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.
