House and Garden
Errands
Reading
Moving
Kinwork
I know Oscar Wilde only through plays and epigrams. I didn't know what I expected from a novel. Not much novel, anyway, lots of epigrams (which Lord Henry Wotton supplied in abundance*), melodrama, decadence.
It was better than I expected, and even lacked a goofy curse, spell, or other gimmick to explain the phenomenon. But just because it was 19th century does not mean it needed the faux science of Shelley and Stevenson and Wells.
I didn't understand the botany. First lilacs, then tulips; and iris bloomed before cherries were ripe.
* In abundance: deliberate "Rocky Horror Picture Show" reference, since that's how excessive I expected it to be.
Swim 1.6K. I really worked on kicking hard from the hips and pushing from the abs, and that wore me out.
Also I breathed every stroke and a half, because every other wasn't enough but every was too much. Every 1.5 stroke means that I keep straighter too. I pull harder on the right than the left anyway, and breathing left only means even greater imbalance. It works okay except that my right ear is not used to the underwater-overwater thing: it feels weird. It can't be experiencing anything different than the left ear does, though, so I must only get used to it.
Scarf suggested graphic novels for bookclub. "The Incredibles" stole from this a bit. It's not Maus and it's not Arkham Asylym. It's better than what I remember of the first volume of Sandman.
Two 3.6-mile city rides and three miles of walking and jogging. Can it really be three miles? The bike ride seems longer. I "ran" slightly more--maybe two short blocks--of it than last time.
This? This? This is what the fuss is all about? This is the worst book I have ever read. It is, so far as I have made out, also the inspiration for "polyamory," which is, in my experience, most common among sf readers. I don't put down the philosophy but I do mock this book as an inspiration and I further mock anyone averring this book as an affirmation. Not because its ideas are bad but because they are so badly written.
This week's Tuesday was the longest day in the history of the world. Far from wishing Dot Org had built a roll-back roof into the new office (which roof I, on the top floor, have wanted quite a few times), Tuesday was a couch and bathrobe day. When finally the clock rolled around to closing time, I was so apathetic that even vamoosing seemed like too much effort. I knew I wasn't going to go for a swim (cold and cloudy, hence not a sunroof day) and stopped at the library. I borrowed the Robert Heinlein and a book from the Modern Library list.
Is this book even available in a durable format? If a book is printed in pulp only, then its publisher shows a lack of faith in its viability as a text as much as the book demonstrably lacks durability as printed bound material.
Impressions: Objectivists must have just about died and gone to heaven with this arriving just four years after Atlas Shrugged. (Aha, googling shows how much objectivism and Heinleinism fawn over one another.) Dialogue in The Sparrow came straight from this, plagiarizing in mood and style if not in word. And damn, Heinlein himself plagiarized the framing story in The Illustrated Man. Also, I know it's unfair to judge a text by my context instead of within its own but that's why I'm me, so I can be unfair when I want to be: the patronizing and the homophobia did not suit a book set supposedly in the future--contextually, probably the 1990s--when Heinlein tried to futurize so much else.
I read Douglas Adams and Ayn Rand and J.D. Salinger as a teenager. I'm glad I did; as Valentine Michael Smith would say, fullness would not have been achieved by waiting. Maybe this is another book that works best only if you come to it at that age. And it's not the worst book ever: I read the later V.C. Andrews Dollanganger books, and I just read The Favored Child, so I know that as far as plotting and structure and language go, there are worse books. But I can't think of a worse cult favorite.
Finally, all books are one book: Jubal Harshaw (which, because of my recent reading of Killer Angels and viewing of "Firefly," I kept reading as "Jubal Early") knew he didn't want to be any older than 100, and Mr. Swales in Dracula thought 100 was a fine old age and didn't need to be any older.
What a perfect weekend. My neighborhood bookgroup, all of whom except Scarf need better nicknames, or nicknames at all, went up to Kal's family's cabin in the Poudre Canyon. Just one night, but we felt like we’d been away relaxing for ever.
Blake and I drove around the corner to drop off the cooler, a canvas bag of games (Taboo and Pictionary crowded into the Scattergories box, and I remembered to bring the dry-erase board Dexy gave us for scoring darts, for Pictionary), another bag with goodies packed inside Blake's cave-box, and an overnight bag. He was in the finch cage, to which I'd added his favorite rope perch and piñata chew-toy, which fits on my lap, but we were seven people, two dogs, and a 'tiel in three cars: I scurried home and put him in his regular cage and we were picked up from there.
The first plans for this weekend called for RDC to be home, but on Wednesday, at an hour's notice, he left for Florida. Wednesday night when we readers converged to give the baby quilt to one of our members, I asked if anyone minded if Blake came with us. No one did; if they had I would have asked Inga's mother to give him his dinner and breakfast (as she had offered to do after September's Inga-walking).
We stopped in Fort Collins for coffee and met Papa Scarf. I'd met Mama Scarf before and seen little resemblance, and this is because Scarf looks so much like her papa there is no room on her face for mama. The coffeeshop, Mugs, had a patio, and I skittered back to the car where I had, guilt-stricken, left Blake in the backseat (in 60-degree shade), and there was always at least one of us and generally more outside while others ordered. Fort Collins is a genuinely college-feeling town and I wish it weren't more than an hour away, besides that I have no affiliation thither.
Saturday was just lovely. I had been up the Cache la Poudre river and canyon exactly once two years ago. It is more than two hours away, which is some justification, and this summer the weekend I was to have gone up to meet Kal's family and the cabin was the first weekend after Hurricane Katrina, when I could not justify a solo car trip for pleasure. The river and its canyon remain lovely even without my supervision, and up we climbed, and continued to climb.
I had had no good idea of the cabin's lay-out. It slept enough to sound big, but was called a cabin. Well, it's a perfect cabin. Yes, it has five double beds, but three of them and a single are nestled in a loft that overlooks the A-frame ceiling, sitting room, and kitchen. Two other bedrooms and a bath are under the loft. It's cozy yet ample. It has a kitchen "better equipped than mine" in one reader's opinion in combination with the kitschy tchochkes, secondhand furniture, pens run dry of ink, and left-over books that mark the best cabins. It looks over the Mummy Range, is unwinterized, warms up with a century-old woodstove, and is bedecked on three sides with patio furniture and birdfeeders. The south, Mummy-facing, A-shaped wall is all glass. And it's perfection.
One reader stayed behind from the walk because she wasn't feeling well, so she got solitude (well, except for Blake) and the six of us and two dogs walked five miles, had a picnic, and went for a swim in a wee pond. Actually, only the two dogs and one of the humans swam (my bathers just happen to be the same fishbelly hue as my nethers). The five-month-pregnant Scarf and 9.5-year-old lab-St. Bernard cross, Mija, did just fine on this walk, and Mija--also not her real name, but close--showed more agility and endurance than any of us expected.
We had split up meal-duties, so after the picnic we had guacamole and chips and salsa, and wine with sunset, and salad and lasagne and brownies, and Scattergories and Cranium (someone guessed "astronaut" after a six-second sketch) and stargazing. There were so many stars (and trees) that I could not find any constellations. The Milky Way was obvious, but we didn't have any red flashlights to read the starchart by and I reprimanded myself for not finding either bear. I did spot Mars, and two falling stars. Scarf's and my meal was Sunday breakfast and I made a baked French toast type thing. Someone else cooked bacon and brewed coffee. It was heaven.
Saturday was wonderfully sunny but clouds obscured Mars even as we watched at midnight. I slept on the sitting room floor, close to Blake on the dining table and because no one in her right mind wants to share with me anyway, so when Kal started the fire Sunday morning I warmed up right there four feet away. It was, again, heaven. Rain began, and if there's anything cozier-sounding than rain on a cabin roof I don't know it. Scarf left early, having another obligation (hence the third car), and we played another round of Scattergories. (My insect-beginning with J, the jaying mantiss, who crosses the street against the light, was rejected.)
Blake was mostly okay. He was a little nervous, seldom having been in unfamiliar places--he was skittery the first time he entered Formigny too--and here be'd dogs. Mija, by age and breeds, was inobstrusively interested, but the other dog, goofy and sweet though she mostly is, was, like the jackal she resembles, fascinated. As I sat cross-legged on the floor with Blake on my knee, she'd watch him, riveted, but as he got comfortable and decided he needed to hop down to prance on the floor (he needs his exercise), she'd immediately rise to approach, and I would scoop him up and she would lie again. I should have flapped him in a closed bedroom to give him exercise, but he got to hide in his box, and I gave away the more interesting feathers he dropped, and the dog was not the only one who found him and his preening and scratching and bowing and hiding in his box eminently watchable. There were no pooping incidents, and he didn't get bitten in half even once, or trodden on, and when he gave his discontented squeaks the only person they bothered was me, so I counted the weekend a success, Blake-wise.
And in all other wise, as well. What a splended retreat.
This weekend as Blake shed feathers I gave the occasional one to Reader--just contour feathers, and a racing stripe feather. No really good ones--crest or tail--fell out, and that's fine because I'm possessive of them. But just now as he crawled down from my shoulder across my lap to his box (next to my legs on the recliner's footrest), a feather turned in a nearly-out way from the base of his tail. On the pretext of tugging his tail in a teasing way, I have this feather now in my paw. It's from his underside, and his entire hindquarters from drumsticks to tail is meant to incubate eggs. Almost a third of this feather is fluff while the outer is contour. The fluff is so soft I cannot stand it. I should make Increase a baby blanket with cockatiel fluff, except that it doesn't keep its loft the way goosedown does. I do know I'm a little insane, but he really is irresistible.
I am home because the rain that made the drive home unpleasant that turned to snow overnight caused some sort of short, putting out Dot Org's phone lines and server connection. No phones, no email, no files. I finished my book, tidied my desk, looked at everyone else's tidied desk, discovered no photocopying jobs, and fled.
John O'Hara's book reminded me more of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street or Babbitt than it did of F. Scott Fitzgerald, to whom I had seen him compared. Better, because shorter, than Main Street. I'm glad I knew the micro-short-story (here's a version by W. Somerset Maugham), though the version I knew emphasized that the distance fled was nearly impossible to cover in one day.
Damn. I remember starting this in middle school, sometime between all the ghost and UFO books and the Stephen King phase. I remember getting to the three weird sisters and being bored. It does drag in a 19th century way, though all the use of the archaic conditional tickled me, and I am glad the diary device has mostly lapsed.
I'm waiting, at this point, to find out how Jonathan Harker effected his escape, why Dracula killed off the crew that he needed to get him to England, why he wanted to go to England at all, why he needed 50 boxes of earth instead of just his one coffin, and why he youth-ified himself. Part of it is just obsolete storytelling, like whether Friday was a Dufflepud or how else he left a sole footprint on a wide beach, and part of it is vampire lore I've forgotten (like hairy palms--does masturbation make you undead?). And most of all how he can change his form to that of a dog--a bat, I can accept. I even can accept that as a bat he could not fly from the Carpathian Mountains across Europe and over the Channel to England. But I want to know why Bram Stoker so demonized dogs.
Mostly, I am at at this point cracking up at my bad self--Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray, John Seward, Quincy Morris, and Lord Godalming all follow Abraham van Helsing in a manner not unlike Stranger in a Strange Land's Jubal Harshaw's minions flocked after him, and they all lurv each other so much that I expect a one big happy Nest too. And ha! As Anne is a Fair Witness, cf Mina:
Dracula travels as a human during daylight hours? He can attack only a willing victim, so why Mina? I remember while still in my Stephen King phase reading criticism of 'Salem's Lot, about how the boy is here described as small for his age and pages later as tall, and another continuity error now mercifully fallen out of my head. Maybe if Stoker's purpose was Suspense Is Good and Sex Is Bad, then the behavior of his monster isn't as important. Otherwise, if this is a seminal horror text, then maybe I should be more lenient to his legacy, including King. Nah.
All books are one book. Except that Stoker's doubting a woman's abilities is more forgiveable than Heinlein's.
Oo, even more books are one: van Helsing must "trepine" Renfield, and trepanning is Julian English's father's favorite surgery in Appointment in Samarra. Now there's been mention of both "elemental dust" and trepanning, but no, Dracula is not One Book with His Dark Materials, damn it.
Like My Side of the Mountain, except about the Okeefenokee instead of the Catskills, and not as good, but not a violation of Jean Craighead George's Newbery books as her sequels were, and, considering she's 40 years older, not betraying a decline either.
Too much football (discussion of point spreads began 40' in), and just as I began to read it RDC found a new, lush, Jeremy Irons narration of Lolita on Audible so pretty much I got through it as quickly as possible. An interesting companion to Blink, also suffering from the plural of anecdote not being data problem, and more inherently contradictory than I could wish.
Why Time put out a list of 100 books from 1923 to now instead of waiting until its centennial I don't know. But I am helpless, and I looked at the list. I've read 60, and of the remainder, 29 were already on my list and I added the other 11.
"Best English-language novels"? Not most influential, or most innovative, or most ground-breaking, but best? Coincidentally I did just read Watchmen, a graphic novel, and while it's interesting in an alternative history kind of way, and maybe deserves to be on some list somewhere for Different or Redefining Literature, the graphic novel format does not allow for "best language." Or "best in language."
Similarly, Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret was shockingly honest and new and revolutionary, and it redefined or shepherded in the pubescent novel (as Catcher in the Rye did the adolescent), but "best language" it is not.
Blind Assassin is not Margaret Atwood's best. Even Oryx and Crake was better. Not to quibble with the Booker committee, but this and not Cat's Eye or Robber Bride for best novel or best language?
Sandra Cisneros. It put me in mind of Gorilla, My Love. Vignettes manage to sketch a full picture of Esperanza's life. Short, not sweet.
Today I learned a new word: cloture. It means closure, the closing or limitation of debate in a legislative body especially by calling for a vote, and the t is a ch-y t.
Recently I learned that jalopy is stressed on the second syllable instead of the first, jaLOPy.
I am slightly better at remembering when "gi-" starting a word is hard or soft. Gin is soft but gimlet is hard but giblet is soft though an alternate hard pronunciation is encroaching. Gibraltar, gibberish, and gibbet are soft (I thought gibbet was hard). Gibbon and gist are hard (I thought gist was soft). The gill of a fish is hard but the gill as a unit of measure is soft, according to Merriam-Webster--who knew? Gimcrack is soft but gimmick is hard. And oh no, a gibbous moon is soft. How am I supposed to remember that?
---
For the first time since I named it six years ago I am tempted to change the name of my journal. From a recent Word-a-Day email:
1. Gardening marked by an affected and elaborate style.
2. Affected use of archaic language.
[From the line "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!" in a poem by Thomas Edward Brown (1830-1897).]
Now here is a word with a dual personality. Poet T.E. Brown unwittingly helped coin it when he wrote a poem describing his garden filled with all that came to his mind: grotto, pool, ferns, roses, fish, and more.
And when he needed a word to rhyme with the line "Rose plot," he came up with "God wot!" He used "wot", an archaic term that's a variant of wit (to know), to mean "God knows!" and it stood out among other contemporary words in the poem.
If you wish to create your own godwottery, we recommend: sundials, gnomes, fairies, plastic sculptures, fake rockery, pump-driven streams, and wrought-iron furniture. A pair of pink flamingos will round it out nicely.
If in morning bleariness you slosh orange juice into your cereal bowl and realize this a split second later, do not shrug this mistake off and finish with your regular liquid just because soy milk might tolerate this better than dairy milk. Just because it won't be as gross doesn't mean that it won't still be gross. Start over, even if you feel guilty for wasting a second bowl of cereal in one week since earlier this week you dropped the travel mug full of cereal you were bringing to work because you were late.
If you once thought it was cute to let your pet share your cereal bowl because his species doesn't have saliva and is very small, don't succumb to the temptation because eventually (i.e., the very next morning) the pet will assume this is the Way Things Ought to Be and insist on eating out of your bowl and turn his beak up at the exact same cereal you just removed from your bowl and put in his dish because of course the mere fact of the food's leaving the bowl means it is not as good.
If you are enslaved to a creature 1/757th your size who insists on sharing your bowl, you can perhaps deceive him by tapping your spoon against his dish as if depositing a fresh portion of your food therein. Because he is only 1/757th your size, it will take him long enough to prance over to his dish, examine it, and turn his beak up at it again that you will have time to take a spoonful or two on your own before he returns.
If you are late to work again (cf earlier this week) because the convenience of using the car has gone somewhat to your head, do not expect to rise from the breakfast table in any sort of timely fashion when your pet has found the Exact Right Spot among the folds of your fleece robe to take his post-breakfast nap and is now compressed in body but enfluffed in plumage in his most irresistible manner such that getting up would Inconvenience him and wrench your heart.
If you and your pet are accustomed to snuggle while one of you watches television and the other has his pre-bedtime preen-and-nap, consider watching something less convulsively funny than "Shaun of the Dead." Your pet will not appreciate his perch (your person) rollicking and braying with mirth.
The invitation said, "Play games. Drink something. Mock non-attendees. Eat"; also that dogs and nursing babies were welcome but men should stay home with the cats. I reneged on that last when I had a cancellation on each Thursday and Friday and Kal said that Neal wanted to come. I am not sure but I do think having even just one man changed the dynamic. I made Boboli pizza, one pesto cheese and tomato and the other tomato sauce, cheese, and pepperoni; I had (boughten) chocolate chip cookies; I made sweet potato crack with both sweet potatoes and yams; I served sliced mango; there were two bags of chips. Other contributions were a strawberry cake, more chips, and chocolate chip bars far superior to the CostCo cookies. So the food was covered.
We didn't mock any non-attendees, and only a few people drank a few beers while most stuck to water (thank goodness: it never runs out), and the newbies voted for Pictionary so Pictionary it was.
While listening to Lolita I am reading Alfred Appel's Annotated Lolita. I have come up with my second dissertation in English literature: the annotated Pale Fire.
Lemony Snicket could not come because he was paralyzed below the armpit by an bite inflicted by an alligator at a picnic. In his stead, a man who didn't identify himself appeared, ran about, and taught us three important lessons:
1. Never raise your hand thus exposing your armpit.
2. If you see Count Olaf, count to zero, scream, and run away.
3. If you squeeze anything hard enough--a change purse, your grandmother, an accordion--it will make noise.
Then he played the accordion.
He failed to teach the most important lesson, though, which is that if you don't know your companion well enough for extended conversation or to make listening to your audiobook an option, you'd better damn well bring a book longer than 90 pages for the nearly two hours your companion is willing to wait to have books signed.
By Rebecca West, with vagues shades of Atonement in class and war, and of Hemingway in deft prose, and of perhaps no one but herself in perfect, haunting, yet succinct characterization. Ninety pages, yet I finished the book feeling like I knew more about its characters than those in many a longer novel, and this despite icebergs of unrevealed emotion. Splendid and fine.
A developer recently razed an unregrettable building along Colfax and two historic if decrepit houses behind it in a neighborhood. The lots are zoned B3 and R4, which means that the floor-to-area ratio and other requirements would allow just about anything, like say an automobile dealership, an autobody shop, a chain restaurant, or just a nice crop of asphalt like that planted throughout much of Denver. Initial neighborhood resistance led the developer to consider instead a project zoned MS: where B and R are for business and residential, MS is for Main Street: more pedestrian friendly, less asphalt, street-level windows, specific setbacks, and other good things.
Problem is, the project is MS-2, which allows for taller and denser than the MS-1 that the city planners, and the two involved neighborhoods, intend for our stretch of Colfax to be. Attendees at last night's meeting could vote for the new MS-2 or continue B3-R4. That was the choice. Our vote is not binding in any way but only a factor the city council considers when deciding about the zoing.
The fear, and it's a reasonable concern except presented last night as a boogeyman, is that if this first project, whose planning began before the MS language became an option, is allowed to be MS-2 instead of -1 (MS-2 was intended for areas closer to downtown), that that will set a dangerous precedent.
I say, MS-2 is better than B3. It's not better than R4 alone, but those houses are gone, the developer elected not to buy and raze the third historic but decrepit house such that its survival preserves a sightline, and MS-2 is better than the B3/R4 combination.
I wish to the Climbing Tree that some of the people the most involved in the neighborhood would present themselves better, would act less like the boogeyman is after them, would whine just a soupçon the fuck less, and would obsess not at all about parking. It's a city: act like it. You do not own the spot in front of your house, and in this neighborhood you probably have a garage so put the car in there (I should talk), and let's encourage pedestrian and public transport!
Cynthia Kadohata's Newbery winner wasn't quite as much of a pity vote as Desperaux--which was a fine book, but I am sure given the medal through guilt that the Newbery committee didn't give it to Because of Winn-Dixie even though Kate DiCamillo's book gave A Year Down Yonder stiff competition. And it wasn't completely unjustified, like the trite, boring, and unplotted Crispin: Cross of Lead.
It did feature the usual Newbery elements: absent parents, death, prejudice, and protagonist mature beyond her years who has made a Terrible Mistake. Sometimes that basic formula works wonderfully--Walk Two Moons--and sometimes it seems plagiarized--Out of the Dust had nearly the same plot as Walk Two Moons but not quite, and its language, in prose that happened to be cut into odd line lengths so as to appear to be poetry, excuses much--and sometimes an excellent book has none of the four--such as View from Saturday.
Lois Lowry didn't win the Newbery for A Summer to Die, also two sisters and the same story line, but with Kira-kira I kinda feel like she did.
Last night we discussed Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. As soon as I got home from work I started preparing sweet potato crack, which I referred to once there as "roasted yams and sweet potatoes," and once it was in the oven went to take a shower. Finally I had a couple of minutes to spend with Blake, but I was already wearing what I guess are obviously going out clothes and he opened his beak at me and stayed on RDC's shoulder. I should have reread the Suspects' discussion before the club met, and at least skimmed the book. We talked a lot about bonding and detachment and water and I think throwing out the quest motif would have borne the conversation along more.
When we were leaving, I said hello to two humans pushing two strollers along the sidewalk in merely a friendly passerby way then veered back when I saw what was bringing up the rear: an English mastiff. Kal laughed at me when I recalled meeting the dog as a Lab-sized two-month-old puppy, especially in the context of the bookgroup, of which several members's names I regularly need supplied to me. When I remembered meeting the dog before, I was thinking it was earlier this year; looking up whether I mentioned it here, I see it was last year. So yeah, I remember a dog I met 15 months ago but not the name of a person I see once a month: not exactly polite. Not to the humans, anyway.
Flannery O'Connor. I had read several of the stories in this collection already but not all of them, not "The Displaced Person," which was my favorite, nor "The River," which is more along the lines I expect from Flannery O'Connor. Recently the Suspects were naming their favorite short stories, and someone opined that Usans have the short story market. These stories support that point of view.
Kate Seredy's 1938 book is more worthy of a Caldecott than a Newbery. A lot more of the earlier winners, before the Baby Boom gave children's lit wings, are meant to be educational than my favorites of the '70s and '80s, and perhaps that's why I can't quite agree with its medalling.
An epic-ish (-ish because short, but epic- because spanning generations and featuring heroes and legends) history of Hungary winning the Newbery medal in 1938 indicate that political correctness might be an older mode of thought than I would have reckoned. If WWII hadn't broken out yet, Hungary--this book suggests it was the Huns, not the Magyars--already had begun to smack down Jews and the Ukraine, as Upon the Head of a Goat suggests.
But the illustrations are fabulous.
All I had in mind for yesterday was the semi-annual, changing-of-the-clocks weekend window-swapping. I brought the storms outside, removed the screens, and hosed the windows. Rinse, lather, rinse, for windows and storms; up the ladder again to squeegee and hang the storms; screens exiled to the coal cellar. Then it was time to enable the swamp cooler's hibernation. Getting on the roof led to cleaning the gutters (beginning to, anyway), and RDC trimmed the vinca so we won't have green icicles crawling around the sidewalk. I do not rake leaves until everything is down, except for trimmed vinca and the plum leaves within it. I brought the one barrowload of leaves in back, which led to raking the compost from a few weeks ago into the garden, and before that taking out the last of the tomato and pepper plants, and cursing the squirrels who have eaten more of my tomatoes and eggplants than I have, and finding an overlooked and therefore squishy cucumber.
When I dug the compost out of the two bins a couple of weeks ago, I just mounded the new dirt in the gardens; today I dug it into place. I covered the gardens with landscaping cloth and rocks, but the weeds have read different stuff about that cloth than I have because they still grow under it. I took up the cloth that covers about a quarter of the backyard and hoed and raked all that processing compost: it's very happy where it has coffee grounds and vegetable pulp but sunflower seed husks just don't break down readily.
After that I rolled the Russian olive stump away from the brush pile and commenced to sorting the pile. The spot underneath flummoxes me. Is flummox a transitive verb? Shit, Merriam-Webster labels it transitive but not also intransitive, which means I can't say "I am flummoxed." Poo. In the time Before, someone laid black plastic at the end of the garage, piled large gravel on it, bordered it with brick, and called it done. Cherry shoots and bindweed grow through plastic and gravel both, and I don't know how to stop them.
The stump has been in that very spot since June, when RDC noticed it wobble when a squirrel jumped on it. He plinked it with his thumb and over it went, and there it has lain since. My stepfather, when he was here, complimented us on our bench, and bench it is likely to remain because we don't have a chainsaw and the wood would probably bend a jillion Sawzall blades and I have noticed that sawing through something thick with a hacksaw gets old fast.
Anyway, I sorted the brush into kindling, tinder, mulch, and Mulchman Mulch. There's a fellow in our neighborhood who is trying to mulch himself to the moon, and last year's raspberry canes are not so much tinder as a waste of space. I started to throw last year's sagebrush in the discard pile as well, but I snapped one branch and decided that as tinder it's pointless to fuel a fire but excellent for fragrance.
Then I was done. The last day of Daylight Time, and I hope I savored it adequately.
Elizabeth Jane Grey. What a good little capitalist, don't-rock-the-boat this is. Also, reminiscent of A Door in the Wall. An enjoyable story, but Adam, though resourceful and talented, is not as independent as all that.
Adam is motherless: I really must go through the list of Newbery medalists to see how many protagonists this is true of.
Years ago we used to dress up, go out at night, drink, and dance. Now the Hallowe'en party is at 10:00 in the morning (11 in our heads, so not that bad), has nearly as many children as adults (we do our bit to keep the ratio rational), and the entertainment is jumping in piles of leaves.
Which, I have to say, was big enough for toddlers but not for adults until I asked to use the rake. RDC teased me: I'd rake this lawn but not my own? Hey, when this lawn gets re-leaved over the next few weeks, I won't be frustrated. I raked the backyard, minus the leaves caught in the ivy, and later part of the frontyard. I like to rake, what can I say, especially when there are kids to jump in the heaps.
I hadn't seen Margaret since maybe last year's Hallowe'en, and we were catching up (Buckbeak is going to be a big brother this spring) and RDC interjected about my promotion. She was all happy for me, which was nice, but, either out of modesty or false modesty or just never being able to be happy with what I've got or needing to make everything a joke, I said I was still sending other people's faxes, and that one of my goals in life was never to send anyone else's fax.
My goals in life: to rake a good-size lawn every fall (or a few smaller ones), to read all the Newbery Medal books, and not to send anyone else's fax.
I saw my best friend Gethen, who after 10 months didn't remember me. But she's still Gethen, still sweet and charming, and we and Scarlett played well together. All the children were charming, in fact, but four-year-old girls are among my favorite people ever. Gethen might remember me if she sees me not too long from now, like for a Yule party.
And at such a party, do we have one, I shall have to refrain from quite so many airplane rides. This morning my left bicep was sore, in a reasonable way, from the gardening; this evening my back is viciously painful. I hate being a grown-up: I don't receive the airplane rides anymore, which sucks; and now giving them sucks too. Damn.