House and Garden
Errands
Kinwork and lisaism
Reading
Exercise
Before Thanksgiving
Julian Barnes. Although this is a form I usually like--the fictionalization of known persons, and in the hands of a skilled raconteur--the book ultimately left me a bit unsatisfied. Perhaps because I only found out, through the author's note at the end, that the events as well as the main characters were based in fact? Or because, since it was based on fact, I'd like to know how the one last fact was known, because it's an important thing to invent.
8 November: The book taught me two words: minatory, having an ominous or threatening appearance, and fleam, a veterinary instrument for letting blood. At least, I think the words came from this book. I wrote them on a post-it note (my bookmark of choice despite their being the bane of preservationists) that I just discovered in a crevice of my backpack.
I've gone to a few sessions of physical therapy after finally consulting a physician about my knees and the pain during and limping after running. The consensus is that I have loose joints--which is no news to me, because despite being unable to do a split since my early teens, my bendiness otherwise still surprises people--made looser because of my unorthodox postures.
Sitting like a grown-up is uncomfortable no matter how much I raise my feet. I prefer left knee up, left foot by left buttock, right leg bent and lying on the seat. Sometimes I mix it up and sit the other way except then the right leg interferes with mousing. Or tailor-style. I have stopped sitting with legs bent on the seat and feet nearly under my butt, because even years ago even I could no longer ignore how stiff and painful that left my knees.
My primary-care physician recommended a sports physiologist, who used the term "loosey-goosey" of my knees. That delighted me, a phrase I haven't heard since elementary school. She recommended physical therapy, and the PT decided that the inner fourth of my quadricep--VMO? something like that--is underdeveloped and the IT band is tight, and this, in addition to my genetically loose, pretzeled-looser knees, has led to my knees pointing not straight but to the side.
A friend in college observed in surprise that, with me seated with my legs straight in front of me, the soles of my feet bent inward at the ankle could lie flat on the floor. In one of my first yoga classes, the instructor praised my ability to lay the hand of an arm bent above my head flat on my spine. I always thought my legs' tendency to splay when I sit was due to fat on my inner thigh. I'm sure fat is part of it, but my loose knees cause it too. Loose joints, tight ligaments: middle age. Hooray.
So I have vicious exercises to do to strengthen that bit of quadricep and, in addition to stretches, an even more vicious instrument to loosen the band. I decided to buy one because I knew RDC had mentioned a tight IT band as well. I didn't know its name but at my second visit I asked for the giant column of pain. It is a 3' long column about 6" in diameter, and you plant one foot along it, perpendicular to your body, and you drag your body, on the side, up and down the rolling column, from hip to knee. Hurts like a sumbitch, that does. Also Blake's afraid of it, no surprise there.
The PT stuck biofeedback doohickeys to that muscle and had me contract it as tight as I could, and then I had to contract it for 10" on, 10" off, at 85% of the maximum, and also do leg lifts at 75% of that maximum. What's interesting to me about that is the measurement: whatever electrical impulses the device measures, my left leg can achieve only three quarters what the right can. That's how strongly dominant my right leg is, as I already knew from skiiing but now can put a figure to. I can't particularly turn at all but I am worse turning right when that leg has to unweight and let the left leg be in control.
Toward the end of freshling year of college I sprained an ankle. (My sister still gripes that I wore bluchers to her college graduation, but my foot was still too swollen to fit in dress shoes.) It was the end of school, so of course instead of studying for exams, I was playing Frisbee on dewy East Beach (gee, and I wonder why I won a spot on academic probation that semester?) and down I went. The nursing and PT majors in my hall wrapped me in an Ace bandage and sent me to the infirmary, and at the infirmary I was assigned some physical therapy.
This clinic was more used to dealing with college athletes and the male therapist clearly found my squishy freshling-15'd self beneath his dignity. He had me resist his manipulations of my ankle and was disgusted at my inability to do so; he expected I sprained my ankles often and was perhaps disappointed or disbelieving that I didn't. (But that I didn't was perhaps because I seldom did anything more strenuous than walking; the Frisbee game was procrastination, I'm sure.) He had me stand, in a doorway to catch myself, on one foot, hands at my sides, eyes closed. He was behind me and after a few minutes yelled from where he was working with a more deserving athlete that I was meant to have my eyes shut. They were, and he was as angry that I had that much micro-muscle control.
That's one thing I can still do well, and at PT I stand on a little platform whose support is a half colum and balance, front to back and then side-to-side. It's too easy on two feet eyes open and still doable on two feet eyes closed. I'm working on one foot, and of course that's my one favorite exercise, the one I can do easily already, that's probably so ankle-oriented that it does my knees and hips no good at all.
I haven't been actually exercising much but those sessions feel like a workout on their own.
Also yesterday morning I attended a flip-turn clinic at the club, and am I ever stupid at applying what I've heard to what I do. If the coach--who was excellent, supportive and encouraging and god knows long on patience--had an underwater speaker so that he could have told me what to do while I was doing it, instead of all of ten seconds before, maybe I could have got it more. I would repeat his instructions after he gave them and again as I was underwater ready to do them, to little avail. He had us splash the ceiling of the indoor pool room, two storeys overhead, to learn how much force he wanted us to apply to a turn; he told me to snap my hands from hips to over my head with as much force to achieve a flip as I use to somersault. But not to somersault, because the point is to reverse direction, a 180, not a 360. And to do all this 18" down, not shallower because of turbulence on the surface, and not deeper because of water pressure: torpedoes travel at 18" down as well, for the same reasons of efficiency. And to aspire to not breathing within the flags. Pushing off, I can get beyond the flags underwater no problem, but not to breathe within the flags on the approach to the wall? Yii. And to be able to turn well before trying to mix the turn with the push-off so you don't miscalculate and slam your ankles. Yes indeed.
He also had us guess who won the swimming medals at the 1904 London Olympics, and I guessed an Australian, based on the name of the "freestyle" stroke, the Australian crawl, but it was Mohawk Indians because they swam crawl instead of breaststroke. This makes me wonder why freestyle is called "Australian crawl" rather than the "Mohawk crawl" but perhaps their being allowed to compete was meant to be honor enough, without getting a stroke named after themselves as well.
Or not: the 1904 Games were in Missouri. Maybe he had his city wrong? Or maybe the Mohawks had the best swim time but from a bit called "Anthropology Days" rather than from the officials events in which whites only competed. Oh: Wikipedia doesn't name the event, but it was in 1844, in London, and of course breaststroking whites sneered at crawl for being "unBritish."
Bookclub discussed The Secret History tonight. The cabin had to close early this year so in Soccer's backyard firebowl instead of in the mountains a couple of people disposed of their own secret histories. It's such an alien idea to me, admirable in those who can do it and want to but alien, deeply foreign to me. We told stories from journals and not from journals, and it was a good evening. After what seems like weeks of neighborlessness, it's a whirl of gaiety again: tomorrow yoga, Wednesday a haircut by AEK's person though I haven't decided how drastic and maybe the IMAX about ancient Greece afterward, Friday "Lion King."
We finished Island of the Blue Dolphins recently and I had to tell him the rest. Scott O'Dell kind of omits what happened to Karana's people 18 years before and to Karana herself: they all died of European diseases within weeks of reaching the mainland. Karana died, apparently of dysentery--can you imagine discovering fresh fruit for the first time?--in two weeks or months of removal. Around 1940, someone took a photograph of her decayed hut.
I scanned the shelves, wondering what next. King of the Wind, I decided, even though my edition's illustrations are in graytone instead of color. Sham's birth, with the shaft of sunlight, does not work in grays. But I don't mind the beating scene, which gave me nightmares, being toned down.
Can my memory be correct, of learning about vivid writing in third grade? Because I remember a textbook--one of the Lippincott readers that we used from first grade to fifth?--using the fight between Sham and Hobgoblin as an example of how to write a lively, descriptive action scene, and that I already knew it. What that memory, false or not, does mean is that I am reading RDC a book years younger than our normal fare. Reading Island for the first time in years I noticed that even its sentences are quite simple, but King is even simpler.
And I still have to get through the whipping scene.
But after that comes The Slave Dancer, which I don't currently own. When we read The Yearling a few years ago, Fodder-wing made me sadder than Flag. I expect that now the Middle Passage will make me sadder than that vicious man.
Mark Haddon has another success. It's not as poignant or as much of a literary reach as Curious Incident, but it's pretty damn good. I particularly liked how different people, such as father and son, would think separately of the same thing--ferries, for instance--and in their individual responses you could see how the people were both similar and different. I might not have liked the book, which at its basic plot is only a family drama, as much if I had not decided just partway through that it is the next book for my mother-in-law. She loved All Families Are Psychotic and has asked for similar books since. A tragicomedy about small group of closely but bitterly related people over a short span of time and an absurd chain of events? I came up with nothing, until this.
I have no idea how far I swam, because I was concentrating on making turns rather than counting them. I cannot claim that the majority of my turns flipped successfully, but some of them did. I was very excited.
We walked through the gorgeous afternoon to eat tacos at Chez José, and on the way back discussed snorkeling and diving and detoured a block to the dive shop and wheee, signed me up for scuba certification. Just like that. I have an orientation class Tuesday night and a weekend-long course in two weeks and then an open-water dive in New Mexico next month.
And I was so proud of myself. As we sat down to fill out paperwork, I said to the instructor, who was the charismatic instructor-type as well as the ebullient diver-type that I am not a strong swimmer, that I am just at the point I can blow bubbles in the water. I kept a straight face for about two seconds, enough to see his face, before relenting.
If anyone pulls my mask off in the water I am sunk.
Bob Harris is not as funny as he thinks he is. But I still might try Ken Jennings's Brainiac, because that gets more into trivia as a sport, as Word Freak, than this did. Harris didn't make me care enough about him for the memoir stuff to work.
Kal and I took advantage of one of Dot Org's optional holidays and went shopping.
A few days later when I filled out the timesheet for the midmonth pay period, I replaced "Optional Holiday" with "Genocide Day." Last week we had two anti-Columbus Day speakers neither of which wants the day called "Indigenous Peoples Day" either, so "Genocide Day" was it. I understand not exalting Columbus, but both sides of the debate are disingenuous to allege that the point of the day is to celebrate Columbus as a person. When a holiday is about an individual, it's on the birth date--King, Lincoln, Washington, Christ--or if a saint, the date they were martyred, e.g. Patrick (though not Valentine). But neither is the advent of mass European arrival and conquest and American genocide worth celebrating. Anyway, it's an optional and we took it off, and the above was one of all my reactions to their spiels that I did not tender to the speakers.
So. The point of the shopping was to find a wedding dress. Besides the everyday absence of Haitch, her removal to Canada, New York (as McCarthy puts it) meant that I got only one day of wedding shopping with her. With Kal, I get another, vicarious wedding.
Our first stop was a shop out west on Alameda whose address sounded like the one where Trey's dress came from. It was. At this shop, during Trey's final fitting, I was instructed how to operate the dress, how to fasten the train up after the ceremony and photographs so she could walk and dance during the reception. (I just looked for mention of Trey's wedding, which happened on my birthday in 2002. Nonesuch. In sum: she got hitched in Utah and the next day RDC and I went to Arches National Park.) This time, Kal and I were assigned an adviser whom neither of us warmed to. Me, because her gray eye makeup made her look like she had flu; Kal, not as given to snap judgments about appearance as I am, because she didn't take seriously Kal's guidelines on materials and cut suitable to a meadow wedding or on price. That was one of my jobs, to be a bulldog, and I excelled.
She tried on dresses and I took pictures. I had brought my own wedding earrings for her to wear to add to the look. We left that shop having added only one dress to a list of possibilities. Also, while Kal was in the restroom I looked at the accessories. A saleswoman passed me while I posed with a thing on my head. "That's a cake topper," she told me. "Right now it's a tiara," I told Ms. No Imagination. Plus when Kal came out I tossed her a box: "I think you need this." It was something I might need to put in CLH's stocking: a tattoo-covering kit.
Our next stop was lunch, and then another shop in a strip mall, unprepossessing in location and appearance. But then we entered, and the saleswomen were nice and responsive.
And we found the dress! Yes we did.
Which I cannot describe, it being Not My Secret, except that it is perfect. This is what I love about wedding dresses, that everyone's dress suits her perfectly. Perfect in fit and fabric, perfect in figure and flatteringness, perfect for setting and budget, and best of all not requiring the corsetty bra thing. The one thing I had to take Kal to task about is that, while ivory is a chancey color for a guest to wear to a wedding, I could wear my ivory reunion dress if she had chosen a white dress. So inconsiderate of her! And now I have to shop and possess yet another summer dress. Woe am I.
And then Kal became the saleswoman's and my own personal Pancake Rabbit. The clerk, Sherry, asked if Kal was considering a veil, and she said no, not particularly, and told her that I had woken with a vision of Kal in a crown of daisies. Sherry asked if she could try one anyway, and she was kind and not overly solicitous and had even found The Perfect Dress based on two Kal and I had found ourselves (it combines what she liked best about the other two), and what is wedding dress shopping without sampling all the ridiculous excess, so Kal said sure. Sherry draped a veil at the back of Kal's head, and when Kal and I looked at the effect we both cooed. "Damn, are well ever well-socialized," was my opinion there. After that the floodgates were opened and I made Kal my personal Oolong, trying tiaras and other sparkly headgear on her and if dorayaki or whatever else had come to hand there's no telling what I would have balanced on her patient noggin.
And then we cooked up the penultimate gigantor zucchini with pasta and watched "Mrs. Henderson Presents."
I took advantage of what might be the last, or perhaps only nearly the last, weekend days the outdoor pool will be open this year and swam two miles. I attempted flip turns during the first 500 meters but I still need to practice them separate from swimming. I did most of the last 25 meters in butterfly and persisted through a muscle seizure before the halfway point, until about two lengths from the end when I surfaced with a shriek. Naturally it was that moment that RDC witnessed, having finished his workout and come to look for me. Hi, I'm suave.
Two miles.
A few weeks ago I trundled the wheelbarrow out front to bring 80 pounds of birdseed and six breadbox-sized bags of coffee grounds from Starbucks to the back. I didn't notice until I tried to wheel it away that the tire was flat, and a wheelbarrow tire has no tube, and when you mash a flat tire against its axle, it comes off its axel. And though bike tools will enable you to shove the tire back over its rim even without spokes to lock the thingies against, a bike pump is not sufficient to the task.
RDC was at a point between coats of paint on the breakfast nook and took it to a gas station, bless him. I'd still be out there with the pump. Also he aligned some bolts better and oiled it, necessary maintenance it would never occur to me to do.
I trimmed the vinca, which grew out over the sidewalk during the summer, so that in case it snows ever this winter, it won't become an ice nest, and barrowed it to the leaf pile. Plus I barrowed the huge pots on the porch columns back to the compost bins. After that the wheelbarrow could rest. I harvested the last of the chili peppers and a spaghetti squash, two cucumbers, a zucchini, and a mound of carrots.
RDC chastised me Saturday morning for fingerprinting chocolate on the pantry door, and I, the not-colorblind one, cleaned off the streak of basil, glad that glossy latex paint does not stain as readily as do fingernails and wooden spoons and the plastic bits of the food processor, and gladder that with RDC away all last week, I was able to harvest and process the basil without him to freak at the kitchen in the meantime. I had the damn Birnham wood in there with me, and did I think to hose it all over before I brought it inside? I did not. But the kitchen smelled great and I froze pesto in convenient ice cube-sized portions.
The next huge thing will be rendering all the carrots into soup.
Anyway, the garden's mostly out. I left the tomato plants for now, in hopes the squirrels do not eat all the green tomatoes currently on the vine--in vain hopes, since I found at least four victims strewn hither and yon. The other victim was my pumpkin. I am considering bringing it to a Halloween party later this month, because I find squirrels pretty scary at this point. But I figure the shorties will not find rotting pumpkin other than smelly and I agree with them enough that it just belongs in the compost.
Today I changed the windows, or most of them. Early, since it's not Standard Time yet, but we've wanted the heat on a few times and all next weekend I'm in class to get certified to scuba dive and the weekend after that, the usual weekend, will be too late. Only two sides of the house, the long sides, but the living room I can do from the porch and the back has only four that I need the ladder for. It was more important to swim.
I can forgive myself a fast stupid read better than I can a long stupid read. I picked this up at the library after work and read it through the news and partway through "The Smartest Guys in the Room" (until I decided the documentary needed more attention and worked on AKT's stocking instead) and finished it before I fell asleep. Is Ann Brashares going to milk the series until all the girls are paired off? Skim milk, that.
So this was a fast stupid read. Margaret George's Helen of Troy is not quite stupid, but for heaven's sake if I can't get through The Iliad I don't deserve 800 pages of faux-Homer nigh-romance novel. At least I should hold off until I finish next week's club book.
I ran slightly more than three miles in about 34 minutes, according to the times of the songs I listened to (Afro-Celt Sound System, Morphine, Pearl Jam, the usual). Where I felt it, in addition to my knees, was my poochy belly.
Going to PT later in the afternoon, I winced trotting down the four flights of stairs to leave Dot Org and climbing the single flight to the PT office with my bike on my shoulder made me flinch again. The therapist, Carla, had me run on the treadmill, and observed something about a high Q angle: I run knock-kneed. Apparently it is possible to run with your feet straight but your knees knocked, which is nothing I wanted to know. And this is possible with my outward-facing kneecaps. But then! She taped my knees, which is nothing she had done before. Soft tape first, to protect the skin against the next, extra-strength layer, which hauled my kneecaps inward toward their proper alignment. I ran again, and very little pain! I ran the steps up and down, and no pain! It was grand.
I am still meant to strengthen the VMOs and keep loosening the IT bands because tape is not a long-term solution. I have to work, in other words.
It is remarkable to me how different a book can be in print and in audio. I loved Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winner in print, and I loved it again in audio, maybe more for the audio this time.
A note to myself about books to query Loganberry Books about:
Solved: Oscar Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost." I came across this title while searching likely terms but dismissed the possibility as not a children's book and not the right period. But Jessie suggested it and at that point I bothered to search within its text for "paint." That's the one, and now I wonder how and when I came across it. A short story is not at all what I remember, and a genre I eschewed as a child. I guess I am content having false or unreliable memories as long as, when they're proven wrong, I realize it. But the faint visual memory of a (cover?) illustration and the stronger recollection of its being a book-length tale aren't resolving into Oscar Wilde. Plus it means "The Importance of Being Earnest" is not the first Wilde I read. Wild.
I am glad I at least remembered the ghost as being dryly witty: the vital Wilde characteristic.
I began Operation Shylock immediately after Portnoy's Complaint and closed it after maybe three paragraphs. I liked The Human Stain and American Pastoral (though less, and I confuse it with E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, because both were audio and one followed the other hard on its little digital heels) and I had to read The Plot Against America for bookclub and I only wanted to write run-on sentences, not to consume so much Roth in such a short period, as my mother-in-law did on lobster, as to become allergic. Perhaps I am too old, and born too late, to have liked Portnoy. Perhaps I prefer Portnoy to be a woodchuck.
This novel's protagonist parallels Roth in a few major ways, as much can happen in whose world Charles Lindbergh defeated FDR for the presidency in 1940 can be--named Philip Roth, born in Newark in 1933, a second child--and also Portnoy, also a second child in Newark whose father is the sole Jewish insurance agent in a gentile office. I don't mind Nathan Zuckerman as an alter ego, but Alexander Portnoy made hair grow on my palms--instead of my usual teeth itching--and Plot's boy Philip Roth resembles Alexander Portnoy more than I would have preferred.
Other than that, I liked most of the book okay. Everything about how Lindberg was elected, the neighborhood and family's reactions to his election, Alvin going off to fight with Canada (pulling a Hemingway, though perhaps I shouldn't use the verb "pull" this close to Portnoy's name) when Lindbergh kept the U.S.A. out of WWII, and Walter Winchell, all of that worked. But I think Roth chickened out of staying in his alternate history, so the last bit of the book fell apart. Spoiler: When someone ceases to be president, her vice-president becomes president and stays that way even if he sucks, until he's impeached, because there's this thing called the Constitution. You can't shove FDR back on the throne just because the people want him, as Roth did, because if the veep is impeached, there's still the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate and the Cabinet and probably the last postal employee before a private citizen can be propped up there.
That said, the novel certainly works as a response to the current zeitgeist.
Lemony Snicket's last Unfortunate Event. I was two weeks late getting to it and the excuse-making is part of the story. Cassidy had to go to the shop, which is near the Tattered Cover, the Monday before the book was released. I was going to get book and car on the same day, but it wasn't ready Friday or Monday and on Tuesday it was snowing, which I didn't expect and wasn't dressed for, so I wasn't in the mood to walk any distance in sandals and short sleeves, even for the book. Then I spent a weekend in dive class instead of reading, and then this read I read The Plot Against America, so yesterday, two whole weeks later, was the day.
And all that unnecessary detail is just the kind of tangential stuff I wanted Lemony Snicket to eschew this time, in order to have space to tie everything up in neat little bows. What I wanted and what I knew to expect, however, were two different things, and thank goodness.
The only Newbery Medal-winning books that I haven't yet read are either very old or about dogs. Today, walking home from a children's Hallowe'en party, I visited the Park Hill branch of the library and borrowed Rifles for Watie and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Shiloh. I was pretty sure the eponymous dog doesn't die, unlike that of Old Yeller, and since Dear Mr. Henshaw didn't traumatize me, maybe Shiloh wouldn't either. Shiloh doesn't die and an 11-year-old learns about shades of gray in himself and others.
Between the party house and the library, I enjoyed the beautiful day, 70-degree sun melting Thursday's more-than-piddling snowfall. I met an old dog named Buster and a young one named Marley and admired a front yard snowfort. Between the library and home I walked and read.
Of course I couldn't resist. As soon as I read the pirated list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and learned that Peter Ackroyd edited it, I had to add it to my lifelist. Although I didn't make the comparisons I did five years ago when I assigned myself the first three lists of 100 (Modern Library, Feminista, Radcliffe), I did see that every list I now track (fourteen*) has non-trivial overlap with it.
Database software intimidates me enough that I'm content with an Excel worksheet full of formulas and filtering. When I read a book off one of the lists, I change an initial in as many columns as applicable from a letter to 1. This is how I know I've read 272 of the 1,001, and that 647 titles don't appear on any other list. It is not how I know I'm pathetic, but it would be a leading indicator if I didn't.
*Feminista, Radcliffe, Triangle Publishing, and Modern Library, with 100 titles each, plus the BBC's and Time magazine's opinions; Man Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award, and PEN-Faulkner winners, with fewer than 100 each; more than 100 Nobel authors but no title count; more than 100 title that the Library Journal considers the most influential; the book 500 Great Books by Women; and now this one. The 500 Great Books' initial is D, and so, logically (since it weighs as much as a duck), this list's letters are MI.
I spent all of Sunday sitting very carefully propped on the couch in the den. I have no idea what I did except to move Crimson (baby sister to Scarlet, daughters of Begonia) from one side of me to the other while we were seated in an armchair at Saturday's party. And she is what, three? Not heavy, though weighing more than the fairy she was dressed as. RDC left the party to run errands and go to the gym, but my idea was to go for a run under the beautiful sky when I got home. Walking home I did notice that the path describing the park's perimeter was a quagmire of melting snow, but it was my back, which I noticed when I got home, that kept me housebound. I don't believe my resident back expert that stretching and massage are bad for muscle strain--for vertebrae and discs, maybe, but surely not for muscle. But neither is sitting in an armchair reading Shiloh letting whatever noninjury I hadn't noticed yet harden a good idea: I didn't stretch it out when it happened and after hardening didn't want to later, and of backrub I got none. Sunday morning I was worse, actually spasming, and this is the first time a night's sleep hasn't fixed me.
My distractions: My So-Called Life in the DVD player. Brainiac and several issues of The Nation. Bills to open and lots of filing to file, at which point I wished I had put in contact lenses so I wouldn't have to bend my neck to look at bills and check stubs and so forth and match them to their folders. The funnest distraction was, of course, beading.
I finished the innards of the As, R, and O and affixed them to their stockings, and that is regular and basic. But Jessie's been making earrings and that reminded me of how much I liked making stuff, even of, as my sister says, glue-shit-on-shit quality, and when I was recently in a craft supply store, I was pleased to see its enlarged bead section. So I broke free of regular and basic to make a pair of earrings with my new playthings.
Beading and sewing letters on stockings made oodles of sense when I had to hold my work on my lap and looked mostly straight ahead rather than bending my head to look down. But I got through the day, which was lovely. This might be my favorite day of the year, the day that stupid Daylight Saving Time goes away and time goes back to normal. It's always a long and satisfying day.
(Also, I am so very glad I violated my own rule and put the storms up two weeks early. It has snowed twice between then and now, the usual time, and balancing off a ladder with large panes of glass in fragile sashes was not going to happen today.)
I mentioned to my sister recently that Cassidy had been in the shop getting dents undented (I roll my eyes at anyone caring about a car's appearance, but RDC said they'd hasten rust) and a headlight fixed. CLH asked how the car got beat up, and I told her the small dent was RDC's fault and the big dent was a cowardly git's and the headlight was mine. Harkening to my 1992 accident, at which each of our parents projected their anger at me for causing it onto her, who was involved only as the reason I drove a) a long way and b) in the Middle of the Night, she asked, "Now remind me, how was this headlight my fault again?"
Hm, I hadn't thought of that. "Well, I had gone to that store to get a new swimsuit, and we all know what an athlete you are," which made her snort, "and I was on my way to see 'Brokeback Mountain,' which is about gay men, and your best friend was gay, and that's why it's your fault." Embellishing the blame to my sister with exploitation of our parents' homophobia: a great excuse.
When I was but a tot, I scurried crying to our mother that my big sister had bitten me. I showed her my arm, clearly imprinted with upper and lower tooth prints. She began to yell at CLH, who pointed out that the toothprints were all of baby teeth, while she had at least two adult teeth by then. I don't remember what happened to me for lying and trying to get my sister in trouble.
Another time, CLH wanted to play with Jennifer, HPV's older sister, alone. I don't know why HPV wasn't available to me: a path through the woods connected our houses. (Nearly; the neighbors across the road from the Vs' house didn't mind our scampering through as long as their German Shepherds knew us. I knew Rebel from puppyhood to his old age, by which time I used the path to get to only my babysitting family, but just now I realize that I should remember his mother's name too but don't.) Anyway, CLH told me that if I let them be, she would bring me gum. No gum was ever forthcoming, and CLH got in trouble for that.
Almost fourteen years of less than Usanly average consumption came to an end earlier this month. Our one-car-ism began involuntarily when Fugly died, and RDC might not have replaced Sugaree with the Terrapin in 1993 if I had been able to use its clutch, and if 1996 had been financially feasible at all, one-car-ism might have ended then. However, one-car-ism might still exist if Dot Org had not moved away from downtown or if I had changed jobs to remain on a busline or if I were more disciplined about biking when it's colder or wetter than I prefer. As RDC put it, he brought Cassidy in for engine maintenance (an earlier shop-visit than the body maintenance shop visit) and then had to get home somehow.
Enter Stella, another Subaru Impreza Outback, on the lot configured just as RDC wished ("and I even like the color"). We're already saying "your car" and "my car"; Banzai remains in Cassidy; RDC is unlikely to decorate Stella with a University of Connecticut sticker but I bet he'll get a "reality" fish (a skeleton); and I'm happy to have the old car because its tape deck means I can use my iPod, while Stella's lack of deck and an incompatibility between iTrip and the iPod means that RDC is stuck with CDs for the time being.
Kal and I read our lunches together for the first time in months. She's reading Nobody's Fool, and she loves it, thank heaven. I'm reading Ken Jennings's Brainiac, which is not only about his stint on "Jeopardy!" but also about trivia as a pursuit. I learned, with a gasp of dismay, that J.M. Barrie did not invent the name "Wendy" for "Peter Pan." Kal said she thinks she learned that from me (probably when we saw "Finding Neverland"), and I apologized, and she said she's since told someone else that, and I apologized again. Truth evidently is not the only virus out there. She giggled and would tell me what she giggled at (a great Nobody's Foolism, "Don't tell your mother," and when Sully's hourly rate went up). I told her Thomas Edison set prospective employees impossible irrelevant "general knowledge" quizzes, e.g. the population of Japan and the weight of air in a 16x12x12 room.
Another factoid in Brainiac is that Australia is not the only country with native kangaroos. New Zealand? I wondered. "Does he tell you, or leave you hanging?" she asked. He tells you, but at the back of the chapter, and I have to read to the end of each and get all my trivia questions answered at once. "Okay," Ms. Reasonable said, "but can I look now?" I handed her the book and she nodded sagely: "That makes sense." So of course I had to cheat and look prematurely: Papua New Guinea. Perhaps kangaroos can swim.
What else. I volunteered at MoveOn.Org tonight and felt unclean, because what I was doing was calling people (MoveOn members, but still) in their homes, disrupting their private lives. Letter-writing or nothing for me for me, and I wonder what sort of penance I can do. Data-entry for whoever maintains the no-call lists? My best contribution was two commas in signs on the wall: "This Week's Volunteers" and something like "Let's Set a Record." That's me, making the world safe for democracy one punctuation mark at a time.
Frank Rich is not immune to the same spin that he faults the current administration for--sometimes labeling the press lapdogs for following the party line too closely and sometimes lauding it for sniffing out the real story--but since I agree with him, I liked this book, his investigation and analysis, very much.
Plus I like Grover Gardner as a narrator. First among my many complaints about audible.com is not enough George Guidall. Apparently double-G initials indicate quality narration.
Ken Jennings is less annoying than Bob Harris was in Prisoner of Trebekistan. His favorite verb is "pore" (though my mock-a-Mormon reflex wants to say "tithe." Also he uses the Gilbert and Sullivanism "very model of a modern major" what-have-you twice, and a limit of once per book that's not about "The Mikado" should be regulation.
I bought a pumpkin (because the squirrels ate mine) on Monday (instead of the weekend because of my back) and didn't carve it (because of my back) and then today when I got home it was 35 and I didn't feel like sitting on the cement sidewalk touching cold pumpkin guts. So intead of candle-lit jack-o-lantern and outside light, the markers of This House Open were a plain pumpkin and outside light. I wanted to say "universal" sign of "This House Open" the way Hawkeye (or Trapper) mocks Frank for deliberately misunderstanding a surrendering soldier: "Don't you recognize the international sign for 'touchdown'?" but of course trick-or-treating is no more universal than American football, poor old universe.
Because I did only survivalist grocery shopping on Monday at Whole Foods, I didn't get candy: Hallowe'en essentials full of high-fructose corn syrup are not on its shelves. On the way home I stopped at a regular supermarket whose shelves looked like Mother Hubbard's cupboards. I grabbed something that looked like Hershey's miniatures, but of course good stuff like that (well, 75% good because of Mr. Goodbar) was gone. They were milk chocolate with different nuts, except the substitute for Mr. Goodbar "I suck the most" was white chocolate.
Well, that could have meant only that I wouldn't eat the stash myself, which is fine, except that I was expecting Stick and his parents assume that he could be, as his mother is, allergic to nuts. So I set out a banana to give to him, hoping that, at two, he wouldn't realize what a cheat that is.
Stick was my first guest and definitely the cutest (no surprise). He was a lion, and when his father asked him to roar, he would say, at normal volume and in regular tone, "Rore." No growling, no gnashing of teeth, no need to warn Lucy and Susan to plug their ears. But still, insanely cute. Of the nine kids who came to the door, only two had hand-made costumes. I find this very sad. It's the costumes, the Eureka moment of realizing what I was going to be and figuring how to make them with whatever came to hand and the excitement of a parent finding the box the right size, that I remember.
But I didn't tell anyone to get off my lawn. (Maybe only because I don't have any lawn.)