Thursday bits (protest, DSL, feline antics)

[cellio]

Tonight while driving through Squirrel Hill I noticed a large crowd walking up the sidewalk. As I parked the group reached me and I saw that they were protesting the war ("no blood for oil" being the pervasive chant). I walked with them for a block or so, raising the average age a bit, before veering off for groceries. It occurred to me only later that its placement on Veterans' Day was probably not an accident.

Our usually-reliable DSL service has been having random short outages for the last several weeks. (Usually 10-15 minutes, a few times a week.) I'm not sure how to test whether it's the DSL service itself or our 5-year-old modem, though, short of acquiring a test modem. So I sent mail to our provider asking if they had other reports and/or debugging hints. (I noticed in passing that their service hours now end at 8PM. I've had productive conversations with them at midnight in the past. Oh well. 8PM is reasonable; I'd just gotten used to hacker hours.)

Ok, Embla is capable of making normal meowing sounds, as opposed to that quiet chirpy thing she usually does. It just has to be Important. Like, say, being trapped between the window and the screen on a cold evening. For calibration purposes, the time a contractor sealed her into a wall she was silent for a long time, even though I was in the room calling her.

(What was she doing there tonight? Well, our sink was plugged up, so we had initiated chemical warfare, but the chemicals gave off mustard gas or something, and we had to open the windows to help with dispersion. I didn't notice the cat on the windowsill when I pushed the window closed later. Fortunately, she was quick to alert me.)

Comments

Meow?

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

After just seeing a movie described as Indiana Jones meets The Italian Job, I just gotta hear the sealed in the wall story.

Re: Meow?

[siderea]

Which movie?

Re: Meow?

[cellio]

I was having my bathroom remodelled, including replacing the floor. This involved ripping up the subfloor and starting over (there had been water damage). I warned my generally-reliable contractor that there were indoor-only cats and asked him to pay attention as he was bringing in his tools and lumber and stuff. (This house didn't have a "cat lock", unlike my current one.) He said no problem; he hadn't lost a cat yet.

The day that he replaced the subfloor, I came home to find Embla missing. After thoroughly searching the house calling to her, I started to search the neighborhood. No response. So I called the contractor and asked if she could have slipped out, and he was extremely confident that she could not.

In case you've never done this kind of remodeelling, there's something you need to know about subflooring. The structure is that you've got some joists, usually 2x6s, and you nail plywood on top of that. This plywood is your subfloor; your tile or whatever goes on top of the plywood. The joists are usually 16" or 24" on center, with empty space between.

A few moments passed while we both came to the same obvious conclusion. The contractor said he would come right over (I'm so glad I had his home phone number!) and pull up the subfloor he'd just installed.

I had to step out for a bit (non-movable meeting). When I came back the plywood was in fact pulled up, but there was still no sign of the cat. As I was sitting on the toilet contemplating what to do next, my eye fell on the plumbing access panel next to the tub. The panel that comes all the way down to floor level. The panel that, just maybe, the contractor had had to remove while working on the floor. Not that he'd mentioned that or anything. And at that moment, I heard the faintest of meows.

So that's how Embla once spent several hours in a wall, snuggled up against the pipes. Now if only she'd had the decency to meow when I was in that room looking for her earlier, she could have shaved a few hours off her confinement.