" at any sound vaguely like paws scrabbling: leaves outside the window, the gardeners raking, John scratching his bearded chin. Poor Natasha is probably getting a complex on top of her complex.
My plan for the evening is to transfer all of the 1997-1999 archives to my account at spies.com, and write a script which will globally change every internal link to the correct location. After that, I need to write a check for my domain name which I plan to start using within a month. Soon you will be able to find me at intaglio.org, a domain I've had for two years but never used because I couldn't stomach the idea of paying Mindspring an additional $20 a month for the privilege of having a domain pointer in place. Vicki Rosenzweig told me about mydomain.com who will do it for free, so I'm signing up. What a wild life, eh? The fun never stops.
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