House:
Garden
Errands
Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
Swam 1K.
The pool opened yesterday, but though I drove and had my gym bag I declined to go to the club immediately after work because I didn't have my suit with me and the weather meant I had to be outside, gardening if not swimming, not inside on a machine. So today, after a few more hours in the vegetable garden, I swam.
Thank goodness for heated water. It was lovely. Sixty-degree sun meant getting out wasn't painful either.
I am so glad to have access to an outdoor pool. This city is much more palatable now that I can swim when the weather says swim, instead of for only the hottest two months.
I liked this one more than Sons and Lovers or Women in Love. In fact, I liked it just fine, except for its one gratuitous, incongruous line of racism: black women like sex more than white women, but the lover's objection to them is that "we're white men and they're...muddy."
One contemporary review said that it was fine except where the gamekeeping was interrupted by romance. There was actually almost no gamekeeping; it was more like the romance interrupted speechifying on political economics, industrialism, and how machinery has killed the life in man. That's a better theme to discuss in the three books of his I've read than relationshipping and navel-gazing. This one had plenty of relationshipping but, thankfully, very little navel-gazing.
I knew nothing of this novel going in, except that it was banned and scandalous because the love relationship crossed social lines and was explicit. I had expected more explicit scenes, but besides a couple of quite mild scenes the only mention of smut was in the word's original meaning, relating to the coal heaps of Lancashire.
After sifting in loam from compost and the original soil minus clumps and pebbles and roots, I still hadn't filled in the vegetable frame. After my swim I bought peat moss and mushroom compost, and today I will add it in, even though today is, gasp, overcast.
We read more about buffalo grass and zoysia and really how much water that much square footage of bluegrass would require and settled on tall fescue. I am still thinking of buffalo grass for under the cherry tree: unlike fescue it grows from roots so can repair itself; and under the cherry tree doesn't have as much traffic as the lawn area, which must withstand outdoor furniture, clothesline, and other traffic; and that is still the best place to grow squash because the vines can creep where they want without crowding either other vegetables or foot traffic.
Yesterday I swapped storms for screens, worked on the back yard for a few hours, made myself a smoothie and drank it on the porch with D.H. Lawrence, and then went for my swim. If I hadn't needed the dirt I would have gone on my bike. I love spring. The weather eked out about a fortnight of winter at the end of March, so I am even glad to see it.
Cybex arc trainer, 10' @ 100% incline and 51% resistance, then
Precor elliptical, 20' @ 100% incline and 60% resistance.
Weights: squats, 3x12 @80; chest press, 3x12 @25; fly, 3x12 @15; lats, 3x12 @60. Abdominal leg lifts, 2x5.
Swim (matron breast stroke, because I was wearing contacts), .5K.
I repotted my new houseplant, some sort of variegated foliage thing. Otherwise, I emptied the other vegetable frame and started filling it in again, mixing it with peat moss, mushroom compost, and cattle manure. (The bag said "steer manure." Is the manure from castrated bulls very different than that from cows?)
Last year, when the soil for the new frame arrived, I thought it was different than the first frame's content. And it is. Either that, or its different orientation (perpindicular to the other) means so much less sun that its clay retains more moisture longer. Sieving the soil was much more difficult: either more clayey, or just wetter, thus much more clumpy, with some clumps hard as rocks. Those I threw back. Peat moss holds moisture too, but should make the soil flufflier overall. So I didn't sieve it all but raked what could be raked back into the frame, and I will break down the clumps and cemented sand later.
After getting up at the perfectly reasonable weekend hour of 8:30, resetting the clocks, having breakfast, and talking to Nisou for an hour, it was nearly noon by the time we left the house. After the gym and another Home Depot run (it must be spring: two visits on a two-day weekend), we returned nearly at 3. Three and a half hours of work in the garden, until dinner: a short day. This is not my favorite day of the year.
Nisou shrieked when I said I was going to Amsterdam, but she, more sensible than I, has a much more realistic view of the practical distance and expense of LeMans to Amsterdam with two little ones. I didn't expect her to come, of course: that's why I hadn't mentioned it. But I told her I would wave as I passed overhead. Though I expect the flight is routed over the British Isles rather than over France.
Siblet has begun to cruise, and she is suddently much happier. Nisou attributes the winter's crying to frustration at wanting but not quite being able to travel yet. Emlet has made up cousins for herself every day since returning from Connecticut where she has actual and adoptive cousins. She sang me her favorite song of the past few months, "M. Carnival." Last weekend they blew eggs and made brioche and hot cross buns from the eggs, and painted the eggs, and hunted them in the garden. Also Emlet told me how I should come and help her play with her new duck magnet. Okay.
Otherwise Nisou and I talked gardening. Lasagne mulch, and how much we wish we had bought ourselves rotating compost bins rather than ones that need pitchforking, and Nisou's plans for the weedbed, as she calls it, at the foot of her garden, and trellises for raspberries. And where I am going to put strawberries.
In a forum I adulterate my Usual Suspects with, a journaler I keep half an eye on enthused about this book, which is by Steven Gould. Eh. It reminded a lot of Replay, another science fiction book, in that the dictates of the phenomenon bled the author of any ability to imbue his protagonist with humanity.
Even William Sleator in Singularity wrote a more believable reader than this jumper. The latter reads for information, and the library is his refuge, but he is never portrayed reading or being interested in books other than as physical possessions, and the only books whose contents he refers to by name are the two Gould drew from most heavily--an sf novel about teleportation whose title I didn't note, and Stephen King's Firestarter, for government interest in these talents.
Oh, and the other Replay thing: Jumper's aseptic dialogue and personalities had reminded me of it even before the Middle East element hurled itself anvil-like into play.
I am considering whether to reread The Fall before I go to Amsterdam. I expect not, because it's not particularly about Amsterdam, only that the layout of canals is the closest geography to Dante's nine-circled hell. I have to check where the Swallows landed when they didn't mean to go to sea. Not Amsterdam, I am sure.
I remember a surprising lot about the Camus considering I read it 17 years ago. That's what happens when I love a book and read it closely and write what my curmudgeonly professor called "an exemplary essay" about it.
RDC recently got Ian McEwan's new Saturday from Audible.com. While I'm at it maybe I should reread Amsterdam. Except that I have struck euthanasia from my possible to-do list on the grounds that, while I can do it there and no where else, doing it is likely to dampen my enjoyment of the rest of the trip.
Otherwise I'm reading tour books.
Bike about 8 miles, to work to gym to home.
Precor Elliptical, 15' @ 100% incline and 70% resistance, ~1985 strides and 225 calories.
Swim 1K.
I haven't told all my stories. My recent mention of The Fall reminded me of what I could tell about English 109. I am still glad I am more attractive than particular people for particular reasons and freely admit that particular, and I am certain, universal, human foible, of comparison and self-congratulation. Blake continues to charm me. PLT just sent me recent photographs of several sprouts, and TJZD just produced a new, almost ten-pound one. Those are stories I could tell.
But, as I told RDC yesterday, as we discussed pen vs. keyboard, though I can write faster with a keyboard than with a pen, the latter allows for contemplation whereas the former demands constant attention (the screen) and input (the keyboard).
It was sophomore spring that SLH and I belatedly took English 109 together, reading The Fall and Endgame and The Maltese Falcon and, spew, Harold Pinter's Homecoming. But I think freshling spring saw one of my favorite SLH memories. That semester, we had biology together (inspiring my nickname Polly), on the opposite corner of campus from our dorms. One warm day we biked back to lunch, on one bike, me on the seat and he on the pedals of an over-worked 10-speed. I think he hopped curbs on that thing, long before anyone, even ordinary people, made bikes jump. We scattered people and sheep in our path and left a wake of pissed off people with run-over toes. I remember clutching his love-handles, legs splayed out to keep out of his way, clutching the saddle with my crotch alone, bouncing over curbs and boulders, shrieking and laughing and shrieking with laughter and wondering when we were going to die.
Eighteen years later that exuberant glee and fear is fresh in my heart. Dearest SLH, I'm so glad you're back.
That's my only story right now.
Except not! I just glanced down to my backpack, wondering what therein might inspire a story. I glancingly remembered that a storyteller did that, found an object about his person and began a story from it. Instantly--and I'm glad not longer--I recalled that I was thinking of Dr. Dolittle, who when his family wanted a new story would look at whatever was in his pockets or his little black bag.
And that's another story. This evening RDC made us hot chocolate, with chocolate he brought back from Barcelona. This is not Swiss Miss Swill: this is liquid chocolate. It forms a skin readily, so you drink it with a spoon at the ready for stirring. Sometime recently I told RDC about Gub-gub's story, about the food sprites who had wonderful innovations for dining, like the speaking tubes into which you say whatever you cannot say at table; and the serving of fruit from one end of the table to the other as with tennis balls, with rackets; and the pincushions for fish-bones. What I didn't remember until tonight is yet another of their inventions: wee clotheslines on which to hang the skin of your cocoa so it doesn't gloop over the side of your cup.
Except I doubt Hugh Lofting said "gloop."
The only other story I can think of currently is the one that Blake is declaiming in his box. He's singing about the events of his day and his love for feet.
Precor Elliptical, 45' @ 100% incline and 60% resistance, 20' with two 2-lb. handweights, 5865 strides and 626 calories.
Leg Presses, 3x12 @80 and 1x12 @90; chest press, 3x12 @25 and 1x12 @30; fly, 3x12 @20 and 1x8 @25; lat pulldown, 3x12 @70 and 1x12 @80; upright row, 3x12 @45. Abdominal leg lift, 2x5.
When next I bring RDC to the airport, I'll stop by Tri-R on the way home with cardboard, junkmail, and phone books. I haven't found a place for plastic bags, though. Today I emptied the house of the latest crates of cardboard and paper, preparing for snowbound claustrophobia tomorrow.
I sieved more soil into the east vegetable frame and covered it well with groundcloth, and covered the garage frame as well. The several feet of yard next to the east frame where I laid the lasagne mulch I covered as well, because now that I've removed all the lovely loam, all that naked dirt will either fly away or be infested with weeds unless I protect it.
All this week I've left tools out: with 13% humidity, no dew, and daily work, I shrugged off that little chore. But today I put everything back, neatly, so tomorrow I can look out at snow, I hope, not made lumpy by neglected utensils. And the snow shovel is on the porch along with several hours' worth of firewood.
I cleared grass from around the ornamental sage against the porch. I don't remember which sort it is, and stupidly, I do not have my garden catalogued digitally. Artemisia tridentata? Something. RDC thought grass was choking it, but it's not: it is a slow grower, and it's tended horizontal to reach the sun faster than the porch's shadow would otherwise allow. Also I cut down a nasty, prickly succulent that was probably not on my easement but on the neighbors'. But it's a hideously prickly plant and probably had a pint of water in its tuberous root. So thlpbt to them if they minded.
Besides shoving all last year's growth from the shrubs and the peony not into but between the compost bins, and carefully filling the birdfeeder again, I didn't do much. The sieving took some time, but I don't feel like I got much done. I didn't dig the heavy-duty, recycled plastic bordering along the north side, and I didn't fetch faux brick bordering and start placing that. I didn't clip out cherry sprouts.
And I won't get anything done tomorrow either, other than, I hope, shoveling, and beating the shit out of my trees again. But at least I spent all the hours the sun was out, outside. And I found lots of worms and tossed them into the gardens to join their friends.
Is this a great place or what? Good thing I put the screens up last weekend.
The poor trees. That's one helpful thing for now about the blizzard two years ago: the weakest branches are already gone. Still, when I woke up, I threw on fleece and thwapped as much as I could reach with the paint roller's handle, which extends to maybe 10 feet. Now it's 10:37 and I've shoveled twice, us and the two houses to one side, among whom exists an unspoken shoveling agreement, and the two octogenarians' houses at the business end of the street.
Which reminded me, now his immediate next-door neighbor has moved, who will mow Mel's grass? I guess me, which is fine: I don't get to use my reel mower much.
First, the head-petting, for relaxation and comfort. He moves his head around under my fingers if he's in a forgiving mood; otherwise he expects me to know where he wants to be pet next and beaks me for any infraction. This was a head-petting he was glad to get because I had been doing terrible things like jiggling my feet to keep him off them or putting him back on his cage if he wouldn't give up his suit. The petting goes well: the skull and jaw massage, the ruffling of the neck feathers backward, the tugging on the crest feathers. The last I adopted from the masseur, when I decided I might happily pay someone just to pull my skull from my neck for a while. I guess I decided that it would feel good on Blake too.
Then he preens, possibly to get everything I disturbed back into place, possibly because feathers need a lot of maintenance, possibly just to startle me when I look up at the webcam window and he has no head.
And then the nap and my holding my head carefully not to disturb him and the breast feathers tickling my neck. This is my favorite part.
Gennifer Choldenko, Notes from a Liar and Her Dog
Beverly Cleary, Ellen Tebbits
Elizabeth Coatsworth, The Cat Who Went to Heaven
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Ghosts of Rathburn Park
Monday I had RDC pick me up from the library instead of at work. I borrowed the Coatsworth and Mukerji because they are Newbery Medalists (and also for that reason the as-yet unread Invincible Louisa), the Snyder for author-loyalty, and this Choldenko because it's about a dog (though a puny one) plus an unread other, a Newbery Honor. Yesterday I went to Park Hill Books, a used and new cooperative bookstore, and bought an armload of books: Amos Fortune, Free Man; Miracles on Maple Hill; and Tales from Silver Lands, all Newbery Medals that I haven't read and that I will be good about sending on their Way if I don't like them, Martin Amis's The Information, Robertson Davies's Salterton Trilogy and The Cunning Man, a present for Haitch and another for CLH, and, because I paid with cash and it was used, a pulp copy of Shelters of Stone, for completeness's sake only, to stash with its siblings in the cache.
This morning I brought my first copy of that last in all its hardcover enormity (I do love English's portmanteaux) and left it on the bookswap shelf in the breakroom. It was gone in less than two hours.
In order of my reading them, then:
I liked this recent Snyder more than most of her later books. I always will read her for love of The Egypt Game and grateful adoration of The Changeling, but that's my weird loyalty thing. I began to read her again, to pay attention to latter titles, after I noticed The Gypsy Game in the downtown branch. That book didn't work in the slightest, and not just because it involved Egypt's characters. This was a little better.
Coatsworth: her author photograph makes her look like Nisou's mother, which is a fine thing, and if I had looked at the photograph before I read it I might have, for that reason, liked it more. It was about a cat, so eh, who had no tail for reasons never explained (and it wasn't a Manx), double eh; the sepia pen-and-ink drawings of various animals were sweet, but then it had cat mortality. I don't need that.
Mukerji: Dull. About a pigeon, of all tedious animals, which I knew going in, but I like raptors, and pigeons' only purpose is to feed raptors. Which reminds me, are the red-tailed hawks back at MIT this spring? I'm counting it even though I only skimmed two thirds of it, because I am a cheat.
Cleary: Dear Beverly Cleary. I began to read Otis Spofford once but stopped when I realized it came after Ellen Tebbits. Ellen and Otis both fell out of my head until recently. I proselytized at Kal about Cleary's teen non-romances, The Luckiest Girl, Jeannie and Johnny, and Fifteen, and she at me about Ellen and Otis. Then on her inaugural visit to Park Hill Books, she bought this for me (and remembered it today). I went to that story yesterday specifically because she thought the Snyder book she saw there might have been Until the Celebration, which I would like to have (it was The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case).
Choldenko: The dog was a six-pounder whom only the protagonist, and not the other four humans of her family, liked (unlike in my family, in which the dogs were the only ones everyone else always liked); and the situation wasn't as harsh as in "Welcome to the Dollhouse" but the ballerina sisters reminded me of it; and instead of Jesse's music teacher in Bridge to Terabithia, Ant's is an art teacher; and instead of Claudia's Duffy, Ant has a Harrison: and I loved it. Blame it on my listening to David Gray's White Ladder this morning and getting all delicately emotey, but I cried.
It's guilt-inducing, because if I would just let go of resenting my mother, this sort of book wouldn't affect me so strongly. I--this is progress--recently made a conscious decision to stop feeling guilty for being happy: being happy now is not disloyalty to my past selves. Similarly, I often have resolved to stop resenting my mother, and though I've improved yet I haven't stopped. And I don't resent her: my emotions toward her are not so clear cut and unyielding as adolescent resentment. But if I were all the way well, this book wouldn't've hurt. Maybe ached, for the past, but not hurt.
Precor elliptical, 30' @ 100% incline and 60% resistance, 20' of two 2-pound handweights, 3925 strides and 420 calories. Lunges part of the way (a small part) toward the captain's chair, and 2x5 abdominal leg lifts.
A personal rule about punctuation: A singular possessive word ending in s gets an 's even if the next word begins with s, even if the possessor is Biblical: Jesus's socks.
Otherwise, I would have punctuated this entry differently:
I have questions too. When the possessor is a book and therefore italicized, does the 's take italics as well? Yes, for visual consistency or no, because those last two characters are not part of the title? I say no, so that the apostrophe-s are not mistaken. Or, if the word is in quotation marks and also possessive, which takes precedent? If I wanted to refer to "Davies" or the punctuation thereof, should I write "Davies's" or "Davies"'s? I should rewrite the sentence.
Interesting, but not as riveting as it might have been if I had adored Little Women from a young age. The one thing I didn't know already was that, like Caroline Ingalls, Abba Alcott lost a son between her third and fourth daughters. Perhaps, by that logic, Charlotte, not Henrietta, should have been the tomboy of the all-of-a-kind family. Except eventually they had a brother.
Where did I recently read an article about Bronson Alcott? I do not recall that it mentioned March at all, but that novel must have inspired this article, which I read fairly recently. Aha, thank you Haitch and SFP, despite Kal and RDC not remembering anything from the New Yorker and my therefore doubting my own memory, it was indeed thence.
I think I have heard the expression "Capone does my shorts." The author, Gennifer Choldenko, points it out as something servicemen wrote in their letters in wartime to indicate they were stationed in San Francisco (even though Al Capone left Alcatraz in 1939).
This was quick and fun. I will keep an eye out for the author in the future. She mentions Temple Grandin ("America's Most Famous Autistic!") as a resource. I want to read her Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.
This won a Newbery Medal? It's not a bad book, but it's not momentous either, and Strawberry Girl had the same girl-goes-to-the-country thing. If Four-Story Mistake didn't win, did this one because it featured a father with combat fatigue?
Idyllic country life, living on government pension (because the father was a POW), lots of sugaring on Maple Hill, which is near Pittsburgh. Cynical, I wanted to shout through the pages to these people about incipient acid rain.
Precor elliptical, 30' @ 100% incline and 60.17% resistance, 20' of two 2-lb. handweights.
Weights: leg presses, 3x12 @90; chest presses, 3x12 @35; fly, 3x12 @25; shoulder press, 3x12 @25 I think; lats, 3x12 @70.
Ten abdominal leg lifts.
I appreciate how difficult it must have been to write an historically accurate novel for children about someone few of whose records involve his life before age 60, but Elizabeth Yates did a lot better with the history than with keeping racist assumptions and tropes from her book. Perhaps she wanted to dwell on the known, his circumstances and career, rather than on the unknown, like how he contented he seemed to be while enslaved. But that gives her too much benefit of the doubt: she portrays him as proud all his life and exultant in his eventual freedom, so his acceptance of his lot before manumission rings hollow.
Whatever: I am closing in on the goal of reading every Newbery Medal winner. I think I'm at 69 (of 81).
My plants arrived Friday. High Country Gardens ships of a Monday, and I like Friday arrivals. I don't plant until Saturday, so Thursday arrivals mean plants remain unplanted despite being in my care. Friday shipments are in boxes just as long, but it's not as much my fault. It's all about me, not about the plants.
I can't quite believe I paid money for more Vinca major (big leaf periwinkle) instead of just taking cuttings from the two-year-old plantings in the south easement, but what the hell. Seven seedlings and a few seedlings to start filling in the north easement. I did end up hoeing out the grass; I'll mulch it over to protect the top soil.
I weeded the north side of the house among the bishop's weed, and transplanted some sprouts from elsewhere, and began to dig a border along that property line. I don't know why the neighbors want grass, but I figure they want it as much as I want my pretty variegated dry shade groundcover. Except they probably don't want it much: the border protects the bishop's weed from the grass and vice versa, and also my plantings from the bindweed they allow to run rampant.
To fill in the north front, I planted--oo! 13 plants. I put seven Veronica oltensis (thyme-leaf speedwell) on the slope, because the two on the south slope have spread so very obligingly over their three years and their azure flowers in mid-May make me insanely happy. Along the north boundary, I clustered three each of Salvia dorrii (desert purple sage) and Lavandula angustifolia (buena vista English lavender). Because I am not the smartest of all possible bears, I didn't notice when selecting my plants that Agastache x blue fortune (blue fortune hybrid hyssop) is suitable for zone 6, not 5, so I placed the three of those along the south property line: the neighbor has erected a (fairly short and surprisingly inoffense) fence that will shelter them from some sun. Nearby I transplanted some sprouts from Perovskia atriplicifolia (Russian sage).
The Cytisus purgans (Spanish Gold Hardy Broom) I planted against the north half of the west-facing porch two years ago died in its first summer, and blue is better than yellow anyway (and three better than one) so this time I am trying Salvia reptens (west Texas grass sage) instead.
I can't think how I misread the plant description for Artemisia versicolor 'Seafoam' (curlicue sage), currently against the south half of the porch. It is lovely, but I want big plants against the porch and eight inches isn't quite enough height. So I will move it somewhere, I hope without killing it, and replace it with, um, something yellow: Ribes odoratum (Crandall's Currant). Also to be moved is a Penstemon pinifolius (pineleaf penstemon), which will look better with its siblings, among which lurks a big gap; also I am not unreasonably hopeful that the Cerastium tomentosum (snow-in-summer) and Erodium chrysanthum (yellow stork's bill) will fill in that spot.
In the backyard, against the south fence where I allow less xeric ornamental plants, I planted more Sisyrinchium angustifolium (Lucerne blue-eyed grass) and three Pulmonaria longiflora (Roy Davidson lungwort).
I hope the frames are full of happy dirt and worms now. In the east one, I planted carrots, Romaine lettuce, New Zealon nigh-spinach, and peas. I can't wait to thin the carrots so I can feed tender little tops to Blake, who loves them. The north one will take tomato seedlings again, in mid May.
Pretty.
Bike 8ish miles in three legs.
Precor Elliptical, 15' @100% incline and 71% resistance, 1984 strides and 225 calories.
I recently have been participating in the Geography Olympics and regularly scoring 100% unless one or more of the ten countries have been one of those pesky Pacific Islands. Tuvala, Fiji, Vanuatu--where are you again?
Ages ago I sought out blank maps of the contitents to see what I could name where. I found some, where I forget, and printed them. The entire existence of Slovenia had heretofore eluded me, and of the string Zambia, Zamibia, Namibia, and Nambia, I wouldn't've been able to say which two were countries (although, like Pooh with left and right, if properly started I could proceed; and Gambia I remember because a Senegalese friend described it as a dagger through the heart of his country). More recently, a Suspect mentioned a game challenging one to place the 50 states on a map, which is, even in the iteration with only one state visible at a time so you can't use Kansas to place the other rectangles, boringly easy, even for me who rereads some books solely to feel superior to them.
Happily, that site also has similar games for the rest of the world, though happily not countries' provinces because I might know where Cornwall, New South Wales, and Provence are but little more. So I used those maps, which do leave guessed countries in place because without Democratic Republic of Congro situated, I would never know where the Central African Republic goes.
Anyway. I worked my way up through the levels, starting at the thumb-sucking level for Africa but not needing any practice in South America. I have a lock on the former Soviet republics for the first time since 1988, though not their capitals as I had then. I skipped the mean level ("Drag each country name onto the map--no outlines given") after a few tries because if the apex of the arrow isn't exactly where it's expected, you're wrong, and became fluent in the next level, "Drag and rotate each country onto the map--you must rotate the country to the proper orientation." I ceased playing when my scores were consistently high.
Last night, preparing for his trip, RDC asked me if there were other countries in South Africa. Even before I got to the point I could place Lesotho at its proper longitude and latitude, I knew it was within South Africa, but I might have thought Swaziland was also an island instead of nestling between it and Mozambique. But I was surprised that the notion of South Africa surrounding another country came as a surprise to him. I always remembered it just because it is a globally unique configuration. No it's not: Italy contains Vatican City and San Marino.
Another reason I stopped playing is that I'm still no better at knowing capitals. Those countries with two capitals, like Bolivia, or three, like South Africa--I mock them. But I can't find any games to teach me those, and previously I learned by pairing in incessant writing the country and capital. That's also how I learned French and Latin and Russian and Old English vocabulary, and I wonder to this day how much sank it by staring at the pairs as I wrote and how much by the muscle memory of writing. It did work then (well, not for Russian), but now a game would be funner.
Aha! A hangman game of countries and capitals, but you have to click on the letters instead of type them: primitive.
Um. Today I called a company about the shipping time on an order I'd placed: I wanted to know if it considered Colorado to be in the midwest or the west. I grant that my knowledge of physical geography is pointlessly not backed up with knoweldge about countries' histories and interrelationships, but the woman I spoke to asked, "Is Colorado near Ohio?" I don't think she was from India because her voice was distinctly natively Usan, not blandly non-British. If I have too pointlessly little, she has too pointlessly none.
I usually say I'm not competitive (except about Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit). However. Today I went back to the map game site because I guessed Liberia for Sierra Leone at the Geography Olympics. I know as much about what countries are bounded by which others as I currently need. But the map games have a new level now, with countries needing not only to be rotated to be correctly placed on a map but resized too, no names given. I do not need to identify countries by their shape, absent name or relative size, I tell myself firmly.
Bike to work and to gym. If the three legs are 8.3 miles, what are two? I have to use the triptometer again. RDC drove me home because I was going to be Productive tonight.
Swim 1050 meters. The last 50 don't count.
It was chilly this morning, chilly being relative and in this case 40 degrees, so I asked Kal for a ride. A good thing I did, too, because in the later afternoon, before my usual leaving time and toward Kal's, hail began to patter down. Little hail, smaller than M&Ms, and soft. But lots.
RDC wanted to go observe the end of R-months until fall with oysters, so we did that at Jax Fish House. I thought, eating one, that it was a little off; I also thought, with it in my mouth, that if it was going to kill me it already had. Then we had fried calamari, and this is not just fried squid. It is light and perfect and strips of body and curls of tentacles and has two exquisitely complementary sauces, a baked (?) lime and a sweetly hot chili.
Meanwhile, hail streamed down.
On the way home we stopped in Marczyk's for dessert and hail plummeted down, and we ate chocolate ganache squares in front of MASH and Northern Exposure while hail formed drifts outside and cloud-to-cloud lightning caused barely audible lightning.
It seems television, as well as music, stopped for me in the early 1990s. Or '80s. A friend once said she wanted some Joel in her perfect man mix of Chris and Ed. Not me: just Chris and Ed. The pickings are slimmer in MASH, but there's one easy answer: Sherman Potter.
Folktales from South America by, or collected by, Charles Finger. Llamas and magic and witches, oh my! Sadly insufficient parrots.
Two 3.6-mile city rides. Possibly I had the wind at my bike, but I zoomed on the homeward leg.
2000 meters. I need to track my time, too. I know I can swim a kilometer in 20', but I don't know how long I can sustain that pace.
Before Gym Foofy, when I swam in city pools, it was rare for me to log two kilometers in a 50' period: the difference being not having to share a lane with four or five other people.
Either in gratitude for my spendy order or because they know I'm a sucker, High Country Gardens offered me 10% off any additional order placed by 19 June. I did try to buy xeric tulips (did you know they exist?), because you can buy whenever for plants to ship later, but HCG is too wise for that. I am still going to buy a zillion tulip bulbs (from them or whoever) to plant this fall, even though I just bought yet more plants with the discount.
My overly enthusiastic spring pruning or the hail took out one of the two-year-old Salvia farinacea. Its siblings are coming up, and it still might grow from some roots, but hey, 10% off! Even though it's in the south garden that the white Achillea ageratifolia seems not to be thriving, the Lavandula x intermedia "Alba" will go in the north half because there is no white in that garden at all and only the foliage and ruby Centranthus ruber and peachy-orange Agastache rupestris relieve the eye from blue and lavender and violet (those pervese eyes that need relief from such colors). I moved the Artemisia versicolor into the main garden and it's still alive (two days without collapsing so far) and its hole against the south porch will be filled with Ribes odoratum, about 60 inches tall and wide. Supposedly it will set a currant-like fruit, edible to birds (and humans?), smell like cloves, and turn its leaves mahogany-red in fall. As long as its scent (clove) doesn't clash with the delicate hummingbird mint, redolent catmint, sage, and lavender, it and I should get along fine. Lastly, I splurged (relatively: each plant costs almost twice the median) on Symphytum grandiflorum because it's lovely and anything that can survive against the south fence, attacked by bindweed and receiving little sun, is something I want to try.
I told RDC we'd have to sell the house. The garden is just not big enough.
When Shadow was young, she would not explore the staircase. Eventually, she tried it out, getting herself upstairs, but for a while we had to carry her down. Staring down those 13 narrow wooden steps, her urge to please could not overcome her fear of that flight, what with her big paws and puppy clumsiness. Finally, she did it, with me by her side should she slip.
We now possess a rooftop evaporative cooler, hooray. Sometime soon we will remove the window unit, and RDC's office will have more light (though not air: I have to build a screen for that window) and the side of the house won't have a burl poking out.
The plumber suggested a mineral block to suppress mold and so forth. I'm not the one afraid of heights, so clearly I am the one to climb up to the roof and set the block into the drip tray. I've been wanting to climb around on the roof for a while anyway, but I have never quite understood how you get from ladder to roof. The plumber said over the top, which I hadn't thought of before, and so today, I went over the top. (Please excuse the WWI metaphor.) It's easy to lift a leg from the third-highest (highest permissible) rung over the gutter to the not-very-slanty roof and, another suggestion from the plumber, to fall forward.
I did that, scrabbled up, removed one side panel (the downhill one, which is Wrong because you lift the panel down which means your weight goes down and the drop is down too), placed the block, and scrabbled backward toward the ladder.
I felt a lot like my three-month-old dog.
Stepping on the topmost rung is no good: it's not just that the safety label says not to, it's that weight on that rung could tilt the ladder and I had no reward like an intercostal clavicle to make it worthwhile. If you fall forward to get on the roof, do you fall backward to get on the ladder? Yii. I turned left, my right, stronger, dominant side to the roof, left hand on the left stile, right foot gripping the sole of my right boot, whole soul hoping that boot had all the gription it ought, left foot out yii out yeepers out to the second rung. After that I was fine.
I tried to give blood today. The screening nurse who poked my finger to test my blood for hemoglobin or some measure by which 49 was excellent also took my pulse. Then she took it again because, she said, the first time was 48. So was the second time. If it didn't increase to 50 beats per minute by the time I reclined in the chair, I couldn't donate. I strolled around the room until a chair was available, but the lamprey nurse said she had to take a resting pulse and, three minutes later when she measured it, it was still 48. I returned a couple of hours later when the screener again counted it at 48.
I am the undead.
The problem, I suspect, is that I regularly push my heart way past what I ought to. Eighty percent of my alleged maximum heart rate is 147, and while I don't think the grip-sensors in gym cardio machines are exact, they do regularly indicate 170+. I sweat, and I breathe hard, and I flush, but I don't turn scarlet, I don't struggle for breath, and I don't fall over, so I have figured this is okay.
It's okay, except it renders me incapable of donating blood. Forty-eight beats per minute: I don't need my heart to be that strong.
So today I tried a different machine where ingrained habit wouldn't make me feel lazy for not exerting myself at the usual level. I used a stairmill, an escalator type deal where, unlike with an elliptical or climber, I do have to lift my entire weight. It's uphill, of course, so I didn't feel it in my knees so much.
Stairmill, 30', 120 floors.
I did feel it more in my quadriceps and lungs. I wonder if this is why exercise hasn't led to weight loss: I have been training my heart muscle but not the big fat-containing and -burning muscles in my buttocks and legs.
Afterward, leg presses, 3x12 @90 and 1x12+ @100, which is where I'll stay for a while because subsequent increases are at 20-pound increments, not 10-; assisted chin-ups, with I think 140 pounds or 90% of assist; abdominal leg-lifts to exhaustion (a dozen! my goodness, what strong abs you don't have!); and 50 crunches on an incline bench.
More biographical and less political history than I would have preferred, but still interesting. French names given in proper French were difficult for my wooden ear to distinguish among.
Another concept besides political maps over time that could be rendered in Flash is the genealogical histories of European (and other) royalty. Because the 17th is my least favorite century of the modern period, I know nothing of the War of the Spanish Succession. I haven't encountered it much because--I think?--England, the only country I pay attention to, was too busy with its tedious later Stuarts and Roundheads and hiding in oak trees to be much involved. But I should pay more attention. I have a couple of books about the Hapsburgs (am I supposed to spell it with a b instead of a p? meh) and possibly I should read those.
I cannot recommend this audio production. It didn't suck, as Flo Gibson sucks, as the Blackstone production of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee sucks, but the beginning and end of each chapter had music, which was annoying. The narrator was a man, despite Nancy Mitford probably being female, and not so much of the tale was told from Louis XIV's personal point of view to justify it either.
Wednesday I choreographed carefully. I had a doctor's appointment at 3:00, a haircut at 4:30, and Haitch was at a conference in Colorado Springs. After Janelle released me from her expert hands, I rushed home to feed Blake and then leave him, squeaking sadly, behind. He wanted to see his Auntie Haitch too.
I ate with John Leonard at the bar while Haitch finished up with her colleagues, and then we crashed on her hotel bed to discuss stick insects, maternity clothing, and child-bearing hips. She has a belly because she is going to provide me with another sprout come August, and she has the prettiest five-month curve I have ever seen.
As far as Haitch visits go, it wasn't very long, but also it happened at all instead of not, so that was good. It had rained on the way down and I had to leave at 9 to get up in time for last-minute fussing, and it rained and also snowed on the way back. But I got to see my pregnant Haitch.
When I am in Europe, I expect tobacco (and in Amsterdam, marijuana) smoke and, less so than previously but still, a certain amount of body odor. Getting there was something else. I landed in Detroit and had just enough time before my flight to track down some TCBY. I ate that on the gangway, and moving along the gangway took that much time even though I was in the back of the plane and shouldn't've had zillions of people ahead of me. I was in my seat, earplugs in, suitcase stowed, book to hand, and an attendant announced they were about to close the doors when a last passenger dashed onto the plane. As he side-stepped along the aisle, I decided he must be my window-seat-mate. He looked like Tommy Chong, whose character on "That '70s Show" cracks me up, so that was fine. Looking like Tommy Chong leads, as I should have realized before his closing the distance between us made evident, to smelling like Tommy Chong too. The man reeked of tobacco in a way I am accustomed to the unwashed homeless reeking. I didn't sit back down but fled to the service area to ask to be reseated. While one attendant looked, another attendant arrived me and asked what I was doing. I told him, and he knew immediately: "Oh, you were in 43B?" So it's not just that I am a wilting flower but that passenger was an Airborne Toxic Event.
I am pretty sure that sitting next to Mr. Bhopal 1984 would have been worse than sitting immediately behind the cryingest toddler ever, the sort who would, having wound down, realized he had wound down and so wind back up again. My earplugs are not as effective as I could wish. Neither was the melatonin. I know I slept some, because I had a crazy dream involving Jessie and flying kites, but not much. I recited, like Proginoskes and the stars, countries and capitals. Once I didn't even finish South America before I was asleep.
