Thursday, 1 April 2004

April to-do list

House:

  • Map electric system in basement
  • Reroute gas to behind, instead of in front of, north kitchen wall (actually, just watch while others do this, and be ready with the dishsoap to check for leaks). Or pay someone to do it.
  • Receive and mount ventilation hood
  • Vent hood through attic and out roof
  • Paint doors and interiors of closets
  • Seal shelves with clear acrylic
  • Scrub kitchen ceiling, trim, walls
  • Prime kitchen ceiling, trim, walls
  • Paint kitchen ceiling, trim, walls
  • Receive and install new range
  • Research and select new refrigerator
  • Research tiles for backsplash
  • Refinish kitchen and back landing floors
  • Remain sane during all this

    Garden

  • Select plants to fill in the front garden
  • Take up groundcloth in north garden and plant with bishop's weed
  • Build frame for new bed
  • Get lots of vegetable pulp and coffee grounds
  • Plant spinach, lettuce, carrots, and beans in old bed
  • Restake edging
  • New edging in easement
  • Transplant some vinca to north easement

    Errands

  • Cardboard and new, different phone books to recycling
  • Plastic bags to recycling
  • Clothes shopping. Maybe more pants! I've been wearing a pair of pants I bought in July. Me! in pants! and I want more!
  • Aquarium back to vet
  • Home Depot: trellis for raspberries, pots for porch columns, edging, tomato cages, seeds for sunflower substitutes, clear rubber dots to place strategically against dings
  • Costco: detergent, butter, vitamins, Beano, paper cups
  • Lots of vegetable pulp and coffee grounds

    Stuff to look for

  • Curtain for watercloset (also W.C. sign and a wee shelfie thing) (since January 2004)
  • Rugs for kitchen
  • New glass "art" for front door (since May 2000)

    Kinwork and Lisaism

  • Margaret Atwood tonight
  • Koelbel library on vet trek
  • Book hotel for Aspen in June
  • Book flight for Tulsa in May
  • Send photograph to cousin for reunion

    Reading:

  • Richard Ellman, Ulysses on the Liffey
  • Don Gifford, Annotated Ulysses
  • Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses
  • At least 300 more pages of Ulysses
  • Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone
  • Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (audio)
  • In the queue, after Ulysses:
  • Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, for the first time since 1993 or maybe 1985
  • Tom Carson, Gilligan's Wake

    Exercise

  • At least a little bit of calisthenics at home? Please?
  • Bike to work 20 times or 150 miles

  • bike

    Two 3.8-mile city rides.

    Friday, 2 April 2004

    petrichor

    From Word-A-Day:

    petrichor (PET-ri-kuhr) noun

    The pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.

    [From petro- (rock), from Greek petros (stone) + ichor (the fluid that is
    supposed to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology). Coined by
    researchers I.J. Bear and R.G. Thomas.]

    "Petrichor, the name for the smell of rain on dry ground, is from oils
    given off by vegetation, absorbed onto neighboring surfaces, and
    released into the air after a first rain."
    Matthew Bettelheim; Nature's Laboratory; Shasta Parent (Mt Shasta,
    California); Jan 2002.

    ---

    That's a good word. It rained slightly Friday night last week and as the five of us stirred and got outside, the whole world smelled wonderful--perhaps especially because the rain released any leftover scent from two seasons of dried catmint blossoms on the ground.

    RDC2, I am sorry to say, opined that it stank. He wouldn't use the toilet in the basement because it smelled, he said; it might, though of basement not of sewage I hope. The other four of us mocked his finding the after-rain smell offensive.

    Monday, 5 April 2004

    weekend

    Except that it was an hour too short, the weekend was relaxing and productive and quiet.

    How old I sound. There's an old "Peanuts" strip--from the ‘50s, I would say, because--if memory serves--Snoopy still looks like he does here in the first two rather than the in later strips--in which someone is trying to get Snoopy to play fetch and Charlie Brown says that because he is older now, he's more interested in quiet pastimes, like 20 Questions. At the mention of that game, Snoopy's head snaps around.

    Anyway. I tried to talk myself out of going to Margaret Atwood but I had promised CGK that I would go and fetch a lower number than she herself could get arriving later (coddling a parent, I confess). When I got there I found Spenser (really, why did I alias her so? I haven't the foggiest) and gave her the number to give to CGK, planning to leave, but true to form Spenser cracked me up so I had to stay. We came up with a new band, Alexander Pope and the Beats. Because "The Rape of the Lock" really could be a rock and roll song, couldn't it? Then I suggested "Absalom and Achitophel," because yes I confuse together everything I had in Restoration and 18th Century Lit.

    I did not wish to have a book signed so hadn't even brought my Oryx and Crake. I had in my bag only What's Bred in the Bone, which cracked me up. Not even Canadian women, only Canadian men for me.

    When Atwood arrived, I was pleased to see she seemed friendlier. On her last tour--did I see her for Blind Assassin?--she was out and out mean. Perhaps by now she's stopped being resentful of being asked about writing science fiction. She allows as how Oryx and Crake is "speculative, like 1984," not science fiction. Even though it's all based on science and she made nothing up. Oh, sure you didn't, honey, because there actually are green-skinned, blue-genitaled, purring, ruminant modified human beings. You didn't make that up. Pat pat pat.

    Spenser asked a good question, I thought. She said Steven Spielberg has said that if he'd made "Schindler's List" first, he wouldn't've made all the dinosaur movies (I hope that wouldn't mean "Jaws" and Indy'd be struck too). Does O&C's Cassandra complex (I paraphrase) make another Robber Bride or Cat's Eye seem to mean less? Atwood said no.

    I scarpered immediately afterward, grocery-shopped, and made like a hermit for the rest of the weekend. I meant to return Blake's aquarium to the vet Saturday, but the range hood doesn't come until Tuesday and the vet can wait such that I don't have to make two trips to McMansionville.

    I watched the final four episodes of "24" while painting fiddly slatted pantry shelves and doors. I scrubbed the entire kitchen, carefully not to drip on the new cabinets. I primed the east, short wall of the kitchen (it has no cupboards touching it) and the bit of wall around the door on the south side (also no cupboards). Not the ceiling, because eek, the cupboards--also because I found a bit of bubbled paint I had to scrape off and patch with wallboard compound--and not the rest of the walls, because eek, the cupboards, and of the trim, only that associated with bits I did (four doors and some floor moulding).

    I uncovered, raked, weeded, hoed, and otherwise pummeled the original vegetable bed and planted beans, carrots, and spinach along marked lines (to distinguish between baby plants and weeds, I hope). I raked and weeded the south bed and planted some flax seeds. Should I cut down the sage? I suppose so. I noticed that the raspberries are still spreading, which made me happy; and that of course so is the cherry tree, which did not. I spent some little time laboriously pulling out and snipping baby cherry trees. Sorry, tree. Blake is so happy to be back outside in the fresh air and sun. He's still no help with the actual gardening.

    Another of my hausfrauisms was to fill the liquid soap dispenser with the last from the big gallon jug. I filled the jug with warm water and used that diluted soap to scrub the patio furniture. I should have done that under the cherry tree, to water it, instead of on what's left of the grassesque, which doesn't need any moisture for weeds to thrive. Oh well. I like "grassesque." It reads like maybe I planted blue fescue. But I didn't.

    I caught up with where I'm supposed to be for the TUS Ulysses seminar. I can't claim to catch more than a smattering of Joyce's cultural references but I do like piecing the action together on the minimal interior-dialogue cues. And I loved the Hamlet debate. This week's reading (episode? chapter? 10) is longer than previous weeks' readings, and I think begins to be even screwier.

    Speaking of screwier, what was I just reading that made me think of Turn of the Screw? I try not to think of The Turn of the Screw at all. It must have been one of David Gifford's annotations and come from a source earlier than James. Shakespeare again, probably. Also, twice now in The Annotated Ulysses has been mention of the poem or song "If a body meet a body comin' through the rye." Yes, I like Ulysses, even though it breaks my brain.

    Last night I was reading in Vito the Reading Chair with Blake playing in his box at my feet (on the recliner). Ulysses tires me, I admit, and a couple of times I nodded off, snapping awake when my head fell over. At some point Blake took himself out of his box and sat on my knee, waiting for me to notice him. I picked him up and put him on my intercostal clavicle for headpetting, but I continued occasionally to doze off, waking now not because my head fell over but because Blake would, quite understandably, snap at my hand when it dropped on him. Poor buddy.

    The one grocery I forgot was butter, despite having obtained a dozen thirsty sesame bagels. This was a tragedy. I scampered out to the nearby 7-11 and thought of recent conversations about how to eat cheaply and healthily. At Whole Foods on Friday I overheard what was surely a visiting parent comment to his Denver resident child that he couldn't believe the selection. I repeated that compliment to the produce guy, who is always pleasant and eager to slice samples. Mr. Produce said the parent was probably from some one-grocery-store town on the plains. Maybe, but you could live in the middle of Denver, lack easy mobility and funds, and come across no more fresh produce in a week than an occasional overripe banana at the local 7-11. It didn't have butter either, and cream cheese is just Wrong, so I tried the grimy little grocery a couple of blocks away. I checked the butter's expiry, but if I die I'll know it's because of scary butter. Or excess of perfectly good butter, of course.

    Speaking of scary butter, while RDC2 was here I chased him around the house with a scary banana, one that had gone quite brown and soft while we were away. I mentioned that to my mother under the category of Amusing Anecdotes with Nephew and she didn't understand the point. RDC2 is 10, and a scary banana is icky...does this need explanation?

    This weekend I also slept a lot. When RDC is gone I sleep with all my animals on his side of the bed, all of them minus either Hamlet or Pantalaimon, who sleeps on my side with me. When we went to the zoo RDC found me an okapi in the gift shop. I say "Wapiti wapiti" like someone trying to start a stubborn, early model car--and I can never say "wapiti" just once--and RDC and I both say "O Kapi My Kapi," like Walt Whitman (well, like Robin Williams). Unfortunately, the stress in "okapi" falls on the first syllable. Sigh. Also this is a standing okapi, and how do you put a standing animal to sleep? I don't know. Also it cannot fit comfortably with the main five, so it will have to live downstairs with Tigger and Opus and Madeline and Josephine the penguin puppy. And it's not an it. Her name is Ophelia.

    (Besides my animals, I also sleep with Moonshadow. This weekend I fell asleep to "Pride and Prejudice" Friday, "Sense and Sensibility" Saturday, and "Persuasion" Sunday. This is why I'm not allowed to have a television in my bedroom.)

    Oo, and I reorganized the nonfiction. It's not all the nonfiction: most of it is critical or literary theory and in RDC's study, and about two shelf-feet's worth is in the living room bookcase, and the reference books on camping and birding and cooking are in the living room and sunroom. (One day I will get book cataloging software and be very happily geeky.) The nonfiction I reorganized is mostly mine: history, literature, anthropology, cultural studies, feminism.

    I ought to organize by proper LOC numbers. Or not. I have a biography of Rachel Carson next to Silent Spring; and Boswell's Life of Johnson next to Boswell's Dictionary; but I have several memoirs and biographies without a counterpart. Jon Krakauer is still in fiction by author, but Touching the Void is not. Does The Tao of Pooh belong with the Tao de Ching or withWinnie Ille Pu, or does the latter with the Latin grammars and dictionaries and not with The Pooh Perplex?

    Partly I am a librarian because I like information management. Mostly because I like books. Some because I like reading to kids. Plus there's a large wedge of fiddly organizing that I geek out on.

    cockatiel adventures

    I rearranged the den so I could put up the sawhorses and paint with movies on in the background. Right now the dropcloth covers most of the floor and some shelves are scattered about, and I'm sitting on the floor with my laptop on one. Because I am hard at work, clearly. Blake has been enjoying this New and Different Set-up because he can go on expotition to the rocking chair and gnaw on its dangling cushion-ties but still see me.

    The shelf is about two inches high and near my laptop is a paper cup with two inches of cranberry juice in it. Blake just now trotted over and reached up with his beak to the rim of the cup, ready thereby to pull himself up to the shelf. As if he can't easily hop two inches, but I guess he needed Up at that one spot and no other. I rescued the cup in time and offered him his water dish (currently his food is on furniture higher than mine: what does that say?), but he wasn't interested. So I offered him the cup.

    Blake is the pet, and I am the human. I know this. I just don't practice it.

    Tuesday, 6 April 2004

    walk

    Walked 5.2 miles

    Wednesday, 7 April 2004

    a dog is not a cockatiel

    When Blake was injured, he was an incredible Velcro boy. RDC has been away this week and Blake has continued to be such a Velcro boy that earlier this evening he flew (fluttered) from the top of his cage (which I had rolled to the kitchen doorway so he could see me) all the way to me, except "all the way to me" was too far for his stubby wings, and he nearly landed in a roller pan full of Behr Ocean Air eggshell-finish latex paint (but I caught him). Right now he is tucked on my shoulder and I am not going to bed but watching actual live television because I cannot bear to get up and disturb him. Also, earlier he had a yawning fit.

    I reserve the right to change my mind, especially if he ever does land in the paint or succeeds in diving into the toaster because he wants his chunk of bagel now, but right now I am content for my dog to be only hypothetical.

    Thursday, 8 April 2004

    vale of tears

    The summer after sophomore year of college, I lived with Nisou in an MIT fraternity house. The point was that we could get better jobs in Boston than in Storrs or Old Lyme. Nisou went to a job fair and scored a regular, full-time, temporary job in one of the umpteen local colleges' registrar--a perfect fit, given her school-year job. I did not do this but did the same thing I've been doing all my life: coasting. I earned my keep, kind of: my rent for the two months was $400, and we were allowed to eat out of the pantry, so I subsisted on freezer-burnt minute steaks, bananas, and 35-cent hearth buns from Au Bon Pain. I had a series of job, ranging from door-to-door canvassing for MassPIRG to telesoliciting for the Massachusetts State Republican Party. (That kind of cracks me up, me, that not the jobs but the companies ranged widely.) Mostly I worked in dead-end, extremely temporary jobs. For example, I got fired from a drugstore because my count was more than $2 off my tape.

    (If I recall, it was $53.17 off. The manager figured out and reconciled the 3.17 or whatever the spare change was; the more serious was, of course, the fifty. The manager didn't even think I had stolen it but that I had mistakenly given too much change to someone (two 20s and a 10? I certainly could have done so, but with two different denominations?); I have always believed I gave someone too many lottery tickets.)

    I worked in retail--I loved my job at the hat store, which was only Sunday afternoons but which I kept through the entire period. I was a receptionist in a SuperCuts sort of hair salon. I worked in food service, as a waitress at a supper club on Comm Ave and as an expeditor at hotspot on Newbury. If I had had any doubts about me in college, that summer erased them.

    Tangents as usual. My point is that I did not work hard at finding a job. Story of my life. I sent all my paychecks home, and I did manage to pay my share of my junior year, but only because of my scholarships and my father did that bill get paid. It was my first summer without a beach, in a city--you'd think I'd've kept that in mind seven years later--and working evenings left my days to be spent in air-conditioned libraries and bookstores. In the children's and juveniles' sections, because again, coasting.

    All of this is my justification--and what an admirable one!--for how many Sweet Valley High books I can recollect. I found a site of plot summaries.

    Thirty-six.

    Realistically, this represents about four afternoons tucked into an out-of-the-way corner with my chin on my knees. Maybe six.

    Thirty-six.

    Next I'm going to see how many Sweet Dreams Teen Romances, with which I wasted many a 12th grade lunch period, seem familiar. You know, aside from all of them, since they were all the same plot.

    Saturday, 10 April 2004

    what's bred in the bone

    After thinking little to nothing of Murther and Walking Spirits several years ago--I was sure because Robertson Davies was Beyond me, not because this particular book wasn't a good starting point--I read Rebel Angels in December and loved it, and this morning I finished What's Bred in the Bone, which is even better. I want that painting.

    It had bits that I love, that I think more learned fiction readers scoff at but which I eat up, like those in A Prayer for Owen Meany, where all these threads and themes neatly tie together.

    There was fictional and actual art history, both of which I enjoy. I love figuring out the iconography of a painting and remember delighting in learning, in ninth grade, how the dog in The Arnolfini Marriage symbolized fidelity. Davies writes faux art history as well. Several years ago at an academic conference on creative vs. academic approaches to English lit, I listened to a presentation of creative art history, a detailed examination of daguerreotypes that existed only in the writer's mind.

    I have The Well of Lost Plots and The Lyre of Orpheus--which I bought 13 years ago--waiting for me, but I have my week's Ulysses reading to do.

    morning

    RDC has a bruise on one arm, acquired somehow while traveling. After we got up this morning he examined a mark I put on his shoulder. "It's almost symmetrical."

    I hadn't been thinking of it at the time, but I decided its placement was a little higher the way owls' ears are placed, not quite symmetrically, so they can triangulate the sounds of their prey better. I said, "Symmetry is very important."

    RDC said, "It's fearful."

    I replied, "No, that's symme-try."

    We had to name our pet after someone. Maybe I should have held out for Tennyson.

    ---

    Before the family arrove, I bought new towels and actual washcloths, since we had previously had exactly two. Now we're using the new ones, and it's quite a treat to use unshredded, still hemmed towels. I bought periwinkle blue because RDC likes blue and I like periwinkle, and I didn't think we'd have a buddy problem because yellow and green have been his favorite colors before. But this morning we discovered a new fixation for him, the periwinkle blue washcloths. Wonderful.

    ---

    We went to Witz, the newish coffeeshop, for breakfast, orange juice and swanky coffee and a blueberry scone (me) and a ham and cheese burrito (him). I finished What's Bred in the Bone and RDC reread part of Foucault's The Order of Things because he just saw Las Menenas at the Prado last week (and the first chapter of Order is about the Velazquez. Someone was playing the grand piano and I am so glad to have a nearby coffee shop. I hope it and Mezcal signal new and better things for the neighborhood.

    Just before we left, an old, bent man entered. He carefully stowed his stick in a corner, arranged his jacket over an armchair, dropped a library book in the seat (Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie), and went to the counter to order. Carefully, he carried a plate with a pastry to his table. I fetched his cup full of coffee on its saucer and placed it by him. He thanked me kindly.

    Why do I always feel bad about doing that? I am sure he appreciated the gesture and didn't consider me interfering. I think because I really don't want to be stooped and wanting a cane myself.

    ---

    To get to Witz, we walked through two and more inches of spring snow! Hooray! The garden is going to go boom. It's a good wet slooshy snow, and around the bases of trees are stains, not from dog pee, but from all the dirt that has accumulated on the trees since the last significant precipitation--months ago--and now rinsed off.

    ---

    I went to the gym! Goodness me.

    gym! yes indeed

    Precor Elliptical: 22'30", 12'30" with two 2-pound weights, warming up to 20/20 incline and 12/20 resistance.
    Recline bike, 10' @ level 12.

    Hack squats, 3x12 @ 90
    Seated weighted calf press, 25 @ 45
    Lat pull, 3x10 @ 60 (used to be 70, what a surprise that it's less)
    Upright row, 3x16 @ 30
    Back extensions to exhaustion
    Rotary shoulders, almost none at almost nothing. Jeepers.
    Lots of stretching.

    I'm going to feel it tomorrow.

    Sunday, 11 April 2004

    sunday

    We've been receiving The Denver Post on Sundays for weeks now. I have no idea why. A few weeks ago when we went to the zoo I gave an almighty leap at the jump-measuring place because I hoped I could improve on a previous performance. Your standing long jump is supposed to be at least your height, and I am taller than four feet. This time I did manage five feet plus a little, but--I am a 35 and decaying fast--I leaked a little. I whispered this to my mother-in-law to make her laugh, and she did; so did JHT, who overheard, except he laughed louder, not having to empathize. Later that afternoon, when I got back from renting my skis, DMB gave me something she'd torn from the paper, a research solicitation for women with incontinence. I laughed like a drain.

    Today I read some of the paper, but if a paper is going to arrive on our doorstep, couldn't it be The New York Times? The front page had stories about DU hockey and a war widow while stories about the Japanese hostages, the September 11th commission, and protests in Taiwan were buried elsewhere in the front section. DU and the widow belonged in the "Denver and the West" section, which I enjoy. It's just not a paper with a national or international perspective.

    Mostly the weekly wodge of newsprint means that Blake gets fresh flooring more often than previously.

    ---

    RDC primed the ceiling and I put another coat of white on the closet shelves, which are a pain in my ass. I am halfway through War and Peace, anyway, which I wouldn't be if the shelves were less annoying.

    Counters on Wednesday!

    ---

    I weeded, since the weeds as well as my darling plants are thriving in the moist soil. I expect the vegetable seeds have been drowned, but potatoes are sprouting in the compost. I don't have a good idea of how potatoes grow. I mean, I understand how a plant grows from a potato, but how a plant develops other tubers in the course of a season I don't know. Do they spread a lot? How do you know where a potato might lurk? Would they work in my south garden? I have been tempted to grow potatoes ever since Nisou responded to my surprise that her family grew them with praise of the bite-sized baked potato.

    ---

    The clevernesses in The Well of Lost Plots are often too clever for my best enjoyment. I do, of course, appreciate that Lenny is allowed to spend his free time in the park set aside for the overabundance left over from Watership Down.

    Whereas the clevernesses in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses are far more clever than I will ever be equal to. Is there anything Joyce didn't know? How much everyone hates Leopold Bloom, and why, is grating. The Irish history lesson was nothing new: I am my father's daughter, and there are some exaggerations I took in on his knee. Or at his other heel, his left one being occupied by a dog, on our long ramblings in the woods.

    Monday, 12 April 2004

    fark

    My reading list, which I've kept since 1990, I managed to fuck up. (I just came across "fark," and while I dislike fuck substitutes on principle, "fark" is the first that I like for its sound's sake.) I think it's not a big screw-up: only the authors' first names are wrong. But they are scrambled--it's in an Excel spreadsheet--in a way I can't figure out. Kingsley Updike wrote Rabbit is Rich. Douglas Dickens wrote Little Dorrit. At first I hoped they were all only a few cells off, but no.

    The web version seems to be okay, so I can use that to fix the original, but I have no idea what I did. Except to use MS Office products on a Macintosh.

    Tuesday, 13 April 2004

    a visit to highbury: another view of emma

    The best of the faux Jane Austen sequels or retellings, which isn't much of a compliment, except this was okay. Unrealistically (because no one recounts word-for-word conversations in letters) but appropriately epistolary; wisely refraining from any interference with Emma's main characters while satisfyingly gossiping about them; plus the marriages so vital to an Austeny plot. The author clearly has no good opinion of Frank Churchill, which pleases me: I've never understood what Jane Fairfax sees in him.

    bike

    Two 3.8-mile city rides.

    Wednesday, 14 April 2004

    maybe change is good. sometimes

    Yesterday I remembered that this is one of the periodic large-item pick-up weeks. The city makes a run on one day in each of these weeks, and the quantity of stuff in the alley decided me that I hadn't missed the day. So last night I put out most of the old cabinets. They'd been in the garage for some time, except the few taken away in an earlier LIP week, and then I moved them to future second vegetable bed when the new cabinets were delivered to the garage.

    On that spot, they were meant to act as weed suppressants, but the bindweed didn't get the memo. When the Grinch saw that Christmas arrived without presents, it came without tags, it came without boxes or bags, he realized that Christmas didn't come from a store and maybe meant just a little bit more. Me, I observe that bindweed grows without sun, without air, without water, and I realize this does not make it warm and fuzzy like Christmas but evil and bad and wrong. Like I didn't already know.

    Still hoping, I pulled all the weeds and lay the drawers and doors (which I won't dispose of until we build the new bed) over the spot. Since bindweed clearly scoffs at the weight of full cabinets, that of mere parts will not deter it at all. But they'll block some light, at least. Another marker of bindweed's evilness is that despite it seeming like a plant that would photosynthesize, it grows just as green in dark oppression of a cabinet's weight as it does in unfettered grass.

    Anyway, the good change there is that the old cabinets are gone.

    Inside, another good change is that RDC finished painting the ceiling, just in time for today's good change, the installation of the countertops (and therefore the sink and its fixtures).

    Another good change is the yearly miracle. The yellow storksbill is beginning to flower, and the large mats of thyme are about to burst into a mass of tiny bluey-lavender blossoms, and the vinca, which is spreading just as aggressively as I hoped, is the flowering kind. Only one plant, from the first planting last May, is so audacious as to flower, but eventually the easement will be a riot of lavender blooms in deep green foliage. (Yes, most of my garden is lavender and blue. I do have some yellow and white for contrast and emphasis. A change from that color scheme would not be good.) It's doing so well I will transplant some to the other easement, where it won't have the advantage of mulch and rototilling but won't have to compete with bindweed.

    well of lost plots

    Another fun romp, but as with J.K. Rowling, Jasper Fforde concerns himself more with the romp than with integrity or sense. (I eagerly await the end of Harry Potter so Rowling can prove me wrong.) Anyway, I like this, but only for the page-to-page fun, because the internal inconsistencies drove me batty. Following are spoilers for Great Expectations and Of Mice and Men. For instance, although both Miss Havisham and Lenny die in their books, Miss Havisham is gone forever while Lenny can spend his free time on Watership Down. The mcguffins and self-aware plot device grenades are fun.

    Thursday, 15 April 2004

    resurrection

    Since last Hallowe'en, our neighbor has had a prop in her yard: a glaring, gaping head, two hands, and two sets of toes, as if coming out of the earth. She decorated for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and St. Patrick's Day, with the dead guy still in the grass. Finally, last weekend the dead guy left the yard. It was Easter. Coincidence? I think not.

    bike

    Two 3.8-mile city rides.

    Friday, 16 April 2004

    squeak

    While I was talking to RPR today on the phone, I was washing dishes in the downstairs bathroom sink. ("You still don't have a kitchen?"--we haven't spoken since her shower in early February.) Blake, as usual, sang as the water ran. RPR said that when she first heard him--whose song is not singy but squeaky--she thought I was being particularly diligent with a dish, getting it squeaky clean.

    More importantly, eight pounds twelve ounces! She is something like 5'2" with small bones. Ow. But the baby is the most beautiful ever, of course, with a full head of black hair, steel gray eyes, and exactly a miniature RPR; plus she demonstrated how brilliant she is by immediately nursing like a pro.

    bike

    Two 3.8-mile city rides.

    Saturday, 17 April 2004

    guys and dolls

    Okay, this was the freakiest fucking dream ever. My usual anxiety theme, but instead of its suddenly being the end of the semester and my realizing I forgot to attend some number of my courses, something totally...not. The emotion this dream evoked was so powerful that despite waking twice, the waking became part of the dream, intense relief, but followed by yet another tragedy. I have had high school and college anxiety dreams, about social and academic problems, I have dreamed about my family's deaths, about torture and pain and loneliness and the screaming heebie-jeebies (whose origin I just looked up: coined in 1923 in a comic strip, benign).

    I have a pen with a light in the tip so I can write in the otherwise dark. I often write my dreams, because writing helps me remember them and remembering them helps me figure out what my brain is working on. Plus they're fun. Sometimes. Sometimes they're fun because I laugh at myself: still mulling over that?

    This was horrifying. The betrayal was deep, it was all my fault, people would shun me in all possible ways, I had hurt people I loved. I woke up sweating and shivering.

    And what was the dream? I had, again, omitted to follow through on an obligation, and the repercussions would ripple everywhere to everyone. What I had done was to forget that I was supposed to perform in a duologue production of "Guys and Dolls" (which I don't know and have never seen in any wise). My stratagem of not writitng it down at the time, or when I got up, or at all during the day until now, has served its purpose: I now remember almost nothing about it except the strength and the anguish of my remorse.

    What the fuck was that about, I'd like to know.

    Sunday, 18 April 2004

    metamorphosis

    I researched trees apt to this climate and compared them to what Denver Digs Trees was offering. This morning, faint with post-dream headache and armed with Pride and Prejudice to distract and soothe me in inevitable lines and between dogs (I met a Viszla named Ruby and a golden retriever named Tahoe), I bought a three-year-old (or older) hedge maple.

    I dug a lovely hole as deep and twice as wide as the rootball. I broke up all the clods, sifted out stones, added some but not very much compost according to current advice, placed the tree, filled the hole, constructed a soil ring, watered and refilled the hole, and redistributed mulch. There. It wants more water than anything else in the front yard, but it's a tree. A tree resistant to disease, air pollution, insect infiltration, and drought; slow-enough growing to be less prone to blizzard damage; and a maple reportedly likely to grow interesting branches, so possibly eventually another Climbing Tree.

    Its name is Gregor Samsa because I expect great changes from it.

    photographs

    I finally began a kitchen photo album, added several photographs to Blake's album, and a few to the garden from this year. The kitchen thus far has only tediously detailed before pictures. I intend not to post any afters (or durings) until it is after, but there's a peek* at the cabinets in the Blake album.

    * This was "peak" until 12 May 2004. I blame this on CoolBoss, who composed a headline--"A Peak Ahead"--not about mountains but about forecasting. I hang my head.

    Monday, 19 April 2004

    bike

    Two 3.8-mile city rides.

    winter crop

    Last fall I planted layers of sunflower seed husks, vegetable pulp, pine needles, and coffee grounds. This weekend I harvested a lovely crop of compost. Some needles remained, but mostly I pitchforked only lovely moist dark crumbly loam into the wheelbarrow to feed Gregor Samsa and add to the soon-to-be new vegetable bed.

    Also I pitchforked ants, whom I should probably thank for their work over the winter. The lasagne was alive with black ants. I found out this weekend at the Wild Bird Center when I picked up fourscore pounds of sunflower seeds that flickers can, in nesting season, eat 5,000 ants a day. So don't use ant spray.

    And worms! I don't remember, when we rototilled the south garden and south fence two years ago, this many worms (except for that one garter-snake-sized one I named Arrakis). Probably because rototilling kills them. Though I didn't amend the front gardens much, because all the plants I chose I did so deliberately because they thrive best in lean soils, there are worms aplenty in its soil now. I expect that, even unamended, soil under groundcloth and mulch stays moister than soil under dead thatched grass. I hope.

    Tuesday, 20 April 2004

    grandmother manquee

    My poor mother. She says that she and two women from her church are awaiting children to be born, all within April sometime. The other two are having maternal grandchildren but my mother can play along with only her cousin's grandchild and her daughter's friend's child.

    Sorry, Mom. Helping you keep up with the Joneses would be among the last reasons I'd spore. Not, to give her credit, that she adopted that Tone this time, but I do kind of feel for her. With two heterosexual, undiseased daughters, she never expected not to have any.

    bike

    Two 3.8-mile city rides.

    truly, you have a dizzying intellect

    I stopped working for the UConn registrar ten years ago. I never took a chemistry class in college (or high school). Nevertheless, as I read a selection of actually published examples of Bulwer-Lytton quality prose, I pegged one item as from UConn at the first alphanumeric:

    "127Q-128Q. General Chemistry

    Either semester. Four credits. Three class periods and one 3-hour laboratory period. (Students who have passed CHEM 137 or 153 may take CHEM 128.) (Students who have passed CHEM 122 will receive only 2 credits for CHEM 127 but 4 credits will be used for calculating QPR scores. A student who has a very high standing in CHEM 122 may be permitted, with the consent of the instructor, to take CHEM 128 without 127.) CHEM 127 is not open for credit to students who have passed CHEM 129 or 137 or 153; and CHEM 128 is not open to students who have passed CHEM 130 or 138 or 154."

    (The CSUs employ UConn numbering for interchangeable courses.)

    Alphabetizing thousands of registration scan-tron sheets over six years and staffing nine bouts of Add-Drop shoved certain course numbers deep into my brain, especially since every Bachelor of Science candidate had to take this pair of classes.

    Wednesday, 21 April 2004

    intern's been talking to my sister

    This morning I finally figured something out and declared, "I'm brilliant!" but of course being brilliant is of little solace unless I can crow about it to someone so I made Intern come over and look at what I had done. He listened quite kindly, following about two inches of my ell* of explanation, and when I wound up, he did my happy dance with me and then asked, "So do you have any snacks?"

    I cracked up. He's seriously been talking to my sister: "I'll listen to your story if you give me a backrub while you tell it." I haven't laughed at myself so hard since--well, probably since I saw my sister in December, but certainly workwise--Egg said that thing.

    * When I wrote that I just pulled a measurement word out of the air, but an ell! Because I, ell jay aitch, do tend to overexplain and at length, don't I.

    bike

    One 3.8-mile city ride. RDC picked me up because it was rainy and cold. Also because CoolBoss and Minne gave me a hanging basket full of potted purple pansies for NotSecretary's Day.

    gossip

    Gossip. I love the gossip. I have my guilty-pleasure trainwreck journals, and I am not above dissecting them with friends. I love dishing about people actually in my life as well. There are, however, lines--perhaps arbitrary to an outsider but logical to me--that I keep to one side of. I hope.

    I know two pieces of (offline) information right now and I am determined not to pass them on. When I'm brilliant and solve a problem, I want to crow, but there's nothing helpful here. One is only a tidbit that could be taken as part of Someone's larger drama if I passed it on to the Other Person who made me a confidante. The other is a matter of public record and has been published, and is much worse.

    The element that disturbs me most--indicative of my own self-involvement, given the nature of the information--is how I received it. I maintain a web page for a group. Someone whom I barely remember after a proximal acquaintance 20 years gone, who maintains a page for a related group, told me. She has presumed before on the similarity of our pages' intents, asking me to intrude on the privacy of someone in my group for information about that person's relative in her group. The fuck, I wondered. The chiseler could ask my groupmember on her own if she though the information so vital to possess. And on what basis did the chiseler assume intimacy between me and my groupmember, and worse, between herself and me?

    I didn't reply to the previous request and I won't reply to this. I could wish for greater involvement with my group, but I'm not going to buy it at the expense of others' public humiliation and private pain and of my own dignity and sense of decency.

    I have 10 years of said dignity and decency to stand on, though that base wobbles on the 25 years of indiscretion preceding it. The element disturbs me because the chiseler and I occupied similar roles in our groups during their heyday. I do not want to occupy--and I don't--or to be seen to occupy, that position anymore. Nor that of an obsequious chiseler.

    I should really get over high school. As if that weren't obvious (where "that" antecedes both what I need to get over, and, just as obviously, the setting for the above groups' formation, where the role I refer to is not that of class gossip).

    the great gatsby

    Why was I allowed to read this when I was so unworthy, getting over Stephen King just in time to fall for Ayn Rand? Books like this shouldn't be wasted on the unappreciative. I remembered the story well enough from 11-grade English, but apparently I missed the gorgeosity of the prose. Descriptive prose wasn't entirely lost on me--I did like John Steinbeck--but I am now ashamed that I remembered eyeglasses and ash heaps and all these beautiful shirts but not Fitzgerald's turns of phrase.

    nosedive but safe landing

    RDC and I went to My Brother's Bar last night and I was a chatterbox. I told him what Shrink said, that she would like to see me self-confident again, "as you were in college," and I amended, "...yet acting in age-appropriate ways."

    Age- and context-appropriate and, as I said above, with a little more discretion.

    But not entirely repressed. We went to Brother's so I could try on new Tevas at REI afterward. The only thing wrong with my current, 10-year-old pair is that the Velcro has lost its grip, but can they be restrapped? I don't know. I tried on Merrills and Tevas and Chacos and, in each pair, skipped across the area to the shoe-testing bit of fake rock.

    I am feeling better because one, I didn't particularly notice if anyone thought I was too old and fat to skip, and two, fuck 'em if they did. Also I am more sensible than I was in college, because I wouldn't've skipped if skipping would have been in the way of a more crowded store's activity.

    I was looking for hiking sandals but most of the shoes I found had river soles. "I can't find my sole," I told RDC, after much looking. Then I realized. "I had to leave it on the dock!" A homophone pun doesn't work if the person hasn't read the right book. That particular scene in that particular book just wrenches my heart of my chest, and I thought, oh shit, so much for that good mood. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

    As we left, we passed through a display of canoes and kayaks, one of which we'd like to have eventually (with a lake to use it on). RDC suggested Blake could perch on a strut and come along. Blake probably would hate it, and besides, the least wind would land him in the drink. RDC didn't drop it right then but considered whether Blake might be able to do this or that, and eventually I had to hit him in the head with a shovel but not before my mind was full of terrible imaginings.

    Not too long ago, either of these things, remembering the leavetaking at the dock or picturing another way Blake could die, would have crashed me. I do think a means of societal control is to keep people complaisant and distracted, and it's not a struggle for me to remain angry and concerned yet, so right now I appreciate that these two incidents merely ended my giddy mood instead of blackening it.

    Thursday, 22 April 2004

    the tale of despereaux

    Not as good as Kate Dicamillo's earlier Newbery Honor book Because of Winn-Dixie, but a hell of lot better than last year's Medal, Avi's Cross of Lead. I guess Despereaux had lessons about courage and loyalty in addition to being a ripping tale, and that might have been its Newberyness.

    just juice

    Family loyalty is all well and good but I prefer to believe, however naïvely, that truant and social service officers would not be so behindhand in dealing with such problems, and I also believe, however cynically, that the chances of the story's conflict being so resolved are some less than diddly over squat.

    After Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse's Stowaway really disappointed me, being a thinly disguised child's version of Cook's log. This was somewhat better.

    Saturday, 24 April 2004

    virginia creeper

    Our fence is covered in what everyone calls, and what might be, Virginia creeper. I like it because it's green and grows on its own and the fence isn't gorgeous, but the fence really needs to be stained or replaced or somethinged. So this weekend I ripped it all out. I meant to take a photograph of the pile of vines and of the tree-grade root structures; I didn't but they were both big and complicated and yowza. The short stretch of fence between garage and gate is in simple dirt, and that's where I got the roots; but along the rest of the back property line I have been piling all the rocks and gravel I find on the rest of the lot. This has certainly suppressed creeper and weeds, but it makes digging out the roots hard.

    The next step is to talk to the spook neighbors. I say "spook" because of The Human Stain; I wouldn't say it if they were black. Which is contrary to Philip Roth's point. Oops. They seem not to exist, so getting permission to stand in their back yard and swab at my fence might be tricky.

    We did brace the fence. An elm growing right on the property line broke out the curb between the lot and the alley, and is now pushing the fence into the yard. We cut out a low branch, straightened the fence as much as we could push it, and nailed a diagonal brace into place. The fence is upright and sturdier, but still needs the protection new stain will give it.

    I am going to play Tom Sawyer. I am not looking to trade staining time for a dead rat with a string to swing it on, only to think of this job as play instead of work.

    Sunday, 25 April 2004

    gym--once a fortnight

    Precor Elliptical, 30'; 15' with two 2-lb. handweights, keeping my strides per minute >120 and often >130.

    Ten minutes rowing, 30 strokes per minute. I think.

    oof

    I am exactly halfway through Ulysses, 500 lines into the Oxen of the Sun episode. I would have no idea what is going on without the criticism and annotations, and I don't have much even with it. The criticism tells me this episode happens in a lying-in hospital, and I doubt I would know that by the text alone. There is finally mention of Leopold's son--that I got. The criticism says that Stephen is being borne of English, and that explains the Middle English touches throughout the first 500 lines. I'm grateful to remember as much of Chaucer as I do.

    The sentences bear only slight resemblance to English syntax, so I read this section aloud until my mouth went mealy (that's why only 500 lines). That forces me to read slower, of course, and the words do sort themselves into clauses more aloud than they do on the page. But not so much more.

    Tuesday, 27 April 2004

    epiphany

    It is appropriate that I have an epiphany while reading Ulysses. This morning I realized proof of God--not my amorphous Gaia ideal but the typical occidental monotheistic dealie who pre-empts evolution.

    Evolution cannot have created human breasts: they are too ugly, cumbersome, inefficient, and purposeless to have come into being by any method as gracefully ruthless as that. Other mammals can engorge only when they need to feed their young, but breasts are an evil perpetrated on humanity by a vengeful, perverse, sadistic, heterosexual male god.

    /rant

    There are plenty of breasts that are proportionate and shapely and a pleasure to their bearers. Mine are not.

    oxen of the sun

    ....As as no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness....

    Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops....

    bike

    Two 3.8-mile city rides. On the way in I did my Michael Jackson impression because the left glove I hoped might be in the car (when it wasn't in my helmet where it belongs) wasn't. I had left it in the shower room at work, so at least it wasn't lost.

    yet more virginia creeper

    Considering size of the roots I prized out of the ground along the north bit of fence compared to the amount of vines, I know scads of tree-like roots must support the creeper along the main length of fence. Today I looked for them. This meant shoving aside all the stones and logs and bricks I have thrown in the long dead space between raised vegetable bed and fence over four years, and scrabbling in the corner through the slowly decomposing three-year-old clods from digging out "lawn," and on the short side of the bed shifting a faster decomposing two-year-old supply of pine needles from one side of its unshiftable tarp to another, to pull out and hack through various infestations of creeper and root.

    I wasn't as successful using the pickaxe as a crowbar as RDC was. Maybe because of our strength differential, but also possibly because I had much less space to work in without hacking out the fence or attacking needle-compost or sinking the pickaxe into gravel. Excuses excuses.

    My entire front, t-shirt, skirt, and legs, as well as my arms, was covered with dirt and mud. RDC asked if I fell. When I told him I was weeding, he asked, "With your shins?" But I was propping up the tarp of needles to get at branches and roots underneath.

    I disinterred lots more worms and dug them new holes in the garden. Maybe I was scared of my soil when I first explored this house, but I prefer to think that I have made a more friendly environment for Lowly and Arrakis and their pals.

    There aren't many worms in literature as namesakes. Who else besides Richard Scarry and Frank Herbert can I name my worms for? Does the Worm in James and the Giant Peach have a name? I think all those critters are just called by their species.

    Also I took up the grouncloth from half the north side of the house. I need to place a plastic border along the property boundary to keep the neighbors' grass and weeds from infiltrating my soon-to-be bishop's weed bed. I might take up all the groundcloth and plant the bishop's weed in the way back and then take cuttings from the maniacal Nepeta x faassenii to fill in the front. That plant seems to scoff so at injury, and the front gets at least some sunlight in high summer, that I would gamble cuttings would would do fine there. Nepeta is the sourdough bread of my garden.

    I am looking forward to planting my new plants. The other task of my weekend, staining the fence, not so much.

    sleepy

    When RDC2 was here, at least twice he didn't want to leave someplace because he was too tired to move. I wouldn't've brought a child to McCormick's at all, but it was a Sunday and I don't know a lot of babysitters, so along he came. He resisted for a while our suggestions to put his head on the table and sleep but succumbed before his meal arrived. When it was time to go, he resisted being woken and wanted to stay, perhaps using his grilled cheese as a pillow.

    Friday when we gussied up and left him at Intern's for the evening, he claimed to be too tired to move when I picked him up at midnight--although he was awake and watching "Princess Bride"--so I obligingly carried him like a child half his age to the car.

    Right now I am not getting up, even though if I did I could read Gilligan's Wake in bed, because I have a sleepy cockatiel on my ankle who huffs whenever I move. Shit, he just tucked as I saved this. Now I can't ever get up.

    Both my mother-in-law and I have created monsters.

    Wednesday, 28 April 2004

    bike

    Two 3.8-mile city rides

    potagér

    What a charming restaurant. We ate in its potagér, surrounded by nothing yet in bloom for a kitchen garden but beautiful and scented anyway, with Siberian forget-me-not and lilac and I think a Penstemon strictus (it looked just like mine) that I groomed. Two of us had a nettle and spinach soup (primarily spinach, which was good) and then yellowtail tuna with hazelnuts and Jerusalem artichoke and also fennel, which was quite daring of me, and RDC had the special, a Hawai'ian fish whose name escapes me, with plenty of morrels.

    I stole a morrel from RDC's plate. "You have no morals," our acquaintance observed. (I could call him either Vancouver, where he's from, or Toronto, where he met KMJ who recommended us to him when he moved here, or Wynkoop, where we first met. None of those works. How subtly to ask someone's middle name?)

    For dessert RDC had crème brulée and I had a slice of flourless chocolate cake--quite predictable choices for each of us. Our third had a rhubard something with basil ice cream. I've seen basil ice cream around but never ventured so far until now, when I asked for a spoonful. The basil just explodes on your tongue, it's amazing, but I didn't like the aftertaste.