House:
Garden
Errands
Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
I liked Howards End and A Room with a View but I wonder if that was out of loyalty to the movies. I am hopeful that I liked them because E.M. Forster was much more comfortable and natural in his native environment than in India. The book was okay for a while, merely adequate, but entirely fell apart in the last quarter.
It reminded me too much of Kim for me to be fair to it, and Dr. Godpole very much reminded me of the lama. Mostly, it was just tedious.
Two disappointing books in a row.
Three days sunning (shading), swimming, and sexing on Florida Bay, where the water means that the Crayola seagreen crayon isn't a lie. Long Island Sound just isn't that color. Stiff northeasterly winds clouded the water, so no snorkeling, and clouded the sky, but not much, and brought up the surf, just slightly. I sat, more or less bundled, under palm and hammock trees, and read, and listened to the waves and the wind in the leaves, and gazed at the water, and swam, and watched manatees, and went parasailing, and had a lovely time.
The place was teeming with French. One family was French Canadian and spoke English but one couple would have been entirely lost if much of the staff hadn't been Haitian. RDC came back from a stroll on the dock and said something that made me jump up and run to the dock. Only on my return did I think to ask the couple, "Excusez-moi, parlez-vous l'anglais? Il y a [should have been "ont"] les vaches de la mer, là. Quatre ou cinq." They thanked me, "Vous êtes trés gentile."
I don't know how to say "manatee" in French [le lamantin], and I don't know how "cows of the sea" translated since the fauna is only American. Whether the Frenchies thought manatee or dolphin or seal, they knew I meant something worth looking at, and went to look. The four or five seacows were feeding on the various seaweed, breathing, bobbing up to look at us, blowing out through their whiskers. They are peculiar creatures.
We saw ospreys and pelicans and herons and egrets and terns and gulls and a bald eagle. Another thing I liked about being on the bay side is the very low, uninhabited, rocky but treed, bits of land across the bay. I am not used to ocean to the horizon but to seeing the tailings of Long Island across the beach from me, and though I like limitless ocean just fine on Cape Cod or San Francisco or Ft. Lauderdale, having a bounded horizon makes me feel safer.
RDC was disappointed that, from parasailing's vantage point, we didn't see anything big in the bay like dolphins or turtles, and I would have liked to see either of them but of sharks I am happier ignorant.
RDC2 was reading this. He asked me if I would join him for his daily half hour of reading, and he read this and I read Wuthering Heights. (I don't know why that occurred to me as a suitable beach reread.) After his 25 minutes had slowly ticked away, I picked up the book and read it that evening. It was your usual Spinelli: someone against society, someone against himself. (I do not expect RDC2, not quite 11, to read Dicey's Song or contribute another form of conflict to her eighth grade teacher's list.)
I asked RDC2 about Zinkoff and his comprehension seemed fine, which was reassuring. But if you asked the author to differentiate between Zinkoff and the kid in Crash, I don't think Jerry Spinelli could.
We left Wednesday and spent the evening with RDC's family, and then I caught an early morning flight home. It was possibly not relaxing to get up at 5:15, but I managed. Up, pee, brush teeth, dress, kiss kiss, leave. Drive. Drive more. The rental car place was easy to find and the return painless. The painful bit was waiting at the gate without falling asleep, but I paid $34 for an upgrade to Economy Plus, which got me a golden ticket for early boarding, a seat in the second row for early deplaning, and leg room. A blanket, Wuthering Heights, eyemask, earplugs, water bottle. That and a few rollings of eyes with my one, only one, hooray! seatmate about the two unruly children and their nearly equally immature adults in the row ahead of me got me to Denver.
In Denver, I had my house and my bird. No sea. I like RDC's family, but, other than my mother-in-law, in small doses. DMB gathered family and friends and I was glad to see almost everyone, but one's own family inanities, however vexing, are at least familiar. I don't need to be a psychic to surmise that a man is likelier to name a son after his dead brother than after himself; and it's best that I don't spend more time around, than I have patience for, mindless prattle; and I cannot imagine what lightning bolt would be necessary for me to tolerate, let alone enjoy, one particular person's company. But I always like talking with Roz, and admiring Kay's rigott' cake and her knitting and gifts for a cousin's new granddaughter; and I'm glad I kept my piehole shut about the psychic because I like that person and spouse just fine, and hearing how much another cousin is enjoying her single freedom, and learning what this one and that are doing in school and his steamrollered sculptures and her history of propaganda class.
RDC2 and I might have had a pillow fight with a bear (him) and a dinosaur (me). The bear's head might have become a quarter detached from its body. I fetched RDC's travel sewing kit from his suitcase and stitched it securely, thinking of Stuart's bear Wolf and Anne's nameless? occasionally headless bear (The Cat Ate My Gymsuit and Look Through My Window) and keeping to myself, again, how even if our thwackers were inappropriate, it was for RDC2 to decide how much unhappiness the reparable injury to the bear deserved. RDC2, upset not by the bear but by drama, held the bear's paw during its operation, and I showed-and-told about how to thread a needle, that you call the hole in a needle the eye, how to knot a double thread by wrapping it around a finger and rolling it off, why to place the knot internally, how to space stitches, and how to make a lock-knot, and also I omitted to show-and-tell about what I think of drama.
I said that this bear could be pope, since it had had a tracheotomy. RDC's Catholic grandmother, who as a former seamstress was watching my surgery closely and possibly pleased that I can do a basic sewing task even though I can't cook, laughed, thank goodness. When I asked if I could help cook or whether instead the Irish should stay out of the kitchen, RDC's aunt told about my garlic bread. So I got to tell Kay about my absence of portion perspective, about how the aunt had given me a loaf of bread, butter, and some garlic, and set me to make garlic bread. I know how much butter goes on a piece of bread, but how much garlic I do not. I used it all, however much it was. A lot. Everybody ate it, and I believe genuinely liked it, but that was some excessively garlicky garlic bread.
Later I was sent to fetch RDC2's early birthday present, and I did, but I did not carry it in my hand. I had it tucked into my waistband and lurched across the porch, not sure if I was a robot or George Bush with a lump in his back at a presidential debate (or both). Tactless again for a Republican aunt and uncle, but everyone else thought it was funny. Basically, anything that prolongs an expectant nearly-birthday boy's anticipation is comedy gold in my book.
My mother-in-law and I plotted our trouble-making swath when she visits me during one of RDC's trips. Massages definitely, and I will let her talk me into spa treatments during which we will gossip girlishly, and lots of window-shopping and frustrating sales clerks by the clothes we try on without intention to purchase. The trick will be finding overlapping indulgence foods. We will persevere.
If there is any beauty in an 8 a.m. flight, it is that it arrives in Denver at 10:30.
When I got to the vet to pick up Blake from camp, I met a dog that might be cuter than my friend's basset/dalmatian cross. I thought it was a puppy because of the texture of his fur, but, his humans say, they crop his fur--sensibly, in Denver's heat--and everyone thinks at first glance that this 13-year-old dog is a puppy partly because of the soft undercoat and partly because of his build. Closer up, his incipient cataracts also gave him away. He was a basset/newfie cross--I hope fathered by an overambitious hound--and the cuteness could not be measured on an ordinary scale. Howie, my friend's dog, has the long basset ears, which might trump the downy fur, but I would have to have both dogs for prolonged and careful scientific comparison in order to decide.
I love basset crosses. Basset plus Rottweiler, or blue heeler, or labrador, or dalmatian. Is it the clodhopper paws in clumsy but constant first position? The ridiculous build alone is enough to trigger my cooing adoration; the hoofs make it inevitable.
Wednesday night I spent petting my dog-in-law, a sweet-tempered if untrained boxer. A boxer's coat is soft, but never fluffy, all over, instead of just the top-of-the-labrador-snout. Kissing her wrinkled face and caressing her ears was, additionally, excellent camouflage when I was cornered by my least favorite in-law. Petting a dog lowers your blood pressure when you're cornered and gives you something else to think about other than flight or tart retorts and almost excuses your refusal to make eye contact.
Anyway, petting Rollie the basset/newf occupied me until I heard Blake shriek as he left camp. I thanked the human for his time and scurried to the desk: I love dogs but I need my buddy, and my buddy was shrieking fit to split your eardrums and heart. Had he bonded to other birds again? Did he fear having another pedicure? But as soon as he saw me he stopped shrieking and started chucking and chattering, and he talked to me all the way home. My puppy-bird.
Did Audible omit final chapters that would have, say, finalized the book? It was good until then, although Felicity should have had a larger role.
One thing I remember from reading The Maltese Falcon sophomore year is that it has only two scenes that aren't in the present or that aren't from Sam Spade's point of view. Or something. Those scenes don't exist in the film. And it's a good one.
Something about The Outsiders occurred to me last week and I reread most of it before we left. I saw the movie only once (before today), with Haitch, and, seeing it for the first time as an adult instead of at 13 when it came out, I thought it sucked. Like "Maltese Falcon," it is nearly faithful to its book; unlike that cinematization, it doesn't work. Pointless scenes like trying to trap the rabbit are added, and pointful bits about the characters that aren't in the linear time period, like Sodapop's love for Sandy or even that Two-Bit is a junior at 18.5, are missing.
You learn a lot about Sodapop and Ponyboy through the latter's telling Cherry about the quarterhorse. In the movie, that's completely absent, but Two-Bit wears a Mickey Mouse shirt, and they watch a bit of Disney cartoon on television. That's just not enough.
Ratty won't mind if I muck about with dirt instead of with boats, I am sure.
The next step, emptying the vegetable frames and mixing in the virgin loam and refilling the frames, won't be as satisfying ("I have made fire!") as scavenging a few cubic feet of rich black compost from my bins, but I figure I'll enjoy it.
I forgot to look for an electric leaf blower at Home Depot. Do such things exist? I refuse anything gas-powered for a property the size of mine but I think a blower is the only way to separate leaves from the heavier stuff I want to keep in the garden. And how long must I keep the groundcloth down? How long until the bindweed gives up growing yards and tangled, anemic yards of vines under there? If I ever can remove the cloth, I could scratch some decomposed mulch into the gardens too.
In the forecast: a big order of bishop's weed for the north side, vinca major for the north easement, thyme for the north garden slop, and maybe finally some bulbs. One crocus survived my mauling of the raspberry bed, but no grape hyacinths or tulips did. This fall I must do bulbs. But for now, High Country Gardens and fragrant blue and lavender blossoms and spare greeny-grey or greeny-silver foliage await. Wheee!
I am pleased to report that I like me a lot right now.
Last night the neighborhood book club that Scarf founded met for the second time over Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Of course discussion dissolved from David Sedaris into regular chat, and at the end Scarf said that she thinks she's like a radiator and has to be wept sometimes. I didn't get that until she explained that hot water radiators sometimes need their valves loosened to release water pressure. Or something.
So the next thing out of my mouth was "Yonder in the bushes."
I am torn between hoping no one heard me--or, if they heard me, assuming this ejaculation belonged to another conversation they hadn't heard--and wanting to explain to the world the wonder of Look Through My Window, in which four little kids take the cap off the radiator so they can sail boats and, when others discover the dripping water and demand the return of the cap, the youngest says the cap is "yonder in the bushes" (which is child-ese for "I forgot where I put it"). And Emily and her mother, having dealt with the flood (and found the cap under Anne's pillow), collapse into laughter and gasp out "yonder in the bushes."
Yonder is a great word anyway. There's a sketch that RDC told me about in which the comedian tells of lying in bed at night "afraid of monsters over yonder--Yonder was my teddy bear--."
Are there any little kids these days who actually use the word yonder? Let's bring it back.
About eight miles in two legs, to work and to gym.
Precor Elliptical, 45' @ 56% resistance and 100% incline, 20' with two 2-lb. handweights, 5770 strides and 615 calories.
Today the fascinating topic of a new butterdish came up. RDC contends the present plastic one is from Caldor, and while I am sure it's migratory, I think it's from Lechter's. That was a mall-type kitchen store, and RDC asked if this was in the collection-of-stores-under-one-roof in Willi. No, and to remind him of the store, I recalled a visit: "Remember, once when we were there, we ran into that woman you knew from whatever apartment complex who stabbed her boyfriend in the leg?" Also: I knew her from a women's studies course, also her name came to me in a moment, also in the store with her was a subsequent man about twice her age.
He looked at me, processing astonishment and recognition, and I looked at him until he also admitted, "Okay, that was scarily impressive."
I amended, "Pointlessly and scarily impressive."
This entry is just to remind me that when Belinda's birthday comes up, I want a new user title.
Of course, the other, earlier option originated with Trish at "Ugly Bags of Mostly Water": Afraid of Lampshades.
I can't believe eight years have elapsed between my first Graham Swift and my next. Waterland is better, I think, but Last Orders is a pleasure to read, with authentic voices and characters and the baggage among any group of people who've known each other for forty years.
Reportedly Swift has been criticized for not acknowledging this book's debt to As I Lay Dying. I have to look that up, but, though not derivative, it absolutely has a lot more in common with the Faulkner than merely being the story of several people bringing the remains of another to a final resting place and told from several points of view.
Precor Elliptical, 30' @ 59.17%, 3990 strides, 423 calories.
Weights: squats, 3x12 @ 70 lbs; chest press, 3x12 @ 25; fly, 3x12 @ 15; shoulder, 3x12 @ something; lat pull-down, 3x12 @ 70.
Abdominal leg lifts, one to the waist and four somewhat lower.
I broke in the new KitchenAid mixer by making my beloved chocolate ginger cookies. While the dough chilled, Kal and I walk to the Botanic Gardens and looked at orchids, whose aesthetic appeal I can now appreciate though not anyone's drive to cultivate them. We walked around the gardens, walked home fetching "Anne of Green Gables" on the way, ate leftover broccoli-tomato tart for lunch and watched the movie, made cookies and watched the movie. She and RDC and I had Japanese for dinner and then we (minus RDC) watched the second half, and somehow by the end of it I had a few Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Women, and Hans Christian Andersen around me.
It was a lovely day, and no one was in the gardens because of the four whole inches of snow.
I followed the action of this, which automatically makes it the best Faulkner yet. I remembered nothing from reading it over ten years ago, so I mention it as I don't with rereads.
This is iceberg writing I can accept. If Hemingway writes that two men are fishing and I am supposed to understand that the fish is a fine fish and a metaphor for the woman they both love but who loves neither of them and that hill over there looks like a white elephant, there is no way I am going to understand that. But if Faulkner writes "My mother is a fish" then I understand that a child is relating his mother to the kind of death he can understand, and how that makes him afraid for his mother because dead fish are gutted and eaten, and furthermore, she smells.
Take Denis Guedj's Parrot's Theorem, subtract all the hard-core mathematics, exchange the macaw for an African Grey, subtract the former's slightly stilted English in translation and multiply by Michael Chabon's beautiful native prose*, and what you have is a mystery about numbers (not math) with a soupçon of parrot abuse.
It should have been longer, and no one should be mean to a parrot.
* "The old man watched helpless as the boy, with mounting agitation, spun threads of loss from his palms and fingertips."
Friday morning, Blake lusted after a dish towel and bit RDC, and RDC snapped his wrist to unlatch the closed beak from his flesh, thereby launching Blake into the refrigerator door. Blake held his beak open in that way he does when he's scared and that I think I remember from the few times he's been hurt, and we palpitated his keel bone and gauged his feet's grip on a finger, and he could spread his wings and bow his head for his neck to be scratched, so I left.
After I left, Blake sang into the hand and chattered for a while but then to RDC seemed lethargic, so he brought him to the vet. No blood in the eye or ear: no head trauma. Nothing broken. Yet he wasn't himself, not talking to the other birds in earshot at the hospital, but the vet said that was a reasonable reaction to the scare and pain and possible minor soft-tissue injury.
The vet, not his usual doctor but an avian-certified one in the same practice whom they both liked, suggested that his accompanying us everywhere (in the house), as we like because of our profound attachment and love for the buddy, is not always in the bird's best interest if it means we take him for granted (allowing him free rein on the floor, allowing him free reign over our lives), especially during his semi-annual hormonal surges.
A friend told RDC later that his shake was an instinctual reaction to pain. RDC knew very well, so I didn't make him feel worse by suggesting, that you simply must not react instinctually in certain situations. A hollow-boned creature 0.002% of your size, however powerful his beak, need not be flung, any more than a teething baby need be flung if she nips the breast.
Injury he might have sustained, if any, might be worse than otherwise because the buddy is closing that size gap:
Blake currently weighs one hundred and one grams.
That's up from 93 grams this fall and 94 grams fall before last. In his first year, before he was full grown, he was in the 80s. His silhouette is a 4 (I am not sure of the scale: I expect 3 is normal and 1 is starving). So Blake is on a diet, and we must exercise him more.
More meaning at all; right now he walks around a lot and exercises our patience and that's about it. He hates to bicycle (revolving index fingers into an endless step-up loop), but bicycling there will be, and more important than muscular drumsticks is muscular wings, of course. So we must flap him.
This happened yesterday. Today for breakfast I gave Blake only pellets instead of mixed pellets and seeds. He didn't notice at first, eating some raw baby spinach and a piece of whole-grain cereal and some corn from his buddy chow while on the kitchen windowsill. A bit later as I sat at the dining table typing this and eating my cereal, Blake left the top of his cage (with spinach, cereal, and chow) for the pellet dish in the cage door (which is propped open with a porch attachment). He began looking for seeds, shoveling with his beak and rifling back and forth, like Keehar ripping into the rotten log looking for insects, except he found neither insects nor seeds. He climbed back to the top of the cage and ate a piece of corn. I wonder which of us will break first.
Right now he is on my lap and preening. He doesn't need the excessive scoopage he did yesterday, and he is his usual chipper self. I am really hoping he wants a shower today, because he smells funny: other people's hands, or latex gloves, or his plumage absorbs odors rapidly. He smells kind of doggy, not his usual yummy dusty popcorniness.
Also, adminstering .03 cc of anti-inflammatory to a cockatiel whose grandparent was a squid and other great-grandparent was a soap bubble is not easy. Aha, and it is the anti-inflammatory that smells like rank doggy ass.
Cybex arc trainer, 30' @ 100% incline and 51% resistance; this machine doesn't total your strides (that I can figure out) but I ranged from 94 to 107; and it reported 474 calories, which I doubt. I doubt the Precor count as well but I figure it's comparable from one exertion to the next.
Then weights: 3x12 leg press @ 70 and 1x12 @ 80; 3x12 chest press @ 20 and 1x12 @25; 3x12 fly @ 15; 3x12 shoulder press @ 20. Ten attempted abdominal leg lifts.
The pool is uncovered and being prepared for its opening in 10 days. Wheee!
I am such a coddled little Denver sunverite. This 40-degree, cloudy morning, I decided I would clean the house, which it needs only slightly less than the garden needs attention. After breakfast the sky cleared and I headed out into 50 degree sun.
I mopped the winter's filth from the porch swing, the capitals (they're really not), and the doors, then removed the screens from the security door and washed them and my are they more see-through now.
I weeded (grassed, mostly, for which I'm grateful) the bishop's weed on the north side of the house. I guess I should put a border along that property line. The next project was to hoe out the north easement to be ready for vinca, arriving the second week of April, but however non-strenuous the project is, it is also tedious and results in unprotected topsoil (which I could cover with a tarp, but that didn't work with my excuse-making). Vinca, I decided, is tough enough that the still mostly grass and not more tenacious weeds wouldn't pose a big problem for it. In the meantime I transplanted some new shoots from the south easement.
When I had finished with the north side (where I cannot be seen from the porch) and the temperature rose to 60, Blake had accompanied me somewhat, mostly chattering. But occasionally shrieking (two black standard poodles, a golden retriever), so I put him inside, leaving the cage door open so he could prance on the top or in his box. Soon I heard him yell and looked in at him: he was not on his cage, on his own windowsill, nor even on the lower sill, but on the sash of the actual pane, which is of course too narrow for him to perch on, and I took this to mean he wanted out again.
I was done with the front, and willing to break from my unHeraclean labors before tackling the back (amending the vegetable beds, separating the lovely black moist loam resulting from lasagne mulch from the sunflower seed husks that didn't break down as readily), and so Blake occupied one capital and I another, with water and Lonesome Rangers, Homeless Minds, and in less than 15 minutes the sky had clouded over again.
I could have, say, put another layer on: a short gardening skirt and a sleeveless tee is not an outfit I should feel entitled to wear on the last day of winter without chilliness. But if I were goosebumped, so would Blake be. So in we came to await more sun, which, three hours later, isn't going to happen. It is supposedly 60 degrees outside and in, but I don't believe it. Blake and I are on the couch waiting for snow, I swear.
We read, and had a nap (which I felt entitled to, having not slept well), and read, and someone's head got pet, and I am still freezing cold just because I am looking through the window at a cloudy sky, despite socks and a hoodie and yoga pants and the perfectly reasonable temperature on thermometers inside and out.
A couple of times Friday evening I saw Blake begin to lift his left leg to scratch his head, then stop. He does that sometimes anyway, but now of course I wondered if it was from pain or injury. Today he lifts each leg over its respective wing readily, and I am sure he is fine. Which is good, because I didn't relish the prospect of dosing him all by myself. The medicine is supposed to fall on the back of his tongue, the more easily to drip down his throat. Ha, I say.
I was thinking I could pour some on the freckles on my shoulders and chest, which he often runs his tongue across, feeling for any imperfections that his concern for my aesthetic would require that he then try to nibble off. Or perhaps I could wait for a yawning fit, when his mouth opens nearly as widely as my own.
Yesterday we weighed a reluctant buddy on the food scale: 102 grams. Today he's had chow and a piece of cereal and spinach and sprouts and I gave him a piece of white chicken meat to shred, and yesterday I bought him a grannysmith apple of his very own to have by slices.
Way back when it was sunny and I wasn't freezing, I was thinking about going for a bike ride. Now, of course, I think that if I go outside I will shatter like an icicle. I am supposed to flap Blake, though, who is right now perched on one foot atop my ankle, eyes closed from the bottom up, crest relaxed. I can't disturb him now.
Hence why we are both fat.
Hoo boy, yes indeedy, yesterday I opened my closet to dress after my strenuous day buying new china, shopping for groceries, eating sushi, and preparing "the guest room," and before I donned regular clothes I tried out my little black dress.
The first time I emerged in this dress, in 1990, my boyfriend fell off his chair. The night I finally kissed CXJ (my motto: or die trying), I wore this dress (and other men that night were interested; that man was a brick wall of latent heterosexuality). It is a fabulous, simple (hence LBD status), linen frock. I can zip it, and there the story ends. To zip it, I hauled my bosom northward, displaying excess cleavage. No one wants to possess (or see) armpit breast. I didn't try to sit in it, and it no longer skims over my ass but my ass juts. Very attractive. Plus my belly didn't use to touch it (because I didn't use to have one).
Exercise and rather less chocolate. Onward.
Overnight it began to rain, and now what's falling is a mix of rain and snow: was I cold because humidity was on the rise? Could I ever manage New England damp heat and moist cold again? Why, if humidity makes heat feel hotter, does it also make cold feel colder, and what is the middle point of humidity and temperature when the former doesn't exacerbate the latter? (Whee! This shows the relation in warmer temperatures, and this site claims that the midpoint is 53F.)
Lovely, lovely spring snow, with higher water content than winter snow. Big flakes, though, and the ground is far too warm for any accumulation. But I've been awake for about three years now and the precipitation has been steady for several hours: a good drink for the trees, I hope.
Louis Menand is a learned pleasure to listen to, like John Leonard; in the audiobook's favor is that the difficulty of rereading passages and taking notes means that I do not feel obliged to, unlike Leonard (whom I am reading on paper). Menand discusses The New Yorker, Hustler, Rolling Stone, Laurie Anderson, Oliver Wendell Homes, Richard Wright, and godfuckingdamnit, when I just checked the table of contents at Amazon, I discovered that, contrary to Audible.com's claim, their production is abridged, even though it's listed as not: I didn't get chapters on William James, Pauline Kael, or Christopher Lasch, not that I know who the latter two are but that's why I listen to and read books, to learn who they are. Also missing: T.S. Eliot, William Paley, Al Gore, and Maya Angelou.
I am really pissed at Audible.com right now, because earlier today I downloaded the first half of Nancy Mitford's biography The Sun King, available in the 2nd best format, and got an obviously lesser quality production of someone else's brief biography of Louis XIV. Its customer support sucks donkey balls too.
Which has nothing to do with Menand. The reason I like him and John Leonard is that they are cultural as well as literary critics, putting people and books into context (Arthur Koestler slept with Mary McCarthy? Laurie Anderson majored in sculpture?) and drawing (what would have seemed to me) unlikely but (now, in their hands) insightful parallels.
Blake is far too wise to expend effort on flapping when perching on a hand that suddenly drops from over the head to below the waist, so I have introduced a wobble to the descending hand. A wobble is the one physical correction with which one is allowed to discipline a parrot: a wobble distracts the bird from its naughtiness by forcing it to focus instead on its balance. A wobble forces a flap, and a flap is the beginning of flapping, but I don't want Blake to think being flapped is a punishment just because being wobbled is a correction. I don't expect him to enjoy it much, and there are other things he submits to without reacting to them as a punishment, like having his sticky beak wiped before he feaks corn niblets onto a sleeve, or having his talons clipped, or being wrapped in a paper towel after a shower and before the blow-drying. His corrections are minor, like wobbling or a sharp noise (a clap to startle him out of nibbling something he shouldn't), or major, like time-outs either in the cage or in the cage covered up in the bathroom in the dark.
Flapped he must be, whether or not he enjoys it. Currently, after flappage and half a segment of orange and shoelace destruction, he is on my foot (I am stretched out on the recliner) and while I cannot (or choose not to) force him to cease the foot-worship, I can, by wiggling my foot, wobble him enough that he cannot indulge in the incestuous behavior he would prefer foot-worship to lead to.
I should just hire a surrogate: "Look, you're no relation to my bird, so if you just would sit in this chair for a quarter hour--want to call your family? read the paper? eat a sandwich?--and let my parrot court and seduce your feet, singing to them and, uh, rubbing them with his cloaca, I'll give you a sawbuck."
But bestiality is illegal.
He is also wise enough readily to distinguish between what he may nibble on and what he may not and to prefer the latter. I commonly will leave a blowcard sticking out of the pages of my book, or a Post-It clinging to its cover, so that Blake can shred allowable paper. Invariably, however, he prefers the book's actual pages, which unlike its dustjacket cannot be removed. This evening, for instance, we are in the chair with the tome Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and while it would be more comfortable for me to place the book in my lap, I am holding it in one hand because Blake clamored for it (rather than the temptingly crisp and substantial blowcard or the snappable catalog paper) when it was so readily accessible, and now that he has left my feet he is on my forearm, ready to snooze, and I would rather strain my wrist holding the book in an unnatural position than disturb his, he should pardon the term, catnap.
Between the flapping and the foot-serenading, he perched on my knee while I did bicycle crunches: more balancing for him. Perhaps there are human-parrot core-strength exercise classes, with a lot of focus on balance. That class I took at 24-Hour Fitness, wobbling on half a sphere while doing squats etc., was eleventy times harder than doing squats etc. on a stable surface. Surely flapping can be integrated into such exertions.
And now he is on my right shoulder, chewing his beak, tickling under my ear with his crest. I cannot quite conceive how I ever equated the sound of beak-grooming with that of nails on a chalkboard. Quite evidently, now my conversion to the cockatielside is compleat. Sic. Doesn't Darth Vader's crisp final t make the obsolete spelling seem appropriate?
-- Being the combination of math genius and detail-oriented cook that I am, I doubled a recipe calling for 1.5 cups plus 1 tablespoon of flour to 2 cups plus two tablespoons. The dough has to set in the fridge for a while, and when I removed it after two hours I realized it wasn't as stiff as it ought to be, but I attributed that to inadequate chilling. When I removed the first two trays--32 cookies--from the oven, they were flat as nilla wafers. Flat flat flat, flatter than the islands of chocolate chips. I gave up in disgust and went to bed pouting. Overnight I realized what I had done, so in the morning I was about to put another cup of flour to the remainder of the dough when I brilliantly realized that I was no longer dealing with the full measure of ingredients. So I added 3/4 cup of flour, and the rest of the cookies turned out very well. Not perfectly, because I should have added only 2/3 cup. They tasted right and had the right texture, but they were a little paler than they should have been.
-- I added any flour to a dough that was, if not as stiff as it should have been, still pretty stiff after a night in the fridge, with my new KitchenAid mixer. In nickel pearl, because how well it goes with the granite, tile, paint, and stainless steel is a vital component in my lurf of this thing. Its only fault is that the blade aligns so closely with the bowl that it snaps chocolate chips into even chippier pieces. So far I have made cookies, the same recipe, twice. I have bananas waiting to become banana bread, and RDC is going to make bread, and it is so pretty I want it on the counter all the time.
-- But we don't have enough counter space for that. If we ever build a breakfast nook, though, it might have to be out all the time. Or I might have to buy a different one, cobalt blue, for the breakfast nook. Then I'll buy a lavender one for the bedroom and three green ones for the dining and living rooms and RDC's office.
-- At the first meeting of Scarf's new bookclub, talking about influential books, I opined how messed up my generation was by V.C. Andrews. Kal, being several years younger, had never even heard of her (it, the writing corporation). I just lent her my 25-year-old copy of Flowers in the Attic, spine broken about halfway through (at the Christmas party, nowhere smutty), on the other side of yellow with age, held together with rubber bands. She asked! I am lisa, bringer of corruption.
-- Also recently in conversation, Ellen Tibbets, The Champion of Merrimack County (compare and contrast this obscure OOP book with The Mouse and the Motorcycle, even though the titular champion is a bicyclist), The Outsiders, and Look Through My Window.
-- Yesterday marked my eighth anniversary at NCSL.
I think I had already read the best six, or listened to them. I like every glimpse into Eatonville I can manage, but a couple of the stories were too obviously recycled.
Precor Elliptical, 30', 100% incline, 60% resistance, 10' with two 2-lb. handweights: 3852 strides, 415 calories.
Standing leg press, 3x12 @ 80. Chest press, 3x12 @ 25. Lat pulldown, 3x12 @ 60, maybe 70. Row, 3x12 @70ish. Two sets of 5 abdominal leg-lifts in the captain's chair.
I was getting a little silly and hoping that RDC would call me in for dinner by shouting "Oh, C.K. Stanley Yelnats," but he does not live his life quite so much by "The Philadelphia Story" and Holes as I do. What I was doing, not that our lot is big enough to require shouting, was putting all the dirt back in the older vegetable frame. I had first taken it out, shovel and hoe, and then begun to put it back, rake and sieve.
I never put the garden to bed this winter, and by this morning it was all over weeds which have probably sapped its nutrients. I hoed out stuff that I call chicory and spurge but whose actual names I know not. I shoveled and shoveled and finally realized I was in the ground below the frame: more than a foot deep.
A while ago I wanted to build myself a sifter, a sturdy mesh nailed to a reinforced wooden rectangle that would fit over the wheelbarrow: throw gobs of stuff at the wheelbarrow, and catch good stuff. That never materialized, though in my more determined moments I have been known to use such a mesh without benefit of frame (which might be how I go through suede-palmed gloves so fast). This spring I bought myself an English Steel Sieve With 1/2" Expanded Metal Mesh, which is nearly what I wanted but on a smaller scale.
So I sifted the garden. I cleaned the house, or some of it, and by noon I was outside. I worked until dark, accumulating a pile of clumps and pebbles and roots and shrinking the pile of dirt, and getting admirably filthy. I took a few breaks for water and to do backbends (I theorize that turning my back momentarily concave will undo the strain of hours of convexity), but not to eat.
When I ceased for the evening, I shoved my filthy hooves into my bluchers to get inside and to the shower. In the shower stall, I toed off the bluchers and doffed everything else, and sat on the floor, completely done in. A few minutes later RDC asked what part of the chicken I wanted. "Half."
I am going to need to break down all the chunks I piled to one side in order to fill the frame back up, even with the compost-loam I sifted in. The newer frame looms yet untouched, but at least it's smaller.
Sometime soon RDC is going to rent a rototiller to take out the remaining grass on the south side. I suggested doing only half the south "lawn" at a time, because I can conceive of manually tilling half but not whole. Nah, he said, he'd rent a machine to do it all. I think I am going to ask him to do the north side of the path, too. It won't do the cherry sprouts any good, but if he keeps the machine very shallow it shouldn't harm the actual tree roots irreparably, I hope. I'll lay groundcloth and mulch against bindweed this year, and perhaps next year expand the bishop's weed or even the zoysia.
I don't know where I draw the line between my sister inserting herself as middler (not quite a meddler, but nearly) and performing the critical task of being the parental newsfeed. I expect that only my perspective, not her actions, changes the function.
CLH recently told me that our mother's continuing resentment of RDC stems from her belief that RDC denies me children. I have told the mater that I made my own decision, and that I'm glad I met a man who agreed with me; but since that statement doesn't mesh with her own feeling, she cannot accept, let alone countenance, it.
RDC and I have been together for almost 13 years and I have not yet begun to tick, nor ever quavered, for which I'm grateful. But then, about this I didn't expect to quaver: although I second-guess many decisions and avoid making several more, this issue is one I'm certain about. I do dread ticking, which I anticipate might happen in my 40s. Anecdotally, I've heard that women question their decision most during the hormonal rush into menopause, and that the women who've ridden that crest through are relieved not to have succumbed. So I'll batten the hatches in a few years, and I have informed RDC that he must hold my hand. Meanwhile, if I see an adult walking with a stroller and a leash and am ever more interested in what I see in the stroller than at the end of the leash, I might be in trouble.
If I had stayed with NCS and married him, I might have three kids but also a miserable marriage or a divorce by now. I don't recall whether SSP and I discussed children, but we were only 20ish when we dated and who thinks about children that young? When I was with PLT, I had decided on one child, but PLT said he didn't want a singleton. I agree with what CLH and reportedly BJWL believe, that if I had married someone else I might have decided another way--hopefully before having married him. But, as I told Kal the other day venting all of this, I married RDC, and I am glad to have found someone who shared my lack of biological imperative, and instead of having kids and probably stress and a stagnant partnership, I..."have this great life," Kal finished.
And I do. I have a husband and other family and friends and neighbors and coworkers and community; I have a house and a garden; I have books and walks and music and my bike and access to a pool; I am healthy and not decrepit; I have Blake; I have, besides my own reflexive self-flagellation, a fine life. I don't have a dog, and that might be RDC's fault because he's the one who first wanted a bird, and I don't have a lake, which also might be RDC's fault because he's why I moved to Denver.
But the fact that I don't have a child is not RDC's fault, and I am beyond sick of my mother assuming she knows better.
So the question is, do I tell my mother again for her to ignore me again so I beat myself up again for having failed to get through to her again, for failing to stop futilely wishing, again, for a mother I simply don't have? Or do I just simmer and resent and ensure that the Happy Couple's visit in three months is absolutely dire? Does she know that a primary reason I decided against reproducing is that I wanted to protect a child from generational repetition? That's not something I need to tell her, partly because it might hurt her feelings and partly because she would take it to mean that, for whatever the reason, I am depriving myself.
---
In other news, I am so glad that Lady Chatterley's lover's last name is Mellors. At first I thought it was his given name, and wondered what was in the water when D.H. Lawrence and Elizabeth von Arnim were writing. The name Mellersh occurs as a given name only in Enchanted April and no where else that Google can find.
---
In yet other news, the new snack sensation is an apple and some M&Ms. Perhaps I could try to shove M&Ms into the fruit's flesh, as one does with cloves and a ham. Probably I will just continue to take a bite of apple with a few M&Ms.