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Updated 29 June
I told RDC I didn't care what the mortar looked like on the north side of the house, since you can't get far enough away to have any perspective and it's not Curbside Appeal etc., but the new mortar in the garage is so vastly different than the existing mortar that I retracted that. And you can see the north side from the street, after all. One of the things that justified Guy the Tuck-Pointer's rate two years ago is that he color-matched the mortar. You can see where his repairs are to the porch and front of the house, but they're not glaring.
But RDC is working on the inside of the garage, so that when the house falls over into a swamp we can live in there. Also so that the garage itself doesn't fall over into a swamp. Also because you can see through it in a couple of places, by the person-door where someone wired it by hacking out bricks apparently with a sledgehammer, and on the back corners where no one cared for years whether the gutters drained properly or the creeper was demolishing brick and mortar in its relentless climbing.
This weekend he did the short end opposite the car-door. Once upon a time, someone apparently drove a car into the garage and tried to keep going, perhaps overestimating the building's length. So there is a concave section. Or there was, before his repair. In four hours Saturday he did a smaller section than he did in three hours Sunday: he got the hang of it. And maybe the mortar will dry paler than it is now. Because I don't want a charcoal-grey striped house.
I am really glad we have a new garage door, since that allows for a garage-door opener (English really needs some new words. Is there a one- or two-syllable word that could communicate that concept?), but this weekend I saw a garage with its original, glassed, bay doors. Very pretty. I am not so dedicated to the house As Was that I want, say, a coal furnace or a smaller fridge; I like admiring the pretty while I get to live with the practical.
A pleasure-ride, through the neighborhood to Cherry Creek North for gelato, down the Cherry Creek Trail to Confluence Park to watch the kayakers (who are, as far as I can tell, suicidal in two ways, immediate and long-term: immediate because the white water flips them and sometimes they have to pop themselves out of their aprons if they can't roll fast enough, and long-term because ack, the South Platte?), and downstream, north along the river for a bit to the "new urban development" up there, and across 16th Avenue and home.
I met two Papillon dogs, Bailey and Bingo. "Bailey," besides being way overused, sadly for humans as well as for dogs, is for bigger dogs. In my opinion. They were very sweet and, being so little, could not beg for gelato very effectively, even with their paws on my knees. At the riverfront we met a seven-month-old Australian shepherd named Bob. Female, but not named for Blackadder's Bob. Possibly because her tail was docked.
This afternoon, grumpy and tired, I retired to the chair where I intended to spend the evening. Through the open window I heard a passerby leap at a plum tree with a rip.
At the next moment, he turned up the walk to the house, with a big Tupperware chest under his arm, a child roped into one of these ridiculous door-to-door solicitation programs that I hate: adults profit in money by teaching children who shouldn't be out on a schoolnight to harass residents, who donate out of pity; the children learn nothing useful and are exploited for pennies.
Before he got to the steps I had called, "I don't want to buy anything, thank you." He turned away, turned back, and asked if I was sure. At that provocation, I added, "And don't rip at trees."
I was just practicing. I figure I can get a lot meaner pretty quick.
He asked, pointing, "Are these yours?"
I didn't say that they're their own. Instead I said, "Whose they are doesn't matter. You shouldn't hurt them."
Who's teaching them that?
And it was the smaller plum, the one that doesn't overhang the sidewalk and requires a leap from a 10-year-old to reach. We were on the swing last night, eating our supper, watching people walk up to the park for the Sunday concert (that we forgot about again). A group of maybe six walked by, ducking the overhanging branch of the droopy one. "I don't know about your tree, man," one said to us, probably more politely than she would have spoken of it if she hadn't seen us.
I forget how low it hangs. I can walk under it without ducking my head. You just have to walk single-file and be shorter than, say, 5'10". Is that so much to ask? We keep saying we're going to hire a tree surgeon at least for the nectarine. I expect the others could stand a once-over too.
And ha, I prevented one dog from peeing in my garden. A human tugged a leashed dog away from the garden when she saw me on the swing. Ha. Score two for the mean old lady.
And I have to fence off the easement, illegal though that might be, until the vinca is stronger. The one that died was from its mother's womb untimely rip't by someone unloading an air-conditioner from the backseat of a car as RDC watched from inside the house while conducting an uninterruptable conference call. By someone, more specifically, who lives across the street, so I wonder why he didn't park on that side so his car door faced the right way. If I'd seen him I'd have yelled. Score three for the mean old lady.
Voting by bike: much more sensible than voting by car. Shadowfax and I entered the polling place together and were the only voters until we left, when I met a black-and-white dog named Harrison. One of the judges asked if I rode to work, and if so how far, and what a good distance, and how nice that it was uphill in the morning so downhill in the afternoon.
Cars are not bases for conversation.
This is so wild. A week ago yesterday it was suddenly 94, and I thought, well, that's that then.
It hasn't broken 80 since. It's cool and cloudy to the point of overcast in the morning. In fact, in the morning, it's overcast to the point I think I don't want to bike. But get this, now I have no choice. There's not the bus to fall back on any more, tra la, at least not from a block away. Now I have to walk a mile--if it's a mile, 10 long blocks anyway--to another bus. Anyway, there's no reason to walk and bus when I can bike. And I biked when it was 25 degrees and sunny, so almost 60 and cloudy really shouldn't be such a challenge.
Since before we moved here, the mayor's been Wellington Webb. You can't go wrong with a name like that.
"John Hickenlooper" just doesn't have the same resonance. It's Dutch and means something like "fence-leaper" according to him.
Welcome, Mr. Mayor.
Two 3.8-mile city rides. I unearthed my 14.5-year-old long-sleeved white t-shirt from the Gap, which had been missing for over a year, and wore it today: perfect. Too cold for a regular t-shirt, not cold enough for a thin sweatshirt. Ha.
I had my hair cut this afternoon. I am not cut out for the pretty or for the high-maintenance cut. I like my cutter and am glad to have found one to return to, and I am glad that whoever gave me the Big Cut in January knew style, but for the every day, I neither repeat it nor live with it. It was a little wilder even than this when I left the salon, and the rain didn't help the frizz settle.
Almost as soon as I got home, RDC had dinner on the table. One of the things I can't do with my hair down is eat. I skewered it with three fake tortoiseshell chopsticks and ate as it fell down my nape. After dinner I twisted it again but pinned it from another angle. There is now one pin in it and it's secure. Hallelujah, and just in time for summer (which might start by Monday). Even the ponytail touched my neck and didn't capture my fringe. This is close to a French twist and it's all captured. This is a style I can live with. And damn it, I still find it much more flattering back than down.
(Haitch, she got goosebumps when I told her.)
RDC has recently bought a bunch of tunes he hasn't had for years from the iTunes store. When I got home today, both times, he was listening to Bob Dylan. I've tried, people, but it hasn't worked yet. That is, it hasn't worked for me. Blake loves his music. Happily the entire flock agrees about Neil Young and Janis Joplin.
Blake sings along. He bobs and dances. There is no kind of a bad mood (and when he's pissy, he's very very pissy) that loud rock'n'roll doesn't fix.
One of the songs RDC downloaded is Neil Young's "Powderfinger." Considering how strongly I feel about The One Right Original Way, there is no justification for my preferring the Junkies' version of this song. Except that they're my favorite band, and except that Young's tone does not at all fit the subject matter. He could be singing about having a beer at the corner bar as he croons, "Just think of me as one/ who never figured/ to fade away so young/ with so much left undone." When Margo sings it, you know somebody's about to die.
Blake doesn't care. The version RDC got is live, and there is nothing Blake loves better than live music. He is just like the Humbug in how much he craves adulation, and all those cheers and whistles he knows are for him.
Clumsily narrated, but a good story, skillfully interweaving the nation's political and military battles into a civilian family's life. Hunt mentioned the family's homestead's "dooryard" all through the book, and I should have realized the allusion she was building up to before Appomattox, when she first mentioned the shrubs that grew there.
I was doing a mailing at work, and it was a pretty empty day, so I could listen to speakers instead of headphones. And tear up on my own and the family's behalf, after the 14th of April, 1865.
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
Just shopping.
I went into an accessories store because my hairclips are all either bent or broken. I was looking specifically for a French twist comb. I found a smaller hairclaw and a larger, a pair of curved hair sticks and a something or other that will work (as do the sticks) for a French twist. The only comb they sold had too many teeth and was clear plastic with rhinestones, and I am not going to prom any time soon.
A French twist is the only way I know to put up my hair that's not in a ponytail or with a claw; a ponytail requires me to skin the hair back too harshly and a claw looks sloppy and doesn't hold as securely as a twist. It's not a true French twist: it's too short still or too layered, the fold goes diagonally instead of vertically, and the ends of the hair peek out, but that's the principle.
Janelle does a lot of undercutting, or something, "for movement," and maybe the hair swings better but it doesn't braid yet, as long as it is. At least it's calmer now, a day and a half later. This is my dilemma. I love a French braid, but I'm letting her cut it for down instead of for a braid. Layers and undercutting are the only reasons I can think of for shoulder-length hair not braiding.
I also bought myself a summer-weight bathrobe with some birthday money, which, ha! puts me ahead in the superior bathrobe category. If it warms up--it might snow tomorrow--RDC's will be too heavy, all summer long. It's white and looks, I hope, not too much like a doctor's smocky coat. I am reminded of the Glamour Shots leather jacket and how much that looked like a bathrobe.
And I finally brought the stupid wine bottle thingies to Bombay Company. They were gifts (with the price tag still on) and they're not my type of thing at all, nor RDC's, who would decide, being the one who drinks wine. He said he saw in the Louvre, in the collection of royal household objects near the remnants of the Crown Jewels, something like these bottle necklaces, but I am fairly confident I would not use such things even if they came in gold and diamonds like the Bourbons' set. I can't bring up the Bombay Company, but that's no loss. I have store credit that maybe I could use nearer Yule, for a tree ornament.
What can I say, I think decorating trees is fun and decorating bottles is ridiculous. Chacun á son gout.
Last night I danced my beloved "I don't have to work tomorrow!" dance.
Today I am working in the sense of Getting Stuff Done, but not in the sense of For The Man. It's not 10 yet and I have started laundry and begun another batch of ginger-chocolate cookies (some for a hosueguest and some for an ill coworker) and have just sat down with a cup of tea that RDC made for me an hour again when I was knee-deep in cocoa and cinnamon.
The more I get done today, the less I have to do tomorrow, so the more time I can spend at the People's Fair. Which is kind of like the grand prize being a week in Cleveland, and the second being two weeks. Or however that Beckett line went. Was that Beckett? Whoever.
Precor Elliptical, 20' @ resistance 12/20 and incline 20/20.
Iso Lat Pull-down, 3x12 @90
Leg Presses, 3x12 @160: finally, more than my body weight
Seated Weight Calf Raises, 3x12 @60.
Lateral Raises, 3x12 @30. This is a weird one. There should exist a machine with more resistance at the beginning of the movement than at the end. And I move the weight with my forearms against the pads, but there are also handles, and I can lift more when I hold the handles. Unfortunately my wrist always winds up bent 90 degrees, and that can't be good.
Weighted back extensions, lots and lots @90.
It really doesn't feel like much now, but I did get stuff done:
I vacuumed and swept upstairs, including under the rugs. Getting under the dining room rug is vital, because dirt--real, sandy dirt--sifts through rug and mat and accumulates around the perimeter. If I am not careful about that, that dirt will scar the floor. (The structural engineer said, upon entering the house, "Great floors!") I vacuumed the upholstery and dusted everything. Having the windows open means the windowsills are filthy and the dirt is black instead of the winter grey and brown.
I tidied up the entire basement. I'll have to take it all out when the work has to be done, but I'm glad to be tidied up and have everything back in place in the furnace room, the cool room, and the cave. And I cleaned the bathroom and the water closet (I call it the water closet because damn it, it is: a closet-sized space with a toilet in it), their semiannual acquaintance with cleanliness.
Then we went to a party.
Okay. The deal with the house falling over into a swamp is this: calcium sulfates in the soil chemically react with the bonding agent in concrete, disintegrating it. Apparently this is a big problem in California, where foundations are now poured exclusively with type 5 (sulfate resistant) concrete. The structural engineer who confirmed the diagnosis we had come to on our own with web research said ours was the worst case he had seen in Denver. He knows of cases in Park Hill, immediately to our northeast, and in Montclair, immediately east, but he's more familiar with its happening in Highlands Ranch, the massive, soulless suburb in Douglas County to the south.
The basement floor is not structurally necessary to the house's remaining intact. The three supporting columns supporting the upper structure are, and two of them are severely chewed. One, behind the furnace and hot water heater, we had noticed; the other, behind a seasonal rotation of screens and storm windows in the coal room, we had not. The third is in my study, and our current hypothesis is that my study is sunken a step below the rest of the basement because someone already dug out some bad soil, installed a vapor seal, repoured the floor, and installed a steel supporting column.
Replacing the other two concrete supporting columns with steel is what we have to do. So we will do it.
The other two problems, ppor drainage on the north side and the resulting uneven settling of the house in the northwest corner, leading to the porch separating from the house, are in the engineer's eyes in more immediate need of correction. He and RDC brainstormed a fix for the porch that RDC can probably do himself, and discussed what we need to do for the drainage--which he said was better than many bungalows', though still insufficient--and that I can do.
So we will do those too.
I enjoyed, I pondered, I was inspired by, Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge, so when I saw this on Jessamyn's reading list I found it in the library.
Smithsonian magazine has the trick of taking a subject, however arcane, and making it interesting to the common reader. Shattuck does this with the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who emerged from a forest in southwest France in 1800. I read it expecting more about the nature of feral children and their ability to learn and use language--Victor spent his first several years of civilization in an institute for the deaf--than I found but it was interesting enough and a fast read.
Dr. Bob graduated. The brazen debauchery was several people in a hotel room, a lot like high school, though unlike high school in that everyone (else) had a baby. Nearly: I gave CGK a backrub: she's got almost two months to go but is huge and uncomfortable. One baby stayed home with a grandparent so I still haven't met him, conveniently the one I am least personally interested in. I can't believe we were thinking of joining No Kidding: if you like your friends, surely you like your friends' children. Conversation flitted between DU gossip and children and teaching and reading--children being only the newest, not the only, topic of conversation.
And I just talked to my mother. She ran into my childhood friend's father, who reported that HPV had twin boys in late May, and also into Michael's grandmother, who said that that childhood friend just had a son. Last I knew about him, he and B were still dating, ten years after high school, so I wonder if she's the other parent.
Apparently my mother and HPV's dad didn't talk long--only long enough to establish that HPV's partner is female, big news for my mother and confirming my longheld guess, but not long enough for anything about the children, like their names or exact birthdays. But I'm glad to know as much as I do and must dispatch essential books immediately.
Also I talked to Nisou a bit this morning. Emlet has discovered how to scale the couch, and she went swimming for the first time last weekend and loved it. Thank the gods. I remember how much she enjoyed her bath at four months, how her body elongated and how she smiled and wriggled. My beautiful little girl.
And in most excellent news, my youngest child and a friend (whom I remember but didn't babysit) are roadtripping home from Arizona to Old Lyme and will stop here Monday night. It will be a tight fit, because we have another friend arriving tonight for several days, but they're young and a night on camp mattresses on the living room floor instead of the already-spoken-for futon won't kill them. I haven't seen her in five years and am most stoked.
I have been missing, I always do miss, the sort of broad community of friends and acquaintances I had in Connecticut--that I still have, though scattered to the four winds. When a friend says he and his family camped with the other families from daycare, when I see the photographs of Nisou's four godchildren--each from a different family--in frames, I feel that lack.
It existed for me only in latter years at UConn. I left Old Lyme when I called it escape. I never belonged to the circles I admired, of the intelligentsia library board members, the patricians of town, my babysitting's family broad reach of school and library and church involvement. Even at UConn I was an outlier, but I knew so many pivots I felt included.
Eventually last night or really this morning, we left the hotel room for the three-year-old to sleep, and RDC and Dr. Bob and SPM and, uh, Alias and I sat around the lobby and talked for another while. The talk was more DU gossip and fantasy baseball and Six Feet Under and someone's boss who was "an insane cunt--no offense" (because I'm an insane cunt? I let that go) but also someone's feeling every June when someone else, but not he, graduates. Of the four DU students, the non Dr. Bob three are ABD and have been for some time. It's been on my mind and I had brought it up to CGK as well: almost eight years here and for what? After eight years I call the fourth Alias because I don't know him well enough to give him an alias?
For a strong marriage and a great house and a garden from scratch and Blake, SPM pointed out, not letting me pity myself. Yeah. But his confession about June was the first personal statement I have heard anyone I'm not married to make, in person, in months.
I want to be quite clear here: I do not ache for or crave a child, I do not hear ticking, I experience my friends' children with affection and amusement but not desire. I do recognize that parenthood would likely hurl me into a community, but it's the community I want, not the child.
It's in my hands, to volunteer or join a bicycling group or open up more among coworkers and RDC's classmates.
It's always surprising to me how a task expands to fill the time available. I managed to be showered and and dressed by the time RDC's coworker arrived, with the house as clean as it ever gets. But barely.
We bussed downtown and had bison burgers at the Wynkoop, again filling all the space available. Except I ordered the pasta salad alternative to french fries and I am very proud. RDC has a theory that french fries are almost never good but that you always order them because they ought to be really good and you continually hope not to be disappointed. There is also the It Will Still Be There Tomorrow rationale of food avoidance that I haven't quite grasped yet.
I bailed soon after dinner and left them to their pub crawl. I bussed home and read Bleak House until Blake and I were thoroughly asleep. Meanwhile, RDC and Denton worked their way home from My Brother's Bar by way of tequila and a 3:00 breakfast at Pete's Kitchen. Speaking of filling the space available.
I guess we're fond of repeating photographs, same setting, disparate times. Or not: this is the first time in seven years we've done this one. Our usual repeat is a map hut in various levels of snowpack. Anyway, in June 1996 we spent our first anniversary camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. That's a really bad scan, isn't it? We looked for the right rock this time but failed.
Okay, I say that deliberately sounding like Mr. Emerson in "A Room with a View." Ooops.
I had not seen RKC for five years, since she was 17, and her friend Sarah for longer than that--probably since 1995 at CKC's high school graduation party. RKC is all tall now, I think the tallest of the three, I think even a smidge taller than I.
Sarah was never a victim of mine but she remembers getting piggyback rides, which I hardly doubt. The best game a babysitter can play is to be human furniture or a cat jungle gym. They both remember when I used to carry all three of my girls around at once, RKC being one of the carry-ees and Sarah being impressed when she witnessed it. When I was 18 and strong as hell, they were 9, 7, and 5 and I could stagger a few steps with them slung about my various limbs.
Since last time, RKC has graduated from high school, attended college, and most important devoted a year to AmeriCorps, which seems to have been one of those life-changing events that shape your whole future. I love being so proud of her.
It was also tremendously reassuring to have her here. They drove up from Tucson by way of Albuquerque, and RKC opined that "Colorado could not be more beautiful." That, coming from another Old Lyme native, who therefore knows natural beauty when she sees it, was wonderful to hear--especially since they only drove up the interstate, alongside not through the Sangre de Cristo and other lumpy bits.
She said she'd thought she'd got used to the desert enough to find it beautiful, but as soon as she saw the green of the Colorado mountains she realized what she'd been missing. I know I have to get over my geographical assumptions--considering how irritating I find it when people insist that Denver's in, not next to, the mountains--but if Colorado is green (to a Connecticut eye) compared to Arizona, then I think the Grand Canyon is as much of that state as I need to see. But then in Animal Dreams there are orchards and flowing water, so not all of it can be sere and ochre.
They had been in the car--she's keeping up the family tradition of Volvo station wagons, I was glad to see--all day and I suggested a stroll around City Park. This they also liked, the pond and the pavilion and the view from behind the Museum of Nature and Science. Stormclouds rolled through, though it was clear over the mountains, which could not but improve the view.
We had a really nice visit, though too short. And I learned that the middle one--whom I haven't seen for four years--plans to visit in August.
Fiona Shaw plays one of my favorite characters in "Persuasion," Mrs. Croft. I finally bothered to look her up and she plays Aunt Petunia Dursley as well.
It's called acting, I know. But it's the same startlement I felt when I realized that Daniel Day Lewis played such unlike characters in "My Left Foot" and "Room with a View" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," or that Jonathan Pryce, so endearingly geeky in "Brazil," was the foxy shill for Infiniti cars.
Two 3.8-mile city rides, the homeward again in a stiff wind, at least until I gained the shelter of the residential, tree-filled areas.
Now, this is summer. Minne, who's lived in Denver three times, or four, as long as I have, says that this is summer as it's meant to be: hot but not unendurable (of course it's only June, and only beginning to hot up), with dependable afternoon storms.
I am really liking Denver this year.
Why must there be such campy caricature in every single Jane Austen adaptation? in "Persuasion," Sir Elliot is portrayed as quite silly, rightly silly, exactly silly enough, but Elizabeth Elliot is over the top and not nearly as attractive as either Anne or even Mary, which doesn't suit the family dynamic. In "Pride and Prejudice," Caroline Bingley isn't nearly as attractive as she ought to be, and it's not just that she overspends on her wardrobe. And no one who married Mr. Hurst could possibly sneer at the Bennets.
Okay, that's two. I don't count "Mansfield Park"--of course Fanny Price is not palatable to the contemporary audience but she doesn't take nearly as well to "Oh and I happen to be the author in her youth" as Jo March does in the latest "Little Women." "Sense and Sensibility" is well cast. Gwyneth Paltrow doesn't look like Emma Woodhouse nor Toni Collette like Harriet Smith nor Euan Macgregor like Frank Churchill nor what's-her-name like Jane Fairfax (or she did, plus about ten years) but at least they're not campy. The only one I don't have is the Kate Beckinsale "Emma."
Satire, yes; foolishness, yes. Camp, no.
Now I'm done with "Persuasion" and I've cranked up "Sense and Sensibility," which I've worn a groove into. Man I love this movie.
Besides that Jane Austen fetishism is my usual state of being, one of my birthday gifts finally arrived. My mother-in-law gave me a gift certificate to Amazon and I indulged myself with The Making of Pride and Prejudice (and Out of Africa and Quincunx). I am all about paying attention to the man behind the curtain.
Pictures! Pictures of Colin Firth! Pictures of all the rest of them, including David Bamber, who played Mr. Collins, looking--quite startlingly--kind of attractive, in a Wes Bentley circa "American Beauty" kind of way.
Also some words. I was particularly interested in the research process. The Complete Servant, published in 1825. Digging through sketchily cataloged stores of wigs and hats. How to light a scene so it can be filmed without forgetting that in 1813 there was neither a constantly full moon nor the convenient 20th-century fallback of damping black asphalt for better reflectivity.
I thought that the girls would quite possibly be vegetarian so I was glad I had made Enchanted Broccoli Forest Green Green Noodle Soup. But it needed pesto, so Monday at lunch I bought basil (and some fruit for them to take with them because I was slightly in loco parentis (which is in fact how I justify calling them "girls")).
Only on the way home did I remember that in May the food processor died as it valiantly attempted to mix up dough for lasagne noodles. You'd think I'd've remembered, because half the soup--onions, zucchini, spinach--needed to be liquefied as well. The blender worked well for that (and for once prudence prevailed so I happened to be holding the top down when I switched it on), but it wouldn't work for pesto.
But then I remembered that people did make pesto before Cuisinart.
We have a hand-held thingie, something that fits in the palm with a six-bladed wheel. I sliced up the basil with that, then mashed up one (just one! though large) clove of garlic, enough pine nuts, enough cheese, a dash of salt, in the mortar and pestle. And then mixed it up in the basil. And it was so much better than usual. Maybe because I didn't overgarlick it, but I don't think so. I prefer to think it's because pesto prefers to be made the old-fashioned way.
Two 3.8-mile city rides.
I've wondered, over the past few days, why a house had chain-link fence around it. I discovered on the way home because it was barely there any more. It was only a 50s ranch without particular personality, but I'll be curious to see what goes up in its place.
I cooked. Again. Baking cookies doesn't count--that's dessert. I made the soup on Saturday, though it went uneaten until Wednesday. Tonight I made something from Almost Vegetarian, which I have to say, as a cookbook featuring allegedly healthful recipes, falls well short of its intention. Everything is packed full of dairy.
I made asparagus tips with a leek and scallions and parsley and orteggio (a circular, shallow dish of dime-sized pasta) and a dallop of yogurt (!) and some wine and muenster to melt into it at the end. Melting the muenster was the bad part; RDC was scornful of so primitive a method of adding cheese and thought it was going to be melted in wine first.
Sticky and too rich but I cooked it fine. Hey, I was proud.
I want to know--maybe not to learn, just to know--how to get a week's worth of food out of a set of ingredients. Two thirds of the leek and chives went into the compost--can you use leek leaves for stock? I still have a cup of leftover chopped onions from the soup that I didn't put in tonight's dish because it was already oniony enough.
As someone said recently of Can You Forgive Her? too much fun to get Serious Litterachur points for. Soap opera and all that Dickens interconnectedness. Way too much fun, even with the brickmakers' plight and Jo.
My sister cracks me up. Yesterday she emailed me saying she couldn't believe she'd had no response to the spinach story. She did the phone equivalent of sending the story to my yahoo account (which I seldom check), which is calling my cell phone (which I almost never turn on). So I turned on my cell to check my messages.
"I'm not even home yet and she's already making me crazy. This morning the phone rang at eight o'clock and it was her and I couldn't understand her before staggering into the living room where I have better reception. I asked her what she had to call me at the crack of hell about, and she got all flustered and said, 'Well, now I've forgotten.' But then she remembered that her spinach crop is so bountiful this year that I can take as much of it as I want. So she's waking me up three days before I go home to tell me I can have spinach."
Reportedly it's been soggy in New England this June and jumped from cold and wet to hot and wet. I am so glad I plan to go home in September, when the weather (barring hurricanes) is more dependable. Our father's home this week too though. Our mother's throwing a Father's Day picnic for her husband this year, and I don't know how my sister plans to juggle seeing our actual father on Father's Day with our mother's expectations about seeing her husband. If I lived near both sets of parents and I saw my notstepmother on Mother's Day instead of my actual mother, the hurt would be vast and percussive--and justified. I wonder whether my mother can make the parallel.
CLH left a postscript in a second message: "If it's all right with you, when I tell her how irritating the spinach thing was I am also going to tell her how inappropriate of her it was to inquire about the state of the gate-leg table during the turmoil of your house falling over into a swamp. 'They ripped off the leaves and are using them as flotation devices in the swampy areas.'"
Me, I fume until I snap, because I find trying to communicate to her the source of my bad feeling and her role in it so frustrating. More frustrating than fuming and snapping? I'm not sure.
(And yes, my mother did so inquire. She called me on my birthday, which was nice of course, and I told her I wasn't in a particularly birthday mood because of the uncertain state of the house. I told her about taking everything out of the furnace room to so we could see the whole thing, and calcium sulfates, and type 5 concrete, and the crystalline structure, and the cracking of the floor, and the disintegration of the support column behind the furnace. She asked, "Now where is the gateleg table in all this?" RDC and I have considered living in Blake's cage or maybe the garage if the house goes. Silly us, not to consider the primacy of the table.)
My sister works fast. I called my mother's house to tell her about the shocking new development (that I cooked) and to be told that the only reason I don't take more readily to this innate female skill is that RDC forcibly keeps me out of the kitchen, and also to talk to my sister, now home for the weekend.
My mother asked about the house and I told her what I told her before, about fixing the drainage and supporting the porch beam and replacing the columns. This time I was able to tell her that RDC was, as we spoke, routing a plank to fit under the porch beams, a nice manly activity I expected she would appreciate, to keep the porch roof up, and she asked, very solicitously, if it was actually falling down. "No, but it would if we didn't fix it." She was all concern this time, unlike last, and I knew CLH had already spoken to her.
Our mother passed the phone to my sister, who (after leaving her earshot) filled me in on lunch with our father (new malapropisms: "cosmatose" for "comatose," as in drinking to the point of, though whether anyone actually had a cosmopolitan I doubt, and "shitake," which is the sort of wave created in the pool when his apparently overweight notstepdaughterinlaw jumps in) and so forth.
I asked CLH how she'd broached the table topic, since it was obvious she had. "Well, I told her you were a little offended [note: amused enough to tell CLH, since any slight mother-error becomes story fodder] that that was her question when you told her about the house. She said, 'Well, I was concerned about the table,' so I pointed out that you were telling her about the house and she was concerned about a piece of furniture."
I know dwelling is unhealthy. But laughing about it, even if we're not quite to laughing it off, has to be good for us, right?
James Spader will never be anyone but Steff. And I hate Steff. I'm not sure if "Sex, Lies and Videotape" would have stood a chance with someone other than him in it; and in the two minutes of "Less Than Zero" I watched I thought Steff was a good choice to play Rip; but for Steff to be in "Secretary" didn't work for me. At all. I wondered who told him a bad Christopher Walken imitation would be a good idea. Because it wasn't.
I mistook the time and arrove at noon, but the pool wouldn't open until 1:15. So I sat and read We for over an hour before swimming only .5K, because I'd been away from the ball and chain long enough. It's such a short ride the bikeage doesn't count.
No, really I love my house. It's just that sometimes it warrants escape. We were going to work on it both days but we might play hooky and go bike up in Fraser tomorrow instead.
So I raked out the big stupid chunky mulch and spread some better stuff, though I still need to do a Home Despot run for more mulch and for stakes. Also I don't think groundcloth and mulch is best for the vinca to spread with. I wonder if pine needles--or sunflower seeds, hm--would suppress weeds enough while still enabling the vinca to spread from below.
The city's digging up the city and I have got to order fill before it gets to our street. If I have two cubic yards delivered on Friday, hopefully that will be in time for delivery to the street, the side of the house that needs it, rather than to the alley, which would be way more extra work than I want to take on.
Then I went for a swim.
Meanwhile RDC installed a steel-reinforced beam to the roof and added a vertical buttress as well. Evenings this week I am going to remove all the rock etc. from the north side and prime and paint the new wood bits. A lot of the bungalow porches have, or had, windows or at least glass on the north side, so you could sit on your porch somewhat protected from wintry winds. I figure the vertical beam will look like that. I hope. Rule the first: no paint on the brick.
Afterward I weeded some of the backyard. Whatever it is that looks kinda like a dandelion but isn't must be on speed: its stem is nearly a trunk, nearly wood, nearly an inch in diameter, and I am barely exaggerating.
And then I dug out the sprouty shrubby stump. I want the raspberries to expand thataway, is why it needed to leave. I couldn't quite bring myself to wear boots when it was over 80 but Tevas were enough to stomp--I first typed "stump"--on the shovel with. I dug and sawed through roots and dug and stomped and pried and finally flourished it above my head, Perseus-like. Blake did not turn to stone, and the only snake-ish things were worms, and it wasn't that ugly, but I was glad to see the end of it.
That I can't remember the source of this recommendation makes me itch, but recommended or discussed it was, so I requested it of the library. Someone whose taste I generally respect later said it was good, better than 1984.
Whatever.
Its descendents are 1984 and Brave New World, or so says the back of the translation. They're also dystopias, but otherwise but I see more of it in Anthem and This Perfect Day than in the former pair. Really it's all through This Perfect Day, to the point that Ira Levin should acknowledge Zamyatin (maybe he does).
The second recommender liked its mathyness and I did like how no revolution can be the last one because no number can be the last one, and how frightening the concept of the square root of negative one must be in an exactly rational society.
Mostly I thought it dull, like "Logan's Run" and The Giver. (Okay, The Giver isn't dull but frustratingly undeveloped).
I don't remember when I developed a taste for dystopias. I had 1984 in tenth grade and either Brave New World as well or I read it independently.
I also liked post-apocalyptic fare, or maybe only liked The Stand so much--one book when I was 14--that I drew a fallacy of generalization. Earth Abides disappointed mostly for its premise that Earth needs human husbandry but partly because I have an expectation I will like post-apocalyptic fiction--why I have that expectation, since it was only the The Stand, and that during my mercifully short Stephen King period, I don't know. Oh yeah, also Empty World by the Tripods trilogy's John Christopher, and I must have read several post-Armageddon books as a teenager as well, that being during the early '80s when we all expected to be toasting marshmallows over each other by next week. On the Beach was okay. I would have liked it better if I hadn't hated Shute's Town Like Alice.
Anyway, dystopias.
I must have read Ira Levin's This Perfect Day during high or maybe middle school as I branched out from Stephen King (I read and reread Rosemary's Baby, Stepford Wives, Boys from Brazil, and even his first one about people who take over the night. Boys and Day were my favorites, by far.) In my Ayn Rand stage, I adored Anthem. I read Utopia freshling year of college, and Erewhon sometime during college, though not for a class.
I should not be drawing a blank here. Oh of course! Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland, but of course that was, according to her intention, a utopia. Is The Dispossessed a u- and dystopia? This is how to get along on a subsitence-level planet and this is how excessive a luxurious planet can be? "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" shows up on a discussion of dystopian texts, speaking of LeGuin, but I wouldn't call that a dystopia anymore than, say, The Handmaid's Tale. Because their settings but not their primary themes are dystopian? I'm not sure I have a reason other than that.
The only unfamiliar title searches of dystopian novels turn up is It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis. When I remember to read that, let me remember why.
Wow.
When RDC wants to lure me into an evening of playing boat (i.e., not moving from the couch because of the sharks in the floor, a holdover from my sister's or my being being sent to our room not to move from our bed but the other freely sharing in the exile, thence not to stir from the bed, because of the sharks), he'll announce that there's nothing on but Jane Austen movies with Peter Gabriel soundtracks.
The fact that "The Last Temptation of Christ" is unwatchable has nothing to do with this. And I don't think he's seen "Birdy," but that doesn't matter because it's the book, not the movie, that's better worth knowing.
Peter Gabriel love aside, Long Walk Home approaches but does not touch its movie's brilliance. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is one of the best movies I've ever seen, with three of the most natural child actors I could ever imagine. It makes for particularly good watching so soon after reading Pigs in Heaven.
Someone recently compared this with The Lovely Bones while implying that the greater success of the latter was due to its being marketed as straight fiction instead of being ghettoized into fantasy. So I picked this up to see; the ongoing issue of What Is Genre Fiction interests me.
One reason The Lovely Bones sold better is that it's an adult book, or more easily an adult book, than this, which is straight YA (another layer of ghetto). Another is that Bones is about the death but more so about the relationships, and less the reason for the death--it's thematically more complex.
House aside--Flying in Place is from Tor, so I mentally waved at the Nielsen Haydens whom I know by two removes through online journaling and three in the real world--I wouldn't call either a fantasy. Fantastical elements do not make a fantasy in my world, any more than the horses and the southwest made All the Pretty Horses a western. To me the only thing that makes a genre book genre rather than mainstream is being formulaic.
Hey! "To Kill a Mockingbird" has a C.M. rating! True to the saying, the rule is thus tested. It's euthanasia.
16 miles, not technical though gravel and hairpin turns made things a little interesting, at 8,000 feet.
God it was beautiful. I was talking to my notstepmother on the phone as RDC and I sped west toward the foothills, which is the only thing that kept me from shouting with joy. The foothills, glory be, were green! Green green green, not brown. Green, such a lovely color.
The north-facing slopes were greener, but even the sun-blasted south-facing slopes had grasses and flowers on them, and the trees, for the first time in three years, had enough water to put out softly, brightly green buds on their tips. Berthoud Pass still had lovely quantities of snow on its peaks, and the north-facing slopes still had snow quite far down the mountainsides--well below the treeline, in the shelter of the pines. Last year at the end of June when we drove to Steamboat Springs, the state was already on fire in some bits and blowing into dust in other bits. As far as I know the reservoirs aren't full yet but I doubt if we passed Green Mountain Reservoir this year that we'd pass through a dust storm like last year's.
Last weekend we gave someone the basic introduction to Rocky Mountain National Park, and I was hoping, for the first weekend in June, that Moraine Park would be as filled with wildflowers as it's reputed to be. But not yet.
Today, in contrast, the Fraser River valley was a riot of color. We biked the Fraser-Granby trail, a lovely, easy ride, with some hills, some slopes, some up, some down, for me a perfect little tour. Lots of dandelions of course, lots of richly blue larkspur, something that looked like snow-in-summer but denser and lower and whiter though without the silvery-gray foliage, relatives of a daisy, several interesting little low mounds with yellow flowers tight to the ground and leaves above. Just gorgeous.
Riparian meadows, actually flowing water in streams and creeks, horses, lodgepole pine forests smelling of vanilla, century-old broken-down cabins, mountain bluebirds, quantities of swallows, and the most beautiful fox I have ever seen--not that I've seen many or had a long look at any--stippled grey and red with an enormous white tip to its tail.
And, despite the perfection of the day, furthering that perfection, we encountered but seven other cyclists the whole way.
A Jamba Juice is embedded in our grocery store, and today I got a most excellent large haul of vegetable pulp. The clerk thought I was insane but I can deal with that. After supper (kale and roasted garlic and tomatoes), I finally spread new mulch on the easement, did not add stakes or s because Home Despot had none, and called that done. Until gravel. I weed-whacked the backyard and combed all the bindweed smooth with a rake. In not quite four square feet, I spread the vegetable pulp, covered that with a thorough if thin layer of sunflower seed husks, and layered pine needles over all. In the next square I'll use coffee grounds. Even if the layers turn to sticky mush, no more, if they act as a weed suppressant that will make me happy.
Today the harvest began in as much earnest as I expect it will muster. Since Friday I've plucked a couple-three berries from the canes per day. Today I nearly filled the bottom of a cereal bowl with perfect red raspberries. Enough to make a teaspoon of jam.
Also the cherries are about a week to ten days from being ready. Maybe more, but not much more.
RDC thought the vegetable garden was doing better this year with its infusion of compost; I had wondered whether the lesser sun has made the tomatoes grow more slowly. The yellow squash is on its own now; the cucumbers are sticking it out; no sunflower seed sprouted; maybe three of the several spinach seeds are now a plant; I see no carrots; four bean plants are growing. I planted most of those seeds too late, and all of them got snowed on almost immediately and I also abandoned them for a week without watering. Three of the squash plants I seeded under the cherry tree are up. Thanks to the squirrels, there's not a plum left on the tree; the nectarine put out few blossoms this year and has a correspondingly low number of fruit; the pear has many many many baby pears, perhaps enough to survive the rodent onslaught.
Every year it's an experiment.
Moonshadow's time is 10:38. I started scribbling a little after 10. I bet one snort of cockatiel dander that, despite the actual differences in the times I saved-to-publish these four entries, this one will show the same time, 22:10 as the first three. Why?
By the time rain began and I got up to lower the north windows, at 3 o'clock, it had been thundering and lightninging for a longish time. I only closed the two on the right: if rain came in the two on the left it would fall on us in bed. Meanwhile we wanted the cool air, and it wasn't windy so the rain just dropped straight down.
The storm was far away, judging by the lapse between light and sound, but huge: the thunder was tremendously loud despite the distance, and each outburst was neither a simple clap nor even a roll but a seconds-long rumble. I am looking this up now, but my guess is that the higher the storm builds, the longer the path lightning travels from cloud to ground, thus the longer the thunder. But that doesn't make any sense, because the difference it takes lightning to go 20,000 versus 50,000 feet must be wee. But more distance would mean more gases to expand. So maybe not so nonsensical.
After the rain started, the sound and light show ceased or moved on, so I fell back asleep thinking it couldn't've rained very much. But the front garden is flattened and detritus marks the high-tide mark near overburdened storm drains.
I am so enjoying this summer.
It had not thundered all damn day but any public organization has to protect everyone from no chance at all, so the pool was closed for lap swim. A lifeguard was present nonetheless and she suggested one of the indoor pools.
Indoor pools in the summer? People are freaks, they really are.
I will figure this out.
I just used the Ohio Public Library's tree identifier finally to determine that the Other tree is a European mountain ash or rowan. I had no idea. Rowan sounds so sexy and romantic and this tree is orange: the bark has an orange tint and the fruit is orangey, in wee little clustered berries that, according to Ohio, birds eat. We call it the Other tree because we don't like it much. I thought, from my tree identification guidebook, that it was a sumac.
I have used the Ohio site before trying to establish a species of tree I love here, with such a scent. A couple were planted by a new housing development on my bike commute and I bet if I ever could find its architect or designer, they would know. In the meantime I'm going to go through the tree identifier name by name.
Okay, none of those. The closest I've found, the narrowleaf cottonwood, doesn't mention the tree's shoots. Like a quaking aspen or our cherry tree, whatever tree I'm after spreads with shoots; when I discovered that I realized that identifying it mattered less since I wouldn't plant it.
We reminded me of dystopias, obviously, and I searched for a used This Perfect Day online. It arrived yesterday. It and We and Anthem all have in common that the protagonist can't handle the idea of his woman touched by another. I wonder if Asher's name is in The Giver is because of Ashi here. Probably not, but it's such an uncommon name I've wondered how Lowry thought of it. I didn't like We, and this is Ira Levin cheesy and derivative of We, but it was a lot more fun to read. Maybe because it had a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory moment, when Papa Jan shows Chip the factory.
Years ago, somehow, my mother-in-law and I discovered that we are the only other people we've ever known to have read the book. I called her yesterday when it arrove and she was excited. She has never read Boys from Brazil either, another book I excacvated from my mother's attic in January, so I have to get to the post office to ship them both off in time for her vacation.
I'm sick! Sick! Besides that I say that anyway, because of a movie or "Bloom County" (The Onion recently ran an article about someone whose pop culture references stopped in 1988 but I go all the way to 1994), it's more fitting to say now because I'm reading This Perfect Day, in which nonassimilated members of the society are "sick." And I didn't think of this in previous readings, but that's a nod to Erewhon, in which criminality is sick but illness is criminal. Hence you say someone's "got the socks" (i.e. stolen a pair of socks) as a euphemism for having a cold. Hence Blake's "getting the flaps."
Anyway.
Where would I be without that word?
I'm sick! Sick! This morning it was pouring (again! I should have planted a tree this spring, but in the window of time when you do that, before it heats up, not that it's done that yet either praise be, we didn't know what the water situation was going to be. Ironic, innit?)--
I'm sick! Sick! This morning it was pouring so I drove because I am made of sugar and will melt, thank you Kymm. NPR or CPR was fundraising so I switched to KBCO and then to one of the "classic" rock stations. A song was just beginning. A song I knew really well. "Wow!" I thought. "I haven't heard 'I Will Follow' in years!" Because I hadn't. And still haven't, because the song was, in fact, "Two Hearts Beat As One." I haven't listened to U2 much since 1992, well after Bono's Christ/Elvis complex began to bother me, and I only just bought War digitally. And then I plugged in my iPod, that being its point, and listened to the album from the beginning. "Sunday Bloody Sunday," "Seconds," "New Year's Day," and then I was at work. At my desk, I skipped "Like a Song..." because I decided, with 20 years' remove, that the song sucked. Then "Drowning Man." Then I skipped "Refugee" because I didn't like it even then, and "Red Light" too. But "Surrender"! That was my anthem! My angsty teenage anthem, baby!
But that's not even the sickness, OMFB. No no no no no. Listening, I wondered if I could find setlists from the Unforgettable Fire tour on that newfangled thing they've got nowadays called "the web." I looked. I knew it wasn't tenth grade, because in tenth grade my first concert was Duran Duran, and then I broke my arm. It was eleventh grade, spring, and I bought a $15 ticket from a schoolmate for $20 and considered myself hard done by. Here I found two dates for Hartford Civic Center, 20 and 23 April. I considered, for half a second, which of the two I had attended. And then I remembered. It had to be the 23rd, the birthday of my high school crush.
Of course I also remember the phone number of my childhood best friend, even though I haven't dialed it since about 1980. That's just how my mind works. I remember in kindergarten when Miss Pancera (who got married the next summer, and I have never been able to remember her married name, even though I saw her occasionally throughout my entire elementary school tenure, because that is also how my mind works) asked my phone number, I gave HPV's, because that's the one I knew.
And maybe I'm not that sick. 23 April sticks out as a date not because it was the crush's birthday but because on 23 April 1985 I saw U2 but on 23 April 1984 I was having surgery on my broken arm. I for damn sure remembered that contrast. (Remembering that I noticed the coincidence of dates doesn't strike me as being as sick as remembering an obsolete birthday.)
But I am still fairly pathe. The exclamation "You're sick! Sick!" is what Milo yells at Opus after Opus ran up thousands of dollars at 1-900-DIAL-aMOM. I reread my Bloom County anthologies far too many times. And it's a pity that the past tense of "reread" is indistinguishable in print from the present tense. Because that is past tense, OMFB. Just not past enough.
By the way, the set list was
11 O'clock tick tock
I will follow
Two hearts beat as one
Seconds
MLK
The unforgettable fire
Wire
Sunday bloody sunday
The cry
The electric co.
A sort of homecoming
Bad
October
New Year's Day
Pride (In the name of love)
Knocking On Heaven's Door
Gloria
40
But can that be right? I remember Bono singing some lines from "Ruby Tuesday," a song I didn't know. I probably had to ask someone at school what that was, or I didn't ask because that would have been uncool but remembered and wrote down the lines. Maybe they didn't do the whole song.
If nothing else the Addams Family movies were well cast, and Wednesday's slow smile at camp has always struck me as one of the best and scariest smiles in moviedom.
I'm watching "Harold and Maude" for the 90th time and it's clearly been too long--maybe only once or twice since Haitch gave it to me for my birthday in 1997? 1998?
Because when Harold smiles after Candy runs screaming is indisputably the best movie smile, scary or not, ever.
Also, "They're my species." Also, "So I'll always know where it is." Also, "Go and love some more."
Sometime during college--it must have been in college because my father was living in the house again and he subscribed to cable with HBO--"Harold and Maude" came on a pay channel one later afternoon and I began to watch it (again). Eventually both of my parents joined me, and though I don't understand how anyone can begin watching a movie for the first time elsewhere than from the beginning, I was much more pleased that it captured their attention. The computer dates amused my father most and the staged deaths amused my mother not at all. But they were both captivated, and I was so grateful and relieved. I have always since used "Harold and Maude" as a gauge. If you prefer cats to dogs, we can maybe talk. If you don't like "Harold and Maude" you have no soul.
We just got it on DVD, which has two theatrical trailers as special features. The first one has a collage of shots with "If You Want to Sing Out"; the second gives the whole damn thing away. And neither features That Trailer Voice saying "In a world..."
Two 3.8-mile rides, with enough thunder and lightning that evening lap swim was canceled. Tomorrow summer is supposed to arrive, right on time, and with it dryness so hopefully fewer canceled swims.
One of the reasons the house is falling into a swamp is improper drainage. Today I took the first step in correcting that by receiving five cubic yards, 2.5 tons, of dirt, tipped into the street against the curb in front of the house.
Now then. The city pools close in the middle of August when the lifeguards go back to school but the pools do not open in the middle of May when they leave school. Why? It's a mystery. No, they open in mid-June--last Saturday to be precise. I swam Saturday, we went mountain-biking Sunday, and then Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the only post-work lap swim times, there were thunderstorms (or at least a tiny little smidge of rain three miles away that we had to be protected from) so swim was canceled.
So today I was all stoked for a noon swim--there is a noon lap swim every day, although the adults who want lapswim generally have jobs that prevent their taking advantage of it, and why do I live in the land o' no lakes again?--so after the dirt's 11:15 arrival I barrowed only three loads from the great big pile before biking over to the pool.
The great big piercing blue sky that Denver generally has all day clouded up fast as the dozens of littl'uns vacated the general swim. In ten minutes the overcast was complete. I swam .7K before we were whistled out, and for goodness sake, a thunderstorm in the middle of the day? That just doesn't happen here. I shucked my suit, regained my shorts and (white) tank top, Tevas and sandals, and biked home as fast as I could through pouring rain, gusty winds, and maybe some thunder and lightning.
My great big pile of dirt in the street wanted to swim away already. Denver might not get a lot of rain, but it really enjoys its downpours. I grabbed tarps from the lasagne mulch in back, from over the leaf pile, from under the brush pile. I dug a trench through the dirt for the lake that already had formed on the upstream side to drain. I hastily reattached all the long gutters that're supposed to divert the water from leaking into the basement--those I'd removed that morning so the wheelbarrow could get through.
I dashed into the house to swap sunglasses for contact lenses and sopping wet white--though muddy--tank top for something more practical and opaque. Just as I emerged, the rain, true to Denver form, dripped to a halt. It's rain, and I cannot resent it. But I maybe did give the sky the stink-eye a couple of times.
So my next barrow loads were of mud as I tried to buttress the pile from further erosion. My gloves were soaked from the lake and the stream and the ditch, so I shucked them. But when my shorts had got so filthy I could no longer wipe the mud onto them for a better purchase on shovel or wheelbarrow, I gave up.
I broke for dry clothes and a sandwich over a few minutes of "Sense and Sensibility." I have really worn a groove in it--it crashed twice and I restarted Moondshadow, taking that as my hint to get back to work. Twice more in the afternoon, thunderstorms passed through, though only with showers, and I took the second rain as a signal to stop for the day.
So here I am, in warm sunlight, on my porch swing, listening to Crosby Still & Nash and now the Waterboys, eating cherries, and not reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.
I am loving this summer.
I bought this not as long ago as I had assumed, since it was published in English in 1993. But it's an intriguing title and the cover is pretty, and it's about Greek mythology, and really what more do you need? I put it, somewhat guiltily, into my to-be-read shelf a few months ago, and then Teresa Nielsen Hayden mentioned it and so did Lucy, so I picked it up again or for the first time.
It's been a long time since I've read philosophical fiction, or whatever you would call this. Milan Kundera and Robert Calasso have probably nothing in common besides their ability to intimidate me. I do know my d'Aulaire and Hamilton and Homer and Ovid inside and out, which has to help, but not noticeably.
The prose, even in translation, is rich and melodic.
"For the Homeric heroes there was no guilty party, only guilt, immense guilt. That was the miasma that impregnated blood, dust, and tears. With an intuition the moderns jettisoned and have never recovered, the heroes did not distinguish between the evil of the mind and the evil of the deed, murder and death. Guilt for them is like a boulder blocking the road; it is palpable, it looms. Perhaps the guilty party is as much a sufferer as the victim. In confronting guilt, all we can do is make a ruthless computation of the forces involved. And, when considering the guilty party, there will always be an element of uncertainty. We can never establish just how far he really is guilty, because the guilty party is part and parcel of the guilt and obeys its mechanics. Until eventually he is crushed by it perhaps, perhaps abandoned, perhaps freed, while the guilt rolls on to threaten others, to create new stories, new victims" (p. 95).
I haven't mentioned it because I hadn't seen the evidence in the rock yet, but now I have so I will. Haitch and McCarthy are engaged, and the subject line refers not to any conversation or visit, I am happy to say, but to the design of the ring. The extremely sparkly stone--that's clarity, right?--is tension-mounted in titanium so there is no metal beneath or around it. Light can enter it from almost any point except two, at 9 and 3 o'clock where the band touches the…rim or whatever you call the transition from the round top to the pointed bottom.
We toasted them with the champagne KREL and her husband gave us in France (that I schlepped in my carryon wrapped in my nightgown, so I'm glad that went well) and fed them raspberries from the garden (yesterday's take made two layers in the bottom of the same style of bowl). Also I gave her her French KitKats. And she gave me my birthday presents: a chocolate and raspberry candy bar, a book of essays on northern New York (I love local books), and moose cookie cutters, big and wee.
I brought them into the kitchen to join them with my other moose cookie cutter. "Oh, I didn't know you already had one," said Haitch, perhaps disappointed.
"But now I have a whole moose family!" I exclaimed. All three have the giant palmate spreads of antlers that mark them as meeses, so it's quite authentic in the lisaverse that they're a bull, cow, and baby. When SEM discovered in college how squeamish I was about giving birth, he accessorized the worst possible baby for me: claws, tail fins, and velcro, and there might have been antlers.
We had dinner at Mizuna, which used to be Aubergine. I don't know why I was the designated driver on the way, except I had had only a sip of champagne while the others had finished the bottle, since I cannot parallel park, even by Braille, unless the space is big enough for a yacht.
Mmm, food. RDC had made me tea in the post-dirt pre-dinner hosing-off period, and I sucked down some Advil, so I was even awake for this meal. I had a goat cheese and morel and some green sprouty thing salad with my first fava beans; RDC had paté; Haitch had some kind of potato and corn pasta; McCarthy had macaroni and cheese, at Haitch's request, so I could try some.
Macaroni and cheese is one of my continued finickinesses. I didn't like noodles or cheese as a child, so after I was grown and loved both and lived with a good cook, I figured hey, pasta, cheese, what can go wrong? I don't know, but I still didn't like it, until last night. It maybe helped that this mac & muck, as my sister (whose favorite food it was) called it, was made with mascapone cheese and studded with lobster. Maybe.
Then RDC and I had prosciutto-wrapped scallops with a shiitake-potato-fava garnish and McCarthy had halibut and Haitch a vegetarian sampler, and we all finished with a flourless chocolate cake covered in crême fraiche. How do you spell that? Whatever.
The restaurant did crumb the table and refold your napkin if you left the table, but it did not provide the far more practical service of a valet with a handcart to roll you back to your car.
Besides that I'm a freak who wakes up early when she doesn't have to and that it's the shortest day of the year, that is.
A family of magpies in the cherry tree outside my bedroom window. Five baby magpies whining mag? mag? mag? mag? mag? etc. while their parents ate and tried to encourage the babies to eat instead of begging to be fed. The babies have short tails and are scruffy but already have their adult white bibs and black hoods.
Now, them I don't mind sharing the cherries with. But yesterday I staggered into the backyard to find a squirrel sitting up on its hind tentacles in the grass beside the raspberry canes, just scooping fruit into its fiendish little mouth. I shooed it off, but it just looked at me; I stomped and yelled scat so it scurried--slowly, but it's a squirrel--first to the vegetable garden, with me quite close to it, clapping my hands and saying "Shoo!" and "Scat!" and "Git!" (so much better with an i than an e in that context) until it finally hopped the fence. Blighter.
Which reminds me that Haitch said she had considered a squirrel and nut set of cookie cutters before the moose ones but then realized that wouldn't be such a welcome thing. No, probably not, except then I could bite a whole bunch of squirrel heads off, not in the messy geeky way either.
Which also reminds me that Haitch is about to read Geek Love. Good. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets…." What a great book.
Okay, now I'm getting up. Dirt and Order of the Phoenix and yet another deceptively sunny day that will cloud over at 11:57 a.m. await.
I had shoveled and barrowed enough to be tired when I got to the pool; I did two laps with a kickboard and one of sidestroke in the slowest lanes, among the vastly pregnant and the old and the abbreviated before finding my stride. That lost my time so I did only 16 laps altogether instead of 20, one mile instead of 2 K. But it was a glorious day, a wonderful swim, right for the first day of summer.
When I emerged from the pool I thought I had a most viscous water clog in my left ear. Maybe after twenty years of breathing to the left my right ear is trained enough to shed water, but when the left gets plugged, it stays plugged. The ride home was interesting. I dashed inside for a drop of isoprophyl alcohol to break the surface tension: no dice. Huh.
Then I admired RDC's handi- and footiwork: while I was gone he had dug a ditch along the property line and stomped grapes all over the fill I had barrowed into place on Friday and Saturday morning. Besides a barrowload for the raspberry patch, there was nothing for me to do until the fill settled down so the sections could take more--nothing…for me…to do…on the house. It was very strange. So Blake and I settled on the porch swing to read Cadmus and Harmony with my head tilted to the left.
RDC was still muddy so I ran his errands inside, like to refill his water bottle and fetch scissors to snip open the silicone he was patching a gutter with. Every time I got up I noticed I was more disoriented in a way people with hearing loss must somehow accommodate. So I gave in completely to nappitude, bringing a floor pillow and the picnic blanket to the swing for more comfortable left-sided reading. Or napping.
I heard Blake greet someone, "wheet wheet!" and I thought RDC was on the steps taking off his boots. But no, I heard him from farther away, "Do you need me to sign for that?" I sat up, not quite awake yet, off-kilter. "It's what you've been waiting for," he told me.
The mailman stood at the mailbox by the door with a box. I grinned and slid it from under his arm with a grin and my thanks. And there were the scissors, fresh from silicone duty. There was no more sleeping.
I did get up, though, when the sun reached more than half the swing. I read for a spell in Vito before realizing it would go better if I weren't wearing sunglasses. I was really out of it. When RDC came in, he suggested an ickier cause of my hearing loss. The next step, warm water and hydrogen peroxide, did indeed fix me. Gross.
Blake and I then joined RDC on the patio, where he was grilling asparagus and bison bratwurst (the point of that eludes me--why disguise bison? But it was in the fridge). I took a bowl and gathered raspberries to snack on and sat reading before dinner--after chasing RDC around the backyard and swatting him with my book, which he tossed onto and then retrieved from the garage roof.
We left Harry Potter on page 178 and Blake very disappointed--two nights out in a row, three for RDC--and hopped on a bus toward downtown.
I feel a little disloyal to Old Lyme but glad too, because, not before time, I really like my city. I love being able to use public transit to a hopping downtown with a Pride Fest and at least something going on every summer weekend. The Pride Fest might have meant the bus turned around several blocks before Auraria, but it was a lovely walk, through Larimer Square with its chalk-paintinged street and over Cherry Creek.
The last time I came here--I wrote this between sets in a little notebook CLH gave me, so "came here" instead of "went there"--also the first time, in December to see Peter Gabriel, the bus dropped us at the Auraria campus and we hoofed the short distance to the Pepsi Center. There is no traffic signal nor even a pedestrian crosswalk between that last stop of a major bus route and this major destination. So we jaywalked. This time, I didn't know where in the complex the attractively named Universal Lending Pavillions at the Pepsi Center Complex would be but I figured a large tent would give itself away. It did. Will-call was obvious too, and overall I liked the Pavillions immediately because it was like the Fleet Pavillions in Boston where I saw the Cowboy Junkies with CLH. And because this place is right on the South Platte, there is a breeze. That's not so unusual for Denver in the evening, but it is for New England, so it was pleasantly reminiscent of the coast.
When we arrove, RDC wanted a beer. Despite Denver's having the highest proportion of brew pubs per capita in the country, Coors is still just up the street. So he got the only premium option, Killian's Red, which he described as Coors with red food coloring, and I got a water. Noshing being my weakness, I looked around in dismay at the foods offered. My sister would have been happy, but I need chocolate not salt. Finally, tucked away in a corner, I found an ice cream stand. Adequately supplied, we sat down just as Robert Randolph and His Family Band took the stage.
I only just learned about this band and I'm not sure if RDC has known about them for long. If I may quote William from "Almost Famous," he is incendiary. He and his 12-string steel guitar smoked. He and his band played only five songs, but they all evolved through jams. I wasn't sure of the titles, but setlists are why I brought the little notebook:
Then Susan Tedeschi came out. I've known about her only since January and I don't know all her song titles either. These might be obvious lines from the choruses:
This is ridiculous--neither the News nor the Post reviewed the concert, so I can't track down songs. In sum, good show, good guitar, glad Robert Randolph played with her, glad RDC liked her, startled to find out that her speaking voice is high and squeaky, considering how throaty and deep her singing voice is.
Spoilers abound, following in white text: Nothing that happens in the first 800 pages has anything to do with the series as a whole. This reminded me uncomfortably of Shelters of Stone, in which nothing that has anything to do with the series happens until the very end, when Ayla and Whinney both hatch and Ayla decides to become a shaman. Rowling does the same thing with Sirius that George Lucas does with Obi-Wan Kenobi, in stripping the protagonist of his last remaining parental figure, but as the exact parallel to Obi-Wan is not Sirius but Dumbledore, to lose Sirius instead of Dumbledore wasn't as bad as could be. Also, we barely know Sirius, since he hardly figured in Goblet of Fire and scarcely appeared in this either to any personal degree. Despite that Sirius's Animagus form was a big black dog named Padfoot, I remain fonder of Lupin. And of Mad-Eye Moody. In the final pages of exposition--Rowling also does the Bad Guy Gives Away Evil Plan thing--Dumbledore admits to making a mistake, failing in his protection of Harry by thinking as himself, as an old man, instead of as a young nearly-man, as Harry. He also describes Sirius as the one person Harry would go to any length to rescue--which makes me wonder why it was Ron, not Sirius, at the bottom of the lake in the final test of the Triwizard Tournament. My answer: because the reader knows Ron, and the reader knows Ron because Ron'd been there all along. He didn't trot into and then out of the story as Sirius did.
Dumbledore told Harry a lot but he still hasn't let on why Snapes can't have the job he wants so badly. And if he had a reason not to realize that that wasn't really Mad-Eye Moody last time, I've forgotten it.
My Usan edition seems to have been incompletely Usanized. Harry eats "sausages and mash" instead of "bangers and mash" but nor does he eat "sausages and mashed potatoes." There's a reference to the Sorcerer's Stone. But Fred and George sell candies that make you sick so you can "skive" off classes, and they "take the mickey out of" Ron for being made a prefect; a character called Mundungus is a fence and uses a slang word for "steal" that slips my mind--"scrog," maybe. Most obviously, Harry also puts on his trainers. That's not Rowling's fault of course but the publishing house's for Usanizing the text at all and then fast and sloppy to boot.
I'm certainly not fond of Rowling's excessive use of capitals when more expressive writing would better indicate emphasis. And she still uses more showing than telling.
Overall, another fun book that I continue not to believe deserves the analysis or accolades some give it.
Nope. I have nothing more to say. I'm tapped.
Partly this is true. Partly I have poisoned myself with hydrogenated fat today so am feeling headachy and ill and down-in-de-dumps, and by god I have got to stop quoting Bloom County. At least the first part, "headachy and ill," is from September, not that Rosamund Pilcher is such an improvement.
When I'm alone in the house, I'm less tidy than when I'm not alone. Partly it's courtesy for my housemate, partly it's that the presence of the housemate keeps my sluggishness and my entropy in check.
Usually when I come home, Blake is not my first stop. Usually when I arrive, I go into the bedroom to drop bag and shoes, into the bathroom to pee, and only then into RDC's study to kiss him and take Blake and then change my clothes and make his supper and get the mail and so forth. When RDC is away, Blake is my first stop for two reasons: he's right there, by the living room window where I rolled his cage in the morning, and he's been alone all day.
Yesterday, I did go outside after I got home but only to bring out the trash and gather raspberries: only out the back, using the spare key that lives convenient to that door. This morning, I looked for my keys. Usually I lose them by throwing them on my bag instead of clipping them to it, so they get lost in a pocket sometimes. Not so. I tried to retrace yesterday's path: did I drop them on Blake's cage stand' My bag lay near the coffee table: did I drop them there to mar its finish' Did I put them on the mantel, there to be lost among baby shower and wedding invitations and anniversary cards' The most likely place was the dining table, or from there to have fallen onto a dining chair. No. The bathroom counter' The nightstand by my bed' My skirt pocket' The kitchen counter'
They have to be somewhere in the house: I got into it last night. But today I'm using the spare car key and the spare house key, and if I lose those I'm screwed. I clipped them into their zippered pocket as soon as I exited the car this morning.
Said CoolBoss when I got to work: 'But you drove' Today's Bike-to-Work day!' And so it is, but today at lunch, since I didn't do it yesterday evening, I am going out to get gravel to fill the last of the ditch. Also, since RDC is away, I have been a lazy toadstool, see letting house drift into entropy, and driven. Monday I brought him to the airport, true. Yesterday I wanted to get home early enough to spend some time with Blake before my swim, but it was 55 and I didn't swim.
CoolBoss also asked if losing keys was a pattern for us--just a few weeks ago I zoomed out on my bike at 2:00 in the afternoon because RDC had locked himself out of the car in front of Whole Foods, to rescue him as he had rescued me from bad or at least less than ideal weather. No, that was the first time he ever in his life locked himself out of the car--the keys were on the passenger seat where he dropped them before messing with his phone headset or getting the shopping bags out of the backseat. ('You two belong in Boulder,' she opined. 'Canvas shopping bags, Whole Foods, biking to work.') I used to lock myself out of Fugly early on, but since she was an '80 Omni with pull-up locks, as long as I could find a wire coathanger I was okay.
I don't, or I haven't yet, locked myself out of my house. I do often lose my keys, but only inside the house. If I lose these spares I'm screwed. SPM has a housekey and I should maybe keep one at work, but the Cassidy key I'm using is the 'valet' key--it works the ignition but not the glovebox. It lives in the house for just such occasions, since I lose my keys more often than we mistrust what valets we use.
2.1K in one hour! I know normal people can swim faster than that but I've been getting a mile in lately, though I think this might have been the first time the lifeguards actually allowed a full hour. Usually they don't rope off the lanes until the lapswim hour has started.
The reason to do housework on weeknights is so it's done for the weekend. I'm not proud of spending the week rereading Harry Potter and watching television, but so it went. By the weekend I was way too much in my head and mindless crap like that wasn't keeping me out of it. Now, Sunday evening, the house is clean (even the bathroom and the birdcage), the weedcrop is weedwhacked (except for the bachelor's button, which is too pretty to be a weed), the trees and gardens are watered, a quart of cherries are in the freezer, the day's raspberries are in a bowl near to hand, the laundry's done (though just piled on the bed with its flipped, notated mattress and clean line-dried linens), groceries are bought and away, the drainage ditch is full of gravel, and if 80 pounds of birdseed are still in Cassidy, well, the baby shower was really nice.
"And all at once she understood what myth is, understood that myth is the precedent behind every action, its invisible, ever-present lining. She need not fear the uncertain life opening up before her. Whichever way her wandering husband went, the encircling sash of myth would wrap around the young Harmony. For every step, the footprint was already there."