House and Garden
Errands
Kinwork and lisaism
Reading
Exercise
Before 18th:
This is the best spam ever. I feel like a bald soprano being led around by a leash:
"The shabby pig pen slyly cooks cheese grits for the apartment building
over the cocker spaniel. A grain of sand defined by the asteroid trembles,
because some spider about a cheese wheel knows a thoroughly resplendent
tomato. Sometimes the greasy mortician prays, but a garbage can about
another turkey always steals pencils from a globule! Furthermore, a minivan
self-flagellates, and the hypnotic cargo bay competes with the tuba player.
A garbage can is somewhat precise. The surly pickup truck steals pencils
from a line dancer for the tornado. Some wheelbarrow is ridiculously
mean-spirited. When the pathetic fairy rejoices, some earring gets stinking
drunk. A spider of a nation conquers the familiar microscope."
On the other hand, it reads kind of like one of my more random dreams. Usually I refrain but now I have to mention that yesterday I had a slash dream about Jondalar and Michael Jackson.
Since I brilliantly managed to leave my lunch on the kitchen counter this morning, I walked out for a sandwich at noon. As I waited in line, a coworker showed up a few places back. He is the primary author of Dot Org's weblog, an recent entry of which mentioned, in the context of addiction to PDAs, someone who admitted checking his Blackberry under the table while the president of the United States was speaking--actually responding to a question he himself had asked--and only reluctantly hanging up when his neighbor indicated his gaffe.
(Now, I understand a normal person wanting to distract himself from the sound of that man's voice and the idiocy of his speech. But this person was a grateful, invited guest at the Crawford "ranch" and presumably does not usually flinch at the noise.)
I told the author that I was glad to know a pack of unschooled teenaged athletes wearing flip-flops to the White House had been out-ruded by a single adult, a state legislator to boot. We discussed the incident for a moment and I moved forward to pay. As I tucked bills into my wallet, both the coworker and a little girl arrived at the counter. The girl was short enough that she needed one hand to pull herself high enough to reach straws arrayed in a mug behind a little barrier. She grasped with a hand just out of seastar-shape, ineffectually struggling against the dried beans holding the straws upright. I drew one out and handed it to her, and she took it but began reaching again. I drew out another and asked her how many she needed. "Two," she said, and scampered away with her straws. I said "You're welcome" after her, because I'm mean like that, especially considering I had deprived her of the unlikely satisfaction of retrieving her own straw. "Never get between someone and their straw," my coworker smiled.
Is the nongendered third-person plural pronoun so pervasive now that people default to it even when the antecedent's gender is obvious? Was he making such a global statement that he needed a nonspecific pronoun?
This makes me slightly crazy because the "blog" (a construction I have not yet ceased to hate) is written in just such a colloquial manner. Our organization's reputation for thoughtful, objective analysis and reporting is vital to its survival, but I believe we risk it when we release sloppy writing, indicative of sloppy thought. I said as much upon the weblog's launch, and I have suggested corrections in many entries: the 70s is a temperature range, not a decade, and "Bluetooth" should be capitalized even as an adjective, and a hyphen is not an em dash, and an apostrophe serves no purpose in "PDA's" other than to annoy me and perpetuate that mark's misuse, plus several non-trivial syntactical confusions. A casual tone might suit the medium but a casual (I might say slapdash) approach to punctuation and spelling and most importantly construction does not necessarily follow.
This morning was sunnier and warmer than it is now at 3:30. Waiting for the firewood, I started cleaning out the gutters and RDC riveted a fallen drainpipe back into place. The wood guy pitched logs from his truckbed into the backyard, which meant no hurry to stack the wood, unlike last time when the deliverer tipped it into the alley. I left RDC to that and continued with the gutters.
I had neglected the gutters for so long--four years? maybe longer--that leaves had decayed into dirt. Also, the bit below the chimney was full of mortar dust and other detritus from the tuckpointing, which was in 2003, I think. Plus I think I had never before touched the garage's at all, and those were packed solid. It was at this point that the metaphor of impaction made its unwelcome appearance in my mind. When I shoved the hose down a bent drainpipe and watched from the roof as a clog of leaves and rot churned from the spout, I was extremely glad that this was the last gutter enema.
While on the roof with the hose, I drained the swamp cooler and rinsed out of it a season's worth of muck (air pollution, strands from the filters, melted mineral block, minor ecosystems). RDC tossed its oiled canvas cover up to me and I snugged it up tight for winter. I wonder if I can find one of those covers with a magneted perimeter to fit over the vent in the hallway. Plus I want to round up the neighbors for a bee to take out the window unit. It's not so very very heavy but it's a cube three feet on a side and awkward and directly above the gas and water intakes.
So we're winterized: wood stacked, birdseed stocked, furnace filter replaced, storms up, winter curtains and wardrobe up, hoses disconnected and coiled, and even Blake is mostly over his fall moult and should have lots of new down to keep him cozy. Right now he's shredding pages from magazines, so even though there's no snow we have a dusting of white flake to beckon in the season.
On Tuesday Dot Org had its usual Hallowe'en party. One group had a good idea and material but, I have to say, poor follow-through: they were "Heathers" but the third Dot Orger named Heather wasn't in, and two Heathers are not "Heathers"; they wore nametags with the surnames but were both dressed in black instead of red, yellow, or green; and worst, they had no Veronica. If there had been three of them, I would have been Veronica for them. Even though I wasn't wearing blue, my hair is dark, if not that dark, and about the right length, and if not Veronica's style, closer to it than their side-of-head '80s ponytails, which the Heathers didn't wear either, and most important, I know the dialogue. I admired their courage during the costume contest, though it seemed few enough people knew their concept for the audience to recognize the inadequacy of its execution.
Anyway, I fed them some lines and plot before the contest. I said that "Is this just another spoke in my menstrual cycle?" is one of my favorite movie lines ever. Then I announced, "A naked American man stole my balloons," and they asked if that line was in the movie too. "No, sorry, I was just blurting my actual favorite movie line."
Next year I am totally going to find a pasty-flesh-toned body suit and wear strategically placed, colorful (and inflated) balloons. "An American Werewolf in London" is an appropriate movie to dress up as for Hallowe'en, n'est-ce pas?
Speaking of French, RDC's favorite movie line is this exchange from "Deconstructing Harry":
Doris: You have no values. With you it's all nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm.
Harry Block: Hey, in France I could run for office with that slogan, and win!
I don't know how to make that into a costume. A platform with three planks so labeled, and a little French flag?
Or, and this just gets better and better, a party where you dress up as your favorite movie line and another prize of the evening besides best costume or best line is how many other people's lines or movies you are able to guess.
Hm.
A scar down each cheek, blood on the belly of a pirate shirt, and a sword. "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father prepare to die." Princess Bride.
A snake on one shoulder and a seaplane on the other and maybe the number 44 on your shirt as an anachronistic hint for those so inclined. Or several snakes and carry a pane of glass. "Aw, that's just my pet snake Reggie!" (I had to look up Reggie Jackson's team number for the Yankees.) Or "Asps! Very dangerous! You go first." Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Therefore, of course, a dog costume and perhaps a map of the 19th state."You are named after the dog?" "I've got a lot of fond memories of that dog." Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Birthday-cake numerals 5 and 0 on a crown, and snaps and Cartesian coordinates on your garment. That's a stretch, but I can't think of how to costume my actual favorite lines from that movie, which follow:
Henry II: I hope we never die.
Eleanor: So do I.
Henry II: Do you think there's any chance of it?
and
Geoffrey: I know. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it. We're a knowledgeable family.
The costumed line is Henry II's: "I've snapped and plotted all my life. There's no other way to be alive, king, and fifty all at once." Lion in Winter, of course.
An ostentatious diamondish necklace and smallpox. Sing "Lydia the Tattooed Lady." Offer people use of a pogo stick and tell them about your dream. Or something.Diana Lord from Philadelphia Story. Except that this ensemble represents no single line, and the pogo stick bit is Uncle Willy's.
A flower-child type smock. Carry a milk carton with your childhood photograph on it. Ask to turn off the music. "Rock stars have kidnapped my son." Almost Famous.
Dress in black and white. Carry a jar of salsa and chips. Act it out but don't say it. Salsa shark! We're gonna need a bigger boat! Man goes into cage, cage goes into salsa. Shark's in the salsa. Our shark." Clerks
Which leads to...a camera, some yellow barrels (a Barrel of Monkeys is a nice manageable size), and perhaps under your denim jacket an optical illusion t-shirt illustrating how size is a matter of perception. Or roll one pant leg up far enough to show your scars and carry a shot glass."I need to have something in the foreground to give it some scale." Or "Okay, so we drink to our legs!" Jaws
Two 3.7-mile city rides.
In the evening I had pool practice, as recommended in the week before the certification dive.
Also I officially hate wetsuits. No one told me you cannot move in one. I was like Linus (I think? maybe Charlie Brown) and Calvin in that when adequately dressed for conditions, I was immobile and unable to build snowfolk or swim. I do not cuss imaginatively enough to get myself in and out of seven millimeters of neoprene. I am going to wear a thing this coming weekend but I am not going to enjoy it in the slightest. Sixty-two-degree water is not that cold, not for four 15-minute dives. What's going to be unbearable is having to remain in a damp wetsuit in between dives and worse, wriggle into and out of it while it's wet.
The horror, the horror.
I was pleasantly surprised that South Dakota rejected the abortion ban. The Democrats have the House and might have the Senate. Rumsfeld is resigning. This should be a good day. But I just don't understand: I expected Colorado to authorize civil unions just as much as I expected it to define marriage (as a union between one man and one woman). Of course the marriage-definers largely overlap with the no-union people. Of course they voted for the definition and against partnership. Of course they did. Of course. I'm dismayed at the referendum's failure, but also at my failure to anticipate this and my ongoing utter incomprehenseion of why people oppose strengthening households and family units and enabling personal responsibility and lessening governmental interference in individuals' lives. I just have this blank space where "understanding the other side" usually functions. I know and understand and even sympathize with many points of view contrary to my own on any number of issues. But this one, I don't even have a starting point for. It bewilders me.
Lo these many years ago a friend and I had a mock argument about which form of toast was superior: peanut butter or cinnamon. The difficulty for me in this is that toast is not only automatically buttered (including pre-peanut butter toast) but also two slices. It took me a while to embrace the heresy of two different types in one serving.
Once I got over that, applied taste-testing demonstrated that in most circumstances, peanut-butter toast is superior to cinnamon.
And it's a good thing that peanut butter gets toast, because mint is unquestionably the superior complement to chocolate. I know this because it's the time of year again for mint Hershey's Kisses and for peppermint bark. This year I think I might try to make peppermint bark on my very own.
Also I want to have a cookie-baking party this year. I need some new blood in my stable of cookie recipies and someone a little less slipshod to guide actual baking and then decoration, preferably also several ratchets less chocolate-rabid than I to suggest variety.
I'm sure Harold Keith was a nice man to everyone he knew. I'm just as sure everyone he knew was white. Yes, Hugh Lofting won the Newbery with a book peppered with racist stereotyping, in 1922; hadn't sensibilities changed at all by 1949? "Half-blood" Cherokees--who survived or were the first generation after the Trail of Tears--to look down on full-bloods because they want to live according to their own lights instead of their tormentors'? I have no problem with his uneducated characters speaking in dialect, but I do with his adult characters speaking like children. Lack of formal education doesn't make you think like a child.
Furthermore, almost every character got slapped by the exposition fairy when Keith thought the reader needed a history lesson. Which I did: I didn't know about various native American tribes siding with the Confederacy in hopes it would respect treaties more than the Union had. But an author should make a history lesson a tad more seamless than this one did.
My Bill Bryson so far: English and How It Got That Way, which was interesting (to me) and in print and, as I recall, fairly free of Bryson. In the summer of 2000 I read A Walk in the Woods, and while I loved his cultural and ecological background on the Appalachian Trail, I got really pissed at him for blowing his ride: an opportunity to hike a seven-month trail, squandered by being unfit and unprepared. But then A Short History of Nearly Everything made me happy: it was funny and informative and an excellent narrative of, yup, nearly everything.
In a Sunburned Country combines his interesting, humorous delving into language, Appalachia, and everything with his unappealing wimpiness, insincere self-deprecation, and complaints. It doesn't make a good audio book because in print I could have skipped all the bits about him and read the geographical and zoological and other worthwhile bits.
The other reason it doesn't make a good audio is that he's the narrator. He doesn't speak clearly. He swallows the insides of many words, dulls some consonants and unexpectedly sharpens others. Hepronounces "unsettling" as "un-seh-dling." Living in Europe didn't sharpen his t's at all, and whatever, we Usans, and he's one, say "twenny" and "mih-ten" and apparently all British women named Katie are quite sick of Usans calling them "K.D." But a narrator of audio books is obliged to enunciate a sight more than Bryson does. "Peer-yud" instead of "period," "quayre-lous" instead of "querulous," "sig-nif-gant" instead of "significant." Plus he sounds like he has a stuffy nose or, harkening even farther back in my college career, a deviated septum.
Davids McCullough and Sedaris read their own work just fine, but Bill Bryson should leave his to others.
I am glad George Guidall narrated this. It's not that he employed what I consider his habitual sardonic tone for Elie Wiesel's story: of course he and the production company wouldn't be that disrespectful. It's that I associate his voice and that tone with more pleasant topics, and that association made the story easier to hear. On the way home I fell asleep so often during Dawn that RDC put on Hemingway short stories instead (assuming correctly I wouldn't mind missing what I wasn't already familiar with).
The only one to complete in her class of three and the only woman to complete in my class of seven ended up being each other's diving buddies this weekend. Lucky Star and I met Monday night at dive practice and reviewed skills together, and I tried not to despise her when, Tuesday, we happened to be trying on wetsuits at the same time and had rather opposite problems of fit. I had my revenge this weekend, when I was mostly fine and she was shivering violently. But I rubbed her back and chafed her hands and we had a good time.
You have four open-water dives altogether in your certification, but only three per day. After the first one Saturday morning, Instructor Mark thought perhaps we would stop after the second one, because Star was cold, and do two Sunday. I wanted to get done, and Star, good buddy that she was and a trooper, decided she could manage three. After that, and retreating to the hotel for showers, we met at the Comet II (I never did ask what happened to the first one) for lunch. We were six: Star and her beau, two instructors, and RDC and me. During lunch, the restaurant played early Madonna, and Star began dancing a little in her seat. I looked at her solemnly and said, "You can be my lucky star, Star," and she danced some more.
This alias became even more appropriate Sunday morning when we swapped contact information. The first thing I asked about her seven-character email leader was what her middle name was. This is perhaps invasive of me to ask without context as often as I do, but the leader--what do you call the string before the domain name?--began obviously with her initials. She told me, and then because of the last four characters I asked if her birthday was 24 May. It is. "May 25th!" I whooped and we high-fived. I told her my very good friend's birthday is the 24th (when he and I were inseparable, we called ourselves twins, not only because we share a birthyear as well), and she said "Gemini power!" but is too young to have offered the "Wondertwin power--activate!" fist so we just high-fived again.
An alias for her is an unnecessary vanity, since I doubt she will figure much in these annals, but I liked her and she made for good story.
So I am all certifimicated. We went to the Blue Hole in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, where the water temperature ranges broadly throughout the year, rather as Dorothy Parker described Katharine Hepburn's acting range, from 61 to 64 degrees. RDC dove with the other "instructor," who was kind of the Miss Bates of scuba diving, talking a lot while saying nothing, though at least he must have been quiet underwater; Star's beau Andy didn't dive but kept the cocoa, towels, and fleece ready; and Mark put Star and me through our paces. A specialty class 80' below stirred up the silty bottom, murking the usually clear water, but the hole was still blue and shining. It's lovely. The Washington Post says people lie on the bottom on winter nights and watch the stars, and if I had a hood and gloves I'd join them. Because it's pretty (and cold).
As long as I can figure out what to do with my ears.
I began on the surface to equalize the pressure behind them--hold your nose and try to exhale--but could not do so enough. I'd descend a few feet, shriek into my regulator (the bit you breathe through), ascend to less pressure, try again to equalize...I took a long time descending, and this made me feel bad for Star: the sooner we completed skills, the sooner we could leave the "platform" and start swimming around, i.e., circulating our warm blood around our extremities.
Cold water and the ignorance of my inexperience meant that I came away with barotrauma: inadequate reaction to changes in pressure. Fluid, including blood, clogs my eustachian tubes. The actual tympanic membranes are fine, and my hearing is not (yet) threatened, but my balance is off and I hear every internal noise more than I ought. Although my sinuses are clear, I have the stuffy-head feeling and sounds. Brushing my teeth, scratching my head, chewing, water from a shower pounding on my neck and back--all of this I hear inside my skull. I saw a doctor Monday morning who told me that this is not a contraindication for diving but that the blood, coagulating as it does, will take four to six weeks to clear. Four to six weeks, beyond which if it hasn't cleared on its own, icky things must happen in hopes of safeguarding my hearing.
I spent the weekend badly disoriented (and disoccidented, and I want words for dissouthed and disnorthed and why do we orient ourselves in English when European navigation relied so much on Polaris? hmm). We napped and read Saturday afternoon in the hotel and drove six hours each on Friday and Sunday. But High points included one, my leaving just one peg in the board on my first try in years at Pyramid Solitaire, at dinner at Joseph's; two, spotting what turned out not to be another game but a merely display of little burros on a board filled with holes for their little feet, and these little burros were flame-breathing. They were lighters, sparked by thumbing the ears back. I was sorely tempted, but even if I needed a lighter, these were bad lighters in both spark and duration. But they were cute burros. And three, most excellent pie at the Comet II. We bought one to bring home and had it for dinner Sunday night. Oh, and four, the victory jumps. I was kinda scared, all my grown-up brain's fault whining about danger from 10 or so feet up. Other divers shouted Star, Andy (in just a bathing suit), and me in, and they jumped, and I didn't, and RDC says on the video camera that maybe I couldn't hear, and finally I jumped because I was not going to back out at that point. Then Andy and Mark decided to go again, and it was fun once I actually got myself off the ledge, and I wasn't freezing like Star, so off I went again. They jumped together and from higher up, all Butch and Sundance, and once again I had to get over my own cowardice/good sense. Swimming back to the steps in a wetsuit was unfun: the buoyancy and immobility a wetsuit enforces made me feel and swim like a bloated carcass. So I went in again in just bathers. If it had been sunny, that would have been fine.
Because the dinner restaurant was named Joseph's, as we approached it RDC called "Joseph! Joseph!" like Clarence in "It's a Wonderful Life" wanting to be rescued from Bert's arrest at the abandoned house The place was packed, as we could see from the outside, and so RDC said Joseph must be giving out a lot of cash-register wings.
Future diving will happen in warm water, which will require few to no millimeters of neoprene compressing my body and restricting my movement, and which is less likely to cause barotrauma, and which is clearer and has more to see. I knew before I started that I would like the wateriness and the underwaterness and the weightlessness, and I figured I wouldn't have the I'm-underwater-I-can't-breathe panic that bested some of my classmates and I didn't. I don't like having water against my nose when I can't breathe through it: it's unnatural. But now that I'm certified I don't have to prove again that I can remove and replace and clear water from my mask, so I don't have to overcome that instinct anymore. The permanent very bad thing is that I hadn't connected champing on a regulator bit with actually having to breathe through my mouth instead of my nose. That I don't like: it makes you stupid and dehydrates you to boot.
Photographs eventually, plus perhaps video of the first jump.
Early last week Amazon reminded me of my own husband's upcoming birthday. I wouldn't have forgotten! Not me! So I ordered him a couple of books off his wishlist. Then in clearing out some email I saw a message I've been sending to myself all year as ideas occur to me. So RDC got another present.
After the kitchen was done, we bought ourselves new china--actual china to replace the Service Merchandise stoneware. In addition to plates and bowls and so forth, we bought a teapot and some serving dishes. RDC wanted the gravy boat too, since it would increase our outlay for the day by only a weensy percentage, and I said we didn't need it because we have a gravy boat that was Granny's. We ended up not getting it, and the very next day when GJW arrived for the annual ski trip and RDC made waffles, I served heated syrup in a Pyrex measuring cup. "Gee," said RDC. "That gravy boat would sure come in handy." Thus was born a faux argument. But wouldn't a gravy boat be a swell present just before Thanksgiving, one of the handful of occasions in a year we use the thing.
When he unwrapped the logo'd box he mock-grumped because I had ruined his fun. He was going to buy it and put it in the china cabinet so when I climbed over the fridge to retrieve the good china on Thanksgiving, there it would be. Aha! I win.
I had bookclub tonight. It is usually the first Monday but I had dive practice so asked if I could shift it (before I asked the group, I asked RDC if he minded it was on his birthday). Someone asked if she could cook and I gladly accepted that offer. I made a double batch of ginger-chocolate cookies, of course, but after the meal and giving everyone a half-dozen to take home, that was that for them. We talked about Holly traveling and the unnamed Fred staying at home, and evidence for Fred's being gay (I didn't notice the first time I read it), and bird cages.
Scarf had spoken of a progressive Thanksgiving, but I didn't know that had no momentum so didn't invite her chez nous, and by the time I invited London and Wolfman they had made plans, and everyone else has local family, so Thanksgiving will be only Maven and Mr. Maven (and Morgan! they have to bring Morgan!) and RDC's mother, sister, and nephew, and us, and London and Wolfman for pie, and Kal and Neal and her aunt and uncle dropping by. Scarf said she was angling for an invitation but I wasn't taking the bait--when did this happen?--and so made plans with another neighbor, and I am continuing my bad behavior by encouraging her and Drums to blow them off and bring Monkey and Mia to my house.
I've been dealing with fiddly little projects that I've put off a long time, and this is just talking to myself.
I'd been meaning to tidy up the furnace room when RDC said he wanted to get a tarp to lay on the decaying floor to protect all our gear from the From Beneath You It Devours. That struck me as too much like the former owner's bathmat that failed to serve as a doormat between the gritty furnace room and the finished basement. I suggested the leftover matting from recovering the porch floor. It is porous and therefore only a stopgap but supposedly we are going to get the basement done Real Soon Now. So I emptied the furnace room of gear--biking, kayaking, hiking, fly-fishing, diving, backpacking, snowshoeing, picnicking, and car-camping supplies for two--plus the large preservation box for my wedding dress, three copyboxes of whatever, a box of summer curtains, and a shopvac, tumbled the carpeting out of the garage rafters and spread it on the floor, and put everything back. I need to pound a lot of nails into the walls; suspending sleeping bags and packs has got to be better for them than heaping them in a corner.
Before family arrive on Saturday I have to do annoying cleaning like vacuuming the dead bugs out of the ceiling light fixtures and hanging the couch on the clothesline to give it a good thrashing. And oiling the wood furniture. And tidying my study so it converts to a guest room.
Cleaning my study means putting souvenirs in my scrapbook and sorting correspondence, which is not going to happen in time. It means clearing out the closet as much as possible. Or not: I could shove the contents of the laundry closet--suitcases, wetsuits, snowsuits, and waders--into the furnace room so guests could use that closet. Yes, that's better, because the study closet rail is only 20" long and four feet from the door--it's mounted perpendicular in a long narrow closet whose door is at the other end--and I'd have to clear only the one closet instead of both. But clearing the closet has meant I've already boxed and sorted many of the Yule presents I've accumulated throughout the year.
Clearing my desk is another issue. Garden plans, materials for letter campaigns, photographs, clippings for my sister, print articles not yet available online homeless because I officially don't keep non-personal paper, and stockings in various stages of completion. One thing I could take care of was a tangle of tarnished silver jewelry, so I polished that. That's not really cleaning up, but I don't want to box up unfinished projects.
While imprisoned in glasses, I wore only small studs, and in the years since have worn only a few pairs of earrings regularly--my goddess ones, mostly, a pair of male and female stick figures, and a pair of plain silver drops. Lately I've been rediscovering my collection, some of which is too tarnished to wear. Two pair of earrings from Thailand that SEM gave me after successive trips. A pair of twisted silver wires from the Benton Art Museum. Venus-symbol earrings (♀). Two ornaments meant as pendants, a representation of Gemini intended for PLT that he, unsurprisingly, would never wear (it was probably a selfish present), and large amethyst from HEBD.
Seeing "Mountains of the Moon" in my Bad Year, I was struck by Mabruki's wearing ears as earrings so that he could hear the spirits. Everyone was gone that year--DEDBG in France, SEM in Japan, TJZD in Russia, HEBD estranged, PLT blessedly only in Boston, no farther than my sister--so I opted to, since I could not hear them, hear their gifts. One pair of SEM's earrings are Thai coins with danglers that whisper on their own, and chattered more when I wore the two pendants in my second holes. I wore those four, plus my Tigger pendant, all the time, as constantly and unchangeably as my rings and bracelets.
I set the pendants aside for polishing only because they were tarnished, with no plans to wear them again (I have no idea why my earlobes didn't rip apart at the time). But diving and frolicking with Lucky Star, another Gemini with that birthday (though scads of years younger), and then actually polishing them the next day, made me reconsider. I strung the Gemini on a necklace (which officially belongs to another pendant with continued emotional significance but declining aesthetic appeal) and am wearing it today. It belongs with HEBD's amethyst but the latter's bale is too small for the available chain.
I'm wearing something I wanted to give to a lover 15 years ago, something representing astrology to boot. It's not the usual Gemini symbol that resembles "II" but two human figures running side by side carrying a tree or torch before them, so (to me) it doesn't represent faith in a snake oil belief but friendship. Plus, it's still pretty, just like the SEM earrings I'm also wearing.
I had to go to Seattle to find a chain for the tanzanite pendant RDC gave me. The one thing I cannot find in this town is my kind of jewelry: where do I go to get a box chain that will fit through the amethyst's bale?
Finally I finished emptying my study. It's still full of bookcases, futon, and desk, but everything that can be elsewhere or away is. I admired the effect (all books on shelves instead of on other books and with spines aligned, an empty desk and clear floor) for a minute before unfolding the futon to shrink the room again. We're still using crates for books in one corner of the den, and I asked RDC if he remembered the shelves I asked for.
Theoretically I could make my own shelves, but a saw belongs to that category of Hot or Sharp Tools that I avoid. He has the measurements but hasn't taken the slip of paper along on supply runs. I said shelves would make a nice Yule present.
"So you're really asking for shelves and this isn't a disguised request for diamonds," he said.
"C'mon, last year you gave me a stump. I like wood." Last year he brought from Australia a hollowed emu egg etched with a cockatoo (not an emu), and it lived on its side for months until, at a woodshop, he found an interesting gnarl of manzanita and shaped and finished it as a egg-stand.
Adding three shelves to the two bookcases that can fit them is not going to be enough, especially since I have no plans to stop bogarting the bookage. Books' dense weight threatens the main floor, which is why we removed the two cases from RDC's study this spring.
Everyone else and I in the neighborhood raked our yards today. Mine is an easy one in fall, since I leave most of the leaves in the gardens as protection for the plants against cold and sun for the winter. But I groomed the front a bit and raked the side yard under the nectarine and pear trees. Most of last year's leaf pile has rotted into satisfying dirt, so I removed the groundcloth from the area whose grass and bindweed I'm trying to smother, rake the leaf mold over that, and dragged the tarp full of this year's leaves over it. I took out the tomato plants and cages and the bean trellises, covered the gardens with groundcloth, tossed a length over the woodpile, and omitted to sweep the walk or vacuum the porch since AEK called about our Tattered Cover date.
She wanted to go while the sun was out, and I, not done, suggested our being together as some safety against human dangers, but she countered that safety in numbers is no protection against sunless cold. Besides, this way I could stop. So I hosed off and off we trotted.
I gave my mother-in-law All Families Are Psychotic almost three years ago and she has been asking since for similar books. I finally found one in Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother. I found that but not Paula Fox's The Slave Dancer, which is next up for reading to RDC--King of the Wind is pretty young. AEK will travel to family for Thanksgiving and chose some picture books for the younger nephew and chapter books for the older--Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and, on my suggestion, Bunnicula, though tragically not Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I also suggested Because of Winn-Dixie; if a seven-year-old can manage Mrs. Frisby he can manage Winn-Dixie as well. But she had already bought enough.
A global regimen of regular skipping and watching Blake yawn would bring world peace (and lower blood pressure) in no time.
My first ounce of deliberate, non-walking exercise in several weeks. I climbed on the stairmill for 15', ran one mile (only one, but at a steeper incline than previously), and did some weights, concentrating on my back, core, and quadriceps. It felt good.
I loved The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything. I hoped Mary Anne's just criticism that in the former, Simon Winchester sometimes sounded like the madman Victorian colonial he was describing--in being patronizing and racist, if not psychotic--was not a constant element of his writing.
This book is an erudite, wide-ranging work whose exploding world, centered on a volcano, is developed through topics ranging from geology to colonialism to meteorology. With flaws. Fascinating: Krakatoa was the first global catastrophe to happen after the telegraph had connected the world, and news of it reached London only three hours after the eruption (by contrast, news of Lincoln's assassination 18 years before had taken 12 days to reach England). Frustrating: lizards and snakes are not amphibians.* Fascinating: in the early 1800s, a biologist traced a line through southeast Asia, east and west of which lay distinctly different flora and fauna; that line correlates to how landmasses have drifted over time, anticipating the theory of plate tectonics of 1965. Frustrating: Winchester footnotes that the New York World newspaper, which after the eruption noted more vivid sunsets, is the paper of "World Series" fame (as if the championship took its name from the paper's sponsorship, 288), but other, apparently more trustworthy (though online) sources deny this, and the paper's own archives show no connection.
Offhand, careless mistakes like those, and larger ones like his persistently (in Madman and in this, more than once) referring to Sri Lanka by its pre-1952 name, Ceylon**, make me wonder if I should not have enjoyed the book overall, if any of what I thought I learned (about continental drift, subduction zones, the repopulation of Krakatoa's relics) is trustworthy and accurate.
* "And as the forest thickened, some amphibians that had somehow found their ways across the sea begin to slink in and make their nests--monitor lizards, paradise tree snakes" (364).
** While Sri Lanka was Ceylon, Taiwan was Formosa. Why then in the same note (33), would he refer to "Dutch outposts" in Ceylon, Formosa, and Thailand, not Siam? Why call Sri Lanka "Ceylon" several times despite seeming to be aware of (not only) a name change ("what was then Ceylon," 262)? This despite acknowledging an assiduous editor and fact-checker.
I was almost 12 when Mount St. Helens erupted. I think I knew about Krakatoa earlier than that, that a story about it appeared in a Reader's Digest collection for children that I read to tatters. But it fit well with what I think is a typical pubescent fascination with the weird, scary, unknown, or extreme. I could not read much this week with three houseguests, but I tried to engage RDC's 12-year-old nephew's interest with Krakatoa. That it was so loud it could be heard 3000 miles away, as if you yelled in New York City and could be heard in San Francisco. That sunsets were prettier all over the world because an entire pulverized mountain was suspended in the upper atmosphere. That it caused tsunamis taller than the one of two years ago, whose effects registered on tidal markers in France. That the barometric shock wave reverberated around the globe 15 times. Sadly, none of this stirred him at all.
Vocabulary: chicane, threnody.
Hooray! Another non-Boggart book by Susan Cooper. I thought King of Shadows was great and so was mightily disappointed by the Boggart titles. Maybe they were just younger than my usual. Anyway, this was great, another now-and-then book like King but without the blatant time travel, and with a small nod to King as well, with a boy from North Carolina, i.e. Nat, playing Ariel at the current Globe. A fun quick read with Horatio Nelson and Mystic Seaport and the usefulness of reading old books. Good stuff.
Blake likes to hide in his box and to know we know he's in his box. Somehow, having him in his box on the chair next to me is better than having him in his box way off on top of his cage: even though I can't see or feel him, just the proximity matters. His latest oatmeal box held two 4.5 lb. bags and has a handle in one side: a narrow oval window, like an archer's window. Depending on what he's doing in his box, sometimes the tip of his tail pokes through either door or window and it is not permissible (though it is naughtily fun) to give the feathers a quick tug. Sometimes just the beak emerges around an edge of cardboard as he widens the apertures, and if he's concentrating very hard on his chewing sometimes he doesn't notice a finger laid on the upper mandible, at least not for a moment or two. If I could find a box to fit in his travel cage, I bet he wouldn't fret nearly as much on those rare occasions he has to be in it. It would have to have proper acoustics for singing and beak-tapping, of course.
Thanksgiving was a rough day for the buddy: we were cleaning and cooking until 2, and then after guests arrived pretending to be normal people who don't let a bird roam around the house, on the floor, on the dining table, whining whenever whatever is not quite to his liking. I had set him up in the opposite corner of the dining room than usual, out of the way of diners' chairs and with a good view of the kitchen. After the turkey came out of the oven, we opened his cage; during basting he had to be locked up. His schedule was so interrupted that he took his mid-afternoonn nap on top of his cage. I really wanted to get a photograph of him tucked on the corner of his cage--"Blake supervises the Thanksgiving preparations"--but clean hands and tuckage never coincided.
Finally, well after dinner, with RDC's sister and nephew and Maven and Mr. Maven and I playing Scattergories around the dining table, Blake perched on RDC's knee in the living room and told him and his mother his tale of woe of the day. This is a prolonged dirge (or hey, perhaps my new vocabulary word "threnody") about the calamity of his day, distinct from the whistling that accompanies shaving and similar fun activities and from the "I'm so lonely I have to sing to my own foot" blues and from the "I'm not a songbird at all and not a songster like my older brother Percy but I do love this keening that my parents indulgently call song." It involves some whining and some chattering but mostly he sounds like the Scarecrow--"They took my arms and they threw them over there! and then they took my legs and they threw them over there!" Immediately upon finishing (it took a long time, maybe 20 minutes), he yawned himself into a tuck (each yawn ends with his head turned farther and farther around) and went to sleep. Such a hard day.
Since I've been typing he has emerged from his box and demanded a cave. I bent my knees to either side, so he has been playing between my calves under his box. Aha, back in the box. This means I can sign his parent-tether over to RDC without disrupting his play or breaking his heart.
London, Wolfman, two friends of theirs, and I joined the throngs at Freak Train last night. As I remembered from my first and only other foray thither, the emcee was the best reason to attend. Most of the performers were bad and not in a good way: rapper Dave, who was permitted two sets, did not enunciate, shoved too many syllables into the wrong cadence, and prolonged about three discrete ideas into each of his five minutes. The emcee followed: "So to sum up, bring the troops home, Dave doesn't give a damn, and Bush doesn't care." A "singer" asked for a reverb(eration) chorus on the microphone, and told the audience he makes his music on his computer and has been showing his CDs around town but had had no response. When he left the stage (after telling us he was looking for bandmates; good luck with that) the emcee described as a mix of Thomas Dolby and Oscar the Grouch, minus the talent. Two stand-ups, one full of fish puns and the other by Bigfoot who finished his act by adapting Michael Richards's recent tirade to the conflict between Sasquatch and human, were laughable but not as they intended.
The best acts were three guitarists, who were okay, and, far surpassing all others, "I Smell Puppets." This last consisted of a seated man with a puppet on each hand, the three of them lip-synching a sped-up electronic version of "Bohemian Rhapsody."
The female emcee I remembered from two years ago, but the other (the one on the left) was new to me. He looked a lot like Topher Grace as Eric Forman in build, hair, face (but not expressions), and some mannerisms. (It was Eric's role as straight man, his faux deference and facial expressions, that reminded me of PLT.)
As at the dog show last winter, the primary purpose of attending Freak Train is to mock. Perhaps, until I get on that stage, I shouldn't. Ha! Of course I will.
One (and so far the only) idea I have for RDC's stocking this year is a kitchen timer. He is perfect and so doesn't need one, but still, the kitchen has that hole in it. I told Kal of my difficulty in locating one: in addition to desiring various visual aesthetic points and no battery, I don't want a really obnoxious ding. I said I didn't want to alienate the entire staff in Sur La Table and while the effect sounds no better than if I were Oliver with his sheer joy at the noise of it, I'm just comparing buzzers. She got it, hooray (what the fuck kind of profane cover is that, though?!). We were at work, and went our separate ways in a moment, with me saying I had to go investigate Tribble Customs in the Sudden. That she didn't get until I clarified it was Tribal Customs in the Sudan (such being one of Dot Org's chief investigative topics).
Tonight we--Kal, Neal, AEK, and I--went ice-skating. At least, that's what it was called, but of ice there was little, either in area or in surface. For a rink in the middle of a faux town center, it wasn't as puny as the one in Cherry Creek, but neither was it a hockey rink or even the size of a decent pond. The real problem was the surface. I didn't see where a Zamboni could have been parked nearby, and one certainly hadn't serviced the surface in some time. It was bubbly and chunky and covered with shaving. These flaws makes pond-skating charming but a rink should be free of them.
The four of us were equally clumsy. Kal and I, having grown up with water and cold, owned our own skates; AEK and Neal, who didn't, rented what they said were decent skates from a booth (where maybe there was a miniature Zamboni). I haven't skated since maybe 1994, and it showed. When I began to learn to ski, I was told you do not ski like you skate, and maybe you don't, but here I applied skiing to skating. When I found my feet, I kept my blades parallel and tried to push off from the inside front of either skate. Apparently the perfect incline for me is more tilted than flat ice but less tilted than your average mountain. I'm picky. And if I could skate at all, I would have only one foot on the ice at a time and get more glide off each push. Whatever.
My point is that I can't skate. At the beginning, I picked up one skate and put it down, picked up the other and put it down. "Look, Kal! Guess who I'm being!"
"Me!" she guessed.
"No! Oliver!"