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.