House:
Garden
Errands
Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
I don't remember arriving in France in 2003 because I was the closest to being asleep on my feet I think I have ever been. Arriving in London in 2001, we shuffled through more than an hour of queuing for customs. My first impression of the Netherlands was thus positive, because after landing at 7:15 a.m. I strolled through customs, tra la, without a line. That was good, because my next absolute encounter, with the train-ticket machine (the use of which I had practiced online, since it is the one thing in the Netherlands not available in English), was less wonderful. I could not use my MC debit card as a credit card, and it didn't work for the man behind me (who was Dutch, as I should have guessed from his ginormous stature, and English-speaking, as was almost everyone we encountered). So I bought my ticket from a human, and asked another human which track ("spoor," which interests me as a cognate, since the spoor of an animal is its track with an implication of poop) I should take. I found Spoor Een, but I just kinda got on the train without checking its direction. I had been on the train for several minutes and the buildings were getter smaller and sheep began to appear. Huh. I was, in fact, headed to Utrecht. Aha. I disembarked at the next stop and found the one Dutch person who does not speak English: I asked the ticket-clerk if she spoke English and she said, "A little." I bought a ticket to go to Amsterdam and asked which spoor. She showed me her outstretched hand, and I wasn't sure if she was telling me the minutes I had to wait or the track number. But the biggest help to get me to Amsterdam was just getting on a train that pointed the other way.
It would have been hard even for me to mistake Centraal Station for anything else. I asked another helpful information clerk how to find the Damrak and scampered thither, wheelie bumping over cobblestones. I got to the hotel by 9:15, swapped some stuff in my bags (ditching comfy socks, eyemask, and iPod, and fetching camera and sunglasses), left RDC a message, and scarpered in the direction of the Anne Frank Huis. I had an idea, from the scales on maps, that the city is about the size of my left thigh, but that idea hadn't sunk in quite enough. It doesn't have to be a 45-minute walk from the Dam to the Secret Annex, but I overshot considerable-like and then backtracked.
The first stop in my wandering would have been Nieuwkierk, but it was closed against Queen Beatrix's arrival later that afternoon. Cool: royalty.
An acquaintance of mine told me that her father thought the diary was not entirely genuine. Not that it was faked, as Holocaust-deniers allege, but that the writing is not that of a 13-year-old girl. I wonder if he had seen her handwriting. I saw it. I also saw her wee bedroom, Peter's alcove, the bookcase'd staircase, and what I hope is still the same chestnut tree flowering in the garden. I listened to the diary as an adult rather than rereading it obsessively as a child, so I didn't have the houseplans memorized. Of course: the annex did not face the canal but the garden. Several tall, narrow houses--ten or so on a side?--form a square. Their fronts face streets or canals and their backs share an enclosed space. I don't know if each has its own sliver of garden or if they all share it in common, but that's where the chestnut grew. I thought of Francie and the Tree of Heaven as well.
After more wandering and lunch in a cafe whose tables teetered on a cobblestoned bridge, I retreated to the hotel. It was 1:00, and aside from RDC's arrival around 3:00 I was unaware of that part of the planet outside my duvet for the next five hours.
In the evening, we wandered and finally found the Leidesplein. Preparations for Koninginnedag--lots of stalls and outdoor concerts--threw RDC off his bearings and it took a while to find the exact street he wanted. We ran it to earth finally and had a filling if not scrumptious Tibetan dinner. We began to walk through the Dam just as the orchestra set up outside Nieuwkierk finished its piece and the royal family processed into place. We did not see them in the flesh, but we did arrive just in time to watch on massive screens. The elite in the secure area rose from their seats at her arrival; hoi polloi in the square raised their drinks.
And the morning and the evening were the first day.
30 April is Koninginnedag, Queen's Day. The current queen's, Beatrix, birthday is not 30 April but on some seasonally less appealing date, so she observes her mother's day. And so does everyone else. I have never seen so much green in Boston on St. Patrick's Day as I saw orange on this day. The streets and canals pulsed with people and boats wearing inflatable orange crowns, moose antlers, arrows through the head, Gilligan caps, clown wigs, leis, grass skirts, nail polish, hose, rugby shirts, streamers, bunting, and balloons. The orange has to come from the same family color as makes Ireland see red, and it's a hideous color anyway, and overall there was so much orange that I saw blue after-images for hours. Weeks later, the correct metaphor occurred to me: the entire country looks like Home Depot. Next time I am going to wear a smock and carry a five-gallon bucket.
A benefit to everyone getting drunk in the street on orange beer (I exagerrate: only Usans color their beer) was that the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh were comparatively empty. Neither had a line. Much of the Rijks collection is in storage while the building is renovated, but I saw Rembrandt's The Night Watch and Vermeer's Woman Reading a Letter and View of Houses in Delft and especially The Kitchen Maid (The Love Letter is not in the selected display), and I marveled over the dollhouses. Despite its being only a partial display, I think I'm done: I don't often care for people or buildings in my paintings, Vermeer being an exception, and so whatever I am supposed to admire about Rembrandt I usually don't. The dollhouses (really, miniature actual houses and vanity pieces for housewives, not toys for children) were exquisite (plus I have that small=cute thing) but, yeah, people and buildings do not make for interesting art on the whole.
The Van Gogh is small and perfect. I still love Starry Night (which I've seen at the MoMA) and Wheatfields with Cypress, which I must have seen au Musée d'Orsay, but here I saw The Potato Eaters (people, but people with a purpose) and Wheatfield with Crows and Wheatfield with Thunderclouds and a Sunflowers and his bedroom at Arles and Trees and Undergrowth. I took a picture of an outdoor concert on the Museumplein from a window in the Van Gogh.
Koninginnedag was like St. Patrick's Day in Boston combined with the day after the World Series last year, minus the burning of couches (UConn after a basketball team won an NCAA tournament) or overturning of cars (Denver after the football team the Superbowl). Drunken buffoonery but no drunken brawlery. It was just a lot of fun energy.
In the evening we ate in a Japanese restaurant, seated at a table with four Usan men who were in Amsterdam for the weekend, for the party, before going to London to see Eric Clapton. They were...interesting, and fun, and the six of us were already obviously the Yanks in the joint long before the loudest said that Michael Jackson's comeback song was going to be a cover of Elton John's "Don't Let Your Son Go Down on Me," shocking me into an outburst of I-can't-believe-you-just-said-that braying.
Sunday we went to Keukenhof, 70 acres of tulips, daffodils, lilies, hyacinths, and 150-year-old beech trees. It was staggeringly beautiful and staggeringly crowded and blisteringly hot, way more than the "vingt trois" the Frenchie behind me in line for postcards and please more water claimed. It wasn't just that I had packed for Farenheit 50s and cloudy and that the press of people redefined clusterfuck ("kloosterfook") and that it was humid too. It was just fucking hot.
And goddamn loud. In the entrance was a giant, electric hurdy-gurdy that was blaring, as the entry crowd absorbed us and spat us into the interior, "Summer Lovin'." Muzaked "Grease" was just not the right background noise, but, as RDC said, what else would tourists take photographs of if not this? On our way out, "Bohemian Rhapsody." When we were out of earshot of it, we were stalked by two different musterings of Canadian bagpipery. Bagpipes are ordinarily just fine by me--men in skirts: what can go wrong?--but they were only slightly less inappropriate than the gypsy van hurdy-gurdy. A measure of my grumptitude was that the sight of men in skirts did not make me happy: they wore kneesocks and made me feel hotter. I looked up animal group words for an appropriate one for bagpipers, and a mustering is a collection of storks. I don't know what Canadian bagpipers were doing in the Netherlands, but "mustering" is an appropriate term for them there.
It was hot and loud and crowded and I was parched and hungry, so four of my five senses had ruffled brows and wanted to run screaming. But my eyes, my eyes were happy. Fucking hot, goddamn loud, and absolutely stunningly beautiful.
We were possibly going to go to Den Haag after this for (I alleged) more than just my slavering over Girl with a Pearl Earring but by four o'clock we were completely done in. Eventually we ate reistafel in Kanijl and De Tijger: a whopping bowl of rice and a dozen smaller servings of meat, vegetables, and seafood, that add up to a bulimic nightmare.
Monday was, thank heavens, cool again, and misty to the point of rain. We visited the Stedelijk CS. It too is being renovated so the temporary location has one work per year from 1875 to 2005. In this museum I felt guiltless for just walking past a piece if it didn't immediately appeal to me. RDC liked it better, as we both expected.
Then we took a canal boat tour, which was required on our visas. I kid. It was touristy as hell but I liked it.
Tuesday I left for home and RDC for South Africa, which (well, Cape Town to start) he reports is breathtaking. I spent two days traveling for four days in the Netherlands: South Africa is two days each way. Next time.
Threescore pictures and six, including the above, are here.
When we got back from the vet and Blake had had snacks (including toast), he begged for the reading chair in the living room. Instead I offered him my lap in RDC's office, and he is now tucked.
I missed my little buddy.
I am not old yet, I know, but I am definitely changing. I always thought I would look more like my mother as I aged, but right now I look a lot more like my father. In every single photograph of me in the Netherlands, I wonder if my mother was in the room when I was conceived. She was, because I have Granny's eyes, but otherwise I'm Dad. Partly it's that fat makes my face look more round, more like Dad's, than the rectangle that is my mental image of myself and that my mother carries.
I have my grandmother's eyes, and the texture of my skin is changing.
I still like my profile best.
I turn 37 in less than three weeks. I still look best with a dog. Edited: this is not my dog. It is someone else's dog in someone else's house. The big clue to its not being my house is the crocheted afghan in plain sight.
As I knew but hoped against, History of the Siege of Lisbon is not a travel book. If all that travel time were actually a single stretch, I could read a challenging book, but it's not and I can't, not when jet noises distract and the only time I read on vacation is before sleep: that doesn't work for Saramago. On the way home, then, in Memphis, I bought the one trade paperback available that vaguely interested me: Christopher Paolini's Eragon.
Eragon to Aragorn is too small a jump. The true names of things and being unable to lie in that language and dragon is straight out of Earthsea, and if Ursula LeGuin took it from somewhere else, I didn't realize it when I first read her in...1992, and it hasn't seemed derivative since either. His languages--three, for pity's sake--have even more random punctuation than '80s glam-metal bands.
People saying "She don't" or "I seen" or writing "I should of done" doesn't bother me nearly as much as their slavishly following a rule they don't understand. Much worse than "between you and I" is the misuse of "whom"; in Eragon I stopped actively counting at five. Sometimes Paolini used it correctly (e.g., "You saw whom?"), but it seemed to my reflexively and by this point excessively critical eye that he got it wrong more often than right.
In the sentence "You must deliver this sword to whoever can best wield it," the object of the preposition "to" is the entire dependent clause "whoever can best wield it"; the clause, comprising a subject and predicate, takes a subject, not an object, pronoun: who, not whom. Paolini used "whom[ever]" in like constructions.
The author was homeschooled in beautiful but relatively remote Montana, right? His Alagaësia reminds me very much of the homeschooled Yorkish Brontës' Angria and Gondal.
Only a vague interest, it only vaguely paid off. I wish I were better about putting a book down a fifth of the way through.
Kal hosted me for dinner cooked by her newish boyfriend Ziggy, and we played Cranium afterward. The instructions call for teams of at least two, but what the hell. One would read a card, the second would perform the task and would progress based on whether the third got it. For the record, I cannot hum Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion," the only words of which I know are the title two. The hum kept sliding into "Sweet Home Alabama," "Smoke on the Water," and "Walk This Way." I can hum "Stayin' Alive," or at least someone can guess what I mean when I flaut the rules and gesture, if pointedly pointing my chin up and right or down and left like John Travolta counts as gesturing.
There was chaos and hilarity, of course, as these things dictate. My spelling words were ridiculous, like "larva," and I dropped my head to the table with a clunk when this question a) was included at all and b) as a multiple choice: "Stars trace a circular path through the sky because of Earth's rotation on its axis/ Earth's revolution around the Sun/ I forget the third choice/ the galaxy's rotation on its axis." Oh, the humanity.
The funniest thing during the evening was not Kal's shut-eye drawing of a stick shift that looked like a priapus, especially after she added action arrows spurting from the knob much more indicative of ejaculate than of a standard transmission. The funniest thing was Marlowe the cat. He had wanted On the table during dinner (Ziggy made stuffed shells) but was not allowed; after dinner he figured he was sure to be allowed On. He launched up, landed front paws on the edge ready to scoot forward when his back legs followed, but before his eyes on the table lay the Cranium box, not heavy or overtall but unexpected. His hind legs now arrived on the table edge, but instead of continuing the propulsion of his noggin into the box, he abruptly dropped to the floor. We cracked up, me braying. Ziggy considered which was funnier, the cat or my laugh. I love people who appreciate my laugh.
(Of the four Yank drunks we were seated with at the Amsterdam Japanese restaurant, one looked like Dick Cheney so it was awhile before I got past that. The final straw that got me past it was his complimenting my laugh.)
Cranium was fun, if not nearly as challenging as I had hoped. I won, even though I couldn't guess Imelda Marcos ("look at my shoes!") and had no idea whether the Chicago Cubs had ever won the World Series.
I bought some (not too many many) more plants because High Country Gardens offered me 10% off. They arrived yesterday, and today I unpacked them, and there was another 10% coupon. I'm wise to them now though.
Three of the five Achillea ageratifolia in the south half aren't doing so well, so I added Lavandula x intermedia Alba to that garden. That might not be such a hot idea: if the yarrow is failing to thrive, it's probably the Nepeta catmint's fault, taking over the planet as it's doing. Baby plants might not make it against plants in their fourth growing season. But Lavender Smells Good is my motto, and the garden needs some white to set off the blue catmint and purple penstemon, so I shoved those in. To give them some space, I halved a catmint.
Part of the occasionally xeric landscaping at Dot Org is a shrub that ÜberBoss identified as a butterfly bush. It wasn't--butterflies might like it, but it's not the same thing as Buddleia alternifolia. Last spring I saw a tub of it at Home Depot and snatched it up, obtaining both plant and name. And aha, High Country Gardens does sell Caryopteris x clandonensis, but the catalog photograph only shows the color of the blossom--blue violet, which I had noticed--not a single blossom's shape, and I was attracted to its scent as well as its color. Now three more have joined last year's shrub as newlings.
I think the Artemisia versicolor has survived its transplanting, and once again I cleared the bit against the south porch, including a two-year-old clipping of catmint that, like its brethren, threatens to take over the planet. I killed that entirely, feeling much guiltier about the worm I accidentally half-severed with the trowel than about the plant (catmint is the garden's sourdough proof, I am convinced), and placed Ribes odoratum, clove-scented currant, which, if it lives, will be a good size against the porch wall.
To the north garden I added three more Salvia farinacea. The impetus for the whole order was that one of the three-year-olds did not appreciate my overenthusiastic shearing this spring (that was the impetus; the justification was the 10% off).
Two of the brand new Salvia dorrii didn't make it, but the nursery will replace anything that dies before 90 days. All three Centranthus ruber are about to bloom, as is the Scabiosus; the Veronica oltensis is a riot of blue and the Vinca major is busting out all over. Both the Cerastium tomentosum and Erodium chrysanthum are beginning to bloom. The former abuts Veronica oltensis and both are spreading; I prefer the latter but suspect snow-in-summer is the more aggressive.
Gregor has new leaves, though it doesn't look as strong and its leaves are not as big as those of the neighbor's maple sapling. The rowan looks like it will set berries this year, which will make the winter's starlings and flickers happy.
In back, the Mexican sunflowers and bachelor's buttons are beginning to sprout around the olive stump, as are the Romaine lettuce, nigh-spinach in the vegetable garden, and peas nearby along the south fence. No carrots in the vegetable garden yet, and no squash under the cherry tree.
So far in the south fence are peas near the vegetable garden, and then the stretch where I'll expend water on non-edibles because they're in the shade of the south fence and benefit from that neighbor's enthusiastic watering. There are two spreading and three new "Lucerne" blue-eyed, three new Pulmonaria longiflora, three two?-year-old Aquilegia formosa, and the most recent order's big splurge of six Symphytum grandiflorum.
This morning I woke before 7 and read and fell back asleep until the phone rang. My father asked if he'd woken me, because it was 9. Nine my time, really? But I was out until midnight so maybe that's not so bad. We talked for an hour after that, so I didn't get outside until 10:30 or so. It was beautiful, sunny and 60 with cumulus clouds, but I had planted exactly one plant, the currant, when a stormfront rolled over. I put Blake's cage through the dishwasher waiting for the thunder and slight rain to pass, and tried to called Haitch's shower but I didn't have the right in-law's number and another in-law quite sensibly had her phone turned off, and did some laundry. The rest of the plants went much faster after the first, which had required the clearing of a grassy patch. At least it was only grass, not bindweed, and I hope the one tulip there survives, and I tried to spare the grape hyacinth. The Caryopteris x clandonensis required removing some sod as well, but I could do that bluntly with a hoe instead of restrictedly in the angle of the porch while trying to be nice to the bulbs. I should have smothered the grass to weaken it previously, but for now I hoed out some and lay all the detritus from the porch garden atop the rest for clearing later this month.
One more rain suggested a short break before I finished around 4. Blake and I had a shower, with him not sure at the start but soon enthusiastic, and pleasant blow-drying afterward (he loves to be blow-dried). Since then we've been preening and reading, and one of us has had his head pet a lot and the other has been sneaking snorts of freshly-washed cockatiel dust. Pretty much a perfect day.
In the morning I read Briar Rose, and in the afternoon Kal and I went to the Botanic Gardens. We had blown off the plant sale the two days previous, but more important was its being lilac season. We had a blanket, books, fruit, and chocolate, and we read on a spatch of ground under the lilacs. Also we talked, and also we called our mothers, it being Mother's Day.
(I miss using "spatch," and not using it means I don't have any spatches. My other current spatch is on the grass at the break of the otherwise semi-circular parapet that bounds the Dot Org patio. I have other spots--under the cherry tree, on the floor between the couch and the bookcase, on the porch swing--but no other spatches. City Park is too full of goose shit for good spatching.)
Before we left we ambled through other parts of the garden. The Botanic Gardens grows lilypads in a series of connected waterways (which might be ponds if they didn't have concrete or stone bottoms). Seemingly grounded walkways separate them, but there are culverts connecting them. On a rock in the middle of one roosted on one leg a mallard duck, beak in wing, and with, we counted, six ducklings underneath her. On another rock the drake also rested. Little heads, little wings, big feet, and oo! such irresistible yet ethically untouchable down. The drake flew off, and two little ones detached themselves from the pile and dropped into the water.
Of course, I had thought of bringing my camera, but because Saturday's weather changed all day, today I brought my parka, leaving no room. Not having pictures of flowers or of Kal is one thing. Not having pictures of ducklings is another matter.
These ducklings were so young they were no bigger than their eggs. If they were two days old I'd be surprised. Can they swim that well so fast? Be so adventurous so quickly? They were so young they didn't know how to sleep yet. One's head drooped forward, forward, as it fell asleep, until it rested on the tip of its beak. Several stretched their little legs out and then forgot to draw them back under their bodies. The sleeping ones were awfully cute and and the swimming ones were terribly cute and we watched and cooed.
When do you use "adventuresome" and when "adventurous"?
Eventually all the babies woke up and swam with their mother, and when they had sorted themselves out they were nine. The two most adventuresome had swum under our feet, through a dark low tunnel, to the next pond, and when the whole clutch were in the water, the duck changed ponds by walking (too big to fit through the culverts) and the ducklings paddled under her feet. Maybe they were older than we hoped, because she must have taught them that through how many repetitions?
How can ducklings be so cute and grow up to be just ducks, and how can cockatiel babies be so very ugly, undercooked dinosaurs with hedghog spikes, but grow up to be parrots? It is a mystery.
I liked Jane Yolen's retelling quite a bit. The tone that must be de rigeuer in her other, fantasy books intruded only a couple of times, and it was an inventive retelling though a lot more obvious through the reader's one hearing than it seemed to be through the characters' multiple rehearings.
Poor Blake. Yesterday he not only had a long day alone with me at work, but also suffered through a post-work errand to the plant store, where I bought some annuals, including tomatoes. So when I came home, I gave him dinner but then brought him outside, where he had to stay in his cage some more.
In the pots on the porch columns I put red flowering tobacco, Crayola violet-red pansies, white snapdragons, violet petunias, and, new to me, bacopa, with lots of small lavender flowers. I watered all the newlings again and observed new growth on the Agastache x blue fortune (planted 16 April) and the lack of death in everything planted since then. (I had already noticed the death of the Salvia dorrii, about which I must call HCG.) In back I planted several varieties of tomatoes in the north frame and a couple of cucumbers at the far (east) end of the south fence. I have another tomato to put in a patio pot and some basil to plant, but that's for later, because by this time, sunset, Blake had had quite enough, thank you.
We went in and showered and ate peanut butter toast and read, not Saramago but a reread of a trashy novel. Luxury.
I have got to stop. Yesterday at the grocery store I bought a pot of lavender petunias to hang from the porch beam and five more annuals to put into one window box. I don't even know their names or whether they're compatible. What I know is "Pretty! Shiny!" So I have one window box (on the porch wall) with two violet-flowering things on either side of, get this, an orange-flowering thing. The orange flower is vaguely daisy-shaped and not Koninginnedag orange but a softer hue.
I had promised Blake that I would be home right after the grocery run and that we would spend the evening together, but instead I subjected him to another 30 minutes of cagefulness. At least he likes to be outside--and doesn't understand that much English--and the next two days are supposed to be rainy and chilly so I will certainly not garden but instead clean the house. He doesn't like the vacuum and he is scared of brooms and mops and he falls in love with rags and he is not allowed to be with me when I scrub the bathroom so it'll be another fun-packed evening for him.
After the planting (and my sternly telling myself that that's it for the season, and droolingly anticipating fall so I can plant bulbs, so that the only difference between Formigny and Keukenhof will be scale, ahem), I took pictures of the house, because I love my house and I love my garden. I was on the other sidewalk to get the whole shebang in the frame when my new neighbor walked by with her dog.
"It looks great," she said, so of course I think she has fabulous taste. My garden is one thing I can readily accept a compliment about without thinking someone is being wrongheaded or just polite.
"Are you Name?" I asked, because I had only met her once before and wasn't sure if this was the new neighbor. Yes, she was, and I repeated my name. I didn't tell her that my guess that she is New Neighbor Named X was based on her dog, whom I did remember: black and white but pointer-furred and -shaped, named Dodger.
For several months, the three pictures here have reigned as my favorites. Now they have a companion. Haitch was given a baby shower on Saturday. I couldn't go but dispatched Leo to bring some gifties.
Bill Bryson is American yet this book's narrator is British. The cosmological stuff twisted my head, the anthropological stuff particularly intrigued me, and the last chapter, entitled "Good-bye" and about all the species we've managed to destroy--even, until tragically recently, by naturalists who wanted to study them--saddened me.
There. Four whole lines. I finished the book on the 11th yet I write this on the 13th. If I cease to use this space even as a log (not a log of the web, but a log of my reading and exercise), then that's that.
The two plants in the one window box are Heliotropium arborescens and Osteospermum "Orange Symphony."
My latest indoor plant (which I expect to die) is Exacum: sturdy green little leaves and lavender flowers with a yellow inside. Of the two plants with variegated foliage I bought last year, one has done well, and the other has died and its replacement is also not doing well. Is the pot cursed? Do you really have to wash a pot between plants? They live in dirt, after all.
Today was one of those maintenance days. I deadheaded the Exacum and hanging petunias, dug a border in along the north boundary and grassed the bishop's weed, mowed and weedwacked, and mulched around the Caryopteris clandonensis and Agastache x blue fortune. I moved the basil from pots into the north frame because RDC reminded me it dries out too fast in pots. And I put cages around the tomatoes, weeded the south fence, and raked up sunflower husks to add to the lasagne mulch (which is in serious need of greens): it did so well over the winter that the only uncomposted element is sunflower seeds, so adding more wasn't that bright.
It wasn't so stupid, either. Despite the cool, relatively damp spring and the good snowpack making this a good year to replace the grassesque with a more apt sod, we've been considering that it would be best to replace the patio and walkway before the sod, so the one process doesn't undo the other. So I have a while to cook another lasagne, and then the new sod will have lots of yummy new loam to nourish itself with.
Besides the mowing, I don't see a lot of difference. When you dust, you see a difference, but it doesn't last; when you weed, you see a difference, but it doesn't last. But if you don't dust or weed, you regret it. So tedious.
Kal had had me read the introduction and tulip chapter of Michael Pollan's book before going to Amsterdam, and on their strength I was certainly looking forward to the other parts.
I knew that apples don't grow true to their parents from seeds, but hadn't made the connection that Johnny Appleseed's trees were therefore not yummy eating apples but for cider. Pollan makes a good argument for John Chapman's therefore being America's Dionysus. Another connection I hadn't made was that since apples are all so closely related, being grafted specimens, they have not evolved as have their bacteria and insects, so apple growers apply a lot of poisons to combat these vermin. Excellent. Apples came from Kazakhstan (and still do): it is their center of genetic diversity and might save American trees (all of which come from a wee narrow slice of the apple's possible genetic diversity).
The tulip: the streaking of color that cultivators tried to replicate came from a virus. Cannabis: it's become so potent over the past few decades as a direct result of the drug war (just as Prohibition turned the U.S. from a cider- and beer-drinking country to a gin-swilling one). That much I knew from Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness.
The last chapter, on potatoes, interested me second only to apples (maybe because I am American first and Irish second). Pollan planted Monsanto's patented, genetically modified NewLeaf potatoes and contemplates the Inca's surviving on a host of different types of potato to suit their array of microclimates versus Ireland's population boom reliant on, and doomed by, exactly one, also cloned, variety.
Tulipomania is interesting but not vital, and cannabis took the author to flights of historical fancy (and fact): the apple and the potato gave me the most food for thought. They were good follow-ups to Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything, whose last chapters dealt with Earth's genetic diversity and balance.
I biked today for the first time since mid-April. Across an intersection I saw a car with its hazards on. When I got alongside, I asked the driver if she was okay, needed a phone. She was fine, thank you. That's something I wouldn't've done in a car.
At work, Intern had me look up when HBO would show a boxing match (I have to look it up so he doesn't see anything about the bout ahead of time). Somehow this eventually led to his saying about my not watching Oprah, "I thought she had a lock on you guys." Apparently he didn't know that not "all women" watch her show "religiously." I told him I ought to smack him for that. But then I admitted that--had he heard of the time she gave everyone a car? yes?--I did watch that footage online, because that was happifying. And that I had once watched, if not Oprah, a soap opera; but I had an excuse: it was Luke and Laura's perihelion. He hadn't heard of them, but I told him that if in 1978 I could know about Leon Spinks, he would have known about Luke and Laura.
From behind us, Ernie said wonderingly, "Did you just say Leon Spinks?" He was amazed that I knew a boxer. (Hey, "Evander Holyfield" is one of my favorite names!) After we pulled him onto the boxcar of our conversation, the three of us talked about the movie "Ali" and Intern offered that he just saw "Cinderella Man" and current movies led to my other confession, which is that I am going to see "Revenge of the Sith" on Thursday.
So then we all got to complain about the second trilogy, which Ernie hasn't seen any of. I told him that of the two, only the second offers only about 45 seconds near its end that is worth watching, of Yoda getting medieval on Christopher Lee. Ernie of course recognized the "Pulp Fiction" allusion and gratifyingly thought that was pretty funny.
Late last week as I didn't clean the house as much as I had planned to for RDC's return but instead reread trashy novels, I hated myself and the world and was in a really pissy mood. Mid-cycle or because I wasn't regular with my medication while traveling? I wish I knew. Since Friday, though, I have been happy, happy to have RDC home, happy to garden, happy to sit under the cherry tree and read, happy to alphabetize the CDs* onto the shelves of the television shrine while watching a few episodes from Buffy's second season, happy to have inane conversations about boxing and Oprah with my coworkers, happy that someone might mock me knowing Leon Spinks's name but then laugh at my suggestion of Yoda with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.
Ha! Except later, Kal was debating what to get her parents for their wedding anniversary. What, anything besides a card? I asked, "Is it a big number?" meaning 25 or a number ending in 0. She calculated, "2005, 1968..." and I grinned, because that is an obvious calculation for me, and she continued, "Yeah, 37 is a pretty big number." I chuckled through my grimace, and she tried to dig herself out by saying it's a long time to be married, not a long time to be alive. That's a new downside to a friend so significantly younger than myself, whereas my making myself incomprehensible through dated pop cultural referents is my own fault.
* finishing with the classical, RDC has now stored electronically all our music.
My sister bought her house! Yes indeed. She wanted some help identifying weeds in her garden, so I found a UConn site with weed flashcards (I have a lot of prostrate spurge and roundleaf mallow and some bull thistle in addition to bindweed; dandelions are not a weed). I recommended the UConn Cooperative Extension Center to her and added something, meanly and obviously unnecessarily but this is my sister, about how our mother spoke of their helpfulness and knowledgeability and, I therefore assumed, how much they must have dreaded her calls.
CLH replied, "with the UConn extension, can I email the appropriate person with a description and ask? and were you serious about BJWL, wouldn't that have been a toll call...what if they kept her on hold."
Ha! So I replied with perhaps the longest single sentence I have ever run:
You mean like the time the summer after I broke up with SSP and she called me at work in Waterford to tell me she had fetched the mail and he had written me a letter and by the time the call was transferred to me who was not at my phone at my desk in JBM's office but somewhere else legitimate so that the switchboard tried Westinghouse first and then Engineering and maybe CHC's assistant whom I also worked for and finally into some other office of which I would have zero memory except that this is where I was run to earth and I picked the phone up and the first thing I heard was BJW, expecting that this was the switchboard again, irritatedly saying, "You know this is a toll call that I'm paying for" as if it were the switchboard's fault I was an office floater and I said "Hi Mom" because who else would it be and she, having called as if in kindness to tell me I had a letter from my dumped and now regretted exboyfriend but not in so much kindness that three minutes of paying for a toll call hadn't already taken its...toll, now made her call even longer by telling me her story of switchboard woe before finally getting around to telling me why she had called in the first place, which intent didn't do a pisscup's worth of good for my state of mind, already poor, because I was an utter wreck for the next three hours until I could get home to read the thing. Hence why I never give her my work numbers anymore. She used to call me for no good reason at all at Phoebe too.
I just made up "pisscup."
Oh, and my freshling dorm had a switchboard too. There was one phone in each of the six floors' three sections, for incoming or campus calls. She had called me I don't know how many times and the switchboard had picked up so she paid for the connections before being switched up to 4S where someone would pick up, knock on my door, and rouse no one, probably deliberately wasting her money. When I came back from wherever, I took a shower, so that the next time she called that afternoon (what was her name, the woman at the end near the phone who therefore always had to answer? poor thing), someone said I was in the shower, which the neighbor dutifully reported to BJWL, and since I was physically present, the neighbor then was commanded to go into the bathroom to alert me, where I protested I was in the shower, whereupon the next step was that I should just wrap a towel around myself and get to the phone pronto. This in itself was pretty damn funny, since I did not have a bathrobe freshling year (do you remember you gave me your old Victoria's Secret peach terrycloth one by sophomore year, a good thing since then I was in a co-ed dorm) but the two towels she was least unwilling to risk to the rigors of campus living, worn to a crisp and waaay too small to "just wrap around myself" as I came to the phone. Once at the phone I asked for 30" to scurry to my room to put on actual clothes, she told me no because she had already called x times and had to pay for each call even though I wasn't there (this was a Saturday afternoon) and she had to tell me this even though, again, it made the call longer than it needed to be. Which was pretty damn short, since as I remember whatever it was she was calling to tell me was not, as she says, "earth-shattering."
Yet it was between the freshling year making me stand exposed dripping and lathery in the hall and the Millstone incident of 1991 that she expended next to no effort to track me down to tell me that Gram died in time for me to attend her funeral. NCS and I had gone to his house for the weekend, and that was a phone number she had. Although even if she had called there, I can just imagine the guilt I would have received from both ends, from the one for leaving school for the weekend (Labor Day weekend, before classes started, and I had been living with the Beasts for the past few weeks to work Add/Drop anyway) and being so very far away in time of crisis, and from the other for so selfishly wanting to leave his home to attend my great-grandmother's funeral. I was dependent on others for transportation in any event; do you think if NCS had been unwilling to chauffeur me and I had taken the train to Saybrook, anyone would have picked me up?
Yeah, I think that's how the extension office works. The Colorado one is downtown, near Dot Org's previous address. That used to be pretty convenient (yep, still--well, not bitter, but a tad resentful: working in the hinterlands has not yet become just a funny story, as these former resentments about our mother have). I used to go over and talk to them about dealing with bindweed and identifying trees and how to compost. But not all the time! Not in a bothersome way! Not demanding attention if they were otherwise occupied! I promise!
And huh, I hadn't thought of how BJWL would have dealt with calling Norwich. This could be one of the ways BDL has improved her general outlook and her stranglehold on her pursestrings.
Not, thank heavens, mine. I would be somewhat more somber and off my rocker were that the case.
Last night we ate on the patio, and as RDC grilled and I surfed, suddenly Blake, in his cage on the table under the umbrella, cocked his head to peer at something nearly beneath him and shrieked. "What's in the raspberries?" I asked. We looked: a baby starling.
Three years ago we stayed out of the backyard all one Saturday (scheduled to be the tomato-planting day) because parent starlings wouldn't attend to their fallen baby when we were in sight. They fed the thing all day, but later when I was in the grocery store and had called RDC to ask him about some item or other, I heard our buddy shriek and a whole bunch of other bird agitation: RDC said a crow had just swooped by the window (scaring Blake) futilely pursued by all the starlings in the neighborhood. When I got home, there wasn't much to throw away besides the feathers that I left where they had been torn out.
Last night there were no parent starlings around. The hatchling was nearly fledged and could get a couple of inches of loft before succumbing to a force greater than its own. Overnight it succumbed to a force greater than gravity: I spotted its little big-footed corpse on the walkway as I laced my bike shoes. I used a terracotta pot to transport it to the dumpster (is that why pots should be washed between plants?). Then, as I wheeled Shadowfax to the street, I saw another dead bird, this one a housefinch old enough to be male-colored, dead in the grass under the pear. So I've got that pleasant task awaiting me this afternoon. Is my feeder diseasing the birds? This is the fourth whole (not killed by a predator) dead finch I have found on my property in the past six months.
I called RDC from work to tell him the starling didn't make it and that I'd thrown it out but to beware of the still-there dead finch. He called me a while later to tell me a magpie was eating the squab from the pigeons' nest the neighbors never clear from their soffits. He knew that would cheer me up. And it did. The avian flu that I would prefer be responsible (rather than myself) for the finches' death killed a large fraction of my favorite local bird--it's been months since magpies made a daily appearance in my life--so I hope fresh warm squab offers a lot of yummy nutrition.
Revenge of the Sith: Nothing I say could spoil it, because you already know that Darth Vader is Luke and Laura's--sorry, Luke and Leia's--father, Senator Palpatine is the Emperor, and that Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader. Oh, you didn't? Where the fuck have you been?
A few impressions (where the fuck have I been?):
* Only when I was 15 and "Return of the Jedi" came out did I learn there was an Emperor.** Who would have thought, from "Star Wars" (which I will go to my grave not calling "A New Hope") and "The Empire Strikes Back," that Darth Vader didn't reign supreme?
** Maybe, if the Emperor was ever mentioned in the first two (was he?) I blocked him out, because Darth Vader was scary enough. This is kind of like Aslan being enough and the Emperor-over-the-Sea, whose son Aslan is, seeming like overkill.***
*** Narnia might have occurred to me because one of the plethora of previews was for "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," which will be out in December. I wonder how much it will suck and how much its production will derive from "Lord of the Rings." Confidence is high, however. I am a sucker.
(The movie is titled as Peter Jackson did his: "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Not "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew." Know why? Because to reorder a set of books, even if to the author's wishes, so that the first one explains the magic of the entire series, is to render the Chronicles lifeless. At least the movie industry is not so stupid. Also this titling implies that others might follow. I expect that "The Last Battle" might have a better movie audience than book audience, given that another preview was for "Revelations," which looked like either part of or distilled from the "Left Behind" drivels.)
Overall, much less sucky than the other two. It had more scenes of Yoda fighting, which seemed more natural and less deus ex machina than in "Attack of the Clones." It didn't have any goddamn stupid pod races or zipping through a Bladerunneresque city's air traffic or navigating a "Chicken Run" pie-making-machine gauntlet (to clarify: that was great in "Chicken Run"; in "Attack of the Clones," it was stupid and derivative).
Most of all, I wish I had been stronger and resisted going to the first in a theatre, which viewing compelled me to succumb to the subsequent two. "Sucking less" doesn't equate to "unsucky enough to be worth it."
P.S. Anthony Lane, I love you: "The general opinion of "Revenge of the Sith" seems to be that is marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes....True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion" (The New Yorker, 23 May 2005).
P.P.S. Anthony Lane, allow me my childhood heroes. He says, "...What's with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. 'I hope right you are.' Break me a fucking give." (Ibid.) Except that Yoda wasn't a childhood hero. I thought he was just a Muppet--and he was--and didn't come around to doting on him until the rerelease of "Star Wars" (which was, frankly, the first time I had thought of him in a zillion years). I need to introduce "break me a fucking give" into my idiolect.
Bike 8.3 miles and swim 2000 meters. I am not sure I have biked all five days two weeks in succession before. Yea me.
RDC rebuilt the server, hence the absence. No spam!
We looked at the new weblogging software in the new operating system, but it would have required a subdirectory called /weblog/. And howevermuch this site has decayed into a log of my daily life, like a captain's log of weather and knots, it is, I insist, an online journal, and is not and never will be a weblog, not even in its URL.
The past two weekends we have done house stuff galore. I am working on a Project that I will unveil in due time. Otherwise, weeding, trimming, cleaning, baking. I washed and ironed the curtains in the living and dining rooms, the den, and my study. The ironing allowed some Buffy watching, which was fun.
The new server is in the closet-under-the-stairs, so I repacked all the Yule decorations to make room. Kind of. I have a stack of boxes in the way, hoping to block some of its noise, that only needs to be scooted to one side. The machine had previously on the other side of the wall, in the television shrine; now it's behind a wall but louder.
I got rid of a Cassidy-load of cardboard, junk mail, and phone books, and a bunch of stuff to Goodwill. I wrapped some hardware boxes in old plastic dropcloths and shoved them into the rafters of the garage. The books multiplied, and I put the tall ones--yearbooks, picture books, Tintin--on the lowest shelf of one case, where they're behind arm of the futon frame. The next step will be to add the last shelf to another bookcase, whereupon all the shelves will be set just a little too close for books to be upright. The real problem is nonfiction. I can't wait for the breakfast nook and its shelves.
The other cosmetic change was to remove the worn, ripped carpeting from the porch. RDC patched it, the steps, and the sidewalk steps. We wanted to paint the concrete, but the cracking was insane and the patches would show. So we'll recarpet.
