I'm watching a program on the History Channel, "Russia: Land of the Tsars," and among the academics lending any historical credibility is Larry Langer, University of Connecticut. I was in the laundry room when he spoke for the first time, and I recognized him, incredulously, by voice rather than face or name. I had him for Russia to 1905 (big surprise) as a...sophomore? Yes, sophomore fall, a year before I should have taken an upper division class. I took two that semester, and I am grateful I was allowed to: they inspired me to become a college student rather than the super-high-school student I had been as a freshling.
Russian history was my first love, before English (history) I think. Or alongside. My favorite high school history teachers both emphasized Russia in world history classes (to prepare us as good citizens to fight the Cold War). We read Nicholas and Alexandra and Dr. Zhivago and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Those I loved, and Fathers and Sons with Professor Langer; however, in Russian Lit, not with Langer, Eugene Onegin and Dead Souls both bored me to tears.
The History Channel values entertainment more than history. The title still of the show is supposed to read "Russia: Land of the Tsars," but thanks to mindless substitution of Cyrillic letters for Phonetic ones that they vaguely resemble, the word "Russia" isn't. The backward-R letter is "yah," the not-U letter is "ee." Yah-ee-ssia. It's akin to the insertion of punctuation for dubious aesthetic effect.
Distressing Blake mightily, I spent the morning in the water closet removing stripey wallpaper. The nozzle of the bottle of solvent didn't work, so I squirted the gel onto the wide scraper and slathered it on the walls that way. The wallpaper came off easily, but most of the backing did not. Blake nearly had laryngitis from shrieking and whining (anyone want a cockatiel cheap?) when I broke at noon.
More coffee grounds. Home Depot again, for another bottle of solvent whose nozzle I tested, and heating register covers, but not ceramics glue. Bloodbath and Beyond for brackets and a curtain. When RDC and I recently examined the back landing, he picked up a curtain rod I freed from the sunroom almost two years ago and wondered why we had never thrown it out. Aha, it turns out that I kept it on purpose, not because it could be ignored behind the vacuum cleaner, because it would come in handy today: I hung a heavy curtain between the den and the laundry room. The doorway used to have--a door. I wouldn't have a door again, but the back of the basement doesn't need to be heated. This curtain might make the room cozier, blocking drafts and holding in the warmth from the space heater.
I had lunch from Einstein Bros. bagels with a book that I brought with me. There are several new nonfiction books that look really interesting, including one on the Bounty whose author is doing a reading Wednesday, but I didn't indulge. For now. Instead I indulged in dogs, an unusual terrier mix with a curly tail and unterrier snout, and more time with more pettable English mastiff named Greta. Her human and I talked for quite a while--he's lived in Hong Kong and traveled all over Asia and nearly bought a cattle ranch in Ecuador and made for a pleasant hour of stranger-chat.
While we sat chatting, lots of other passersby wanted to meet Greta. She obviously loved all the children she met. One little girl commented, "It looks like Fluffy!" Which she did, in shape of head, besides that she had only the one head and a brindle coat. Greta's human asked who Fluffy was, and I told him Fluffy was a Cerebus in the first Harry Potter book.
The girl's father contradicted, "That dog's name wasn't Fluffy."
The girl and I protested that yes, the three-headed dog was named Fluffy.
Now, it turned out (eventually), that the man was thinking of Hagrid's regular dog, Fang, who is a mastiff, and Greta did look more like Fang than Fluffy, being a one-headed mastiff not a three-headed CGI. I can't fault the girl for thinking of Fluffy first, since it has more page and screen presence than Fang. I can fault the father for insisting that the three-headed dog's name wasn't Fluffy.
After they left, I told Greta's human about a recent zoo trip. I was watching a resident, not captive, gopher, because it was little and cute and right at my feet, instead of over a moat, like the ruminant in front of whose enclosure I stood. A series of passersby asked what I was watching. "A gopher," I would say. The majority, spotting the animal, would reply, "Oh, a chipmunk!" In the Crested Butte newspaper I read a column by a park ranger who's been stationed all over the Rockies, on the frustration of not being believed when she answered certain questions ("How big do deer need to be before they're elk?"). Ah, the tribulations of being a know-it-all. It might have been a ground squirrel at the zoo, though the lines of spots among its solid stripes really do indicate gopherhood.
Anyway, I got home and attacked the water-closet for another three hours. The two drywall walls were relatively well-behaved, though (nooo!) the toilet has to come out to do the wall behind it properly. The exterior wall is plastered brick or cement block, and wallpaper does not come tidily off plaster. I'm not done scraping yet, but nearly.
When we first moved into the house, we saw many traces of the previous tenant. She told us that the one thing she never got around to doing was painting. As far as the main walls of the house were concerned, this was true. But she decorated quite a bit. The chute cover in the coal cellar is the most obvious example. On field of blue bordered in green, painted in red, are painted a flower, her nickname, and the word "Boogie," which might be her son's nickname. The saloon doors into the sunroom were the same primary red, as is the edge of the hardwood floor in the back landing, as is the frame of the window in the water closet. Stripping the wallpaper revealed another instance of tagging. Just to be clear, the W.C. had been painted white, then someone streaked it (as if cleaning off a brush) with a mix of the blue and green of the chute cover, and saw fit to tag it with her name in white. The coal cellar, home of off-season window parts, painting supplies, and beer carboys, is easily ignored. But I have got to get that toilet up so I can paint the room properly, because there is no way I'm putting up with that name over my shoulder every time I need that facility.
