Oh, good. Asta from "The Thin Man" is also Mr. Smith in "The Awful Truth" and George in "Bringing Up Baby." Nasty little cur.
Today when Mia detoured from her regular walk and gallumphed toward me, I saw her before she shoved her snout in my leg so I didn't shriek as I did the other day. (RDC came running out to see what was up, and Drums was all apologetic.) But I have a very low startle threshold. I like that she heads for the house on her own.
But when she came along with her parents to our house after dinner out last Friday, we had no doggie treats for her and she was peckish. I have to add those to the grocery list.
After Mia washed my face and hugged me, she and her family went on their way, and a moment later another neighbor walked by with her dog. This dog found me very interesting, all Mia-scented, but this neighbor did not come with glad tidings. We have a very old neighbor whose dog died some years ago, and since then he is seldom seen outside. Today he came out in such a bad state that someone called paramedics for him. I don't do anything for him but shovel his walk and bake the occasional cookies, and I doubt my previous solution, of his getting another dog, will do him good any more.
Background: Lots of bungalows were built with a pantry feature I've heard called a "California cooler." It's a closet on the exterior wall with two screened apertures at top and bottom, through the exterior wall to the outside, and the shelves ("Shelves in a closet! Happy thought!") are slatted for air circulation.
When I returned from grocery-shopping today, I called my parents to confirm their arrival time. I was on the phone with my notstepmother when I opened the pantry door and saw the nearly new tin of cocoa powder spilled on the floor. I had just made cookies the night before and figured I hadn't set the tin squarely on the shelf. A few minutes later, when my notstepmother had handed the phone off to my father, I wandered back into the kitchen and looked at the spill more closely: the plastic lid hadn't burst off on impact but had been chewed through. I got off the phone fast.
First, was the squirrel still in the house? The absence of little chocolate footprints leading away from the scene of the crime let me hope not. Plus, the door was closed, though not on the latch. The powder was all over the pantry floor, but not much on the kitchen floor. That was good.
I called Scarf and Drums, asking to borrow Mia, and when I got to their house, Drums came back with me, Mia, and a squirrel cage. Mia assessed the house and found it free of rodents, and then the three of us went outside where Drums and I measured the lower aperture. I set up the extension ladder while he and the dog went home to cut a square of wood cut exactly the right size, and he even screwed it into place with a drill.
So as squirrel attacks go, it wasn't bad. I should have realized a squirrel was burrowing into the house, because over the few weeks before, I had noticed a lot of dirt on the containers on the top shelf. I noticed that the canvas or whatever material someone had used to close the opening (once only screened) was bent or torn, but even that didn't activate the squirrel-light in my brain. If I hadn't been able to borrow a carpenter as well as a dog, I would have filled the tunnel with bricks (the exterior wall is two sailor-bricks wide, but the aperture isn't stretcher-brick wide) to protect the house (do squirrels eat cockatiels? threaten cockatiels? mock their manliness or in any way mar their happiness?) while I scurried off to buy my own bit of wood. Then I would have wondered if I might affix the wood to the wooden trim of the aperture without first painting it white (like the rest of the house's trim) and without the approval of the house foreman (despite his absence from the country). Plus I would have nailed it crooked rather than screwed in on straight.
As it was, I emptied the entire pantry of food and shelves, ditched all the open food--it had chewed into the cannister of oats as well--ran all the containers (the floor is Tupperware territory) through the dishwasher (cocoa powder and possible squirrel pee), and still made it to the party I was aiming for. The bottom aperture already has a wooden cover, and both need to be sealed on both inside and outside, and maybe with alumninum in addition to plywood.
And I shouldn't say "it." I am sure it was the little female who regularly perches on the dining room windowsill and peeps into the house in a brazenly cute way: first, because she's evidently fearless; and second, because the first food she attacked was not the oats in their more vulnerable cardboard canister but the redolently tempting tin of Ghirardelli cocoa powder with its plastic lid.
I remember the first third of The White Mountains so well--the Watch, the transformation of Jack, Capping and Vagrants, Beanpole--that I was sure I read not only the first book but all three books in John Christopher's trilogy. I finally reread them, quickly because they're children's books, but not with appetite, and now I doubt whether I even finished Mountains, let alone tried the other two: they were completely unfamiliar to me, and very sf-y, and especially the third, The Pool of Fire, was clumsy. A blurb from The Washington Post says that the third is worthy of the first two and "no higher praise is possible." That's an ambiguous remark if ever I've read one.
I've reread his Empty World a few times over the years and I still think it's fine. Also, familiar, and well-worn, whereas a new read as an adult, as these books were, shows a book's hackneyed construction and tropes under a harsh light.
I emptied the newer raised bed of its soil and put it back in, amending as I went. It's the same "planter's mix" from Pioneer Sand and Gravel but it is so much more clay-y than the first bed's. It's hardpan, and I don't think two bales of peat moss and a couple of bags each of compost and aged manure are enough amendment. I do not relish repeating the task, soon or next year or ever, not unless I develop some core strength. My back is shredded, despite lifting with legs.
I didn't quite finish the job. Some chunks of clay-cement I dumped along the fence under the downspout in stupid hopes of run-off or fill. The fact is that this dirt has no place on my property and the only place I can remove it to is the garbage. Unless I illegally heap it in the alley with a sign saying "free fill" and a deluded soul takes it. But by 5 o'clock I was done and didn't tackle that problem.
I did make dinner though. After AEK and I saw "Transamerica" a couple of months ago, she made a crab chowder whose recipe she got from Southwest magazine (the southwest being so well-known for its crab and its chowder). My notstepmother told me last week that I am a good cook, which amused me because she was not privy to the pre-arrival menu-planning, stressing, and preparation, and because I didn't make a single dinner over their three nights; plus, sometime later when she described her recipe for macaroni and cheese and without irony or embarrassment mentioned Spam as an ingredient, any praise I had felt was canceled. But I had never made this chowder before, only watched AEK make it, and even my heating marinara sauce and boiling pasta is liable to be criticized by the actual cook, so I was nervous. RDC admitted liking it! which made me happy, until a while later when he suspected the crab hadn't sat well with him (a hypothesis he tested again with the leftover crab as crab salad the next day). But he figured it was the crab's fault, not mine.
I have been Not in the Mood to socialize recently, which is especially bad when Other People often keep me from excessive navel-contemplation. In college, on the last page of the notebooks in which I wrote my journal, I kept a list of Things That Make Me Glad I'm Alive, which were mostly interactions, the story told, the laugh shared. In that spirit, I don't want to forget last Friday's Other Bookclub party (and the date, the boyfriend, and the fiancé, or even the squirrel attack that preceded it), or last Saturday's neighborhood progressive dinner, even though I neglected to make the guacamole that Scarf thought I was bringing, or this Saturday's evening at the Ninth Door and Trios (tapas and jazz) with RDC, or last night's craft night, when the nabe gathered to cobble together the next baby quilt. Or afterward, when Maven came home with me to get some interfacing left over from the vest I tried to make, and how we choked with laughter at my sewing-butchery.
Bike 9.6 miles in three legs. Run 3.8 miles. Swim 1000 meters.
I have read you should alternate sprinting and walking. I don't. I have to represss a snort when people ask how my training is going, because while I am sure my performance would be better if I tackled the sports systematically, I don't. So anyway. I ran, and there is a usual turn-around spot on this route so the full distance is four miles. In addition to knowing that I am not a rigorously physiologically correct athlete, I know too that turn-around points are also where I slow to a walk--I do better on loops. So I continued to the next major street, and when I turned there (being forced by traffic rather than an arbitary point), I didn't stop. 3.3 miles at a chugging jog, walk a half mile, and sprint--this is a relative term, of course--another half-mile, then another half-mile cool-down.
This route is along the median of an avenue that deserves the name, since it is in fact lined with trees, even tunneled with trees (elms, and I prefer to be in denial about their fate). The surface is a path of packed dirt, and the trees make it the shadiest route near Dot Org.
Almost an hour after I finished, my pulse was 54 bpm, which is fine. Hail the packed dirt, because my hip doesn't hurt yet either.
Penelope Fitzgerald. I like how she drops hints through dialogue, but this book, despite being less than 150 pages, was not as readable as The Bookshop or Offshore.
Milan Kundera, in audio . I hadn't read this since the summer of 1989. Beautifully written, well-translated, but possibly not well-translated, because I don't recall hating Tomas the first time around.
Swim a half mile in the indoor pool because of overly cautious cowards who'd spotted lightning miles away.
Then I ran 5K at 6 mph! the whole way! A ten-minute mile! On a treadmill, but afterward I did not hobble, and that is saying something.
Le Ly Hayslip, for Other bookclub. Similar enough to First They Killed My Father--young girl caught up in a war in southeast Asia and finds her way to the United States--that I know I am going to confuse details.
Milan Kundera, in audio. I hadn't read this since the summer of 1989. Beautifully written, well-translated, but possibly not well-read, because I don't recall hating Tomas the first time around.
Stephen Crane, and if it was assigned in high school, I managed to skip it. I can see why it was revolutionary for its time for the psychological portrait of a youth in battle, but to this reader a hundred years on, it wasn't as impressive. Fine, but not awe-inspiring.
Afterward I took a multiple-choice quiz Sparknotes, which deliberately? mistakenly? has incorrect results. The red badge of courage is, no spoiler but obvious, a wound; it's a squirrel not a dog and a blue demonstration not a useless crew; and, unless I blindly misread my symbols, question 18 is way off. Reading on-screen, my eyes do tend to volley after my attention has lapsed, but I have more faith in my reading comprehension than that, and so the question scares me because maybe I shouldn't.
Colorado resident Temple Grandin got a fair bit of press a couple of years ago for Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, so I picked it up. I've read about 50 pages and that's enough. I feel bad because maybe her writing style is a function of her autism, and therefore to dislike the style is to be mean to her autism. I'm content just to feel stupid about feeling bad because I know that I am, in fact, not being mean.
She tells the reader that cows don't like yellow. Okay. She doesn't need to say that another three times in those first 50 pages, does she? Not only the same fact (or observation) repeated over a few score of pages but in the same paragraph as well:
(An interesting idea, but anecdotal; also, animals perhaps don't have developmental disabilities because humans are (sometimes) humane and don't let the imperfect die, as animals must do.)
Furthermore, it's irritatingly memoir-esque and chatty and I don't need every last item spelled out in words of one syllable.
I had the nicest birthday I've had in a long time. In 1994, Nisou gave RDC and me and SEM dinner at her house and a cake; in 1995, RPR came running into the house with a handful of roadside flowers asking for a marker, because I had said I wanted a birthday cake with flowers and my name on it and the marker was to write on the clear plastic grocery-store container. In 1997, Haitch and RDC and I went in quest of sushi but it was Sunday so Wallyworld was closed and we were confined to the Cheesecake Factory (Denver has improved significantly since then).
On the birthday, my department took me to lunch, and in the evening, at Other bookclub, a cake that someone had bought for another woman's retirement turned into half a birthday cake too. Plus I got to brush a long-haired cat named Poppy enough to make another cat. Plus KDF's aunt attended, her first non-medical outing since she got sick.
Then today, we had a party. I thought the invitation shouldn't mention any significance to the date at all, but word got out, and I received, in addition to an evening with my neighborhood friends, flowers and a box of Revolution Earl Grey with Lavender tea and a book by V.S. Naipaul. And a cake with my name and rosettes on it. Plus, Maven's visiting brother drew a pen-and-ink portrait of Blake based on this photograph.
In addition to all this, there was the unintended birthday present...
Wednesday morning a couple of birds were in the street in front of the house when I woke up (when they woke me up). I had no idea what they were, apart from partridge-shaped and non-flying and vocal; Animal Control said they already had a report on them; and when I called the zoo at 9:30, the receptionist was sure they were peachicks--despite their necklessness, and non-peafowl-feet--because, after all, some zoo patrons call a gopher a chipmunk even when another patron (me) says gently, no, it's a gopher, and so everyone in the city must be that stupid. At any rate she didn't know of any escaped animals. When I got home from the millet factory, they were still browsing along the same stretch of houses, and RDC finally recognized them as guinea fowl--his grandparents kept them. Aha, I said, catching on. I had seen guinea fowl only once before, in a large Ashford backyard, where our friends kept some for tick control.
In the evening, RDC decided they and motorists would be safer if they were in our backyard, eating our bugs, shitting their nutrient- and nitrogen-rich shit in the garden, and not causing accidents. At this point, Animal Control didn't want them because they weren't a rabid dog and it doesn't deal with wildlife. Does it deal with livestock? I think they're captive, like cockatiels, rather than domesticated, like Leghorn chickens. They might be feral, like cats, but our guess is that someone was raising them until they realized how loud and unhideable they are--they're against Denver code--and then the someone released them into City Park.
Thursday I made more calls. RDC posted a query to a guinea fowl board. The Wild Bird Center suggested a poultry store, naming it as the only place in Denver that sells chicken feed and is allowed to keep chickens. I called that place, and the man said, none too enthusiastically, that he could try to find a place for them. We would bring them on Saturday. Thursday night I went to bookclub, and Friday we had a party.
RDC hosed the patio with a dilute bleach solution, and the hope was that the birds would stay in the yard and the people on the bricks. But the birds kept wanting the basement window, on the patio. RDC wondered if that was for shelter, but they had the overhang of the garage for that; I realized oh! their reflection. So I brought out the full-length mirror from the inside of my closet door and propped it horizontally against the compost bin. They loved that and had no more interest in the patio. When the guests came, we had a conversation piece, and neither the toddler nor the dog molested them. Scarf already knew about the birds and wanted them, though I teased her that they are no relation to guinea pigs (she wants a guinea pig again), and she called her mother and asked if she wanted the birds. She said yes. Throughout the party the birds behaved well by not screeching. One jumped to the garage windowsill to admire its reflection, and when I yelled at them "No sex at my party!" at least that drew everyone's attention to their clumsy balancing act, which was acrobatic and amusing, and as dusk fell they bedded themselves behind the comfrey along the south fence and slept.
Saturday morning, Maven lent her dog's flight crate to the cause, and RDC and I coaxed the birds into the narrow space alongside the garage, and then, with mirror and groundcloth, into the crate. That actually wasn't as difficult as I thought, because squawk and flap though they did, they couldn't get six feet of loft to clear the fence. Then Scarf and I drove south to her mother's fenced lot and released them.
I don't know how good a solution that will be. Though her backyard is large by metropolitan standards, she still has neighbors in the sort of neighborhood that might not want livestock. It's large, but it doesn't offer much shade or shelter, and I don't know how much it offers by way of insects or even how much the fowl need. I wasn't sentimental about their fate--I thought the poutry place was a better idea and said so--but home again with the crate scrubbed and returned, I literally washed my hands of them.
This title caught my eye in my search for Temple Grandin's book. I couldn't remember Grandin's name except that maybe her first was Summer, and the library catalog produced this with the keyword autism. Elizabeth Moon does a good job illustrating the perspective of her autistic characters, but her straw antagonists are stereotypes and she makes her protagonist act contrary to his previous motivations for a quick resolution, Flowers for Algernon having already been written. She perhaps should have camouflaged, better or at all, that she wrote it in the early 21st century but set the action several decades later: all the discoveries and technological innovations are dated to the '90s, the early aughts (though I credit her using that phrase), or the turn of the millennium.
This is the outstanding contribution to children's literature for 2005? It wasn't terrible, but either I am too old or this has been done already. It is my fault for not noticing that, horrors, this is the second book featuring these characters but I haven't read the first one yet.
Lynne Rae Perkins's book made for a pleasant couple of hours diversion in a camp chair under a tree in the backyard for a while, after cloud cover let the temperature drop from the low 90s to comfortable.
UConn's library, Homer, didn't fall over into the swamp, but its face did fall off. Precipitation leaked behind the brick facade, froze, and popped bricks right off. From 1987 to 1995 the building was swathed in plastic to protect passersby before eventual correction. Snopes says no architect ever did forget to account for books in the weight of a structure--though it does say that Homer's floors are sagging. As are Formigny's.
RDC observed, or at least suspects, that the house continues to settle: has the dining room floor sunk, or was there always that much space between the oak planking and the floor molding? does the porch roof continue to pull away from the house? Are those two bookcases with 42 feet of shelving altogether compressing the flooring? The answer to the last is yes. So this weekend I emptied them and brought the books downstairs, where they can weigh on the cement foundation as heavily as they like.
In August, I bought a larger bookcase for the nonfiction. The 36x36x12 bookcase that that displaced has been in a corner behind the closet door and held only Ann Lauterbach and D.H. Lawrence so far. One of the upstairs bookcases could fit there, 84x36x12, the only spot in the basement with high enough ceilings--my study is sunken but still has walled-in ducts in some bits. I removed one of the shelves from the standard-and-bracket ones we installed on the wall to the right of my desk and from beneath them removed the little chest of drawers and the little bookcase, so the shorter bookcase now fit in their spot; and I added its last shelf to another case (a step I avoided because it results in two short shelves).
Neither of us has used the NordicTrack or Total Gym in ages. The latter has been collapsed and away at least half of those ages, and the skier merely collects dust. RDC says he can't imagine our not belonging to a gym, and so they're both going to go live on the farm. The skier's absence frees the west back wall for two pieces of furniture from the sunroom, where RDC has begun to build the breakfast nook--the gateleg table and the cookbookcase.
The table in the den has been pieces of board left over from building the drawers in my closet (under the hanging shirts) supported on two crates. I removed one crate and one board and put the little chest of drawers in its place with the little bookcase on top.
So much for arrangement of furniture: now to arrange the books. Forty-two feet of shelving, but once all the books were downstairs, only about 35' of books, into 30 additional feet of cases.
The standard-and-bracket shelves by my desk had had a shelf each for writing books, favorite authors, favorites, and kids' books in pulp, and the little bookcase had had my reference books. I purged some reference books--I don't need the Merriam-Webster dictionaries of law and etymology at my fingertips--and some writing books--Annie Dillard and Sue Hubbell could join general fiction--and the favorite authors--Atwood and Byatt, except for Possession, also could join general fiction. Reference and writing merged, favorites (including Possession) remained, and bracket height dictated that pulp books remain as well.
Some of RDC's particularly favorite fiction--DeLillo, Hemingway, Kerouac, Tim O'Brien, Pynchon, Gary Snyder--had been upstairs but the bulk was cultural, literary, and information theory. Fiction would be easier to categorize than nonfiction, as well as beginning at the far left of the available shelf space. It all had to come down, case by case, beginning with A for Atwood. I emptied the first case, Edwin Abbott to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and filled it again, Abbott to Don DeLillo. I emptied the second, Penelope Fitzgerald to Wally Lamb, and filled it again, Dickens to Ken Kesey. From there to the end of the alphabet was faster because I didn't have to empty before filling. Fiction now ends on the second shelf of the second case, with the fixed third shelf of impractical height holding a Riverside Chaucer and one Riverside Shakespeare and one Pelican, and Shakespearean and Chaucerian criticism. The third case is all fixed shelves, but only the top one is a silly height, at slightly less than trade. It had held my Penguin medieval and Renaissance collection, but now the pulp-sized Penguin is on the pulp-sized shelf and the trade-size is at the end of general fiction (I'll work the latter into general fiction but I forgot during the main project) but now it holds whatever nonfiction is short enough to fit. I dislike arranging books by height, but so it goes. Other than first three feet of short books to hand, I kept some groupings--women's studies, history, cultural studies--but otherwise arranged the non-facetious non-fiction alphabetically by author or editor. Not by LOC, because RDC prefers to go by author and because I am not going so far as to label the books. Yet. Facetious non-fiction--Cynthia Heimel, Uppity Women of Medieval Times, Al Franken--and a slew of Norton anthologies end the hoard.
Cullings: Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi in pulp, since we have them in a Twain collection, vast but more readable than pulp. A duplicate collected Yates. One Riverside Chaucer. Ellen Tebbits, even though it was a gift, because it is not a Beverly Clearly I grew up with. James Howe's The Watcher. Yellowed pulp versions of texts that are readily available online, like Malthus and Veblen. Pulp Dreiser, since neither of us will ever read him again for pleasure and Sister Carrie, though not An American Tragedy, is available through Project Gutenberg. Learn Downhill Skiing in a Weekend.
Next, the cookbookcase will leave its temporary quarters in the bedroom for the den. Because we digitized the music collection, the CDs don't need to be easily accessible. Cramming rather than shelving them will free up space for how-to books in the television shrine, and eventually the sunroom will take back the cookbooks--another whole new bookcase! And then I will have to go on methadone. Or we'll have to decide that we don't need two different editions of the two-volume Norton collection of American literature, or perhaps not the one-volume version at all.
