The first several books are out of alphabetical order because they are bookclub selections or books I'm currently reading.
House and Garden
Kinwork
Read
Moving
I have heard unfavorable things about Kazuo Ishiguro's latest, Never Let Me Go, and I wish I hadn't so I could come to it fresh. I loved this novel completely. Ishiguro has a way of writing protagonists who live somehow superimposed upon rather than within their worlds, and who despite this are real and true and full of sympathy.
Oh, what fun this site is. Some misspellings are mere ignorance (elementary for alimentary), but other make terrific puns. "A posable thumb" would make a lovely painting, though I want to avoid the visual for "balling your eyes out." I can see how "antidotal evidence" might cure a bad situation. I came across "reeking havoc" some time ago and it makes brilliant sense. I'm sure for some people, "never regions" is synonymous with "nether regions." And perhaps certain eels are gregarious--social morays.
Addendum: I don't know who owns these gems; I read them on Miss Snark's site who identifies them as first lines from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine's slush pile. My favorite might be "'Be good,' he called after her as he bit back the tears in his eyes," with "He whetted his lips" second. The best ones involve eyes in unfortunate ways, like the above and "Mona was on the liquilounge, her dark eyes pouring over him like warm jello."
Me, I always have to be careful not to spell vertical as "verticle." But that doesn't lend itself to great puns or mixed metaphors.
Two 3.6-mile city rides on new tires, road not dirt, through which I can feel every pebble on the road and on which I go noticeably faster, and with front and back lights (though not even the rear one was necessary). The option is good.
A few years ago I collected a second haul of mulch from the TreeCycle, and unlike the year before it was a bad mulch: huge chunks of wood and some whole branches and lots of needles. I piled it at one end of the vegetable garden and ignored it for four years, until today. Today I sifted lovely loam from huge chunks of wood, added the loam to the lasagne mulch still in progress, and cleared that end of the garden. Without a pile of something to deprive it of light and air, that ground will be overtaken by weeds, I know.
So I moved the leaf pile. This has been in kind of a corner of the backyard, blocking access to the so-called dog run between the garage and the fence. If we get a dog, its latrine will be in that area, and now the hypothetical dog can get there without clambering over a tarped pile of leaves. I spread a tarp under one side and raked part of the pile on that and hauled it aside and did the same with a second tarp. Now the main pile was small enough to haul.
Also I watered all the trees except the ash and partly remulched the front gardens. The north half isn't mature enough not to have mulch between plants; the south half is if I can keep up with the bindweed.
Plus I finally put the cover on the swamp cooler, excellent timing since it's unlikely to get cold again at all, let alone the uncovered cold of December.
A good day.
Yesterday and today I tackled mementos and correspondence. I hauled the boxes out of my closet and commenced to sorting. Two years of cards and letters, sorted dated and bundled. I did find some stuff I could throw out, like envelopes and newspaper articles, and some stuff that I could cram into photograph albums and scrapbooks, like photographs and newspaper articles. I don't know how I continue to do that.
To the scrapbook, I added the newspaper photograph of RKC as honor essayist at high school graduation, tidily on the same page as her older sister's college graduation. Is it tacky to have obituaries in a scrapbook? I put in the notice from the religious organization to which RDC's aunt and uncle made a contribution for prayers in perpetuity for Granny, which is personal, but are public death notices as well weird to include? I am going with no, since I am the only person who will ever look at the books. Or maybe my father would be proud to know that I included the newspaper mention of his first hole-in-one (I love a small-town paper).
Swim 2K.
I must have left my swimsuit at the gym last time I swam. It wasn't in lost and found so I swam in my bathing suit, a tankini whose neckline is conservative (this is me, after all) but still not cut for laps. I need new jeans, too, and so I have to shop for the two most trying items at once! Yea! (Shoes are more boring, but I don't live in hopes that I will ever find The One Perfect Shoe.) Plus I could use another bra but I know where to find what I want if it's still available.
Two kilometers are 60 laps in this pool, 120 lengths, and three nonconsecutive lengths were butterfly. For the first time, 20 meters of fly didn't slay me. I could have done three 25-meter lengths, I felt, had that pool been open; my lengths weren't continuous because I still cannot do a damn flip turn. SEM tried to teach me with both of us in a pool, but it didn't take; and I have to assume everyone else I am likely to meet would be leery at teaching something that might involve bodily contact. So I have to visit SEM at camp; he's the only person I know as absent of body taboo as I am and who also knows and can teach me to turn.
Monkey--which is what I'm going to call her here no matter what she is named--finally arrived, almost two weeks past the due date. While she and Scarf and Drums remain in hospital, RDC and I get to host Mia. Despite being a year older and half St. Bernard to boot, Mia is spryer than full-Lab Morgan. Poor girl, she has been away from home since labor began, not because of doggy germs but because she and Scarf are so devoted to each other that her not understanding why her mama was in pain and consequent agitation caused Scarf further pain.
I don't know whether it will be better to walk her past her house, to let her know that she's near it and let her sniff it or if that will upset her.
Before we dognapped her, Mia spent the day in the yard of a neighbor who doesn't care for dogs in his house. I guess we were the first to act upon his message--please take her home with you--because when RDC went over in the late afternoon to see if she was still available, she was. Conveniently, Drums had just darted home to shower and change. So we have her food and leash, and during dinner someone came by with her bed, and right now she and I are in the living room reading and snoozing.
During dinner and also now, but now sadly muted by the dishwasher, Mia has been snoring. One of my private theories is that I began to sleep with men only because, away from home and at college, their snores were my only substitute (I suppose I should be grateful that my roomie wasn't a snorer). I have considered getting a white-noise generator for waves, crickets, and rain; I wonder if any is available with dog snores and sighs.
Oh, and while RDC was cooking dinner Mia lay in the doorway between dining room and kitchen, on the cold mean hardwood floor. Eventually she rose creakily and hoisted herself onto the one rug in the kitchen--which is exactly in front of the sink. When I patted the corner of the dining room rug she came immediately, and she was only a couple of feet further back than her position in the doorway. But I like that she wants to be just as much underfoot as she can be.
She might not smell as rank in body as Morgan, but she has worse breath, and if she's not as rank she's still a dog and therefore no flower. Objectively, cockatiel dander smells good, while dog does not; but if Dog is an acquired preference, I've certainly acquired it.
Really, it's the best sound ever. Deep doggy breaths from the doggy bed. When we came downstairs after dinner, she rose from her first choice of spot on the rug, stood leaning against the couch, and lay her chin on the cushion. Blake could not have indicated what he wanted any more clearly. While dogs do not go on the furniture how ever much they are loved, I am otherwise at their beck and call, so I went up and got her dog bed.
Okay. I finished Henderson the Rain King. For Stingo's sake must I read Dangling Man too? Because otherwise Saul Bellow joins Dreiser and James on the list of Modern Library 100 writers I don't need to read more of. Henderson--brash, clumsy, oversized, determined to mean well, but deluded and dangerous--is American to his core. None of his philosophizing with Dahfu enlightened me about Henderson's or Bellow's purpose. This books rates not even a "meh" but only "eh": it didn't involve me even enough to dislike it.
This is whom (fine: what) I got to dogsit and then let go home in the shortest two weeks ever: Morgan and Mia. Maybe because of her hips, Morgan is the only adult lab I have ever known who has lain down with her legs outstretched behind her, like a puppy. I should have taken close-ups of her amazing ears.
Neither dog seemed to pine pathetically, but Morgan didn't eat much and almost bounced when her mother came to get her. I wasn't home when Mia's father arrived but she was ecstatic to see him. I hope she likes her new human sister. Oh, and Blake dropped a shoulder feather today, round (so obviously shoulder joint), dark gray with just a fleck of racing-stripe white. I'm sure he doesn't remember his mother at all, but her name was Blaze for an un-hen-like streak of bright yellow through her otherwise dun crest. I pointed out to him how Mia had a similar streak of light-on-dark, but he failed to feel any kinship with her because of it, nor because he clearly had Mia-colored feathers--(not quite) black with a tip of white. Both dogs ignored the bird, thank goodness, but that is not something I expect of either a younger dog or a dog who is more confident of her family.
I think the first time Blake met a dog was Thanksgiving of 2000, when Maggie came with Clove and Dexy. I wouldn't doubt that he had a headache from carrying his crest so far forward (is that why I like the Grinch's dog Max, because of his antler? I think of him getting caught in the sewing machine and hopefully waving from the back of the sled more than gradually dropping from over-antlered-ness). Perhaps because he's older, because because these two dogs were older, he could relax in their presence--play in his box, have his head pet, go to sleep on a shoulder.
He's such a good boy, but he's not a dog.
Thank goodness! My mother is referring to her stepdaughter's new baby as "my grandchild" instead of "my stepgrandchild." When in the course of human events, people consider the children they parented with someone else to be their new partner's children as well, to the point that the one's children inherit part of the estate of the other's antecdent, then the one had better damn well call the other's grandchildren her own. My sister and I were beneficiaries to part of our mother's husband's mother's estate, and I thought (privately, not to my mother*) that was pretty messed up, and more messed up when, after her stepdaughter fell pregnant, my mother for months said that her husband was going to be a grandparent but did not say the same of herself. That was then, though, and this is now. The younger German Shepherd had a puppy today and all is well, both in mother and child's health and in how my mother names the relationship.
I said something to RDC the other evening about when "my parents" visit us this coming May, because that's shorter than saying "my father and notstepmother." Depending on context, I also occasionally refer to my mother and her husband as "my parents." I don't think either of my actual parents would be pleased to know that I refer to a stepparent as parent. I don't know. I have never called RDC's mother "Mom" although she has welcomed me to do so. Perhaps it's okay if I refer to the sets as parents for convenience as long as I don't call people by onceling titles.
* Privately, because how anyone disposes of their belongings is none of my affair. My father wanted my okay about offering my sister some financial assistance, and I told him that his money, now and after that thing that he's not allowed to do, is his to do with as he wishes, and I promised him, solemnly by Shadow's memory, that it would never be a problem, and he had my okay if he wanted it but that he didn't need it.
The other baby is my mother's first cousin's new grandchild. Its raising will be more of a group effort than certain people might expect, and I'm all for village-parenting especially when the parents are as young and unexpected as these are. The baby, its mother, and my mother's cousin all live close enough that I hope my mother can work off some of her grandmother-jones on this kid too.
When I congratulated my mother on becoming a grandmother, because she had emphasized "finally" I offered that 20 years is a long time to wait. "But you've only been married 10 years," she replied. But you've known since before I married that I wasn't going to spore, I didn't say. Instead I finished my earlier thought, which is that my sister and I have been grown for 20 years. She, probably wanting to be supportive, once told me while I was in college, that she hoped I would tell her if I got pregnant. I didn't tell her that the fewer people who knew, the better off I would be--because heaven knows there's reciprocal gossip-sharing among her family--and that I would dread both her support and her censure.
Two significant things in therapy:
I am going to taper off Lexapro and see how it goes. Either it has helped me remember how to be me, in which case I'll be okay, or I won't be okay, in which case I might see it as medication to treat a chronic condition--dysthymia. The previous sentence's two clauses are not parallel. I know.
Between fall of 2003 and June 2005, I saw my shrink almost weekly. Most of the hiccups in that weekly schedule were unscheduled cancellations (occasionally I would get a call in time but more often I would show up at the clinic at 8:00 a.m. for my appointment and she would be absent). She excused herself by illness; of course I asked her if she was okay; and of course as a professional she thanked me for my ongoing concern and said only, "It's being addressed." Last June she graduated (I see psychiatric residents at UCHC) and referred me to her friend and classmate, whom I have seen perhaps a half-dozen times since. Yesterday, this second shrink told me that my shrink--who by dint of longevity and frequency is still who I think of as my shrink rather than this new (also excellent) person--died over New Year's. She was 34.
When the new shrink told me about the previous shrink's death, which had occurred less than a fortnight before, she said she wanted to make sure I learned it from her. I was glad to know (how do you say that? I'd rather know than not know, though I'm desperately not glad it happened), but I thought it hugely unlikely I would have heard about it otherwise.
I was in my cube at work when a colleague arrived to chat with CoolBoss for a moment, catching her up on an ex-DotOrgerista. Colleague spoke of the difficult year (school, baby, parents' health) the exDO had had, and then said something along the lines of how to cap it off, on New Year's Eve a friend had died, suddenly, and gave other details, including a name.
So I would have found out, not two weeks after it happened, not two days later.
It's something she and I talked about at the end of my sessions with her. She said Denver was a small town, really (it is?), and how would I like to handle it if we happened into each other? A million people in the city and another million or two in the hinterlands, sure, but it is a small town: I believe not only in six degrees of separation but also in the fact of overlapping demographics. Similar neighborhoods, income levels, political leanings, tastes in food, reading, and music, and hobbies will keep you among similar people. That's why it's important to keep punching at the bubble around you.
Also, I finally remembered something. One of the names Scarf and Drums were considering for Monkey was Sylvia, and the day I learned that, that night I dreamed of a Sylvia I once knew. For the past several weeks, I would remember this woman but not her name. It's interesting that even though her name was safe in my subconscious, my subconscious didn't retrieve it for me, either by sudden recollection or by dream, until I heard the name in such an unrelated context.
I was her assistant one day a week one summer at Millstone. She was sweet, not in the best of health, and had four adult strappingly large children (how did "strapping" gain that meaning?); at that point a fair way along the nonbreeding path, I wondered if gestating and birthing them had done her in. At the end of the summer she gave me a purple backpack that served as my gymbag during grad school.
But who I really have to get in touch with from Millstone is my main boss. Last year was the first time I heard from him rather than from his wife (whom I also knew) in the annual card exchange. Just the fact that he took pen in hand to write to an employee from 1991, though not just an employee but the amanuensis to his Grand Poobah, meant that he had more time than usual on his hands. Dear man. His wife is a dear as well; I met her several times when Poobah took me out to lunch because a proper Southern gentleman does not take a young slip of a girl to a public establishment without a chaperone. And he always stood up when she entered the room. I last saw them sometime in the mid-'90s when they returned their son to campus--and took me out to lunch. Poobah kept offering me more butter for my bread because, though he won our weight-loss wager, I had kept off the weight I'd dropped and he had not.
I was a block into the walking start of my run when J decided to continue her walk a little farther and turned to accompany me. We talked of babies (hers and others), the perils of jeans-shopping, and husbands' odd clothing ideas. We crossed into the park, whose perimeter I was going to run, and parted.
5K around the park.
Afterward I entered the neighborhood at my neighbors' street rather than my own, in case anything was going on. AEK was throwing a ball for E's dog with one of those atl-atl ball-throwing thingies that not only increase your range but spare you dog slobber, and she lent me her toilet and then gave me pints of water.
Later in the afternoon Kal came over to fetch boxes for her move and we took pictures of her new house--hooray, a move that brings a friend closer rather than farther.
I really like my neighborhood.
A few weeks ago I looked in This Name Store and That Name Store for jeans. I didn't like the denim washes in either place. I looked in Another Name, eh. In Foley's--a department store whose quality level, I've decided, is more like Sears than Filene's--I found jeans whose denim I liked but which I wouldn't try on because their label was enormous, and other acceptable denim whose tag emphasized that they sat at the waist. I was looking for jeans to replace the at-waist, straight-legged Levi's that I barely wear.
(Last March when Kal and I went to see "The Incredibles," I found a ticket stub in the pocket for the previous October's corn maze. At this October's maze, I found the movie stub.)
Friday night I went to Old Navy, and yep, I'm too old for Old Navy, or too something, because--how excessively picky of me!--I prefer my jeans without holes in them. From there I ventured to Ross and T.J. Maxx. I don't know what A and R stand for after numerical sizes in Tommy Hilfiger jeans--average? regular?--but a 14 in one swam on me and a 10 in the other was a tetch too small and of course there wasn't a 12 of either and what is it with these new jeans that they strangle your pelvis and billow around your legs? And who cares if you have the trendily jeans-molded ass when the overall effect makes you look fatter?
On to Park Meadows, which houses the nearest Nordstrom, because this night's expedition was for the three most harrowing garments: jeans, bra, bathing suit. (Hooray for consumerism: Nordstrom is taking over Lord & Taylor's old space in Cherry Creek, providing me with a nearby department store at a reasonable price point, between Sears and Saks.) Nordstrom shoes made me homesick for Haitch--we last ventured there together looking for her bridal shoes--and I called her. I told her she had to be my link to the real world for jean-selection.
"No tapered legs!" She has known me for a long time, but those tapered legs aren't as long ago as I would readily admit, and I think tapered legs ended before 1996 anyway.
"I know!" I saw that light all by myself. "But what about this exposing the belly thing? and the unflattering softball-sized gap at the back, where my lumbar tattoo isn't and I don't want to get a cold in my kidneys anyway? and the pelvis-constricting factor? and 'muffin-tops,' which body part I own but would not call anything so supposedly appealing (as if) nor ever display? and thong-top-show? and butt-crack-show?" New jeans, sure, but not a new lifestyle. She held my mental hand and talked me through it.
Lord I miss shopping with Haitch. I asked her to justify "shrugs," which are, at least, merely unflattering, rather than uncomfortable and impractical, as the New Jeans are. She said they are allowable only on the pregnant, and they certainly do emphasize the belly in a way only Fabienne of "Pulp Fiction" would find attractive. Once I randomly interjected, "Oh honey, that look's not working for you at all," and I finally see a need in my own life for a camera-phone, because oh, how I wanted to share the visual with her.
My minimal rule about Fat is to cover it with clothing, whether taut or baggy. The flab of the unfit-but-slender is still flab and should be covered. The flesh of those who are fit and slender and possess a healthy fat percentage should not be corseted into bulge. So the quest for jeans continued. I bought a new bra, same make and model as last time, because it supports the flab at the proper midpoint between shoulder and elbow and disallows all bounce. I bought a new swimsuit, same make and model as last time, becuase I know it fits and is comfortable, but not new goggles because I forgot them until I was in the interminable cashier line. But no jeans.
Enough. I headed home and stopped at Target for sheets. Passing through the clothing department on the way to the cashier, on a whim I looked at jeans. Levi's. Huh. New but not overly dyed or flayed or streaky or objectionable denim. I tried a pair. And I liked them!
Should I recite Steve Martin's "Cruel Shoes" bit? Because that's what I realize I sound like. Except not funny.
Low-waisted but not hip-waisted. Not so constrictive as to force bulge up, and low enough not to cut into belly or bladder. I crouched and contorted to check for buttcrackitis or underpantitis. Full-legged but not bell-bottomed. Amply long but not impractically floor-length, and just right with my near-daily Dansko clog. Victory.Levi Signature Mid-Rise Boot-Cut Jeans, in Ocean; where "Signature" means "line invented for Target and even lower-end stores."
At home, I took a seam-ripper to the label while RDC and I watched Haitch's latest recommendation, "You and Me and Everyone We Know." I close letters with "oxo" instead of "xox" because I prefer hugs to kisses and the shape is more rotund, more like me; but in future I think I will sign ))><(( .
Today I wore the jeans to Kal and Neal's new house, of which RDC and I took digital pictures for the gratification of the distant. And there I am, in new jeans, with a tank top under my sweater to spare the world (or just neighborhood) sight of my pasty excess and for weekend-level breastal restraint, and y'know, excess is not the less repellent for being covered. So much for following even my own minimal rule. Jeans to (not above) the waist would cover, if not disguise, that bulge more acceptably.
The option of ridding myself of that belly, of course, well, let's stay in the realm of possibility.
I only recently realized that Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde is by Robert Louis Stevenson, not H.G. Wells or Jules Verne.
Yesterday I read an excerpt from Louis Sachar's new Small Steps for which, I am glad to know, he takes Armpit as his protagonist instead of Stanley or Zero.
I gave Emlet The Trumpet of the Swan and the Audobon plush trumpeter swan, another in the line of American animals I am giving her. Her bison's name is Wyoming, for American English practice.
That's all my Louis news.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is the story of six people who are killed when a bridge collapses; a friar wants to compile their stories. Luisa Rey is a character in the six-part novel Cloud Atlas. But I read that Luisa Rey (and Timothy Cavendish) appear one or both of Mitchell's previous books, and I wonder how he named her.
David Mitchell gleefully name-drops some of the texts he draws from: someone reads "20th-century optimists" named Orwell and Huxley; one part's character quotes "Soylent Green" and that movie's supposed twist features in another part. I have meant to read Delius: as I Knew Him since I first listened to Kate Bush's Never for Ever, and now I have a bit more reason to do so.
Neil Gaiman. Can you say "derivative" and "nearly plagiarism"? I knew you could! I mean, it was fun, but unlike with Cloud Atlas, which is also fun and relies heavily on previous texts, my noticing the man behind the curtain didn't add to my pleasure. This might be an anti-sff bias, but I don't think so: I liked his Coraline fine and my not getting into Sandman from its first volume probably has more to do with my not having read all the subsequent volumes than with any failing on its part.
For its reliance on archetype and myth, I was reminded again and again of Summerland. Michael Chabon managed to use Norse and First Nation and American myths of the Tree of Life and Raven and baseball, none of which he invented, in his own fresh way. When Gaiman used Raven and Remus, I thought not of what I was reading but what he read first.
Also, and this is the worst, stop smoking the Douglas Adams weed, Neil! Adams was Adams, and he was great, and he is dead, and you are not he. Gaiman aped Adams's style of humor to the point of directly copying two of his jokes--a meaning of the word "similar" previously unknown, and "smiling in the way striking cobras tend not to." The first is something Arthur says when Ford first brings him to the Vogon ship (with "safe"), and while I can't quite place the second, I know it occurs somewhere in the Hitchhiker's trilogy, early on, along the lines of something hanging in the air much in the way anvils don't. Perhaps the whale? It's not just the five Hitchhiker books, either: there's a lot of both Dirk Gently books too. And Spider is Zaphod Beeblebrox to an unfunny degree. Besides having to wave his hand at his featureless black sound system, he embodies Zaphod's mantra, "If there's anything more important than my ego, I want it caught and shot now."
Whatever. Fast and mostly harmless [snork] and I possibly have more reason to read American Gods now, except I can find it only in pulp.
Eight miles. Up, down, around and around, from Glacier Gorge trailhead to Mills Lake. Buttclenchingly unnecessarily cold.
Also, very pretty. We passed wapiti in Moraine Park, leading me to say "wapiti wapiti" since I am incapable of saying only "wapiti." The parking lot at Glacier Gorge trailhead has been moved and the original is being restored closer to a natural state, for a grand total of the same number of spaces. The NPS is promoting, I hope, more shuttle bussing by not increasing the uphill parking. The massive pasturage for cars downhill is big enough.
I have more to say about Mr. Stanley of the Stanley Steamer car and the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, but for now, I'll just say I hope he's happy. He is credited, at least in his own hotel, with beginning the idea of automobile touring in the United States.
And I'm part of the problem! Hooray! Just after 10, we put Cassidy into one of the last spaces and starting bundling up. The temperature was no lower than 20, fine, but the wind howled at gale force, damn. Smartwool socks, titanium bra, polypropylene underwear, turtleneck, Gore-Tex pants and parka, gaiters strapped under boots and hooked to laces, gloves with sleeves, hat, hood up. Contacts in case I needed goggles. Backpack full of fleece pants, running pants, heavy fleece jacket, lighter fleece vest, spare socks, face mask, Clif and Balance bars, two liters of water, camera, wallet, glasses, matches, compass, walkie-talkie, mylar topographical map. Snowshoes and poles.
And away! As soon as we got into the trees, the wind tunnel effect of the straightaway calmed somewhat. Somewhat.
Pretty! Snow! Boulders! Frozen creeks! Pretty! Up we clomped. Cliffs! Halves of mountains! Pretty!
I have read that 90% of Rocky Mountain National Park's visitors see the park only from their cars. On the trail today were a friendly number of people, not constantly in sight as has happened on the Bierstadt trail and as usually happens on the more popular trails in the summer. We met three women who had to be in their 70s as far up-trail as we were and whom I aspire to.
Because we overshot toward the Loch and backtracked to Mills, and because on the way down, we backtracked again because we didn't recognize the trail, we wound up doing about eight miles instead of over six. We didn't recognize the trail downhill because we followed the signs and therefore the marked, summer trail, rather than the haphazard winter trail people improvise. There were snowshoe and ski tracks, and it was marked, so we returned to it, but we knew it wasn't right. Were we going to end up on Bear Lake Road far downstream? Or where, exactly? Sighting the road about halfway through was reassuring.
I'm supposed to have a sense of direction, and RDC too. But snow is disorienting!
Further proof, if any were needed, of my hypocrism:
When I arrived at work Friday, the receptionist returned my greeting by asking, "Didn't you get the message?" and I saw that he was dressed a little casually and perhaps had layered a sports jersey over his other clothing because the heat in the building was dead and the office was closed? He was continuing: "The governor's message?" Had he declared a state snow day, so the office was closed? Finally the rest of what the receptionist was saying sank: Both the Colorado governor and the Denver mayor had asked their constituents to wear orange on Friday in support of the football team. I don't know if my hatred for orange clothing began in childhood for St. Patrick's Day's sake or if even without the Sassenachs I'd've wound up hating the color, but hate it I do, and football is about the least likely reason on earth to change that. I begged off, pointing out that my punishment was brief fiery but dashed hope of a day off.
In late morning I scampered down to the receptionist's desk for another errand, while vaguely craving elevenses. The receptionist offered me a little round orange sticker to affix upon my lapel. I declined again because I am that much of a grinch. What's the deal with the city building a privately-owned football team a stadium, yet that stadium being named for a corporation rather than for the city, and afterward seats in that stadium not being freely available to the citizens who funded it? Grr. And I still don't understand why a team's players come from all over the place instead of from that team's area. High school teams are drawn from that high school, but city teams not from that city? I don't get it.
After being chastised for declining, I sought out Kal to tell her how glad I was to be out of the city (if not the state) this weekend, and planned to stop at someone's candy bowl afterward. On the way, though, I saw free chocolate cupcakes on a low table. "Score," thought I, and picked one up. At Kal's desk I asked if I could give her further proof of my hypocrisy--"of course!"--and told her about being glad to leave town and declining even stickers--"You have no spirit at all"--and finished by showing her the cupcake, which I had helped myself to despite its blue and orange frosting.
Go Broncos.
Addendum: This was a story as soon as I showed up at Kal's desk cupcake in hand, so I'm glad I didn't take a bite first. That would have destroyed my story because the cake was pointless, as (with apologies to Melissa) I think the cake in most cupcakes is, and the frosting, being blue and orange, wasn't chocolate, and therefore was also pointless. Broncos suck!
Almost five years ago after a day on my own in the park, I browsed through some shops in Estes Park. Not the ones that inexplicably sell salt-water taffy a thousand miles from the ocean, but the giftish ones. I found a cabochon iolite ring for my right ring finger, and well-timed because my moonstone Tolkien ring was really about to die. After we determined on Saturday that there would be no more snowshoeing on Sunday, I said I wanted to window-shop a little.
In the Glacier Gorge parking lot, a car leaving one of the a perpendicular parking spaces that line the north side must have swiped Cassidy's right front fender, helpless Cassidy patiently chewing its cud in one of the parallel spots lining the south side. The parking lot is icy and snowy and we did the same thing four years ago, giving Cassidy its first (and until yesterday only) dent. But we left a note on the car we'd struck with our phone number because we are not cowardly gits.
I mention this because in the course of making out an accident report at the station, the ranger noticed that RDC's license was expired. This meant that, since I'd definitely do the rest of the weekend's driving, I could make sure one stop was a touristy jewelry store.
What is wrong with me, or with Denver, that I can't find what I want in town? Sterling silver, cabochon iolites or amethysts or maybe moonstone or garnet or turmeline, substantial. Even though I didn't replace the five-year-old iolite on my right ring finger that is now beat to shit (the top of the stone is severely scratched, the sides also but not as badly), I did find a ring for, this is new, left index finger. Six little iolites surrounding a seventh in a little flower pattern.
My wedding set is allegedly white gold but it looks fairly yellow, and the sapphire's setting clashes with my usual, so another left-hand ring has been hard to find. Now I have decreed that one whole finger between yellowy white gold and sterling silver is adequate metal-separation, and the hexagonal setting is somewhat closer to the sapphire's traditional setting. I still want (need) a sterling silver bangle and want other right-hand rings. But whee! I have a new ring.
Here, in approximate order, are books I have read aloud to RDC:
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Richard Adams, Watership Down
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Various mostly American short stories
Steven Levy, Insanely Great
James Howe, Bunnicula
Authur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons
E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Roald Dahl, Danny, Champion of the World
Joan Aiken, The Shadow Guests
Jane Curry, The Bassumtyte Treasure
E.L. Konigsburg, The View from Saturday
Robert O'Brien, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling
Sharon Creech, Walk Two Moons
Louis Sachar, Holes
Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Egypt Game
Mildred Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
David Sedaris, Naked
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Penelope Lively, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe
Jean Craighead George, Julie of the Wolves
Most of the adult books have been during road trips. The first, the Lewis Carrolls, I read using e-texts and his first laptop as we roadtripped to Pittsburgh for a wedding, because the idea of an English major who hasn't read Lewis Carroll makes me shudder. Then my two favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird and Watership Down, and short stories to roadtrip to Florida with and Stephen Levy to move to Denver with. And then vital children's books. Bunnicula isn't as vital to children's literature as it is to understanding my insurmountable fear of white asparagus.
Recently I finally bought myself Thomas Kempe, which, like Aiken and Curry, combine those apparently irresistible elements of being set in England, in a very old house, with a ghost. It's fun, but, like Swallows and Amazon, fun to no purpose. During Ransome RDC kept asking when they were going to get a keg, and seriously, these kids didn't even walk around barefoot. After we finished the Lively I asked if he would rather be a hermit in Alaska or in the Pacific Ocean, and both choices had Canine Mortality. It was only this morning as I was brushing my beak that I remembered Julie has Avian Mortality too.
I tried the first page of The Giver and that didn't work; I am not going to try The Blue Sword on him because he was never a 14-year-old girl; I think no one should live ignorant of Gram Tillerman but we have already failed with Jackaroo and Bad Girls so I might not attempt more Voigt.
But after this, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and probably My Side of the Mountain, I am not sure what to read to him next. Hmm. The Slave Dancer, definitely. Maybe Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy. Oh, A Day No Pigs Would Die. Maybe Ghosts I Have Been and The Cat in the Mirror. And The Machine-Gunners.
Good gracious, look at the proportion of male protagnoists. All the pets in Bunnicula are male, but, as Mo said of Watership Down, it's bunnies, whatever. Swallows and Amazons stars the Walkers, but there's no denying Nancy's ascendancy. Maybe Lucy is the protagonist of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but really it's Aslan. The View from Saturday is three-quarters male. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is narrated by and stars Cassie but the story is Stacey, Taylor's father's. Likewise--and unlike Bunnicula--Mrs. Frisby is the central character but the book is about mostly about Nicodemus and Justin (and Mr. Ages and Jeremy and Timothy). Alice is merely a spectator to Carroll's opiate dream.That leaves The Egypt Game, carefully balanced by race and sex but focusing on April, and Claudia Kincaid, Salamanca Tree Hiddle, Turtle, and Miyax Julie Edward Kapugen, six girls, to seven boys: Cosmo Curtoys, Tommy Bassumtyte, Jesse Aarons, Jody Baxter, Stanley Yelnats, James Harrison, and Danny. Does Danny have a surname, or is his epithet enough? I had to look up Jesse's, and I wouldn't've remembered James Harrison if I hadn't just read it, and I needed to ponder on Jody and Penny before I recollected Ma Baxter.
The to-be read pile is two-thirds boys: Karana, Erin Gandy, and Blossom Culp to Sam Gribley, Jesse Bollier (another look-up), Eustace, Cor, Rob, and Chas. Maybe I should read him some All-of-a-Kind Family or Laura Ingalls Wilder just to bump up the chick count even though they don't really belong to the theme.
I have been keeping a book lifelist for about ten years now. What's online is only the read and unread; what is in what should be a database but is instead only Microsoft Excel has a lot more, not necessarily pointful, data. I have combed the internet for titles and synopses of long-forgotten books of my childhood, as if I needed more evidence that actually I read about a dozen books 20 times rather than, say, a lot of books.
Every time I think I have everything important, another title or several occur to me, but that hasn't happened for a long time. The Secret Language came up recently, and yeah, I read it and liked it well enough to recall it from a synopsis, but it wasn't ground-breaking. Then today, on my bike, out of the blue, came a title: Tread Softly. The author turned out to be Corinne Gerson, and the Library of Congress synopsis reads, "A young girl tries to cope with the loss of her parents by inventing an imaginary family"; those data are on Amazon. What flooded back to me on their own were older brother Buck and younger sister...Gabby? and the trip to Maine, and the other babysitter, and the weird painting, and the two friends, and the actual brother, the grandparents, and their aphorisms. My sister always wanted an older brother, which is as opposite to a younger sister as a sibling can be.
In the six years between its publication and my departing my library for college, I must have reread the book a dozen times. Or more. Yet it lay unrecollected, unthought of--except for flashes when I read Yeats--for 20 years. How does that happen?
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The Tattered Cover is closing its Cherry Creek location, removing to Colfax. The Fourth Story restaurant is closing, since the Colfax location in the renovated Lowenstein theatre doesn't have four storeys, and frankly I don't think the store as a whole is far behind. It might survive in LoDo and Highlands Ranch, for downtown and architecture and hordes of children, but how the store can survive without the Cherry Creek demographic, within that shopping district, without those numbers of passersby, I do not know.
I don't know of another independent, adult, new-book bookstore in Denver. Lots of used book bookstores--hooray for that stretch of Broadway--and there's the Bookies, independent sellers of children's books, and the Barnes & Noble downtown to threaten the LoDo store, and the Barnes & Noble on Colorado Boulevard that must have contributed to the decline of the Cherry Creek store, and the other B&Ns and Borders. But so much for independence in a metropolitan area of two million people.
While it survives, I will patronize the Colfax location enthusiastically, and if the relocation of the Tattered Cover and the rejuvenation of Colfax build on each other, well and good. But does the TC have the time to wait for the new housing (more traffic) and high-end housing (moneyed traffic) to be completed and lived in? Does the rest of the city believe, as I and many in my neighborhood do, that Colfax is grittily vibrant and full of possibility, rather than scary and suitable only to be avoided?
Two 3.6-mile city rides.
5K run. I ran more of the distance than I have previously, getting nearly back to my building before "Hail, Hail."
Reading my triathlon book, I learned that the Olympic distance is much closer to the sprint than a midpoint between sprint and Ironman: 1.5K swim, 40K bike, 10K run. As sore as I am after a run, I shouldn't say I am confident I can do a sprint triathlon, but I kind of am; what I should aim for is an Olympic-distance event.
Swim 50 laps in the indoor pool, which I now suspect could be 20 yards, not 20 meters. Of course I can feel the difference of at least five meters between it and the outdoor one, but it does seem even shorter than that. If it's 20 yards, not meters, then a mile is 44 laps, not 40, and the 50 laps I swam today are therefore, uh, 1.83K and I would have to swim 55 laps to log 2K.
Those who work there have claimed it's 20 meters, but I have previously heard members murmuring, and today I have a better reason to think so. I swam one lane in from the westmost one, and in the westmost one swam a nine- or ten-year-old boy with an elderly man walking alongside or sitting at one end, coaching. At one point I broke to ask if he was a grandfather or a coach. He said he was both, and we smiled. He was a nice coach, I thought: encouraging (praising the degree to which the kick broke the surface--just enough, not too much) and giving sensible advice (keep the elbow higher than the wrist) and obviously, for all the 70+ years I'd give him, still a swimmer himself.
The boy and I finished our swims at the same time and fished ourselves out, freeing two lanes for an approaching swimmer to choose from. She asked how many laps make a mile, and I said 40 in this one and 32 in the outdoor one, since this one is 20 meters and the outdoor 25. The man told me nay, that it's yards.
The reason I want him to be right, even though it would mean I haven't swum as much this fall and winter as I've credited myself with, is that the next thing out of his mouth was, "You're good enough to be a masters swimmer. Why aren't you?"
I kinda wondered how he knew I wasn't. Do masters swimmers get a diamond tattoo indicating Imperial training on their foreheads (Dune reference)? Do my paunch and flab betray how unready for competition I really am? Or does he know all the masters swimmers in Denver?
Obviously, I want him to be right about the pool length because that would mean he has as good an eye for all things swimmy as I would like anyone to have who watched me swim and thought I was good.
I am a good swimmer, by the bye. This morning I read in my triathlon book about fist gloves, which you wear to prevent your hands from extending and cupping in order to force you to get a feel for the water, to pull with your forearm as well as with palm and fingers. I already keep my elbows above my wrists, and today especially during my middle, sprinting 10, I felt how much I do use all the surface area of my arm to push water.
Still can't do a flip turn, though. I can do a sort of mangled manuever that reverses my direction, but a flip turn it's not.
P.S. Yep, it's 20 yards.
Successful and cheap plundering of Fahrenheit Books before "Capote" today. I hadn't been in for more than a year and the store has moved. It's not ten feet wide with "Howards End"-type tottering piles of books anymore. I scored hardcovers of Blindness and Pippi Longstocking and trade paperbacks of Tim Drum and Waterland. Happy happy.
Returning to the Mayan, I half-recognized a woman passing by. We each turned over a shoulder to glance at one another again. I spoke first: "Dot Org?" And so it was. She and her friend had just emerged from "Brokeback Mountain" and were headed to the Hornet for a drink. I think she might have been the one who started the defunct Dot Org book club and whom I offended by scorning Anne Lamott's Hard Laughter. Oops.
A Usual Suspects linked American Book Review's opinion of the 100 best first lines. Of course I couldn't read them just for the pleasure of it but had to copy the text, replace the em-dash separating line from origin with a tab, paste the result into Excel and hide the column showing the origin. Yes, in so doing I saw the first two, but, thanks so much, those I knew. Some were obvious; some were giveaways; some I have read but didn't recognize; and some I have read and should have recognized but didn't. For those I get a smack. Answers in white.