october to-do list

House:

That kitchen thing:

Remount doors

Replace scrim

Rehang windowshade

Find microwave stand

Find kitchen rugs

Empty, clean, and refill cupboards and closets

Empty, dust, and refill bookcases

Fall cleaning generally

Swap screens for storms, 30th.

Garden

Get lots of vegetable pulp and coffee grounds (ongoing)

That fence thing

Pluck bindweed (ongoing)

Eat somewhat fewer tomatoes

Admire the pumpkins, if they ripen in a month

Weedwhack

Take pots off porch columns

Stuff to look for

I bought a kitchen. I can't have anything else.

Except kitchen rugs and microwave stand.

Errands

Cobbler to reheel shoes (17th & Marion)

Burn and mail photo CDs

Kinwork and Lisaism

Lucy and Trish, 9th noon

Corn maze with KDF, 18th

Margaret Drabble, TCCC, 25th 7:30

Hallowe'en party, 30th 3:00

Reading:

Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten

Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

Virginia Hamilton, M. C. Higgins, the Great

Charles Hawes, The Dark Frigate

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little

E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

Mary Renault, The King Must Die

Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto

John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius

Eudora Welty, Stories

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Exercise

Bike 8 miles nearly every weekday

Gym

06:06

now that is just weird

I don't want to make a gaffe in Gstaad where the merest gaffe might trigger an avalanche but what will they pinch on me...I hope?

I sleep raw and have done since high school at least. I was nervous, living with a roommate for the first time, that I would be compelled to wear the nightshirt I had brought along as camouflage. Occasionally I'll wear a nightgown, when we have guests or I am one. A nightgown, and not pajamas, because anything that interferes with the thrashing of my legs is evil and wrong.

Last night I shucked my pyjamas to the floor and climbed into bed. Rarely I have to get up to pee, not often; to my knowledge I have never sleepwalked.

This morning I woke up from a series of uncomfortable dreams (wanting to take a nap instead of vote, Cordelia from "Buffy" trying to steal my boyfriend, the Cowboy Junkies saying "no comment" when asked whom they would vote for in the U.S. election [they're Canadian]) that, happily for my overall impression of them, was interrupted by the alarm clock when everyone was laughing (I think in an end-of-the-Bradys or of-Scooby-Doo "you crazy kids" kind of way) and staggered out to turn off the shrieking thing. Midway across the floor I noticed...I was wearing underwear.

A while ago, out of desperation brought on by shredding elastic, I bought a pack of underwear from CostCo. These are terrible garments, supposedly bikini but really fitting near the hip such that at every move I am reminded of too much fabric or elastic over my hip bone. Which is wrong. I assigned them for use only under bike shorts. This is what I was wearing this morning.

Part of the nap-instead-of-vote thing was that I had a hotel room facing a sidewalk and kept lowering the shade but someone not in the room nor on the sidewalk but existing only as a reflection in the window kept raising the shades or opened the louvres on the blinds, so I couldn't lie down and sleep except with an audience (both the passersby and the haint, a priest), and I couldn't get to my polling precinct without some rest. I wonder if it was because of that dream that I got up, opened a drawer, removed a pair of underdrawers, didn't notice or care that this was the most uncomfortable style I own, donned them, and went back to bed and to sleep.

the grim grotto

It wasn't Slippery Slope, but it was fine. I do hope the twelfth, which might be Lousy Lane, starts wrapping up threads so the thirteenth isn't overwhelming with raveling and knotted care. Grotto does end with a chance in that direction. Sunny didn't bust out with anything as priceless as "Buscheney!" but she did use a few words I want to look up.