I got a late start and thought I would get nothing done before lunch. How wrong I was.
Carrying the hamper down to the laundry room, I was disoriented by the dropcloth bunched at the bottom of the stairs that disguised where the floor began. I stepped out, expecting floor, instead of down to the final step. Ow. Extreme ow. On three points, I crawled upstairs, toward the phone, in sight of Blake, in sunlight. By the time I lay supine on the living room carpet, my subverbal moaning had evolved into sobbing. I steeled myself to unclench my hands from my ankle and examine it. It was the right shape. I could move it in any direction. I didn't need Willoughby to ascertain if there were any breaks. In fact the initial burst of pain subsided quickly, and it soon could bear weight.
So I wrapped it up tight and put another coat of paint (embarrassingly, "December Lace") on the front landing ceiling, up both ladders to be careful of the edging. There.
Then I had a lunch date with a friend of a friend. KMJ left Denver in 1998 and I last saw her in 2000, but we keep in touch and when her friend Paul recently moved to Denver, she gave him our email address. Someone raised her eyebrow at this--a date with a man I'd never met before without RDC, who was out of town--but at least called it an adventure instead of quite a rendez-vous. Paul was charming, a good conversationalist, funny. After bison burgers at the Wynkoop, where he taunted me about his Canadians burning down the president's house during the war of 1812, which I dismissed as their being colonialists following Mother England's orders, we wandered around the Tattered Cover, where I bought books entirely forgetting to use the gift card I was recently given (The Good Earth in a trade paperback) and discovered that one of Paul's favorite books is José Saramago's Blindness. I'm a fan.
As soon as I got home, I broke Blake's little buddy heart by immediately leaving again to see "Girl with a Pearl Earring" Chez Artiste. It was okay. It attempted to keep the spirit of the book, but it failed to convey the chemistry unspokenly explicit in the book. What else did I expect? I do hope Colin Firth doesn't become the new John Corbett, so beloved as Chris in the Morning that he's cast as Perfect Man even if he doesn't fit the role ("Sex and the City," "Serendipity," "My Big Fat Greek Wedding").
The ankle didn't break my heart. It hurt, but it would heal. What broke my heart was my pretty pretty iBook Moonshadow, which wouldn't start when I got home. And my Macintosh consultant was away.
Sunday I started painting the walls and trim. I know you're supposed to do trim first and then walls, but I wanted results. Flat off-white on the ceiling and even semi-gloss blinding white on the trim don't make for contrast against primer. Eggshell moss green does.
Plus I chipped off more tiles and packed up more kitchen.