Honestly, we do have better reason to renovate the bathroom than only the leaking of the sink (whose fix requires a new faucet, not just a new washer) and the flickering of one fluorescent bulb. There's the absence of the storage and, most important, of a tub. I have found the single best reason, trumping even the tub, and I found it in an advertisement in 5280 for Carpet Exchange. The caption is "When it comes to an incredible selection of flooring materials, carpet is just the tip of the iceberg" and the illustration is a mosaic of marble and granite forming two penguins on an iceberg.
Flooring is the only aspect of Formigny's permanent decor that should be patterned, and we do want to replace the hideous linoeleum with tile. Instead of the train station-looking black and white ceramic hexagons we've been assuming, why not equally black and white but more interesting penguins? Mr. Killjoy was unmoved. He correctly pointed out that I do not actually want to tromp on penguins. This means he probably won't want magpies or badgers either. Foiled again.
5K in 33'30" at 1% incline, averaging I guess 5.5 mph, then a quarter mile at a nice stretchy 15% incline and a cooldown at an even lower mph and incline until my pulse was under 125.
That's two 5Ks in two days. I know I'm supposed to pay attention to how my clothes fit and not to the scale, but the middle number on the home scale rolled up to the next decade last week. That was once, and it scared me so much that I continued the bold effort I noted earlier this week not to graze. The medical scale at the gym balanced at the same number last week and today, but that number is at least in the previous decade than the house scale's figure.
Kal and Neal gave us dinner last night, a yummy lamb curry. We brought champagne to toast their recent engagement--
--last week Scarf and I were in their house to feed the kitty when the phone rang and the machine (they have a machine!) answered and Kal's voice said, "Lisa, I just called your house and RDC told me you were here so if you're there, pick up!" Scarf was closer and she picked up and said hi and was instructed to pass the phone along to me, and the first thing I heard was "We're engaged!" and I squealed and jumped up and down and pointed to the appropriate finger for Scarf's benefit and she squealed and jumped up and down and Kal reported to Neal in the background, "There's a lot of squealing and jumping up and down"--
and we toasted their engagement. As we sat down to eat, Neal picked up his wine glass and said, "Two bay leaves and two cardamon pods and four innocent palates--" at which point I laughed because only then did I realize he was counting instead of toasting "to bay leaves and cardamon pods, and for innocent palates..."
Also, he believes in butter with peanut butter toast. Another voice of reason amongst the legions of dry-toast sufferers!
Bessie Head, from the Feminista list. I kept thinking of Henderson the Rain King and maybe I was supposed to. I liked it a lot, much more than the Saul Bellow (which I tolerated). There was also a white guy and there was also dynamite, but here their collaboration was not disastrous.
I know I'm thinking about the white guy's choice of cash crop, tobacco, through a 2006 perspective, but what about the idea of a cash crop at all? Why should people who struggle to grow enough food for themselves expend energy and rare water on a cash crop? And okay, Gilbert's an agricultural specialist (unlike Henderson), so why doesn't he know, in the '60s when this is set, that irrigation is not sustainable? How long until the land becomes salinized and mineralized into uselessness? And how superior of me to want Gilbert and the village of Golema Mmidi to prioritize the fate of the land in a thousand years over their daily survival.
I liked that Makhaya could know at least one righteous white person, and his pan-Africanism, and that the reader knows almost nothing specific about his past, and especially how the lack of specifics doesn't render him faceless and interchangeable.
I would like to know how Botswana got its name. The novel has Botswana people and Motswana people [aha, Motswana is the singular of Botswana] and someone reads a Tswana translation of the Bible.