House:
Garden
Stuff to look for
Errands
Kinwork and Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
Bike 8.3 miles. Swim 1K.
This marks possibly only the second and certainly no more than the third week in the nearly two years at this building in which I have biked to work all five days.
Because I am that compulsive, I did check. Four such weeks in 2003 (and several four-day weks); five so far in 2004.
I last drove to work on 27 August, when it was raining. (I understand that this is not a good excuse.) It was reason enough for RDC to bring up again the possibility of a second car. Driving to work in order that afterward I can drive to the gym where I have to go because I'm not biking to work. It's going to be an issue when darkness falls before I've got out of the gym, which will coincide with the pool (with easily portable gear: suit and goggles) closing for the year. But one of the reasons to belong to Gym Foofy is that it has enough equipment that we can go together after work, with me walking and taking the bus and RDC picking me up at work to go to the gym or my biking to the gym to meet him there and shove the bike in the car afterward.
Somewhere along here I finished listening to The Odyssey. It was a lot less exciting this time than it was 22 years ago. I look forward to The Iliad, though.
We began work on the kitchen again. Washing the previous kitchen rugs, which we weren't overly fond of but which would protect the newly finished floors, wasn't such a hot idea. They disintegrated, leaving behind quite a tide of filth in the washer. We acquired more drawer organizers and other even less exciting things and brought two boxes of stuff to Goodwill. We removed cabinet doors and scrim so we could paint walls, caulked around this and that, regrouted here and there, planned how to build a switchplate that would fit around the misplaced electric boxes by the sink, and refitted the soap dispenser. I--note the more accurate pronoun--put another coat on the pantry doors.
Blake is moulting so severely that in 10 minutes, the area surrounding his eight toes looks like Alison Reynholds made a snowfall and then cut her fingernails and emptied a down pillow in place. He's desperate to have his head pet but snappy because I inevitably hurt his blood feathers.
Walked 2.5 miles, then around and around and around with Trish and Jared at the Taste of Colorado.
The narrative is hard to follow because of jumps in time and perspective and the necessity of not knowing more names than is good for the struggle. The prose was beautiful, and I appreciated getting more inside the heads of those involved in the Troubles than newspapers and history books had yet put me.
Bike 8.3 miles and swim 2K.
Breathing every other stroke is almost natural now. I am sure I breathed too shallowly at every stroke. I did a few lengths at every third stroke, which is fine when I don't mind resting every lap.
My library turns up books I had forgotten or never knew we owned. We own Les Liaisons Dangereuses, French title, English text, Penguin volume. I haven't read it and it doesn't strike me as RDC's usual. But there it is. I have combed the shelves a few times for titles for the upstairs stretch of unread fiction, and one of those books was Mary Gordon's The Rest of Life, which is on the Feminista list, though whether the title novella or three-novella volume as a whole I don't know. Last night I opened it for the first time.
The title page is inscribed: "For Lisa. Mary Gordon."
I have no memory whatsoever of attending a booksigning for Mary Gordon. Her face on the back cover doesn't look familiar (which means nothing). I always peel off the bar codes, so whether I bought this book, published in 1993, from the UConn Co-op or the Tattered Cover I couldn't say. But probably the UConn Co-op. At the Co-op I remember Gretel Ehrlich, Ken Kesey, Louis de Brunhoff's son, Bobbie Ann Mason, Douglas Adams, Anne Lauterbach, and Allen Ginsberg. Mary Gordon I do not remember.
I try to tell myself that remembering every event ever isn't necessary. My father just visited Connecticut and one of my sister's plans with him was to go to Block Island, just as he and I did in 1987. He had no memory of that visit. That's another story, but that's the kind of thing I remember. That I want to remember. That I ought to remember. Booksignings, I don't require. But still.
Throughout college my journal was a series of 120-page Joredco notebooks that eventually they stopped making, driving me to merely serviceable or occasional really cool spiralbound books. The last sheet or two of more than one notebook listed Reasons I'm Glad I'm Alive, events that I maybe didn't have time to chart in detail but didn't want to forget, or the date and the event so I could find its detail easily rather than pore through pages of not-as-happy-making filler. It's occurred to me recently that those pages could stand review (recently because I am almost finished with my current paper volume and it'll be time to dig the box out and either quickly cram it in or torment myself by skimming previous volumes). I wonder how many of those events I would remember.
A struggle for me has been how much to cling to my previous tastes and preferences out of loyalty to my former selves or devotion to the idea that I don't have former selves but am an integrated being. If I have forgotten a gathering in SEM's room sophomore year, does that mean it didn't mean anything? It's another thing for me to feel guilty about, that I am trying to learn not to feel guilty about.
Just in case I haven't said it enough yet, Blake is moulting. He leaves little bits of nail clippings and shoelace aglets and plumage in his wake. My navy blue-clad sternum looks like the shoulder of my sixth-grade teacher whose dandruff was legendary. Right now he is chewing on a blowcard when he can't reach around it to my keyboard, but last night he snacked on my Norton Anthology of English Literature, which I had out for John Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel," which has fuck-all to do with Absalom, Absalom!
About a month ago I began starving the birds in an attempt to be rid of the squirrels and pigeons (which do not count as birds). This was successful. I had to deal with grumpy sparrows for only a couple of days before they gave up in disgust, and I live with a louder and more persistent bird in my very house so their complaints were easy to ignore. I wonder if I taper off feeding in the spring (breeding time, but that's their look-out) and make them eat on their own throughout summer whether the squirrels would also vamoose and leave me some fruit. I doubt it: though the squirrels can find enough dropped seeds to make the birdfeeder a draw (they really cannot get into the feeder itself after a year's worth of attempts, hurrah!), fetal nectarines and pears might be even more appealing to them without those seeds. I think keeping the litter raked up might reduce the pigeon infestation. My one regret about killing the piñon is that it deprived chickadees of their shelter and therefore me of my chickadees. And I wonder if pigeons (or squirrels, ick) will be able to eat from the suet feeder my mother gave me for Christmas last year that I never bought suet for. That will attract starlings, which I don't care for, but also flickers and woodpeckers and maybe Denver's new bluejays.
The plan for today was to take the kayaks to Chatfield. We did that, detouring to the Apple store in the mall on the way because neither of us remembered the one directly on the way and remembering only when we arrived that someone who packed the car had forgotten our PFDs. (For once, the responsible someone wasn't me.) Violating state law there would have lasted about two seconds and, I'll have to check, cost us our kayaks. The boat rental area, which must offer them along with canoes and foul jetskis, was closed.
So we retreated, walked through the (our) park and up 17th Street to À La Tomate (which has been open more than eight months though not that we noticed until today) and had yummy sandwiches over newspapers, and came home.
Then I did tidying up stuff. The kitchen is winding down--we have only to paint the window sash, touch up the east wall/ceilng crease, rehang the blind, remount cabinet and pantry doors, replace scrim, and invent thresholds to cover border between newly finished floor and not--and I am so delighted that I accidentally on purpose prematurely put away supplies, which led to a larger project. I disposed of--in or near the dumpsters for the opportunistic or determined--crap that we'll never use, that was in the coal cellar or garage from before we owned the house and that we should have got rid of ages ago, and things that I wish could be recycled but which I haven't found a taker for. From the garage, four bags of Scott's lawn repair, scraps of real wood and lengths of particle board, many little seedling pots, odds and ends of kitchen tile. I stacked empty paint cans in the far corner for hazardous pick-up, sorted through odds and ends in the cabinet, stacked this and that better, used space more efficiently, and swept the floor. That leaves, after I bring the cardboard to recycling this week, only one thing in the car-space in the middle of the garage--one unstackable thing. But one thing is easier (for two people) and tidier to move in case of hail or blizzard. There.
Then I tackled the coal cellar. Useable segments are now not in the garage but the coal cellar with the remaining whole tiles; all the particle board and ugly shelving strips are gone; the painting supplies are in a box big enough for them so they don't spill out; gloves are clipped into pairs; brewing stuff is contained and off the floor; all the sanding stuff is together and all the plumbing; and sometime I am going to get RDC down there to tell me exactly which component boxes we still need to keep.
This winter, or Before My Mother Visits, I mean to refinish the much missed gateleg table. I would prefer to horrify her with a new cherry finish than with scars in the current mahogany (? so dark as to be nearly black) one. That needs to happen in the furnace room, which means that several of its denizens need to reside in the coal cellar for the duration, like the standing fans and the wet/dry vac and the coolers. And now there is room for them.
No kayaking. But I got to nest, or to clean my nest, and that's fun too.
On the strength of a luxurious visit to the Park Hill branch (which shouldn't feel so luxurious, since it's the one closest to my house) instead of the overcrowded with people and non-book media one near work) and her Peaceable Stories, I borrowed Francine Prose's After yesterday. She uses a high school shooting as the catalyst for post-September 11th invasions of civil liberties. Kind of like The Wave. And not without some "Red Dawn." It was mediocre, and not just because lately my diet has been of High Literature.
I confess that after the Barnes & Noble opened on the Sixteenth Street Mall, I browsed there as in a library. It was closer than the library or the Tattered Cover. I didn't buy from there (much). But it facilitated cheesy browsing. I read Life in the Fat Lane there. And The Face on the Milk Carton and Whatever Happened to Janie?. So yesterday when I spotted another Caroline B. Cooney Jane book, I bought it.
It was a Twinkie, a soap opera. I read it after After last night and in the jacuzzi this afternoon. Woe is me.
I swam 500 meters. It was windy as hell and stormed later and I wasn't the only one who wimped out of my full swim.
...not water but hair. Yesterday afternoon at work when I began to notice my hair--shoulder length and not thick--I knew I was in for a bad spell. When I got home I made myself tea and prepared to nap over Inkheart until JJM picked me up. I didn't sleep but did feel more rested, and was able to break Blake's heart by getting dressed again in street clothes (he whined when I shucked my robe, and the hours I spent last night inhaling him counted for nothing, I guess.
I am better. If I had gone to DU, particularly lovely old Mary Reed building, and to a short story reading, in one of my pits of despair, I would have waxed all self-flagellatory about Wasting My Life. Being properly drugged means that I just don't mind wasting my life! Or something. The stories were good, or serviceable, but I was glad to get home. Despite the late hour, Blake needed some snuggling before he would go to bed, so it's a good thing I prefer Inkheart to Thief Lord.
This morning my hair weighs several tons. Let us not consider that my crippled head is probably due to this week's inactivity. I almost always take advantage of RDC's absence to drive to work and this week has been no exception. I excuse it with errands, like looking for kitchen rugs during Monday lunch and acquiring pounds of buddy seed during Tuesday lunch (at the African Grey I met a pied cockatiel who sounded more like Percy than any other bird I can remember, right down to the tone of his wolf whistle) and Wednesday, well, just going to the dry-cleaner after work.
However much exercise might have staved it off if I had exercised, I am somewhat sick: I have a canker sore inside my lower lip, and those never flare up except when I am sick or stressed. So I am hanging out at home, writing letters and ruining Blake's pleasure in my company by cleaning his jowls--I just removed desiccated corn molded exactly into the shape of his lower mandible.
I wrote a note to Haitch's in-laws, thanking them for wedding photographs they sent. This reminded me to write to the person who hosts the B&B in Old Lyme the in-laws enjoy, and also to her daughter; also to KREL, whom I dreamed of last night; and also to a friend whose pregnancy has turned tragic.
I think I need more tea.
Last night's reading was four stories read by four actors not their authors, which worked well. The authors were local, though I don't know how well known the three who aren't Connie Willis are supposed to be. Connie Willis lives in Colorado? JJM and I mostly enjoyed them but also were waiting for each to be over.
Margaret Coel's "Lizzie Come Home" had such the tropes of, as a DU colleague said looking at earnest cheese in Santa Fe, "Honest Injun crap" that it was difficult to discern any merits of story within the Women Who Run with the Wolves names and the descriptions of hair and skirt and particular beauty. Still, its theme was compelling and I liked it fine even with its plot hole and unlikeliness. How does the sister justify spending however much time with Lizzie if she's not the woman she seeks? How could a woman orphaned at the age of 10 make a good enough marriage that now as a widow she had no financial worries ["You can have whatever you want"]. Also, the Sand Creek massacre happened after Gettysburg, which is too easy, if not too significant to the plot, an error to mess up. (Yes, I had to confirm it, but my hunch was right!)
James Van Pelt's "Home" was funny and funnily read. Then after the second occurrence of the phrase "Pack your things," his use of elements of "Solsbury Hill" gelled for me and at least the author admitted his debt to "a Peter Gabriel song." So I knew approximately what would happen in the last third of the story and its last line.
Connie Willis's "A Letter from the Clearys" typifies what I dislike not necessarily in science fiction but in clumsy fiction. There are clues to The Big Mystery all along, and then you figure it out long before the author is done with her smokescreens--which makes the remaining smokescreens before the Unveiling more annoying--and then has to hammer home the Message of the Mystery. This happened in The Da Vinci Code and, Climbing Tree help me, I noticed it in Absalom, Absalom! too: Quentin's pacing of his storytelling to Shreve suits Faulkner's purpose more than Quentin's character. But her name did remind me to find The Domesday Book, which is the most recommended of her titles besides To Say Nothing of the Dog, which I think was fine Twinkie-ish writing that Jasper Fforde has obviously overread.
The writing in the first three was fine, as much as I can harsh on their other elements. The last, Chris Ransick's "When the River Runs Red," went on far too fucking long. And what was the deal with the wasps beyond the beginning short-story writer's technique of Honoring the Catalyst? Bah. The narrator's rich voice nearly but not quite made up for it.
Except for the one weeny little instance where I thought one weeny little bit of story-unfolding suited Faulkner's narrative goal rather than Quentin's character and got some water in my lungs, this entire novel swept me away. The story, the characters, the history, the themes. I will need nine rereadings, but I loved it.
We got new, 9 oz. glasses that are taller than the previous and therefore entailed cabinet reorganization. In each of two cabinets I had two very high shelves and therefore two very low ones. Today because of the new glasses I realized it makes sense to put all the tall stuff--wine carafe, coffee thermos, champagne glasses, red wine glasses--together in one high shelf and let the other cabinet have better spacing.
"The tall stuff" reminds me of when we moved and RDC was looking for a fishing rod and I told him to look in the box with the tall stuff--an umbrella or two, wrapping paper, fishing rods. They went together.
Don't you wish you were me?
Bike 3.6 miles and 30' elliptical.
RDC brought up the possibility of a second car, which would be a terrific convenience but a blow to my self-righteousness and conscience. Having said no, I had to walk the talk, or bike the talk. Forty-eight degrees is not cold, even when there's rain.
After work he picked me up and we went to the gym, leaving my bike at work. Kal's proximity means not only tomato-watering and kitty-feeding but carpooling. This, if it works (considering it would be unbalanced but for tanks of gas), would be just tremendous all winter long. It is awfully easy for me not to bike even when it's sunny and 25. Snow and ice on the ground is flat-out dangerous.
I trekked to my favorite non-Denver non-PGN library with a list of children's books. Indiscriminately--totally being one of those parents at whom, as a page, I rolled my eyes, because they selected books for their children based on exactly the same list--I plucked Newbery books into a stack in my left hand.
And then I went off and read them. I don't know what I thought I wanted to find at Nordstrom, but I read Everything on a Waffle over a sandwich from Paradise Bakery. That was charming and fun and safe, like Because of Winn-Dixie.
(What did I miss about Desperaux? It was okay, but it fit into a pattern, in which the work that follows the best work is rewarded, out of guilt for previously neglecting the best, that I had previously noticed more with Oscars. And, as regards Philip Roth and Richard Russo, the Pulitzer.)
Home again I read On My Honor, which was A Taste of Wild Blackberries Meets the ABC After School Special; yesterday I read The Wish Giver--I'd say Stephen King lifted Needful Things straight from it if it weren't such an old premise--and The Matchlock Gun, which had a strong anti-Indian slant (even for 1942? when Laura Ingalls Wilder was publishing Newbery Honor Indian-hating books?) and brought up interesting bits of history only to let them fall scattered and neglected.
Today I'm reading One-Eyed Cat, and I'm surprised it took four books to prove that all books are one book. In Everything on a Waffle is a recipe for perfectly boiled potatoes. In One-Eyed Cat, someone describes the succulence of the perfectly boiled potato.
I also borrowed one of the three Medalists I feel guilty about, Up a Road Slowly--about which I feel the guiltiest since it was mentioned in Look Out My Window and I even read a book about a doll (Impunity Jane*) for its sake and and painted my teenaged bedroom yellow with white trim. The others are M.C. Higgins the Great and A Gathering of Days. Those are the only three since 1959--unless it be about a dog (Sounder and Shiloh**)--that I have missed, and 1959 to 1986, Witch of Blackbird Pond to Sarah, Plain and Tall, is the Golden Age of U.S. children's books.
* Impunity Jane was fine. So was Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. I am not impugning (disappointingly, those words' sources are dissimilar) dolls.
** I did survive Ginger Pye and King of the Wind and Julie of the Wolves. I could try Sounder and Shiloh. And maybe Rascal. I am not going to read Where the Red Fern Grows, though. That I refuse.
It occurred to me to take before and after pictures of the house today. This is just to remind that I intended to do that. A before picture of the microwave would be too gross, and an after picture would tragically fail to include the microwave cart currently out of stock at the closest Target unless I did something insane like go to the two other nearby Targets.* A before picture of the dining table as an example of the mess would probably suffice, but an after picture would similarly fail to include new white tapers for the candelabra and therefore be inadequate.
Also, do you see what I am doing? I am not cleaning. I am typing.
I have houseguests on Monday, one Ukrainian whom I've never met and the other whom I've seen once at a wedding in the past nine years and who is more RDC's friend than mine and also someone else's ex-husband. I don't know anything about the Ukraine. At least previously if not currently extremely fertile soil. Kiev. Chernobyl. Odessa. The Endless Steppe. The Dnieper and the Dniester, because of Russian History to 1905. The Crimean War, because of a biography (for children) of Florence Nightingale. I'm not sure if it's Little or White Russia, though I know Belarus, which I cannot spell off the top of my head--no, I can, but not so confidently as not to check--is the other. Everything Is Illuminated.
I'm still typing. Meanwhile, Blake has been preening on my lap. He has finished dropping feathers and is now growing them in. I'm wearing RDC's navy terrycloth robe instead of my periwinkle fleece one, and I don't know how I can still be surprised at what he can produce, but there are strips of feather casings as long as my little fingernail. He's only little.
Oo, a list. Then I'll stop typing and do the list.
What I did instead of clean:
* 30 September 2004: Most of the cleaning strike-outs date from last night; since the potential houseguests got stuck in Flagstaff I stayed slothful for longer. I did attempt the other two Targets but one was illusory and the other was also out of stock.
My history is off, or Laura Adams Armer whitewashed--pun deliberate--it in Waterless Mountain. I didn't know Big Man was white, since he was given a Navajo name, until he drove a car. And I'm not sure when it was set: there are cars and planes, but no missionaries and no reservations.It was a lovely story about a boy growing up and becoming a medicine man, but "medicine man," even in a 1932 book for children, rankles my 21st-century sensibilities. Big Man took the Younger Brother and his family by train to the California coast, where Mother wove at a museum without quite becoming Ishi, and legends were related hinting that the Navajo are descendants of Karana's people. Or not, since they all died as soon as they were brought to shore, but from a Channel Island people.
Up a Road Slowly is my favorite Irene Hunt. I read and reread No Promises in the Wind possibly for years without associating it with the two books Kate's parents give her when they won't let her have Inky, and I liked Across Five Aprils just fine, but Up a Road Slowly is by far the best. Yet I'm glad I didn't read it until now. It's so solemn and detached that I think I would not have liked it as a teenager; now I can recognize its voice as just right.
Did I not read this as a child because it was about a boy? I wish I had: lots of Boston, lots of Revolutionary War build-up, and a fine bildungsroman embedded in that backdrop (instead of nonsensically marionetted before it).
Is this too hard for fifth grade? I still remember the illustrations in the history book showing the steps and time necessary to fire one musket shot. Johnny is 15, but is that too old a protagonist for a 10-year-old?
Esther Forbes doesn't omit that the Sons of Liberty owned slaves, and while a man is orating about freedom from tyranny, from the Spanish and French slavery to the south and north, an enslaved woman is serving punch.
I don't know what I expected this to be about. Two Years Before the Mast mixed with All Quiet on the Western Front, maybe. Instead it was a short happy version of Island of the Blue Dolphins with the added benefit of no canine mortality. A fine adventure story in paradise.
Except that somehow I doubt cannibalistic tribes were darker of skin than any other: should Armstrong Sperry in 1941 be allowed that aspersion or should I consider that "those dark people" was a metaphor?
An idyllic story about 1890s New York. The girl reminded me of Phoebe Caulfield because of her class and not being a snob (but not because of roller skates, because the rollerskating girl in Catcher is anonymous). An idyllic story, that is, for someone of that class: it would be decades before there were books about the Italian immigrant boy who tends a fruit stand, instead of just about the wealthy little girl who befriends the boy.
Why haven't I known about E.L. Doctorow before, besides Ragtime? I really enjoyed this story, in spite of the narrator, whose manner I hated. There is some line I feel like I want to draw between this and American Pastoral and Underworld, but I think it's not there to be drawn. I guess I thought, because of his best-known title, that Doctorow was from much earlier in the century than he is.