Kinwork:
Lisa:
Stuff I keep putting off
Read
Exercise
Which is how I prefer to be. I raced (relatively speaking) home, swapped work stuff for swim stuff, pedaled slowly to the pool, swam 1.7K, came home to dinner on the patio, picked a quart of cherries and a handful of raspberries, fed me and RDC the latter and pitted and froze the former, folded and put away laundry that I took from the dryer only this morning, and here I am.
At the pool swam a man in my lane, the slower of the two medium lanes. He more thrashed than swam and he could not keep to the right. Also he was too slow for the medium lanes. A length and a half after I noticed him, he ran into me several yards (meters, whatever) from the shallow end. He stood up. I faced oncoming swimmers and told him, quite kindly I thought, that he needed to wear goggles so that he could see to keep to the right. Although he did not physically speak like a stupid person, his content was stupid: he didn't know the word for goggles (he sounded like a native Usan though), he hadn't noticed you should keep to the right, his eyes hurt but he hadn't connected that to his lack of goggles. I gestured for him to move on, out of other swimmers' way; he either didn't see or didn't comprehend. I gave up and walked to the end and that he followed. He said he wasn't used to the pool's being roped off and I told him about general swim and lap swim. I referred him to Gart Bros. for goggles and pushed off, pleased with how frustrated I hadn't been at his numskullery.
Swimming, I tried to figure out his deal. He could have been just not as bright as average, on the left side of the bell curve, without being left enough to be mentally disabled. Had he just had a shock? A concussion? Could anyone be that blasé?
Some time later when I took a water break, I heard him in the next lane over saying to another swimmer, "I was too slow for that lane and they kicked me out." I had said nothing about his speed at all. And if he thought he was too slow for the slower medium lane, why would he move into the faster medium lane instead of into the slow ones? And I didn't ask him to leave the lane.
I somewhat wanted to say, at least to the other swimmer, that I didn't kick him out, that he could swim neither straight enough for lap nor fast enough for four of the six lanes. I didn't, because she probably had noticed and I have that much self-respect. I don't have so much that I could just gloss over it, thus this.
Two 3.8-mile city rides and a 1.7K swim (and another twoish miles to the pool and back).
When we first moved here, everything was migratory. We had about as much crap as any two average English grad students and the Best Value U-Haul and I packed extremely efficiently, thus with room for nonperishable foods. In our first months in Denver, we finished off a lot of migratory pasta. I don't know how we came to have a badger in the oven (I think it might have chewed through the wires one time when we were going to feed ABW and KRW baked chicken; instead we fed them delivered pizza), but it came along too.
And so it's gone, over these past eight years, finding migratory items, with decreasing frequency. I guess we don't have a lot of use for isoprophyl alcohol, because last weekend when I took it from the cupboard I recognized the old-style Stop & Shop price sticker on the top. That it was Stop & Shop brand to begin with probably clued me into its being migratory. I commented to RDC that this was probably the last of the migratory stuff.
Saturday I polished a silver barrette I seldom wore with my hair really long: too much hair to make a ponytail with the barrette and my occasional attempts to draw the front hair back into a barrette and leave the rest loose seldom lasted. I wore it to the baby shower, since it was cool enough to wear my hair down. This morning as I brushed my teeth I noticed the little jar still on the sink instead of put away down in the laundry room, with Stop & Shop sticker on its lid.
That's a lifetime supply of silver polish, unless I acquire actually silver silverware. Or maybe it would work on the floor lamp, whose hood is getting fingerprinted. Yes, knowing that I'll always have something migratory in the house is comforting to me.
Blake is so happy that his daddy is home. Unfortunately RDC's day began with a 7:30 conference call, remotely accessing others' computers, meaning he was stuck at his desk. He preemptively covered Blake in the bathroom, because besides Blake protesting whenever he doesn't his own way, he also is compelled to respond and compete with the whiny baby mapgies infesting the neighborhood. RDC called me when he was free again. Instead of napping or moping or breaking his heart or whatever he usually does when covered up, Blake sang and chattered, showing what a sweet and wonderful buddy he is. He kept asking, "You're a good boy buddy?"
As soon as I joined them in the living room tonight, Blake wanted me. "Oho," said RDC. "He's done with me." But between work and swim and cherries, Blake hadn't seen me all day either. He is now making his beloved nails-on-a-chalkboard sound, grooming his beak as he gets sleepy on my shoulder. The very picture of a contented cockatiel.
Two 3.8-mile city rides. 94 degrees, though maybe less at 4:00. I miss fireflies, but we also don't have deerflies that feast on joggers. I miss peepers but not the bugs the peepers live on. 94F is brutal in New England, but here's it's just damn hot. Here, sweat works. I do have a sweat rash on the underside of one breast. In an ideal world, no body part would touch another: no buttcheek overhanging the thigh, no breast touching the ribcage. Heat and friction are not so enjoyable in this context.
This is really good, much better than Blind Assassin, whose snaring of the Booker Prize I don't understand. Blind Assassin was really incoherent, for me. It shared with Oryx and Crake a protagonist not quite in tune with its surroundings, which is interesting, and there are shades of her other books as well. Probably unavoidably with Handmaid's Tale, since it's a futuristic dystopia, and with one specific tidbit about the main character's mother (Offred sees her mother, now and Unwoman, in her training at the Red Center; Jimmy sees his mother in footage of a protest long after her disappearance). Offred's Scrabble words, which all had to do with beds and procreation as well as using the high-score letters, also echo in Snowman's occasional flashes of vocabulary: I would have to look it up to confirm but I am pretty sure Offred uses "valance," as this character does as well. Atwood uses Tony Fremont's knowledge of war from Robber Bride to inform Jimmy and Glenn's game of Blood and Roses, which is a nice touch. Oryx sounds sometimes like Xenia and sometimes like Roz ("Oh honey, you need a new table!") and the vegetarianism reminds me of Edible Woman.
I am really glad I attended CGK's class presentation on Alias Grace, because it hadn't made much sense before then, not even with seeing Margaret Atwood herself in between my initial reading and that class. Blind Assassin I just didn't like. This sounds much more like Atwood to me and I am well pleased.
Oh, and one of the baby shower diversions was to wear a photo sticker of whichever parent you thought the baby would resemble. If it looked like the father, its hobby would be fantasy baseball, if it looked like the mother, it would have to read all of Atwood's books by the age of 11. I did not hazard a guess there. I did mark a square in the baby pool: the weight was hard to guess because she looks huge but I wanted to be merciful, but the date was easy because she wants it born early and one of the early dates was 29 July, a favorite date of mine with, for once, no real-life significance. PSA's and my anniversary, though I assigned that occasion to that date, out of the week we spent together, because I was already fond of it rather than its being on that date that any first thing happened.
Later, fin.
Margaret Atwood and her names, Margaret Atwood and her vocabulary and vocabularies. Her most brilliant coinage here is foetility. I looked up mephitic and mastitis. Queynt is not in my Tenth, but it is in my Chaucer. Again, a high-scoring Scrabble word with sexual overtones. Leman is not high-scoring but it does mean mistress. I had to look up fungible, which I shouldn't've'd to do but did and it didn't mean anything like what I thought. Pullulate is another completely unfamiliar but thematically perfect word, as is pistic. And so she strings together words: fungible, pullulate, pistic, cerements, trull. Succulent, morphology, purblind, quarto, frass.
Best book in months.
1.2K.
I did the first two laps with a kickboard. So I kicked hard without worrying about breathing, because the fact is, though I have always believed I can do a passable Australian crawl or freestyle, I think really I cannot. If I could, I could kick hard and coordinate my breathing at the same time.
Those two initial laps did seem to be better preparation than just shoving off and swimming. If I had swum properly for the entire time I could have done my proper 2K. I maybe shouldn't've counted those first two in the total laps, but I did, so when with them I got to ten I just blew off for the last two, casually doing the matron's breast and side strokes.
A real breast stroke is what they do in the Olympics, where your head is aligned with your spine and goes under. The matron breast stroke, which is not meant to sound as racy as it might, is what I call the head-above-water, not to mess with the hairdo, frog-kick, scoopy-with-the-forelegs thing. A sidestroke is another for people who can't breathe right. It's an amble instead of a stride kind of swim. I like it because the sideways scissor kick makes me feel vaguely like a squid.
I bought this yesterday between swim and seeing Trish and Jared. Making sure I had time for the Tattered Cover might have been why I shortened my swim. I haven't been a regular reader of Pamie's for a while, I think since she moved to L.A., but I knew most of the entries she used in this, either because they occurred while I read or because they garnered enough attention through links that I sought them out.
I can't distinguish between my pleasure that one of us--indubitably suitably Pamie, and I don't really consider her and myself an "us," I'm not that delusional--really got published because of her journal, and the delicious pleasure of lite reading fare, which is exactly what I wanted yesterday.
One eensy copyediting error: the medium of web journaling clearly places this book post-1996. But someone gives a Hartford--an unlikely place to have a nice house with a backyard and a swingset but I'll let that pass--phone number with a 203 area code. Connecticut, minus the New York suburb of Fairfield County and New Haven County, has been 860 since 1995. (Hartford is in Hartford County. It's an imaginative state, wot? Guess what the county seat of New London County is. G'won, guess! Next try Windham County! and Litchfield County! But Fairfield County's is Stamford, I think. And there is no town of Middlesex for Middlesex County. Pity, that. Really though I doubt Connecticut has seats as such.) Anyway, should've been 860.
Today I did one of the stupidest things I've done deliberately since I was grown. Or at least since Friday, when RDC gave Shadowfax egg-beater stirrups (at my request). And not counting the rollerblades. RDC took the car to DIA for a long day trip, back and forth to Tucson, and I already mentioned going to the Dead tomorrow [except I accidentally deleted that, so I didn't, but we are], and really I should've mailed it Saturday but we went to Grand Lake instead.
I had to send it today, so I pedaled (unclipped) to the package store--I love saying that--with a care package for my sister under my arm. I was fine, and thank heavens, because if I had spilled it would have been my sister's fault (in our parents' eyes) as much as my 1992 car accident was, since it was her care package I was sending.
(1992 car accident: driving back from the surprise birthday party she threw for her boyfriend in Boston, half mile from home, passing (on the left) the braking, left-signaling other driver, passing on the left despite the left turn signal, because he must be turning right onto the residential street rather than left into the restaurant because who would be going to the restaurant at midnight, three hours after it closed? No one except its cleaner. Both of the 'rents gave CLH shit for that, like my carelessness was her fault.)
Care package: a child's jigsaw puzzle of a duckling, because it was there and a nice quiet game she probably can't injure herself with, except I forgot about Curious George eating the puzzle piece until just this moment. Plus she hates birds. A book of crossword puzzles with a rainbow cover, and a package of "pencil pillows" coordinatedly colorful.* A bag of individually wrapped Wint-O-Green lifesavers, because what is a stocking without them?** A package of Newman dark chocolate peppermint cups. Animal Dreams and Poisonwood Bible and Why Girls Are Weird, the last of whose first non-entry scenes is Anna washing Dale's hair because he just hurt his hand. CDs of John Denver and Barry Manilow because they will make her laugh and PJ Harvey (thanks Trish) just in case. Um. A tin of Before the Kiss mints in a tin with Klimt's The Kiss on the lid. Did I mention I just bought Nisou a shower curtain with The Kiss on it? Well I did. Then I saw the mints and thought that would be a good follow-up but somehow wound up with two tins. My sister gets the spare. A candle holder that, frankly, has been in my Goodwill box (along with that travesty of a jacket I foisted on Jessie some time ago) for a long time. A store credit to Bombay Company for the princessly sum of not quite eleven bucks that I scored when I finally brought two wine bottle necklaces, for chrissakes, back to that Land of the Laminate. (Both the candle thingie and the necklaces were Christmas presents. I am the regifter.)
I have not been to an interesting store since before I got The Call alerting me to the Need of the Care Package, so what she got was what I had in the house or could score at Rite-Aid when I picked up prescriptions, plus Pamie's book.
I could have found good swag at the Tattered Cover if I hadn't been scurrying. Between the Tiny Wooden Hand and the hair-washing, Why Girls Are Weird might be just what my sister needs. It will be interesting to see if someone who's not Among the Initiated likes it.
* and ** My sister just sliced her hand open, hence the care package. Her right hand. Crossword puzzles and individually wrapped lifesavers might not have been such hot ideas.
Moving on. So I need to get hold of the second Addams Family movie. They lose their house and have to move out, and there's a scene where Thing, the hand, trots down the sidewalk on its fingers trailing a little red wagon filled with one-handed thingies. I want to get her that stuff. I want to know what Ned Flanders sells in the Leftorium and get her that too. And then there's the "M*A*S*H" where Charles is so proud of his painstaking work enabling someone to walk again, even if he slacked on the hand a bit, not knowing that the soldier is actually--sob!--a concert pianist. So Charles finds him left-handed piano sheet music--amazing what you can find in a mobile army surgical hospital in the short window of time a soldier would have convalesced in one. Not that my sister has a piano or remembers any more than I do of our lessons with Mrs. McNamara ("Swans under the Willows, "My Favorite Things," and "Three Blind Mice," me).
I can say this because she doesn't read this (she tried it and stopped, disappointed that it wasn't all of the calibre of "Breathing Stuffed Animals): I boxed everything up in the box that her last year's birthday present came in, the Super Bubbler. She was really disappointed in me that I didn't find this as amusing as she did. I'm a grown-up: I'm not going to use that in the house on my hardwood floors and upholstery! Or outside, all that soap film to harm plants with? Plus the concept of blowing bubbles with a motor instead of with your breath is faintly heretical, isn't it? Like using a leafblower instead of a rake, a motor instead of a sail. Plus it's loud.
But, CLH notes with satisfaction, I have used it at every outdoor gathering I've had since. Which is two, last summer: a cookout with Clove and Dexy, who I knew would enjoy it and did, and Haitch's graduation party, when little kids ran through the bubbles and emptied the bottle into the large stockpot I'd put out as a water dish for the dogs. Dogs with diarrhea from drinking soap: just what I want in my backyard and what their owners wanted to take home with them. This year for my birthday CLH sent me a box of stocking-stuffer type stuff that was all just super, and one of the things was a large bottle of bubble juice. Ha.
So she'll be amused by the box I used. Hey, it's the only one I had in the house of the right size. Damn it.
So Ebay has this beautiful handmade Tiny Wooden Hand for $35, and frankly if she hasn't read either Pamie's site or book, would it be funny? Otherwise I can buy a gross of plastic backscratchers for two bucks. I exaggerate, but she might not be getting a TWH. Also I need to find the titles of appropriate sheet music.
But the box won't even get there until Friday. Perhaps by then I shall have completed a second box. I have already contracted to drive to work on Wednesday, after a late night with the Dead, and at lunch I plan to find one of the Other Targets. I've seen one, probably a mirage, not too far away. Ours is closed for expansion until October, and the line in our house is that that was the only one on the whole planet.
I am taking suggestions for subsequent care packages, though the hook and the pirate keyboard are probably the pinnacle of possibilities.
By the way, she says Kitty really likes the splint. It makes for good scratching. There's a cat for you, always looking out for your best interests. "Oh, you're injured? That cast looks like a good scratching post." I am not one to talk: RDC had to go around like Napoleon last winter because Blake found his cast deeply, deeply enticing. It moulded RDC's hand and wrist into the buddy-scoop position! What could be better?
Why the hell am I still awake?
Five cubic yards of fill, 2.5 tons, in three steps, 20-21 June, 29 June, and this evening.
When RDC came home the 30th, after a full week away, he asked why I had not moved all the dirt. I had blocked out my frustration with the project in the intervening 36 hours and forgotten why, exactly, I had stopped. "I was tired?" I guessed. Wrongo. I remembered as soon as I started again. I fucking stopped because there was no more fucking room on the north side of the house. I did not order five cubic yards, no. I voted for three. Three, I grant you, might have been inadequate, since all but one wheelbarrow-load that landed in the raspberry patch is in fact on the north side. But five has taken some trampling, and some gentle grading of the slope on the north front, and quite a bit of fill against non-tarred bricks, where it cannot stay.
When we started this project, you could see two tiers of black, that is tarred, brick on that side of the house, where bad drainage had gradually eroded the soil. Or, I should say, not before we started but after I had removed all the stone previous owners have tried to improve drainage with. Certainly dirt should cover those two layers, but no higher. I worry about the grading, whether it's sufficient to keep rain, should any fall again, from the window wells.
I should also say I don't know how dirt solves the problem. I understand about grading, about sloping the dirt primarily toward the property line but also from back to front. But dirt, even clay dirt like this, still is water-permeable. Water still drains down through the soil. It just has to go through more soil before eventually finding our foundation with its probable crack. Yea. If it had been just RDC's brilliant plan I maybe would have objected, but since it was the structural engineer's I credited it.
There's been no rain to test anything since 20 June. We'll see.
This might not be the final step. We still might need to dig a ditch.
I don't understand why they call themselves the Dead. When the remnants first toured without Jerry Garcia, only the next summer, they called themselves the Other Ones, but it might not have been everyone. I once wrote "the other one" as the return address in a letter to my mother, so I understand why, Jerry-less, they were Other. Besides, there was the song. But now, just "the Dead"?
It reminds me of that scene in 1984 when Winston and Julia have been reading Goldstein's book and they say "We are the dead" and the Thought Police reply, "You are the dead."
Anyway. I changed into my paisley tank top and sweatskirt. (Both of these are miracle garments, the latter because it hasn't given out yet and the former because it's the sort of thing that fades after a few washings but I've had it for 11 or 12 years now and the colors are still strong and I wear it all summer long.) And into my Sneetchified Bear's Choice earrings, dime-sized dancing bears punched from silver, dangling below a couple of chunks of polished quartz, Sneetchified because one has a phosporescent star on its belly. I parted my hair diagonally and braided pigtails, which worked surprisingly well on a first attempt.
(Apparently a Dead show is like the opera, where sartorial matters are so vital.)
SPM came over and the three of us zoomed off to Red Rocks, there to meet Alias, whom I have decided to call Begonia. Alias is male, but despite its ending in -a, Begonia is appropriate for another reason than just the song "Scarlet Begonias." A parking lot attendant waved us into place, and what a place: they weren't placing cars immediately next to campers, so we had a car-spot in between to set up coolers and chairs for socializing with the camperfolk, whose vehicle shaded this idyll. We ate and drank and shoved the remaining beers into RDC's and SPM's CamelBaks to sustain us (well, them) in line, which we joined soon enough (Red Rocks is all unassigned seating).
Red Rocks. Hot and dusty, but the shade, once you're in some, by grace of either a camper or the sun's gradually inching behind the monoliths, counts. Plus the view doesn't suck. Swallows and swifts and bats and the city steamrollered flat on the plains below twinkling first in the heat by day and later by artifical light.
My escorts, or whatever you would call it, I guess I was theirs as the built-in designated driver, finished their beers and a bottle of Maker's Mark in line, and criminy, may I never get SPM mad at me. Well likkered up, he told the most hysterically scathing stories. But we're English grad students, or nearly, so occasionally a story would require the right phrase from Yeats' "Second Coming." It was very amusing. Also, since we found out too late that no water containers without a factory seal would be permitted, I got a little shower with the remnants of the drinking water. Damn hot. It was, after all, a lap swim night.
Also, how the scene has changed. I say this so authoritatively, having attended a total of six shows between 1993 and 1995, plus two Jerry concerts. But as we stood in line, we spoke of children, of how brilliant one is and how another just wants blocks and another is such pals with his dad, of houses and maintenance and real estate, of work (managerial, not sustenance) and so forth. I was reminded of when Ruth Anne borrowed Chris-in-the-Morning's motorcycle and fell in with some Hell's Angels-looking bikers, one of whom wore a patch over his eye, and how their conversation bikerishly accepted this 80-year-old woman into its midsts and evolved from "Easy Rider" to having to get home to a child's school recital and how relieved the patched one would be when the stye in his eye cleared up.
So, the show. I was worried about Joan Osbourne. In the summer of 1998, I went to Lilith Fair with Haitch and KMJ, Haitch for Sarah Mclachlan and Natalie Merchant and I for them but less so and primarily the Cowboy Junkies, who were also KMJ's reason. The Junkies' abysmal sound did not further my campaign to convert Haitch, I'm sorry to say. I am also sorry to say that during Joan Osbourne, during "What If God [were] Watching/One of (whichever it is) Us?" I was compelled to make a munchie run. I loathe that song, not only for grammatical reasons.
Begonia had seen them Monday as well, and said they sucked. "Baby Blue" is not an up song for third in the first set. They played Deal, Sugar Magnolia, and Box of Rain, the first one of RDC's absolute favorites besides "The Wheel" and the latter two mine or ours and Sugar Magnolia being one of the two songs RDC is required by marriage articles to dance with me during (the other is the Junkies' "Anniversary Song"). I am willing to believe bad renditions are worse than none. Traditionally their sucking one night should mean a much better show the next night. I wondered, and I wondered more when I saw setlists in front of everyone's microphone and more in front of Osbourne's, or perhaps they were lyrics.
They came out and took their places. I asked who was playing keyboards, and SPM suggested, "Linus?" I thought he was making a PigPen joke--Pigpen died, as do all their keyboardists, and now they're killing off the next Peanut--but he was making a Schroeder joke. Either way was okay. They began to play, and the crowd whooped as it recognized "Friend of the Devil." But then Bobby began to sing, and I buried my face in RDC's Phil Lesh & Friends t-shirt (only one of the four of us wore tie-dye, heretical). So, so, so wrong. Lyle Lovett can sing "Friend of the Devil." Bobby should not.
Throughout the show, Bobby sang less and Joan Osbourne sang more, and that was really good. Not as good as Susan Tedeschi (I would warrant), who could even play guitar and occupy herself thus instead of by twitching her skirt around, which was Osbourne's primary means of entertainment. But good, better than Bobby. Joan was Different But Okay where Bobby Sounded Wrong. I stopped calling Osbourne Donna, anyway. She has a much better voice than Donna Godchaux.
-Jam
-Friend of the Devil
-Mississippi Half-Step ~~>
-New Speedway Boogie (this is when Joan's voice began to assert itself more)
-Night of a Thousand Stars (a Phil Lesh & Friends song we heard last summer)
-Looks Like Rain (sung by Bobby, and a ridiculous choice showing the danger of setlists because there wasn't a damn cloud in the sky. Also Bobby was trying to look like Jerry, having grown a beard and mustache and even a little potbelly. Mostly he looked like Charlton Heston as Taylor in "Planet of the Apes." Scarily enough, they bear a strong mutual resemblance. This was RDC's "What If God Whatever" song and he vamoosed in search of drink.)
-Deep Elum Blues
-Good Morning Little Schoolgirl
-Stagger Lee
-Mr. Charlie
second set:
-Playing in the Van
-Shakedown Street
-Built to Last (another of RDC's unfavorites. He made a beer run.)
-Truckin'
-Reuben and Cherise, a Jerry Garcia Band song (sung by Joan)
-Take It Home by Midnight (?), sung by Mickey. No: Baba Jingo
-Drums. This is a perennial favorite of mine, and this was a great one. I'm not sure that Bill is as cutting edge as Mickey, but he was game. They had drums like the Kodo Drummers', and it was amazing.
-Space, very shortly, and I was glad I peed during the break instead of waiting for Space, as was my habit. Space~~>Happy Birthday to You (with no singing), because it was Joan's birthday. Some kids brought her out a cake and there were flowers.
-Comes a Time (another JGB sung by Joan)
-Uncle John's Band, which made me very happy
~~>Playing in the Band
-Lovelight
encore:
-Brokedown Palace, which made RDC very happy since it wasn't "U.S. Blues."
And then we went home. Home by 1, perversely awake before 6 with a second-hand smoke hangover. I am such a grown-up for being so tired.
I still do not have an emotional connection to this band. Six shows, two Jerry shows, one death, two Furthur Festivals, five years and then Phil Lesh & Friends (with Ratdog, bleah), another year and everybody, but no. I was happy for RDC to have a good show, it was fun to hang out with Begonia and SPM and RDC, but I didn't tear up, as I did when Peter Gabriel began "Here Comes the Flood" or shout with perfect glee, as when he started "Solsbury Hill." I am there for the music, not as a tagger-on wife or lone invasive chick, so I didn't feel like I didn't belong, anyway.
Friday we bought two objets d'art from the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, a photographic print for over the mantel and a covered bowl now on Charlie Walnuts the bookcase.
Saturday we went to Grand Lake and kind of brought Blake. He likes going for rides in the car and we wanted to bring him for a ride that didn't end at camp. He most certainly noticed his surroundings, though if he could comprehend any of the landscape I would not guess. We brought his towels to screen him from scary things like dogs and hot things like sun, but forgot about wind. We used a beach towel as a wind screen and so his crest calmed down, no longer blown to one side by the wind.
Sunday he was glad to stay at home though. As were we, except for my swim and ice-cream date.
Monday RDC spent a long day in Tucson and I--oh yes, the accidentally struck entry--finished the dirt, picked and pitted and froze cherries, and ate an exceptionally unhealthy dinner, even for me, comprising toast with elderberry jam and, instead of or, an apple sliced with the remains of the cheese, species forgotten, I had bought to go with the devoured Granny Smiths. Then the cheese was gone but the apple wasn't, so I added some slices of romano, because why not? And it was good. And a bowl of cherries. And then a bowl-bottom of chocolate chips, which were enough caffeine to keep me up until RDC got home after midnight reading Devil's Larder.
So I started Tuesday tired, which wasn't a good plan.
I recently said to..someone, I forget who, that RDC was required to do whatever it was by marriage articles. The person was surprised and I pointed out that I was kidding.
Mostly.
By marriage articles, which is a fiction in my head, RDC is required to:
- Fasten my necklace or bracelet and then kiss the back of my neck or my wrist
- Dance with me during "Sugar Magnolia" and "Anniversary Song"
- Accept that the car will always have a platypus in it
- Pluck the (so far, solitary) hair that sprouts from my (so far, not yet a) wattle.
I think that's all. So far. I can't think of what I'm required to do. I've become a Deadhead, mostly and by extension. I've learned to like lots of even those Woody Allen movies with lots of Woody Allen in them instead of just "Radio Days" (from which he is mostly absent), some Ernest Hemingway especially For Whom the Bell Tolls, and, heaven help me, I'm beginning to give on the Bob Dylan issue. I should ask him.
Well, it's been almost eleven years. Even if I can't name my obligations I must be fulfilling them.
Recently UberBoss marked his 15-year annniversary at Dot Org and wanted to take my department out to celebrate. A gracious idea, but hardly fitting for him to treat us. Luckily CoolBoss just earned an honorarium at a speaking engagement and that was enough--for the twelve of us, since we have interns this summer for the first time ('nother story, that).
So we went to Indigo, which used to be Papillon. When it was Papillon RDC and I went once, in 1999 maybe or 2000. We weren't impressed, and you really are supposed to be impressed. Is it the same chef? I forget. Anyway. I had a tarragon chicken salad sandwich with dried cherries and sprouts and maybe walnuts? which was fine, not spectacular. The really interesting thing was the appetizers we shared as a table: popcorn with wasabi peas, almonds? I think I'm transposing my nuts, doesn't that sound painful? and something else. Also--separately--calamari.
It was a yummy meal and a fun one. I sat across from Lou, who swapped travel stories with Intern #1 on my right.
Part of the nother story that is the interns was the question, "How are we going to tell them apart?" (not mine). I think, because he's often the funniest one, it might have been UberBoss who said, in honor of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Intern 1, Intern 2, Intern 3. They are, in fact, quite easy to differentiate. Which is another part of the intern story.
Lou is so cool. She left the States in 1984 with a thousand dollars and came back in 1987. "And you'd spent it all?" UberBoss asked, mock incredulously. Today's stories were how she got from China to Tibet to Nepal, there finally to Kathmandu, with neither language nor money nor passport, the latter two of which had just been stolen. In Kathmandu at least English was often provided.
So the point of the subject line is that RDC called in the midafternoon suggesting coquillages et pommes frites for dinner, at Le Central, one of our old favorites. I was dubious but thought that a swim might restore my appetite.
It didn't really, but that's why I had the second, third, and fourth stomachs installed.
Never eating again, that is, until breakfast Friday morning, over which I wrote the above.
Don't mind me, OMFB. This is merely the only way I'll be able to find the list again.
AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DE FL GA HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WY.
That was easy. That I can do without thinking. I can't do it in statehood order. I am pretty sure Connecticut wasn't third, but I often think it was since it is third smallest and Delaware is first and smaller. Statehood order, of the top of my head: DE, PA, the other 11 not including ME and VT (showing shocking disloyalty to New England), the general clean-up of the east and southeast-eastern midwest, KS in 1861 and WV sometime during the Civil War, CO in 1876 (the Bicentennial State, yo), and then the rest of them, ending with NM AZ AK and HI.
More to the point,
Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, Missouri, Arkansas,Michigan, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada, Nebraska, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii.
031223: What do diamonds have to do with Arkansas?
Tex came over to my cube asking what I guessed would be on Alabama's. I had no idea whatsoever, and it's easy for me to wax disparaging about the South. So I said whatever, couldn't be anything good. It's Helen Keller, and he was tickled that I had shown my true colors. But please. No one thinks, "Gosh, you know, Helen Keller wouldn't have been such a brave, determined voice for the blind and the deaf and the otherwise disabled, wouldn't have graduated from Radcliffe summa cum laude (or magna? I forget), wouldn't've traveled the country speaking out and meeting Great War veterans, if she had been from any other state than Alabama."
Connecticut's design is by far the best, of course. The rounded treetop fits the coin well, of course, but it's a tree! There is nothing better than a tree! Plus there's a stone wall, very appropriate, that balances the caption. All of the designs so far have been either about the Revolution, if they could manage it, or used icons of the state. Pennsylvania's is boring, but at least it is the Keystone State. Ditto Georgia--a peach? New Hampshire's is iconic, Virginia's is pretty if a bit of a stretch, since it wouldn't be Jamestown's bicentennial for another seven years after first minting, I know North Carolina and Ohio nearly came to blows about which would claim flight (holy shit, they're nitpicking on Capitol Hill about which state can claim it), Vermont's is pretty lame but at least people do associate syrup with the state in a way they don't associate Helen Keller with Alabama. Etc.
Anyway. I'm comfortable with having been mean about Alabama, but I love Helen Keller! I wasn't being mean about her! Really!
"Buddy" is an adjectival noun sometimes. There are buddy toenails, buddy clippers (for the toenails), buddy fluff (in drifts on the floor, on our shoulders, or stuck to his beak), buddy eyelashes, sweet buddy basil breath, buddy greens, buddy dishes, two buddy windowsills, the buddy bedtime, buddy poopers (an essential accessory, some bit of junk mail for the buddy poop), the buddy foot (lifted and waved in a request to be picked up), buddy yawns, the buddy box and the variety of buddy caves, buddy flaps, buddy sneezes, buddy chow, the buddy spray bottle (for showers), and of course the buddy beast himself.
Last night after I finally got home from work, the pool, and Le Central, Blake had a thorough head petting and then some buddy fun with a 5280 magazine. It might be almost as good as the Utne Reader for whatever the magazine equivalent of a fabric's "hand" is: a good snap in the beak from good substantial paper, and also, a lenient mommy expecting to vacuum the next day who doesn't prevent the confetti production.
I am lying on the couch (yes it's a gorgeous day out, your point?) reading and napping. Blake is on my naked left shoulder (most of me is in the navy satin pyjamas my MIL gave me for Christmas). He's mostly napping too, and I roused when I felt him stir. I reached for him and held him out over the pooper. He did his prepoop stretches, left wing and leg, right wing and leg, both wings up over the back, and pooped. I sleepily moved my right arm back toward my left shoulder, but before he was close enough to hop back, I stopped my arm and inspected my shoulder more closely.
I know this means I have enough fat to make this possible, but if so I never want to be thin: I have a perfect little buddy footprint in my shoulder. One, because he was napping, damn it. The other was tucked warmly into his belly feathers. A buddy footprint. Than which nothing is cuter. There's not much plantar surface on a buddy foot. But there's some, I know, because it's imprinted in my skin, and a little halfmoon where some weight must have rested on the cuff on his bent leg.
Should I have the vet remove his cuff? Not that anyone has ever harassed me for having a possibly stolen-from-the-wild bird but I like it for proof that no, he wasn't, he was born into prison thank you.
A little buddy footprint, there on my shoulder.
Or something. Tendonitis is much more likely than carpal tunnel syndrome, which is just so trendy anyway. I mention this only to give context about why anyone took my blood pressure Wednesday afternoon.
I had a smoke hangover, I drove because I was damn tired, I was going to go to Another Target at lunch but I went to the doctor instead [see medical care, not seeking of, because no transportation to and fro], and did I mention it was damn hot and I was damn tired?
Nevertheless, my blood pressure, at 1:15 p.m., was 88/54. Could the tech possibly have done that right? I've been falling over after standing up too fast for years now, but that's nearly dead, isn't it?
Then she took my pulse. I doubt its accuracy because she held her finger to my wrist for maybe 15 seconds but I think 10 really. Sixty. 60. Again, nearly dead.
45' elliptical, incline 20 (does that mean 20%? it's as inclined as the machine goes), resistance mostly 12 but sometimes 10 or 11 out of 20. Total strides, uh, over 5600. It felt good. I did not afterward swim at noon. I thought I might go and play at the city pool, after some yardwork, in the later afternoon.
I swept the front walk, finally, cleaning up after moving dirt from here to there. I was going to stretch groundcloth over the fill, but RDC thinks it's not distributed properly yet to which I say "Here's the rake." Otherwise I weeded the backyard and garden. Damn, I hope buffalo grass is determined stuff. Otherwise I don't know how it will ever scratch a roothold among the crap back there. There's some plant I hate with dandelion looking leaves but with pokers and teeth on them, that irritate my skin. Bachelor's button, which is not a weed because it has a pretty flower. Ditto dandelions. Fucking bindweed. Some other damn thing I call chicory for no reason other than my near-total weed-name ignorance. I clipped zillions of cherry sprouts and some hammocky sort of weed that grows even more like a weed than a regular weed and if you leave it alone often becomes an extremely weak, falls over in the slightest wind, tree.
Anyway it's all gone now, every single bad plant, killed with handclippers because I hate the (rechargeable) weedwhacker.
As we stood in line, SPM told stories. He talked about the daughter of some friends, who is three with the vocabulary of a five-year-old, and how she will very clearly state what she wants. She has the entire Baby Genius series, and SPM listed them, "Baby Einstein, Baby Mozart, Baby Beethoven, Baby John Holmes."
I knew he was making a joke but I didn't know its nature.
This is even funnier, considering that last winter he and his wife mentioned the porn catalog I had left for them back in September when they watered our plants while we were in Grand Teton. I was flummoxed as to what they could possibly mean and realized, some hours later, that the only catalog I would possibly have had that I would have assumed to be of interest to them was The Common Reader. The raciest it gets is Anaïs Nin and Colette.
So Baby Porn Star was pretty funny.
The other thing I learned is the word "ganja." I am certain I had never heard it before, and I would love to know its etymology. Marijganja? I don't know.
I think the pool was a few minutes late opening, but in the near-hour alloted I swam 1.4K.
One point four kilometers, OMFB. A woman in her 60s or maybe 50s passed me. She was wearing flippers, true, and she also passed a man in our lane probably ten years younger than I with much broader shoulders and a much trimmer waist than mine, but still.
One point four. I suck.
Still not shopPING. I don't think going to Ross counts as shopPING unless you wind up with a ballgown for fifteen bucks.
I found a suit for which I need shoes. I have brown leather sandals for summer and black leather clogs for winter. The latter work--as far as I'm concerned--with my winter suits, olive green, houndstooth, eggplant, chocolate. The former do not work with summer suits. I also have an icey lavender-grey suit that I need shoes for. Shoes bore me so utterly. I can tell mine are wrong but I have no idea what might be right or where to find such Right things.
The suit is summer weight, skirt above the knee, jacket either short-sleeved or unsleeved, and the color--the color is shell pink. It is tragic, but that's a good color on my pasty skin, summer or winter.
I also found a knee-length "natural" linen skirt and a white linen shell with some eyelet. The shell is stunningly similiar to the black shell with white embroidery I bought in May. Same label. Do you call it eyelet? Perforated. Different pattern any.
The real score is A Perfect Skirt. Pale buff, sueded rayon, nice and substantial, ankle-length, and it fits perfectly slightly below the waist and at the hip and, though not a miracle worker, it makes my butt look okay, like an attractive if oversized thing rather than an object that moves at a different speed than the rest of my body and has a distinct gravitational field.
I told Haitch and my sister I hadn't clothes-shopped since Dot Org left downtown. This is not true: I bought a sweater in November and a sweater and skirt in the later winter and some other clothes in May. Somehow none of this counts: the sweater was a specific errand, the May excursion was for a specific thing too even if it yielded more than the long black skirt, and the winter stuff was online. It's not that it doesn't count as much as it does that I'm spoiled.
Really enjoyable, sometimes grotesque, micro short stories, all concerning food in some way.
I had Blake on the porch while I watered tonight (I watered the south xeriscape for the second time this year), and back on the porch after that and tidying up inside. We read on the porch swing until dusk and after I opened the house to the cooling evening, we retreated here to the basement. He puttered about in his tray and his box, finally eating his dinner, chewing on the piping on my pyjamas, clawing his way up to my lapel for head petting.
When he jumped to the arm of the couch and peered onto the table beside, I knew what he was after. I lifted my big cup for him to drink from. Hey, I used to share with my dog, and birds don't have spit. He looked at it suspiciously and I knew why: ice cubes. He doesn't like ice any more than he likes snow, which he has seen only by the handful brought in from outside for his inspection (or just to frighten him). I poured some water into my empty juice glass, but even without ice on its surface the water was cold.
I could see him debating in his tiny brain which was worse, cold or thirst. Thirst won. He dipped the tip of his upper mandible--which has blood and nerves to its tip--into the cold, then worked it off with his tongue or let it drip into his lower jaw.
I'm keeping water in the juice glass to warm up, sans ice.
Jesus GOD Usans are single-minded.
I'm watching ABC World News. It's Bastille Day, maybe that's why ABC noticed the Tour de France at all. The newscaster said, "Lance Armstrong had a harrowing day in the Tour de France today. He had to swerve out of the road because his closest competitor crashed right in front of him!"
The competitor, who apparently has no name or country, might be out of the damn race with road rash at the least, but poor Lance! he had to swerve!
I love cycling, don't get me wrong. I know next to nothing about it other than that male cyclists shave their yummy, yummy, yummy, and did I mention lickable, legs. Is there something else to know?
Anyway. Years ago I pointed this out to CLH: "A plane crashed in India today with 400 aboard. Three Usans were killed." Three hundred ninety-seven other people don't matter at all, apparently. Some time later CLH found and sent me a cartoon illustrating just this concept, with a penguin newscaster showing some sort of catastrophe among polar bears saying, "Luckily, no penguins were killed."
She named her cat Kitty, which is unusually lacking in imagination for her, but of course Kitty has multiple nicknames such that the actual name is only for show (cf. Blake, Buddy).
I love my sister because she has got bored with calling Kitty "Lambchop" and has moved on to "Choppage of Lamb."
It was 94 today. Do I remember accurately from childhood that it was seldom in the 90s in Connecticut, that humidity not heat made summer hellish? Or did it often get that hot there? Anyway, 94 here is a reasonable temperature as long as you do sensible things like loll about in the shade of a large tree with a pitcher of ice water and a book or eighteen months of a new journal to read. It is not so good to drive in, though if your father's birthday is Friday and you have not yet motivated to acknowledge it by post that's a good reason to get in the damn car and go shopping.
It is now 8:30. It's still over 80, but in a sundress I had no idea still fit (though I doubt it suits me as well now as it did in 1989 when I bought it), sitting on the porch with Blake in his cage on the swing beside me, I am perfectly comfortable.
It is, in fact, a beautiful evening. The neighbor with the golden retriever and the basset hound (my new snow-measuring unit, you remember) strolled by and I greeted her (yes, I know her name in addition to her dogs'). A new father (well, new to human fatherhood, he's had Sam the lab since we moved) has gone by too. I congratulated him--we passed their house on the way back from the Arts Festival just as his mother-in-law arrived with flowers, is how I knew the baby had been born--and he invited me to drop by and meet the baby, but that's got to wait for seven weeks at least: new babies unnerve me and they're not cute enough to bother about. The kids in the rented house passed as well, with their shrunken golden retriever. I don't know their names, the kids' or the dog's. The dog looks like its legs were shot off in the war and its paws sewn onto several inches up, it's adorable. There was also a three-year-old on a trike, but I have my priorities.
Long summer twilights on the porch swing.
But if my other neighbors water their new sod again, well after the permitted period of daily-for-two-weeks-after-planting, I will have to spank them.
Later. Here returneth the golden retriever and the basset hound and their human, in their typical end-of-walk pattern: the retriever trotting out ahead, bounce bounce bounce, the hound trailing well behind, lope lope lope.
It's dark now. Actually it's not, but it's dark enough that Blake is scared. In we go.
Five hours ago when I got home Blake begged for Vito. He loves the reading chair, which is unfortunate since his favorite activity on said chair is foot-wanking, which is quite tiresome as well as ticklish. Also there was important television-watching for me to accomplish, hence the ABC News story above, and not to forget the "Friends" reruns I might watch even if RDC were home if the reruns were worth his whining and undisguised disgust. (But this week? is the pilot. After that I might be done. I hope.)
At 7:30 when I emerged from the basement hoping the earth's surface had cooled, I brought Blake outside. This he certainly preferred to the basement (he's chewed away almost half of his--formerly my--hatbox, so he doesn't have a Fortress of Solitude so much as a Half-Shell in which you might find the Boston Pops), but it still wasn't Parental Contact.
Closer to 9:00, it was darkening and so we came into the light, child. (Fact: I have never seen all of, or even most of, "Poltergeist.") Only then did I settle into Vito. I myself prefer Vito toward the end of Blake's day, when he's more into snuggling than wanking. And so, indeed, he just spent the last hour plus having his head pet and snuggling into my neck. Only when I disturbed him by moving my left arm to type instead of read did he realize, whoa, bedtime, and scrabble across to my right shoulder, the one closer to his cage. It is, after all, 10:19, and a cockatiel needs his beauty rest.
So does his mother, but first I had to say, blissful hour of gently stroking a cockatiel with my chin! No wonder my blood pressure is nearly negative: buddy-cuddling. I should rent him out to the hypertensive.
10:58. The sun set more than two hours ago. I should emphasize that I have listened to my swamp cooler on the outside, and it's no louder than a box fan, before I say I loathe the neighbors. If they--and not to be too outlandish here--say, opened a window once in a way, they wouldn't need a fucking air conditioner, let alone one that rattles on the 2x4s propping it up. But they finally turned it off.
(It only ran for an hour that I'm aware of. But damn, that thing is ten times louder than the sun.)
I was going to say "rabbit pellets" but I've read Watership Down too many times for that to have any other connotation but one that's a little stronger than I actually feel.
Athena mentioned the other day that she has Go Lean Kashi for breakfast, so--since this would probably give me the same fitness results, you know, even though I'm not also exercising quite so much--I decided to look it up. How different could it be, I wondered, than the kashi I've been eating since I joined the gym in January and looked for a cereal with less sugar than Cranberry Crunch?
It has more calories per smaller serving size and more sodium. It also has lots more protein and fiber. That I knew by reading the panel. Today I poured some into a bowl and discovered it also has rabbit chow in it. Those half-inch cylinders of solidified bran. Yeah.
I halved it with regular kashi, and it's not that bad. It doesn't look much worse than the ribbed lozenges of RDC's cereal that I love to watch Blake dismember. (I say I've seen a lion eat a gazelle with more surgical precision than he shows eating a wedge of orange. When he's gnawed a hole through a little pillow of cereal such that the ribbing really looks like, well, ribs, I get to think that again.)
Verdict: tastes better than rabbit chow.
I haven't seen either for a long time. I remember watching "Return of the Jedi" with SSP, so in 1990 or 1991, and already the 1983 Rancor looked as cheesy as that version of "Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde" when Jeckyll falls behind a sofa and Hyde rises.
Anyway, last night ranting about the neighbors' air-conditioner I couldn't remember the Emperor's line about the hatred being strong in Luke and that being a reason he would join the Dark Side. Then one of my own lines occurred to me "Hate the [Someone]" and I knew it was a photo caption but I couldn't remember from what.
Tonight, again at 9:00 sharp, they (grr) turned on the hell machine. With my windows open, I can take advantage of their watering, because their sprinklers act as evaporative coolers and the chilled air zips into my house, thankyouverymuch. Again, the "Hate the [Who?!]" line occurred to me, this time with its context. That's what I need: 24 hours and the same circumstances to remember something.
(A million years ago, driving to a movie probably at Trinity with ABW and KRW and RDC, somehow none of us could remember a particular Yes song for a particular reason. We were just passing the Mansfield Depot on Route 44 at this point in our conversation. Time passed. Something like weeks or months later, passing that exact same point with the exact same people (probably going to our next movie), the answer--the lyric, the meaning, the memory, whatever--surfaced and I blurted it.)
"Hate the waiter!" came up as a "Say 'cheese!'" substitute when my sister and I were in a photo booth. Division 16? that former firehouse and now former restaurant on Boylston, near Mass Ave, near the Cheri, and stop me before I reminisce further, had a photo booth. I may never have been in one of those coin-fed, four-photographs-to-a-strip booths. We had just had miserable service, either at Division or wherever we had fled from. So just as the warning light flashed I cried "Hate the waiter!" and we growled and made fangs at the camera.
Hold on a sec. Excuse me, Blake (he is tucked on my lap).
Got it. First picture: I'm trying not to laugh, so my face is about to burst, she's cracking up, hand demurely over her mouth; second, we both look scared; the third is Hate the Waiter. I think I allowed her the first picture of the four for herself. When was this picture taken? My hair is long enough to pull back but she hasn't started growing hers yet. I'm behind her and can't tell what I'm wearing or even my earrings, which might not be helpful anyway considering how long I wear my clothes. Hmm. Acne inflaming my forehead: 1991-92 school year. Grad school, feh. No pressure.
Please for next time remember not to open old photograph albums when RDC is away. At the least I was reminded that today, today, is NAV's eighth birthday, and I don't have the Vs' email address! And also reminded that I need some sort of wallet-size photo pages for an album for all those pictures of newborns I get. (Can I tell any of them apart? Could I even if everyone didn't use the same pink and blue rainbow hospital background? I could not). I found a 5x7 of my father and his sister my namesake and wedding pictures that I haven't put into an album yet even though the marriages have long since dissolved and really, there must be a drug for this. Or a disabled parking permit: hello, I'm crippled by nostalgia.
Enough. To bed to bed to bed. To sleep, perchance to dream. Maybe instead of "Shakespeare in Love," my usual RDC-is-away movie to watch in bed I'll watch "Richard III." Since, just for closure's sake, I don't have any of the Star Wars movies.
But that reminds me, the Boulder Shakespeare dealie is putting on Cymbeline this summer. Don't let me get superstitious about days on which that play is staged.
Another book whose source I don't remember, though probably in a discussion of the ghettoization of books, because children read all genres. I have never seen a library separate its children's fiction into genre, as all but the smallest libraries do with their adult fiction, but that also has to do with size of collection. The large print books are seldom separated into genre either.
Anyway. City of Ember. Good story. Physical set-up totally impossible. A dash of "Logan's Run," a generous portion of The Giver, a dab of Gathering Blue, and quite a bit of whatever marketing ploy that is where the sequel is built right the fuck in, as in Witch Child.
Formulas are fun in formulaic setpieces, like "Pirates of the Caribbean," which I'll stop talking about eventually. The Hidden Manuscript That Reveals All, in this and Witch Child, is tiresome.
I refuse to consider that I just don't like children's books anymore. The Giver satisfied its less sophisticated, or should I say less experienced, readers; it did not satisfy me however compelling its story. I hope that children reading J.K. Rowling will one day learn to appreciate edited prose and internally consistent settings, the lack of which in HPs 4 and 5 turns me off.
City of Ember is a great story, but I could not suspend my disbelief enough for it to work. It did have a nice Sarah, Plain and Tall touch that I appreciated.
Yesterday morning I filled the birdfeeder and -bath. Yesterday afternoon I glanced out the window and saw that the feeder was still nearly full. Then I saw that the anti-squirrel part was down.
This feeder has been great in the months I've had it. An inner tube holds seeds, and an outer tube on a spring has strategically placed fig leaves. If a squirrel gets on the feeder, its weight is enough to pull the outer tube down, covering the holes; when the squirrel leaves the spring draws that tube up again. I haven't often seen a squirrel on it--they learn fast--but the few times have been great: once they negotiate the thin hook from the branch and the thinner loop of wire from feeder to hook, there they are on a closed feeder! Whee! They scrabble around with the seeds not half an inch under their tentacles but still ungettable-attable!
Welcome to my small world, in which that passes for entertainment.
I could not figure out in a quick inspection what had gone awry. Before dissecting the birdfeeder I am going to have to scrub it. I don't mind filling it and then washing my hands, but prolonged manipulation through its filthiness is more than my fastidiousness can take. I stood the feeder on the patio to Deal With Later and proceeded with my evening (which went City of Ember and then Oscar and Lucinda on the bus and then "Pirates of the Caribbean" and then Peter Carey on the bus again and then City of Ember until I finished it just before midnight).
This morning I glanced out the window to a herd of sparrows and finches on the nectarine branch, on the windowsills, forlorning looking to that empty bit of air below the hook. I had already thought what a commotion there must have been yesterday as they perched on the feeder only then to realize they had no access. They are not parrots, these birds. They are like the aliens in "Toy Story," as I've said. Not overly bright but admirably single-minded.
What the hell. I fetched the old feeder from the garage, filled and hung it.
Ahoy there, "Pirates of the Caribbean"! I mostly thought you were great and could ignore your illogicalnesses! After all, I make up words like "illogicalness," so I'll overlook that two men could not walk along the seabed carrying a boat upsidedown over their heads for an air supply. But especially in the late eighteenth century, no one would say "hung by the neck until dead." Hanged, damn it!
The old feeder must be exactly what the squirrel engineers who must have plotted the new feeder's demise had in mind. I can just imagine the committee meetings over the last several months, the deliberately accelerated evolution of an opposable thumb, the forging of a small pair of snips for the spring.
Yesterday Shiny Happy New Coworker and I stood by the printer waiting for our jobs. She said, "You have the best clothes."
I was flabbergasted, oh yes I was. Not so much that I couldn't thank her, but pretty much. I was wearing something new, at least.
When do two garments become a suit? This is a skirt and a shell (note: I hate the word "top" for "shirt") that together cannot be a suit because the upper half is not buttoned, is neither jacket nor vest, is sleeveless. Of course I do not want it to be an "outfit" but the two pieces are clearly not "coordinates" (oo, more concepts to loathe!).
Tuesday I told CoolBoss about my Sunday shopping spree. Wednesday I wore the new pink--well, I'll call it a suit--and told her this was one of my new things. She said oh! with some relief, because when I told her "pink," she thought--she groped for a term--I supplied "'Legally Blonde' pink"?--and yes, that's what she thought. Okay, pale pink is bad enough, concept-wise, but aesthetically it's a good choice for my pasty skin. Barbie pink is beyond the pale (oh, I slay me).
Then when a few minutes later I reported this compliment to her, let's just say that, after six years (despite this period's leaving her with the impression I might wear Barbie pink), she was familiar enough with my wardrobe to understand that while this was a very nice compliment, it was a little odd.
Of course, Shiny Happy New Coworker has only been around since spring. Let her experience my winter wardrobe--black with a side of grey--and repeat that comment.
Still, it was nice.
When I told the story to my sister last night, I was a little more dramatic (moi?). "She must be on crack," I said, and my sister, ever so much less diplomatic than CoolBoss, agreed.
But I had another story to tell my sister! When I scurried out for the bus last night, my hair escaped my leather barrette (which, hooray! I can wear again--my braid had got too long to fold into it). I stood there, on Denver's most notorious street, twisting my hair up. I heard a noise behind me and turned to see a cyclist stopped on the sidewalk. Standing in front of the bench, I was blocking the way. I apologized and stepped aside. "Oh no honey I was enjoying it! I just want to stay here till the show's over." By this time I had switched on my Ignore function and hoped fervently for the bus and calculated the distance between me and the nearest open door. He moved on, not before saying, "If your boyfriend don't know you sexy with your hair up, he crazy."
So here we have figurative and actual crackheads with the compliments.
In "Shakespeare in Love," Geoffrey Rush as Philip Henslowe always wants to know when in Romeo and Juliet the pirate king will appear.
He starred as le Marquis de Sade in "Quills," which also featured Kate Winslett.
Kate Winslett starred in "Titanic." In this movie, which had a sinking boat, she yelled "Jack!" a lot.
Yesterday at the library I picked up the copy of City of Ember that I had had the library find for me. I mourn my absence from the central branch and its stacks of stacks and decided to Browse and find a book the old-fashioned way. Oscar and Lucinda occurred to me, and lo, it was there, in an edition old enough, hooray, not to have a movie cover. I read City until it was time to catch a bus (to go see "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl") and then on the bus started Oscar, which I had brought because it was small enough to fit into my bag.
Oscar and Lucinda was made into a movie, some or all of which I watched without knowing about the book. Whatever parts of it I didn't watch I didn't because I hate Ralph Fiennes, both his acting and his face. Whatever parts I did watch, I did because of Cate Blanchett, whom I adore.
Joseph Fiennes as Shakespeare omits the pirate king entirely from Romeo and Juliet. In "Shakespeare in Love," he does not sleep with Elizabeth Regina; in "Elizabeth," with Cate Blanchett in the title role, he does.
So Geoffrey Rush had to make an entirely new movie in which he could play a pirate king! So he could slit more throats, as he did in "Elizabeth"!
This movie's heroine, though not much this side of daft, at least didn't yell "Jack" too much, though there was a scene where she could not save her Will (see, Shakespeare again) from the collapsed hold of a ship, just like in "Titanic."
And so is proven the interconnectedness of all things. The end.
At one o'clock someone shouted everyone out of the pool, and those who had any idea of what time it was protested. We were shouted out again, so I turned around, hence the .05 lap. Lifeguards unhooked and began to wind up the ropes, with swimmers still protesting, and I picked up my pannier and helmet and towel and headed out. When I passed the lifeguard, he called, "Okay, sorry, go until 1:05 [the listed time] then." By this time, it was 1:03 and the ropes whipped snakily through the pool. Yeah, excellent for lap swimming. I would love for the pool to be staffed by anyone who didn't hate everyone over the age of 19.
1.85 K
My mother-in-law's friend, the one whose cancer inspired me to cut my hair, came last night to the end of her struggle. She was 47.
It is certainly not among my best beloved characteristics how immediately the whims of my mood affect everything. I was in a woebegone mood this noon and knew it, so I just paddled casually.
1.5K
No rain had fallen for the four weeks between 90 minutes after we took delivery of five cubic yards of fill and two days ago. Friday evening the thunderheads delivered their goods here instead of east of here, and we had a deluge.
Temporary no-parking signs close off one bit of our street for construction. We watched two float past on the torrent, spinning, lifted clear despite their manhole cover-sized bases.
The catmint lay under the brunt, flattening their ears back in distaste. My potted cherry tomato plant got drowned--I didn't realize how poorly I had provided for its drainage. The pears are noticeably bigger today; the last of the overripe cherries were beaten from their pips, and I had a nightmare about getting lost in the weeds of the backyard.
And the basement stayed dry as a bone.
Two 3.8-mile city rides.
I rode through a damn sandblaster on the way home. A thunderstorm loomed thunderily in the northeast and another to the south, and me in the middle, I battled scouringly, searingly hot winds all the way home. Lordy.
Home. Bounce Shadowfax down to basement. Throw shoes and gloves and helmet into crate on landing. Peel clothing out of pannier and throw pannier on crate. Rescue Blake. Strip off bike clothing. Turn on swamp coooler. Shower. Make buddy chow. Collapse into Vito.
Damn it's hot.
Blake preened on my knee for a little but of course went for my foot when I stretched my leg out. I wondered briefly why he prefers my left foot to my right, but it's probably because I keep the right leg folded much more often. I wouldn't let him make with the friendly-like with my foot but threw him back onto his cage, where he is now whining. He is my child and it would be incest but mostly he tickles.
Trish said someone hit her site looking for a particular phrase she'd heard me utter. I searched myself and yep, there she is at the top of the list. I also read actual cockatiel sites, most of which said "It's normal, they have no shame, don't encourage it and don't punish it and yes, they do probably consider your face and your hands or feet to be separate entities." One cockatiel-advice site featured--let me guess, a conservative fundamentalist dumpy inorgasmic female--asking how to get her cockatiel to stop "because that's just NASTY."
I really hate people sometimes.
"Florp" as a title was supposed to be all about my adventures in Vito whence I am not moving for the rest of the evening. It shall not be a euphemism for cockatiel self-abuse--oh, the irony--because said activity doesn't require one.
It's still hot. I still haven't moved. I should probably read Oscar and Lucinda instead of blathering though.
Mm. In late June, I did 2.1K? That's according to me. Today I definitely did. All of these lapswim times are 60 minutes, incidentally. I looked at 2000 and 2002 distances, and they're about the same. I thought, this year, that I had slowed. Apparently not. Twenty-one hundred meters, O My Friends and Brothers and Future Biographers, I am quite relieved. I thought I was having a casual enough swim, pausing a couple of times my goggles or treading water while someone passed me, but I was concentrating on extending my body, on pulling through my torso, on using my abdominal strength, such as it is, to do whatever it is it does.
Also two 3.8-mile city rides.
Shyeah. 5280 and Westword, approximately, both said this place had the best burgers in Denver (apparently never having been to the Cherry Cricket). We went, nearly going to a new? or at least previously unobserved, Frenchie bistro or maybe Tamayo. Ted's patio faced east, so we stuck to the original plan. We were seated and handed menus and thereafter left to fend for ourselves. Eventually a waiter showed up and desultorily took our orders after reluctantly omitting his routine about bison's nutritional information. We live in Denver, we're aware.
Parenthetically, in Grand Teton last September way up in Cascade Canyon as we stopped to eat our lunch (which was not bison), somehow a passing hiker asked if we happened to know where he could buy bison meat. He was in Grand Teton and Grand Teton is in Wyoming: the only meat they don't sell there is human. I ducked my head, not to be sarcastic at him; RDC told him he could probably find it at any grocery store in Jackson or certainly the higher-end ones. The man asked how he, RDC, could be sure, since, tragically, we had neglected to conduct a thorough survey of foodstuffs available in the area. Because this is the west, I said. "I live in the west," he returned. He was wearing a Berkeley t-shirt. Geographically, he was right; culturally, he was way off. I ducked my head again until he went away.
So anyway. My lemonade was good. When an expeditor brought our food, RDC asked for another beer and I had to ask for my burger to be fixed: I had asked for cheddar, not just mushrooms. I had ordered it rare and expected a fresh burger, because you can't melt cheese on a hunk of meat without cooking it more. My cheesified burger arrived by expeditor again; RDC's beer never did and I offered him some lemonade; the waiter never checked to see if the temperature was okay (it wasn't: I am used to restaurants not taking "rare" seriously enough but gray is not seriously at all). The fries were dry.
The burgers, overcooked or not, were excellent. Reportedly they also have the best milkshake in town--which isn't much of a challenge or even a statement, here, malheureusement--but I could not fit one in.
We had a drink afterward in the Samba room, RDC some rum and mint and sugar cane thing and me lemon-spiked water. (I feel bad asking for water: charge me for it, but give me a sugarless, caffeineless, alcoholless drink.) On our way back to 16th Street, I tried to prop up the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory's bear. He's very large, the St. Bernard of bears, and he has a leash around his middle (certainly not "waist") since Denver disapproves of bears roaming its downtown. But it has a severe c-curve to its spine, like the only pool regular who uses a snorkel because of how much he'd have to bend his body to breathe directly, and I always try to prop him up. Through the window I spotted globs of raspberry and chocolate and I darted in to buy one. They were about to close and offered me both, since they wouldn't be good tomorrow. I accepted one, with many thanks, without lucre exchanging hands. (I should remember to go there every night at 8:59, possibly wearing disguises like Count Olaf so they don't clue in.)
A 2.1, torso-stretching swim, and only one glob of chocolate instead of two! And no milkshake! So I'm thin now.
The ripping out of the street continues, today accessorized by the breaking off of major branches from our plum and the silver maple across the street. RDC yelled at the driver, who ignored him, and so found the foreman and yelled at him. There will be no more branches broken off.
Later in the morning, RDC glanced out the window and saw three people standing on the sidewalk, looking and pointing at the house. He went out to the porch and said hello in a much different tone. It was the Fosters, the former owners of the house I found two years ago.
They talked about the house for a while. The Fosters were sorry to see the state of the evergreen, which does look quite pathe without its two spires. It was their Christmas tree one year, and they transplanted it. Pity about the three feet of snow. They seemed to like the garden, but I theorize they were being polite. Very little of the south half is currently in flower, and the north half is only started. Plus there's the north side of the house, currently raw unlandscaped fill.
They declined RDC's invitation to come inside, possibly not wanting to see the house with 20 years of change (and a good thing, because Blake's cage was extremely foul and smelly. I scrubbed it this evening.)
When I talked to Mr. Foster before, he said that they came to Colorado occasionally. And here they were. Not, this time, only for their vacation. In 2001, a librarian noticed my address, told me she was my house's family's former babysitter, and sent the owners--the Fosters--the note I enclosed in a card to her.
She died.
Is there any good reason I had never been to the Cache la Poudre before Saturday? I cannot think of a single one. RDC has fished there almost since we moved here and always said it was gorgeous, but somehow I never accompanied him. The day before we adopted Blake, two months after we arrived here, we explored the South Platte in Cheesman Canyon a little; I have gone with him several times to the Lower Williams Fork (of the Colorado). I have seen, several times, the particular, quite low spot of the Continental Divide with the ankle-deep Colorado on the west side and the Poudre on the east, within Rocky Mountain National Park. But I had not seen the Poudre as anything more than that wee streamlet until Saturday.
From my perspective, coming upstream, it seems like the road joins the river where the latter emerges from the foothills, and they climb together up Poudre Canyon for quite a distance. The river, playful, follows broad, shallow, slow curves, bounces in whitewater, and jumps small falls. The road, much tamer, still gives wonderful views and sneaks through a tunnel in unreinforced living rock. Two thousand feet up, at Big South, a sharp bend, the river is let alone--the road climbs on to Cameron Pass--and a trail leads from Big South to the river's genesis in the Park, twelve miles away.
We hiked a distance--not the twelve miles, nor even the seven to where a washed-out bridge would have turned us around anyway--up the Big South trail until we found a good fishing and reading spot. RDC caught (and released) trout after cutthroat trout and I sat on a rock in the middle of the river, my feet in the water and my nose in Oscar and Lucinda, except when I emulated Dante and found the perfect view over my head.
It was a good day.
This morning on NPR I heard a segment about Ashton...I've already forgotten his surname...who is The Voice for movie previews. This reminded me of a few things. Last week when I entered the theatre for "Pirates of the Caribbean," I did so just before the previews began, late enough that I couldn't sit in my spot. My spot is in the middle of the first row of stadium seating so I can put my feet on the railing in front of me. Ahead of the railing is floor space for wheelchairs and a few seats for companions of the chairy. I sat at the end (the left end, sorry, Haitch) of the second row, with a seat, not a railing, for my feet, but no railing is less important than farther back. Next to me was a little boy, maybe five, short and light enough that his legs weren't enough weight to keep the seat down. He sat folded in his seat, knees over the edge, and his father told him to sit up. I smiled, remembering how much more comfortable furniture used to be when it was bigger, and grinned at him. He told me he was too short and the seat didn't work. I said that sitting that way might come in handy if the movie was scary, and he wasn't short, he was five. I also told him I missed being that short. "You do?" he was flummoxed. "Why?" I told him that I miss riding on the back of my mother's bike.
(And I do. I was so sad when, as a new school year started, my mother told me I was too big to go to preschool in our accustomed manner. Now there are those follow-along half-bikes so that kids too big for the tow-behinds (none of those either!) but too small for solo can still come along. Not 30 years ago.)
He told me his father's bike had been stolen, and his car seat. I commiserated and hoped they could get better ones, and so we were friends by the time the previews started. I had wondered whether sitting next to a little kid was going to make me crazy, but he shut up as soon as the previews started.
During the previews it was a she-grown-up behind me who complained about each subsequent trailer, about their quantity. Wouldn't the ticket-taker tell you exactly when the feature itself started, if you asked? I'm sure you could avoid trailers if you really wanted. During the movie itself, a couple of times the kid leaned to me to tell me something, but when I put a finger to my lips and with the other hand pointed at the screen, he subsided. So there's a well-behaved movie kid for you. I meant to ask him afterward about one time he wanted to tell me something--actually I wanted to compliment the father on a well-behaved kid, but the father started reprimanding the kid immediately the lights came up for offenses I couldn't imagine and didn't stay to hear. I wanted to ask the kid about one of the times he sought my ear: it was when Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom defy the laws of physics to use an upturned boat as an air bubble, and I like to think that the kid and I had the same thought there: "Just like in 'Toy Story II!'"
Way back when we saw "The Pianist" at Chez Artiste, we saw a trailer for "Russian Ark." I've kept an eye out for it since and Friday I noticed it had arrived. We arrived hours beforehand because, of course, this time I was with Mr. Exaggerates the Time It Takes to Get Anywhere in Town. Wee example: we left the house just before 7. We stopped at Wild Oats for illegal concessions and I paused between the bulk foods aisle (chocolate-covered almonds and chocolate-covered ginger) and the check-out saying we should get a card for Sooby, whose daughter arrived Thursday. "We don't have time," said RDC. It was 7:05. Wild Oats is about 1500 South Colorado, Chez Artiste is 4100 South Colorado. I selected a card, we paid for our food, we drove down, we bought drinks, we sat down. It was 7:20. The movie started at seven forty-five. In addition to smuggled goodies, I had Oscar and Lucinda. RDC had his Palm. So we read. After 7:30, three young women sat directly behind us, though the auditorium was not nearly crowded enough to warrant that. Though they were (clearly, from their conversation) about to start college, they had not lost their high school ways: the vituperative attacks, the round-about self-aggrandizement through vicarious flattery, the inability to gauge their volume (okay, like I have that skill either) when they dropped their voices to comment on how much RDC and I must hate each other, not to talk before a movie.
Mrs. Miniver was right: "It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye to catch."
I expected, as I had with the five-year-old, disturbances from the peanut gallery during the movie. They were absolutely quiet. In fact I made more noise during it than they did, because as soon as the lights dimmed, the movie began, so I couldn't open my slick plastic bag during previews as is my wont but had to during the credits. There were no trailers. How very, very odd.
"Russian Ark" was great. Technically spectacular, because of the cast and the costuming and the orchestration and the dancing and the 96-minute single shot. Also bizarre, because possibly deep within the recesses of my brain more Russian remains than the words for tea, but, please and thank you, and goodbye. ("Yes" and "no" I knew before making my attempt.) I want to see it again, because I doubt I will ever get such another guided tour of the Hermitage in real life.
A friend's father-in-law would support an amendment to criminalize flag-burning. My friend's counter-argument is that on Fourth of July he--the father-in-law, but presumably also the friend--wipes his mouth on flag napkins, and how can burning be so much worse than that?
If you burn the flag, I damn well hope you're doing so to exercise your First Amendment rights. If you use a flag napkin, you're probably only showing ignorance through patriotism, like those who display a flag any which way, flouting the code.
Last night I delivered RDC's old bike to an underfed, deserving intern (both adjectives do apply, but it was to an underfed moose and a deserving porcupine that Harold gave the remainder of his purple pies) and scampered for some groceries. When I left, just after 8, I saw the most amazing sunset. Actually I didn't see the sun, behind thousands of feet of storm clouds, at all. It gilded the translucent edges of two prominent towers and its light streamed between them, their two broad shadows striped the sky all the way to the eastern horizon, light, dark, light, dark, light. The eastern horizon was here marked by the Cherry Creek Mall, and it was still fabulously beautiful. It didn't hurt that, away to the west, in the mass from which the towers grew, lightning streaked.
The flat still makes me nervous, that there is nothing to contain me should I leak outside my own edges. But being able to see miles of sky, horizon to horizon, and an entire bowl of sunset rather than a wedge, makes up for a lot.
The feel of the language reminded me of Waterland: its reserve didn't get in the way of the feeling.
I cannot justify why it took me so long to finish this. I suck.
It is strange to me that Bunnicula's author is also the Watcher's and the Misfits' author. Bunnicula succeeds best of the three, and I think so even though the latter two belong to my wonted age range. The Misfits doesn't have the alleged shocking nondevelopment of child abuse that made The Watcher so formulaic, and the dialogue among the children is okay. I really didn't need to see "he goes" that much as a dialog tag: can't a book's tone be immediate and topical without resorting to the present tense? and whatever is wrong with "he said" anyway?
Also the book was printed in a sans serif typeface, which always reminds me of books for remedial readers about motorcross.
It reminded me of Staying Fat for Sarah Burnes, not only because of the two fat protagonists. Maybe they have that Teen Problem Book tone (and not all teen problem books do have it: Freak the Mighty doesn't). There's a children's book whose title I forget about a girl who Read reads, which her family don't understand. She fixes herself a tray every day after school before retreating to her closet with Jane Eyre (so she's plump, too). Her mother tries to convert her to more "appropriate" stuff--presumably to turn her off reading so she becomes "appropriately" interested in skinning down--and I remember her first attempt's first line, something about a girl living with her father after her mother split, with her father "and my frog, Suki." Whatever that book is, however the line went, is a prime example of Teen Problem Book tone. Both Sarah Burnes and The Misfits were much better than that, of course. But not entirely immune.
I bought my two favorite non-Daughters of Eve (which I have had since a circa sixth-grade birthday) Lois Duncans, Stranger with My Face and Down a Dark Hall, in the same lunch hour bookstore run today and reread them after James Howe. You read it here first: 1975 to 1985 was the golden age of YA lit.
