House and garden:
Garden
Errands
Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
Bike 8.3 miles. Swim 500 meters. Only 500, but I worked on pulling through my torso and breathing every other stroke.
"Good title."
The investigative reporting, the deductions, the willingness of some to speak but not others, the squirmy lack of commenting by more, made this fascinating reading. The thing is, it was published in February 1974, and closes with an address to the nation by Nixon in which he says he'll never leave his responsibilities. Wasn't it August of 1974 when he resigned before being impeached?
Politics are dirty, sure, but I was grown before I knew that Nixon had been Eisenhower's vice president and thought that the outcome of the 1960 presidential election was false but didn't want to put the country through what it would go through 40 years later. So I didn't know how very much he wanted the presidency in 1968 and to keep it in 1972. Am I wishy-washy for simultaneously thinking "crook" and feeling a little sorry for him?
Haitch gave me this book for my birthday years ago--2000, 2001? Every birthday I think I ought to read it. Knowing who Deep Throat was made it a little less mysterious, but not less intriguing.
If Richard Bach had written The Little Prince.
Nah, I can't leave it at that. I know that Illusions is supposed to be cheesy now, and even on the peak of my Jonathan Livingston Seagull love I couldn't swallow the first pages of Bridge Across Forever, but Paolo Coelho is not as treacly as Bach. The young person questing for the meaning of life in the desert, though, and meeting different sorts of people, and sheep. If there had been baobab trees and I were de Saint-Exupéry (and not dead), I'd sue.
Before the book club meets on Wednesday, I will try to think of something more charitable to contribute.
We walked down to the Cherry Creek Arts Festival and I was going to buy The Alchemist from the Tattered Cover while we were there. But we passed the library and I darted in and found it. I am extremely glad I didn't buy it. The festival was okay, boilingly hot as usual, and we cooled down as soon as we left the commercial streets for the shaded sidewalks. It also began to rain, and the only amusing incident of either book or festival happened then. I tucked the book at the waist of my skirt, because nothing gets wet under the tit umbrella. Apparently this is an expression I had never used in RDC's hearing before.
Kayaking, kayaking, kayaking. I need to improve my technique and form, I'm sure, but I don't think I can improve on my preferred site. Grand Lake is so pretty.
Biked 3ish miles, whatever it is to the gym and back, and swam 2 miles (3.2K). I began to think I'd had enough at about lap 45, and Apple should really look into a waterproof iPod.
Saturday, boarding my kayak after lunch on an island in Dillon Reservoir, I fell and banged my right knee.
This morning, I stopped to fiddle with my front brake. I unlatched from my right clip easily enough but could not disengage from the left pedal. So over I fell, skinning my left knee, and the front cluster dug into my right calf as I fell so I look like I was clawed by a werewolf (a short one).
Both my knees have scabs on them! I'm fixed! Aiming (or lack of aiming?) in life always to have two scraped knees is probably neither dignified or ambitious or world-changing. But it's doable, and it's me.
Bike 8.3 miles and swim 1000 meters.
Also I finished The Amber Spyglass during the next hour, poolside.
A while ago Kal and I went to see "Ladies in Lavender" because of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. One of the trailers was for "March of the Penguins," which I would have forgotten about except that Jessie just reminded me. Kal and I will waddle over to watch the penguins marching at the Mayan (eh, the prepositional phrase follows the wrong verb, but alliteration is vital) next week.
Also Jessie's reminder brought up a kayaking tidbit.
I have a history of mistaking things on water for other things. It was my seeing the nearly-drowned tops of the pilings of a decrepit dock as ducks that made my mother realize I needed glasses. Saturday, kayaking on Dillon Reservoir, I saw...penguins. They were flocked like birds, white with black edges and tops like penguins, and bowling pin-shaped and pudgy and clumsy like penguins, and I guess I didn't Believe hard enough because the grown-up in my head could not reconcile these obvious penguins with anything that was likely to be at 7,000 feet on Dillon Reservoir, close to the continental divide of North America. They were up-ended Canada geese--fat white bellies, dark sides and tail.
This morning, after RDC roused Blake but before the latter had emerged from his boudoir, I disappeared into the bathroom. I was there long and quietly enough that Blake must have assumed I had left for the millet factory and so crawled up to RDC's neck for his morning nap. When I ran water, letting Blake now I was still home, he shrieked--right in RDC's ear--communicating with the errant of his flock.
Yesterday after work I stopped at a nearby store to order a pair of Dansko sandals. It took the clerks about nine years to place my order, but the shoes should arrive by next week. I love my brown ones but I want them in black, because I have become someone who wears black in the summer. I have a black dress with white polka dots and a black floral dress, both of which prefer a prettier shoe than my also-beloved Dansko clogs. The black microfibre mules I bought for Haitch's wedding I now hate (they're not particularly comfortable plus are loud on stairs) and with those two dresses, plus the dress for Haitch's wedding and an outfit based on my black linen skirt, I will be fully outfitted for the Big Top--four days of Dot Org working and socializing from 7 to midnight on one pair of shoes.
Shopping by bike continued zooward, where I did not find a zebra. Tapirs and meerkats made me covetous, and also a little perplexed: these more obscure animals, and regular elephants and lions, but no zebras?
Then I went home and melted. I am so glad to have the swamp cooler. It claims an extra shower's worth of water a day, but our water bills are quarterly so I haven't compared this latest period's usage to last year's. It uses less electricity but more water, of course, than air conditioning, and I am thinking of planting a tree--something ornamental, sure to stay small--where it drains.
I made pesto from the prolific basil and RDC made salad. Naturally Blake got his own piece of rotilli but then he needed salad too: no one had given him evening spinach and sprouts, and he could see that we were not sharing. He doesn't get dressing, of course, so I gave him his own, and later his own half-cherry. After that I reread Then There Were Five (we'd been talking about stills).
I am making excuses not to spend an hour at a time with The Name of the Rose. Starting Saturday I'll have the new Harry Potter to distract me, and Friday evening we will Consume in Cherry Creek North--RDC's new sport jacket will have been tailored, I'll hopefully seek a zebra from Kazoo & Company, and acquire the next two bookclub books from the Tattered Cover--still not Umberto Eco.
Two 3.6-mile city rides, completing another five-day bike week.
No swim, because it was maybe going to storm.
Have I mentioned my idea for body art? The only idea that's ever appealed to me occurred to me after Blake woke from a nap and left on my shoulder a single buddy footprint, four toes and an ankle imprinted in my skin: a brand in just that shape. It would have to be a brand, not a tattoo, because the point is not just the shape but the imprint; but it cannot happen, because the only reason I would need a false imprint is if the real imprinter were no longer on my shoulder.
Buddy is going to be 10 in August. We're discussing letting his two outermost primaries be, to give a little more power to his glide. I don't know if cockatiels get osteoperosis, but they do get old.
Although not yet. We are on the couch, watching "Queer as Folk" and playing with iTunes. There is a parade with whistles and hooting on the show, and Blake is participating, prancing and bobbing. For the record, Blake would love a good gay parade. Parrots are chockful of ego and love to be conspicuous. Oh no: except that parades have balloons, and there hasn't been a parrot yet who could tolerate a balloon, nor similarly flippy flappy things like banners and pennants and the dread pompons and lethal pinwheels.
My sweet little scaredy-cat.
The pacing was much better this time than in any of the previous books. I didn't feel at all that action was stretched to fill a schoolyear, which has bothered me about every one of the previous books. I welcomed that Harry started confiding in people finally--Mr. Weasley and Prof. McGonagall about his suspicions about Draco, and Dumbledore about a lot of stuff, but that made his not asking Dumbledore about the half-blood prince the worse.
Why would Slughorn have needed (or merely appreciated) Dumbledore's help cleaning up his house? And Harry asked why Merope couldn't have magicked herself food and shelter--if that were possible, without money, wouldn't the Weasleys not wear hand-me-down robes? These are the type of inconsistencies about Rowling's world (in addition to waxing Procrustean with the timeline) that makes me itch.
My goodness, JKR has been reading her fantasy books, hasn't she? Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone, both setting and cup; the entrance to the Mines of Moria in Fellowship of the Ring; Arthur's white tomb; His Dark Materials. And the Chosen One, jeebus, in addition to Harry's being now without parental figures just like Buffy.
Plot points and questions of a spoilery nature: Was Dumbledore a Parseltongue? He understood the Gaunts' casual everyday use of it. Is it realistic that Draco would have bragged about joining Voldemort even to his pack? Being in Slytherin doesn't require being evil.
"Neither can live while the other survives," but they've both been alive for two years now. Unless the prophecy is off, and Dumbledore did say not to put too much stock into it, but if it didn't deserve stock, why'd he hire Trelawney?
Why, as Potions teacher for five years plus however long before Harry showed up, wouldn't Snape have taught students the better ways to do Potions that he knew? How did he learn these improvements?
Overall: R.A.B. and horcruxes are totally new. There is no way anyone reading the first five books, even obsessively, would know about them. If a reader cannot guess the overall story by deduction of given hints, then Rowling is just leading readers down the garden path instead of supplying an orchestrated lead-up to total denouement. I hope to have to eat my words when #7 comes out.
Yea! Dumbledore ends his speech with "Pip, pip!" when the wizarding world doesn't use telephones. Now, that's okay, because while inconsistent, it's minor, and it's funny. Plus I wonder if even British kids wouldn't get it these days; do Brit phones still say that? I only know it from Arthur Ransome and Rosamund Pilcher's WWII books and maybe Tintin.
A lovely evening on the porch swing before the onset of a week's worth of triple-digit heat. I called my father (it was his birthday) and opened a treasure trove of real mail: an invitation to a wedding in Italy (neither person is Italian), a letter from my sister full of gossip and yet more clippings of Thomas Kinkade shit from the Sunday supplements, and a letter from Nisou with photographs of Emlet and Siblet.
After that I read The Name of the Rose on the porch swing for a while, until Blake very obviously wanted tactile companionship. After a day spent in his cage, an evening on the porch swing in his cage isn't too much of a treat. I had just brought him inside and opened his door when Scarf came by with her dog. We spoke of heat, pregnancy, and Umberto Eco, while the dog nosed about and Blake shrieked from within. Poor Swee' B.
Last time I tried to donate, my pulse was 48, and I was told that that was too low: the acceptable range is 50 to 100 beats per minute. Today, I had Tex take my pulse in the morning, and it was 48 again. The vampires frown on exertion before donation, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. I ran the steps, glancing at the donation station at every descent to see if I could be taken right then, not to give my blood a chance to slow. After 54 steps four times and a few laps of the first floor, my pulse was 64 bpm and a vampire told me that I can sign something indicating that 48 bpm is a regular and healthy heartrate for me. That no one offered or knew that information last time is why I get to call them vampires instead of nurses.
I think I had given ten pints before 1997, when having had Lyme Disease became a deterrent until 2004 or so. Now I've given 12.
An uneventful evening flight and a quick SuperShuttle pickup: how fair is it that I was last on but first off the van? Sorry, co-passengers.
We took the ferry to Sausalito looking for art galleries and interesting food. I had a calamari steak, which was damn good, and maybe we didn't walk far enough from the dock to find interesting galleries. Well, interesting combined with possible. I loved some tapestries but they ran to several thousand dollars apiece and what would I do with a tapestry? What I can't launder, dust, vacuum, or scrub, I am not going to bring voluntarily into my house unless it is, say, a couch.
I had come to San Francisco ready for reasonable temperatures and trusting too much to Mark Twain, who said the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco. I had left Denver at 104 and 102 degrees. So for San Francisco and Sausalito to sizzle was cruel, damn it.
For dinner we found merely adequate sushi. The concierge's recommendation looked like Friendly's but with fish, and at 7:30 on a Saturday night was empty. So we strolled on until we found a place with customers in it and whose menu was not solely in English. That was better. But not great.
There is something amiss about Bay Area Rapid Transit: the signage is clear, the oral announcements are comprehensible and accurate, and it's even rapid. Gee. Coming out of a tunnel where the view of is an industrial warehouse section of Oakland is not quite pretty, but the rest of the East Bay was fine.
RDC's friend (and now mine) picked us up in Berkeley and we went to their house to meet his nigh-wife, their daughter (12 and "almost 13" though how late July is "almost" for a December birthday is one of those nuances that geriatric arterial hardening has scoured from my mind), and her cat. They were all great (and the view from their house in the Berkeley hills is decadent), the daughter particularly. We went to a beach in Alameda because the pool they intended in Berkeley was closed, and a beach is better than a pool anyway. We talked Harry Potter and other children's books, and two hours later but kind of only an hour late, PLT arrived with his two daughters.
That was wonderful. I had not seen the elder in almost five years, and 8 is more sustainable fun than 3. Four is great too (as is 3, really), as the younger soon demonstrated. We played in the waves and I gave motorboat rides to the younger and was available for dolphin rides (scarier, because involving going underwater) to the older. I advised Almost 13 that it was her responsibility as a tween to dunk her mother, who was making immersion worse for herself by one-inch increments. However, she was not to be solicited into misdemeanor.
PLT and Sprouts could not join us for dinner, which involved fajitas (made of skirt steaks) and avocados, but we had later dinner plans with that bunch. A strange thing about Berkeley houses: they don't have screens (the coworker commented on our screens when he visited Formigny), just like France. I saw insects, but no pesky mosquitoes. However, because of the cat, this family cannot keep doors open. I'd rather have ventilation. That preceding is what you call sour grapes, right there.
Saturday was the only unnecessarily hot day, which is good, because apparently Denver dropped to bearable on Sunday and if I had left hot for hot when my regular hot had cooled, my grumping would have been unprecedented. Sunday was lovely and Monday started out just as well.
We went to SF MOMA and looked through a Richard Tuttle exhibition, also at So LeWitt's Wall Drawing #232, Location of a Square, which I liked because it could be drawn only on this particular wall. On any other wall, the same geometrical measurements would have been inaccurate or altered. Also a Olefer Eliasson's Aerial River Series, a series of photographs, seven by six in a rectangle, of a river from mountains to sea.
Then off to Chinatown and to eat dim sum, and once we finally pinned PLT and STL to the mat about which of two evenings left we might descend upon them like locusts, to a Peruvian restaurant, Limón, for the most amazing meal ever. Plus service most excellent, the perfect complement to the food, and unexpected (though welcome) for such a casual setting. I don't need my table crumbed between courses or my napkin folded if I leave my seat, though those are fine things; to me, good service is inobtrusive and doesn't try to clear one diner's plate before the other has finished his. I had ceviche with Peruvian corn (the kernels much bigger than those off the cobs I'm accustomed to), some sec and some not. Also arrizos con mariscos. I forget what mariscos are. RDC had a Peruvian bouillabaise with succulent broth. For dessert, chocolatl bandido: a flourless chocolate cake with mango and strawberries.
Wandering yesterday, we passed a Masonic temple with advertisements for the Universe Within, which I remembered Weetabix adoring. A little research in the evening proved it to be not Weet's Body Worlds but a copycat; still, we thought, likely pretty cool. In this we were mistaken: it had potential, but the bodies, however plasticined, were falling apart; their parts were haphazardly, inaccurately, or not at all labeled; and it was quite small. So go see Body Worlds, but give the Universe Within a miss.
After that we walked down to the wharves so I could say hello to the sea lions. We might have made a few comments about how to distinguish between the sea lions on the docks and the ones on the quay (the latter had video cameras). We were strolling aimlessly and I am glad, because though we stayed too long on an unattractive stretch of the Embarcadero, when we decided we should head back to North Beach, the only thing between it and us was Telegraph Hill. This we climbed, using whichever set of steps leads to the summit right next to Coit Tower (which we gave a miss).
Partway up, I heard the distinctive screaming that can come only from parrots and looked up in time to see a dozen or score of the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill, which I knew about only from a trailer for their documentary. In North Beach, after eating scrumptious eggplant parmesan, we found City Lights Books, where I bought The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Heh.
That evening we took BART to Berkeley again, this time for PLT and STL's house. We had spaghetti for dinner, and I am totally moving to Berkeley, or at least somewhere in California. Sunday's corn on the cob was perfectly sweet and tender, and Tuesday's salad probably grew about two feet away, plus STL served yellow raspberries for dessert. I had never heard of these things. Also, RDC and I ate wild blackberries up and down Telegraph Hill. What a town.
I played with the sprouts, which is all I wanted to do, and when it was time for bed I wanted to read them their bedtime stories but apparently they wouldn't've settled down in my presence. I'm a bad influence. Also a good one.
Poo. Berkeley is too far away. Even within Colorado, dear little Gethen is all the way up in Fort Collins. We did discuss Thanksgiving in LeMans, that hotbed of traditional New English food, speaking of too far away.
I picked this up last Sunday after finishing HP6 at midnight of the day I received it (at 4:00), and began to read it this Monday when I realized oops, bookclub Thursday. I finished it on the plane, with One Hundred Years of Solitude-type anticipation, listening to Peter Gabriel's Long Walk Home over the Wasatch Plateau in Utah. I don't care if I loved it because it was a good vacation book; I loved it because I loved it and that's fine for me.
It had some Replay, and a bit of Sunshine and other Robin McKinley (I nearly automatically crush on long red hair, McKinley heroines and Polyhymnia O'Keefe alike). As Jeffrey Eugenides says in Middlesex, the gun on the wall in the first act must be used by the final curtain, and that happened, but I'm not averse to Standard Literary Techniques. The character of Kimy reminded me of Ruth Gordon. Also, House of the Spirits: Clara and Alba, though not Blanca.
At book club we discussed Clara as Penelope and Henry as Odysseus. Hmm.
Before my flight home, we hied ourselves out of Union Square, where the hotel hulked, into the Tenderloin for some real food. I thought I wasn't hungry, but I was wrong. Saag, naan, beef in one preparation, lamb in another, and I thought I was going to die of overstimulation of the palate. We've got Indian food in Denver, but not Pakistani, and not this good that I've found. It was a total hole in the wall whose primary business was take-out, so I shoved our leftovers into a bowl, paved the top with naan, popped a lid on it, and called it dinner. But then I had to leave the city where we ate tremenous dim sum for $18, spectacular Peruvian at all (Sabor Latino in Denver is yummy, but it's General South American), and perfectly flavored Pakistani. Sigh.
After work I scurried to the vet to fetch Blake from camp. He screamed leaving the boarding room, but as soon as we were out of the building he began to chatter, chastising me for abandonment and telling me about his time at camp. At home we had a little bit of headpetting, but he smelled like a kennel and I didn't have time to shower and dry him before bookclub. Is it being surrounded by several other birds or a cessation of preening while at camp that means he comes home stinky? I'm all about the buddy scent, but this is stank.
Anyway, bookclub was great. We all loved the book, even those of us who would never ever ever touch speculative fiction. I spoke of it in terms of Harry Potter, any one of which books falls apart upon too-close reading, because I think this would stand up to a scrutiny of its timeline and characterization that I, in hotel and plane, didn't care to give.
As Mrs. Bennet settled Elizabeth's marriage while stirring the fire, I finished this while watering the garden. That occurred to me because I maybe kind of bought an annotated Pride and Prejudice the other day.
I was thinking that the plural of anecdote is not data, but Kal found Malcolm Gladwell's response to that, which is that he's not trying to prove but give food for thought. Not a belief but a pretty good idea. I like that.
Kal's cat made himself all lovey for bookclub, and we, the South City Park book group, crossed Colfax to go to her house, and she made wonderful food for a hot night, and the power went out, and it was stories all around.