House:
Garden
Errands
Stuff to look for
Kinwork and Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
I might say de Cervantes and Faulkner and James but right now I'm reading Watership Down for the first time in at least four years.
How I do love long summer evenings.
On the way home I fetched DWJ's photographs*, returned the four children's books I borrowed Thursday, and picked up a bag of grounds from Starbucks. At home I changed, packed the car full of cardboard, and set off again. To Tri-R, to drop off what was maybe only half the cardboard but a lot of volume (the remainder is flat and maybe too wide to fit in Cassidy, the cabinets' boxes), plastic bags, and phone books; to Home Despot, for pavers and an additional trellis; and to City Floral, for ladybugs. Home again, RDC and I walked down to Heidi's for sandwiches.
* Talking with DWJ awhile ago, I spoke fondly of Rocky. DWJ is more RDC's friend than mine and I had not spoken to him since Rocky's death. I mentioned I had pictures of Percy and Rocky together, of Percy singing to Rocky (see? not all cockatiels are afraid of all dogs, you coward, Blake), and DWJ said that when he visits he would like to see them. Three minutes after I handed the phone to RDC, I had the negatives in my paw. So he can not only see but own them.
I moved the five round brickish pavers to the back, stepping stones between the brick walkway and the compost bin, and laid the new, faux sandstone pavers on the north side (I need two more). I weeded the raspberries and pounded another trellis into place to try to keep their prickers off the patio.
I hosed the cherry tree, mercilessly using the "jet" setting. This was "to disperse pests," as if aphids don't have grippy little toes and jaws. The Botanic Garden Ask-the-Expert dude said there was a pesticide that wouldn't hurt animals, as if insects weren't animals and leaving ambiguous whether it would hurt birds. I didn't believe him. He also said that aphids aren't dangerous to the tree, don't damage its vascular structure, and only suck out water and nutrients, likening them to mosquitoes on humans. Okay, but the more moisture and nutrients the aphids suck out, the less goes into the fruit or, more important, the roots. So I poured 1500 ladybugs onto the cherry tree, and I hope they have big, vicious, chompy jaws. Ladybugs and their larvae can eat several times their weight every day. Hop to it, ladybugs.
It began to sprinkle on my way home. I should not apply stain if rain is forecast during the next 24 hours, and I don't like to pressure-clean if I'm going to freeze in the blowback. So that was my excuse. I transplanted the jasmine that the neighbor gave us, we ate spinach from the garden, and I read Watership Down. Also I put away two-day-old laundry (only occasionally do I get it away the day I do it). Blake was a beast with two back toes, falling in lust first with the washcloth (I bought new, periwinkle blue washcloths when the fam came in March, but did not bring Blake to vet colors) and then with laundry. He spent a lot of time in his cage, pacing and whining, because he would not play nicely in his box or with a peacock feather or be pet (and to turn pages with one hand and pet with the other constitutes a perfect evening for me) or listen to music with his daddy. I will use the old washcloths if I have to but the new ones are still cushy. Hmph.
My neighbor gave me a jasmine because he is kind and generous. The jasmine is hardy only to 20 degree Fahrenheit, which means it should come inside over the winter, yet it wants to climb, which means it should live outside where it can climb. Also it is very tall, and my pots are either pretty for inside or big for outside. Well, I have until fall to get it a pot of adequate size and prettiness, but I am not an indoor plant person. And since it was a gift from someone I like, its probable death will be guilt-inducing. Hooray.
One thousand five hundred ladybugs supposedly were in that bag. I shook them into the lower branches of the cherry tree and left the net bag and the raffia in a crook for them to finish escaping from. The leaves do look better--maybe because the hosing rinsed off some goo as well as less grippy aphids, since I don't see scads of ladybugs around. What eats ladybugs? Any meat-eating bird, I figure. We have flickers and robins and starlings in abundance.*
Tomorrow is supposed to be hot and I will pressure-clean if it's not cloudy.
* I have not seen "Rocky Horror Picture Show" in years. When will I be able to say "in abundance" and not hear Frank N. Furter in my head?
Two 3.8-mile city rides.
That I survived was no thanks to one particular driver. I am used to the city buses taking no notice of red lights. They go through lights so red they're brown--with the perpendicular direction's green. So this morning when I got the green to go east, I waited for the southbound bus to blow the light before proceeding. Then a northbound car also blew the light to turn left and westward. I figured--stupidly, maybe--that that was the last of the lightblowers, so I was well into the intersection when another northbound car blew the light to turn left and westward--despite me going east and westbound drivers going straight who could evade it and westbound drivers turning south, who could not.
At the other hairy intersection, another car waited to turn left but not did blow the light to do so. It even backed up, out of the intersection and behind crosswalk, when it realized it couldn't make its turn.
Both were single-occupancy vehicles wanting to turn left at an expired green. In ascending order of stereotyped stupid driving, the one that went for it had a male driver, was a minivan, and the driver held a cell phone to his ear. The other, who anticipated but cleared the intersection, was a woman driving a Saab without a handheld cell phone. Also, the minivan certainly had an automatic transmission while the Saab could possibly have been standard.
I was going to channel Yosemite Sam and say "Grrr, I hate rabbits," but I am still under the beech hangar on Watership Down so I won't.
Months ago we bought tickets to see David Grisman at the Botanic Gardens. Yesterday the Junkies finally posted more tour dates. There is one show in Colorado. Both Grisman and my Cowboy Junkies are on Friday August 27th.
RDC, prince that he is, said we could probably sell the Grisman tickets--Grisman is more him and Junkies more me, though he like them too--but we bought the Grisman tickets first and we've never seen him but we've seen the Junkies a slew of times, me eight and him six. He was sweet to offer.
But still, fuckity.
It certainly was not free of certain stereotypical Oprahisms, but it was fine fluff. The three sisters were Chekov (I don't remember that story at all, but the title works); were Mrs. Which, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Whatsit; were any three sisters--weird, fatal, gorgon, harpy--from myth and legend and no worse for that. It reminded me of Sue Hubbell's A Country Year (also about bee-keeping), Carson McCullers, and even E.L. Konigsburg because of a French Provincial bedroom set (just like in The Outcasts of Schuyler Place.
Now comes the decision: which of the real books should I start?
Now comes the decision: which of the real books should I start?
From the library I have José Saramago's History of the Siege of Lisbon. Otherwise, on the top shelf of the living room bookcase, reserved for stuff high in the queue, are Isabel Allende's Infinite Plan (I've had that for years), Sherman Alexie's Toughest Indian in the World, Don Quijote, Tracey Chevalier's The Virgin Blue (I started it and it seems like she doesn't do the annoying swap-the-narrator thing, so it might be okay), Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, Moll Flanders, David James Duncan's The Brothers K, Zora Neale Hurston short stories, Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters (about which I knew nothing when I bought it for RDC except its great title), an annotated Lolita, Charles Palliser's Quincunx that SPM said is one of the best books ever, Iain Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost, Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Geoff Ryman's Was. Also War and Peace, for reference.
The harder or longer of those have sat there since we bought the bookcase over a year ago. I need a good thick book to sink my teeth into, like Palliser or Pears. But I've also got to get started on Absalom, Absalom!, though I should reread The Sound and the Fury first. Maybe I'll take Faulkner as my Project reading and punctuate it with Hurston, though if Ulysses is any pattern I did a lot of lite reading just to avoid him, 'cause I'm such a brainiac.
We might have left earlier and made the evening reception, but I needed my head shrunken first, so we set out a little after six. I had not been over Independence Pass since 1998 or so. It's still gorgeous and hairy and windy and loopy and absent guardrails. The Arkansas River looks tempting and there might be stretches where bodily contact with the water, rather than wading overalls and boots, or boats only, is permitted.
In Shrink's waiting room I wrote in my paper journal: I didn't think about this until I chose my next book. I only thought that I had already started it, a few pages at least, and that it's a reasonable vacation book. But I first read Tracey Chevalier in October 2001, the last time we went to Aspen, the weekend we started bombing Afghanistan. Now I am going back to Aspen with my last unread Chevalier, The Virgin Blue, and we are still at war, and Afghanistan is still in rubble.
I still love Aspen. I know our habits there are unsustainable--but I love it. Sunday on the way home, RDC suggested stopping in Vail for a late lunch, and maybe Beaver Creek for coffee, for a trifecta of towns we're only kidding ourselves about. I don't know Beaver Creek at all, but I don't know if I'll ever get over my feeling that Vail got rolled out like so much Play-Do and baked like polymer clay. Or puffy paint, while Aspen feels like a town where people live. And where they can't afford to live, and where they don't actually live, but which is a damn sight prettier than Vail would be even if it didn't have I-70 slap through the middle of it.
Anyway. As soon as we were down out of the Pass, I could smell the black willow cottonwood trees I so love. It makes me want to run alongside a fence. (I am not really allowed to make Sound and Fury jokes.) That's the predominant smell. Also aspen, also ponderosa pine. But mostly this specific species of cottonwood.
Three blocks away from our hotel (the Hotel Aspen), we ate a late dinner at the Hotel Jerome bar. In addition to the Texans whose volume and hairspray and assumptions about go-cups gave them away, and the upper crust so crusty and inbred that the men actually have evolved to grow less body hair on their chests where their knotted sweater arms hang and their faces betray what Toulouse-Lautrec's body did, there were the Aspen crew that I knew, the privileged poor who ski by day, wait tables by night, and manage to prolong their early 20s lifestyle into their 30s.
Besides black willow cottonwoods and people who ski without health insurance, I love Aspen for the stars. Okay, I could get them anywhere outside of a city, but they just add to Aspen's loveliness. And we had a 270-degree view from our patio.
Another plus to our hotel was its proximity to the Main Street Bakery & Café. Not that anything public is too far to walk, but only two blocks is a fine thing. On our entering, CoolBoss waved, and we joined eight or so Dot Orgeristas for breakfast. I am not so good with work folk outside of a work setting, because in my head at least I am demure at work, not laughing The Laugh or swearing or telling raucous jokes or telling stories nine tangents long or at least doing these things only to well-broken-in coworkers and no more than two or three at once. RDC is much better at that, so breakfast was not merely stupid small- or work-talk.
Most people were getting a late start as well because of the reception the night before. We could have done something outdoorsy if we had finished our breakfasts before noon, but no. My sister had told me that one of her friends--happily, RDC's and my mutual favorite from her 18 months here--now owned a jewelry store, named This. I looked This up in the phone book, where it wasn't; I called her and she told me its name under the former owners had been This but its friend-name, well, she couldn't remember That. So I strolled into a jewelry store and said I was looking for one that had used to be called This but its new owners, Friend and Wife, had changed its name? This was Aspen, so of course those jewelers knew the new name. We went into New Name, where Friend wasn't. He was at his fly-fishing store--he had been a guide when we first met him. And there he was, glad to see us, inquiring after my sister, admiring our sleuthing.
Oh, and my earlier epiphany. I had this one, recently, while reading Ulysses, but upon stopping into the bakery where an earlier one bloomed (I slay me), though this time for lemonade, I had to mention it.
We were visiting my sister for the first time upon moving to Colorado. We went into the bakery, where CLH and RDC each ordered a chocolate chip cookie and I a brownie sundae--which they didn't offer on the menu, but I asked if they would just shove a brownie (which they had) into the bottom of a bowl of ice cream (they offered both paper bowls and ice cream) and charge me whatever à la carte and I would just call it a sundae. Soon enough my sister and husband had finished their cookies and wanted some of my sundae, which I did not want to share. They had had theirs, and this was mine. CLH insisted, explaining, "We're grown-ups now. If we want more, we can have it."
My epiphany was not that as an adult I could have more, but that I could share without resentment. I had aspired to this as an articulated concept since I read Ursula LeGuin's Eye of the Heron, but this was the first time I knew I was practicing it.
After a late breakfast and due at the gondola by 4, we didn't do much in town besides find my sister's friend and poke about in a cookery store. Then we strolled along the Roaring Fork trail for a while, sucking in deep breaths of aspen and black willow cottonwood and everything else on offer in a high-altitude riparian environment. Then we repaired to the hotel to dress.
I have got to get new dress shoes. It doesn't help that I am not fond of shoes. One pair of grey satin pumps would go with every single one of my best dresses, since every one of them (four) is an ice tone. I found the current pair almost four years ago and they are, besides stained, fucking uncomfortable, bearable only with doses of talcum powder and bandaids on my heels, which latter I forgot. We walked less than half a mile? to the gondola and at the top I asked at the lodge for a band-aid. A band-aid, because at that point only my left heel was cut through. By the end of the night, my right heel was sliced through too.
Anyway! The top of Ajax Mountain is no sucky place to get married. Snow-capped mountains ring the top. They were not as capped as in 1995, when friends of CLH got married up there; the photographs she brought to my wedding were the first I saw of Aspen. But they were white and shiny and lovely. The ceremony was funny and perfect; and the bride lovely of course.
I love that almost every wedding dress I have ever seen is exactly right for its bride. This wedding and EJB's are the two loveliest I have seen (except my own). They had in common gorgeous settings (this one far more spectacular), personally perfect services (EJB's had far better grammar), gracious service (this one had better food as well), but also they had nothing in common other than us and another pair of attendees--one woman works with TMB and is the cousin of this groom. And how each dress suited each bride, but that's something every wedding has in common.
The bride tugged me and others behind a pair of microphones to be back-up singers during "Mustang Sally." The next day when we ran into Ernie and his wife Seahorse, who had not stayed that long, for breakfast, I said I didn't have the moves to be a back-up singer.
"All you need is a tight black dress," Ernie suggested.
"I have one of those," I said. "It wasn't tight when I bought it [1990], but it's tight now."
"I have that dress!" Seahorse said. "Damn drycleaners."
RDC did say that throughout the wedding he noticed that I was much more comfortable talking with strangers than I have been in recent years. I am not sure that's true. On the gondola going up, we chatted with another couple, and the three of them were out-Colorado-ing each other so I shut up. It might be state pride, which is fine and which, oceanless as Colorado is, I could participate in, but it sounds like boasting. But otherwise I was chatty. Mostly with my coworkers and their spouses, but also with spare people. And during a tussle with another guest, which might be too hairy a story to post, though I don't think fast on my feet, my refusal to confront or to escalate or to speak disdainfully didn't leave me anxious and shaky. Instead I shook it off. And that is certainly better.
A side note: another road trip, another celebrity death. One major figure we haven't been away for is John Kennedy Jr. And slightly less major, Johnny Cash. The actor deaths in threes we tend to be home for too. But to date, Elvis Presley, Jerry Garcia, Princess Diana, Mother Theresa, Frank Sinatra, Charles Schultz, and Ronald Reagan.
The tussle concerned a child, which led me to think about its taking a village to raise a child. Someone--not the tussler--suggested that if I can't name the kid, it's not my village. I respect someone's thinking that I was out of line, though of course I don't share it; I do not respect the name division.
One time at a neighborhood ice cream shop, I saw a toddler playing on the bike rack as if it were a jungle gym. He was close to the curb and ignoring the street inches away. I walked over with my cone, keeping on eye on the kid before a parent came out of the store and thanked me. I couldn't name that kid; was its safety not my concern? A few years ago a man watched his grown male friend lure a little girl into a public lavatory; the man knew the friend was going to rape and kill the girl but did nothing to prevent the friend's actions or to alert anyone who would safeguard the child. He could not name the child, but he damn well shirked his responsibility to her.
At the Vietnam Memorial, a very little boy crouched at my feet and picked up a photograph someone had left below the names. I crouched myself to address him eye to eye. I asked, "Is that yours?" and he looked around in consternation. His father had been several feet away and now came to scoop him up and take the photograph from his hand. "He doesn't understand," the father apologized to me. "No, of course not," I replied. And that was that. I shouldn't have said "No, of course not," though. That didn't express what I thought, which is that the the boy was being a little boy, which is a fine thing to be, but having picked up and examined this curiosity, he shouldn't be allowed to keep it.
That's my ongoing problem in unrehearsed speech in unexpected situations, that I don't think quickly enough to respond cogently and evenly.
I am not sure whether this is Tracey Chevalier's first or second book, but I know that this and Girl with a Pearl Earring are her earliest. And that she should have stopped there.
On Sunday after breakfast with Ernie and Seahorse, we drove down the Roaring Fork valley, drier and wider and drier yet, into Glenwood Canyon, from which we climbed (not a climb but a steep hike) to Hanging Lake.
Pretty.
I banged my knee on the way down. I have not had a scraped knee in some time and was feeling way too much like a grown-up. Now I have scabs on both knees and am feeling more like myself.
Earlier stories made us shout with laughter as we drove through the mountains to Aspen; later ones were more serious. But the final few nearly made me pee again. An excellent driving book, read by author David Sedaris.
I am getting the house in shape for my sister and a small party we might have on Saturday. I had planned to take two days off, but now we have administrative leave Friday: when the federal government closes, the other office closes. I do not know if the other office had the same days off we had in March of 2003 when they didn't have our blizzard, but we do have this Friday off. I am not sure why anyone is in shock: Reagan was 93 and surely his death comes as no surprise.
CLH doesn't arrive until midnight but I took the two days of vacation anyway: five-day weekend, shweet. This morning RDC and I hiked in Red Rocks, lovely in green still. We saw a sharp-shinned hawk and a rufous-sided towhee and heard lots of meadowlarks.
I still have to weedwhack and scrub and make the bed and so forth.
If she wants to watch the funeral on Friday I am going to go to the zoo by myself. Princess Diana's funeral happened to be the day of our mother's second wedding and as I pried my sister away from the television I teased her that it was inconsiderate of her, Mom, to schedule it so. (She did understand that I was teasing.)
This afternoon as I weedwhacked and mowed, I felt the occasional drop of rain. Certainly there were piles of clouds over the mountains and in the foothills this morning, and by afternoon they had released themselves onto the plain. I was showering off when RDC came in to tell me the tornado sirens were going off.
Into the downstairs bathroom went Blake in his cage, his travel cage should we need it, his styptic powder, a tupperware of food, and my backpack of my current book, journal, Moonshadow, Dandelion, my camera, a different shirt and better bra. Also Booboo, wrapped in my blue hoodie, and light hiking shoes.
We watched the storm from our front steps and on the television, which is how this entry came to be written. Local stations split their screens between the storm and the arrival in Washington of Reagan's body. What I am struck by is how closely Blake seems to be watching television.
He watched the six horses pull the caisson from the White House to the Capitol, a half hour slow march. Every time I glanced at him from making CLH's bed or dusting, he would be in the same spot, his head cocked the same way. Eventually I made his dinner and came to sit with him while he ate, and he ate with one eye on the screen (not that he could ever keep both eyes on the screen). He's still watching the honor guard carry the casket from the street up into the rotunda.
Oh! It's not that he's watching flags flapping as much as he's listening to the music. Besides rock n' roll, Blake loves a march. A military band has been playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" adagio for ages now.
We hung out with an Aspen friend, we explored trendy Potter Highlands, we wandered through the Botanic Gardens, we ate Cricket burgers, we shopped, we hung out under a tree in the park with books, we ate at Adega, we had a cook-out with her friends and ours, we hung out around the outdoor fire, we explored a street fair, we had more burgers and milkshakes too, and we had dinner with a couple of RDC's coworkers.
It was a good enough time that I have forgotten all our bons mots, which were plenteous.
Still with its Disney moments, probably nearly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read it (which is fine), better than the previous two, with one major problem: the fourth member of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs was never explained, nor the shape of the Expecto Patronum spell. Also, Alfonso Cuarón has watched a lot of Monty Python and Hitchcock and hasn't forgotten his "Wizard of Oz."
Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint still can't act their ways out of paper bags, though Emma Watson is coming along nicely. Michael Gambon is a much more vigorous and less cariacaturey Dumbledore. Despite the improvement in director, this is solely a plot movie.
And fun.
We changed our gym membership. 24 Hour Fitness is full of lines, I didn't feel comfortable locking my bike outside it, and its indoor pool has no daylight.
Gym Foofy is just a couple of blocks farther away. It's on a side street and its bike rack is immediately outside its glass doors with members walking in and out instead of in front of a concrete wall with almost no pedestrians and a lot of automobiles. So I can bike to it after work, with sneakers in my panniers.
Gym Foofy vows you never have to wait for equipment, which means that RDC and I can go together in the evenings, as we originally plotted at 24. Even after the New Year's mob (of which we were part) thinned out, evenings were a bad time to go. He would go during the day when he could schedule a free hour, and I would not go in the evenings because it was packed and I could not ride on the coattails of his discipline.
Gym Foofy has an outdoor pool, heated and open from April 1st through October 31st, for lap swim, and another outdoor pool for leisure and children, and an indoor pool with big windows. It is a 25-meter pool, rather than Congress Park's 50, but I was happy enough in Cook Park's 25 and I lost a lot more time to crowding than I will to twice as many of my inefficient turns.
Gym Foofy also costs twice as much. It provides towels, which is nice, and Q-tips, which is insane. But I can swim outdoors for six months out of the year instead of eight weeks at the city pools, not in such restrained times (all of them have the same lap swim hours, of which I could make four a week), not in such filthy water, and I can ride my bike.
Next year, supposedly a 24 will open within walking distance of Dot Org out here in the hinterlands. At that point, I will have to make a decision: if I am still going to Gym Foofy, I will allow me to keep my membership; if I am not, better waste less money at 24 where transportation won't be an issue again than at Foofy. That's good motivation to go to Foofy.
Precor Elliptical 30', and I have a complimentary meeting with a personal trainer next week.
From my semester of astronomy in high school, I remember only that it was hard (that and the viewings in our own observatory). It involved math, which wasn't my thing. I had expected to be thrilled by physics, to talk about Newton and Galileo, and was similarly disappointed by math-heavy formulas calculating acceleration--three feet per second per second? mass multiplied by what equals what?
But I still like stars and planets, and I still like Copernicus and Einstein--their discoveries, their processes, their clean deductive minds.
For some years now I have asserted that the full moon is never in the sky at the same time as the sun. I do not remember where I picked up that factoid, and I figured it was about time I researched its accuracy. This is not completely satisfactory. It does confirm that the full moon cannot be high in the sky immediately or soon after sunset, which is the gist of my assertion, but does it mean that half the moon and half the sun both can be visible at their opposite points of horizon? Most places are not so flat that you can see a full 360-degree plane.
Anyway, that search led me here, where I learned again that Venus rotates opposite to its revolution. Now I'm trying to think how that would affect weather and evolution on Earth. Oo, a science fiction "plot."
(Someone told me once that science fiction, apparently unlike all other fiction, is based on an idea. He didn't elaborate at the time, but I filled in the blanks: What if a planet had insufficient water? Dune. What if Germany and Japan had won WWII? The Man in the High Castle. I remember that morsel because even at the time I thought it was bullshit but didn't know how to assert it. What if a girl had muddy drawers? The Sound and the Fury. What if a woman's first impressions of a haughty man were wrong? Pride and Prejudice. What if Frank Cornish's secrets were finally revealed? The Lyre of Orpheus. (Perhaps because at the time I had not read these, I could not assert this?) An idea is different than a premise, but I can't think of a science fiction "idea" that's not actually a "premise," just as in straight fiction.)
How would everything had evolved differently if Earth rotated and revolved in different directions? How much does the direction of our revolution affect us? If rotation were reversed, ocean currents and winds would be different to the point of opposite, but if rotation were the same and revolution turned face, what effects on a planetary level would there be? Any, before Earth's course disrupted the solar currents?
CLH's loves RDC's comment "You shouldn't anthropomorphize animals--they hate that" because she anthropomorphizes more than anyone she knows. I say that because probably everyone anthropomorphizes more than anyone else they know because only everyone is in their own head. That was confusing to write--and to read too I suspect.
Anyway, CLH was talking about how Kitty's facial expressions change, the tilt of ears, how the eyebrow and cheek whiskers are held, the angle of the head. That's all well and good, but can cats (and dogs) shift their facial fur hair by individual hair? Blake can change individual feathers on his face, it seems like. He can't moue his beak as a regular pet can its mouth, but he can move each bit of filoplume independently. His crest is his major indicator, but he can tweak his plumage with great precision and delicacy.
Also his feathers are long enough to get mussed, unlike cat and dog fur. (It's obvious my experience is with short-haired pets.) An eyebrow feather can hang over his eye like a fringe. His crest can be shoved to one side like--this is my invention--my father's comb-over in a stiff breeze.
And I know dogs and cats speak with their whole bodies, with their posture, when they need to, but a bird emotes with its whole body all the time, not just when it's awake and alert. If a dog is awoken, it'll open an eye and roll it around, and if it's startled maybe it'll jump up (my dog was not among the world's most active, obviously). But a bird--a cockatiel, anyway--will always use its whole body: the puffy, downy chick pose of dozing, with the feathers puffed up, the neck pulled in, the beak almost hidden by feathers; the guard-bird who has just seen a seagull on television and is sleek and slender; the scaredy-bird who has just seen The Exercise Ball or the Falcon at the Meta-Birdfeeder and looks like Alice when she's drunk the potion.
Okay, I have to go to work, but Blake is on my lap in the dining room, listening to his newly-returned daddy snoring in the bedroom, cuddling under my typing arm among folds of terrycloth bathrobe, poised for his after-breakfast nap, and I cannot bear to get up. I have to, and the beakless chick swee'b (I called Percy Swee' Pea, and Swee' B doesn't have the same ring but the swee must continue) will turn into the growling lion of Uwokemeupistan. Obviously, I prefer the former.
I see a shrink biweekly. Hi, my name's Lisa, I'm overindulged. Anyway, I started seeing her in October. Since March, she has made roughly every other appointment and canceled the others, or not canceled them, such that I show up at her office only to be told she's out. She has some sort of onging medical thing, or so I gather, because the first time was "a medical emergency," and when I said next time that I hoped it was okay, she said "It is being taken care of."
Every other appointment. She's made fourof my nine appointments since March.
Also, in late May she asked if I was getting anything out of therapy, because she's not sure. So now I'm second-guessing everything I said to her until then and since because I am clearly doing something wrong.
My sister took an instant, unmet dislike to her, one because you don't blow off your patients like that, and two because she should have known that to say something like that to be would make me nervous and insecure about the thing that's supposed to help me get over my nervous anxiety.
Also, her name is Dr. Hu.
I am not going to sack her--maybe because I am not so devoted to shrinkage that missing these appointments fucks me up, which would make both my sister and Shrink right. But I am glad of the Lexapro and I want to keep it.
RDC has said I seem more comfortable around people lately. My self-loathing has decreased, though I still eat garbage and don't exercise. I'm not beating myself up about stuff as much, and while I now have the impression that I did something wrong earlier this week, I can't remember what it was. That's a good thing, that I am not turning it over and over in my head and crippling myself with guilt.
Precor Elliptical (a newer model with a smoother stride), 45' at 20/20 incline and 8/20 resistance, about 6K strides. I changed machines at 15' when the one to my left became free so I could read captions on CNN more easily, so I'm not sure. I used two 2-pound handweights nearly throughout. Every five minutes or so I'd check my heartrate through the sensors the handles: 160 rpm, above both the purported "fat-burning" and "cardio training" ranges, but I didn't feel strained. For a couple of periods I dropped the weights and pushed my strides-per-minute above 175 instead of my average of 130-135, and that's what I should do. That challenged me aerobically as my usual efforts do not.
Then I swam a half-mile, even though thunder in the distance probably had closed city pools. Ha.
Me and Harry Potter is like me and Woman on the Edge of Time or me and The Fountainhead or me and The Giver. They're way easy targets and that's why I like them, because I can feel superior to them. But I'm only showing my own stupidity by not picking on something my own size. I have long maintained that Harry Potter is fun but not worth such devotion and analysis--so why do I reread and analyze? Pomposity, OMFB.
Seeing "Prisoner of Azkaban" got me rereading Prisoner of Azkaban and then Goblet of Fire and then today starting Order of the Phoenix. I got a couple hundred pages in and then stopped myself, because god knows I'll reread them when #6 comes out and they don't bear rereadings that often.
My new grievance tickled the back of my mind at the end of Prisoner: how did Sirius get a wand after getting out of Azkaban? He couldn't go to Diagon Alley or show his face anywhere in the wizarding world. It crystallized at the end of Goblet: when an animagus transmogrifies, how does it keep its wand? I'll allow clothes to reappear on rehumanizing because that's so assumed in fiction as to be quibbling even for me. But a wand is not so much an extension of the body as all that: viz Harry dropping his at the Quidditch World Cup.
The biggest problem is this: when Voldemort lost his corporeal self after his curse rebounded off Harry, he could not have kept his wand. He could not hold it. Who restored that very same wand (we know it is the exact same wand) to him when he got re-embodied at the climax of Goblet? Did Wormtail accompany him to the Potters' that night and pick up the wand? We are given to understand Voldemort was alone.
Which reminds me--and this, unlike the previous, is easily my own not remembering and not a fault of Rowling's--but if Sirius was suspected immediately upon the Potters' deaths, why would Hagrid have borrowed his motorcycle? Neither can I omit commenting again on Voldemort's stupidity as a villain: it doesn't fit with his character so is an intrusive, shoddy crutch on Rowling's part that Voldemort explains himself to Harry, and that this explanation happens at the end of every. single. book.
Plus Goblet's fleeting look of triumph in Dumbledore's eyes when he learns that Voldemort now has, through Harry's blood, the protection Harry's mother's love and sacrifice laid in his skin bothers the hell out of me.
Swam 1 k, including one whole length of butterfly, ooooo. I have got to learn how to do a flip-turn. My non-regulation turns totally disrupt my rhythm--although that's hardly why I cannot do more than one lenght of fly.
I know I'm way too acclimated to Colorado but it was damn humid today. Sweat actually trickled down my face instead of evaporating. It was sticky and not an effective means of cooling. And I felt buggy as I worked in the yard, which I hardly ever do. Sixty percent! I weep for me.
I weeded the vegetable garden, groomed the south fence of bindweed, added perhaps two gallons of vegetable pulp to what probably cannot be a lasagne mulch since I'm adding its layers gradually, and gathered a small bowlful of raspberries (slightly more than yesterday).
One 3.8-mile city ride. It rained again today, but not during my commuting times; nevertheless, RDC picked me up and we went to the gym.
Precor Elliptical EFX 546: 45' at 20/20 incline and 8/20 resistance, 6000 strides. I used two 3-pound handweights for about a third of the period.
A special topics class on evil in literature was one of the best classes I had at UConn, professor and books and discussion and everything. The Book of Job, Macbeth, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass (evil in history rather than in literature), Things Fall Apart, Ursula LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl," Tillie Olsen's I Stand Here Ironing.
I'd have to look at the syllabus to remember what else there was, but right now I'm wondering why we didn't read The Sound and the Fury. I can't think of any literary character less chockful of pure cussedness than Jason Compson.
Non-humans can't compare, so Woundwort and Saruman are out. Mr. Gradgrind is too flat. Teacher isn't flat but he is limited. Anyone insane, even criminally, like Whatsisname from Handful of Dust is out. Raskolnikov is sympathetic, maybe a tad touched, capable of love. Danvers and Heathcliff are sympathetic because they love someone. Even the Wicked Witch of the West is just drawn that way. Aha--after thinking of book after book I see the light: Jason Compson is the only one who tells his story in the first person, so you can see how deep, how causeless, how impenetrable and pervasive, his evil is.
I love Benjy. I love Dilsey. I love this book.
The weather that, I realize, I am far too accustomed to has returned. After a week of welcome rain, mist, and humidity, and continual thunderstorms, our clear blue skies are back. This morning's ride was chilly for June at 40 degrees, but by noon the weather was perfect: 70 degrees with a cool moist breeze; Kal and I sat on the patio and basked, her with a New Yorker and me with an Economist and Portrait of a Lady (at which I have chuckled a couple of times, not necessarily when James planned me to but still). I'm not sure about her but I'm not fond of a hot sun. This was perfect.
Yet no one listened when I requested that the new building have a retractable roof. True, I only asked for this when I learned that I would be on the third floor, and I have also asked for Bathrobe Day and petitioned for Pet Year. But still.
I biked to the gym and swam a kilometer plus a few lengths of fly alternating with side- or backstroke so I could breathe. I am also working on kicking from my abs, which are flobby.
Something more than two 3.8-mile city rides, and a 1K crawl.
And I biked home totally happy. When I am not exercising, I forget just how profound an effect exercise and activity have on my mood. I must not let myself forget.
Last night Blake was in the living room with RDC as I dismantled his cage: he wasn't in it, he didn't want to be in it, but he didn't like the fact I was messing with his turf. (He could hear my activity.) While his house was in the dishwasher, he could forget his territorialism, but when I began to assemble it again he recommenced whining. As soon as I got the basics assembled I put his box on the roof, and he hopped from my shoulder to thither and pranced into it and huffed at me while I arranged his perches and toys.
Today he's been sweet all day. I am sure that if everyone had a cockatiel to entertain, oral hygiene would be a major hobby. Flossing, brushing, and gargling are just so much more fun when there's a buddy on your shoulder bowing and bobbing.
Now I am downstairs with Blake on my shoulder. He has just had a yawning fit and is now on my sternum, just under my chin, where I can pet him with with little lip nibbles.
I understand he is a rarity among parrots to be so affectionate, but I really can't imagine life without a buddy.
I don't know what gets into me. I meant only to watch some news over breakfast, snugglified because it's still cold. Instead I watched most of a sentimental woe-is-me movie from 1952, Invitation, with Dorothy McGuire (whom I didn't recognize as the mother from "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"; if I had I wouldn't have lasted any time at all) and Van Johnson, whom I know only as Spike from my beloved "State of the Union."
Also I downloaded part 8 of War and Peace. Which means I am only 75% done. It might not be as bad as I think it is if I only listened to it more than occasionally. It's why I should cook, so I can listen to it in the house. The match that I wanted to happen could happen now, and I know Napoleon falls, so maybe I could stop listening! There would be much rejoicing.
But the scene with the black-eyed little girl in Quention's section of Sound and the Fury is straight out of War and Peace. Countess Rostov isn't nearly as bad as Caroline Compson, but she tends that way.
Two bike commutes. Once when I drove home mid-morning, it took me less than eight minutes. Today for the first time I biked that route. It involves a diagonal street--a rarity in Denver--one that is not marked as a bike route. It is less pleasant, but much faster. I have to drive it again with the triptometer to see how much shorter.
Kal said she was feeling lucky and that she would push her way to the front, but when we arrove at the Tattered Cover around 6, there was no hope and the line was insane. We were herded as through a sheepfold around the perimeter and up the stairs and around some more (I picked up a title something like Grammar for the Completely Unclued) and we grabbed some floor two rooms away from the hall. In this way, going to a David Sedaris reading was a lot like listening to him on NPR or through an audio book, a broadcast, disembodied voice. It was also a lot not like either of those, because occasionally those people in his presence laughed when the rest of us did not. At a gesture? an expression? We will never know.
Waiting, we entertained ourselves with the quizzes at the end of each chapter of the grammar book. The first chapter was on capitalization, and the book claimed that the one properly capitalized sentence of the mutliple-guess four included the words "Dominican republic," not Dominican Republic. Have I been spelling this wrong all my life?
Sometime in elementary school (I hope no later than fourth grade), we were assigned a project in the school library that the librarian, not the teacher, reviewed. (I can't remember the teacher, hence not the grade, but the librarian was the perfectly friendly but intimidating-looking one whose half-glasses sat on her really tremendous bust.) I remember that Mrs. Bust was surprised I finished whatever it was, probably a reference and geography project, so rapidly and then said, "And you capitalized everything right too." That's why I like to think it was no later in elementary school than fourth grade. Capitalization is simple and follows rules, unlike spelling, which is a sense much more than it is a subject. I got a little glow, of course.
The CIA World Factbook has an entry for the Dominican Republic, in which it mentions "The Dominican economy," following a normal pattern, and gives the conventional form as "Dominican Republic." Britannica's entry capitalizes both in its title, mentions the Dominican peso, and capitalizes both in a sentence: "The Dominican Republic was originally part of the Spanish colony of Hispaniola."
Well, this book also claimed that apostrophes properly do occur in "the 1970's" and in "the 70's," as in temperature; it didn't mention how stupid "the '70's" looks although that's correct according to their pattern nor how Class of "86" is hypercorrection nor what to do when you need quotation marks within quotation marks such that perhaps quotation marks within italics would set off the phrase under consideration more clearly than nested quotation marks.
So mocking that was fun.
David Sedaris was also fun. He read two essays from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, about cleaning apartments in New York City and about seeing "The End of the Affair" in Paris with Hugh. Then he read from his diary, which was better for me because new. He told us about finding, in Budapest, an obscene monkey masturbating with a penis as large as its banana. Because it was just as nasty as it could be, he said, he gave it to his brother, Paul, who of course loved it. A visiting sister found it so repulsive Paul hid it in her luggage, in her decaffeinated espresso. She didn't discover it the next morning, however, since she drank caffeine before traveling on to her in-laws' place. Her father-in-law has beginning Alzheimer's but still can do simple tasks, like make coffee. Also he's a retired Baptist minister. Sedaris also told us his ruminations after reading an article his sister (the same sister; I like to think that Lisa is his favorite) sent him on people who want to be amputees. He used a term for it, o-something-philiac, but that is not a Google search I want to do. [28 June 2004: I can always count on PLT to delve into something prurient: the word was "apotemnophile." Teehee, I said "prurient," for dubious humor of which see below.] Sedaris said that unlike transsexuals, who are born into the wrong body, these people are born into the right body...just too much of it.
See, I'm not David Sedaris.
Afterward, Kal helped me find books and animules. For SFR, I got A Snowy Day and When the Elephant Walks; for SLG, Pat the Bunny, Hop on Pop, and Is Your Mama a Llama? and a pink pig with enormous trotters. (SLG is Emlet's new sister, and Hop on Pop might be better for Emlet since she can speak, and so ma filleule doesn't feel left out, also A House for a Hermit Crab.) A birthday card for Intern, an arrival card for SLG, yet an anniversary card for my husband slipped my mind.
Then we were starving, but it was 9 so Denver was closed (the Market on Larimer and Max BurgerWorks on Lawrence). Before we ordered at Sam's (a faux diner), Intern and one of his brothers came in; they said hi but sat elsewhere. Kal and I decided on breakfast for dinner and I ordered pancakes and bacon. My order came with two eggs, which I hadn't noticed, rather than poison myself, I told the server to give them fried to the skinny guy in the last booth. Intern came over to chat some more and said "dope!" * when I told him eggs were on their way, but when my three fucking enormous pancakes and four slabs of bacon arrived, the cook hadn't made the eggs because the server didn't think I was serious. Maybe she thought I was just making fun of the skinny guy--Intern is really staggering nonexistent from front to back. So when Kal's toast came on a separate plate, we sent that down the end.
* "Dope," like "bomb" as a good thing, is slang that not only passed me by but also that I never heard personally in the flesh. Then Intern came along and I smile like a geriatric when he describes something as dope.
Meanwhile, I was tucking away my pancakes and Kal her huevos rancheros. She reminded me as I picked up a piece of bacon that when we arrived, I had said not to order any pork. I turned guilty to the pig, then picked it up and shoved it head first into the bag so it couldn't see. Then neither of us could remember the name of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's table manners-teaching pig, though of course I realized I had offended this pig the same way the messy eater's mother had (although I hadn't fed the pig anything). So afterward we had to stop at Barnes & Noble to look up the pig's name. I wondered if B&N might be closed (since it was after 10, ooo) and was glad that (thank you again Kymm) I had them in my house if need be.
Need wasn't--that pig's name is Lester. SLG's pig doesn't yet have a name, but he, or the Tattered Cover bag he peeked out of, attracted the notice of another couple in the diner. She asked if we had just seen David Sedaris and we chatted about him. I promise that, for once in my life, I did not drag the conversation out. It was not I who brought up politics. The man--easily in his 40s, note the lack of apostrophe since nothing is dropped, damn it--said had just registered to vote for the first time. My face did that thing that it does that I don't regret not controlling this time, and he said, observing this, that he didn't believe in it. This was clearly our exit and we scarpered.
I asked Kal what she did the day she turned 18. Register to vote, of course. Now, I didn't register the day I turned 18 because in 1986 my birthday was on a Sunday (it was the day of Hands Across America, which I still think was stupid to stop in New York City instead of continuing to Boston so I could have had a hope of participating), but it didn't take long. I also didn't give blood the day I turned 17 because Old Lyme had drives only every 56 days, but whenever I did go no one there knew me nor would take my blood because lacking a driver's license I couldn't prove my age, damn it.
So that was a fun night.
A three-legged commute from home to work to gym to home. For now I'll call it eight miles, figuring that the diagonal cuts off a lot.
At the gym I swam, or traveled, 2.05K. Fiften of my 21 laps were with a kickboard, and five of them were dolphin kicks for butterfly. I have never worked on my kicks or (strokes? is that what the arm movement is called?) much, not since college. Also, not being a technically proficient swimmer, I seldom swim anywhere near my aerobic capacity because of that breathing thing.
Two laps of dolphin kick had me gasping. I did another two of regular scissor, really concentrating on my core and trying to kick from above my hips. I would dolphin until my muscles were so exhausted I couldn't hold my legs together and got even sloppier, and then I would scissor or give up the board and crawl. It was a fine workout.
On the way home I saw something, let out a cry, jumped off Shadowfax, and hurled myself in the direction of Tia, an eight-week-old English Mastiff puppy who just came home last night. She has two older siblings, a cocker spaniel and a rat terrier (so no wonder the man wanted a real dog), and I would love to see that interaction as she burgeons to her anticipated weight of 150 pounds. Her human let me hold her, and she kissed me all over the face and put a paw against my neck with considerable force and let me feel her buttery soft paws and fondle her ears and stroke her nose and what an adorable dog. Her sire fathered the largest dog ever in North America at 295 pounds, and while such dogs of course have an abbreviated life expectancy and probably a messed up phyisology, the cute is considerable. Especially now, before the drooling. I was so in love.
Then I stopped at the newish Starbucks in my neighborhood, because last night with Kal I discovered that they just bag their grounds and set them out instead of needing to be called and asked and then reminded when I show up at the agreed-upon time, unlike the other Starbucks I've used.
It was a good bike ride.
Number nine, number nine, number nine...
We each gave the other a card with a dog on it: he a bulldog wearing a flowered bonnet and I a basset hound with its ears held up like a rabbit's. Also mine came in a silvery envelope, stainless steel to match the kitchen, I said. He gave me Eats, Shoots & Leaves and I gave him a last-minute impulse buy (because this is the first time we've done anything more than cards, I think) from when I bought the basset ears: a deck of George W. Bush cards. These will go with his Friendly Dictator Trading Cards which pack was a text in a class once.
His card read, and I quote,
Then we went to Bistro Vendrôme, whose patio even looks vaguely Parisian, since it's in a pedestrian courtyard with a garden. It's surrounded by three-story Old West buildings instead of five-story baroque ones, but that was close enough for us. I had chocolate-hazelnut crepes for dessert. Yum.
Wednesday Tex wasn't in the office for staff meeting, and I was glad because CoolBoss used my HumanDictionary function when she needed "prurience" defined. I asked for someone to pitch out the worst of the reality television shows, and then I said that these shows appealed to the public's prurient interests, and prurience was the noun for base and usually gratuitously sexual interest. The example was "Lawmakers in furor over prurient turmoil" and she rightly questioned turmoil being prurient.*
This discussion might have made squeamish Tex squirm, so I was glad he wasn't there. Except that naturally on Friday when he asked me what had happened in staff meeting, I was compelled to needle him so said, "I had to define 'prurience' and I'm really glad you weren't there." He said, "What?" and I flipped his dictionary open, pointed out the word, and left the room just as his phone rang.
* I don't know if there is a technical term for misassignment of adjectives. Recently CoolBoss asked me why a divorce couldn't be called "amiable," and I more felt than could articulate why. Because people and dogs are amiable but relationships and concepts are amicable, like divorces and treaties. You might say "an amicable gathering" but you'd say "a gathering of amiable people" or "an amiable gathering" where "gathering" was a grouping word rather than a description of the ties among the people.
Later in the day Tex asked what constituted a divine period. Was I on a crystal clear, snow-covered mountain top, communing with the sun or something? We got that cleared up by my clarifying that I had had to define 'prurience,' not that I had had a divine period, for pete's sake.
But this allowed me to tell a recent amusing story. When CLH was here, we had lunch with an Aspen friend who now lives in Denver. As the three of us chatted, I announced, "I think I'm getting my period." I left them at the table to go a-questing for supplies. We were at trendy 32nd and Lowell, which means that clothing, books, gee-gaws, and antiques were available to me, but tampons there were none. I drove to Walgreen's, picked up a box of 40, and scampered to the counter. Except that someone evidently had shop-lifted one out of the box, whose end was therefore loose, which instability I didn't notice until 39 tampons suddenly skittered underfoot--under my own feet and those of at least four people, including a man and children, around me. I debated for a tenth of a second whether to gather them, decided fuck no, returned for another box, and beat a hasty retreat with a box of 20, that having been the last 40 (or 39).
CLH and her friend were amused, of course, and CLH told us an incident from when she worked at Souper Salad, fishing in her apron pocket for a pen to take an order and poising a tampon over her order form to write with because she hadn't looked at what she'd retrieved.
Tex told me in turn about a coworker's being pulled aside by apparently a new employee of the TSA who had not been properly briefed and whose cultural background rendered him a lot less likely than, say, Tex, to know certain things. The TSAer, searching her purse, extracted a tampon and, waving it, demanded to know what this was. I can picture Coworker's efforts to restrain herself from saying, "You want me to show you how that works?" and instead calmly to inform him that it was a feminine hygiene product.
Anyway, I'm glad we got that cleared up.
In Erewhon, Samuel Butler describes a culture where illness is illegal but criminality is a sickness. Therefore to gloss over someone's slight indisposition without getting them in trouble, you'd say "he's got the socks," i.e., stolen an insignificant item. We use this for Blake when he's got the flaps.
What I mean is that I Don't Get Sick, Especially in the Summer. I know very well I did get sick over July Fourth two years ago, but I like to pretend that that didn't happen. Thursday night I thought I bit my lower lip because I am clumsy, but I am probably catching RDC's cold: when my immune system is compromised, I get cankers. A canker just inside my lower lip swells it enough that I bite the lip. Yea! So now I might be getting RDC's cold.
Which means that this is the fourth weekend in a row we're not tiling the kitchen; RDC doesn't feel steady enough to operate the saw and heaven knows what butchery I'd commit even if I were 100%.
Last Saturday, RDC slept until late after the Dead show in the rain at Red Rocks after returning from Vancouver at 2:00 a.m. Friday; the weekend before that CLH was here; the weekend before that we went to Aspen; the weekend before that it was too cold to get sprayed by the wetsaw. This is just never going to get done.
And then we're not going to paint until the tiling is done, and even after the tiling, there's moulding to be made for the floor and scrim to be removed from the cabinets before the painting can be tackled. This is, I repeat, never going to get done.
So I am just going to flobber (my favorite neologism, inspired by flobberworms in Prisoner of Azkaban) about today, headachey and muscle-weary.
I read the first part of this amused by a fellow elitist stickler. Then at lunch yesterday I talked to Überboss about it and he said that after reading the New Yorker review he only wanted to look through it. I read that review when I got home and the remainder of the book fell apart and Lynne Truss seemed unnecessarily snobbish. That's how malleable I am.
The review was good. In the first third, Louis Menand dissects Lynne Truss's grammatical mistakes in perhaps a fussily nitpicky way, but in writing a book subtitled The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, she has to have expected that. And why isn't it "zero-tolerance"? Surely it needs a hyphen? Menard uses the book('s faults) mostly as a springboard into a broader, compelling discussion of voice in writing, and that discussion, more than his nitpicking, was the brilliant bit.
Überboss's understated snark (that having acknowledgments, foreword, publisher's note, preface, and introduction is a sure sign of a new writer pulling out all the stops*) and the review made me much more critical the second part of the book, but she didn't entirely lose my respect until page 158:
* This isn't a quite fair snark. Only the American printing has Frank McCourt's foreword, and if a stop was pulled out it was the publisher soliciting McCourt for his sure-fire appeal to Usans; and the publisher's note explains how we Usans are getting the exact same book the Brits got even though the two countries punctuate differently; and what ÜberBoss mistook for an introduction is really a first chapter. But it does look like excess and perhaps could have been disguised.
Also, the panda joke is just not funny. The argument over the serial comma is a valid one--"I'd like to dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God" is an excellent, if apocryphal, argument for it--but a comma between predicate and direct object is a mistake, not a stylistic nuance. And it's a British joke: in the States you'd have a serial comma that would certainly clarify that the sentence has a three-part predicate and should be modified.
Moon Tiger appeared on my to-be-read list because it was on the Feminista century's-best list. I'm not sure when I connected the author with my childhood favorite The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, but Moon Tiger got bumped up when I cross-referenced all those lists with the Booker and Pulitzer lists.
It is again raining and I cannot convey how strange this is. The chief occupation of this flobbery day was reading Moon Tiger, and it was time well spent. I knew immediately I would like the book--Thomas Kempe's author writing about an historian--and it lived up to my expectations. I liked the protagonist initially because of Antonia Fremont, a stupid reason, since Claudia Hampton and the Margaret Atwood character have only being historians in common, and because of "Wit," a better reason, each with a woman on her deathbed contemplating her life. Also she reminded me of Penelope Keeling, and I don't care that Shell-Seekers is banal fluff because war-time love is a particularly romantic sort.
I particularly liked how she and her friend or lover would recall the exact same scene, both remembering the truth but each knowing different words and gestures and ramifications.
I think this means I have to go back to Portrait of a Lady. That I don't mind giving half an eye to, but I won't deny myself full attention for The History of the Siege of Lisbon. That looks promising for the same reason Mooon Tiger did: "Raimundo Silva...has chosent he safe occupation of proofreader at a distinguished publishing house. One day he inexplicably takes it upon himself to alter a key word in a history text. His alteration leads him into an affair of the heart that changes the course of European history....Saramago has constructed one of his most ambitious, sweeping novels to date: a broad, multifaceted tableau involving meditations on historiography, the uses and abuses of language, and life under authoritarian rule. This rollicking love story is a delight for readers of Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, and Gabriel García Márquez."
Between "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and Tobacco Road, I'm pretty sure I never want to be in the pine woods of Georgia.
"Babylon Revisited" makes me hope that Tender Is the Night was a fluke and F. Scott Fitzgerald is usually eminently readable.
I love Many Moons and James Thurber's little illustrated story called something like "The Last Flower." "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is more like O. Henry and why I can always confuse the name of Hemingway's character with the short happy life.
This is so cool.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a honeybee colony in a silver maple across the street. Silver maples grow really fast, so new neighborhoods in Denver were once planted thickly with them, but because of their growth rate they have weak wood and are prone to breakage and holes. So we have lots of natural nests for starlings and squirrels and bees. This hole is about seven feet up, and I was concerned what might happen if the city discovered it. (The property-owners probably wouldn't: they might as well live in suburbia for all they use their front yard but enter through the back near the garage instead.)
The colony explained where the scores of bees who love my front garden live. My catmint especially but everything else as well regularly hums with bees.
Just a little while ago I glanced out the screened front door and saw them swarming. The noise was terrific. First I worried for the original nest: did this swarm represent some few survivors? But the original nest seemed fine, still with traffic. Less traffic than I have observed before, but I don't pretend I had been keeping a close enough eye to gauge the difference.
I wrote to an acquaintance who has just begun to keep bees and then commenced to google. It seems likely that, with all this rain and consequent spike in nectar production, the hive is doing well enough that 40% to 60% of the bees, including the queen (who can fly?) or perhaps a virgin queen, have left to seek new quarters. For now, they are clustered high in my European ash tree, along a stretch of branch, forming a living cylinder about the size of a three-liter bottle. Over the next few days, scouts will search for a new home, and then they'll all move.
My concern is that they'll find a way into the attic. I would love for them to continue to live nearby but I do not want them in the house, in the attic, in the structure anywhere. And I am not about to become a backyard beekeeper, which seems like a full-time occupation, and which furthermore would probably lead to my divorce. RDC is not so much a fan of bees--spiders are his job and bees mine.
But honeybees are nice. They aren't mean, like yellowjackets, and they make honey, and there'd be a lot less to eat around the world without them. Plus, while they swarm, they have no brood or honey to defend and are much less likely to sting (I just read that).These are European bees, bigger than the native American ones that aren't big enough to fly far enough to pollinate fields as big as Usans plant (a factoid I think I learned from Sue Hubbell's A Country Year: Living the Questions).
Anyone want a swarm of bees? At this point all you'd have to do is somehow erect an extension ladder without disturbing them--the cluster isn't near the bole--and clip their branch into a container. Simple.
It feels like it's about to rain. What will that do to them?
I expect the sequels and prequels to Rebecca suck as much as those to Jane Austen's novels, but I am intrigued. Why did Maxim marry Rebecca to begin with? How could he have been so misled? And I just watched a cheesy Cary Grant movie, "In Name Only," similarly with an interloper; and I wonder why his character married his first wife. It's based on a book probably even more cheesy, Memory of Love by Besse Breuer, and maybe that has more background. Or not, because that title sounds like teen Harlequin shlock.
Danvers is a fright, isn't she?
6.3 miles home to work to gym plus the leg I didn't measure of my commute, from gym to home. Whatever, I'll get to it.
Then, 20' on an elliptical with handles, one I was unfamiliar with. I choose the "cardio" program and set my maximum heartrate to 160 bpm and while I could breathe easily throughout, occasionally the resistance spiked to a point I could not push or pedal.
Then I had my complimentary gym session with a trainer. I learned some new exercises to do with a ball and handweights, but my problem is not ignorance of what I ought to do but actually doing it.
Lifeguards chased me from the pool at .6K for lightning and I finished the K in the indoor pool. This is 20-meter pool instead of the outdoor 25-, and is much warmer. The outdoor water is 80 degrees, insanely warm; I didn't see a thermometer in the indoor but it felt close to blood heat, which was probably because of contrast.
As I left it was sprinkling, and as I crossed Colorado Boulevard the sprinkling because rain. I debated waiting it out in the mall or the Tattered Cover but pressed on, and as soon as I veered north toward home the skies opened.
It was a terrific ride. The rain was even warm. I paused under a maple to tuck my iPod into my shell, which I do carry but disdained to wear. Thunder sounded a lot farther away than would excite my concern--I wouldn't have chased me out of the pool--and my shoes didn't get soaked through until about three blocks from home.
Eight plus miles of city ride and 1K freestyle.
I fought with a fitball for 3x9 hamstring curls. I am not sure I'm working my hamstrings as much as my utterly nonexistent abdominal muscles. I have a serious paunch going, as if I had borne about 18 children.
Then Precor Elliptical, 30' of an alleged weightloss program and 15' manual. The machine claimed more than 600 total calories burned, and fewer strides than when 45' all manual. Also I used two 5-pound handweights, though not for the whole 45'. And my heartrate ranged around 135 bpm, which might officially be in the "fat-burning zone" but it doesn't feel like much.
I cooled down on a treadmill, a 15% incline and 3 mph, intending to walk until my heartrate was under 100 bpm, but what the hell, after 5' I threw in the towel. I finished with as many crunches on the squishy disk--there has to be a name for that--as I could manage, which wasn't many.
And then I soaked in the whirlpool with The Portrait of a Lady.