For the past few days we've had normal--that is, as I remember from my first few years here--weather: sun during the day building to an afternoon storm. I recently read that for the past few years those storms didn't happen in part because the weather had so much less moisture in the mountains to get started with. I think late April might be earlier to start, but I do love the rain. Yesterday there was a brief thunderstorm just as I wanted to bike home, with hail. My Macintosh consultant-cum-bad weather rescuer rescued me, and a fine thing because the streets were flooded. It didn't rain that much, but the storm sewers (stupid things, drawing off all that water just because not enough ground is permeable) are clogged, seemingly always.
Denver Water has a site now where you can find your historic usage--inexplicably arranged in reverse chronology--and compare yourself to the average user. The average household uses 9,000 gallons in the winter and 23,000 in the summer; we use 7K and 13K. The average household is 2.7 people. So we beat the average comfortably, which is fine, but I know we could conserve more.
We don't catch the pre-hot shower water in a bucket. I don't know about the state of our pipes, if they're sufficiently insulated to shorten that pre-hot flow. I run only full clothes- and dishwasher loads, and I probably could conserve more water if I didn't use a dishwasher at all, but I would sooner replumb my house to redirect all graywater to the toilet and the hoses than give up a dishwasher. We replaced the dishwasher our first summer with one that allegedly uses less than average water and electricity. The clotheswasher came with the house and I wonder if replacing it with a horizontal axis one would be worthwhile.
The appliance we are thinking of replacing is the swamp cooler. Right now it makes RDC's study freezing and grimy and the rest of the house bearable. If we got a new one and mounted it on the roof, using the existing ductwork from the solar panels (is that possible? we'll find out), said new one would be quieter, use less water, and cool most of the floor more effectively. But that's the thing: his study needs to be cool enough for him to work in and the bedroom cool enough to sleep in; the solar heat affects the kitchen, dining room, and living room. The floor fan--ten years old and still humming, and clean because a filthy fan is icky--would probably draw cooler air into the bedrooms better than it does the solar-warmed air.
This summer we won't save anything on water and might use more: establishing a xeriscape uses less water only assuming you used to water the grass it replaced. I did not. According to Denver Water, we used more in the summer of 2000, when at least RDC made some attempt to preserve the grass, than we did in either summer since, when there was a vegetable garden and no bothering with grass.
Next year we deal with the backyard, ripping out the pathetic, weed-ridden remnants of bluegrass and planting buffalo and gama grass plus, replacing one raised bed and building another. This year, whatever doesn't need nurturing and isn't bindweed can frolic at will.
The other day a someone asked me over the phone what I'm planting this year. Flowering shrubs, I told her, and she repeated that to someone in the room with her. "Oh, rhododendrons?" he asked and she relayed. "No," I replied, "rhododendra don't do well in Denver." He began to offer suggestions.
First of all, I hate two-way phone conversations. I won't be the mediator between whoever's on the phone and whoever's standing next to me. I hand the phone off for almost anything more than "RDC says hi." Second, the plural is rhododendra. Third, "oh, rhododendrons?" because that's the only flowering shrub in the world?
I restrained my response, not to make the friend the mediator and because I had no idea how politely to say that in addition to amending the soil as he recommended, I would also have to alter the climate, making it more humid, and lower the altitude, making the sun less harsh, or at the very least suddenly have a 30-year-old shade tree. I guess I could have just stated these facts, but stating them without sarcasm, or evenly without sounding antagonistic, was beyond me.
I maybe should work on being able to confront people, to address them. Mostly I favor a pointed silence.
I don't recall my mother's being as rude on the phone as she is now before her second husband. I have attempted to view this sympathetically (she wants people to know, and to reaffirm their knowledge, that she and BDL are so very involved with each other at every moment) but, unsurprisingly, failed. Often she'll initiate a call to me but be talking to BDL when I answer and greet her. I've asked her why she calls me despite having more pressing need of conversation with BDL. And she'll always explain why, just this once, she needed to talk to him right then--despite having dialed me half a minute before. I don't mean that we're on the phone and BDL calls "I'm going to the store, do you need anything?" and my mother says "Oh yes, could you get a jug of milk and I think we're out of sugar." I mean we're on the phone and she might interrupt even her own sentence to me (my own to her are always fair game) to tell him what we're talking about. Can't this wait? If he hears juicy gossip or a compelling debate, can he not wait until after the call to be filled in?
When I'm on the phone with someone and RDC needs to tell me something Right Then, I'll generally excuse myself for a moment, listen to him telling me briefly that the house is on fire, and return to my call. The problem is that my mother is so damn deaf or inattentive that when I excuse myself she doesn't hear. My parents both are fond of calling me before work "because I know you're home," despite being repeatedly informed that RDC sleeps later than I do. (This makes him a slackabed, not differently-houred.) If I need to get some clothes, I'll tell her that she should keep talking but I won't respond for a moment while I'm in the bedroom with a still-slumbering RDC. Invariably she needs this repeated, by which time I'm in the bedroom and not talking but grabbing (not deciding among) garments.
Would this bother me as much if it weren't she committing the offense? I don't know. Sometimes when I'm on the phone with a friend, a housemate, human or animal, adult or child, might interrupt her. When it's a kid or a pet, I want to know what my niece or nephew is doing to cause the quickly quieted ruckus. It's part of the story. When it's an adult, I honestly can't recollect that anyone else I know will allow, let alone initiate, an interjection that disrupts our conversation.
BDL is extremely immature, it's true. He thinks nothing of interrupting an in-person conversation--a sentence, not a pause--to show you his orange-peel dentures. So maybe I should make child-allowances for him. Nah. My sister doesn't: if she and my mother are talking in person and BDL interrupts my mother's very sentence, she will shut up immediately because he is The Man. My sister will ask her, "Oh, were you done? I thought you were still talking," and at least my mother seems to accept this correction of her doormattitude. If he interrupts my sister, she doesn't shut up until she's finished her thought. (My sister's sensitive to interruption for this very reason--maybe too sensitive to it in animated conversation.)
Ursual LeGuin wrote something in The Eye of the Heron that I really like and try to live by. It could be just so I can feel virtuous and martyred (just like my mother), which scares me. It was something about having enough self-esteem that others' insults or demands matter less. I should add that passage to my Explanations page. A pointed silence with eyebrows raised disdainfully into my hairline is not what Ursula LeGuin meant, though, I'm pretty sure.
Oh.
Oh my.
Oh my goodness.
Apple's new music store, OMFB, is what I've been waiting for. It still has gaping holes, mind you: it has some Corey Hart but not "Sunglasses at Night," some Til Tuesday but not "Voices Carry": not the one-hit wonders. Lots of the songs I'm looking for I haven't had since I arrived at college and starting taping people's vinyl over the compilations I built off the radio, full of the hiss of low recording quality, FM background noise, and my dog suddenly scratching herself or my mother calling for me.
I paused for a long time at Journey. Journey was a guilty pleasure of mine in high school, it being heavy metal and not something that I, as a wannabe prep, could admit to. Later I learned from a real high school metalhead (the one I married) that no boy ever liked Journey but pretended to because that was a chick band. Oh. I forewent Journey for now. I set myself a ten-dollar limit to indulge my nostalgia this evening.
It didn't have that song by the Call, I think, that's in "The Lost Boys." Nor the Cult song I wanted. I didn't get Echo and the Bunnymen, because I want all the Songs to Learn and Sing and the Music Store doesn't yet have it complete. No "Welcome to the Boomtown" by David and David. No Flock of Seagulls. I didn't get Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" because I couldn't decide among the several remixes and clearly the original 2:51 is not long enough.
The take: Animotion, Obsession; A-HA, Take On Me; Big Country, Where the Rose Is Sown and In a Big Country; Dennis DeYoung, Desert Moon; Dexy's Midnight Runners, Come on Eileen; John Waite, Missing You; Madness, Our House; Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, If You Leave; Smithereens, Blood and Roses; Modern English, I Melt with You; Violent Femmes, Blister in the Sun; and Weather Girls, It's Raining Men.
That was just too easy.
Yesterday we each put in twelve hours on the house and garden and bikes: I ripped the sod from, added spent garden soil to, laid groundcloth in, and edged with brick one side of the north front garden, lay a path of stepping stones through it to the north side of the house, clipped cherry sprouts from under their parents, and cleared the last leaf, twig, and mulch debris from the porch and side gardens. RDC swapped the ski for the bike racks on Cassidy, and in the rackless interim, we made a Home Despot run for compost, brick, and the makings of a pegboard. Breaks from my sod-busting and -hauling were holding down the other end of pegboard and 1x3s.
RDC brought the last of the firewood back outside, vacuumed the back basement, emptied the shop vac (discovering a hair clip I'd been missing), and fortified our bike tires with Tuffy strips, of whose worth if not spelling I am certain of. When I scampered to the coal room to get my old Cannondale (where the Tuffies were), I admired the new lightswitch that doesn't spark or buzz or anything.
I was really unenthusiastic about ripping out the last of the front yard. I measured and staked the property line and if anything shortchanged us, but I absolutely don't want to impinge on those neighbors. I'll pull the south neighbor's bindweed when it gets too close to my garden, but not the north neighbors': they might find the bindweed flowers too pretty to kill. They have trodden on our downspouts while mowing our grass, knocked the "Please Do Not Block Gate" sign off our back fence while shoving unbundled, unbagged yard waste into the dumpster (last fall while I hoed out the vegetable garden, listening incredulously through the fence), blocked our gate with unflattened, unrecycled cartons, flouted the watering restrictions all summer long, and are altogether unapproachable. At some point I would like to ask them please to stop throwing water away, first because overwatering is wrong and emptying the clippings directly into the dumpster illegal and immoral, and second because my leaf pile is almost gone (my compost pile is hot! glory be!) and I'll need browns soon.
But I did it. I still have to edge, really delicately along the property line.
As dusk fell we put the bikes and tools away and showered. Mm, shower. RDC's other critical task had been lunch, which we ate around 3:00,* late enough that all we wanted now was dessert. I suggested walking to Licks, and RDC wondered if that was nearer or farther than the gelato place in Cherry Creek North (nearer) but after showering decided the corner store would have all we needed. We scampered out, debating flavors. We got two pints, because we're grown-ups and can, but mostly because he is a heathen who prefers Swiss Almond Vanilla to Mint & [Oreo].
We watched "Road to Perdition," which considering it had Tom Hanks was quite good. He didn't overact (Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan). At the end of this sentence I am going to spoil the endings of both "Perdition" and "Ryan" to explain why it was good: his last words were not "Earn this." Safe now.
Besides ice cream we also bought a Sunday Post. So today, in marked contrast to yesterday, we got up at 10 instead of 7, it is cloudy instead of sunny, I actually read 100 pages of a book (I have ignored Book of Evidence all week because I wanted to read it in a big chunk) instead of browsing through travel guides, and we are slubbering around the living room with bathrobes and newspapers and lattes. Also we might go to the gym.
*Hey, that sentence could easily be misread as using "which" for a conjunction: "Task was lunch, but we didn't eat until three," instead of "task was lunch, which meal we ate at three."
30' elliptical on the handly machine.
Lat pull-downs, 3x12 @ 70
Upright row, 3x12 @ 75
Something that should be good for my wingspan, arms out and then back, 3x12 @25
Back extensions, 75
I rode to work but had to get my chauffeur to bring me home. I still don't know how to shoe Shadowfax and its rear tire was flat. Again.
Saturday when RDC inserted the Tuffy strips, he unknowingly pinched the tube when he reset the rear tire; Sunday we were going to ride our bikes to the gym but Shadowfax came up lame. We had no spare tubes or patches, so we drove instead, and first to REI for supplies. Sunday night I finally had a lesson in bike maintenance, learning how to pop the bead of the tire out of the wheel, find the puncture in the tube, apply a patch, etc. Biggest obstacle: filthy hands.
Monday I rode to work, without patch kit or pump, and in the afternoon the tire was flat, the patch having skittered off its mark, which was on the inner, concave wall of the tube. Perhaps those patches adhere best where they don't get wrinkled. So I have a spandy new tube.
Now all I need is my own patch kit and pump and willingness to get road mire all over my hands.
RDC's timing was perfect: he pulled up just as I finished the last paragraph of The Book of Evidence. I read it yesterday and today, once I finally started. Frederick Montgomery reminds me of a Nabokovian protagonist in his inability to perceive and treat other humans as humans, and specifically of Pale Fire's because of his unreliability.
Unlike most books (in their small numbers) told in a single first-person monologue, this one worked. The monologue suits a megalomaniac well. The narration paused as, I the reader sensed, he gathered his thoughts or put down his pen and took it up again the next day. He used asides and addressed his probable readers--his solicitor, the judge--personally.
Really good. Plus it kept me, at least at the start, skedaddling for a dictionary.
(Why Denver has its city elections in May I have no idea.)
I didn't remember about voting until I was two blocks on my way to work. This is why driving is evil: if I had been on my bike, turning around and going to City Park Pavillion would have been no problem at all. But I drove because I am going to make a CostCo run at lunch.
The park I know so well on foot or by bike, the Martin Luther King statute, the Robert Burns, the other, metaphorical one, the Museum of Nature and Science, the zoo, the rose garden, the lilac shrubbery, the pavillion, the pond on the south side of the zoo that should be plumbed for new disease-bearing (or -curing) microbes, the bigger pond in which my friend's brother-in-law's father swam and contracted polio 50 years ago, just like FDR, the playground named for a little boy who drowned in that pond, the not exactly great lawn that's the best place to fly a kite...that park is a great black hole to me in a car.
I knew about the parking lot behind the pavillion. Weddings occur there, and concerts and other events: trucks must be able to bring in equipment and no one could expect a wedding party to trek across the goose poop-addled expanses of turf. How to get there, that was the problem. I turned west onto 15th, two blocks south of the park's border. I should have turned north and got on 17th, but much of City Park South is having new sewers dug in and some of the roads, including those with traffic lights that enable a left turn, are closed. I turned north on York, the park's west border. I remembered a road on that side, under a gate like l'Arc de Triomphe (somewhat smaller). But no, that road was closed. I knew 23rd, the northern border, would be no good: it's all zoo and sports fields and museum. (Only now does the access road along the south side of the zoo, that approaches the pavillion, accessible between zoo and museum, occur to me. The construction of a parking garage would have confused me anyway.) South on Colorado again, I turned right into the museum. I found another road looping through the park, gated off. Okay. Now west on 17th again. Almost at York, therefore after skittering around the full perimeter of the park, I turned into the park at the "Esplanade" (there is no water), circled Robert Burns, parked, illegally I'm sure, in the MLK circle, and scurried the rest of the way to the pavillion--still with no idea how to get to the parking lot.
There's a reason voter turnout is low. If I'd remembered, I could have walked over at 7:00 like a civilized person and not been late to work. But I wasn't tragically late and I took a sprig of lilac for my hair, so it worked out.
Cars are evil. I voted. There will be a run-off election in a month. Further reports as events warrant.
Today the new books came in and I brought an armful to the staff meeting to distribute. CoolBoss challenged who would find the first typo, because we always find something. The meeting began but I paid only half an ear as I thumbed through the book. I found a formatting error on page iii, for pity's sake: the footer under the Table of Contents is left- instead of center-aligned--mine. Bleah. I continued to read it through and immediately I turned the leaf of page 21 I gasped. The entire table swiveled to me. Mutely I pointed out to CoolBoss to my left. She gave the exact same gasp. "First sentence of page 22," I squeaked. Everyone turned to the page. There were no other gasps.
It's not an error of fact. It's not a misspelling or misgramming (hee!) or misformatting. It's just...wrong.
On the other hand the other two books that've come out in the past month are perfect. So far.
I have previously declared I don't like opera, but I said that based on two exposures, both Puccini. Last night I saw Don Giovanni and now it's "I don't like Puccini" or perhaps even "those two Puccinis." I hardly dreaded the prospect of an evening of Mozart, but I wasn't looking forward to it as RDC was. Mostly I was anticipating being able to wear my dress.
Right now I hear the Commandatore intoning "Don Giovanni," which scene is in "Amadeus," but it's overlaid with another "Amadeus" scene, with Mozart dictating his Requiem Mass to Salieri, singing "maledictum," which scans the same. Because I am a real eddicated opera-goer.
So I got to dress up! And really, isn't that the important thing? I even wore nail polish, though it's a bit of gilding the sow's ear to polish my short, broken nails in their ragged cuticles. It was only my skin color but shiny. I wore a tiny bit of eyeshadow, a tiny bit because once the first daubs went on correctly, any additional stroke might have either gone wrong or been whorish so I stopped. And the mascara was still on my eyelashes six hours later, a first.
My hair refused to be either curly or flatly curvily obedient. I pulled into a French twist and mourned aloud that now that it is nearly long enough for that style, I don't have a twist comb (and it's not long enough to use sticks in). I picked up a barrette RDC gave me two years ago, a slightly concave, oval, broad ring of silver, whose silver-topped wooden pin goes in one piercing, under the hair, and out the other piercing. RDC came in to look, loved the twist, and fastened the pin. And it held! It wouldn't've held for, say, dancing, but it held for sedate dining, strolling, and sitting. Silver and wood might have been Wrong with my ultrafake rhinestone and pearl and silver earrings, but did I care? I did not.
The real coup was my dress. Last spring, rootling through Ross, I found, OMFB, the most beautiful dress ever. At Ross. Yes, I know. Celidon. Silky satiny floor-length full skirt, a shimmery but not sparkly shell top. The shimmery layer attaches at the shoulders to some kind of underpinning fabric that connects the shoulders to the waist of the skirt. I am probably not explaining it adequately, but it means that the weight of the skirt (which is considerable) and of the dress as a whole is on the shoulders, not at the waist, that the bust is not fitted or exposed, and that waist is suggested but not defined or constrained. I wore the same silvery grey shoes I bought for the 2000 fall weddings, which were only passing serviceable with strategic bandaids and a dose of talcum powder. Floor-length skirt: the way to go. (I am aware I match the wall.)
We dined at Adega again. I would make such a good fabulously wealthy person, except that I might not be allowed to do my own gardening or wear shorts overalls. I love good service. Also I love good food. RDC had a fish whose name I forget, with crab and pea tendrils (pea tendrils?). I had goat cheese and asparagus tortelloni with salsify, which I learned is a root vegetable like a parsnip and also called oyster root for its briny taste. I considered whether it would be couth to tip the bowl to my mouth, not to miss a drop of broth.
Talcum powder: the reason I was able to walk from public conveyance to restaurant, to theatre, to conveyance again. Stupid shoes. On the way we met my COO and her kids. She'd recently given the oldest "Amadeus" for his birthday, hence their presence. I remarked to the youngest that we were supposed to have met three years ago when her mother brought her to the Tattered Cover for the midnight release of Goblet of Fire (no surprise we missed each other in the press) but maybe we would see each other this June.
The set was modernized in good ways. Instead of scenery, on the floor and backdrop were huge scrawls of all the names in Don Giovanni's little black book. The actual catalog was a Palm Pilot in Leporello's hand; people carried firearms instead of swords (though a musket and pistol are in the text); and the dresses...actually, the dress. Donna Anna wore black mourning; Zerlina wore red in a flamenco-ish style; but Donna Elvira's dress I lusted after.
(Yes. Opera is all about costuming, mine and others'.)
Stiff, nearly gun-metal gray but pretty anyway, four buttons in a square closing the bodice, wide neck, stand-up cloak collar, long to floor but, because it was cut like a coat, opening from buttons to hem revealing a sheath underneath. Stunning.
The program told me a couple of things to listen for: how themes in the overture, which by legend Mozart wrote at the last minute, are repeated and developed later on (which might mean the legend is not true or that he did, as reputed, have everything composed in his head but just not notated yet) and how, when Don Giovanni is seducing Zerlina, her music changes into his until, as she succumbs to him, they are singing the same notes. Also that he wrote the opera to suit the voices he knew would perform it.
That's a new one.
I returned all my Paris guidebooks to the library and picked up about a gallon of coffee grounds from Peaberry Coffee--a good bike-sized portion. They will be an excellent source for my lasagne mulch. Getting raw materials in sufficient quantities to dedicate a spatch of garden to might be tricky.
When I got home I began to fuss with compost, frustrating Blake, who wanted me inside. RDC was wearing a collared shirt and was therefore Bad (collared shirts mean that Daddy Is Leaving the House and must therefore be Shunned and Yelled At and Avoided) so Blake was desperate. RDC put Blake on the kitchen windowsill and came out to say hi, and when we went back in, Blake was pacing back and forth on the floor of the back landing, squawking and whining his discontent. Poor little beast.
I changed into garden clothes, shut Blake into his cage with barely a cuddle, and brought him outside to help me in the garden. I took a last wheelbarrow of dirt out and began to double-dig. I think. I'm not sure if what I did counts as double-digging, but there were trenches and mixing compost with present dirt. And combing, to remove old root structures. The whole vegetable garden is soft again, for most of its depth. It's a step I didn't take last year. I also amended the south garden, much less diligently because it was late. I planted spinach, carrot, and bean seeds along the south fence, and squash plants under the cherry tree on the hopeful hypothesis that only weeds (zucchini is a weed) stand a chance against other weeds. I had been fed at some point, bison burgers with plenty of spinach and tomato and mozzarella, but mostly that was three hours of hoeing and digging.
Then it was dark so I stopped.
Two 3.8-mile city rides, the lilacs nearly over. Tomorrow night is the Botanic Garden's plant sale, and I might go just to spend some time amongst the several varieties of lilacs.
The other day I used the word "spatch" for perhaps the first time in this site. I deplore my underuse of this invention. It's a spot or patch of territory you claim for your own. If it's not at your house, it could be just Yours anyway, like the bit against the slopey rock on East Beach across from my dorm Holcomb, or under the little sapling outside the first Denver apartment, or under the one particular linden tree on the plaza outside Dot Org's previous building, or the one bit of grass on the concave side of the parapet enclosing the patio at the new building. At Formigny, the reading spatch is in the backyard in the shade of the neighbor's tree.
Spatch. It makes your mouth happy. It makes your butt and your book happy to have a favorite place to read with a name to it.
This one ranks with her comment to me when I was in high school and newly disdainful about her preference for elevator music, predicated by a Muzak version of, say, "Let It Be" assaulting my ears and my asking her, respectfully I am so sure, why not listen to the original versions of songs. She said, "How do you know my music didn't come first?"
My mother called Saturday while we were in the garden. I didn't call her back during the weekend, so by Tuesday evening when she called again she was worried. I called her Wednesday morning over breakfast, apologized for not returning her call over the weekend, and explained that we had been at the opera yestreen (another underused word, though not my invention). She asked how that was and I commented about not liking opera before, maybe because before was Puccini but now was Mozart and she said,
"But you liked 'Phantom of the Opera.'"
That campaign I'm to be no more sarcastic to her than I can help? Severely strained.
To paraphrase Kymm, apparently I am made of sugar and will melt, because RDC picked me up out of the freezing rain today. He offered.
One 3.8-mile city ride.
Granny would have been 85 today.
We woke to six inches of snow. I thought the blizzard in March would have done away with the weakest branches, but undressed branches that withstood three feet of snow and my clobbering could not manage six inches of snow with their leaves on. We lost about a third of the cherry tree and a major branch of the larger plum.
But that wasn't the only reason I cried while plying the pruning saw.
High Country Gardens was to have shipped my plants the week of the 4th. I thought that meant Monday the 4th, so when they hadn't shown up by Thursday I was nervous. They arrived Friday, but so did a freezing rain; Saturday it snowed; Sunday, despite melting snow, clumping soil, and my impending absence, they had to go in. And so they did.
Vinca major for the easement, not enough to fill it in but a start, and I have to remulch it and make some sort of gravel border along the street. The plants right now are far enough away from anyone exiting a car--instead they're on the dogs peeing, sidewalk side--but the hope is they'll spread. A couple of salvia, a couple of penstemon, an agastache, and a catmint for the north side, not nearly enough to fill it in. I was modest buying plants, but there is also the neighbor's lamb's-ear sometime soon, and though it might be too hot (according to books, not to actual life) to divide last year's catmint, they are top-heavy and middle-thin and look like they might want to take over the world. Also a Spanish broom against the porch on one side and a decorative sage on the other. Now they just have to survive a week without watering and the season in soil I might have scarred by working while saturated: it's clay enough to have clumped.
The planting was interspersed with dashing downstairs to stem the tide, by towel and vacuum, of the flood in the northwest corner of the basement. RDC says this didn't start happening until the summer of 2001, and theorizes the foundation might have cracked (more) during the extremely dry years of 2000-2002. I didn't remember exactly when it started, but I know we didn't bother buying a rug to cover the tile in the front of the den until we had the television set up, which wasn't until late in the summer, and that the first we knew of the leakage was my wondering aloud why the rug was wet after a torrential rain (Denver's preferred form).
We shoveled all the snow away from that side of the house (in shorts and Tevas); we increased the length of the gutters on the ground to move the flood further from the house, and placed buckets under, ahem, leaks in the gutters. I don't know what we're going to do, but it's a serious problem.
One of my first tasks when we get back is to dig a drainage ditch. PVC pipes, gravel, grading, surveying. Oi. Or something.
I finished this somewhere over the Atlantic. I can see how someone who was used to Animal Dreams and this would be dismayed by the abrupt shift in tone in Poisonwood Bible. I do like her characters.
I wonder how much Sharon Creech likes Barbara Kingsolver.
Is "strike" feminine? It is now.
Because of the strike, it took us two hours through thick traffic to cover the 30 kilometers between the airport and La Défense. Happily RDC's work had arranged for transportation, so from Dulles we didn't worry about that leg.
One time years ago Haitch and I could not remember the names of the four "Cosby" daughters and the one we couldn't remember then is the same one I can't remember now, Tempest Bledsoe's character. Sonya, Denise, ?, Rudy. When we finally remembered, I decided that the next time I picked her up at the airport I would have one of those signs that chauffeurs carry, with that name. (I never did do that.) Anyway, this time we were met by a driver with such a sign. I felt like a movie star.
He was a really nice man, a good conversationalist, with quite serviceable English. I could tell only that his French wasn't native, but RDC guessed that Spanish was, and after that they chatted happily in a medium I couldn't follow. Which was good, because I had been awake for 20 hours and wanted to sleep, but Miguel was much too friendly for that. He had an Eyewitness (different publisher, same exact style) guide to the Louvre, in French, and I would have loved putting myself to sleep attempting to read that in a moving car, but it was not to be.
When I saw the map of where RDC's business meetings were going to be, I thought, by the angle of the Seine, that we were going to be near le Tour d'Eiffel but on the right bank. Nope. Downstream of le Tour, the river makes a hairpin curve and turns north again, and we were staying on the left side, in the very businessy district called La Défense. It looked much like any business district I've seen in the States, except not. Except better.
Immediately outside our hotel door grew un grand pouce. I didn't go find out what it was supposed to represent, because I already knew. If you squint you can nearly see the onion field at the top.
Because he had a business dinner that evening, RDC needed sleep; and though we both knew you Don't Sleep on first arriving, we both happily did, for five hours. We had planned no more than le Tour d'Eiffel that first day, but between 3:00, by which time we had woken and showered, and stopped at a café for lunch (croques monsieur--maybe messieur), getting back by 7:00 for dinner meant that we got, by foot since the mé wasn't going, only as far as halfway through the Bois de Boulogne. Which was still a very nice walk.
RDC scampered off. I found a faux little shop for croissants and jus d'orange for the next morning and happily went back to bed until 6 the next morning, though not so much to sleep. Either the nap or Something meant I did not adjust to the time difference for about three days.
She looks exactly the same, except 15 months old and a toddler instead of four months old and an infant. She has about eight teeth, and more hair, which is truly golden and not blonde, and her eyes are blue not green, but she looks exactly the same. She looks like someone who likes to toddle here and there and decapitate chives especially when someone exclaims "Pop!" She loves Nana, who is a giraffe, and she loves to turn the pages of books (usually all of them at once). She is remarkably (I think) adept with her fork and spoon, and adores yogurt. She dropped her spoon, I thought because of slippery hands, and I retrieved and handed it to her; she made steady eye contact and quite deliberately dropped it again. I barked with laughter and Nisou shushed me: I shouldn't encourage her. Nisou knows when Emlet has woken up in the morning because she will pull out the accordion bear that plays Brahms's "Lullaby" as it contracts. She tells long stories that unfortunately I could not understand, as she is still learning to string syllables into words: "Lo lo lo lo lo" and "Bababababa."
She looks exactly the same and totally different, with a year's worth of learning inside her.
I guess I am glad I read and enjoyed Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer before her earlier three. The difference in tone is striking, but all of them are good.
I think I propositioned a cabbie. I meant to ask if he would take me to my hotel. (I asked because the taxis closer to Gare Montparnasse had been reserved and I didn't know what was going on with the strike). I think I asked him if he would take me in my hotel. Or something. Um, no. After we got that confusion as cleared up as it was going to be, he had to look up rue de l'Échelle on his map. I had the street number of the hotel, wrong, as it turned out. There was nothing at 11. It was 7. I probably crossed a numeral 7, all suave and continental, and then mistook my 7 for a continental numeral 1. Though how I doubled it I don't know. Anyway the hotel was only the block before, easily found.
RDC had left me a note and the key. I happily threw myself into the room, onto the bed, to nap before his return in about a half hour; and then into his arms when he got back. For supper we found a little restaurant in the rue Moliere and he had a good red wine and we had decent chocolate mousse.
I love Paris. Anyone can love the central, walky, best-preserved area of a city, and paint me a tourista but I love Paris. I love the architecture. It's mostly of a piece in this main, oldest, central part of Paris, but a good piece, 17th century, four and five stories, shops at ground level, living and office space above, shutters and window boxes, lovely. "I am here as a tourist." I am so shameless that I quote "A Room with a View" about tourism.
Friday we went to the Louvre, which was supposed to open at 9. Because of the strike it didn't open until 10:10, and then the ticket-printing machine we chose ne marche pas. We brought our half-printed tickets, whose timestamp though nothing else was legible, to the information booth. There helpful people helped us, in two steps, one of which lasted long enough that before the second step I asked, in flawless idiom and accent, ahem, "Combien temps?" Of course I have no idea what that actually means but I was understood, and a clerk told us "deux minutes." Two minutes later, indeed, we were on our way.
There was a special exhibit of da Vinci's notebooks and cartoons. I loved seeing his rough draft work. He was like, and I don't mean to be profane, Mrs. Barrable from Coot Club, whose own letters she would unconsciously interrupt with sketching. I confuse, because I suck, some of his notebooks with others of Michelangelo's that we saw upstairs. One of the men interrupted his doodling with the odd line of Petrarch. Since I couldn't even ask how much time it would take for our tickets to be fixed, my French was not at a level to translate much of the commentary about the work. But it was still remarkable to look at.
After that we did the Cliffs Notes to the Louvre: the Venus de Milo, the Victory of Samothrace, the Mona Lisa, and its two Vermeers, The Lace-maker and The Astrologist. The Wreck of the Hesperus I didn't track down, but my attachment to it comes solely from A History of the World in 10.5 Chapters, which I haven't read since 1991. And some stuff in between, Italian Renaissance paintings and a chamber devoted to Michelangelo's notebooks and an Egyptian tomb and some remnants of the crown jewels. At least England had three centuries of Empire after its Revolution to rebuild its collection of sparkly rocks for my viewing pleasure. France, not so much.
We found lunch in a cafe in the Place à Malraux. Nearby in le Jardin du Palais Royal, RDC indicated the square with a sweep of his hand, the black-and-white striped columns of different heights, and said, "This is where they grow their columns." He pointed to some circles set into the ground. "These have already been harvested."
He retreated to the room to nap and I would have joined him if I had harbored any hope of success. Instead I went ShopPING, because I was in Paris. A store near the café sold Tintin stuff, which is ridiculously marked up in the States, so I bought myself un petit Milou. (I found out when I got home and replaced Babe with Snowy on my monitor at work and brought Babe home, that Blake is afraid of Babe. And in return for acknowledging that the French pronunciation of Tintin is better, can we please all admit that Snowy is a better name than Milou?)
Last time, walking from la Place de la Concorde and to Musée Picasso, we detoured just a moment into a kitchen store. It was very close and my first place to try this time for my main task, a butter dish for my sister. (That's what she asked for.) The closest thing I found this time turned out to be a terrine dish, and a clerk recommended a shop just across the way.
The china shop I found myself in was one of the few businesses I encountered in which no one spoke English, and even with my stupid French we all got on fine. I spoke with three different clerks, besides greeting them: yes I had seen the back; please could you pack that for travel; thank you for writing out the sum (dix-neuf quarante-neuf wasn't so hard) and I don't want the receipt thank you. So I hope ma soeur likes son cadeau. I bought some books at the Louvre bookshops for some of the shorties in my life.
The other treat of this trip, besides going at all and seeing Emlet, was to see my old college friend KREL and her family. Her husband picked us up after work, which was a kindness I hardly expected, and we introduced ourselves and it was all pleasant and comfortable from the start. He brought us back to their lovely apartment in the 16th arrondisement and the next person I saw was not KREL but her older daughter, who threw herself at us, and then the younger, and then KREL herself, who has not changed one iota in the ten years since I last saw her. She must have a portrait up in the attic somewhere.
Her children are spectacularly adorable and charming and, which reassured me about Emlet, completely bilingual. There are some things they know how to say in one language but not another, but they chattered easily in both. I have worried that my absence of French will leave me unable to talk with Emlet after her "Lo lo lo" and "Ba ba ba" resolve into speech, but these two girls are in the same position, Usan mother and French father, and they speak both languages as well as any monolingual child of their ages might.
We had two wonderful dinners with KREL, at a brasserie on the Trocadero Friday with just the tall folks and en famille Saturday, which meant I got to sing ELL to sleep. Also it was RJH's birthday, so we called him in Connecticut, startling him rather.
In between, on Saturday, RDC and I wandered over the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint Louis.
We visited the Sainte Chapelle, and when Melissa tells you to go somewhere, you should go. It felt intimate even with a crowd, and then the school group left and it felt even smaller. We toured le Crypte Archéologique, more than two millennia of buildings and walls and roads and the edges of the island. We went through Notre Dame again, this time with time to go through the treasury with the Holy Hand Grenade and a human femur (whose, it did not say). I was, cue foreshadowing, coming down with a cold, and not interested in queuing in the rain for a climb to the top--despite having just read The Hunchback of Notre Dame--which is titled with Hugo's intended protagonist in French, just Notre Dame de Paris--which was my main reason for a second visit.
By the Pont St. Louis we crossed to l'Île Saint Louis, which is as touristy as Commercial Street in Provincetown if not quite so tacky. RDC startled me by wanting to shop by actually going into shops instead of just looking in their windows. We had crêpes in a little hole in the wall, and eventually ice cream at Berthillon's, just as everyone, and I do mean everyone, I know who has been to Paris, commanded us.
I am pretty sure I have never eaten an ice cream cone while walking along in the rain, but I wasn't going to miss the chance. That was some good skeam.
Sunday I was definitely sick. We scampered into the 7th arrondisement toward the Musée Rodin (which gets points for being one of the few sites with its own site), where we planned to meet KREL at 10:30. A walk like this is the sort that makes me resent Usan cities, but resenting anywhere for being insufficiently Parisien is about the stupidest possible attitiude. It was Sunday, there was little traffic, many places were closed, but a little boulangerie that was open sold the most tempting array of noshables I have ever seen. We both spotted a pastry and--okay, my French is really bad, so I'm proud of these little moments where a Frenchie and I understood each other--I asked, "Ces sont aux pommes?" where I mentally patted myself on the back for saying "aux" (and heard the "x" in my head) instead of "avec." The clerk said, "Non, poires." Pears are good too, so we bought those and called them breakfast and devoured them.
A reason I was anxious to go to the Rodin was the jardin aux roses. Is that grammatically correct? Whatever. Mid-May is now the perfect time to go to Paris, because of those roses. The house itself is lovely but the grounds are endless roses, heavily perfumed and smelling even stronger in the misty rain. I managed not to think of Petals on the Wind for some hours. We saw Le Penser et Les Burghers de Calais and the gates of the Inferno, which had the Thinker on top. I only just learned that Le Penser is Dante. We saw Balzac a few times and The Kiss, the Eternal Idol (which I prefer to the Kiss for sensuality), and Springtime.
We also saw KREL and her older daughter, who continued to bewitch me. She drew everything--really well--and I asked her for a drawing for my refrigerator.
I really liked The Hand of God because the hand was finished while the marble it loosely clasped remained unworked, The Danaide for her hair and back, and The Secret for the unknown within the hands. I was not so much taken with his drawings and was glad they were not his day job.
After that we separated, the Parisians to a baptism and we to a special exhibit of Magritte in the Tuilieres. This I would have liked better if I had not been ill. Often and often I do not get Magritte's point, and nearly as often I don't find the paintings aesthetically pleasing. But there were many that I did (La Magie Noire, La clé des champs--translated not as the Key of the Fields but as the Door to Freedom, which means I will never understand idiom) and RDC really enjoyed it, so that was fine. Magritte drew a lot of birds, or bird-like thingies, always a good thing. Les Grâces naturelles and its variations I particularly liked, birds growing out of leaves. (Searching for images, I found a Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy named Magritte. Though neither Labs nor dalmation/basset crosses nor black, Ridgebacks are gorgeous dogs.)
Saturday and Sunday had had sprinklings of rain and sun. Monday, in contrast, pissed with rain, and these fucking smokers have got to stop. Both of these conditions made leaving very easy. But flying, with dry air and changings of pressure, when my ears and sinuses were clogged, was less than no fun.
Home. Home home home home home by early evening.
This is one of those books I can Appreciate but do not Love. I hadn't read it for ten years, and now I read it in Paris, and it's RDC's favorite, but except for some really lovely paragraphs about fishing and swimming and even bull-fighting, where some emotion shows, I wasn't in love.
When Mike responds to someone's question how he went bankrupt, he says, "Two ways. Gradually then suddenly." I laughed and told RDC that sounded like something Cary Grant would say. He sighed at my ignorance, telling me how much the book informed script-writing (and everything else). He quoted "Philadelphia Story," though not a Cary Grant line: "Belts will be worn tighter this year."
Besides that I really should have scheduled a day between transcontinental travel and work, I was actually sick. So I was home at noon when the phone rang. My new best friend missed me so much she couldn't go to sleep without talking to me.
It was very endearing.
UberBoss lent me this just before I left, like the Friday, but between planting and flooding and guests two nights, I left for France with 30 pages left. I finished it today.
It's fun, though I'm not prepared to admit I might like detective or speculative fiction. At least the author is honest: when an outlandish scheme is proposed to solve a problem and someone asks what is that, another character admits it's a literary technobabble device. That cracked me up.
Both of us had some sort of relapse and I could face neither my bike nor contacts on Friday morning. I have to find my bus route's new, less frequent times. But I drove. I should have remembered to call Peaberry's for a big bag of grounds, but I didn't; instead I went to the post office with my presents.
Also I had to carry something home which wouldn't've been convenient on a bike.
We had three lay-offs last week. So today when I saw UberBoss quietly walking up to my cube, slowly, eyes down, my breath caught. It resumed a moment later when I realized that everyone else in my department was also converging on me. After we all laughed at me for that confusion, pour mon anniversaire, they gave me a card and a wee potted rose.
Much better than being laid off.
Much better than The Sun Also Rises. His writing life in Paris and elsewhere, not so much with the racist slurs, and a little kid called Mr. Bumby. Gertrude Stein, and how he fell out of love with her (hearing her plead with her nameless companion); Ezra Pound, and how disappointed he was that Pound had never read the Russians; Tolstoy (who appears only through his books), whom Hemingway loved even though he wrote so badly (according to Hemingway, who maybe didn't see more than one way to write well); Ford Madox Ford, "as he called himself then" and what a twit he was; skiing in Austria and having the legs for it because lifts didn't exist and you couldn't ski what you couldn't climb.
The Colfax bus makes for good anthropological research.
We were maybe two minutes late to meet Jared and Trish and I called Jared to tell him we were almost there. It was all very hip and now as, when RDC and I got to the top level of the Pavillions, there was Jared checking his messages.
Greetings were greeted and then Trish put a bag into my hands, wishing me a happy birthday. She gave me a penguin (and chocolate). Presents!
I recently learned that baby platypuses are called "puggles" and recently decided that baby penguins, being fuzzier than their parents and cuter, should be called puppies.
My penguin puppy is named Josephina because I am reading The Age of Napoleon and Josephina's is next door to the Market, where we ate.
Then we went to see "The Matrix Reloaded," about which too little cannot be said.
Remembering, I pounced on Trish: "Mo had a finger puppet of Beaker in her latest entry! I want one!"
Making me excessively happy, she told me they were at Starbucks.
We were in downtown Denver at the time, never more than two blocks from a Starbucks. I dragged her in, she pointed me in right direction, I snapped up the only Beaker in the bunch and removed the stripey stick of candy from his butt. Then I noticed there was someone already at the register. "Oh I'm sorry am I interrupting maybe just a little?" But I wasn't. I offered him the candy anyway, but he didn't want it; I gave it to Trish.
Despite its being my birthday weekend, I had to pay for Beaker. "Twenty-five?" inquired the non-customer I had non-interrupted. The cashier shook his head, "Now you're flirting."
The thing is though, since he was making friendly-like and obviously thought the mock guess of 25 was young for me, to the extent he thought he was flattering, he was actually insulting. But I am all about Owning My Age and he and the cashier, whose skate-boarding convo I had non-interrupted, were making friendly-like, and at least I don't look so decrepit as not to be worth flattering at all.
If that makes any sense.
We don't know what it is causing our basement floor to disintegrate but it has to be stopped. I am not going to speculate publicly yet, but that title was too good not to use.
Most of the conversation today concerned the house falling over into a swamp. My mother called to wish me a happy birthday, and I was content to listen for the ninetieth time about how buying a rose bush from disease-free stock is so worth the money and how long she's wanted a magnolia bush and exactly how they're going continually the amend their soil to keep their hydrangea blue and also how they have a store of a toxin that's apparently now illegal but which they use with impunity. My father called to wish me a happy birthday, and I told him about the swamp and heard about his cucumbers and tomatoes and in-laws (the last of which he is not growing nor perhaps even cultivating). My sister called to wish me a happy birthday and we debated whose fat is more attractive (she thinks she's fatter than me now, which I doubt, but her spongey bits have always been more appealingly arranged) and bemoaned the lack of decent television of a Sunday afternoon and swapped pet stories.
Eyewitness accounts of the Warsaw ghetto, from transcribed oral histories and discovered secret writings buried and sealed for years, from people who are known to have died during the war, people who're known to have survived the war, and people whose fates will be forever unknown.
I recently learned that I have been falsely impugned. My immediate reaction was to wish (though not to plan) to clear my name. I will say nothing, however. Of course this is a rationalization for a pre-existing habit of non-action (read, for cowardice). Or not: I could be being sensible. I know the facts, and I really want that to be enough for me; it shouldn't matter what slander the slanderers believe.
It's not though. Privately, though aloud and to non-involved others, I mutter blackly. I'm working on that. I would work harder if the private muttering weren't funny or if it didn't help with the public silence.
SPM was here when I got home from work. I came along the sidewalk slowly, looking for bindweed, as I do every summer afternoon, bounced Shadowfax up the two steps to the walk, and spotted RDC inside. I am glad I didn't blow him a kiss or flash him--well, the latter was unlikely anyway--because through the screen I didn't recognize the additional height that made the figure SPM, not RDC. He said hi and I realized my mistake, and then he remarked on the garden. He hadn't seen it for 2.5 weeks and in that time it really has taken off.
It is lovely, as a matter of fact and thank you for noticing. Some spaces need to be filled in and the nepeta needs more cutting but yeah. It's lovely.
RDC remarked that after the house falls over into a swamp we can live in the garden. Our cheery conversation with SPM concerned how to fix whatever's going on down there and how much it will cost (Blake's definitely not getting a car when he turns 16) and how to vanquish an insurance company we anticipate to be reluctant.
After SPM left, I dragged RDC out to make him repeat SPM's compliments. He thought we (read I) could remove the groundcloth, as there's not a bindweed problem out here. "There's not a bindweed problem because I look for it every day," I told him, as with perfect timing I spotted quite a long vicious parasite winding up a penstemon strictus. The groundcloth stays.
As we inspected the catmint cuttings, wondering if they'll survive, and looked at the emerging flowers on the penstemon pinofolius (yellow, flame, coral, a welcome sight in my blue and lavender and white garden), and plotted for more thyme, and wondered how high the salvia will grow this year, RDC noticed a moth feeding on the catmint. We watched it for a moment. "That's a hummingbird!" we realized together.
I think it was our first summer here that I saw a hummingbird in the large, anonymous bush on the north side, also initially mistaking its wee brownness for a moth. But it was a hummingbird--and I haven't seen one since, until this one. I've known from the start that bees love the catmint, which makes me if not RDC happy. It is listed as a hummingbird attractant. And it is! This makes me so happy.
Not all wildlife makes me so happy. As I type this the next morning, I'm listening to a squirrel in the nectarine tree, sounding like nails on a chalkboard, gnawing on the fetal fruit. Little fucker. There are dozens of baby plums that they'll destroy next, and then they'll work on the pears. We watched "Amy and Amiability" last night, an excellent "Blackadder" episode even if it didn't feature the Shadow killing their excessively tailed selves. I am becoming Anya, squirrel-wise.
All right. I accepted that I could never destroy the brush pile, even one created by the detritus of only seven trees, as quickly as it could generate itself. Not, she muttered darkly, with three-foot snowfalls. The city is picking up branches, but it doesn't say whether the amputations go to the landfill or to mulch. Probably to landfill, because people can bring their own stuff to the city nursery through the end of this month. Over the past two evenings I have extracted the largest, most useful wood and bundled the rest. Whatever I cannot fit in the car at once, I will leave by the dumpster. I admit it.
In 2001, with an eye to do more gardening than just the vegetables, I fetched myself a Cassidy-load of mulch from the TreeCycle mulch giveaway. It was good mulch, and so last year RDC and I borrowed a small pick-up truck and went back for another load. I mulishly insisted on filling the thankfully small truck bed even when I saw that this mulch sucked. There were whole branches of Yule trees, chopped not chipped, there were quantities of needles. That crap has sat in my backyard on a tarp for a year, where it has served to discourage (though not kill) the bindweed under it.
My other unethical measure, then, has been finally to bag up most of this pointless, pointy stuff. I'm going to bring it to the City Nursery as well. But not all of it. I pitchforked through it, sifting the big and most of the little chunks out. I am going to use the needles in a lasagne composting bed I am going to try, these needles plus those from the two branches the evergreen lost in the blizzard.
Two unstoppable forces rule my yard: cherry sprouts and bindweed. I had known that the garage is surrounded on the three non-car sides by a couple of feet of gravel, but I didn't know until I shifted the brush pile away from the garage and clipped the cherry sprouts that have grown up through it that they first were growing through two layers of black plastic as well.
Is it okay that I love my cherry tree but hate its sproutlets?
Two 3.8-mile city rides.
I am taking my life in my hands to commute by bike, even over established, signposted bike routes. Denver's particular driving quirk is to run red lights--to keep going straight through the yellow, so that people waiting to turn left do so on the red, on the mutual red and even against the opposing's green. I know to watch for that.
I don't expect cars to come to full stops at stop signs, especially in residential areas like those the bike routes go through. I don't rely on blinkers. I am shocked--still--by how many people look left when turning right on red, for cars on the road they're turning into, but not right, where a cyclist might be waiting. And if the light turns green in that time, so that the straight-going traffic (including the bike that's been there longer than the right-turning car that didn't even see it as the driver approached the intersection) has the right of way, the driver will turn.
Making eye contact is critical.
This occurred to me, for the first time and in so many words, the other night as I demolished the brush pile into manageable fagots. We await the verdict of geotechnical and structural engineers on the fate of the foundation; we need to contract with a landscape engineer about the north side of the house because neither of us foresees the exact grading called for; and lots of the brickwork needs tuckpointing.
It doesn't matter.
I have always wanted a house. I have always wanted a house the way some people have always wanted a child. Blind to the responsbilities, ignorant of the challenges, unknowing of the maintenance. This house isn't the one I expected, but now it's mine. Mine, yet still its own, with its own individuality that I'm responsible for, to preserve and improve and pass into the future.
It's an imperfect analogy, of course, but fitting in another way. I never questioned whether my desire was right to act on. Lots of people want kids but don't weigh whether their parenting resources are sufficient. I wanted a house but didn't consider whether my mechanical, design, landscaping, gardening, and overall housekeeping skills were up to the task. I just blundered willfully into the job, trusting to love and devotion.
But so far we're doing okay. And I don't regret it for a second.
Nearly a gale blowing during my ride home, which made it fun. Lots of blinding dust.
Two 3.8-mile city rides.
On the way I got grounds from Peaberry's Coffee, which has to be a more regular stop for me. I had no idea coffee grounds were as green as they are. I can get rid of the leftover bad mulch with enough grounds. And, I realized, there's a Starbucks kinda on the way, and a Diedrich's not too far out of the way. I would rather ask the Diedrich's: I can prop my bike outside and keep an eye on it while I picked up my stash. I need enough for, say, 25 square feet, 3 inches thick. Let's see how long it takes me to figure out the volume.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
6.25 cubic feet of coffee grounds.
Here, an exclamation. I went to the gym.
I didn't ask the clerk to tell me my last time, which I'm sure the monitor indicated. Some time in March, I figure. No, I went sporadically in April and as recently as 4 May.
Handled elliptical thingie, 20' level 12.
Lat pull down, 3x10 @ 120. How can that be right? I was using a Hammer Strength machine instead of a bar in the cage, but I haven't lifted weights at all for a month or seriously for longer than that. Am I confusing this with the high row? But I always could pull down more than I could row. Yard work and biking cannot have done that. But I am sure of my weights: I know there were two 45-pound disks to start and I added a single 25er to one side and two 10s and a five to the other.
High row, 3x10 @ 90. Or so.
Hack squats, 3x10 @ 130. This surprised me at the time, but not as much as the lat pull-down weight does. Can biking have helped that much? It's 10 pounds more than I could do a month ago.
Leg curls, 3x12 @ 50. That's gone down by 20 pounds, and that makes sense.
Weighted back extensions, to exhaustion at increasing weight, topping out over 100 pounds.
Shoulder presses, something like 25 pounds.
Then I swam .6K. This is the first year since I started I have not swum outside before my birthday. At least it was before June, though barely. It was inside, but not to swim is more sacrilegious than to swim inside. Even in an indoor pool without windows.
I tried to listen to Across Five Aprils while weight-lifting, but for a clumsily narrated audio book it's really affecting. Okay, it is about the Civil War, from a civilian point of view, based on the author's grandfather's boyhood, but it's not as if I don't know what happens. So in the gym I listened to stuff like "Express Yourself"--maybe that's why I could lift so much--and in the yard I listened to Irene Hunt, where I could cry when the names in the family Bible were read out, those with one date, and those with two.