You know what cold is? Thirty degrees. It is a completely different 30 than usual here. In November in New York, the mid-20s felt warmer. Possibly because we woke to blue skies for the first time in days, the cloudy cold of early afternoon felt worse. When we left REI at 1:30, I was sure it was in the teens. Also, I wore only a fleece vest over a rolled-sleeve shirt and it was damn cold.
I might have to revoke my heretofore complete backing of REI. Out of all the dozens of bikes hanging from the ceiling, not one was a women's bike fitting my specs--aluminum frame, front shock, mountain but not too techy. The clerk didn't say none was a woman's bike--maybe if I'd asked for a racing bike I'd've seen one--but I don't think I was looking for anything that obscure. Also they had already sold out of a lot of models.
I am so crippled by nostalgia. When we went to DU Wednesday night, we parked by the English building, whose name I don't remember, and walked to Magness Arena, where the talk would be. When Moore came in, he ogled at the nearly 7000 people and and realized this must be a sporting hall. "Hockey," the audience yelled. While we waited beforehand (Moore was about 20' late for us and the preceding reception hadn't happened at all), RDC and I reminisced about parking at UConn, which was abysmal for students of course. You could pay your annual fee for a parking sticker and still be booted if the university decided your spot was necessary for an attendee at the ConnDome.
(The pavilion's name is now Gampel for the single largest donor. While it was still only planned, a dome at UConn, and being built, it looked like a condom with a reservoir tip (the crane tower out of the top of the roof). Hence.)
Because of course, a funder's attending a basketball game is so very much more important than a commuting student's attending a night class. Also, more shuttle buses plied the shorter distances between game lots and the Dome than did the greater distances between student lots and academic buildings, which shows priorities.
Anyway, RDC, who lived off-campus longer, grew much more familiar with the various lots than I. And, I am so proud, I did not consider my forgetting the letter names of the various parking lots at UConn to be a betrayal of my love for my alma mater. Now that's progress.
Where was I? Crippled by nostalgia, right. My bike, which is almost nine years old, is not one I ever developed much of a relationship with. It's served me well, gear shifts aside, and I like having it of course. I name my cars and I named my first bike (my first real (that is, geared) bike that I bought myself) but I never named this one or its predecessor (my third and second bikes, respectively). What am I being paralytically nostalgic about? That my next bike (which might be the one I try out on Thursday, by which time it will have been built) won't say "Scott's Cyclery/ Willimantic, Connecticut" on its frame.
Where was I? Freezing my ass off in the REI parking lot. I could easily have spent the entire afternoon in front of REI's (gas) fireplace reading the Colorado Hut to Hut and Cycling France books I whiled away RDC's bike-browsing with, but it was not to be.
We took the other, unnecessary lamp back to Restoration Hardware and browsed in Sur la Table for a while. RDC asked, "Doesn't that mean south of the table?" "Sud," I told him. "This is on the table." Just yesterday I asked him what vaqueros means after passing a store on east Colfax. I have already forgotten whether it means "blue jeans" or "cowboy." We found a roll-up pastry-rolling sheet, which is a fine and necessary thing for bread and pies as long as we have tiled counters. I eschewed bread pans, as anything that seemed thick enough to make a real crust was four millions dollars and the rough peasant loaves I formed on the pizza stone last week turned out okay. Whatever was wrong with them--plenty--would not have been solved with breadpans.
And in Whole Foods we bought a bag of King Arthur whole wheat flour for more bread, and if I don't use the cherries soon they'll probably get freezer-burnt and ruined. I would like to make a pie for friends who just adopted a baby they'll call Scarlett, because of how appropriate the color of a cherry pie would be, but RDC sagely pointed out that the first such attempt should not be sicced on outsiders. I should probably just make sour cherry jam and be done, but I don't think I have enough.
When we got home with the groceries and toys, I was stunned to see the thermometer at 30. I seriously expected to read 10. Okay, I wasn't wearing the right clothes, but the raw wind and humidity didn't help. It is too cold to have a fire, but we are snuggled under the fleece on the couch, reading Underworld and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and tucking our beaks into our wings and planning to have tomato soup for dinner. Because it's damn cold.
20' and 25' Precor elliptical, level 12, incline 15. Both of our trainers have said that cardiovascular exertion longer than 20' at a stretch (or maybe 30') means the body burns lean tissue. That makes no damn sense to me whatsoever. Lean tissue is protein; fat is energy. However, it's either longer exertions than I should do or--just maybe--the fact that I haven't been restraining myself chocolate-wise because I seem to be going in reverse. Then
3x15 @70 cage lat pull-down
3x12 @25 Cybex overhead press and
A few attempts at a Cybex fly machine, but I couldn't find the right weight. Either it was too light and the flying was nearly literal or too heavy and I couldn't budge it.
Or, holy shit it's March.
When did that happen? I have the other half of the front garden to plan and order pronto. And I have to clean out the south half, to get the leaves out and cut down last year's growth. Some stuff, the low-growing penstemon and erodium, is already green. I'm debating using the ugly mulch from last year's TreeCycle under the cherry tree or planting squash there. Neither would combat the cherry shoots and the squash might give a ladder to the bindweed and the mulch would make the shoots harder to clip.
I finished the windows in the sunroom, took up the dropcloth, and put the cookbookcase back in there. I still have to scrape the windows but that's easily swept up, and the cookbookcase had to leave the living room because our new furniture arrives tomorrow. The terrible thing about a built-in breakfast nook? We have to build it in, meaning, we have to mar the floors. With nails.
I also turned the compost. This year I am going to get a second bin or maybe two and I must, somewhere, find a sifting screeen. I love that no eggshell survives a month but that the broccoli trunk I didn't chop up or surround with high-nitrogen matter is still intact five months later. But I need a screen to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
I finished The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and now I'm somewhat at a loss of What Next. The Home Despot Kitchen and Bath Remodel Book doesn't count. Right now I have Donna Tartt's Little Friend ready to go in my bag but I have lost some of my urgency about that. I guess I should have read it immediately, but I flew twice in the weeks after and it's large for a plane book. I also have Postmodernism for Beginners in my gym bag, because it's slim and easily interruptable.
I'm listening to David Denby?'s Great Books, about his experience taking Columbia's literature and humanities core classes again, 30 years after the first go. It's abridged, but it was RDC's last month's choice, and it's read by Ed Asner, which makes the narrator sound to me like he's 78 instead of 48.
Right now on my bedtable are Mary Anne Mohanraj, Torn Shapes of Desire; Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves; Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose; Paradise fucking Lost; Don Quijote, ditto; the King James Bible (Cambridge UP); Isabel Allende, Daughter of Fortune, which I am frankly not overly interested in; and Zadie Smith's White Teeth.
I have gorged on Great Yet Accessible recently--Byatt, Chabon, Saramago--yet I still am intimidated by Great--Milton and Cervantes--while fearing that purely accessible--Zadie Smith--will disappoint me, as James M. Cain just did.
I don't know what I did differently with the sponge this time but yesterday I made bread that's not even "bread" but actual bread. I am quite pleased. I went home at lunch to cast a dragony eye over my new stuff and have a sandwich on this bread.
From October of 2001 to March 2003. Paint and stuff, yep. I know we still need artwork on the walls and coasters on the table and vases on the bookcase and so forth, not least books in the bookcase. Having a whole new drawered piece of furniture that's not in the bedroom makes me think of Laura Ingalls-now-Wilder looking at the house Almanzo built for her, at the pantry with its shelves and drawers and the space for the butter churner and other things, as they should arrive. But I do think I might use those two big drawers for linen, since we have almost no linen storage. The little drawers will be for my camera and webcam and Palm Pilot synching thingie, since I don't use my study as much as I ought.
(Okay. Not that I would admit having anything to do with "Coming to America," but Samuel L. Jackson holds up a restaurant in it. I prefer his restaurant job in "Pulp Fiction.")
The new chair is excessively comfortable.
For the first time, I did only weights and no cardio at all. I did legs.
Hack squats, 3x15 @115 (up by five whole pounds)
Single leg press, 3x15 @75 (up by five whole pounds!)
Donkey presses, whatever the hell those are.
Prone leg curls, 3x15 @50 (either it was too little weight and the curl was too easy, or it was too much and I couldn't bend my leg fully. I have to work on that.)
Ball squats and standing lunges, not many, intending to do more in front of "Six Feet Under" tonight. Gang aft awry.
Calf raises, 75 per leg
Seated weighted calf raises, 3x15+ @55 (up by ten)
Standing weighted calf raises, 3x15 @ 50.
I haven't been keeping good track of my weights. Obviously. I need to enter everything in a spreadsheet again and then maybe refer to it once in a while. I also need to make up better workout playlists for Dandelion. I also need to go to bed.
I had heard a lot of good things about this and wanted it to be as good as I hoped. It was the first YA book I've read in months and months. I really liked the Sarah Byrnes thread--it reminded me of Freak the Mighty and So Much to Tell You, the latter of which I really like, and of Ordinary People, what with the swimming and the older brother, and of Silent to the Bone, what with the not-talking. But I thought the author didn't do so well with his other plotlines, which overdominated the primary (or so I thought, given the title) and more interesting line. I was really afraid of the same sort of teacher-denouement as in The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, especially since the vice-principal was exactly that caricatured. Also, such an incredibly reductionist presentation of abortion with such exaggerated hypocriticism (or hypocrism, Haitch) weakened the book's integrity as a whole. I wanted to know Sarah Byrnes more.
I just got another crop of crap from my sister. Some of it is the usual: any page of the L.L. Bean catalog with a retriever on a dog bed will find its way from her house to mine; and there's usually some pathetic or goofy thing advertised in the Sunday supplements. I, not getting a Sunday paper or a lot of junk mail, can seldom return the favor. I didn't even make a Catalog of Tackiness last Yule. But last week in the mail I did get unsolicited mail from someone offering Christian counseling. Enclosed were two tracts.
Ah, I thought. A gift for my blister.
CLH's latest stuff came yesterday, before I mailed mine, and she trumped me but good, without even trying. An oversize postcard asking, on one side, "Is Jesus Good?" with testimonials affirming this, and on the other a message soliciting addressees to a meeting of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Cambridge. Of course this is the sort of thing that she comments on extensively. Her address is circled, with this note: "I have no idea how I got on this list!" but I am happy to have read the card more carefully than she did: the fine print says that this was a mailing to the community at large and "You are not on a mailing list."
Wow. If Jesus has the power to take me off mailing lists to the point that he or his affiliates could truthfully say to me, "You are not on a mailing list," then maybe I should look this group up.
Speaking of Jesus, yesterday I also received a letter from my mother.
Parenthetically, she sent a note last week as well covering a newspaper clipping about the death of my seventh-grade history teacher, who cannot have been that old. Should anyone doubt that some teachers do perpetuate the societal ranking each new crop of kids brings to a classroom, here's what this one wrote in my seventh-grade yearbook (the tidbit is fresh in my mind because I just rescued my 1980-1985 yearbooks from my mother's garret): "You're ugly. J. Goodman."
Yesterday's letter from my mother was as impersonal as the post-it stuck to the obituary, but it showed two improvements: she signed it Mom instead of "Mommie" (I was never sure which annoyed me more, the quotation marks or the -ie), and she used subject pronouns. Often she omits these: "Am very busy. Am very happy. Just wanted to jot this down..." But the prize was the enclosure, an Al-Anon pamphlet, 24 pages on denial: "Alcoholism. A Merry-Go-Round Named Denial." I would really like to ask her to summarize this thing and tell me what she thinks about the issue and how it relates to her. But I am not currently in a beat-my-head-against-the-wall mood.
CLH is, though; she initiated another attempt to Communicate with our mother, sending the letter to both of us, and this pamphlet was our mother's response to me. She will never think for herself and never give us the respect of responding with a letter as carefully phrased and thought out, as reaching-out-to-someone, as those we occasionally send to her. She maintains that she is willing to talk but it has to be in person; at least that has been her excuse since we left her roof.
On the occasions of talking since, like the summer of 2001, she turns from us, says she's too busy or there's traffic or we shouldn't ruin our time together or what have you. My sister, magician that she is, elicited a promise from our mother that Saturday, when she goes home, our mother will talk to her and not make excuses. I suggested to my sister that she get our mother's husband out of the house as well, because our mother will use him as an excuse--that their conversation will disturb BDL--or an interruption--since BDL cannot fix his own peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and must be sucked up to.
I do enough beating my head against a wall on my own without involving anyone else in it.
Now, this I had no apprehension about. If Absolutely Normal Chaos isn't at the level of Walk Two Moons or even Chasing Redbird, well, how many books of that calibre can one author have in her? However, for her to be a step or two down from there is still better than most.
The protagonist is 13 again, and a girl again, but also this time a boy. Twins, though, so while two different people not exactly independent. She set up the Dickensian antagonists in an I hope impossible fairy-taley way, so their comeuppance would be entirely satisfying.
I would love to live in Ruby Holler, so I could chase a redbird and befriend Salamanca, or so I like to think. I loved Sal's grandparents, but I know details like the grandfather's driving and the grandmother's Peeby would drive me round the bend, since I'm intolerant like that. And even without them I would stand no chance against the accents. But I really want to know Sairy and Tiller in real life. (Of Tiller, of course, I was immediately fond in an automatic, Cynthia-Voigt-reflex, way.) But of course I already do, in Nisou's parents.
My cockatiel is better than your cockatiel. Also, this bathrobe is better than yours. Unfortunately, it's not mine. It's RDC's; since he's not here I get to wear it. When I gave it to him, I thought I was bringing him up to my standard, not surpassing it. But this terrycloth is heavier and warmer than my robe's and the skirt reaches the floor instead of mid-calf. And it won't be in stock again until next winter--the only color Lands' End had left when I, in a fit of jealousy, decided I needed one too was orchid, which turned out to be pink not lavender. So for the next six months I have to steal. Or the next two, because by May I'll want a summerweight robe again.
Also, Blake's oatmeal box is better than anyone's. We used to buy boxes of 40 packets of Quaker instant oatmeal, until the company started including foul flavors like Cinnamon Danish or whatever it was. These boxes, we discovered, were an excellent size for a Buddy Cave. It's been so long since we've bought such a perfect box--food grade, not too thick to gnaw on, a good size for the top of his cage or the table in front of the couch in the den--that he's destroyed, in proper cockatiel fashion, these caves. He has chewed the doorways so much that now anyone can look right in, depriving him of that wonderful I'm Running Away to My Secret Cave feeling. The cardboard's collapsing.
Well, Mommy's coworker saved the day. Tex eats a mixing bowl (I'm serious, a glass mixing bowl, way bigger than a cereal bowl) of plain oatmeal every day at work, in the hopes it will slough off the cholesterol in his arteries. When I spotted that nice big oatmeal box--fitting two 3.5 pound bags--I asked if I could have it when it was empty. Friday he gave me two such boxes (and this is a man with very little pet-tolerance at all, who thinks I'm insane for living with a bird, which I don't contest).
Now Blake has two new caves, a cage-top one and a downstairs in front of tv one. He spent most of the weekend in his new cave, seasoning or tempering it as one would a wok, except that instead of oil and heat he used song. He playing in his box all weekend, singing. He's such a good boy buddy.
The photograph is from a new angle, facing me in the chair with the fireplace end of the living room behind me. The chair is blissfully comfortable. Blake is right now in his cage having a snack, but the great thing about this chair is that his cage is right around the corner. It can contain his mess but when he or I get lonely, I can just reach up and around for him. And although we are officially in Separate Rooms, which is Very Wrong and Bad, we are actually closer with me here than when I'm sitting at the dining table.
He just loves being in his box. He wants you to talk to him and tell him he's a good boy and invite him to snuggle and have his head pet, so that he can prance into his box with an audience, but he doesn't want to be watched while in his box and he doesn't want you to leave the room. If you do, he'll come out and call for you, but as soon as you return to his line of sight and he confirms you're watching, he turns tail and retreats, prance stamp waddle, into his sanctuary. I don't see why it's a surprise that bird-humans are insane. It's the company we keep.
Yesterday was not a good bus day: first I missed my usual going-home one and then when the later one approached, it pulled over and put its hazards on. I threw up my hands and waited in the library for RDC to fetch me. There I found my two latest books, Crutcher and Creech. Which only postponed my immediate What Next after Saramago question. I haven't started Little Friend yet.
I'm listening to David Denby's Great Books, and I'd be pleased for him to stop at any time his whining about how stupid the freshling are. I acknowledge that a wisdom might come with age that cannot, or seldom can, come by any other means, but being 18 doesn't make you stupid therefore. It makes you 18. This is why I hate grown-ups.
I also started Stupid White Men and got partway through the prologue. I don't read Dave Barry either. Someone sent me a column about his main dog and his auxiliary dog once (summer after freshling year, probably, making me 19 and therefore unwise and puerile), and I read it to my parents (who are 30 years older than I but still amused), and because of that I tried to read some other Dave Barry, but it was all the same. I had expected or hoped Michael Moore to be more like Al Franken--funny but not juvenile. RDC suggests I soldier (ahem) on through the prologue because the actual chapters are better.
I'll do that, but Denby reminded me I've never read The Aeneid.
Or The Lysistrata. Or The Frogs or The Clouds. Or the entire Oedipus trilogy. Cycle? When he mentioned Euripedes and Aristophanes and Sophocles, I remembered doing reports on ancient Greek culture in ninth grade (I did mythology, natch) and being impressed with how interesting my classmates made the plays seem. Twenty years later (holy shit), I have still read only Oedipus Rex and Medea.
20' Precor elliptical, level 12 incline 15. I didn't drink my half-gallon today or remember a water bottle for the gym so after the one 20' stint I didn't wait for another round but moved on to weights.
Iso lat thingie. Incline press. Overhead press. Lateral raise. I haven't written them down yet because I suck. I know one of them was 80 pounds, which impressed me. It hurt to get through 3 sets of 15, but I managed. On another, 3x10 ending with a lower weight than I started with (very bad! write it down!) was a real struggle. I really like the overhead press and the lateral raise. They're the kind of thing that--in an alternate universe, granted--might make my shoulders start at the ear, but they'll improve my swimming, oh yes.
PSA reproved me in high school, for pity's sake, for liking depressing music. (The pity being that it's been that long: doesn't everyone like depressing music in high school?) I don't even remember which song I suggested to him, but he countered, "My favorite song right now is 'Walking on Sunshine'!" I know he was exaggerating, but he's still right. I mean, the Cowboy Junkies? Beth said their "Sweet Jane" makes her want to slit her wrists (approximately).
Today toward the end of my workout I let Dandelion play all its songs in alphabetical order. It's not a crime for music not to be workout music, but lordy lordy lordy. From the top, the Junkies "200 More Miles," Junkies "A Common Disaster," Waterboys "A Bang on the Ear," Godspell "All Good Things," Kate "And So Is Love," along with some Cocteau Twins and Passion and other tracks I now forget but which were all depressing as hell. Innocence Mission, probably. Roxy Music "Avalon." And I haven't even mentioned my current favorite album, Aimee Mann's Bachelor No. 2.
That is in fact why I stopped lifting weights. I have got almost as sick of selected tracks from Oil and Gold as I am of Ten, and I had Shriekback with me only for weeks instead of the years I've used Pearl Jam. But I can't remember Pearl Jam as anything but exercise music while Shriekback is fraught with other associations.
Part of the problem is that I have thus far copied only my favorites into Dandelion--Kate, Pete, the Junkies, Innocence Mission, Fumbling Toward Ecstacy (not really a favorite, but I think RDC thinks Sarah McLachlan would poison him should he touch her work, so it lives among my particular favorites), Godspell, Tim Easton (also not really a favorite, but he belongs with the Junkies, as does Animal Logic only because it backed Caution Horses until the tape died). I need to go through the main CD library. After which the situation will not improve: Little Earthquakes and Diva and Jagged Little Pill.
I added the souped up "Little Less Conversation" to a workout playlist and moved "Corduroy" into it too. That helped.
20' and 20' Precor elliptical, level 12 incline 15
Tricep rope pull down, 3x12 @20.
Right after the elliptical I moved toward the back extension frame, but someone got there a step ahead of me. Grr. So I went for the lat pull down, and someone else got there a step ahead of me, with an apologetic look, having I think been waiting for it, and offering to spell sets with me. I shook my head, disliking to alternate sets (moving the weight pin, and what if the person does more or fewer reps with more or less time between...maybe I don't share well). I told him to go ahead, that I'd do tricep rope pulldowns, but that afterward he'd have to help me get another guy off the back extension machine.
"Maybe," he agreed, "but not if he's bigger than me."
I couldn't do the tricep rope pulldowns the past couple of tries @20, where 10 pounds was ridiculously inadequate. And then today, did the pulley pop, or what? Because something moved, and I squoke, and then I could do it. But first I crouched to look at the weight stack: had I not engaged the pin fully? "What happened there?" I wondered aloud.
"I don't know," said the friendly usurper doing lat pulldowns. "But you hurt my ears." I apologized for startling him. To myself, though, I grinned, because using a strong-verb form for the past tense of "squeak" is something I adopted through cockatiel companionship, since he does not speak but squeaks.
For weights I listened to Susan Tedeschi, whom I learned of through my sister. She's like Bonnie Raitt in style and I am well pleased.
Lateral pulldowns, 3x15 @70
Back extensions, 3x15
Arm extensions, 3x12 @30.
Sometimes a movie happens along that exactly suits my mood. I really want to reread this, in paper, because the audio version was lovely but I remember little of my listen twelve years ago. I remember a few lines: from a hunt, when she says, "Was this shot not a declaration of love?" which was such an alien mindset for me that it stuck with me, and the Kikuyu telling her they did not think she would forget about them, which again was such a peculiar way to convey their missing her that it stuck.
(In French, or so I understand, you don't say "I'll miss you." The verb, the concept of which I can't articulate in English, is reversed, so you say something like "You'll miss me" but you're speaking of your own emotion. Or something. Nisou messed up her English once, using the French idiom--her English gets more expat and continental all the time--which is how I learned that. Or thought I learned that.)
Anyway, lovely book or not, it's a lovely movie. I have known, since I first saw it as an innocent young thing of 17, that it has one of the sexiest lines in all cinema: "Don't move." It also has one of the strongest, when the governor's wife says of her own word, "You have mine." And one of the loveliest, when the protagonist tells Farah that she wants to hear him speak her name: "You are Karen, sabu."
Also, Michael Kitchen, who plays Berkeley, is dead sexy. I looked him up in imdb, where I learned that of course the name is spelled with an e. Clerk. Derbyshire. Damn Brits, spelling things before they shifted their vowels.
My sister got a cat and is soliciting names. It's brown and black and I asked in patches or tortoiseshell? and she told me more striated, like a bad dye job. Also it has a loud purr. I can't think of any cat names, though I did come across the term "prune whip" the other day and immediately begin to itch because I am sure that a cat in a children's book somewhere is named Prunewhip.
The thing that amuses me about this is that the last time (that I remember) someone asked for help finding cat names was a coworker in September 1996. I typed "cat names" into my search engine of the day--Alta Vista?--and came across Bryon Sutherland's Semi-Existence of Bryon. Bam! Online journals. Bryon, opheliaZ, Tracy Lee, Sage, Ceej, Diane, Willa, Jen Wade.
Anyway. I reminded my sister that pet names should end in -y. This is not strictly necessary, witness our dog Shadow, but mostly true. I told her about Blake's support group: "Hi. I'm Blake." "Hello, Blake!" "They named me for a Romantic poet, but they call me Blakey. Or Blakey-Jakey. It's really embarrassing. I wish they'd just named me Buddy at the start."
"Actually that should be more embarrassing for you," my sister rightfully pointed out.
Point being that among his many nicknames (which are a reason he can't say his name right, since he hears it only when I'm not calling him my bananaheaded boy), of which Buddy doesn't even count since it's nearly his actual name, the primary one is Puppybird. I'm not about to let him forget that he really should be a dog. (If I had a human child but not a dog, I'd do the same thing. That's probably illegal.)
So I suggested she name the cat Puppie.
Building a music library for Dandelion is empowering in all kinds of ways. I've got Learning to Crawl in there right now and I am all bouncey at the prospect of lots of listening to "Show Me" and "My City Was Gone" without "Thumbelina" in between.
Speaking of the Pretenders, after I got back from Momix last night (another entry), I couldn't sleep so I tried watching television. Nothing in TiVo appealed to me, "Winter Guest" being too depressing and "City of Lost Children" being way too scary. And having already lain down I could not possibly have got up to select a DVD. I found David Letterman and watched the Pretenders--of whose post 1983 work I am completely ignorant--perform from a new album. Eh.
Wow.
A while ago I noticed a cobalt blue convertible new Bug in the parking lot. Less of a while ago walking to the library at lunch I saw it and noted the sharp bob of the driver, and when later that afternoon I saw a New Person at work with such a bob, I asked if she had the Bug. (Someone else has a Mini Cooper. Not that I'm jealous of these sexy little cars, no.)
We chatted, and I noticed Pilobolus on her wall calendar. We spoke of dance and I told her about the most amazing dance performance I have ever seen, which was Momix dancing to Passion at UConn in 1993 or '94. Momix danced the entire soundtrack, dancing the creation of life as strings of protein and amoebas on stage, the rise of flowering plants, the evolution of animals, the invention of fire, the invention of the wheel, until the last dance, which began with three dancers suspended on three velvet ropes. The side two dancers finished being crucified and left, leaving the center one to finish his passionate death. I prefer to think of Passion as music for that dance, in fact, rather than for the wretched "Last Temptation of Christ."
Thursday she mentioned she had heard that maybe Momix was going to be in town soon. A quick web search placed them in Fort Collins Friday night. We got tickets in the last row of a small enough venue that they were perfectly fine seats.
Opus Cactus, lots of desert-oriented dances. They were tumbleweeds and gila monsters and raindancers and delicate blossoms and ostriches and sundances; they used native American and aboriginal Australian and African sounds. Why is it, I wonder, that purely memetic music bores me--I could never sit and just listen to Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" or Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker," and because John Williams borrows so heavily from Aaron Copland I have a hard time hearing Copland as himself and not as a potential soundtrack--but memetic dance I could watch for hours, maybe (although this hasn't been tested) without musical accompaniment? Maybe because I prefer visual to aural arts, I don't know. Maybe because dance involves athletic humans in tight clothing.
While the Passion dance is, because of the music, still the most amazing ever, this show was still spectacular and jaw-dropping and evocative and wonderful. I am so glad I saw it. Plus I had my first ride in a new Bug! Its front seat is roomier than Cassidy's.
The choreographer, Moses Pendleton, is broadly and deeply talented. So very talented that even his creations are talented: "An avid and original photographer, shows of Mr. Pendleton's work have been presented in [several cities]" (quoting the program).
Michael Moore's right about a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, his rhetorical tricks detract from his credibility. He wants his book in politics instead of humor? Then he should stop the false causality.
Saturday I plied the junk and antique shops on south Broadway. I saw some really amazing quarter-sawn oak stuff and some not so amazing stuff. I bought a copy of The Official Preppy Handbook for two bucks. Something from it occurred to me a while ago so I looked it up to find that it's out of print. But it's so very very high school that I'm glad to have it.
Anyway, the author, Lisa Birnbach, lists preppy nicknames and suggests the given names they might spring from. She says "Bunny" might be for someone whose given name is Corcoran.
Huh.
A valid criticism I have read of The Secret History is that Donna Tartt has no idea of Californians, so the narrator rings false. I think she deliberately distances the narrator from warmth and regular human interaction, and that might make him, including his being from California and the California she places him in, ring hollow.
She was a classmate of Brett Easton Ellis at Bennington in the early '80s, when the Handbook came out. A main character in Secret History, set in an anonymous Bennington, is named Bunny Corcoran. I'm thinking she consulted the Handbook to make the New England seem New Englisher.
After several tryings-on sessions (with all the bikes suspended from the ceiling, and you're not supposed to use the hook yourself to fetch a bike down but get Farm Boy to do it) and research here and there and deciding against the Novara Bonita which might be intended for a woman but is certainly intended for a short woman who wants to sit up as straight as Miss Gulch and doesn't mind pink and also against several other makes and models, I wound up with a 15" hardtail 2003 Marin Palisades. RDC swapped its default with my wonderful cut-out saddle (that link is approximate; remember?) and moved the pannier rack to it from the Cannondale and I rode it to work today and its name is Shadowfax (because it's mostly white).
It's not much, but it's all for today. Two 3.8 mile rides. Oh, and the iso prone core suckinthegut thing this morning. And I kinda might do leg extensions on the ball in a few minutes, if Blake can manage to feel safe on Daddy with The Scary Other, Green Ball in use. (Later.) Nope.
Two 3.8-mile city rides
30" Precor elliptical, incline 15 level 12. You might ask why the cardio after two days of riding. You might also have noticed I have posted no exercise entries since Thursday. You might also find the reason in the fact that yesterday I weighed 150 pounds again. I know why: chocolate. I have to stop. Months ago I bought a four-pound? bag of Ghiardelli bittersweet chips and in the past two weeks, the Tupperware that is their home has become my personal playground, in a walrus-and-carpenter-among-the-oysters kind of way. A fortnight ago it was full; now it's half full. And that's only what I eat at home. There is reasonable chocolate and then there is my recent consumption.
For camping in September I bought a big canister of salted roasted peanuts. It's good fat, right? One morning after Dot Org moved I brought the container in and left it on the counter in the breakroom. It was empty by noon. I should do that with the chips. Except that I like chocolate a lot more than peanuts.
Tricep rope pulldown, 3x10 @30
Upright row, 3x10@70
Lateral pulldown, 3x10@70
Lateral raise, 3x10@35
Assisted pull-ups, 3x10@40
Back extensions, 3x15
Last week I saw a magpie flutter by toting timbers for its castle. The blue jays (which seem well-established in Denver now) are being raucous again. Yesterday I heard and saw a robin singing (sometimes they winter through, but not this year; also, apparently our robins don't winter here but those that do are from farther north). The starlings are caterwauling--odd, since they're birds not cats--and the seed drops more slowly in the feeder.
I might have gone to the gym immediately after work, but I would have spent the entire time fretting about Shadowfax. The gym does have a bike rack, but it's against a blank brick wall instead of ten feet to the right, where it would be in front of the gym's office windows, and that brick wall is extremely close to a bus stop, so that I would see innocent waiting-for-bus-ism as suspicious loitering. Except I wouldn't've been able to see it, because of the brick wall. Hence the fretting.
So instead I came home and Blake and I worked on the front garden. I raked out its winter bed of fallen leaves, discovered new green on the lavender (the one plant that didn't grow at all last year) and on most of the other obviously happier plants. Today I have to call High Country Gardens to find out about how to trim my sophomore garden. (Blake's help consisted of commentary from the porch.)
My hair is too long for its length right now ("What does that even mean?" RDC asked) and needs its first trim. I have to make an appointment with Janelle, who I guess is my new Frank. I haven't had a Frank for ten years, since he was not One with the long hair project.
Anyway. Yesterday I walked out to get a sandwich, hair in a ponytail, nose in a book. It was 65. Today it's going to be 70. It's not going to be easy to Embrace the Down when it's over 60. Or when I'm working in the garden. Or on my bike. Fifteen fewer inches of hair has to be cooler than a braid to the small of my back. I can get it off my neck, which is vital; the wispies (that I asked for, I know) fall in my face and it might be time to invest in barrettes.
Yes! Walked out to get a sandwich! There are now, in addition to the grocery store, two whole restaurants in walking distance. They are even of a lunchy, sandwichy nature. Goddess knows when it was over 95 downtown, I was a big fan of staying inside over lunch, subsisting on whatever I had remembered to bring from home or could glean from the building's convenience store or sandwich shop. Out here, though, there are no trees to walk under in the heat, no buildings of the sort to cast a shadow (also, therefore, not such a heat sink), and no plaza right outside my door with trees to read my book under.
When I got back with my sandwich, Tex was just coming out with his lunch. We ate on our patio in the sun. I looked around and made the same observation yesterday, 11 March, as I made 8 January when it was in the high 60s and Lou and I went rollerblading and returned to a staff cookout (for, not of): there are no umbrellas on our patio tables. There will be no, or much less than there ought to be, outdoor eating unless umbrellas take up residence here.
Bitter, party of 150. Well, 120. Maybe a fifth of us prefer the new site.
And there will certainly be no hanging out outside if I Embrace the Down for the summer.
I bought the damn thing so I should read it. Three months of negative reviews have soured me on its prospects, though, and I can't believe that if Tartt didn't notice she had a twelve-year-old girl detective named Harriet her editor also neither did nor said so, and I understood about Harriet tipping someone the Black Spot not because I've read Stevenson (although maybe I should have after The Secret History) but because I've read Ransom. Also on page 82, "The flustered orchestra, which was composed mostly of penguins, struck up the tempo."
I borrowed The Iliad from the Field branch on Saturday (this branch is located conveniently across the street from Bonnie Brae ice cream, where a double-dip of Triple Chocolate probably didn't help the weight issue). Maybe I should just stick with that.
Tex said I should teach him whatever I learned from my trainer (which I always type "trainder" as I do "raindy"). Tuesday he said he wanted to try my new bike (he's six inches taller than I--I can't wait to see that) and I told him he ought to go to the gym, rather than tootle around on my bike. He promised, so yesterday we went during the day. (I would love to go during the day more often and need to latch onto to regular driver-gymmers.)
He'd said he didn't know how to use any of the weight machines and I advised him of the two free trainer sessions the gym neglected to tell me about until after I'd bought my ten pay sessions. So anyway I thought this was going to be tutelage, although what I could tell him beyond "don't lock your joints, keep your gut sucked in, and align your joints with the pivot points of the machines," I had no idea.
It turned out he would rather use the aerobic machines, and thank the Climbing Tree for that, because--aside from his conservative nature and my lycra--this meant I could crank Alanis and Eddie Vedder and put in some real leg work.
Seated weighted calf raises, 3x15 @50
One-legged leg presses, 3x15 @ 90. Ninety!
Hack squats, 3x12 @120
Donkey presses, 3x15 @60 or so
Leg curls, 3x15 @45
Ball squats and lunges to exhaustion.
If I bike to work tomorrow, it will be the first time since high school (well, college, but that doesn't count) that I commuted to work or school under my own power for all five days.
College didn't count because walking across East Beach from dorm to classroom was about two feet. But why didn't I ever bike during grad school, at least the first year? (Second year I am absolved, since Spring Hill loomed between me and campus.) I didn't have a bike, I guess, Zeph being rusted into a hulk by that point. I borrowed RJH's hybrid for a spell but barely ever used it. I carried a lot of stuff and didn't have good panniers, I know. Once while I lived with NBM she drove me to campus when Fugly was being worked on and she ribbed me about my baggage: my regular backpack, a gym backpack (I had just done laundry; it usually lived at either of my campus jobs), and a stack of library books (probably I had just given up on yet another paper).
Anyway. I rode my new bike. Naming it Shadowfax might be overkill: I already always mount a bike from the left, as I would a horse (I've been on a horse I think twice), but naming the bike a) at all and b) after a horse and c) after that particular horse is making me think in horse-metaphor a lot more. When I started bike-commuting I started keeping my bike in the basement rather than the garage, which entails fewer locks to unlock and lock. Now every afternoon I think of stabling it (and I pat it on the saddle as I leave it). When I prop it (right side against the prop) and the front wheel falls left, I think of how a horse turns its nose to look at its human.
I am not so far gone that I hesitate to hang it from a hook in the indoor bike closet at work though.
where "fucking" is an adjectival modifier and not a verb.
Uberboss just excused me from reading any book that doesn't thrill me, like The Little Friend. I just can't get over that no one told Tartt to change Harriet's name. I mean, okay, it's only the protagonist, and it's not as if I have ever averred that someone's name affects their character, oh no. But damn. A twelve-year-old girl detective with that personality, named Harriet? This book might be a Louise Fitzhugh alternate universe.
Anyway, so I picked up Jane Eyre when I got home, because that book annoys me and I am insane. Because Charlotte Brontë didn't like Jane Austen. Because I'm not that much fonder of Jane Eyre than I am of Fanny Price. It doesn't annoy me as much as Wuthering Heights, which outright pisses me off for its overthetoppiness. I do like Tenant of Wildfell Hall, though, so the Brontës aren't a total loss.
The reason I always come back to Jane Eyre, though almost never the whole thing, is that I continue to try to puzzle out Mrs. Fairfax. Have you read it? Why not? Spoilers follow. Mrs. Fairfax knows there is a madwoman in the attic. She loves Jane, or is fond of her, and respects her as a good and proper young woman. But does she know that the madwoman is Mrs. Rochester? Mr. Rochester says, after the botched wedding, "Mrs. Fairfax may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no precise knowledge as to facts." Is her questioning Jane when she learns of their engagement meant as a warning? That is the last time we hear her voice directly; afterward when the wedding party return from the church Mr. Rochester rebuffs the congratulations offered by her, Sophie, and Adèle. Much later, after the fire, Jane tells her reader about Adèle but not about Mrs. Fairfax. She was such a priss to decent old Hannah that I wonder what her attitude to Mrs. Fairfax might be.
Lou Grant narrating Great Books made the David Denby seem even older than his attitude. He said a reason for women and minorities to read the traditional canon is that it is a body of knowledge traditionally denied to these demographics who now shouldn't deny it of themselves. Something occurred to me on my bike ride home that I've now forgotten, about how just because women now live in a man's world doesn't make the man's world such a hot one to begin with that anyone should clamor to be part of. Thought that's truth, I don't like that it might lead to no one's reading Gilgamesh or Othello anymore. The real problem is that with more texts (a word Denby despises) recognized and necessary and worthy and important, curricula are still constricted. Why not two courses of the canon rather than one?
and the regular weekly crap I almost never do on weeknights.
Since posting initially:
Here, the part of speech "fucking" assumes is more obvious. Otherwise, ow.
Yesterday after my computer ate my book, full of tables and formatting (mine) and three months late (not mine), for the fourth fucking time, the computer folks deigned to give me a new CPU. It's damn loud. While someone was hooking it up, the monitor blinked in its annoying way, and he asked, "What's that?" I said, "That's my monitor blinking in its annoying (and loud, when I have the speakers on) way; sometimes it flips out entirely so that you can see the shape of the tube."
"Oh. I can get you a new monitor too." So he did.
"While you're here, can I ask you why my taskbar's autohide function never works?" I have it set to hide, and I expect it to display when I mouse to the bottom of the screen. It doesn't.
He told me it's because I have my windows maximized, so the taskbar shows up but behind the windows. I should have realized that myself, I know, but for fuck's sake. That's what the autohide is for, no? So I can use the piddly 17" screen to its capacity, and waste space for the task bar only when I want to use it? The same way I keep my email program, my web browser, my word-processing software, etc. all open at the same time but only display when I want? If I have to size a window to accommodate the taskbar, what is the point of autohide?
I love Macintosh.
I love iTunes, I love my iPod, despite their deranged use of capital letters. I just ripped The White Album without "Back in the U.S.S.R."
I am so absolved from reading this book. Not only p. 82's passive "compose" thing and UberBoss's dominus-nabiscoing yesterday but today on p. 289: "You look like one of the Odum's to me."
RDC suggested this is meant to be possessive. Nah. We know Mrs. Odum is dead, and even the redneck speaker wouldn't say "the Odum" to refer to a single person, the father.
However, I am more than halfway through.
I did ask UberBoss what he is reading these days. Twentieth-century political history and commentary as usual, and he didn't like Summerland, which I lent him. But no good new novels.
I feel like I'm in the long dark tea-time of the soul here. Barbie was on the (local, daytime) news Thursday promoting Good Books Lately, discussing spring's new paperbacks. Even she was fishing, naming We Talk Pretty One Day (which I read in paperback in Haitch's pool in the summer of 2001 and Four Corners, which on her recommendation RDC gave me for Christmas 2001 (in hardcover)). One sounded good, a memoir of a white African growing up in Rhodesia. I forget the fourth. But I did remember to record the 11 a.m. hour.
Later. I remember the fourth: Atonement, which I read in paperback in September and which was wonderful but which isn't a new book for spring.
Torn Shapes of Desire, The Odyssey, The Iliad, Seamus Haney's Beowulf, two M.F.K. Fishers (Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me and Last House), Peter Ackroyd's English Music, the His Dark Materials trilogy next to Paradise Lost, House of Leaves, Don Quijote, The Lecturer's Tale, the King James Bible, Madeleine L'Engle Herself, The Name of the Rose, Jeff Noon's Vurt and Automated Alice, my Alice in Wonderland coloring book, an Annotated Alice, and Alice herself; and Mad Madge (the first woman to publish in English, from Molly). This is PLT's suggestion of high-end porn, books that I haven't read yet or need to reread or that (like Pullman) go with books I haven't read yet (Milton). In the oversized bottom shelf, the oversized books previously in the Pooh bookends downstairs: The Music Pack, The Art Pack, The Arthurian Book of Days, Sisters, Meetings with Remarkable Trees, Oh the Places You'll Go! The Father Christmas Letters, Granddaughters of Corn, Good Morning Captain! a pop-up Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a lavish Kings and Queens of England and another less lavish, and Geoffrey Ashe's Mythology of the British Isles; plus three unread books large enough not to look dwarfed among such tall companions, Infinite Jest, PrairyErth, and a book of 20th century short stories by women.
And I guess I do consider "that I haven't read yet" to be a valid sort criterion. "That don't look dwarfed among tall skinny companions" is less valid but I'm going with it. Unfortunately, those three also happen to be predominantly blue, which could seem like a cover rather than a content choice--as if size were okay but color were too base. Oh, The Places You'll Go! doesn't belong among the picture books, not being a children's book; and Tolkien's Father Christmas Letters might really belong among the Christmas books but it's too delightful a volume to be only seasonal.
Yeah. Four blathery entries since I made the list of the weekend's chores. This would be why I seldom finish a weekend's tasks. Away with me.
RDC made us mocha lattes in the middle of the afternoon. I took a break and drank mine, reading The Little Friend and blathering, then returned to the front garden. My main project over the next few weeks (or sooner) is to plan my plantings this year, so I abandoned the grooming and consulted my gardening books and High Country Gardens catalogs. Gradually I noticed how badly my hands were shaking and connected that with an inability to concentrate and mild paranoia. It was 3:30, and I hadn't eaten since my morning cereal nor drunk very much. But I had had a powerfully chocolatey coffeey latte an hour before.
I dove for the kitchen and made myself peanut butter toast. It was medicinal, really!
I hadn't felt paranoia like that since I had Percocet four years ago after my wisdom-tooth extraction.
I took two quarts of sour cherries out of the freezer today. We were planning to snowshoe tomorrow but RDC isn't feeling well. He says he's feeling up to helping me make a pie crust, though. Sometimes I think he wakes up with a stranger every morning, because how after ten years he can continue to hope that teaching me anything kitcheny would require any less than his full strength I don't know.
So tomorrow, after pie- and maybe bread-baking, I'll clean the oven and fridge. Before, I'll upgrade my kitchen applet.
One good book, one really not.
More Harriet the Spy: Harriet loses her Ole Golly, and her parents are as distant as the Spy's. She has her Little Friend Hely (pronounced Healy; is this some sort of Southern thing, not that that would excuse it?) as the Spy has Sport.
More copyediting errors: Tartt confuses "repetitious" and "repetitive." Is Allison's note "IDAJ..." a typo or does the J mean something elusive? "Part of the reason was because..."?! Pot, kettle, whatever; I am, very obviously, not even proofread here, which is not a published book.
One of the criticisms I've read of The Secret History is how much more like a stage set than real life Tartt's Vermont feels. I didn't remark this, and on reread it didn't bother me, because I thought she was going for a mood more than for verisimilitude, the way (I know I'm almost alone in this) the impossible generations in The Corrections didn't bother me because Franzen was going for archetype (I thought).
I wouldn't know how fake her Mississippi is. I did wonder why a felon whose offenses were state would have wound up in Angola, but that might be a regional prison rather than a Louisiana-only institution. The attitudes really seemed to bend back and forth between '50sish and '70sish, and that really got to me. If she named a year at the start, I missed it; for ages I read thinking it was set in the '50s but then something--a TransAm, mention of Vietnam--would make it '70s. The boy Hely imagines himself as Bond in "From Russia with Love" and that was 1963. How would a boy not yet born in 1963 know a movie from that year, before VCRs and in a town probably lacking in rerun movie houses? I guess it could have been on television. Would it have been more credible for him to refer to a '70s Bond film?
Yeah, I was fed up anyway, and fed up more because I woke at 3 in the morning and ended up reading in the living room, finishing the book just after 7:00, but at the end Tartt really got clumsy. Though I'm still not certain of the year, it had to be after 1977 because a boy has a "Star Wars" toy. Since it's set in summer, it might even be 1978. Yet Tartt has a character mention the Indianapolis and the sharks as if no one would have known about it, as if, therefore, "Jaws" had not yet been released. "Jaws" came out in 1975.
I am impossible to please lately. I spent the morning in the really blissfully comfortable reading chair with The Iliad, a sweet-tempered cockatiel, and the propensity, after the sleepless night, to nap (despite a delicious vanilla latte that I drank soon enough after breakfast to enjoy rather than be drugged by).
After he listened to Great Books, RDC looked for audio versions of The Iliad and the ones he found through Audible were all abridged. I told him I wouldn't worry about it: the abridgement would leave mostly only the begats on the cutting room floor. What, like cataloguing the boats and warriors isn't equivalent to the begats of the Old Testament?
Anyway, now I'm reading all the begats, a bunch of people and cities with unpronounceable names, and wondering what I got myself into. Did I read this in English 112 with Tom Roberts or not? I remember clearly his saying that there are two types of people, those who prefer The Iliad to The Odyssey and those who don't know enough to prefer The Iliad to The Odyssey. I probably wouldn't remember that comment if I had read more than only the inferior one at the time--so was he only mentioning it in passing or introducing it in lecture? I would have read it, even freshling year, if he had assigned it, however minimal my understanding might have been. (I was damn stupid about my college papers and notes and syllabi, early on.)
I'm ready for Achilles's anger and Agamemnon's nobility and the gods' capriciousness and so on, but right now all I see is a bunch of people sticking it to another bunch of people.
I really like the translator's and editor's notes, from which I learned that Homer's Greek is not a Greek that anyone would have spoken. Like, ever. It's more than just archaic and rarefied, as the English of the King James Bible seems to a contemporary reader. Or something. But I do have this expectation of high-blown language, so in the text whenever someone, mortal or deathless, uses a contraction, I cringe. I feel like the translator uses a contraction for meter, not because it's akin to the original language. Well, that is the dilemma of translation.
Check. My very first pie crust that didn't sulk and become delinquent before grumping off into a tough and unchewable texture. Or at least, so I hope. It's in the oven.
I called my mother to tell her. I told her I had good news, that I was not pregnant but she should sit down anyway. (I wouldn't want to incubate her hopes at all.) I only found out in November that when I was a wee tot, she and her friend (the one whose glance reassured my eulogy at Granny's funeral) made pies for the sorely missed Lymelight Diner. How can I not have known this, all the Thanksgiving Eves when I would peel pecks of apples for pies and watch her make pie dough and help spread butter and cinnamon and sugar on the scraps to make kisses? Her husband happened to mention it as we sat at lunch in the Bee & Thistle. So she told about splitting up the work, about her making the apple pies one week and her friend making the berry ones the next, and about using lard in the dough, about how the health inspector, visiting the house to issue a commercial baking license, first gave my sister and me the once-over. That probably is an excellent initial indicator, clean and happy kids. I always knew she made the best pies--much better than Granny's--(and never skimped on the telling her, either, not biting the hand that fed me apple pie) and it saddened me that I never knew that. Could I have forgotten?
So. RDC helped with the crust, verbally. I'm the only one who touched it, but he offered valuable advice like to freeze the pastry roller and spray it with Pam and to preheat the oven and not to stress the dough by rolling tooo fast. As soon as the pie went in the oven, I called my mother and we talked through my rolling out scraps. (I've never had scraps, before using only the Pillsbury premade crusts.)
My beleaguered mother. She asked me if I still had my hair in that "cute" cut she saw in January and I told her no, that I'd grown it a couple of feet since. In all honesty this is the same smart-ass answer I'd give to anyone, but since I know her question meant "I really like that haircut" despite its simultaneous undertones of "and thank god you don't look like such a hippie anymore," I could answer her accordingly. But I am constitutionally unable to cut her a break. However, she did seem to get the joke. Whew.
The pie's not out of the oven yet but the kisses have disappeared. Something went right, apparently.
The other day RDC and I arrove home at the same time, me on Shadowfax and he in Cassidy. I pulled up next to him as he unfolded himself, chatting about the day and the bike and watching two little boys--well, nineish, not so little--walk along. They were clearly on expotition (RDC blames me for his no longer being able to say "expedition"), one in camo, one in as close to hunter's-orange as he could get, both carrying backpacks full of, I was sure, vital supplies, both carrying weapons, striding along on their mission. I watched them, grinning. They gained the corner and looked up from their intent conversation. They saw me and one raised his plywood gun and aimed it at me.
"Please don't point your gun at me!" I exclaimed. "I have done nothing to you!"
He lowered his rifle immediately, waved sheepishly with his other arm, and called "Sorry!"
I grinned wide at him, still charmed. "That's all right."
And it was. Somehow, it still has to be.
This was taken in January (so that's the old box on top of his cage and about two shoelaces ago) but somehow I hadn't posted it yet. He is now perched on my toes, probably entertaining impure thoughts since I am wearing fleece socks with a fleece blanket on my legs, while preening. Blake's had a wonderful Sunday: housebound, reading parents, a new living room arrangement by which he can hop from the toes of the parent in the recliner to the table, across the table to the other parent on the couch, hot cereal and a bit of orange and a sour cherry.
A while ago I noticed "1984" on Sundance. I had never seen it so skipped to it, realizing for the first time that John Hurt plays Winston Smith. In the moments I watched, I decided he's wonderful in the role (however unfilmable the book is) and to record the next showing of it.
I had the Eurythmics soundtrack and loved particularly the song "Julia." I watched part of the movie last night and I am really glad the music is as toned down as it is. I watched a cinematization of The Chocolate War once and in addition to how changes in the denouement completely altered the theme, the Yaz soundtrack totally detracted from the movie's--integrity? timeli- and timelessness? The book is dated but not impossibly so; Yaz makes the movie scream mid-'80s.
Last night and today I reread bits of Nineteen Eighty-Four. How Orwell combines the satire and dystopia with a compelling plot continues to impress me. Minor nitpicking: Winston wouldn't know who St. Sebastian is when he plots what he would do to Julia should she ever fall into his clutches.
Katherine Mansfield, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel"
Willa Cather, "Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament"
Virginia Woolf, "Solid Objects"
Elizabeth Bowen, "Her Table Spread"
The Secret Self: A Century of Short Stories by Women, edited by Hermione Lee, is a good collection as far as I can tell, of first-rate female authors. I liked the first two stories I read, not so much the second two; I skipped the Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton (for now, I hope).
What intrigues me is how this book got into my house. I have no memory of having bought it, and for me that's unusual. I could unless forcibly stopped tell you when and how I came by my books. UConn Co-op, Coventry Books, UConn Pound Sale, Tattered Cover, on vacation, naughtily at a big box, Capitol Hill Books, remotely, yep. And this is a British book, Brit edited, published, and printed. But it looks quite new, as if it didn't come from a used bookstore.
Anyway. It was a good choice to put in the bookcase, because as I sat this morning rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four, I noticed it and picked it up instead.
I had my hair cut again last night. I wanted to see what it looked like a little shorter. I don't like it as much and would like it to my collarbones again. At least. I do miss a braid.
In the right pic, I'm on the phone with my sister, who is chez our father and notstepmother. Our notstepmother finally got another dog, more than two years after Sam died. Unlike regular-sized, black, setter and lab Sam, Ben is a Yorkshire terrier. Before my own visit in December, I tried to imagine my father with a Yorkie. Having actually experienced my father with a Yorkie (a Yorkie, what's more, with a ribbon in his topknot) has not improved my ability to imagine it. CLH told me today that though she has little time for him and he seems afraid of her, Ben can't resist her anyway. "Sounds like our father's kind of dog," I said: "'Oh yes, frighten and ignore me so I can try harder.'" Why can't we laugh like that about our relationships with our mother?
If my next haircut is in two months, I will be almost 35 and might want something a little more, I told the cutter. "Maybe some color," she suggested.
Er. Hair color is not only makeup but long-term makeup. It doesn't respond well to chlorine, which is what I have to swim in here. Chlorine is one bad chemical and hairdye is another. Not a good train of thought. However, when my hair looks particularly mousey I can see the appeal. She did a splendid job restoring Haitch's natural color on her very first visit, so I trust her skill as a colorist, but still.
When I first got it cut, at least two people asked if I had had it colored as well and one didn't believe my denial. Longer, in a braid, the undersides of the strands were exposed to sun. Shorter, loose, the unexposed sides show; they haven't been sun- and exposure-bleached. Or at least that's what makes sense to me. Maybe enough dye to make up for the highlights the sun hasn't had the chance to burnish yet. Hmm.
The photographs show my hair curlier than it was when I left the salon; they are post-snow today. Actually intra-snow. More than a foot fell overnight, a wonderful, atypically wet, dense snow. All the schools and many businesses including mine had snow days. I remembered to call the office before I even got dressed for the bus, and Dot Org was closed, closed, closed! I yipped and yahooed and yeehawed, because unlike schooldays, snow days from work don't have to made up from February or April or summer vacation. Also I pranced.
I took butter and molasses from the fridge to warm up. I did laundry. I tidied my study and vacuumed downstairs and put away the tottering stacks of CDs I've been ripping. I chose more books for the bookcase--Italo Calvino is someone RDC and I have in common so is a good choice.
Also I shoveled our sidewalk--city ordinance requires shoveling within 12 hours of significant snowfall--and the neighbor's and the other neighbors' and of course Babushka's. Either she heard me or was coming out to feed the birds anyway but she sounded almost scared as she called, "But who are you?" I shucked my hood, "I'm lisa from up the street, with the bird and the cherry tree and the cucumbers?" I didn't know how many more identifying details she might have needed, but she did seem to recognize me as soon as my hood came down. I haven't seen her since fall and she looked very old this morning. Perhaps she only lacked her teeth.
We snowshoed in City Park in the afternoon. First we banged on the overburdened trees with the snow shovel and a broom until they unbowed themselves. During this RDC wondered how many more layers we'd want for our walk. He went inside for gaiters and came out with snowshoes. They were a good idea. People were sledding on the puny little hill behind the museum--what does happen to people who grow up without sledding, without snowfolk, without fireflies, without frogs?--and about a dozen dogs were having the time of their lives off leash as their humans played in the playground, quite illegally. When we got back I shoveled us and Babushka again, another foot having fallen during the day. A neighbor's golden retriever bounded about, out of her mind with glee, while her basset hound stumped about much less pleased with life in snow well over his head.
Before and after the snowshoeing, I made cookies. Last summer a Charenton friend made ginger cookies of a quite whizbangy level of gingerness, but they lacked the essential ingredient of the best desserts, chocolate. These have a wonderful ginger bite but plenty of chocolate too. A Martha Stewart recipe, it assumed parchment on cookie sheets instead of Pam, and a high-end blender instead of a strong right arm with a wooden spoon, and "chocolate chopped into 1/4" pieces" instead of what that obviously means, chocolate chips. I did nothing to adjust for altitude, added less clove, and zounds, what a good cookie.
My notstepmother wants some; my father wants more of the peanut butter cookies I made him for Christmas. My sister just wanted to tell them about my adventures in being unable to make snowrocks.
Meanwhile, the snow is forecast to continue through tomorrow. It's over two feet in the backyard now but could always--please!--get deeper. A second snowday would rock my world. I'll find out in 11 hours.
I have no idea how I learned about this book. It is a series of vignettes, memories of maybe the author's or author's mother's time as a refugee, and the stories themselves are charming but don't add to a cohesive whole. I thought of both Journey to America, whose family is in much more danger in their emigration, and From Anna, in which Anna grows as a character against the backdrop of emigration. In Rabbit, mentions of atrocities and tragedies appear without context and the purported theme, that the family can manage as long as they're all together, isn't strongly developed.
Or maybe I was just horrified that when they left Germany, hoping and intending to return within a year, the protagonist took her new stuffed animal instead of her constant, lifelong companion of Pink Rabbit. The theft is, of course, that the Nazis confiscated their possessions in storage immediately. She's a child, and she thought both that they would return quickly and that their belongings would be safe. But she left Pink Rabbit behind. I know this is unreasonable of me: I still feel guilty for taking Melvin the raccoon with me to Florida when I was 10 instead of Booboo.
<--Yesteday morning and yesterday afternoon-->
I am grieved to report that the precipitation, which had stopped about 11 this morning, has commenced again (it's almost 2:00) in the form of rain. Of the three times I shoveled, morning and afternoon yesterday and morning today, after I cleared the main accumulation from sidewalk and walk I would finish with a last scrape. I would start at the porch, clear the walk, clear the sidewalk, and then do Babushka, and by the time I finished that, there'd be another quarter or half an inch on the pavement. No more. The sidewalk is wet, not crusty; the trees are dripping.
This morning when I shoveled, my two neighbors brought their three dogs for their walks. The basset hound was even sadder (his ears!) and even the golden retriever, still wriggling with joy, obviously struggled across the drifts to greet me. What a New England cheap-ass way out of a snowstorm, to melt under rain instead of sun.
<--Last night and this morning-->
This morning I tried to unburden the trees again. Covered head to toe in Gore-Tex, I stood under the trees and lifted their branches with a long broom. One plum tree that to comply with city ordinance I should trim covers the sidewalk even without snow to make a cave out of it. It leans over more under the snow weighing its branches, and then its tips get buried again in the snow on the ground. Carefully, I freed it from its contortions. Though the two shield the sidewalk from accumulation somewhat, my de-snowing them of course dumps it down again. So I shoveled and shoveled and shoveled, a 48' long x 5' wide x 2.5' deep sidewalk plus a 20' x 5' x 2.5' walk plus however much volume I removed from Babushka. Anyone who says that isn't exercise can kiss my pearly white ass.
Before snowshoeing yesterday afternoon, we banged off the trees in the front, ignoring the cherry tree in back. As we looked out the bedroom window last night, I saw that a branch had cracked under the strain. Damn. These trees are 30 years old and toward the ends of their lives; they need better care than for me to forget to clear off the branches.
I think RDC took this without a flash; I was surprised to see it among the photographs this morning. With all the white on the ground and falling and the moon nearly full behind the clouds, the night was lit with a wonderful blue-white light instead of the unlovely orange of sodium. He took another photograph of me this morning shoveling again--he doesn't have a snowday as long as the snow spares the phone and electricity cables--but all that shows is the impracticality of my hair cut, with a couple of bangs falling into my face, too short for the ponytail. Which isn't a pony but a pug's tail.
Koroshiya rocks, but you knew that. After seeing what she did for Jared, I whined and stomped and asked whether I perhaps live in a snowshadow, thus deserving no banner? This despite her just--like, Tuesday, the last time the mailcarrier trekked to the house--sending me a mind-bending mix cd, mind-bending because the Smiths and General Public and I go way back, so to hear Love Split love and Harvey Danger do "How Soon Is Now?" and "Save It for Later" threw me. Not to mention, who the hell are these people? I am pathologically unhip.
So she sent me my own banner. Hmph.
Yesterday afternoon, after 36 hours of letting the snow tamp itself down under its own weight and a couple hours of rain, I scurried outside to get the final tally, except what with the weighing and the rain it wasn't. The official measurement for Denver was 29", though I don't know if that was downtown or at DIA.
About 5:15, the electricity wavered and came back. Two minutes later it was gone. At this point, the storm became much less fun. I don't think I've been without power in the winter. In the summer, one doesn't freeze. Previously, I haven't had a desert birdkin to keep warm. But the house keeps itself fairly warm fairly well, as long as outside is not windy or too cold, and we didn't expect the temperature to dip much below 30. The fireplace heats the living room splendidly and we would live in there. City water and a gas stove meant no worries about water or even cooking.
So the camping began. We cozied up the coffee table and chair next to the couch, to make room for the futon up from my study. This became our bed. We dug a path to the woodpile, thinking ourselves very clever for buying all that wood this fall, removed the tarp, and hauled a bunch of it inside, downstairs to drip dry in the furnace room. I was pleased with myself for actually having cleaned the bathroom and the birdcage this weekend, because I don't do those things nearly as often as I should and there's nothing like not being able to do anything about it to make a house seem grimy. I wished I had washed my hair after beating the crap out of my trees in the morning. We dug out the camping box, the box of matches, the candles, the flashlights, the headlamps. Our landlines are cordless thus need electricity, but we had our cellular phones.
As dusk fell and there was no light, Blake began to look around suspiciously. What were we doing? Didn't we know he's afraid of the dark? I lit a candle in the 5-armed candelabra and put it in the corner of the dining table closest to his cage. But he's afraid of candles too, and flashlights! I found a honeystick in the cupboard and hung it in his cage to keep him occupied.
We couldn't light the oven, which though gas has electric controls, but we could light the stove burners. We ran those with pots of water on top. After dinner (pasta with sauce out of the freezer), I washed up. So far, so civilized.
The house was cooling down, and while a fire would suck the remaining heat out of the house, there in the living room we'd be warm enough. So we lay the fire, newspaper twists like Laura Ingalls Wilder and the hay, scraps of lumber from the woodshop (!) since everything in the brush pile would have been soaked, dry wood from under the tarp. And a match.
This is where we found out the hard way that our chimney is so very old-fashioned, so wide and open, that it can get packed with snow.
About that the less said the better.
Not yet. I have read and cleaned and baked fabulous cookies and listened to music and have I mentioned that Blake is in some form of cockatiel heaven, with both parents home for three solid days? He did freak out yesterday morning when I went outside for two hours, immediately after getting up so without first properly bidding him good morning, but otherwise he's blissed out.
Twenty-four hours without outside communication just kind of worked out right now anyway. It would be clever for us to have a battery-powered radio, but this way we didn't find out that the war had begun until long after it had. I wrote to my heavies about my recent hausfrauing, whether it's making peace within myself or just ostritching. (I also decided that "to ostrich," as a verb, needs a "t" at least in the gerund form.) "Life goes on. Even in London in wartime. Especially, perhaps, in London, in wartime" (The Shell-Seekers).
I really like, in Maus, when, to his analyst, Art quotes Samuel Beckett, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness," and then they sit wordless for a panel before Art continues in the next, "On the other hand, he SAID it."
Perhaps because I read the form so seldom, a short story seems like something to be studied as much as read, so the absence of individual introductions seems pretty bizarre to me. There is a general introduction, though short, and the collection is arranged chronologically (I think by story publication date, which would explain the seven-story gap between the two Elizabeth Bowens, though not why there are two by her when only one by everyone else). I want some context; but that's what the web's for.
Kate Chopin, "The Storm." Less depressing than "Story of an Hour" or The Awakening.
Edith Wharton, "Souls Belated."
Katherine Mansfield, "The Man without a Temperament."
Pauline Smith, "The Sisters."
Dorothy Parker, "Here We Are."
Henry Handel Richardson, "Two Hanged Women."
Jean Rhys, "Let Them Call It Jazz."
Eudora Welty, "Why I Live at the PO."
Elizabeth Bowen, "The Happy Autumn Fields."
Antonia White, "The House of Clouds."
Katherine Anne Porter, "Rope."
Marjorie Barnard, "The Lottery."
Anna Kavan, "An Unpleasant Reminder."
Stevie Smith, "Sunday at Home."
Doris Lessing, "The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange."
My fourth snowday in a row. About the one, I didn't worry, for me or for Dot Org. It pays a snow day as administrative leave, so I--unlike a lot of people from a lot of other jobs in town, I know--lost no salary. But four! I won't find out until Monday at the earliest what the fiscal consequences might be.
This morning after breakfast I put Blake on RDC's shoulder for a minute so I could go fill the birdfeeder. Blake screeched and flew after me, fluttering to the floor and waddling after. He spends days with his daddy, on his lap under the desk, so I don't know how RDC suddenly became so inferior. Now we're in the living room chair again, with books and a shoelace.
Also, it's snowing again.
Unfortunately, I probably won't; nor could I afford to. I dusted the living and dining rooms, whose horizontal surfaces had drifts of ash; I vacuumed the rugs and upholestery; I would have laundered the curtains if they had any chance of drying on the line; I washed the glossy paint of the hearth, discolored with smoke. I read some short stories; I tried to bake bread (without my kitchen chaperon, and a failure despite its being Donald Rumsfeld as I pummeled it); I cleaned the wood floors; I shoveled behind the garage in case we want to use Cassidy, I shoveled most of the patio, so the snow would melt into the earth instead of the brick; I set a five-gallon bucket under the corner of the porch that needs better gutters and dumped 15 gallons of meltwater into the front garden, sparing the house that much flooding. We walked out for coffee and read The Onion over mocha and vanilla lattes.
The two discolored streaks in the front landing floor are (I discovered today for the first time, almost three years in the house) come from tape. Someone taped what was surely television cable on the floor, between the hole they'd seen fit to drill in the floor, between the understair space where it entered the house through a basement window, and the living room. I had never noticed that the streaks were not permanent stains but dirt stuck to tape residue. Did people hate my house? Why would anyone drill through oak floors just for television?
They hacked holes through the floor for the new heating system too. The original air exchange has a wonderful oak grid; the floor in the dining room was built around it. Sometime later another furnace required another air intake to be cut in the living room in front of the window. This isn't particularly lovely, but it's inconspicuous. The current furnace's air intake is in the dining room, conspicuously in the traffic flow to the hallway, and under the unlovely metal grille the hole in the floor was cut without love or care. Sigh.
I'm still not sure about the living room wall. I can't believe that if the wall separating the living room from the front stairs is not original, more windows wouldn't originally been built into the exterior wall. The one small window and the ceiling light fixture suggest the wall is original; only its being drywall instead of plaster suggests otherwise but it might have been rebuilt after rewiring. I suppose when people build houses, they might not think about refinishing floors. But there's about a foot of floor in the stairwell between the wall and the railing along the staircase, a foot in which a floor refinisher cannot reach. That strip is discolored with age and a millimeter or two higher than the resurfaced area. I have no idea whether the floor will be able to handle another refinishing in another couple of decades. I hope so.
I can't claim that we've taken the best possible care of the floor ourselves. The very day we moved the furniture in, we marred it. The couch from the apartment became the downstairs, den couch. It had to go through the front door (wider than the back), through the length of the house, through the doorway between kitchen and back landing, and down the back stairs (wider than the front). The doorway wasn't quite wide enough, and the corner of the couch gouged a wiggling foot-long line in the floor.
I don't know what we should do in the kitchen. I don't want to tile or lino it but the wood is extremely sad. I need to get more or better area rugs for in front of the fridge and the dishwasher, and when the area rug in front of the stove is up--last weekend I hosed its pad and beat the crap out of it (that being my thing)--you can see that the floor under it is less worn.
My new audiobook is The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I tried to listen to this a few times before, but it seems to curse whatever audiotapes it's put on. I'm skipping the tape this time, which might help. Or maybe I previously tried to listen to Les Misérables, because I remember whatever Hugo it was beginning with a trial, which this doesn't. It's read by George Guidall, which is all I need to know.
I don't remember the name of the late '80s cat in Avenue Victor Hugo on Newbury Street. I remember hand-drawn signs in the store, "Please do not stick your tongue out at the cat." Even I wouldn't do that.
One of the kitchen toys we bought along with the pastry sheet is a set of measuring cups. Sturdy, simple stainless steel measures, but to me its chief delights are its 2/3- and 3/4-cup measures.
The local news featured the frivolities of the snowfall: snowfolk and snowshoeing to walk the dog. Another snippet showed people sledding off their rooftops onto drifts. The images, therefore, were of rapid swooping movement across a field of white. I've mentioned that Blake warns us of Bad Dangerous Flying Stuff like the occasional escaped balloon overhead or things on TV like the flying monkeys in "The Wizard of Oz." Well. Sure enough, Blake loosed a warning shriek. This is why we have Tivo: so we could rewind it and make him shriek again.
It's a fact that the only people who are killed by sledding people on their televisions are the ones who don't live with cockatiels.
Last night,
Mavis Gallant, "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street"
Flannery O'Connor, "Everything That Rises Must Converge"
Bessie Head, "Looking for a Rain God"
Elizabeth Taylor, "Mr. Wharton"
Jean Stafford, "A Summer Day"
Nadine Gordimer, "Six Feet of the Country"
Grace Paley, "The Loudest Voice"
This morning,
Alice Walker, "Everyday Use"
Muriel Spark, "The First Year of My Life"
Toni Cade Bambara, "The Lesson"
Anita Desai, "Private Tuition by Mr. Bose"
Jane Gardam, "The Weeping Child"
Janet Frame, "Swans"
Angela Carter, "Peter and the Wolf"
Alice Munro, "Miles City, Montana"
Ellen Gilchrist, "Revenge"
Ahdaf Soueif, "The Wedding of Zeina"
Jayne Anne Phillips, "Mamasita"
Bobbie Ann Mason, "Shiloh"
Fay Weldon, "Weekend"
Suniti Namjoshi, "Three Feminist Fables"
We went gallumphing through City Park again today. The Sky Terrace at the museum was "closed due to inclement weather," which we found hideously unfair. It was, in fact, in the high 50s and sunny and I should have worn shorts instead of jeans with my gaiters. So instead we gallumphed to ground level on the west side, four storeys down. I really hope that this dump means the mountains keep their white peaks well into summer. Last year I think by May you could see no white from the city. Mt. Evans has lost much of its contour under its mantle and I hope it doesn't find them again until July.
This morning as I ate my breakfast at the table and Blake ate his on his cage, he shrieked as I have seldom or never heard him shriek before, with panicky fear (not the alert call of the roof sledders the other day) as he leapt into the air and fluttered.
I followed him into the living room, calling quietly to him, and he dashed as fast as his dashiest waddle would close the distance between us. His crest was bent nearly in half, it was so high, and he was panting through his beak, body attenuated, breast heaving. He didn't want a full body scoop-snuggle but to be on my shoulder where he could watch and hide behind my head.
Our birdfeeder has become a birdfeeder-plus. RDC has seen it a couple of times but when I turned, my hand cupped over Blake's head like a horse's blinder, it was my first time to see the peregrine falcon perched on the nectarine tree, on the lowest horizontal branch from which the birdfeeder is suspended. I wanted to dump my little boy on his daddy so I could watch the raptor, but Blake was having none of that.
The falcon hoisted itself up and dropped into the evergreen tree before leaving. It's amazing. I would be so pleased if our birdfeeder were a regular stop on its hunting rounds. I know. I know that I said that about the squirrels, that I planted the sunflowers for them, and that I turned out to be lying. But housefinches and housesparrows are so much less important than birds of prey. I might be upset if its first victim (it hasn't been successful here yet that we've seen) were a chickadee or a junco, rarer and prettier than either housething.
It took a long time for Blake to calm down. He wouldn't be coaxed to the kitchen windowsill at all, even after the outside birds had returned to their black oil sunflower seeds. He certainly doesn't like crows and magpies aren't much better, but a falcon--where does his fear come from? Instinct, of course; if Australia doesn't have peregrine falcons (does it?) it must have butteos and eagles of some sort. But I still call Blake a very clever boy, cagebound and housebound as he is, for recognizing such a predator.
Beautiful. Snow to the eyebrows, just as it should be.
From this to this. Saturday, the mountains looked like this from City Park. Sunday, the mountains looked like that from Rocky Mountain National Park.
I do love the dark blue of the sky, the wind lifting the snow off the peaks, how the sun glazes the skin of the snow into liquid, the patterns on the surface from the melt underneath, the vertical thrust of cliff without snow.
I really don't know what to do about graphics.
Anyway, 5 miles easy snowshoeing.
And also this, Long's Peak across Bierstadt Lake. This is the halfway point, and where we stopped to fuel and water ourselves. We saw people feeding gray jays and I said nothing.
The day before, in City Park, I did not say nothing. A woman called for her daughter who had strayed far from the museum toward the pond. The mother, not dressed for snow, called, and the girl, tromping around in said snow, didn't obey, and they yelled back and forth
("Don't go any farther! Come back here!"
"Why!"
"Come back!"
"Why!")
and after closing half the distance between them having to listen to this I was sick of it and hollered at the girl, "Because she said so!" Which really helped, I know: it enforced the mother's inability to discipline her child and the girl's lack of need to obey her parent and the rudeness of random strangers and "because I said so" is no reason whatsoever. But they were yelling across 1/8 mile of snowy park, and my, I felt better for yelling. The downfall of society, that's me. Last I saw, the girl was moving, as if dragging a large dead tree behind her, in the general direction of her incompetent mater.
Thank you, Beth, for telling me the tag to make images work.
Rachel Ingalls, "Third Time Lucky"
A.S. Byatt, "The July Ghost"
Jamaica Kincaid, "What I Have Been Doing Lately"
Lorrie More, "Places to Look for Your Mind"
A.L. Kennedy, "Friday Payday"
Amy Bloom, "Sleepwalking"
Georgina Hammick, "The Dying Room"
Rose Tremain, "The Candle Maker"
Shena Mackay, "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land"
Helen Simpson, "Labour"
Marina Warner, "Ariadne after Naxos"
Margaret Atwood, "Happy Endings"
I've only just started this but it starts well: "I'm not licensed for suicides!" I am so in the mood for some gallows humor after Little Friend and a bunch of really good but not excessively light-hearted stories.
Precor Elliptical, 30' @ 12/20 resistance and 20/20 incline.
I was shocked, yes. Two weeks since I've been to the gym.
The airport died--that's such a silly name, too easily confusable with the place the planes are--and I have no internet access at home unless I umbilicle (the verb form is spelled -cle instead of -cal, I just decreed) myself to the server. Or something. So count on my being quiet for a while.
The other day as I scampered the half-mile between bus stop and work, I looked up briefly from White Teeth to see that the vehicle leaving a driveway for a road was indeed going to stop for me the pedestrian. He was. I noted briefly, "Oo, white van--must be a sniper," and was back in the book when, 20 feet later, I heard a voice.
The driver said, "Hey, I know you! You're the lady who waits for the bus on X Avenue near Y."
"Yep--that's me."
"Do you work here?"
"A little farther on," I evaded.
"I drive out here all the time--I could give you a ride."
I laughed, thanking him, turning away. How do I handle that? He didn't set off any warning bells--older, decent grammar, probably the last of the decent-to-strangers generation (sniper's van aside).
This morning as I stood at the bus stop, the white van pulled up and the passenger side window came down and the driver offered me a ride. I had not thought of what to say; what would I say? Smiling I hoped self-deprecatingly, "I am sorry, sir, but I really can't accept a ride from a stranger."
He nodded, waving and pulling away. "I got no problem with that."
I do though. If people don't accept kindnesses from strangers, strangers will stop offering them. The chances that he would harm or even threaten me are, I'd wager, slim to none, as are, nonetheless, the chances that I would get into a stranger's car. He was just being nice. I hate that I can't accept that nicety.
I feel like a heel.
In the past three months, two different people I work with have got engaged. In both cases, the man asked the woman's father's permission before asking her to marry him. What the hell? Long Island, Virginia, I get that some things persist in some regions and cultures longer than in others. Both men asked the father, not the parents.
That the men asked the fathers before asking the women makes no sense to me, yet only as I began to write this did it occur to me that it should strike me as equally stupid that the men asked the women instead of vice versa. That that it didn't shows the mores I have kept.
Tex and I went to the gym today. Midday is a great time for me to exercise, motivation- and energy-wise, but to go, exercise, and return in an hour is tricky. Also it will only last until it warms up, because I have never spent summer lunch hours inside unless it's blazing hot or pouring wet. Also Tex is going to be out for two weeks.
25' Precor elliptical, 20/20 incline and 12/20 resistance.
2' arm-spinny upper-body workout thingie
Hacksquats, 1x12 and 2x10 @ 110.
Precor elliptical, 30' @ 20/20 incline and 13/20 resistance
I wanted to do 45' but at minute 29, someone began to wait for the several machines and a second person had joined him before 30'. I made him wait the minute and felt all self-righteous about the women next to me, who was at 39' but didn't leave.
Lat pull-down, 3x10 @ 80. I finally went up 10 pounds. From this machine I could see the 39'+-woman and the line of people waiting. She finally left during my
Tricep rope pull-downs, 3x10 @ 50--fifty instead of thirty because I was on the inside of the cage with two pulleys instead of one. I think.
Assisted pull-ups, 3x10 @ 40 (110 pounds of assistance)
Tricep arm extensions, 3x10 @ 50
Back extensions, 3x25
and
Precor elliptical, 15' @ 20/20 incline and 12/20 resistance
My strides per minute averaged over 125 the first time; in the second stint I didn't push myself past 110. The assisted pull-ups really beat me down.
But anyway, a good solid work-out for the first time in what, three weeks?
We scampered downtown aiming for the Bonnard exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. We gave up on that because, just before 1:00 when we arrove, the next available entry was at 2:40; plus the member's line was ridiculous: it issued tickets to members for the exhibit but also sold memberships--so the member's line was almost as long as the non-member's line. Meanwhile, will-call had no line--yet that volunteer couldn't assist at the other two lines, returning to his post when a will-call person showed up?. So we'll register on-line for a time next Sunday and pick up our tickets at will-call, which had better not have a line then either.
RDC wanted to try the Appaloosa Grill, where I went for lunch once with Trey. It was okay, but not okay enough to be open on Sunday and plus it didn't have outdoor seating. So instead we ate at Marlowe's, on the patio, in the just-warm-enough sun or the cloud-over-the-sun stiff breeze. I had a spinach, walnut, blue cheese, and duck salad. Yum.
The Museum of Contemporary Art is closed Sundays; the Byers-Evans house would close at 3:00 and it was 2:20. So we just went to the library.
Nisou and I talked yesterday and I told her I had just acquired Animals Dreams and Pigs in Heaven. She set me straight that Pigs is the sequel to Bean Trees, not Dreams, and I exclaimed in dismay, "You mean I have to read another book? Noooo."
The library didn't have Bean Trees though. But I got Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and last year's Newbery A Single Shard and Creating the Not-So-Big House and When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden.
I think I should start flexing again. The sunlight is back; if I go to the gym for an hour then I work an extra hour, if not 30 minutes; and I can still have some time in the garden when I get home--as can Blake, if it's warm enough. "In the garden!" as the voice of Mrs. Craven said.
Oh! Yeah, absolutely: Tex out for two weeks means no daytime gym unless I drive or figure out someone else to mooch off, and I know CoolBoss won't be going either. Cool. On the 11th of April, then, I will start landscaping in the other half of the front yard.
Linda Sue Park's A Single Shard won the 2002 Newbery. It was the first time in several years I had never heard of the author and I came to this book with absolutely no expectations.
It was lovely. I really liked how she pulled back the curtain in the endnotes and spoke more about the pottery and explained some of the choices she made, altering or guessing at history. It reminded me a bit of Girl with a Pearl Earring in the inventing the background for a piece of art.
Bill Maher, When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden.
The blurbs kinda threw me--Michael Moore and Arianna Huffington, Ann Coulter and Al Franken. The last asked that his blurb be as far from Coulter's as possible. That might have been the funniest thing in the book.
I thought the whole thing was going to be a take-off on WWII posters, like the title one (when the object of the preposition was Hitler). But different wars need different posters.
At first I didn't see the Libertarian stuff that annoys RDC about him--I didn't know anything about him but "Politically Incorrect," which I never watched, and why he was fired. He seemed to understand the social contract, which seems to be generally absent from the Libertarian mindset. ("Which should the government tell me to wear a seatbelt? It's my life!"--"Because if you die or are injured, society has to pick up your slack. Because you don't live in isolation. Because no one is an island.") He admires JFK's speech on asking not what your country can etc. He understands that individual actions have worldwide consequi.
I agree with him that They hate us because we don't even know why They hate us, that the States commits violence by negligence on the rest of the world, and that the States hasn't been as obviously violent in its domination as previous powers have been. I also think the last is meaningless, because you cannot compare 20th century America even to 19th-century Britain, let alone any earlier power. I said this of war but it's true of superpowers as well: that the point of earlier wars is to make subsequent wars less necessary.
I also agree that we're so paralyzed by political correctness that we apply the same precautions to tottering grannies as to the demographic that's actually done harm. I cannot agree with him--and here is where the Libertarianism reared its ugly head--that we must have security at any cost and that security is government's only function.
Overall he was more left than I intended to find him. He illustrated how sense and dissent both are now vilified and I hope by his format made himself accessible to the apathetic.