Sunday, 2 April 2006

wide sargasso sea

I suggested this for bookclub because it's short, deals with -isms, and is (kind of) a book told from a minor character's point of view. But I remember so little of Jean Rhys's psychological history of Mrs. Rochester that it was pretty much new to me. I read it in 1991 or 1992--it has so very much to do with medieval history--sitting in Fugly on Horse Barn Hill in the rain. I don't even remember when I first read Jane Eyre, but I remember that afternoon clearly.

Of course she was driven mad by confinement and lack of sun. John Sutherland asks, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? Because she's a freak of fiction, yes; for any other creature, no. Mr. Rochester is cruel.

swim

The first outdoor swim of the year happened in ocean, which is best; but the first outdoor swim of the season happened today, in a heated pool. Yesterday, when the pool opened, it rained and I did a lot of wallowing. Today I swam a very long kilometer, long because I barely kicked. The blisters are no longer raw and the right one is fine, but the left does not enjoy being flexed. Because I didn't use my legs much--in half the laps not at all but used a float instead--I could easily go seven and nine half-strokes (where a stroke is both arms) between breaths.

lovely day

I didn't swap storms for screens today despite its being a time-change day. That will no longer be a reasonable schedule anyway, since as of I think next year, daylight saving time is legislated to encroach even further into actual time, before it's warm enough for screens. Yesterday and today I savored the quiet house: no forced-air heat (if I had a scrillion dollars I would change Formigny to steam heat: silence and even though slow heat is a fine exchange for noise and responsiveness) yet still two layers of glass against city noise.

I had mostly decided that beforehand but a gusty wind made me feel prudent instead of lazy about it: handling glass sails up a ladder v. not doing that. The wind was so strong that it knocked over and rolled away my water bottle at the pool (and I didn't find it in the flowerbeds or in the leisure pool or anywhere) and blew away the gym's towel (which probably didn't escape the walled enclosure to become litter, I hope).

Afterward I grocery-shopped and, home again, had my lunch on the porch swing with the buddy and a book. The north wind was so strong I heard the lion roaring. Occasionally we hear the sea lions barking during feeding-time, and I've heard an elephant trumpet a couple of times, and it's easy to hear the several wolves howl or the dozens of peacocks cry at roosting time, but the lion's roar was new. It perhaps shouldn't be, at less than a mile away, but perhaps in areas where you really need to hear the lion's mood, traffic doesn't drown him out.

The porch swing sojourn, however pleasant, was short, because I had been gone more than two hour-years in the buddy brain and he was begging for step-up (holding one foot out flat and waving it frantically: pick me up, pick me up!). Inside the house he can come out of his cage, and he did, joining me on the chair not to snuggle into my fleece sweater (sunny but windy) but to play in his box. I gave up sun for an invisible box buddy.

I spend the rest the REI dividend on a dress I can hike in: no waist, unlike my hiking skirt. It's pale blue, not periwinkle, not frost or smoky blue. Just pale. Pastel, in fact. Yii. Also a fleece sweater that has, get this, horizontal stripes of periwinkle, celidon, peach, ivory, and pink. That's what I wore today, dress and sweater, and I look like an Easter egg and entirely unlike myself. Horizontal stripes! Sherbet pastels! More than two colors at once, and none of them a neutral! The color on one half not picked up anywhere in the other half! It's craziness, I tell you. But I think kind of pretty.

Monday, 3 April 2006

jane austen book club

Kal lent me Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, which is so far an inoffensive story peppered with some Jane observations I had never considered before, such as the set-up of Sense and Sensibility as the opposite of a fairy-tale (a kind stepmother abused by her nasty stepdaugher-in-law).

bookclub

Scarf, Kal, Harrison, and London (and I) were the only ones who liked Wide Sargasso Sea. At least everyone loved The Golden Compass last year, and I know my priorities. Someone new attended, someone whom Scarf collected on "the walk." I asked about her dog, but Scarf said it was the baby walk. Oh. The new person does not, in fact, have a dog because of an allergic husband. I refrained from blurting that allergies are for the weak, because I figure I should at least choose a book that more than half of us like before inflicting my perverse ideology on especially a new person.

In two weeks London has a piano recital that she invited us all to, and I am slightly torn--just a tiny rip--because at the Tattered Cover that night is a reading by both a DU professor we know and, uh, the UConn equivalent of its poet laureate during my tenure. Another UConn writer I knew spoke of him scathingly--"You mention his poetry and you can see the bulge in his pants rise"--and I am, still, crippled by nostalgia. I liked him, or at least one of his poems, well enough once to transcribe it into my poetry journal. But I'll probably go hear London instead.

Speaking of the Tattered Cover, the Lowenstein project got a third tenant, an independent cinema, with a café! Retail and entertainment: maybe this thing will survive.

Tuesday, 4 April 2006

not very heavy

A few things about my household:

  • My keyring contains a house key, a car key, a bike key, and a keyfob about the size of the car's keyless security dealie except it's not a car thing. The whole shebang is smaller than average, I think.
  • Blake's cage has a long stick that fits through loops at the top and bottom of the door so he can't open his cage accidentally (this could, with a lot of effort, conceivably happen if he hopped with all his puny might onto the perch of a dish, which both fit into the door). When we're home, the stick lies on the cagestand.
  • When Blake is abandoned on his cagestand, he will pick up the stick by its handle end and give it a shove, and another shove, and another shove, an inch at a time, until finally it overbalances and falls to the floor. Blake will watch the fall and listen to the satisfying rattle as it hits the floor, turning his little head on the side to peer down with one monocular eye. Just playing with gravity, or expressing frustration? Perhaps both: a cockatiel is a deep, complicated thinker.
  • A cockatiel can't test a surface to gauge whether it will bear his weight. If a magazine is hanging off the edge of a table, both magazine and bird might tumble.

    So the other day I came in the house and, as is not my habit, dropped my keys on the cagestand where it stood, as is its habit, by the livingroom window so Blake can watch the world go by. Sometime later in the day, I viciously cruelly and wantonly abandoned Blake on his cage, and he was forced by the utter invisibility of the several toys in his cage and the threat posed by approaching dragons to attract my attention by dropping the keys off the stand, nudge by nudge. But the keys are not a long thin pole but jointed and complicated.

    Blake loosed the keyring from his beak a moment after the keys went over the edge. He let them go and pinwheeled (or whatever it's called when a cockatiel does it) and escaped gravity, but only just.

    Okay, that was really long, but it was really cute.

  • Wednesday, 5 April 2006

    the planets

    I loved Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter and Longitude and I figured this would be equally engaging. It is. She writes the creation of the universe with awe, as it deserves, and quotes the first chapter of Genesis a lot with her reverence properly directed at the universe and the solar system, not at the Judeo-Christian god. After discussing the sun--I had never known it takes millions of years for light produced at the core to escape the star's gravity, but of course that makes sense--she starts the planets with Mercury and refers to Greek mythology just as much.

    I started listening while walking to the post office. Now it's a mile away instead of a few blocks, but I saw a kestrel and what looked like a mutated magpie, with more white on it than should be. It looked so peculiar that when I first spotted it I thought it was a plastic bag caught in a tree, even though the shape and the tail-flipping were magpiesian. I paused, watching in wonder, until it flew off. Let's all be reverent together about this great planet we've got.

    Then I got to this bit: "Jupiter more than doubles the mass of the other eight planets combined. Compared to the Earth alone, Jupiter measures 318 times Earth's mass and 1000 times Earth's volume. The diameter of Jupiter, however, is only 11 times that of Earth, since the giant compacted itself as it accreted so its diameter expanded at a fraction of the rate at which its mass and volume increased." That sentence asserts that the volume of a sphere functions discretely from its diameter, twice its radius, but the volume of a sphere is calculated by 4(pi*radius3)/3.

    Even Homer nods, of course (this saying was much more apropos at UConn, since the Homer Babbidge Library nodded its facade right off about two days after it was pasted on): Jean Craighead George writes in Julie of the Wolves about Miyax looking at the constellations of the southern hemisphere. I was reading it aloud to RDC, and I hadn't read it at all in years, and I do sometimes editorialize our reading (as Lucy and Susan walked Aslan up to the Stone Table, I called them Mary and Martha). George was the Rachel Carson of my childhood, and I was Sam Gribley under (if not in) my own hemlock and Miyax with my dogs and so my first wild, accommodating thought was that maybe the southern hemisphere stars are visible during sunless arctic days. But no. They're not. (Whoa, I just emailed Jean Craighead George. I thanked her for Frightful and Tornait.)

    RDC says that Orion is in the sky over South Africa right now as winter begins. I accept that: Orion sets from the northern hemisphere for the summer. But he doesn't claim to see Polaris, and I want that geometry explained to me.

    I'm not sure that RDC finished listening to this: he said she wrote with the adoration of a kindergartener and that was offputting to him. I noticed that tone too, but I'm a sap and enjoyed it, like Walter Cronkite saying "Oh boy!" as Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.

    book of imaginary beings

    Jorge Luis Borges. RDC heard about this on NPR and thought he could surprise me with it but it was already on my wishlist because I'd read about it in The Week. Since Yule, it's served well as a bedtime book because each being gets only a page or three. If I wanted to read my actual book, I did; if I was tired enough that I knew I wouldn't last, I read Borges. This and Invisible Cities and Dictionary of Imaginary Places need to be together in the library.

    Thursday, 6 April 2006

    dream

    I was wearing a ladybug costume (my black-clad limbs and head stuck out of a fat disk upholestered in red with black dots) and about to go into a classroom.

    This is from the "Lunar Eclipse" episode of Big Love (fine: I see the need to italicize television programs) in which a third-grader plays the moon in a pageant. Her costume is black on one side and blue with yellow mare on the other.

    The classroom was off the laundry room in my own house. I was listening to a Walkman, definitely not an iPod, which was supposed to feed me ladybug facts that I could spout at the kids. I was late getting into the room because the headphones tangled (iPod headphones in design and tangliness, though black). I wanted to zip the hood of the costume completely over my face.

    That's so obvious.

    My shrink was the teacher. In "Big Love," Jeanne Triplehorn is a teacher, and my shrink, at this point my ex-shrink, is African-American; their association is that both are my kind of lovely: not conventionally pretty but appealing and wholesome.

    The tape in the Walkman was U2's October and--tape? who can find the right spot on a tape?--I had no ladybug factoids. Instead I just blathered. It turns out that insects have strong political proclivities. Ants and bees, of course, are communists, all working to death for the common good of the dictator. Who is herself enslaved, a consideration the second-graders were not interested in at all. Ladybugs are liberal: benevolent, tasty, nonviolent. That's about as far as I got.

    The kids weren't interested in West Wing, either.

    Kal and I talked yesterday of the end of the show, just as it's got good again, and Josh and Donna, and how the show dealt with John Spencer's death, and how what they really need to finish the show well is another mention of Dot Org.

    So I was flailing to save myself verbally or physically. I was also trying not to laugh at myself and the kids, and that is a really good thing for me to dream about: I realize this is a ludicrous situation and I am not going to panic about it or let a bunch of four-footers jeering crush me. I--this is from the notes I scrawled at 5:30 this morning with my light-pen--apparently threatened to kiss one, and I received a text message (on my cell phone? because I had one of those but not an iPod, and the cell phone couldn't've told me vital ladybug information?) from one of the kids, "Kis1." I told the texter that if I kiss someone I'd do it right, with two s's. Even in a dream I am a snob.

    The alarm saved me this time.

    panic

    Definition of a best friend: someone you can call from the station not because you are stranded (though you might be) but because you have become so distraught by the wanton abuse by the person you asked politely to get off your toe in the train that you just really need her.

    The first few weeks off Lexapro I thought I was going to be okay. The several weeks since the drug has cleared my system, not so much. Last night I left work for home, remembered about 2/3 of the way there that I hadn't bought vegetables for buddy chow, and detoured toward a supermarket.

    At home, I cleaned and tidied and puttered and filmed the house to show Nisou. RDC gave me a video camera for our anniversary and so far I have footage of Blake (lots, as expected), magpies, Rocky Mountain National Park in July, and seeing some sprouts in Berkeley. I examined the cables available and could figure out how to charge the camera but couldn't find a USB one to move snow-shoeing in RMNP in January and today's house from camera to computer. Fine, I decided, I'll take the snippets of the garden in June (the day after I got the camera) and of RMNP on Independence Day that I could find on RDC's machine (mine, at four years old, cannot store that much data or manipulate it in iMovie) and make a DVD that I can play in Moonshadow and that will be nice.

    I sat at the computer for over an hour, iMovie book (a subsequent present) in hand, listening to The Planets--Dava Sobel's book, not Holtz's suite--trying to figure this out. I had clips in iMovie, but I didn't want to compress them into Quicktime and iDVD would only take footage straight from the camera through a USB cable I couldn't find. I did not make buddy chow. I did not pack. I told myself that if something didn't click by 8, that was that. Nothing clicked, I was frustrated and stupid, The Planets was done, and that was that.

    It was 8 o'clock and I went into the kitchen to start the chow. Two hours before, filming the kitchen, I had stared straight through the viewfinder at the clear glass canister where the buddy quinoa lives and not noticed that it had a half-inch of grain in it.

    Eight o'clock. Whole Foods is two miles away and is open until 10, I have a car, this is totally possible. And eight is a much better time to go than five--rush-hour neither in traffic nor in the store. But I haven't had a panic attack, if that's what it is, that bad since I broke my sister's car 2.5 years ago--preLexapro, but one of the final spurs toward therapy. When I could breathe again, and see through my tears, I drove very carefully to the store with Hamlet in my lap.

    I didn't bring the elephant into the store, and I have to get sanity credit for that. In the bulk food aisle, quinoa in hand, I asked a stocker about hazelnuts, which I haven't seen for weeks. I don't know whether I was blind or WF had not had any, but there they were. I had breathed easier when I saw the nice full bin of quinoa, but now I may have smiled too.

    Home again, I freed Blake and began to prepare the quinoa (lots of rinsing before boiling and steaming). I roasted hazelnuts. I added water to the honey jug and nuked it into liquidity. When the quinoa had soaked up all its water, I stirred it into the vegetables. I still needed to bag and freeze the chow, but (having and) not burning the quinoa as it steams is the hard part. I rubbed the skins of the nuts and threw them into the food processor, then added chocolate chips, honey, and condensed milk. Only the noise of the chips reminded me--even though I had consulted the recipe to find time and temperature for the nuts--that the chips should be melted, not just chopped.

    But see, hazelnut spread is not vital. Buddy chow is. A hostess present is a good idea, and I had opted out of chewy chocolate ginger cookies a couple of days before. The spread is not vital, and the nuts were still piping hot from the oven and melted the chocolate some, and friction from the processor helped, and for heaven's sake it's chocolate: there's a lot of leeway before it becomes inedible.

    My mother makes jam--elderberry is the favorite but they cannot be cultivated, also raspberry and blackberry--and gives jars for birthdays and Christmas, and last week when I walked to the post office one of the things I mailed was a box of empty jars, returned by her request. Charenton gives me jam too--blueberry and currant and quince--and in the box where I accumulate presents all year are empty Charenton jars. Jam jars are good things to return, but Amelia Bedelia taught me that a plate should not be returned empty. She filled home plate with cookies; I filled jam jars with faux Nütella. (I hope no one gets salmonella from eating it after the time of my travel without refrigeration, but Charenton keeps eggs on the windowsill so I don't stress too much.)

    Packing was the hard part because Blake Knew. He stalked back and forth on the plank (the footboard of the bed) before pouting in a corner of the mattress. He didn't even want to play cave in the suitcase. Running shoes and zebra (for Siblet) and cardinal (another American animal for Emlet) are more important than video camera, and I shouldn't use it until I know how to store and manipulate its results, so thphbt.

    So. Realizing I had not the food I needed to prepare for Blake on the eve of camp was a reasonable thing to beat myself up about, given what I was doing instead. I might not have beat my breast about it so much if I had been on Lexapro, but I recovered quickly and well. Recovery is all well and good, but not having the attack at all despite stimulus, or, even better, thinking more clearly and focusing better so as to prevent the stimulus, is what the drug does for me.

    Monday, 10 April 2006

    run

    3.6 miles. With hills, even. Nisou heard my footfalls on the uphills because there I plod like a dromedary.

    flanders panel

    Nisou recommended this; it's by Arturo Perez-Reverte. I liked it as faux art history and for the chess, but as a story it fell apart. Spoilers follow. I accept that Europeans, Spaniards in this case, are big smokers, but would any restoration specialist chain-smoke around a painting? in 1990? especially after she removed the varnish, exposing 500-year-old pigment? Also, Julia's working on the painting in her own house instead of a sterile lab struck me as off before I saw how that unlikelihood was manipulated to fit the author's plot rather than the demands of realism.

    As with The Da Vinci Code, the unveiling of the villain was no surprise because who else could it have been? I prefer to be amble along a garden path overgrown with ivy and tangled with weeping willow that obscure my sightline, not to be led down a straight path with clearly defined edges. And I wanted the villain and motive to have something, anything, to do with the painting, rather than with a simple homophobic bogey. Unlike The Da Vinci Code, at least no silhouettes glared.

    The only sidepath alluded to but never glimpsed was the possibility of more chess and more mirrors: the game on the board, the placement of the figures in the painting on the chequered floor, and the reflection in the mirror. I kept hoping a clue to the game--and I hope the retrograde analysis was correct, because it was fascinating to this non-chessplayer--would be found in the mirror, which might reflect a different game, or different point in the game, than that depicted on the board.

    Overall, disappointing, because the same characters and betrayal could have happened without mentioning either painting or chess. But Perez-Reverte uses enough epigrams from Gödel, Escher, Bach to inspire me to tackle that again.

    Tuesday, 11 April 2006

    blissful weekend

    The only thing more endearing than Emlet's irrepressible giggle every time I mooed at her was watching her figuring out how to tell the joke.
    "Knock, knock."
    "Who's there?"
    "Interrupting Cow."
    "Interrupt--"
    "MOO!"
    Except she's a very polite child, and four, so it took her a while to figure out how to MOO! before the respondent completes the response "Interrrupting Cow Who?"

    There was plenty of other endearing stuff. She's as devoted to Nanabush as I was to Booboo as a child (I only wish I had given him to her), she has delightfully Continental consonants, enunciating t's as few Americans do (she says "twenty" and "mitten" instead of "twenny" or "mih-en" and even hypercorrects "cuddle" and "middle"), and for the first time she addressed me by name: "Tante Liesl."

    ZBD and I were talking about the riddles Gollum and Bilbo ask each other. The only one I remember, besides nothing or string in the pocketses, is "30 white horses on a red hill, first they champ, then they stamp, then they stand still." Gollum jeers "Chestnuts!" at Bilbo because that's such an old obvious one, and that's what ZBD thought the answer was! I am so in love with her. She can tell you umpteen details from The Silmarillion and where the Rangers are from (she, not I, remembers their proper name) and contemplate the origins of Tom Bombadil but she has enough child's literalism to take a figure of speech straight. Also, her least favorite chronicles of Narnia are also The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, demonstrating her good taste.

    Siblet doesn't speak much yet, just lots of purposeful babble in no particular language but her own. She has at least one extremely French gesture that never failed to crack me up: arms up and bent bringing spread hands to shoulders, and a shrug, indicating "I don't know" or "no more" or "such is the state of the world," depending on facial expression. Unfortunately I never quite captured that on film, only on brain cell. After fruitless searching of Kazoo & Co. and the zoo and the Museum of Nature and Science, I had no idea where to find a zebra until Maven told me that the herb and tea shop Apothecarie Tinctura had one (I mentioned my quest when Scarf received a lovely monkey for the Monkey at her baby shower).

    Emlet saw the zebra change hands and asked if I had brought anything for her. I reminded her of the Playmobil giraffe and the Jan Brett beaver that had gone swimming in the hot tub, and she nodded, and then I gave her the cardinal. It's the Audubon series that sounds the bird's call when you press it, and though Emlet is not quite coordinated enough to press hard enough in just the right spot, she could tell what she was meant to do: "Press here," she read aloud.

    It was an Everyone weekend but I still had good one-on-one Nisou time. She picked me up at Framingham and we talked from 11:15 when she fetched me to 2:00. On Friday SEM and his girlfriend arrived, and TJZD and her two kids RED and ALD; the younger just turned one but I hadn't met her, except in utero, yet. I knew I was going to like Girlfriend, and I did--we toured the house and garden and brook, talking--and RED and Emlet are two months apart and play well together. It was chilly enough that, once in, I wanted to stay in the hot tub, but the kids, afraid of being too hot, stood on a bench up to their knees for minutes on end. Brr.

    SEM and Girlfriend were home for the weekend for his stepbrother's wedding, and Nisou and TJZD and I signed a card I harebrainedly managed to remember to get for him and his bride.

    We left a generous Maman with the four under-fives and nipped out for lunch, stopping at Tranquility because we saw a car with New York plates and there plucked up N. She didn't remember me, but I am Elephantine not only in belly but in memory too and I remembered her. At lunch, a schoolmate of the local set whom I had not met showed up, and her father popped in to say hi. He taught music theory and I told him his class was my husband's favorite from UConn, and he'd probably remember him, he sat on the left? This is funny only if you know that that course was taught in von der Mehden, a 400-person auditorium I know best from its Friday night art flicks.

    In the evening, many more locals arrived. I am a pathe enough freak really to want to go to their 20th high school reunion, but a self-aware enough freak to know that wouldn't be right. Also, coincidentally, the day after I got home I had e-mail from one of my own classmates, emerging from the woodwork and wondering what was up with our reunion, and from one of the organizers, promising she'd get on the ball right quick. There were photograph albums and yearbooks at Charenton that night, and when I actually counted up my acquainti, I realized anew that while I do have more friends from that school than from mine, I know only about two dozen (plus several outliers from other classes) altogether, whereas I could reel off many more of my own classmates' names and perhaps recognize them. I am not such a yearbook-memorizing freak as that seems: I recently compiled a contact list of not only the 120 people I graduated with but also the other 60 or so who appeared in a yearbook between sixth and eleventh grades. But I'm still a nostalgic freak.

    At Charenton Friday night, then, were all my heavy people--a Kate Bush phrase, for me meaning this set of friends--except PLT and his family, and then some. Seven kids--six under five--and 16 adults including me: a good time. Nisou's newest niece baptized my arm and I showed my childfree colors by immediately thrusting her at her father with a "here's your spitting child" and stalking off to rinse my arm. The elder niece, named for Maman, is the size of a five-year-old (she's a bit more than 2) and I heartily approved her wardrobe--lots of overalls, and when the snaps on the inner perimeter of the legs are unsnapped, they look like dresses.

    Saturday some of us went for a short stroll along the Nipmuck Trail in the rain. The pond just upstream of the grist mill looked temptingly clear and wet, even in the rain, even in the cold (it was about 40), and I flung off my clothes and jumped in. For less than a minute: my companions were waiting. Or maybe a bit more than a minute, because you should always swim for longer than it takes to undress and redress. The only bad bit was putting on socks over wet feet.

    In the afternoon we continued the perusal of photograph albums. Nisou has pictures of NCS and me that I had never seen. I haven't seen him since 1994? and so in the picture he looks like my memory of him, but I look like such a child! I think I have only one picture of the two of us, and because it is familiar to me, the same 20-year-old face doesn't look as infantile as in Nisou's unfamiliar one.

    Easter eggslooking for hens' eggsSunday morning I visited the Beasts, meeting the new batch of cats and admiring the renovated house and garden. In the afternoon the children and I dyed Easter eggs. Red vinegar works as well to fix the color, or whatever vinegar does to dye, as white. Next time, balsamic! Also we searched for chicken eggs, and the Easter egg hunt can only be easier than that, since humans will have hidden red and aqua (and one lovely celadon one that says "Liesl") eggs rather than hens hiding pale green and brown ones. In the evening Nisou crashed early and I stayed up late with Maman and Papa talking, and then she woke up and we stayed up later talking.

    Monday morning we had a run involving some hills, which are not so much in my flatlander's repertoire. Maman asked if I had room in my luggage for sirop d'érable ou pain, or both, and what a question! I would leave something behind rather than pass up Charenton Pretty Virgin syrup* or her bread. But my luggage was now minus a zebra, a cardinal, three jars of Nütella (which went over well), Miss Hickory, and two Playmobil figurines, plus a wee plastic hedgehog and an equally wee beaver, so space there was plenty. Lunch was leftover paëlla and quantities of Maman's bread with framboise, and it ended late, with noticings of the time and last-second photographs and hugs.

    *Is that as funny a grade as I think? I love the punly options of "relatively virgin" and "attractive virgin."

    Papa drove me to Framingham and I just caught the 3:30. Thank goodness, because the 4:00 would have encountered more traffic and possibly delivered me to Logan a hairsbreadth too late. Me, I prefer an entire hare between me and departure.

    Maven was going to lend me Morgan for the night so I wouldn't have to sleep in an empty house but I just crashed. The sleeping went fine: I don't actually sleep with Blake and he doesn't snore, so I didn't notice his absence. But the solitary breakfast with a whole bowl of cereal to myself felt wrong; if a cockatiel doesn't share my cereal I would appreciate at least to drink my orange juice cuddling with a four-year-old having her milk.

    run

    Run 4.4 miles with the Dot Org runners.

    Wednesday, 12 April 2006

    the nabe

    I love my heavies, but I love my neighborhood too. We congregated at Scarf's to plan the next baby quilt, and Scarf read Goodnight, Gorilla for the first time, and I learned a Spanish equivalent to patty-cake ("When I came here, first I learned to sing, then to dance, then to work"), and Mia washed Monkey's face, and afterward AEK walked with me and Mia to the new hot dog stand. AEK shared my fries and Mia the hot dog, and we sat talking on Scarf's porch until the fries and limeade were gone ("they had eaten every one"*). Saturday AEK and Maven and I will dye Easter eggs--unless you got it out of your system last weekend" (no)--and Sunday several of us are having brunch; also we're planning a Cinco de Mayo progressive dinner.

    Can conservatives have progressive dinners? Maybe they call them something else.

    * Besides Gödel, Escher, Bach, The Flanders Panel also made me want to reread Through the Looking Glass.

    Thursday, 13 April 2006

    whee!

    Groovy. According to Google Pedometer, which tool I've been waiting for, my usual bike to work is 3.77 miles, not 3.6. I feel thinner already. And it's just under a mile around Ferril Lake in City Park.

    My favorite, or at least daily, bike ride in high school was 7.79 miles. The three-point swim in my lake is just over half a mile, and it's just under a mile end to end. My road, from Boston Post to the turnpike (when you walk there through the woods, it's the turnpike because that's what that stretch of road was when father was a boy), is 1.1 miles. When Griswold Point existed, my walk or run (I did try to run one summer, barefoot and in a bathing suit) was 1.75 miles from my beach to its tip.

    run

    Run 3.4 miles with work runners.

    Swim 1K.

    Friday, 14 April 2006

    bike

    Two 3.77-mile city rides.

    Saturday, 15 April 2006

    run

    Run 5 miles in 57' at a 1% grade, minus a 45" pee-break at the 5K point. I trotted bathroom-ward on the indoor track, approaching a mirrored wall, and that was an unpleasant view. Also, my pain level jumped as soon as I left the treadmill for the padded track, not as much as it would on actual ground, but still.

    Sunday, 16 April 2006

    brunch

    richandlisa.jpglisamia.jpgScarf herded us all together for Easter brunch after some went to Mass. We gathered chez lui a bit beforehand for photographs, and then we processed to Café Star. She had set up a curtain at one end of her porch and added a vase with flowering branches, which was a nice touch, but so was full sunlight. When we walked, I called to Mia, and she got her feet under her and lumbered toward us, but, too eager for bellyrubs, she lay down too soon--while still on the slope over the sidewalk--promptly rolled once down the slope, and, poor dog, we all laughed at her. But then I gave her a thorough belly rub.

    group.jpglisaannamarieerin.jpgIn addition to the usual bookclub suspects were other neighborhood agitators whom I have met through their dog, the Hawaiian soccer god Pele. (They named him after the god, but he's black and white and about the size of a soccer ball, so for me he's both.) They would like to have a political bookgroup, and I absolutely could do with more nonfiction reading, and political reading more in-depth than The Nation and news sites. I hope that gets off the ground, as long as the age thing doesn't matter.

    other eggsSaturday night AEK had had an Easter egg dyeing party, which should cement her forever as My People except that Sunday morning, looking at Mulchman's house, she said that instead of giving him her leaves, she throws them in the Dumpster, loose and unbagged. I suggested she doesn't have to bag them just to barrow them across the street to him and offered my wheelbarrow. Anyway, I wrote "Blake" on one egg in orange and dyed in yellow, and on another wrote the household's four names--me, RDC, Blake, Formigny--and dyed it green. She had all this newfangled stuff--Paas, which doesn't need hot water or vinegar, and newer Paas tablets that give a marbled effect. I am going to have a Yule cookie-baking party in December--more food coloring, though no crayons--and empty lots and lots of eggs through blowing so that next Easter we'll have lots of shells. Since Blake didn't come to brunch, for the family pictures one of us held his commemorative egg.

    This was Café Star's first brunch. They served blueberry crepes (the first item on the menu, and the point at which I stopped reading it), lobster bruschetta (with an egg on top, gack), duck confit with a duck's egg and potato pancake, lamb--Eastery but not 11-in-the-morning-y, mushroom quiche, a savory crepe with trout and asparagus, French toast with ricotta and strawberries, and a few other yummy things.

    It was a lovely, three-hour-long event, and afterward we broke Blake's heart by almost immediately leaving again for the gym. It was halfway through April and 83 degrees and I had meters to swim before I slept.

    swim

    Swim 2K.

    gifts

    This newish Ursula LeGuin caught my eye in the 'brary on Thursday. The setting's geography, called Uplands in contrast to away's Lowlands, plus the wearing of kilts, reminded me not as much of Scotland as perhaps it was meant to, as Cynthia Voigt's Kingdom. Also the protagonist's name, Orrec, reminded me of the unfortunate same in Voigt's Wings of a Falcon (Oriel). But LeGuin's conflict--and here I think of the English class in Dicey's Song when Dicey first becomes aware of Mina--is on a grander scale than Voigt's usual: a person's conflict with her society rather than mostly with herself.

    The only thing that didn't wholly work was the first-person point-of-view: I assumed female and the text didn't clarify for a few pages nor did the character's own gender assert itself strongly. Which would have been fine without my assumption, in fact.

    Monday, 17 April 2006

    bike

    Two 3.7-mile city rides.

    things to do in denver

    Good heavens, three weeks until my father and notstepmother arrive. SMW said, "Don't clean!" Shyeah. It's bad enough my father will see the state of the backyard and the house not yet jacked up; the least I can do is scrub the house. A lot of this counts as spring cleaning anyway.

  • Scrub column tops. Plant big pots of flowers.
  • Bleach or similar to other column tops that pigeons tried to colonize.
  • Scrub birdbath.
  • Trim vinca. Transplant some from south to north easement.
  • Transplant some bishop's weed further back on the north side of the house.
  • Move the firewood back to the woodpile.
  • Clean up litter in neighbor's yard where visible from Formigny.
  • Transplant some thyme from south to north slope.
  • Spread mulch on front gardens, including sunflower husks. Allow no groundcloth to show.
  • Bring whatever scrub doesn't work as compost or mulch to Mulchman.
  • After the wheelbarrowing of mulch and the transplanting of plants and the transporting of bales of peat moss and manure, sweep the walk and vacuum porch and car (and rebelt Banzai).
  • Uncover and hook up roof-top swamp cooler. Remove window unit.
  • Unbend screens in the doors. RDC made new screens!
  • Weed patio and walk.
  • Empty ash from fireplace. Empty ashtrap.
  • Hose patio chairs and bathe them in teak oil.
  • Hose patio table and bathe it in teak oil.
  • Hose patio umbrella.
  • Hose buddy rug.
  • Power-wash and stain interior of back fence.
  • Amend first and other vegetable gardens with peat moss.
  • Plant early vegetables, sunflowers, chives, bachelor's button, forget-me-not, chamomile.
  • Fertilize cherry, nectarine, pear, plum and ash trees.
  • Hammer a few more nails in the garage for hanging storage, and screw a few more hooks into garage soffits for tomato traction.
  • Empty yellowjacket traps and rebait them.
  • Clean up behind garage in alley. Dump baking soda in dumpsters.
  • Hang birdhouse.
  • Vacuum upholstery. Oil furniture. Touch up scuffs on trim.
  • Wash windowwells, front door, and back door.
  • Buff lamp. (Restoration Hardware should have cautioned it would tarnish.)
  • Vacuum and dust ceiling fixtures and bulbs.
  • Scrub Blake's shelf of the television shrine.
  • Tidy study.
  • Scrub (white-painted and scuffed) front staircase.
  • Bring donations to Goodwill (three bags of clothes, curtains, and towels; rice cooker; two sauté pans, double boiler, and small saucepan; assorted sundries.
  • Replace winter curtains with summer ones.
  • Tidy furnace room and coal cellar and back of basement.
  • Find extra keys or have others made.
  • Plan menus. This will be tricky, mostly because I am not a cook but also because my father is a carnivore and prefers his meat gray. I can reliably cook pasta and I like my meat rare as hens' teeth.
  • Bake peanut butter cookies. Bake more peanut butter cookies. Bake cherry pie. Stock chocolate-covered blueberries. Make faux Nütella. Hide Haitch's frozen Tagalongs. Improvise Tagalongs for us peanut-butter fiends?
    Last minute
  • Launder bedlinens from mattress out. Air pillows.
  • Shop for groceries, including flowers.
    Also:
  • Scrub medicine cabinets and other cupboards.
  • Clean fridges.
  • Clean lightswitches.

    Errands

  • Home Depot: mulch, peat moss, tree fertilizer. Thingie for porch light so can have outdoor plug. Trellis for beans. More tree fertilizer stakes.
  • City Floral: annuals, hanging pots.
  • Petsmart: honeysticks, dishes.
  • Costco: romano, crab, avocados for guacamole for progressive dinner and crab chowder, toilet paper.

  • Tuesday, 18 April 2006

    bike

    Two 3.7-mile city rides.

    Wednesday, 19 April 2006

    bike and run

    Two 3.7-mile city rides and a 5K run. I have got to do more lunges or something for my knees, because this inability to run down stairs is tedious.

    Thursday, 20 April 2006

    bike

    Two 3.7-mile city rides.

    sister of my heart

    Jae suggested this by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni for the neighborhood bookclub. Pleasant, the usual tropes but not used in as stale as way as a run-of-the-mill chick book might, reminiscent of Clear Light of Day (only because of the setting, because I don't read scads of books set in India) and even of "Bride and Prejudice" because of the dual marriages, one to stay in India and the other bound for America. Pleasant, and not a waste of my time, but I don't feel like I learned anything from it either.

    The timing was a little off, too: published in 1999, it's set now-ish, recently enough that a computer programmer exists, recently enough for routine sex-identifying ultrasounds, which would make the the two protagonists' parents (who had their daughters probably in their early 20s) too young to remember, led alone be mature at the time of, the partition of India. I thought, since it's set in Kolkatta (Americanized to Calcutta), that perhaps the partition that beggared some characters was the eventual freedom of East Pakistan, but Wikipedia tells me that no, the Partition refers only to India's independence in 1947, not also to Bangladesh's separation.

    But whatever, I love The Corrections despite the impossiblity of its timeline--Depression-era parents of a Gen-Xer?--and I'm a lot more certain of U.S. generations than of Indian history.

    Friday, 21 April 2006

    bike

    Two 3.7-mile city rides.

    Sunday, 23 April 2006

    productive weekend

    Midweek, RDC suggested we have happy hour on Friday, and we did, just for the neighbors. RDC stocked the bar and could make martinis, margaritas, and manhattans, plus he bought little plastic mermaids to adorn the edges of the highball glasses. He claimed he could make any drink beginning with m or adorned by m, but I stumped him with milkshakes (my usual) or mojitos, which I was proud of myself for remembering. I had the dining and living rooms ready, but it was so lovely and warm we crowded onto the porch for a long time before reaching maximum density and processing into the back yard.

    The drinking succeeded so well a lot more people stayed for eating than we expected. After the toddlers left (one had to be pried away from the buddy cage), we lit the fire pit and sat around it without s'mores, talking for a long while.

    And so we didn't get up Saturday until 10 or out the door until 11. But then we worked.

    We cleaned out the coal cellar, furnace room, and garage. Lots of boxes to be broken down for recycling. The extra cabinet doors we have (I don't remember why) are now in the garage rafters; lots of stuff that's accumulated inside the garage perimeter is gone; the floor endured its annual sweep. I must remember to call for a hazardous waste pickup: there are a dozen paint cans from as long as six years ago, plus the garage emitted up a vinyl treatment for the Terrapin, especially ridiculous since Cassidy had replaced the Terrapin the year before we bought the house.

    The fill on the north side of the house is so clay-ey that nothing is growing under the eaves after two years where there's not groundcloth (the front half). The bishop's weed has spread abundantly along the length of the house from where I planted it down to the property line but ceasing its houseward growth abruptly under the eaves' dripline. (It is not a gossiping plant, apparently). So I exposed the same two feet against the house for the length of the back half in hopes it will remain equally weedless, and, for planting, exposed a swath of earth another five feet toward the back fence. I transplanted a bunch of bishop's weed from the back yard to that spot: tricky, because it's all one plant and hard to separate, and also I hope I didn't mess up the drainage slope. Then I transplanted some vinca from the south easement to the north (I have work up the story about Babushka's daughter).

    Also I oiled the patio chairs; they drank it up. Also I washed and line-dried and ironed and re-hung the curtains. Also RDC plumbed the evaporative cooler and I uncovered it (and forgot how to move from roof to ladder: a few scary moments there). From the roof I saw that we are the first household of the half-dozen with such rooftop devices to do so. Also RDC made us new screens for the front and back door. Also he installed new lights over the workbench in the basement and in his new workshop (previously known as the garage). Also I amended one vegetable garden with peat moss and manure, emptying the garden box, barrowing a few cubic feet to some low spots in the yard, blending in the amendments, shoveling it all back in; that was today, and that was enough. After that I might have slept a bit with The Piano Tuner and a tucked buddy, and in the late afternoon we had a tremendous hail storm. Hail spring.

    Monday, 24 April 2006

    piano tuner

    Daniel Mason's first novel, fit in alongside his work on malaria along the Burmese-Thai border. Hints of Heart of Darkness, unavoidable what with going upriver into a torpid territory not yet subjugated to treat with an insubordinate; airs of José Saramago that I could have done without, because running dialog altogether in one paragraph is annoying even if you are Saramago, and this author isn't; and Flanders Panel:chess::The Piano Tuner:piano tuning. A real gem of a first novel.

    yet another list

    Susan is not the last to do this list, and there will probably be respondents after me as well. You are meant to bold the ones you've read, italicize those you haven't, and ? those books you've never heard of, but I dimmed those I've read, brightened those I haven't heard of, and bolded my intendeds. I have no idea whence this list comes: there are 93 titles, which doesn't make much sense, and neither does including Sue Monk Kidd alongside Eliot and Wollstonecraft.

  • Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
  • Isabel Allende, The House of Spirits
  • Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
  • Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
  • Jane Austen, Emma
  • Toni Cade Bambara, Salt Eaters
  • Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
  • Simone Beauvoir, The Second Sex
  • Judy Blume, Are You There God It's Me Margaret
  • Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
  • Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
  • Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth
  • Frances Burnett, The Secret Garden
  • A.S. Byatt, Possession
  • Willa Cather, My Antonia
  • Kate Chopin, The Awakening
  • Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
  • Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
  • Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History
  • Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From the South
  • Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory
  • Angela Davis, Women, Culture, and Politics
  • Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
  • Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems
  • Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca
  • Lois Duncan, I Know What You Did Last Summer
  • George Eliot, Middlemarch
  • Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen
  • Louise Erdrich, Tracks
  • Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
  • Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
  • Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
  • Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
  • Nadine Gordimer, July's People
  • Edith—Mythology Hamilton,
  • Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
  • bell Hooks, Bone Black
  • Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road
  • Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona
  • Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
  • Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
  • Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
  • Carolyn Keene, The Nancy Drew Mysteries
  • Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
  • Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
  • Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
  • Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
  • Nella Larsen, Passing
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
  • Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
  • Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
  • Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
  • Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
  • Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
  • Kamala Markandaya, Nectar in a Sieve
  • Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones
  • Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding
  • Lucy Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
  • Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost
  • Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
  • Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
  • Lady Shikibu Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
  • Iris Murdoch, Severed Head
  • Gloria Naylor, Mama Day
  • Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller's Wife
  • Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys
  • Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
  • Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
  • Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
  • Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
  • Katharine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
  • E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
  • Rachel Ray, 365: No Repeats
  • Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
  • Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
  • Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
  • Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
  • Zadie Smith, White Teeth
  • Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
  • Johanna Spyri, Heidi
  • Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle
  • Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
  • Deborah Tannen, You're Wearing That?
  • Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale
  • Jane Urquhart, Away
  • Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar
  • Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings
  • Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence
  • Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
  • Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

  • Tuesday, 25 April 2006

    bike

    Two 3.7-mile city rides.

    sweet revenge: the wicked delights of getting even

    I had Regina Barreca for a special topics class entitled "Revenge in Literature" in the fall of 1993; this book was published in 1994. Over a decade ago I read her They Used to Call Me Snow White...But I Drifted and Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales, and I enjoyed the hell outta her class, but there is no way I would have slogged through this current book in its entirety if RDC and I weren't in the acknowledgements (him by name, me only in the conglomerate sense of her students) and, primarily, if I were not crippled by nostalgia.

    I was expecting more revenge in literature and less revenge in pop culture, some literature, and a passel of anecdotes. Even the typeface gave it away: I might not have read anything in that large a point size since I progressed beyond Syd Hoff. She writes for a popular audience, and I should have known better.

    Wednesday, 26 April 2006

    swim and bike and neighbors

    The work-gym-home commute, which is 9.6 miles and not the 8.3 I'd estimated, plus a half-mile swim (.8K) and a (nearly) 12-mile bike ride up to the top of Cherry Creek Trail, just before its plummet back down to the creek and under I-225. When I got home, I asked if there was time for a 5K run before dinner: no, which I did not regret.

    I thought I might walk three time around the pond in the park after dinner, which would be three miles: the distance, if not relative speed. Throughout dinner I managed to talk myself out of that, but after dinner back into it, and we strolled through the park at sunset. As is now our habit, on our way back we came down the next street over, where almost everyone lives, and indeed we stopped to chat with these two and throw a ball for their dog, and farther along play with these three and their friend and her dog, and along came Scarf and Drums and Monkey.

    It occurred to me in a different way that I am part of a community that I have wanted for years, since I left campus in 1994. Not long after Jessie returned to Massachusetts from California, she ran into friends on the sidewalk and wrote something about that being why she came back: so she could randomly happen into people and talk for a while. My neighborhood is not as stable as a hometown or a college town, but I like it.

    Thursday, 27 April 2006

    bike

    Two 3.7-mile city rides.

    Sunday, 30 April 2006

    my first 5K. also swim

    AEK and I ran in the Cherry Creek Sneak today. I ran the first 100 feet or so with her and then dropped back; her time was 28'something" and mine was 32'51". I ran a race!

    And whee, the time as I crossed the finish line was 32'51" (accelerating at the end to get under 33'), but I started a bit back in the pack, so from start line to finish my official time was actually 32'19", squeaking me just into the top third of my division (F35-39). What's interesting (to me) about this page, if the link works, is the snapshot of generational names it gives.

    And then it was 8:30 and we returned home for pancakes and coffee.

    Later in the day I swam two thousand of the most casual meters ever. Because I barely exerted myself, I practiced breathing on 7s and even 9s rather than on 5s. My respiration has grown much stronger over the past year, so progressing from 3s to 5s wasn't hard.