Kinwork:
Lisa:
Read
Exercise
I searched for that book I mentioned the other day. I had "Jane Eyre" and "girl closet tray read" and lo, I found it: It All Began With Jane Eyre: Or, the Secret Life of Franny Dillman, by Sheila Greenwald. If the book itself doesn't have that tone (I'll find out when it makes its way to me through the library), its title sure does. Deliberately, I'm sure.
Finding it made me grin. So did my first episode of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" last night, which I thanked Eliza for. So did my first swim, rather than only immersion, though in only fake, rather than real, water, in over a week, just a leisurely mile but enough.
So did this:
I love its little punk-ass haircut. Which I have just (the next day, watching Blake, perched on my shin, preen in a sleepy kind of way, and fluff his plumage in a sleepy kind of way) realized is vaguely cockatielian, which is so a word.
And its jauntily angled nose.
And its little blind stare.
Also, it tasted good. It grew, I plucked it, it modeled for the camera, I devoured it with salt. Such is the life of a tomato.
Well, Blake's more than a friend, but that's the phrase. He likes the cave, the space under the arm of the couch, between its side and the wall. Back there, he's easy to clean up after. Today, sitting on the couch, I set up his box at the open end of the cave as a Buddy Containment Device. He can't wander all over the floor if he's penned in by his box, or so went my reasoning. I'm not as bright as a cockatiel, though: the first time he got bored, he nudged the box aside and trotted out on the wall side, my clever little thing; the second time, I braced the box with my tall glass of water, and he nudged the box forward and emerged on the couch side; the third time, he gathered his strength and did a standing jump from floor to box top, six inches up, scampered across its top, and hopped off the opposite end. At least all of these ways were noisy enough that I could hear him and recontain him otherwise.
Thank goodness I was cooking dinner: an obvious and also honest excuse to cut short my conversation with Babushka. It is tomato season and she damn well knows it, so she opened the door and said "Yoohoo, honey!" (she's forgotten my name again) and came right in. I had been moving between porch swing and kitchen and not locked the door: a mistake. I picked six tomatoes today, including Mr. Nose; I gave her three. I didn't give her any cherries this year but selfishly kept them all myself. I can't begrudge her a decent homegrown tomato or three.
The project itself doesn't have an easily googleable site, but "CBS Sunday Morning's" story about all that can be produced from one tree made me happy.
In other tree news, I drove partway up Mt. Evans today, aiming for the West Chicago Lake trail. I didn't like the look of its dirt road so instead strolled around Echo Lake and found another rock in another creek to sit on while reading another book. Under more trees, I should say.
When we were kids, we were sent to the back of the station wagon to sleep during the second feature of a drive-in. My sister sneaked awake once and saw "Audrey Rose," the lurid plot of which she detailed to me and which became the basis of many later games. Maybe because of it, this is how CLH and I decided we should have a code word so that when one tried to haunt the other, she could give the name to prove the haunting was genuine and not someone else's trickery. That code word is probably the one secret I will take to my grave.
I never saw "Audrey Rose." Until now. I recorded it a couple of days ago but only just talked to my sister. I didn't know if watching this movie, like riding an upside-down roller-coaster, was something I needed to do with her. But I at least have her permission.
Because of the subject matter and the age of the child, it's hard not to see "The Exorcist" all through this. Because of the lead actress and the age of the child, it's hard not to see "The Goodbye Girl" too, and that's one bizarre pairing of movies. Anthony Hopkins is the lead actor, so it's hard to dismiss it as trash outright. Yet, at least, 30 minutes in.
[Later.] Definitely more "Exorcist" than "Goodbye Girl," no surprise there. Gee, I wonder how those big windows high over Park Avenue will come into play.
[More than halfway through.] Oh cool, Higgie-baby is in this. I know John Hillerman only as Higgins, and--who was just saying this? maybe Kymm, though she understands acting and I can't get past my typecasting--he and David Ogden Stiers sound so wrong to me in their native Usan voices. I probably would have the same issue if ever I heard James Marsters as someone other than Spike.
I finally emptied the camera. The garden in June, soon after a rainstorm. Obviously, because otherwise the columns' white paint is never so clean as to be so blindingly white.
Now, everything then in flower has faded and the sage and the agastache are coming into bloom--it needs other mid-summer blooming plants to balance all the spring stuff.
There at the near corner, in the blank spot you can see where the lavender has only doubled in its two years, where everything else has grown exponentially.
Conversation with Egg and an intern (the newly biked one) this morning. Egg had just seen "The Philadelphia Story" for the first time. Much enthusing on both our parts plus reenactment for the ignorant intern was necessary. [Logically, it should be "were," but that sounds wrong. Have I been corrupted?] Through Jimmy Stewart, we got to "Airport '77" and other cheesy crap to watch in the '70s, so "The Donny and Marie Show" was but a short leap--unlike the conversation, which was a long gossipy reminiscence on a Monday morning. The intern (who is Mormon) said that besides polygyny, the Osmonds were the worst thing for the LDS' reputation. Here I refrained from commenting that harassing people on their doorsteps probably doesn't help either but instead observed that I didn't remember any Mormonism in the show particularly. My first exposure to the religion was in the Great Brain books. "I remember those!" exclaimed Egg. Of course she does: we're only a year apart, whereas most of our childhood television was lost on the intern, a decade younger.
So I explained the books to the intern (much as Egg and I had, in tandem, quite a while earlier, explained "The Philadelphia Story"), how in the little town of Adenville, Utah, the preponderance of Mormons necessitated each boy (Sweyn, Tom the Brain, and John the narrator) to be able to beat up those Mormons in his own age group. And the Brain's swindling and crime-solving. Egg exclaimed at how much I remember, and the intern has--big surprise--also noticed it. She said something about "how much you remember, when I'm ready to go on to the next thing."
I cracked right the hell up. That is such a perfect description of me. I laughed and laughed and laughed and teared up with laughter and laughed in that unstoppable, face-aching way, and she was laughing too and insisting she hadn't meant it like that. I knew that she didn't mean it maliciously, but the subconsciously rendered, absolutely perfect description of what it's like to be around me, reduced me to hysterics.
Then the intern asked me how I can keep all of that in my head, that he would go insane with so much going on. I told him I don't know the capital of Angola, which more important to daily life [whereupon I shut up, continuing in my head, "than the Fitzgerald boys' middle name (which is Dennis)," but I didn't want to prove his point too much, did I?]
1.3K
For the last week of its season, the pool--perhaps all city pools, but I should check, maybe Cook is merciful--closes at 5. No afternoon lap swim. A small sign announces this, also that the pool will be open for lap swim from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. (post instead of ante would make me so happy). At 7:00 a.m., it's 60 degrees out; at 5:00, it's generally still over 90. Hm.
Well, I can swim in cold water if the day is hot. Here at least the water will be warmer than the air.
And it's the last outdoor afternoon swim of the city's year. Not, mercifully, of my year.
I know that, by now, this is old hat and no revelation to anyone. But Margaret Atwood has such a way of putting things. From "Hair Jewellery"--which story is, anyway, older than my own revelation:
"You were, of course, the perfect object. No banal shadow of lawnmowers and bungalows lurked in your melancholy eyes, opaque as black marble, recondite as urns, you coughed like Roderick User, you were, in your own eyes and therefore in mine, doomed and restless as Dracula. Why is it that dolefulness and a sense of futility are so irresistible to young women? I watch this syndrome among my students: those febrile young men who sprawl on the carpets which this institution of higher learning has so thoughtfully provided for them, grubby and slack as hookworm victims, each with some girl in tow who buys cigarettes and coffee for him and who receives in turn his outpourings of spleen, his condemnations of the world and his mockery of her in particular, of the way she dresses, of the recreation room and two television sets owned by her parents, who may be in fact identical to his, of her friends, of what she reads, of how she thinks. Why do they put up with it? Perhaps it makes them feel, by contrast, healthful and life-giving; or perhaps these men are their mirrors, reflecting the misery and chaos they contain but are afraid to acknowledge."
A Formigny screen or storm window hangs from two tabs at the top and then, once the frame is fully into place, is secured by a hook on the screen to an eye in the sill. Mostly: they are old, and some of the hooks and eyes are missing, stripped out, whatever. This morning as I sat at the dining table and Blake ate his breakfast on the kitchen windowsill, I sneezed. This startled Blake and I heard him flap once and then utter the cockatiel equivalent of a human "hmph" of frustration. I was already up and after him: his flap had delivered him three inches left and four up onto the screen, from which he hung by claws and beak, with tail splayed out. Remind me to check that the hook and eye are quite, quite secure.
In the future, people will not wear clothes but instead stick Post-Its all over themselves.
2.2K. I know when I casually do 1.4 or even 1.6, that's much less than I can do. But 2.2K is an exceptional lot for me to accomplish. Having the pool emptier really does help.
Today after my swim, after pad thai and Life on Capitol Hill and a peach for lunch, reading, as I had eaten, on the porch swing, glancing from time to time at the garden which is now in its late summer blooming of sage and agastache, I saw our hummingbird again.
Bright green, with a black tail, it zipped here and there among the flowers, sipping. I stood up to see better and called in to RDC. It makes me so happy to have attracted such a bird with natural growing things rather than a feeder.
I replaced the broken bird feeder. I should have tried instead to replace its springs. When this one snaps I'll do that. The squirrels had really enjoyed the two weeks of the old feeder, but I was happy to disoblige them. The other day as I came into the kitchen, I saw the winged regulars arranged along the branch, all facing my house, not the neighbor's, the way they do when I haven't filled their trough. When I got to the window and looked down, I saw why: a squirrel was back on the feeder, trying to figure it out. I rapped on the window and it fled. Too bad the trees don't come with the same sort of anti-squirrel device: the fruit, what there is left, is near ripe, and the ground is littered with more premature fruit than I thought was on the trees to begin with.
Also, RDC called me at work to tell me the peregrin falcon made another appearance. It was Blake who told him, of course.
What a fantabulous day. Get this: it was perfectly sunny all day, but not blazing hot even in the sun.
We walked to the farmer's market for tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches, plums, butter-and-sugar corn, and two pounds of basil. Our own tomatoes and cucumbers will be ready soon but not our nectarines or plums. (If you guessed a rodent with tentacles and a tail, yep.)
Then I inaugurated the new food processor: basil + piñon + romano cheese + elephant garlic (milder) + olive oil + salt = a couple of ice cube trays lined with plastic wrap filled with pesto, now in the freezer ready to stave off the bleakness of winter basillessness.
New food processor! New food processor! New food processor! Cuisinart, quite strong motor, two work bowls, three blades. The last one died in May as it struggled with perhaps too much pasta dough. I discovered in the meantime that pesto tastes much better when made with a mortar and pestle, but basil in bulk is available now and pesto in bulk is nothing I want to prepare without electricity. Plus the mortar holds less than a pint. So.
After that--which process spared me yet another opportunity to learn to change my bike tires, hooray!--we set up the new tent, which is snazzy although less exciting than the new food processor, not needing repetition, because it will entail camping. It has a moonroof! It has a vestible without really a vestibule (you keep your muddy boots between the fly and the tent but don't have to turn a pretzel to exit the damn thing. Also you can unzip the doors--two, one for each occupant, hooray!--with one hand: they're curved instead of cornered. There's an attic (a little shelf made of screening) for glasses; luckily there're also a few pockets along the sides, since the attic obscures the moonroof. The fly can roll down in seconds if the weather turns (completely covering the moonroof). It sets up about as easily as the...whatever the people's name was...tents in The Hero and the Crown.
Then I weeded! in the middle of the afternoon! in the sun! without dying of sunstroke! I clipped out all the old raspberry canes because, who knew, a second crop is coming in. There is one little baby pumpkin coming along, so I removed the other blossoms. (Last year, the mystery plant that turned into a pumpkin was huge before it was orange. This year, it's wee but already yellowy-orange. I didn't mark which squash I planted where, so because of the color I wonder if this is the Casper variety I planted.) I snipped the cherry sproutlets, ripped out whatever it is that has dandelion leaves but also pokey little irritants, not quite thorns but bad enough, ripped out some maybe-mums that do way too well on way too little care to be anything but weeds and that were crowding the rosemary anyway.
Then I emptied the garage. Kind of. Its perimeter is lined with this and that, but its perimeter is what the masons need access to. Some stuff I brought inside, and I am sick of moving stuff from here to there, and other stuff I piled in the middle, which the mason said was fine. I got to throw out some crap, always a plus.
I was soaked in sweat by the end, because of work not because of sun.
Today is Blake's hatchday! To celebrate we are going to glue an eggtooth on his beak and pluck out his tail so he fits when we fold him back up into an egg.
I do occasionally bike to work even when RDC isn't home (for discipline and to need the car himself) but it's so easy to make excuses to drive when he's gone: it makes for a shorter day for Blake, I can run errands during lunch instead of after work (again less alone-time for Blake), and, uh, I probably had others.
Last Saturday, the 2nd, leaving the pool after my swim, I detoured around the construction not the marked way but my own, shorter, way, apparently through a nest of those thorny thingies. Do I know how to change my own tubes? I do not. So I drove Monday and Tuesday, RDC came home Tuesday, Wednesday I took the other bus route (a mile walk on one end and a half on the other: not bad, but going from cold to overheated bus to cold to overheated building is going to suck this winter), Thursday and Friday I had off. Sunday RDC, not I, changed the tubes, because patching the tubes would have required umpteen little patches.
I do know, in principle, how to do it, how to pop the tire off the rim, how to test the tube for punctures, how to apply a patch. I have just never actually done it. I ought to know how to do it, because, unlike changing a car's oil, a flat cannot be planned for and renders the vehicle useless until fixed. More than to know how to do it, I ought actually to do it. Next time (ha!)
Two 3.8-mile city rides.
When I got home from work and plucked a summer squash and some tomatoes, the flower hadn't opened; two hours later, back from sushi, as I raised the shades and opened the window, there it was, brave and solitary. I raced out to it and admired it and kissed it and damn, it's not a real sunflower of the seed-bearing type so I hope squirrels leave it alone. I wasn't the brightest bear to plant it way in the back, where the tree--not a Tree of Heaven, despite its growing in the alley and my wanting it to be--shades too much. Also there's the creeping stuff--Virginia creeper? I'm not sure--that is growing up from the fence into the tree and that I haven't torn out, giving yet more shade. Next summer we'll have an additional bed, against the garage, with sun almost all day, for tomatoes and cucumbers and sunflowers. The original bed will be for crops I am not so in love with and also that don't need quite as much sun, like squash and beans, but I should still rip down a lot of the creeper.
This variety is the sort that produces several flowers per plant instead of just the one big one. I doubt I'll name the rest but this first one is Emily.
I don’t do this often. Bear with me, OMFB. The first thing I remember was being held against my will in some bizarre religious culty thing (RDC is reading Jon Krakauer’s new book Under the Banner of Heaven, about a murder in a Mormon context). In my small bedchamber, a persistent swain pressed his suit in the most unwelcome self-assured courtship since Mr. Collins’s of Elizabeth Bennet. (After her volunteer vacation in Togo three years ago, Egg received the most hysterical postcard from an utter stranger who must have got her name and address from another Togolese, with a cut-out three-quarter photograph glued on, trying to woo her, saying something about how even though he didn’t meet her he experienced the beautiful scent wafting in her wake. She is in western African this week for work and I enthused with her just before she left that maybe she could meet him this time.) The next day, as I knew it in the dream, I had escaped, and I had a newborn (it was Blake's hatchday Monday). There was no coitus, no pregnancy, no birth, but I knew it was mine. I wanted to be rid of it before it needed to eat because I was afraid if I nursed it, I would bond with it. Here are the ways it was like Blake: it moseyed about (and, unlike Blake, nearly fell down the cellar stairs), it was kind of toilet trained (one mosey was to poop somewhere that wasn't-on-me), and it kind of talked (like Blake, but more like the cat in Half Magic). It could do all this despite being merely a day old, and I liked it and told it how brilliant it was. It was a girl and I thought I might name it Emily but then I would reprimand myself that the sunflower was Emily (I had a sunflower yesterday). I wound up in a house belonging to a woman who looked like Chloris Leachman (we watched “Interiors” last night and apparently Geraldine Page reminds me of Chloris Leachman). I finally nursed it when it needed to be fed. While it fed, I realized, “Hey, I'm on the pill! That must be bad for the baby.” Following rapidly on the heels of that brilliance was “Yeah! I'm on the pill! I can't have a baby.” Whereupon I woke up.
With, interestingly, neither horror nor relief nor longing but disorientation and then amusement.
A while ago I bought a pen with a light in the tip so you can write in the nearly dark. I have never used it in my paper journal because, as my sister says, if it's not violet, it's not recognizably my handwriting. I woke, I pulled my journal from my backpack (which lives by my bed) and the pen from the drawer, and wrote four pages.
One and a third geological ages ago, either my boyfriend's grandmother or his friend's wife had a butter-keeper: the lid has a bowl that fits upside-down into cup, you have some water in the cup, you put butter in the bowl, and lo, room-temperature butter that's slightly cleaner than leaving it on the counter all the time. I've been wanting one since and remembered to put it on a gift list my mother asked for before last Yule. She found one for my birthday and sent it in the box from the store, with her usual inability to pack such that the lid, chattering against the bowl on its journey, arrived in three pieces (shh).
Meanwhile, when I went to France in May my assignment for my sister was a butter dish on a pedestal. (I have no idea what she meant.) I bought her one, not what she had in mind but she liked it, and it arrived entire because both the shopkeeper and I know how to ship.
Meanwhile, my mother had been harping that the one piece she needed to complete the yellow Florentine pattern Depression glass set she and Granny had been trying to complete for years--for my lifetime, I am sure--was the butter dish lid. She had the base but needed the domed lid. I timidly ventured into eBay a-looking. In the 1.75 years since I broke my favorite ornament, it has never come up for bid, though I could have bought dozens of the Kurt Adler Polonaise Boot with Presents. So I added a search for this thing. It came up once before and my maximum bid didn't even meet the seller's reserve price, which I thought was ridiculous, since the final bid was ten times the starting price. Another came up a few weeks ago and zounds, I won it.
I dislike auctions in general: they are too close to gambling. But I got the thing for my mother, although, as my sister pointed out when I bitched about the first auction, what's the point, because it will live in a cupboard so crowded that nothing on display can be seen, and she doesn't appreciate nice gestures anyway, and it came from a gas station to begin with. I had the seller (who frayed my nerves by never responding to my emails telling him I had sent payment, that I would like to know when he received payment and shipped the item) ship it to her, and he did, and I told her a package would arrive that was her Christmas present and she could open it either now or on the proper day.
She opened it yesterday. She left me voicemail sounding not particularly enthused, which is unfortunate considering how much she worried this particular bone.
So now we all have a goddamn butter dish and can get off each other's backs.
I will be so glad when the street construction is done. We've had pounding that shook Formigny, so sturdy a little brick house that even the Wolf couldn't blow it down, and I figured it was a good thing the masons would start their work after that was done. The other morning the Trojan Rabbit rumbled along the street before we even got up, a wheeled behemoth or maybe a conveyor-belted one, not that I got up to see. Remember how in "Jurassic Park," they know the Tyrannosaurus Rex is coming because the Jello wiggles? Or perhaps a more highfalutin example is the opening scene in "Richard III" when Henry VI is supping at his war table and notices the wine is a-tremble moments before Richard's tank comes through the wall. Anyway, that's been our house.
The most beautiful noise in the whole wide world is that of a washing machine deciding, after stopping midcycle and not starting again despite being rebalanced and having its drum jiggled and eventually having its clothes removed and wrung out and dumped into a plastic bag-lined hamper ready to go to a laundromat and its lid closed and its dial turned and pulled again (just in case), to run.
I added this to the list of stuff I don't get:
Wearing gear from a team you don't belong to (relatively mild, really), or from a school neither you nor anyone you know attend or care about (less mild), or with the initials of the New York Police Department or the Fire Department of New York just like that worn by those who actually have committed themselves to those departments (not mild at all, that one).
For a few reasons we decided to leave a day later. One of the several benefits was making the drive in daylight: the climb to Bailey, over Kenosha Pass into South Park, a break for lunch in Jefferson or Fair Play, at a diner cum general store cum post office. Resolved: to stop thinking of Colorado as Denver plus a stretch of interstate to the regular ski mountains or another stretch of smaller roads to Rocky Mountain National Park. Also: to take better advantage of knowing how much more to Colorado there is.
I had seen South Park a few times before, the remarkable flats leading back to the plains and the long drop down, Mt. Elbert looming in the distance. This time we didn't turn toward Salida (an exit from the mountains) but west toward Monarch. I might have done better with blinders on: Monarch Pass was scary. But in that case I would have missed the snow.
Prosaic as I am, when I look around to these small towns, the homesteads without the towns, I wonder about their fresh produce. Weekly or monthly mail I can figure. If only monthly, though, do they get tomatoes and spinach and asparagus only monthly as well?
After four hours of painted horses, parched, sage-covered hills, creeks a-jump and a-burble, foothills and mountains, we reached Crested Butte. On almost every postcard I wrote that this was the most beautiful bit of Colorado I had ever seen, and that was true because I hadn't seen Telluride yet.
One of the things I miss here is forests, both their presence and their views. I've always preferred deciduous to coniferous trees in general, but somehow I knew the problem with Colorado forest wasn't just that they're mostly evergreen. Here in southwestern Colorado, the forests appealed to me much more, and I immediately saw why. More moisture means more deciduous, more aspen and cottonwood (including my favorite, redolent narrow-leaf black willow), but also more Colorado blue spruce instead of the drier eastern slopes' Ponderosa and lodgepole pine: the green of the forest is more blue than yellow. It was soothing to the eye (like poppies).
Crested Butte is in two parts: Crested Butte, full of Victorian, mining-era buildings, with shoppes (pronounced "shoppies," natch) and galleries and restaurants, and Mt. Crested Butte, nothing but ski condos and hotels, three miles north and directly under the eponymous mountain.
Geographically, I'm not sure what the difference is between a butte and a mountain or a butte and a mesa, but I know a mountain and a mesa aren't the same. Crested Butte is relatively independent, descending to the valley floor on all sides instead of being one peak of many (butte not mountain), and it's not flat on top (butte not mesa) even where it's not crested (like a cockatiel or a dinosaur, take your pick).
I don't know how a ten-mile round trip could possibly include 12 miles uphill one way, but it did. North of Crested Butte, north of Mt. Crested Butte, north of Gothic (a ghost town revived for the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory), we headed for Copper Creek trailhead. We did not park at the base, no no no, because apparently the jeep track passes for a road that RDC wanted to take Cassidy up.
(Monarch Pass went on for a long way, was vaguely snowy, had narrow, sharp curves and no guard rails, but it was paved smoothly. This wasn't even gravel, like Guanella Pass, nor washed-out blacktop like the state forest road to Uncas Lake. This was nothing that a vehicle should be taken up, four-wheel-drive or otherwise. We went up and Cassidy did fine. Like Olivia Steinbeck in East of Eden with airplanes, this is something I continue not to believe in even after experiencing it.)
Gorgeous. This is how everywhere should be, with surface water and lots of trees and, get this, about a dozen people along our entire several hours on the trail (I know I'm part of the problem, but part of my problem-causing is that I like it deserted). Sallows and blue spruce and cottonwoods on the north-facing slopes and sage and bear grass on the south-facing and Indian paintbrush and campanula and did I mention the creek and the lake?
The last mile up lasted about twelve times as long as I wanted. I plodded. Steep is one thing. I don't know what the grade was: "plenty" about sums it up. RDC wasn't quite up to speed and listed somewhat, and unfortunately strained his knee. I was determined to get to the top, and so was RDC, and so we did.
Why we had packed only one sandwich apiece instead of all of them, I don't know. But I am damn glad I had my own 64-ounce Camelbak bladder.
From the map, we thought we were close to the Canyon; from the guidebooks, I, at least, had different expectations about what the reservoirs would be like. First, we weren't close but two hours and 90 miles away. Second, I was delusional to hope that Blue Mesa reservoir would be any different from any other water dammed in high arid land. Water, imprisoned into an unnatural form, low along its shoreline, below hills so dry the scrub sage is less than spotty, looks not dammed but damned to me.
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison was much better. What other major canyons in the United States haven't I seen? Glenwood Canyon and the Grand Canyon; the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone; now this. I haven't seen Yosemite, and there must be others.
When we arrove, it was cloudless and hot. While we were there, clouds formed and rolled in. Light rain began to fall, and then more. At the downstream end of the south rim, we stopped for a torrential thunderstorm. To the west, where the canyon plateau fell away into a 60-mile view, we now could not see even to the next bend in the river, but during a brief lull we saw that lightning had sparked a fire on the north rim. The rain closed in again, pounding the car, and when it finally ceased the smoke from that one had lessened, but not gone out--a fire could simmer in the sap of a juniper or piñon through a worse deluge than that--and a second fire, a little farther east, had started. A ranger, who had waited out the storm along with many civilians, said around a wad of tobacco in his jaw that they'd have to hike in to ensure they were out. I would not have felt as assured without the chaw.
The Canyon was only recently upgraded from monument to park, and even if it had had marked trails down, there was no way, capital No, capital Way. We took pictures from the rim, at Dragon Point of Painted Wall, where because of the small fires it looked somewhat like the dragons were breathing the smoke in the air, as well as that on the wall.
We never do this: just hang out by the pool all day on vacation. We did this day, such a novelty.
I can't recommend the Sheraton in Mt. Crested Butte. A king mattress fits across two twin box springs, but the hotel doesn't spring for king-sized pillows or king-sized fitted sheets or even fitted sheets at all or indeed sheets that aren't pilly. We didn't sleep well during our stay: the least movement untucked the minimal tuckage, just for starters.
There was a pool, smallish and not particularly cleanish, with a fine view of the butte, without shade. But that's me: it's a pool, and I would have preferred to laze the day away by a creek or a pond. But even fake water is better than no water. I explored the beautiful old Victorian village in the morning, checking out books from their library (in super old building that was a school until nine years ago) and shopping a bit, and then joined RDC by and in the pool. I stood in five feet of water, arms and chin on a towel on the deck, and read Second Summer of the Sisterhood.
There are worse ways to spend a day.
As Melissa said, nowhere near as good as Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but since in my laziness The Goldbug Variations seemed too strenuous, it fit the pool mentality just fine.
We fled the short-sheeted Sheraton for a lovely bed and breakfast in Ouray. The China Clipper's nautical theme was incongruous in the middle of the mountains, and felt more like a small hotel than a B&B, but the bed was high (there was a little wooden stepstool on what was therefore clearly RDC's side), the atmosphere non-corporate, and the view of the canyon wall from the porch an excellent way to rest your eyes over the top of your book. Our room was the Southern Cross (#8 in the virtual tour), and I noticed that in the Sheraton, we usually had CNN on, while at the China Clipper, the television remained blind and mute: corporate v. non-corporate.
But damn, that was a long drive, and we had a leisurely start to the day, so all we did was wander about the town and, get this, shop. Can you call it shopping when you don't buy anything? Or is it shopping if you go in instead of just looking through windows and have not ruled out the possibility of buying? Crested Butte, Ouray, Silverton, and Telluride all were born mining towns in the late 19th century and the architecture shows it. Now, with the mining nearly not happening, they survive on tourism. This time, I'm sorry to say, we fit more into the sightseeing demographic than the active one, but the sightseeing was fine and the shops were mostly shops, not shoppes, and the galleries good.
(Only Ouray's main street, part of U.S. 550, is paved. There are no traffic lights. There is no McDonald's or Wal-Mart in San Juan County. There is Billy Goat Gruff's Biergarten, though.)
On the way to Ouray, we did not stop at Ridgway State Park, whose photographs lie. This our guidebook had proclaimed "the crowning jewel" of Colorado state parks, which bodes poorly for all the rest of them and for the state. It looked just as much like a reservoir as any other and its roped-off swim area, visible from the state route, was the size of Cherry Creek reservoir's, such that even if you ventured in (which I never have, preferring my swim water separate from my sewage water and please don't ask where my drinking water comes from), you could not swim any distance, or away from paddling peeing children, or in water deep enough not to be murky from disturbing the bottom, or out of the roped area without being run down by a foul motor boat or "personal water craft."
We had our best meals yet, service and food combined. In Crested Butte, the Wooden Nickel's service was surly (though the prime rib was good); the Gourmet Noodle's and Bacchinale's marinaras abysmal (RDC dove into the kitchen when we got home to make real sauce) though cheerfully served; and the Idle Spur was depressingly empty though the elk chops were tasty. Our first meal in Ouray, by contrast, was lunch at Le Papillon Bakery, which served po'boys! I regretted not sampling its desserts. At Buen Tiempo for dinner, I had a seafood mixed grill with a wonderful fruit salad. I had never eaten anything called "mixed grill" before (I would have said "mixed seafood grill") and all I could think of was The Corrections--I think the transposed adjectives indicate that "mixed grill" is really its own dish. RDC had something way hotter than I can manage--the one forkful I ventured made me regret my wussy palate. The next night's dinner happened at the Coachlight, a hokey enough name that I could not help thinking of the late Chop House in Flanders, Connecticut, an unfair slight to this not nearly as pathetic place.
The first stop on the Million Dollar Highway was Box Canyon Falls. Whole trees jammed one spillway; whole hillsides had been softened by floods. Then up and over the Million Dollar Highway to Silverton, where I bought a rock.
I always get a rock for Haitch, or usually. This time it had entirely slipped my mind through Copper Creek and Black Canyon because I suck. Then, as we crunched through Silverton (which, like Ouray, has one paved road, or none because it was being resurfaced at the time), we saw a rock stand.
Ages ago in Denver we saw what would have been the perfect photograph if it had been possible to capture the image without its subject's notice. A shorty, nowhere near 10, had a lemonade stand on his corner lot. Apparently business wasn't brisk, because his expression rivaled Puddleglum's for pessimism.
These kids were too young to be discouraged. I think. If the older was even five, I'll eat my hat. They were dazzlingly towheaded and fairly shone out of the empty lot where they had set up shop. It looked an unlikely spot as we drove by, but I hadn't noticed the traintracks like a spine in the road. RDC said, "You should get Haitch a rock." Oh yeah.
So we investigated the rail station (the Saybrook train station looked only slightly less decrepit last time I looked) and looked at some old rail cars (including one ambulance car still running on a 1918 Cadillac automobile engine) and then looked through town. We looked into the town hall (which has a great dome I would have photographed if there hadn't been a jumbo potted tree directly under the rotunda) and the one-time prison and now museum. Repeating our strange new habit of poking around town, we did that, which is basically the historic walking tour. This jaunt also included its Carnegie library, which was just fine, especially its nonfiction room in the basement.
Upstairs, I spotted a book I showed to RDC to rival the legendary Tact for Dummies: Virgin Planet, a seeming combination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland and...that short story that's a twist on the saying "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" (the blind doctors want to remove from his face the one or two bulging, soft tumors that they are sure are causing his dementia). The back cover matter of Planet proclaimed an astronaut's crash landing somewhere that had been man-less for 300 years. Apparently this man faced the same difficulties Taylor does on the Planet of the Apes. Lord. (Of course now I regret not borrowing it, but please, it's bad enough I interrupt Goldbug Variations with Second Summer of the Sisterhood. I don't need to encourage myself.)
So anyway. I made sure to walk by the two young entrepeneurs. They had wee little chairs by a wooden crate. The older pawed through the bills and change they'd collected in a coffee mug, probably not yet having mastered arithmetic (or maybe he or they had: they were businessmen). So I asked the younger, "Where do your rocks come from?"
"The mine." Duh. They were clearly not from the empty lot behind him.
"How much are your rocks?"
He began to pick up rocks from the array on the crate. "This one...is two dollars," putting it down and randomly picking up another hunk of granite, "and this one...is two dollars and fifty cents,"...pausing as in Godot's "Endgame" before picking up, with difficulty, the largest of the rocks about the size of my fist, "and this one...is five dollars..."
I had already picked out the one I wanted, a yellow quartz, so I touched it and asked how much that one was.
"A quarter."
I managed to stifle my laughter until I was around the corner and in the car again. That was the funniest thing of the whole trip.
The funnest part of the whole trip was next. Back up and more down to Ouray, north of Ouray to a not-quite-town called Orvis. We were looking for Orvis Hot Springs. Our aim was County Road 3 off State Route 550. Believe me when I say these were driveway-level turn-offs. We saw a sign that said "Orvis Springs" and thought that was it.
It was not. The sign actually said "Orvis Springs Inc. Custom Meat Processing." We thought, for heaven's sake, all we want to do is soak. Where do they get their meat anyway? And we drove up a long driveway that probably also counted as a county road and passed a shed outside of which stood a frame with a grate set into the ground below. I recognized it not because it looked like anything I've seen in (pictures of) slaughterhouses but because it was a larger version of the game room in the kitchens of Chenonceau. I know you hang small game for a day or two to facilitate dressing, but these were elk- (or human-) size hooks. We had turned to hightail it the hell out of there as a man approached us on a tractor (which we could outrun, as long as his other brother Daryl didn't show up wielding a chainsaw, because believe me, the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" jokes kept coming). The man, with the weary smile of one who has had to deal with this once too often, directed us back out to the state road and to the next turn-off.
It's easy to miss Orvis Hot Springs because it's in a little dell and its privacy fences are cloaked in green. It needs the privacy fences because, praise be, the entire outdoor area is clothing-optional.
We spent the next three hours in a 40' long, four- to five-foot-deep, pebble-bottomed, 99- to 102-degree pond, surrounded by mountains, sage, hollyhocks, sunflowers, cottonwoods, and willow, occasionally being rained on, moving now closer and now farther from a plume that fed in unadulterated, hot, mineral (but not sulphury) water, and we did this unimpeded by the known carcinogen that is a bathing suit.
And the next day we went home.
This is why a small town's library makes for the best browsing. I looked at the wee half-stack of juvenile fiction in Crested Butte and immediately saw two titles I wanted (this and Second Summer).
I did the same in the adult stacks but ask me if I've cracked Prague yet.
From Ouray we detoured to Telluride. The way led among mountains in more dire need of an orthodontist than any I have seen before, between working ranches and resort ranches and ghost ranches, through quaking aspen and gambel oak, up the San Miguel river, and into another mostly preserved, mostly Victorian town (with some architecture that wouldn't be out of place in Aspen, and some even in Anonymous Suburb, U.S.A.)
From Cascade Canyon last year I remember glacier-fed creeks tumbling down hillsides, and one of those is the prominent feature of Telluride, visible from anywhere in town at the end of the canyon. A private residence improbably perches halfway up Bridal Veil Falls. From partway up the ski slope by gondola, you can see the young craggy mountains (whose names I forget), lapsed volcanoes like Little Cone, and other unimaginatively name hills like Bald Mountain that cradle the town.
Passing signs for it, I had no idea how anyone could fit an airport into the narrow canyon; from the ski slope I looked down on its single, short runway on a conveniently placed plateau that must make for gnarly approaches and departures.
The town is so crunchy! Boulder is not, actually, crunchy anymore. The Ramseys lived there: QED. In Crested Butte and in Telluride, wild mushroom festivals were going on. Telluride has a movie festival, a bluegrass festival, and Widespread Panic just played. How Spreadheads afforded Telluride, even camping, I do not know. But when we come into our money, we're moving there.
Coming down just the sixty miles thence to Montrose--well, I wished the whole state looked like Telluride. Montrose is flat and arid, eh. From Montrose to Delta didn't turn my head either, and just east of Delta, Colorado looks as much like the barren former seabed of Utah as anything else that I never want to see again. (I just don't do deserts or near-deserts well. I can live with that.) We were in the Gunnison Gorge area, but you'd never know there was a river within a million miles.
But then, oh, but then, we started to climb again. Colorado's geography changes so rapidly, so dramatically, and so much over the state, that I am ashamed it took me eight years to learn this for myself. After Hotchkiss, the altitude enough to trap the clouds, the land blossomed. Cherries and apples and peaches, vegetable crops, livestock: beautiful country. We passed through a coal-mining town that brimmed with stories. I regret to report that even Paonia Reservoir, high enough to be surrounded by forest, still looks like a reservoir. Mostly, the climb to and the drop from McClure Pass was staggeringly beautiful. There is a campground along the North Fork of the Gunnison which looks both fishable and swimmable and went on the list.
East from Montrose, lightning beckoned us up and chased us down the peaks. We had rain, lovely rain, sporadically throughout the drive. (We had rain nearly every day. I loved all of it.) We cut the trip short because, what with RDC's knee and antibiotics, hiking and camping weren't happening--next time, we camp either in Poudre Canyon or along McClure Pass. These several days were a gorgeous introduction to an area I want to see more of, and see more deeply, and find places to swim in. I will never ice climb, but Ouray in the winter must be even more spectacular; I am not a gazillionaire, but Telluride in snow (without diesel fumes) probably blinds one with beauty. Not a bad last sight.
There are more pictures in the gallery.
Denver Events, as Reconstructed: we got home, I brought my first load inside, I left the car unlocked and the doors open while I inspected the pear tree (denuded) and the tomatoes (booming) and the raspberries (not quite ripe yet) and the garage (tuckpointed but not acid-washed). I returned to the car for more stuff, emptied the car into the living room, and breathed. I showered and shampooed and shaved, and wrapped myself in my bathrobe, and, amidst piles of dirty laundry, sleeping bags, Nalgeen bottles, fishing tackle, etc., wondered aloud, "Where's my wallet?" which had the effect of convincing both of us I had left it in Montrose, either in the store or in the peer or on the car.
Montrose Events, as Reconstructed: I left RDC to fuel Cassidy and went into the shop to case it for peers, snacks, and drinks. Exploration of its nether corners yielded no peer of either persuasion, so I asked a clerk, who said they were outside round the corner. I tried the female one, whose door I could not budge, and returned to the car, somewhat shamed of leaving RDC to both pump and squeegee. We both went back to the store and out again. He and I serially used the same facility, with him guarding me while I violated gender protocol. We bought Gator-Ade and Dove Dark Chocolate and retreated to the car, whence we did not emerge until nearly Glenwood Springs, where we made use of a McDonald's, and not again until Denver.
Did I drop my wallet on the initial pass-through of the store? on the roof of the car when I offered to squeegee? in the peer? RDC thought I left it in the peer, because he would have remembered seeing it in my mouth (where I hold it, lacking pockets, not to put it down) and he did not.
When my keys run away, I generally panic and give them a day to their own devices. I use the spare house and car keys and then, finally, make one more assay into my bag where, invariably thus far, they have hidden in some recess. My wallet has never run away before, but anonymous keys are a lot less scary to lose than a wallet. I would have to drive all over the state to reaccumulate all my library barcodes, for one thing. Someone else could enter the Botanic Gardens in my name and maybe spit in the lily pond! My first step was to google "Montrose Conoco" and RDC's to place holds on the credit and debit accounts.
To clear my head, I continued to unpack. Sorting laundry. Hanging up parkas. Searching the car, like the undercarriage of the passenger seat where, it turns out, Rarities, B-Sides, and Slow, Sad Waltzes emerged several months after I replaced it (so I gave it to JGW, thereby converting yet another person to the Cowboy Junkies). Picking tomatoes. Showering. We were both in the kitchen when I lifted my Camelbak bladder from the counter to rinse it, exposing the wallet beneath, which did not skitter away quite fast enough. I pounced.
Stress kills my appetite anyway, and what fortuitous timing: there's nothing in the house to eat but cherry tomatoes.
What makes a good story? What is truth? Where does faith end?
An excellent story, with humor and pain in spurts. An excellent production, nearly exactly as long in audio as our drive. And I had forgotten, since I can't on a bike and in a city bus I can read now, what I like about audio books: the sense of place. Pi's naming himself is Monarch Pass; his exploration of religion is the stretch between the town and the canyon of Gunnison; his coming up with a survival plan is nearly in Montrose; and the most fabulous (fable-esque) interlude of the sea journey is at Chief Hosa's grave, nearly home.
Jon Krakauer can write himself a book. His pacing is perfect. I didn't like it as much as Into the Wild or Into Thin Air, but he had less biographical stake in this tale than those two, and also I prefer not to know such blind, bigoted folk swarm* through the country.
*Utah is the Beehive State because of the industry and all for one (but not one for all) of the LDS.
Two 3.8-mile city rides.
Also,
Precor Elliptical, 20' at level 20 (100%) incline, resistance 12 (60%), with two 2-pound handweights for 15'. I have to go later at night so no one waiting compels me to obey the 20' limit.
Hack squats, 90 pounds, 3x12
Lat pull-downs, 70 pounds, 3x12
Back extensions, 50
I have never been into weights. But I must, must, must get into better shape, and that means resistance in addition to aerobic training.
I love this. CoolBoss's son asked her what the double-fingered, two-handed quote gesture means. She said it indicates quotation marks but that the gesture usually indicates irony, so he asked what irony is. He is eight, and she floundered a bit before saying something about "unusual development." Her son asked, "So it's like a caterpillar?"
So far he trumps both Troy Dyer (could the name be any more symbolic, O ruined existentialist city?) and Brian Krakow.
Ethan Hawke as Troy in "Reality Bites" says, "It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning."
Brian Krakow in "My So-Called Life" defines "ironic" as "Um, when you realize the, like, component of weirdness in a situation."
I like better that it's a caterpillar.
A satisfying evening in the back garden.
The other day on my way to work, cars parked innocently along three blocks worth of curb had yellow paint sprayed low down along their sides, as if the passenger in a car had activated a spraypaint can held idly from a dangling arm. I really need to learn to put Cassidy in the garage. The first step is replacing all the stuff I had moved for the masons, the hanging shovels and racks, the now-unneeded 80-pound bags of cement (which I could lift, tentatively because the bags are mere paper, and carry), the supply of shingles now increased by the stack I found buried along the north side of the house as if they were proper drainage material, charcoal and birdseed and the camping stove and white gas. So I did that first.
In 2001 I ripped out the daisy-like maybe-mums that formed a solid bank of white for two weeks midsummer. In 2002 I rototilled along the south fence where they grew. This year they came back stronger than ever. They bloomed in early July or so, crowding out the spinach, beans, and carrots that I'd planted from seed and the blue-eyed grass and delphinium that I'd planted from seedlings. Now I ripped it all out again, too late, probably, for the cucumber plant that survived the crowding really to come into its own (it has fruit, thoroughly green but stunted in size).
I collected a huge pile of these ex-flowers, but what to do with it? Laced with bindweed, it couldn't go in compost. I barrowed it round the other side of the house and shoved it under a bush where we still need some fill. This is delusional of me, I know: the bindweed will survive. But most of the pile was regular plants, and I can't throw out regular plants. Neither can I maintain a compost heap hot enough to kill bindweed, however.
All the plants along the south fence reach for the sun, leaning over those plants on the lawn side of the two-foot-wide strip. So I've learned: next year, along the fence, I will plant stuff that likes shade and doesn't crowd, and along the grass border, stuff that likes half shade and doesn't crowd. Vegetables get too little sun there, though the spinach did okay in the short period between my realizing it wasn't a weed but then forgetting its existence.
I checked the lasagne mulch. I layered sunflower seeds, coffee grounds, vegetable pulp, and pine needles in a two-foot-square patch, with a plastic tarp folded into four plies on top and the square metal foot of the former patio umbrella on top. Despite that weight and dark, bindweed was growing up through the husk- and needle-mixed dirt, but the dirt is good loam. Next time, less husk and needle and more grounds and pulp.
Whatever kind of plum tomato I planted this year did well, unlike the previous two years, whose plants produced few fruits and those deformed.
I used the swan rake to comb the "grass." All the weeds in the "lawn" are bindweed, and the "lawn" is more bindweed than grass. I combed and combed and collected a large pile comprising almost solely of bindweed. This I dumped in the alley, on the theory that alleys need love too. Somehow. I couldn't quite put it in the dumpster, though I suppose I should have.
I don't remember what kind of squashes I planted under the cherry tree and I didn't mark them. When I saw one fruit setting on one plant, I plucked the other blossoms on the theory I only need one pumpkin and that one would grow large. But maybe this plant was of pie pumpkins? Because that one fruit, while undeniably a pumpkin, is small and orange already, while last year's mystery squash didn't turn orange until it was large. So if it's a pie pumpkin, just the one is not enough for a pie. I could maybe make pumpkin bread though, since I don't like pumpkin pie. Another squash plant didn't survive the trampling the masons gave it, it being apparently way too much trouble to walk around, and the third, by far the largest plant at eight feet or more, has lots of blossoms but only now just the beginning of a fruit way at the end. Whatever: at least I was right that squash plants would vanquish the weeds and the cherry sprouts in that area.
Plus I picked the first of the second crop of raspberries. These are on this year's canes, while the first crop came from last year's, and they are bigger and juicier and sweeter than the first. Mmm.
I worked for almost three hours, from when I got home until it was too dark for sunglasses and I was too dirty to go inside for regular glasses.
Good grief, this is as stupid as wanting to make a stuffed animal tiger and selling it with the label Hobbes. Or stupider. I just got "The Two Towers"--I am that much a sucker for marketing and consumption--which came with a booklet selling the obvious crap, like elven brooches and Arwen's pendant and a truly unspeakable vomitation of porcelain and pewter and also RDC's Christmas present. All of that is offensive to my aesthetic taste, because the "jewelry" is costume, not of elvish or dwarfish quality and the vomitation is...unspeakable and the chess set is tacky and so forth.
I don't mind the idea of a Hobbes: Just as "Calvin and Hobbes" burst into syndication, HEBD gave SEM an enormous bear, about the size of a St. Bernard, whom he dubbed Hobbes. I mind a mass marketing of, rather than an individual relationship with, Hobbes. Similarly, I don't mind the copyright violation that Bill Watterson did mind when folks made t-shirts reprinting the strip where Calvin and Hobbes dance in their sunglasses. I don't even mind non-Watterson Calvin and Hobbes interpretations that respect their spirit, like their playing with Max where the Wild Things are. I have always despised those violations featuring, fr'instance, Calvin and Snoopy and Opus, bleary-eyed and weaving, captioned "I get by with a little help from my friends" or Calvin, drunkenly pointing and saying "What about that one?" and Hobbes nearly puking, captioned "Friends Don't Let Friends Beer-Goggle." (To be honest I haven't seen these since college.)
So. Selling a mock-up of the One Ring violates the entire principle of The Lord of the Rings and, I daresay, "The Lord of the Rings" too. One ring. One. Also, it's bad! It's evil! It's wrong! And it gets fucking destroyed!* It doesn't exist!
* What, you didn't know that?
The icing on the cake is that it's in mere 10K gold.
Okay, I wouldn't call this "reading," really. RDC said, "What is there about Sense and Sensibility you don't have yet?" I should like to emphasize that I would never read a novelization based on the movie "Sense and Sensibility," should there be one--Emma Thompson said she would hang herself--and regret the absence of Lady Middleton and Anne Steele. (However, overall I am so glad Emma Thompson could even out the satire Jane Austen didn't yet have a handle on, and adore Margaret so much, that the movie is a Very Good Thing.
Anyway. Reading Emma Thompson's production diary. "I'm excited about the fact...that Hugh Grant, for whom I wrote Edward, has agreed to do it despite having become after 'Four Weddings' the most famous man in the world." I screamed in no little pain, because I first misread that, replacing "Grant" with "Laurie." Yikes.
And remind me not to be disappointed: the title is The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries, not The Making of, as with "Pride and Prejudice" with all its satisfying, if insufficient, detail about how casts and settings were chosen and developed.
Precor Elliptical, 45' at 60% resistance, 100% incline, about half the time with two 2-pound weights.
Yesterday a brief, intense rainstorm burst out just around 4, so if I hadn't been flexing I'd've been caught. It had cleared enough by 4:30 that I got wet only by my tires hurling puddles up at me. Because I take my bike into its native environment so often its big chunky treads are necessary.
Then last night it was cool in a pleasant kind of way and we were going to have supper outside. I went downstairs to do laundry and watch "Sex and the City" (so RDC wouldn't have to) and when I came up again, half an hour later, it was cold! Cold cold cold! I closed windows for to keep the heat in, not out. Wild.
Later in the evening rain began again, loud because I still haven't spread mulch on the groundcloth on the north side of the house (which laziness was, at first, a good thing, because walking on mulch would have pissed off the masons, but which is now because I haven't gone to Home Despot to buy edging--I have to dig 30' of edging in so the mulch doesn't wash into Their yard). It rained and rained and rained, and now it's 10 in the morning and still merely 56 degrees, and though the weather will of course warm up again, it is fall.
Also it's been overcast enough for the past two weeks that we haven't seen Mars.
Precor Elliptical, 25', 12/20 resistance and 20/20 incline and two 2-pound handweights.
Then some weights. Some, as Baldrick would say, like "some beans."
Then ten laps of crawl. I don't remember if it's meters or yards, but it's 25 somethings long. So have a half k. RDC is swimming now too.