Selectively transcribed from paper journal:
We set up the tent without snapping. Mostly. So it's a good tent. We spent fifty bucks on a screen house and now can cook and eat and maybe read without rain or insects. The screenhouse feels so luxurious, it's almost shocking. It's like the Weasleys' tent at the World Quidditch Cup. There are horses right behind us, a gorgeous walnut mare with a foal, a brown and white pinto with a black and white foal, two horses so large I am surprised their lower legs aren't hairy, and a black and white paint.
We downloaded Pat Barker's Another World. It is very different from the WWI trilogy, a contemporary family story with disagreeable relations, but both the grandfather and the house the grandson and his family live in date from WWI.
We have camp chairs with footrests, so we can sit elsewhere and more comfortably than at the picnic table. The campground has, lo, hot running water in its washrooms and toilets that don't feel like they haven't been cleaned all season. And showers.
I have a pile of books (Confessions of Nat Turner, Left Hand of Darkness, Unlocking the Air, History of the Siege of Lisbon, House of Splendid Isolation, Straight Man, The Brothers K., and Absalom, Absalom! Also From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler for RDC. Plus nearly half of The Odyssey to listen to.
I do not know if these are lodgepole or Ponderosa pine. Probably lodgepole, because they don't smell strongly of vanilla. But they smell pretty good.
Yesterday as we drove to CostCo for a supply run (including the screenhouse), I discovered that the pen in the car had exploded. So I had to remember "hotdogs" and "windshield wiper fluid" without adding them to the paper list. Then as we walked through the Target parking lot for yet more supplies (groceries), I heard a parrot shriek. It was about 80 and someone had left a conure, perched on the steering wheel so it could see out, in her car, with the windows cracked. My hackles flared. I strode straight to customer service (CLH would do a great impression of the walk) and had someone announce that the driver of a white Jeep of this plate number should return to her car to attend to her pet. Another customer asked, "Someone left a dog out there?" "Conure," I replied, then expanded at the blank look, "parrot." RDC meanwhile was in the grocery area with our list, and he said he saw someone run out at the announcement. Good, we thought. Ten minutes later we left and saw that the Jeep was still there. I shaded the window with my hand and looked in. The conure now was in its travel cage on the backseat so it could not see out and therefore, yelling to greet passersby, attract attention. Since we didn't have a pen in the car we couldn't leave a note on the windshield: "You suck."
We had to scurry to REI for a valve for the stove. While we looked at bits, I spotted one box that claimed its stove was "Duel Fuel." I cracked up and cried "En garde!" at RDC, lunging at him with a pound container of propane.
On my way back from doing dishes, I stopped to pet some heads. Are there different words for mares and stallions in ponyspeak versus horsespeak? I'm not sure if the piebald is a pony. Her withers reach my breast and the palomino's my shoulder. They needed their jaws rubbed (because all pets secretly like to be pet in a cockatielian manner) and their necks and sides rubbed and--well, I thought they needed this last though they might have disagreed--their snouts gently berubbed.
They are so friendly, even the dams with foals, despite having other horses to assuage their loneliness and despite probably being mauled by anyone who's ever read Misty of Chincoteague as well as lots who haven't.
Why isn't there a collective word for magpies as for crows and ravens? Murders of crows, councils of ravens. Oh, there is! A tiding of magpies! What a great word.