Jessie did a great job making her Movable Type template look like the old Perpetual Motion, but for right now I'm just pleased to have figured out how to put the date before the month.
Also I attempted for about 2.4 seconds to come up with a Speaking Confidentially theme for the side matter. I realized that the Soundkeeper in The Phantom Tollbooth had a vault in which you could search for the spoken word, and then that was it for the cleverness.
Movable Type offers a comment option, which I removed. Remember that my email link used to say "Speak your mind"? That was from the days when I had the First Amendment on all of my pages, and then I kept it because it worked well with the Speaking Confidentially title. But that's ancien régime, O My Friends and Brothers. I don't like the comment feature, so no soup for you.
But I should add an email link. And shall, if I can figure out how.
Also that notify list sign-up thingie. I need that too. And to figure out how to make all entries for any given day chronological instead of reverse chronological, and always a separate page for each day. Baby steps.
Email link, check. Chronological order, check. RDC says he will find whatever it is he did to his template such that the columns adjust for platform, resolution, and browser. I don't understand categories. I know how to assign them, but I don't know how to segregate entries by category so this can read as a record of exercise or reading progress. Can this thing understand paragraph tags or shall I be reduced to hitting the return key twice as if this were a typewriter? I just got prints back of the photographs I took at the funeral. I brought my camera for my visit as a whole, had my camera in the car that day anticipating post-funereal highjinks with my sister and cousin, and offered it up when I heard my great-aunt (my mother's paternal aunt, not the maternal aunt who has ALS) say she wished she had brought a camera for a photograph of my uncle. Camera karma again.
After realizing that Halley was born in 1986, I thought of things besides the Comet that she wouldn't remember. Besides that, the biggest event of the my twelfth-grade year was the Challenger. And Chernobyl and Iran-Contra, but mostly the Challenger. This is her eleventh-grade year.
Why is it that clicking on the date in the calendar thing doesn't bring you to entries for that date?
Friday when I watched ER, I saw "State of the Union" in the list of recordings. I didn't permit Tivo to record anything on its own. Then I realized it wasn't the Katharine Hepburn version.
Looking around the table of ten last night, I saw three other glasses of water besides my own. Furthermore, none of our party were smoking, though being in a bar made up for that. I remarked on the water to CGK, whom I think I'll call Margaret after her favorite author. She mouthed something I didn't catch. I glanced a "what?" at her and she repeated herself: "I'm pregnant." Good.
Later in the evening, Dexy complained that no one would do tequila shots with him "because everyone's fucking pregnant."
"No," I retorted, "Some of us are just fucking." (I didn't go to yoga this morning.)
RDC offered me a sip of tequila. I tried it, because what the heck. I liked the 2.3 sips of his margarita this summer. I about touched my tongue to it and screeched. This lack of drinking disappointed someone in the group, a man I'd never met but who's known Dexy since before Denver. "With a name like yours, you don't drink?" he asked. After the Julio crack, I automatically adore anyone who appreciates my name.
A while later he asked me about keeping my name (and he asked out of curiosity, not out of befuddlement, so that was fine, and he understood perfectly when I said, "It's my name. Why would I change it?"), so then his wife asked me what my name is. I told her, and she exclaimed, "Of course you wouldn't change it with a name as good as that!" These two clearly possessed fine taste. Then she asked what RDC's name is, and I told her, and she understood even better. I should think.
The reason clicking on a date in the calendar didn't result in an archive-by-date was that the entire template was screwed. So I killed the whole thing, sucked RDC's working template into my account, and started from there. Actually, RDC did the deleting and resetting up. However, I did do all the formatting on my own. Also I did not see in the manual any way to order the category archive (which I wanted so that anyone who wants to avoid the exercise log can do so) other than alphabetically. I numbered the categories, starting with Speaking Confidentially at 1. But I didn't like the numerals showing. I renamed the categories again, still with the numbers but with a color tag bounding the numbers. So the numerals are there but are white on white. I have no idea why the entries under the categories are increasingly indented but that doesn't bother me nearly as much as not being able to define the font in the before and after tags. Also I'll probably copy Jessie and not have an entry on the main page but reserve that space for an introduction. Maybe.
Yesterday it was 70 degrees. How long can Denver pretend to be liveable with no water? At what point will the neighborhood requirements for Kentucky bluegrass under a sprinkler be revoked?
My point was more that today it is back in the 30s with snow forecast. When I last went outside, freezing rain was falling, a phenomenon new to me here this winter. Maybe last winter too. But it's not supposed to happen. I looked up in disgust and muttered "freezing rain?!" Then I realized I was criticizing precipitation in whatever form so I apologized and shut up.
The reason I went outside was to get more firewood. It's a Blue day and finally cold enough to warrant a fire. I have been struggling with Movable Type more than reading the Times, but I do have the paper here (aside from the sports section, which went up in smoke a few hours ago), and Summerland, sadly equally ignored, and RDC is reading Underworld and Blake is pretty sure there's nothing better than a peacock feather, unless it's a shoelace, or maybe the mechanical pencil, except of course having his head pet, and so overall it's a perfect winter Sunday afternoon.
I've been meaning to show you, O My Friends and Brothers. About fifteen inches came off, starting about an inch up from the tattered ends, then a full foot of hair, elasticked at both ends, and then a bit more as she cut the remains. Without even asking if I was prepared, she started hacking through the ponytail, and then about halfway through she exclaimed "Oh! Are you okay?" I was; if I weren't I wouldn't've sat down in the chair. But the chomp-chomp-chomp of shear through hair was pretty odd.
I lack any decent Photoshop or junior version thereof, so the actual photographs are too big. So, from the webcam, a day and a half later: 
I know I shouldn't consume newspaper, but I am a lot more likely to read a whole New York Times in paper spread around me over the course of a day than I am in an electronic medium. Recently retired DU professor Burton Feldman's obituary appeared in the Times today, an honor RDC and I would have missed if I hadn't bought the paper. I might read online a few book reviews that caught my eye, like The Child That Books Built, but I might overlook "And Bear in Mind," which is how I discovered Amazon's negligence: the fourth book in A.S. Byatt's tetralogy!
Unfortunately, I rewarded their negligence by buying it from them.
The color tag making the numerals before the categories white shows up in the title tag of the archive page. Criminy.
Not so curly now. Actually if I air-dry it and maybe scrunch it a bit in my fingers as it dries, it gets decent waves; but it can either be a) like that, with thick shanks of hair waving, yet tangled, or b) combed, therefore untangled, and hence fairly straight. And I've become one of those people who is always messing with her hair. I hate people fucking with their hair in public. I don't want to watch anyone clip her fingernails either, for one thing; for another thing, if you have to fuck with it just to have some peripheral vision it's a stupid style. I am trying to, as Haitch put it, "embrace the down," but that's hard to do when it won't stay out of my face, damn it. I bought some gel, not that I particularly know how to use it; my fear is that if I put enough crap in it to keep it out of my face (and the cutter deliberately--at my request even--cut a few pieces short), I'll look like John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction."
Filling the birdfeeder makes me feel a little like The Claw in the Pizza Planet vending machine in "Toy Story."
"The Claw decides who will stay and who will be chosen..." I'm paraphrasing, but I can hear the little three-eyed alien dolls (or are they three-headed with three eyes in each head? Clearly, I haven't watched "Toy Story" recently enough).
I fill the feeder on my way out in the morning, between 7:15 and 7:45 depending on how I go to work. The birds have been up rather longer than that, and by the time I stagger into the kitchen to dump cereal into a bowl, they've congregated forlornly around the empty feeder. Like the aliens, they're not overly bright and they travel in packs. Yet when I come around the side of the house, scoop in hand, they disperse. Okay, so the aliens worship the claw and the birds clearly do not worship me, but they do worship the feeder. They seem not to understand the connection between the arrival of me, the Scary, and the deposit of seed in the feeder.
I could fill it in the evening so I wouldn't have to wake up to a bunch of mopey sparrows, of course.
Egg was just looking in The Synonym Finder (I guess there is a synonym for thesaurus) for something or other and came across--I'm not clear how--the phrase "sweet patootie" and laughed at its presence. "Isn't that what Sally Brown called Linus?" I asked. But no one remembered. I remember someone calling someone that because the callee yelled back, "And I am not your sweet patootie!" The delayed response (I remember the little figure alone in his panel) makes me think it was Linus. Schroeder, I continued to ruminate, barely responded to Lucy at all, except to rip his piano out from under her head. And would Peppermint Patty have been so girly with Charlie Brown? Then I wondered aloud why all the aggressive lovers among the Peanuts were girls. Charlie Brown loved the little red-headed girl from afar.
Egg's and my hapless coworker, whose conversation tends much more work-ward than ours, opined that he didn't think Peppermint Patty was aggressive to Charlie Brown. Just buddy-buddy with him. "The only one she was aggressive with was Marcy."
"Yeah, but Marcy worshipped her," I countered, unlike Schroeder and Linus and Charlie Brown with Lucy, Sally, and Patty respectively. "Like Mrs. Danvers."
Neither of them had read Rebecca or seen it.
But I think I have my new dissertation topic.
And what did Hapless, who needs a better name, know anyway? I said that Patty's behavior might have calmed toward Charlie Brown over the years, but way back when she first arrived (I have read, if you can call it that, collections dating back well before her 1966 arrival), she was all over him for more than just baseball. "Oh," he said. "Well, I only ever watched the cartoons anyway."
Hm. The phrase is "sweet babboo," not "sweet patootie," which now sounds too risqué anyway. And Marcie (it's spelled Marcie, according to Peanuts' syndicate) is sweet, unlike Mrs. Danvers. But I bet Mrs. Danvers called Rebecca "sir."
Finally. It's snowed three of the past five days. Sunday night's accumulation was the heaviest at four inches, and mostly gone with Monday's sun, but we've had another two inches Tuesday and Wednesday night. Praise be. I want it to snow every day until the last frost date. I want lots of spring snow, wet enough to build snowfolk. I want lots and lots of snow so I can stockpile it--maybe I should shovel my neighbors' walks and bring the snow home in a tarp or wheelbarrow--for that much more moisture in the ground.
I miss icicles. I took my camera along in my woodsy walk in Connecticut. I noticed two things: the "cliff" the Indian shelters are in (or are) is not nearly as tall as it was when I was six (nor as far away), and icicles make a lovely fringe for a cliff face.
Ack. When I told my mother about my walk, about how close the shelters really are and how easy the trail was to find despite house-building by people who then don't walk in the woods as much as they ought, and how beautiful it was (I saw an ironwood tree, along a trail I can never have walked before. I am sure I never saw such a thing before I went to UConn, which, being inland, is higher and colder.)
Her husband told me that he just, after 5.5 years, finally went all the way down the road to the turnpike. I was agog that he had lived here so long and not bothered to go for such a simple, short, pretty walk before. Even if it's not quite so pretty anymore, with the new houses, and also gloomy in a different way: the gloaming under the hemlocks has given way to a false brightness, since they're all dead after the blight. But he didn't even walk it--it took him five and a half years to drive it. Damn, it makes me crazy that people can live there and not appreciate it.
Which I suppose people could say of me living in Denver. I heard someone say recently how much Denver is like Phoenix, and that's truer than I would like for anywhere that I live. Sunny and dry. Now, sunnier and drier. Having to import its water.
I appreciate some stuff, really. I like being able to walk to a lot of things (though I wish I could walk to more). I love our bungalow neighborhoods. I suppose I'd have to lock my bike almost anywhere I lived, though I believe libraries should serve as sanctuary as churches once did. And it's not as if I wouldn't feel guilty about being a civilized human living anywhere else in the county.
I filled the birdfeeder on my way out to the gym last night so it would be full for the little buggers at first light today. When I looked out the kitchen window at 6:45, no one was fluttering around the feeder: the thermometer stood at 0. No wonder the house felt cold.
For Christmas I discovered a wonderful book for Emlet, A Lot of Otters, without realizing at the time that the same author-illustrator did a book I loved from when I still worked at Phoebe (or at least still frequented it), Grandfather Twilight. In A Lot of Otters, the mother moon looks for her baby, her moonlet, so it's a perfect book for Emlet. And Grandfather Twilight is just a wonderful bedtime book. So I collected that for her birthday, and another by Barbara Helen Berger, All the Way to Lhasa. And Stella Luna, partly because of the ratapiñata, partly because of "I Am Sam," and partly because it's such a wonderful book.
I found a lot of green and lavender clothes, a purple chenille sweater, a pair of green with purple flowers leggings, a lavender shirt and socks to go with the leggings, a little white sweater, a blue denim sack dress with embroidered flowers around the collar. Also I taped "Monsters Inc." and found a Peter Gabriel mix cd RDC ripped while roadtripping to Yellowstone as a token for Emlet's parents.
Also I found a donkey. After acquiring it, I walked back to Cassidy with it propped on my left forearm and the bag with the other shopping in my right. (The clerk had offered a bag. Ha!) I saw a woman in a restaurant window notice the donkey's notinabagness and smile. If it had been in a bag, it wouldn't've been able to wave at her. She waved back!
I did all this shopping on a Thursday night. The donkey spent the weekend with Morse, Hamlet, Monty, Pantalaimon, and Booboo. Actually I had met and fallen in love with the donkey while Christmas shopping but I couldn't quite put such a Real animal in a box. Instead for Christmas Emlet got a small hippopotamus puppet who can hold a bar of soap and wash her back: not quite real. This time I determined that the donkey's need for a home and Emlet's certain delight would overcome whatever trauma it endured in the box.
I wrapped the three books and put them in. I squished all the clothes as small as they could go, taped the paper tight, and put them in. Meanwhile, the donkey lay on the floor by my bedtable with its head partly on Booboo's legs and under Hamlet's head, making friends. I showed it the box and told it what awaited it on the other end of its journey. I cut out some apples and pears from construction paper for snacks. I drew a sippy water bottle on the inside of the box, figuring that if a hamster can figure one out, a donkey can. I told it about the Little Prince's sheep.
Then came Monday. The donkey and the box sat separately on my desk that morning, to be joined and taped at the last possible minute. Minne suggested some windows. I drew some sashed windows on the inside of the box, with screens for air and blinds for darkness. Then it was lunchtime. The donkey clambered into its box, on its back, its hooves (which are huge--it's going to be a big donkey when it grows up) gathered under its chin. I ruthlessly taped the box up and sent it on its way.
I talked to Nisou this morning. She peeked in the box to see if things were wrapped, so the lid is ajar and the donkey has some air. It will have its freedom on Tuesday, Emlet's birthday. She mentioned that the Pacific northwest hummingbird I gave Emlet lives on a shelf over the head of her bed and sends her dreams, and that she had just read A Midsummer Night's Dream and so finally named the hummer Oneiros.
"OH!" I exclaimed, all happy. In the donkey's letter of introduction (in broken French), it says it doesn't think it's Eeyore. It is much too happy to be Eeyore, plus it tail is sewed, not nailed on. The only other donkey I could think of was poor confuseled Puzzle from The Last Battle. But of course, Midsummer! "Could the donkey's name be Bottom?"
And Maman, who is Meme to her grandchildren, has been there for a fortnight, mending clothes, baking bread, and most of all babysitting Emlet. I talked to her a little too, and she said that she has heard I am responsible for all the best soft toys in Emlet's collection. I erkled inwardly at "soft toys" but was pleased to know that my offerings are noteworthy.
Today as we began to paint RDC asked what I would like to listen to. He is having great fun with his iPod: in addition to all his CDs he also subscribes to the audio version of Scientific American and gets either one or two audio books a month. He's already listened to Laurie Anderson read Don DeLillo's novella The Body Artist and is now on Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell, also, ahem, not read by the author. I've heard some of it, when he's piped the iPod through the speakers in the kitchen to cook, and Hawking can be quite funny. Thank goodness. Anyway, I said Nutshell, because I'd probably have to listen to and read it a few times before understanding any of it so hearing only bits might not matter at first go.
"But I'm almost done with it," RDC countered.
"Great. I'll find out how the universe ends."
The trim is done. It might need a few touch-ups here and there. Also RDC finally finished painting his study's closet door (which has been off since that room went under the palette knife in June 2000). He got all panicky when he thought, this morning looking at the door, at its hinges and latch, that he had been painting one of the room doors.
Four doors stand in a vertical heap in the laundry room: two that we removed and don't wish to restore to the study and bedroom doorways, and two glass-paned doors that might have been Formigny's original exterior doors. The basement ceiling's not much taller than the height of a door, and the solid interior doors stood at the back of the heap (being not as pretty as glass); we moved the doors carefully. He looked at one of the solid ones, the hinges, the latch. We have a houseguest on Friday and RDC had hoped to have his study done by then.
"But that door's too wide for the closet," I pointed out. "It must be a room door."
We examined the suspect door, on sawhorses in the furnace room for months now. It was narrow. It, like all the interior doors, is two-paneled, the lower one square and the upper rectangular. He'd been mentally hanging the door upside down, with the knob four feet off the ground. He has this thing about the world being built for shorter people. Ask him about kitchen counters some day.
Anyway, I spared him from throwing no small fit about working on the wrong door. Now all that closet needs is a fetal shelf to have an inch cut cross-wise off its width so it can be fit as a shelf. And for us to hang a series of coathooks in the front landing (which will be next after the sunroom).
Nisou was telling about their kitchen, about timbering the walls and installing wood (!) countertops and reinstalling appliances and so on--all since December. This they do with two jobs and a baby and they don't even know Jessie. I am such a snail.
Now that's a better way to get to a mountain. We hied ourselves to Union Station before 7, took a slow train (partly because of the terrain, partly because this country hates public transportation) to Winter Park, and disembarked 100 feet from a lift.
The ride is lovely. Anything is better than the I-70 corridor to begin with, especially with ski traffic. Boulders and snow and creeks and elk and two hours of scenery. Sometimes I watched the world go by; sometimes I read A Whistling Woman.
Of course, the base temperature at 9,000' was 0. Two thousand feet higher up, that much colder. Plus windchill. And falling snow. And blowing snow.
I wore a face mask, a headband, a hat, and goggles: no skin showing. My head was warm, though my peripheral vision (does that include up and down?) was severely compromised. And contacts, which I have to get more of Real Soon Now. My goggles fogged, as did RDC's glasses and goggles to the point he shucked his glasses and skied blind (relatively: two layers of fog being worse than no correction). I wore an undershirt, a turtleneck, a fleece, and a shell. I wore two pair of pants, fleece and goretex. None of me was cold.
Except my wrists. And my fingers.
I need to get gloves with gaiters. I wore glove liners under my gloves, with some sort of chemical hand-warming pads in the palms. I couldn't possibly arrange the gear on my head with lined and gloved hands, but with the face mask on, my teeth couldn't assist with the gloving of my hands. Liners first, head fleece second, then gloves. Thus the pulling down of the glove cuffs didn't happen. Nor the snugging of shell cuffs by velcro over glove cuffs didn't happen. Thus cold wrists.
And my fingers were cold despite the hand-warming pads in the palms. Numb. Stiff.
However, I can feel the difference in my legs. Winter Park has a lot of traversing. I've always been better than RDC at traversing, because of shorter skis and ice-skating, but it still sucks. At the least sign of any slope, this time, both of us would tuck. Tail way up, upper body over, all weight in the toes, to get the most out of whatever little hill there was.
At the end of the day, I didn't feel like a length of chewed string. I felt like a piece of frozen string, sure, but not chewed. That's an improvement.
So. Damn. Cold.
This morning on NPR an announcer coaxed listener-supporters with an album of classic music, called something like the top 40 of classical (no: #1 Classical Album). The teaser was the opening notes of Vivaldi's Spring concerto. Why anyone would want Spring apart from the other seasons, why would anyone want an anonymous album without knowing which symphonies or conductors were involved? Also the announcer said it would be a great way to start your collection of classical music. I suppose I should expect the condescending tone, deal with it or not listen. But erg.
It started out innocently enough. I just wanted some fisheye shots of the buddy like these of many puppies. It soon disintegrated into buddy torture.
 First, RDC lulls the buddy into a false sense of security. |
 This is the scoop with head pet, the favored hold. |
 If you stop petting, he'll duck his head, exposing his tempting neck. |
 Blake worships the napkins. Sometimes the only thing to do is make a buddy burrito. |
 Next, the emotional distress for art's sake. Even though RDC had no intention of leaving the house, he donned his fleece just to document the buddy reaction. |
 Blake hates all jackets. If you never left the house, you wouldn't need a jacket now would you? |
 You have to put him in his cage before you put on your jacket. Or sunglasses. Otherwise he'll snap. |
 He's really as vicious as can be. |
 In a comical way, that is. |
 After all that, it's a tired yawny buddy. |
I am somewhat better about not quoting movies so much. I am still wont to say "It's a mystery," but that's so useful and furthermore comprehensible even outside its "Shakespeare in Love" context that I can't foresee stopping saying it.
However. While waiting for a program to respond, I would like something better to say than "Wake up, limey fish!"
By 6:30, therefore, I was in desperate need of sustenance. I had just learned a new rule by which I got to treat myself to sushi and did so, tuna, yellowtail, red snapper, salmon, California roll.
I finally got my contact lens prescription and took it to CostCo to buy lenses there. I bought 180 pair for half what they cost at the eye doctor. Woohoo! I danced back into work, quite delighted, and informed Egg of this bounty. She said, "You know the rule is that you can spend the difference on something else."
I can? Now there's a sensible rule. It kind of cancels out the saving-money principle, but hey, it allows me to shop and buy more crap, so I'm in favor of it.
I don't think I've ever bought sushi on my own before.
No exercise for me Thursday no sirree. At lunch Tex drove me to the post office and I mailed, finally, Ella Minnow Pea to PLT, because I think that was his reason to give it to me (so he could borrow it) and the Marie Antoinette biography to Molly, because it's about time I passed along some book karma, and Girl Scout cookies to my sister and Haitch. (Surprise, Haitch. But don't get all happy. I forgot your favorite.) After work RDC and his coworker came back from their long ditch-digging day and we went to the Tattered Cover and the Fourth Story where I ate my weight in lamb tagliatelle.
This coworker, who needs an alias, was great company despite that he doesn't understand "Peanuts." (I would call him, in protest, Peanut, but that is Nisou's and my nickname for each other.) I honestly cannot recall why, before we even left the house, I gleefully exclaimed, "Randy's going down!" one of my favorite "Far Side" captions, but on Wednesday I titled an entry "cat fud" so if I'm better about maybe not quoting "Breakfast Club" as much these days, quotes in general are not extinct from my repetoire. Anyway, he described someone as interesting despite her liking "Garfield." He proceeded to class Garfield, Family Circus, and Peanuts together, and I stopped him in his tracks. In mid-sentence, probably. We agreed on Calvin and Hobbes, Doonesbury, and Bloom County, so at least he's not going to hell. Perhaps an outer circle for the Peanuts slight.
"It's my coloring book, and I'll color the bunnies any way I like."
Snoopy said this to Woodstock, but it's a useful principle to stick to in life in general.
I'm going lie again and date this Thursday despite writing this Friday morning. I mention the lack of exercise yesterday because it's going to lack again today unless I get my ass in gear and on my bike in four minutes. Let's take a poll of how likely that is, shall we?
This new format, or maybe the fact that I write the entry for the format in this wee little boxy, is not so good for the big fucking emotional fuckwittism that's been occupying my overtaxed little pea brain this week.
Not that I did, of course, but I was speaking of it. I found out my so-convenient bus route is going to be axed in May. Riding my bike all summer long, no problem (I didn't walk all the time last summer, but for no good excuse). Riding when it's under, say, 25, or snowing, not so much looking forward to that.
Shit.
It might be possible to have a house without accumulating material weight and outlaying oodles of cash but I have no idea how.
When Haitch first saw the couch, the first and for months only furniture in the living room, she asked, "And what do you do on the couch?" I cracked up.
"Um, you think about how nice a rug might be, or a reading lamp. You could listen to music," I might have added, because RDC might have put the stereo into the built-in shelves around the fireplace as soon as the tree came down last year.
In October--six months later--we bought the rug, and now we have ordered a bookcase and coffee table (it calls itself a Mini Mule Chest; a larger version is our bureau) and a chair. We should actually have them in three weeks. Also we bought wall lamps (which aren't on the site) for over the couch and a floor lamp (the taller one in the shorter one's finish) for next to the chair.
The wall lamps I am not sure about. Just because they came from Restoration Hardware does not mean they are all they need to be. I need to keep that in mind. Their cords will hang down the wall, which spares us having to wire and rebuild that wall but means that cords will hang down the wall.
We popped into Z Gallerie. Most of its stuff is too glitzy for me, though some is appealing. They had a violet velvet chaise longe a while ago that I lusted. But velvet attracts more dust than twill, shows it worse, and shows wear more: it would only make me sad. And it would look affected, as well as ridiculous with the piles of laundry it would inevitably accumulate. Z Gallerie has prints, including the two now in the dining room, that we occasionally agree on. But we didn't have measurements for the space over the mantel or the proportions for over the couch between the lamps.
Another measurement we didn't have was for our heating register covers. Right now we have brass covers throughout the house and we are gradually replacing any metal with brushed nickel or pewter. So we want these but we didn't know whether in 10" or 12".
We waxed excessive, I know. We opened an RH credit line for the 10% off lure and had a gift certificate from my sister and had a little bit of play money from RDC's bonus and a tax return, plus all the money I saved buying my contact lenses on the cheap. So really all this stuff was nearly free.
When we first moved in together, in Storrs, we each had our books. I had two bookcases, one wee and one regular. We had a collection of milkcrates. The apartment had shelves built into an alcove, and someone had added a wider piece of wood for a desk which became mine; RDC had his own desk.
When you walked into the apartment (this is the one we call the tenement), RDC's desk stood to your left, then the bookcase, then nine milkcrates in a 3x3 square under a window. On the short wall, a double closet (with the bikes in front of it) and my desk with the wee bookcase. On the long wall, the kitchen doorway, the dining table (with Percy's cage), the bedroom doorway, two milkcrates as an end table, the futon couch. On the short wall, under another window, another 3x3 square of crates, and then along the rest of the wall, five columns of crates four high. Behind the door on the long entry wall, the television sat on another set of three crates.
We moved to Denver soon enough after marrying that we didn't marry our books until we unpacked here, and the first furniture we bought and built was bookcases. We used the dining area as an office (we didn't own a table; the tenement was semi-furnished): two tall ugly laminate bookcases and RDC's desk. In the living room, and therefore what assailed the eye when you walked in, were two short bookcases under the bar, Blake's cage, turn the corner, the opening into the hallway, a homemade bookcase, the futon, a bookcase, turn the corner, a bookcase, sliding doors to the deck, a bookcase, turn the corner, the television cabinet flanked by speakers, the external door.
And we didn't marry all the books. My usual excuse is that I didn't want Hemingway to Make Way for Ducklings with a shotgun and a dog. But most of them. Many of them. The fiction started under the bar, alphabetically at A, and wrapped around the room. We segregated my favorites and some Themes and picture books and poetry and plays and nonfiction and reference.
Then we moved into the two-bedroom apartment, bought a couch and a chair and had a fireplace in the living room, used the small bedroom as a bedroom, and arranged the "master" bedroom as a study. The only bookcase in the main living area was a short one under the bar for cookery and hobby books. It's how the space worked out, I told myself. It's not as if the living room was ever tidy and bookless anyway: there were library books stacked near the door to be brought home, and whatever either of us was reading strewn on and under the furniture. It would be different in the eventual house.
Except it's not. Right now when you walk into our house, you see one bookcase filled with cookery and hobby books that actually belongs in the sunroom (but the sunroom is being painted). Three shelves flank each side of the fireplace and a mantel spans that entire short wall. The shelves contain stacked coffee table books (an atlas, A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union, Thomas Hardy Country, Medieval Art, A History of the Grateful Dead), gardening books (The Undaunted Garden: Planting for Weather-Resilient Beauty, Dry-Land Gardening, the Sunset Western Garden Book), tour books (Seattle, Glacier National Park, England, France, Tuscany), back issues of American Bungalow and Wine Spectator, stereo components, Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County collections, Pictionary, Taboo, Balderdash, Trivial Pursuit, Twister, binoculars, photo albums (all covered in Morris paper or, in the case of our wedding album, a gift from RDC's grandmother, kind of upholestered in white satin), and a tea chest. The mantel has plants and photographs and some tchotchkes and a miniature Rosetta Stone and right now a card with an image from the Lindisfarme gospels because ABW just wrote me about reading Tolkien for the first time.
(Hee! Kind of like Keats "On First Reading Chapman's Homer"! I'll have to tell her that one.)
I asked a booky someone what he would think walking into someone's house and seeing all this nonbook or maybe quasibook stuff. He paused. I hate the pause. The pause is one of those tactful things that I can't abide, marking time as you think of the polite while not dishonest thing to say. I called him on it. He decided that these might be interesting but not necessarily booky people.
He suggested some high-end porn, just to intrigue people. I could put out Torn Shapes of Desire, which would amuse me because of the online connection. In a nonporn vein I suggested Arkham Asylum, partly because of whom I was speaking with and partly because it's not what you would think of to look at me.
So now we'll have one bookcase, just one in immediate sight until you go into RDC's study with its tall bookcases or the bedroom with its stacks of books or the sunroom with its eventual shelves. I could say it's how the space worked out; I could say it's how we prioritized the space. I'm glad we have all the windows we do, even though they're so low we'd have to design and build cases to fit under them and it wouldn't be overly efficient to place anything over the heating registers anyway. I might wish we had removed the old heating system's register, which sticks out two inches and would require, upon its demise, the replastering of its wall. (When we painted the room in 2001 I think furniture was still such a pipe dream that we didn't consider its intrusion.)
One bookcase.
Fiction could start there, Edwin Abbot, Achebe, Alcott, Alexander, Allende, and that makes the most (or the most linear) sense. Breaking up the fiction between floors might be disruptive but could work. RDC doesn't like this idea because House of the Spirits, fr'instance, is in pulp and pulp is unattractive. I say dividing books by ugliness is not a valid sort criterion.
We could do a Selection of Authors: DeLillo, Hemingway, Kerouac, O'Brien, Pynchon, and Snyder are in his office, with a little duplication in the main collection. Their absence from the main collection doesn't bother me excessively: I don't actively miss Dharma Bums when I cast a dragonish proprietary eye over it. So that might work.
Also, a Selection of Authors could conveniently be Pretty Authors as well, since I have not restrained myself from buying every new Atwood and Byatt immediately and therefore in hardcover. Except instant book gratification also means that I have fucking Shelters of Stone in hardcover and the cliché of the compleat Harry Potter. I don't admit publicly to Jean Auel--if Clan of the Cave Bear sits among my favorites, the other three decently hide, and as soon as I notice that Shelters is in pulp I'll buy it again so I can donate the hardcover (which does not fit among the Hidden but does not sit between Maya Angelou and Julian Barnes in proper alphabetical order, no no no). Also except that Atwood and Byatt are Favorites and therefore next to my desk in my study with the Cynthia Voigt and Watership Down.
See, I had to write all this out. It reminds me that Haitch gave me a lovely Annotated Alice and I think that would work with my properly, Tenniel-y illustrated Alice and my improperly, lisa-illustrated Alice coloring book (also a Haitch gift) and Jeff Noon's Automated Alice and therefore Vurt and hey, Nymphomation looks vaguely pornographic, and there you have it, the beginning of a web of books, better than a selection or a range.
I sent someone a link to a friend's essay of I thought quite staggering beauty and honesty and dread and pain and love.
She asked where mine was.
Granted there's a wall or at least a jellied parapet between us just now, so I might be being just a tad oversensitive, and I know she asks because she thinks I have a similar talent or capacity. But still it feels like I'm disappointing her. It's remarkable to me that someone can say something motivated only by love and how the recipient can hear disappointment and failed expecation.
That's one of the lines I love most in Nobody's Fool and why I guess Ralph is so real to me. He looks at the people around him and the various nets and tangles of their relationships and he doesn't understand why people can't just get along. He looks upon them all "with only love." Perhaps I envy the clarity of his emotion.
I came home from the gym, ate a dinner comprising--hey!--pasta and cheese en famille except I should say en flocke, and then Blake and I read on the couch and pet his little buddy head and he tucked and I might have snoozed a little bit because if there's anything more peaceful than a buddy tucked and one-footed under my chin I have yet to experience it. And I finished Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
I had no idea how he was going to end this. He ended it well, in a tone so apropos for its character that yep, that's the only way he could have closed it. Its population of beautiful, ornery, unique characters reminded me a little of Secret History.
Before bed I actually put away laundry, though it was only dry this morning, instead of letting it age on the floor. Really, I was proud.
Apparently the '80s are so fashionable now that even cheesy restaurants have updated their tape loops. At Subway I heard "Down Under" for the first time in not long enough. Another time, "Message in a Bottle," which to my mind never went out of style at all.
(Who said to me, in person and recently, that no one but he himself seemed to appreciate the irony of Sting singing "Message in a Bottle" during half-time at the Superbowl (to me, that's ironic in itself) as a duet with another singer? I don't remember. Anyway, I cracked up. Because that's funny.)
Today when we entered Qdoba I heard "Pride (in the Name of Love)" during which I attempted to order a burrito:
Could I have a burrito please
he to justify
chicken, no beans
One man caught on a barbed wire fence
Medium salsa, please
One man washed on an empty beach
No cheese or guacamole or sour cream, thanks
One man betrayed with a kiss
But could I have a scoop of those mixed peppers and mushrooms?
Early morning, April 4
It was late afternoon, you twit
For here. No drink, thanks
Free at last, they took your life
But they could not take your pride....
One of the reasons the dance in the dole line so amused me in "The Full Monty" was that I identified with it too strongly. I should point out that only the burrito segments of the above paragraph were aloud. The other bits might have been mouthed, but I'm not confirming or denying that.
So we sat and listened to the next song
(the Blowmonkeys' "Digging Your Scene" from Choices which is the B side of my Echo and Bunnymen's Songs to Learn and Sing tape, both dubbed, it might go without saying, from dear BHM)
and ate
(me: one third of that already nigh-fatless and staggeringly vegetablized burrito: go me!)
and heard more songs and kvetched, because that's how our lunches run these days
(during staff meeting this morning, someone said something about our funding "because now we have a mortgage to pay" and I muttered, "We could always move back downtown" and no it seems I won't stop bitching about that).
Until. Until. Until another song's first note, at which I slammed my hand on the table and said, "Can we go now?" and we got up and threw out our trash
("Does she walk? / Does she talk?/ Does she come complete?")
and I scarpered, needing to get out of there before the chorus.
I didn't quite make it: "My blood runs cold/ My memory has just been sold/ My angel is the centerfold/ Angel in the centerfold." For the rest of the afternoon. Thank you very much.
Yesterday after the gym I scampered into PetsMart for buddy pellets (Kaytee Rainbow Cockatiel Diet, specifically). We call these his Fruity Pellets. I also purchased, because I am a sucker, an issue of Bird Talk because the cover, and therefore the centerfold, featured Nymphicus hollandicus. I gave the rag money because of that, despite the issue's suggestion that you rotate your bird's toys regularly to peak its inquisitive nature [sic].
I would never say anything as foolish as that I buy Bird Talk for the articles. I buy it for the photographs. Like the photograph of the whiteface on a boy's shoulder watching him color. The photograph is charming: the 'tiel's head is cocked to point one beady eye at the marker, and I can see that it's plotting to climb down to the table to help. The caption, of course, is ridiculous: "Take your cockatiel out for some one-on-one interaction a few times a day." A few times a day! I laugh, I chuckle, I go ha-ha-ha. Or the photograph of whiteface pied perching on a vet's hand and--it looks like--singing to the little wand flashlight a vet uses to look into ears and eyes and vents.
Then, if I were truly a freak, or slightly more ambitious, the segment I'd want Blake in, with a photograph and a short paragraph. A pied taking a shower. (See what I mean? Especially with names like "Spike" and "Cheeky." Total porn.) A gray male and female having their heads pet. A mantling gray male (I won't say "mantling gray cock" because that just sounds so wrong). A cinnamon (Percy's color) and a pied playing in a bowl. A gray male having its head pet. This last one's name is Buddy, "a very bold cockatiel [who] isn't afraid of anything (almost)....There is one thing that he is deathly afraid of and that's the dreaded blueberry." He also sings to his girlfriend and their eggs.
Naturally we had to see what Blake thinks of blueberries. He loves cherries particularly, strawberries, and most fruit, but I think we've never given him a blueberry. (We already know he's afraid of flashlights and wouldn't sing to one.) First, we evened the playing field: we have only frozen blueberries and he hates cold things, like snow and ice cubes. He also doesn't like sudden confrontation with The Strange, so the slightly thawed blueberry approached slowly. He just chucked at it, his usual greeting noise. Ha.
I think snow, fitballs, and balloons are quite reasonable things for him to be scared of. If he'd just stop huffing at Booboo and Pan, since he likes Morse and Monty and Hamlet just fine, I'd be content.
(Oh, the centerfolds. I wonder if they're show birds, because do so many individuals really keep their birds fully flighted? But would a sicko bird-showing person allow a photograph in which the tail feathers are not perfectly zipped, in which one tallest crest feather is still partially encapsulated in shoelace aglet? But anyway, two pearls on one, full wings tip to tip over each tail, and a normal gray, mantling a little, on the other. Nisou asked me why we didn't get a pretty kind after Percy, all yellow or all white or pied, why steel gray. Because he's pretty too, of course.)
And I do appreciate the irony in the juxtaposition of this with the previous entry. Yep.
I haven't been helping, but then RDC can work on the house over his lunch, and we've been eating so provincially early, soon after I get home from work, that there's no before-dinner and after dinner there's no natural light. Excuses excuses.
Monday he hung his study closet door. I can't remember how long it has been on sawhorses in the furnace room. I didn't finish painting the storm windows until June--June?--and I don't remember fumbling the windows and screens out of the coal room past a door on sawhorses. Say six months. It improves the room immeasurably.
And I love our doors. They're two-paneled solid wood, the lower panel a square and the upper a rectangle, they have glass knobs, they're handsome. Only four are hung: the study closet, the bathroom, the kitchen closet and pantry. We removed the study and bedroom doors and someone before us removed all the other interior doors: the hinged ones between the dining room and hallway, the living room and front landing, the kitchen and back landing; the swinging one between the dining room and kitchen; the probably gorgeous glassed ones in the arch between the dining and living rooms. We know these existed because we're the first to repair the hinge and latch scars in the doorways, and there's a mark in the center of the arch where a floor latch once held one door. But they're nowhere to be found; the only other doors in the house or garage are two glassed ones RDC thinks used to be the exterior doors. I think not, because who would be so profligate with heat and privacy to have glass doors? I could be wrong.
Yesterday he painted the sunroom ceiling. Today he intends to paint its walls. Then there will be pictures. And then there will be the hair-pulling out designing of the breakfast nook: the shelves, the table, the bench. And the building of same.
Just think, it took us six months to paint a door and me a full year to paint 40 storm windows and screens. Just think how long the construction of a breakfast nook might take.
We have to consider what we want. One, we're going to paint it in oil so it can take some wear. RDC pointed out how sensible this would have been for the mantel and built-ins, which we have scuffed while shelving books, shunting a photograph aside, placing a vase. Oops. Also, oil will stand up to a cockatiel better than latex and I mean this to be a casual, cockatiel-approved environment (unlike the more formal dining and living rooms). Two, I had said its table doesn't need to be as long as the original one because it needs to fit only two. RDC just suggested that if we did make it long, space by the window could be for parrot-safe plants. I like that idea. Three, lots of shelves. The top ones, which will be hard to get to, will be for plants as well, the middle ones for books--cookery and reference, I reckon--and the lowest ones maybe pigeon-holed for bills and stationery. Four, a bench, with cushions for bottoms and backs.
We have this great woodworking book that gives the proportions for different pieces of furniture: for how much space there should be between bottom-of-table and top-of-chair for ease of skootching into place, for how long a table should be to fit two or four or six people along its length, and stuff like that. That will be useful.
Whole Foods, being in Cherry Creek North and as much of a watering hole as grocery store, has inadequate parking. A parking garage has just gone up next door. Humanity already frustrates me enough through the parking garage at the gym: I am sure I've never seen a collection of cars so ineptly parked. (If I were parking cars parallel to a curb, that would be a more inept collection.) A parking garage at Whole Foods is going to become even more of a clusterfuck than its parking lot, since people are averse to using stairs (even to go down) and even I would use an elevator to go up with a week's worth of groceries, and more after people start using it and it gets clogged with shopping carts.
We left the gym at 6:30. I don't have the grumpy-because-of-low-blood-sugar issue the spouseling has, but what happened made me plenty grumpy on my own.
We scampered up the stairs to Cassidy with our take-out (RDC, a salmon bento box; me, a kale and seaweed salad and a tuna-avocado sushi roll) and RDC zoomed out. At the gate, the driver of the car ahead of us exchanged words with the attendant, then shifted into reverse. So did we and both cars backed up. It turned out he had to back up because he was so obese he could not exit his car so close to the attendant booth. He backed up only so far as he needed to remove himself from his sedan, did so, and rooted through the bags in his trunk for his parking validation.
I hesitated before I called to him: don't rile a stranger in a road-rage world, don't be rude, maybe he won't take long. But then I did, because his behavior was rude and my request was not, and I need to assert myself appropriately. I called to him in a perfectly polite but matter-of-fact tone asking if he would please leave the gate entirely so others could exit. He returned that the clerk was giving him attitude (presumably for not letting him out without showing validation, the hussy) and continued his search.
If someone questions my behavior in public, I am generally mortified. Embarrassed to be remarked upon, mortified to have done badly, anxious to correct myself. I did expect that he would notice he was holding up parties in two cars and be shamed or conscienced into fixing the situation. (Another motivation for my attempt must be, admittedly, my assumption of its futility and my consequent feelings of superiority and martyrdom. Shh.)
RDC fumed as well, and his next step was to ask the attendant to raise the entry bar and exit through there with me watching for any oncoming car. This ended up not being necessary because Mr. Rude finally found his receipt, ambled slowly back to the driver seat, inserted himself into it, and went on his way.
I really don't understand deliberate rudeness.
A refresher course. Please consult this list frequently in your dealings with me.
Because Dandelion tells stories and is the fastest rabbit.
Right now he's waiting to tell me "The Body Artist" and The Universe in a Nutshell. The rabbits didn't sing, but their stories are their past and lore as some human societies' past and lore are song. So Dandelion also has the various albums I've imported to iTunes since--not Gandalf, Gandalf has never sounded right, but its current name is private--I got the iBook in July.
(I changed "history" to "past" because I am such a damn elitist. If it's not written, it's not history.)
Hm. HEBD sent moonshadows to Sad Lisa when Granny died because she knew I'd be listening to Cat Stevens. Perhaps the iBook's name is Moonshadow. Is that sufficiently different than my dog's name? If so, it's the iBook's name. Jessie named hers Eloise. I just gave Olivia to soon-to-be-parents and Olivia too, because those ears! Plus, she wears an "I Read Banned Books" pin, because a pin is such a suitable gift for a newborn. I gave Emlet an Olivia counting book, I think. Some form of Olivia, whom I love because of her big mouth. Anyway, point being she's black and white and red where an iBook is white and white and aqua. So Moonshadow, not Gandalf the White, not Olivia. That took long enough.
Finally. Recently it's been either appointments immediately after work with the trainer and too dark (also: too sore) to ride home afterward, or too cold and I don't have the right clothes. I need better gloves to ride when it's under 25. I have a face mask, I have fleece pants. I just need gloves.
Anyway, I rode. Definitely my legs are stronger, if not the pistons of my youth. I rode 2-7 (is there a technical way to enumerate gears?) wherever it was flat (up from 2-5), and 2-5 instead of 2-3 or -4 wherever there was slight incline.
(And there is slight incline, despite Denver's overall flatness. From my house to work is upstream. Not that the slight incline is enough of a hill really to justify the lower gears.)
I expected, going home, to be 3-x all the way, but I didn't count on a strong biting wind. Still, I rode.
Last night at 9:30, RDC suggested we go to bed, since I was already snoring through "8 1/2." So I uncurled myself, brushed my beak, got in bed, and bingo, I couldn't sleep.
I had fascinating reading though. In addition to "8 1/2," I borrowed Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts: the Art & Science of Keeping House from the 'brary yesterday. I was interested in the first 150 pages or so: her (pedantic) reasons and theory and how and why. The home is important: yes, I can get behind that. Some ways are better than others to do stuff. Yep. Then all of a sudden she threw herself into Germs Will Kill You Dead and Here's How to Pronounce Fabric Names and I was bored.
Though not yet asleep, so I continued with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
Which is why I was so proud to be in the gym at 9:30 this morning.
It wasn't only because of this stupid housekeeping book. It was mostly because of talking to Maman two weeks ago. She took Emlet to her playgroup and some of the parents were talking about breadmakers--Frenchies!--and how wonderful they were and Maman had to bite her tongue.
She makes the best bread ever, and usually when I go home, I try to finagle a baguette to bring home. Where, malheuresment, I have to share it with RDC. Her only allowance for breadmakers is that they at least save people from store-bought bread. But she opines that baking bread is so easy a breadmaker is ridiculous.
I have occasionally wanted to make bread. I tried once. I glued--flour+water=glue--one half of the kitchen to the other half. Then I stopped. That was probably eight years ago. I have read the bread-making chapter of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest a couple of times. I really like how Katzen likens what happens to gluten between its flour-state and its bread-state to what happens to wool between sheepsuit and sweater: still wool, but profoundly altered in its structure.
It's also because yesterday we finally went to a little market on 17th that's new since Dot Org moved, I think. It would have been wonderful to stop there on the walk home for fresh bread or produce or fish. It sells King Arthur flour! I'm not often in the market for flour. I've been buying it bulk from Wild Oats or Whole Foods for years now, and who knows what quality that is. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen the King Arthur brand very often in Denver, though, and it is still pretty strongly a New England distribution, I think. I bought some.
It's also because I met a couple at a party last week. One man worked with the hostess, hence the connection; the other is a painter. "Oils," he responded to my query. "Watercolor. Some pen and ink."
"Plus he's a master gardener," supplied the first.
So we talked of gardening--he likes English cottage gardens or whatever he can mock up here--and also of pets, because Charley was curled, sphinxlike, on a comfortable human leg. I admired Charley (that grey thing I have) and when they said all their animals were black and white (my other preference for animal colors) I asked their names. One (the only one I remember) was Tasha. "For Tasha Tudor?"
It wasn't much of a guess, considering he's an illustrator and keeps a cottage garden. But people are always so surprised when I guess why they name their pets what they do. Also he was just really pleased that I know who she is.
So that's why I tried to make bread today: Maman and Tasha Tudor don't eat boughten bread and I had my favorite brand of flour.
I was very careful that the water be only wrist-temperature, as Molly Katzen directs. I added fresh dry active yeast and a dollop of honey and the right measurement of flour. As I waited, I reread the chapter on kneading and listened to The Universe in a Nutshell. RDC wandered by and asked how I liked it. I knew he meant the Hawking but I was thinking only of the Katzen. Both were beyond me. After 40 minutes, I blended into a sponge that didn't look quite riz despite my care with the water temperature a mix of melted butter, honey, and salt, then gradually added in the other seven cups of flour and kneaded the dough until it assumed the consistency of an earlobe. I covered and planned to ignore it for two hours. RDC wandered through again and pronounced it dead.
I think I want a breadmaker.
The housekeeping and woodworking books are a wealth of obscure, industry-specific terms.
I didn't know the etymology of "sleazy": it applies to cloth flimsy, limp, or loosely constructed which should not be.
Camber: slight convexity, arch, or curvature
Cheek: part of the joint that is parallel with the face or edge
Cove: concave molding cut into the edge of the board
Hackling: the process that separates flax into long fibers and short, or staple.
Hardwood, sapwood, springwood
Lappet weave: a method using additional warp yarns to create designs on the face of a fabric.
Quirk: the small groove that defines the edges of the bead
In woodworking the warp is any distortion in the shape of a board caused by changes in the moisture content of the wood; whereas in weaving it is the lengthwise threads in the loom
The first time we saw the house, the sunroom looked like this. The lace curtains came with the house, so I know for a fact how difficult they are to open and surmise from what I know of the previous owner that she never ever opened any of them anywhere, even here for her plants.
A pair of scarlet saloon doors separated the kitchen from the sunroom, and when I first saw them I planned to paint them a more lisa color. It turned out that the lisaest thing to do was remove them entirely. I think they're in the coal room now but I might have ditched them. I wouldn't want to encourage some future encroacher's poor taste.
The woman's trashcan stood in here as well--through the saloon doors from where trash would be generated--in a faux Ethan Allen-y camoue that I considered immensely impractical. Also, it's garbage. Does it have to be pretty? But of course, she was merely squatting in my house which was mine and I would own, so naturally her taste was questionable.
In the nearly three years since, the sunroom has been mostly a storage room. We took the bedroom, study, and closet doors off their hinges before we moved in and here they lay for three months before moving to the basement. Before the bikes moved to the garage, they lived in here too. After a year or so on the mantel--maybe when we were going to paint the living room Real Soon Now, the trailing house plants moved to the potrack, which held no pots. I bought some hanging baskets and suspended potatoes and onions in them from the rack. The gateleg table lived in here and for two seasons supported seedlings in front of the east-facing window. (This year I'm going to buy young plants, though: last season's bought seedlings produced a lot more tomatoes than my grown-from-seed plants. Maybe one day I'll have a heatlamp to keep them happier and healthier.) The cookbookcase lived in here too, and gateleg table, the Dustbuster, the garbage can, and the Things That Needed to Go Somewhere Else, like the Bag of Bags (which occasionally I remember to bring to a plastics recycling spot) and the Bag of Dry-Cleaning Detritus.
Last winter, I began to remove the bracketed shelves and the metal vertical strips whose proper name I never remember that supported them. A lot of plaster and some brick dust came with them. And we finally--after 1.5 winters with heat pouring through the glass--bought cellular blinds. Sometime over this summer, RDC began to rebuild the windows. The broad, east-facing one opened, but its sash ropes were busted and we propped the window with a bit of wood. The narrow south window didn't open at all. I spackled holes and RDC repaired worse damage. This winter--another season of heat pouring through the windows--we began to paint (Benjamin Moore Butter, as I've mentioned.)
It's not done yet. Obviously. Before I can razor the windows clean, the sashes and mullions need another coat of white. And yeah, we paint all over the glass. The first room in this house we painted, the bedroom, has seven windows--four six-over-one, two two-over-one, and one eight-over-one. I taped each invidual pane. Four little stripes of tape per pane.
Never again.
So we paint on the glass and razor it off. I have yet--the dining room windows (40 individual panes), the living room windows (four six-over-ones plus two six-paned apertures), the study (two six-over-ones) to regret this.
Then the potrack goes back up and the copper pots on it. Perhaps not the plants on top now that pots exist. The cookbookcase needs to go in there this week, because we might get the new living room furniture earlier than we expected.
We're plotting the bench(es?) and table, the plans constantly in flux, bought or built, oak or painted white, two benches or one bench and shelves, though two benches could still permit shelves.
I am not really going to name the sunroom for a Baudelaire.
This morning it was -1. The building was not noticeably warmer today. Well, okay, it was, it was 65. That's the warmest we keep the house, and for the house that's fine because we wear fleece socks and cozy trousers and snuggly sweatshirts. For work it's not so fine, because we're not accustomed to it. Growing up, I wore corduroys and turtlenecks and wool sweaters at home and at school and in the library, and that was fine. At UConn, this was not so fine, because everything was overheated. I became accustomed to wearing two thin layers or one thicker layer. Today I wore tights, a thin wool skirt, a thin cashmere sweater. And my Dot Org fleece vest, one of those corporate give-aways, and my scarf, because it was cold. And my fingers froze off.
I scampered downstairs for mocha. The liquid the cocoa machine dispensed was almost, but not entirely, completely unlike cocoa. I tipped most of it out, added coffee, added half-and-half and a lot of sugar, alchemizing what I would drink from what was available.
I did all this mixing and whatnot in my new mug: we all have new thick plastic mugs with our names carved in the bottom. That makes sense, since we all have the same one. I didn't paint On Gnissapsert in nail polish on my incarnation of the previous ceramic giveaway, and who knows whose I have now.
But it was very sad. A plastic mug does not warm the hands as a ceramic one does, and that was the mocha's purpose.
RDC was wrong about the bread, by the way. It didn't turn out wonderfully by any means; it didn't rise enough. Possibly I killed the yeast in the sponge; probably I didn't knead it well. But it is bread.
I ate it, because I knew I would. I made it, and I have the attitude toward my own creation that a previous boss had about Father's Day presents: "When your kid paints a rock and calls it a paperweight, then by golly, it's a paperweight!" (I had asked why he had a bare rock in his office. The child's poster paints had all worn off.)
The real proof that it is bread is that RDC ate it even when I wasn't there. Ha.
I don't get it. Albert Camus claimed The Postman Always Rings Twice as an influence on The Stranger. This is another of those Modern Library Great Books that leaves me totally cold. I understand why, fr'instance, someone would think Deliverance is an important Usan novel. I do. I don't think it's as important or as great as To Kill a Mockingbird, but I can see its import.
James M. Cain's appeal eludes me. Because Dalton recommended him, I read Double Indemnity and two others of almost the exact same plot in one volume. I disappointed him when I found them boring. I think "Mildred Pierce" is a great movie and I'd still like to read it. But why Postman is all that and a bag of chips, I don't get.
In Postman, I could get past the misogyny to understand that the denouement is a masterwork of plotting. I couldn't get past the insurance stuff, because while he hadn't yet written Double Indemnity, why did he write it, since it's all here? Great plot twist or not, still I don't understand why Cain is anything more than a hack.
I've only read Maltese Falcon of Dashiel Hammett, and I expect calling him a hack just because he wrote detective stories is unfair. It might be genre prejudice, but I don't understand how any mystery or detective story can be Great Literature.
Huh. And I read Camus's The Fall in the same class as Maltese Falcon. I loved The Fall, much more than I had The Stranger four years before. I liked Falcon okay, but would I have without Humphrey Bogart?
Monday we saw "Bowling for Columbine" at DU. I haven't read Stupid White Men myself, but every time RDC tells me something from the book it sounds familiar. I was glad to see the movie again, though, because I was paying attention to different things. Today was the man himself.
And Jon Krakaeur is coming to DU soon as well. Where is my copy of Into Thin Air, damn it? I think Sooby has it. At least I have Into the Wild.
It was called "an evening with" Michael Moore because I'm sure he wouldn't've wanted to call it a lecture. He speaks well off the cuff. I was really glad he called us all responsible for what happens next. While he still was taking longer questions (in the last 10 minutes, both the question and answer had to be fewer than ten words), someone said that students here might not be registered here or from Colorado but legislators whom you contact don't know that. Moore didn't point out for the crowd, as he should have done, that a name on an email or a phone log is nothing without an address for exactly that reason. I do plan to fax--more effective than to email--my state representative tomorrow morning about the possible reopening of the gunshow gunbuying loophole.
In the crowd, though not introduced (I just spotted him) was Columbine victim Daniel Mauser's father, who appeared in the movie. I didn't notice either of the two wounded students who also appeared.
A couple of people asked him some IDon'tWorshipYou questions, which was good, and which he had specifically encouraged. Why make people laugh at the ignorance of Charlton Heston and James Nicholls and those two young men from Michigan who apparently didn't know how many days were in a year let alone in a school year? Isn't that cruel? Moore opined (correctly in my opinion, me who laughed during "Pulp Fiction") that laughter through sadness or in shock is valid. During the lightning Q&A, someone asked if he recognized he used the same shock techniques that the media he criticizes use and he said, "I certainly hope so." Someone else said the audience were sheep, applauding at any little thing, and would he encourage people to find out the facts for themselves. Yes he would. Someone asked about fair editing in the Heston interview in "Bowling," and he said the cuts are perfectly chronological as can be seen in the clock over his head. He didn't say, however, whether he cut less bone-headed statements than those that wound up in the movie. (I noticed that although he used a single camera throughout, two angles appear after the Heston interview: one showing Heston walking away from over Moore's shoulder, another showing Moore's front as he holds a photograph of the child shot in a Michigan school that Heston is walking away from. RDC excused that because it's not like that didn't happen, it's only that they had to restage it, and rhetoric devices blah blah blah. I say a documentary should be a documentary. (I might have been thinking of William Hurt's single tear in "Broadcast News.")
Someone asked about Palestine and the Usan funding of Israel. He emphasized that Jewish people deserve sympathy and support because of the Holocaust, to the point I thought he was going to Hitlerize the question into humor or uselessness, but then he said, "with that said, we shouldn't give another dime to Israel while it's killing innocent civilians." He distinguished between the terrorism by a powerless Palestinian and the organized killing by the government of Israel. He said he's emailed Yasser Arafat suggesting he get a million Palestinians to sit in the street in passive resistance, because while some of them will be shot the world won't allow the million to be shot. He took the audience to task for the smattering of applause that following his saying "never another Holocaust" in contrast to the more vigorous clapping that followed his statement about not giving more money to Israel. No one in that audience, however, was old enough to be responsible for the Holocaust, whereas we all, by virtue of being alive and taxpayers now, are responsible for what's going on in Israel now. I don't feel responsible for the Holocaust any more than I do for Ferdinand and Isabella's ethnic cleansing of Spain, which they conducted while sending Columbus off to begin another ethnic cleansing. I recognize that my country and I have profited from WWII's aftermath, but I can't change the past. I can only affect the present.
Moore called our infant mortality rate an act of violence, which is good. He suggested a question to ask of people who are pro-war: how threatened do you personally feel by Saddam Hussein right now? How imminent do you consider his threat to the United States of America's land and people and you at this instant? Which is what I have thought for a while: the United States has sat back while wrong was done until threat was imminent before acting: secession happened and the North did nothing until the Confederacy fired on Ft. Sumter; Germany mowed over Europe twice and we did nothing until the Mexican telegram in WWI and until Pearl Harbor fired us into WWII. I do not see Saddam Hussein's immediate threat to the sanctity of the United States or to Usans, but only that his removal would benefit the plutocracy. There's a lot of EvilDoing in the country now that's killing people now that the administration ignores because it's not profitable to them to correct.
The Rocky Mountain News's article correctly pointed out that Moore didn't give a source for the survey that he said shows how liberal the majority is, but tsk'd that he only glancingly mentioned Columbine in the first 75 minutes of his talk. Did the reporter then leave, not hearing the final 15 minutes, which was all Columbine, or did the person merely consider that for Moore to concentrate on an imminent war to the not-actual-exclusion of a nearly four-year-old domestic event was insensitive or wrong? I liked that Moore pointed out that Columbine could have happened anywhere--another reason not to focus on it here more than elsewhere. Someone asked him how to reassure an eight-year-old not to be afraid of attending that high school when the time comes. He spoke of how statistically, mathematically unlikely another slaughter there is. Which I'm sure will put the little kid's mind at rest.
His next movie is going to be called "Fahrenheit 911: The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns." I wonder how many people are aware of the Bradbury story, and I dislike the shorthand of "9/11" instead of "September 11th," but it's a good title.
No one, including me, asked him what he is doing with the millions he has earned through movie and book royalties.
From Word-a-Day, an online subscription service:
agelast: someone who never laughs
edited to add,
sciolist (SAI-uh-list) noun: One who engages in pretentious display of superficial knowledge. Huh.
anopsia: absence of sight, due to a missing eye or other structural problem.
From Forgotten English, a page-a-day calendar my sister gave me for Christmas:
anteloquy: a preface, or the first...turn in speaking; also, a term which stage-players use, by them called their cue.
cunnythumb: in grasping, having the thumb aligned with, rather, than opposed to, the fingers.
volentine: birds, fouls [sic?]; alterations of Old French volatile, perhaps influenced by volant...capable of rapid motion or action.
Besides the post office and the bank, the other semi-regular errand I did on my lunch while downtown was to have my eyebrows waxed. Which is, of course, just so vital and important. WHATever. A salon opened here, where I can get it done for 20% more but without driving and on my lunch, and with the increase it's still less than $20 so I can live with it.
Anyway I strolled in yesterday to make an appointment. I had spoken maybe four sentences (hello, eyebrows, next week, lunchish) when the clerk said, "I hear an accent?" as if intoning a statement as a question would make it more small-talky and less likely to offend someone who would have been offended. (She hadn't merely elided the an initial "Do.")
"You hear that I'm from New England," I offered, having reluctantly accepted that out here, I have an accent. "You also hear the slight remains of a speech impediment."
"I thought I heard English," she nodded. Um, I said New England? What's with the "so I was right" tone?
Is it me? Would someone who has heard me speak please confirm or deny this? Do I, or do I not, have some residual vowel-r wonkiness that might sound to someone like a vague (or, heaven help me, affected) British accent?
I don't hear Maman's British or LEB's Australian accents anymore. They just sound like themselves. I imagine being overly used to me would mean someone wouldn't hear whatever this is. But why do people, infrequently but often enough, both here and home, think I have a non-Usan accent?
The difference between educated Coloradan and educated New English is slight, or at least that's what I found moving here. People say "pop" instead of "soda" and "ant" instead of "ahnt" and the initial syllable in Colorado is a little more a'd than schwa'd, but it's not a big difference. At home there's more variation in accent in less geographical area: Worcester is distinct from Southie, Rhode Island from Connecticut, Long Island from Staten Island. But people did comment on my speech.
Maybe Mrs. Newman didn't do such a great job. Maybe my lower jaw is listing to starboard again.
I had another gyn exam at CU yesterday, performed by a female resident and a male med student. She asked if I minded if he assisted; I said no. I thought she was asking for the male/female thing, the way the male gynecologists I inflicted on myself asked if I would like to have a female nurse present, but she asked because of his status.
They listened to my heart and lungs; my heart makes some sort of splitting noise such that its beat has three parts instead of two. Possibly I have the more evolved six-chambered heart, I suppose. I lay back and opened the smock for them to do the breast exam, and she was surprised I opened both sides. Like exposing one breast at a time would lessen someone's embarrassment, someone who already said she didn't mind a male med student assisting and was about to have a pelvic too?
Speaking of which, the speculum bit didn't take long. He inserted it just a little and she corrected his angle--hey, I could have told him that. The cyst is gone, which is good; also because I didn't need another Pap they didn't use the crunchy q-tip, more good. I hate the mean bitey crunchy q-tip. I emitted a demure woo-hoo! and she grinned in complete empathy.
Then the manual exam. Unlike the other two male gynecologists, this one believed in manual preliminaries, which is all well and good, but then he spoke.
He said, "I'm going in."
I have not laughed so hard in weeks. I lay there on the table just gasping and hooing and ha-ing. Both of them laughed as well, she in sympathy and he in mortification. I'm not sure I've seen a Caucasian that deep a shade of maroon before. If she hadn't corrected him, I would have, but she did: she told him it was good to announce his intentions but not with that wording and that they were lucky it was me rather than almost anyone else on the table.
I'm pretty sure that was the most relaxed I've ever been for a pelvic. Whooo.
So. Two pelvics in two months despite the normal smear. It's my new hobby.
You know what cold is? Thirty degrees. It is a completely different 30 than usual here. In November in New York, the mid-20s felt warmer. Possibly because we woke to blue skies for the first time in days, the cloudy cold of early afternoon felt worse. When we left REI at 1:30, I was sure it was in the teens. Also, I wore only a fleece vest over a rolled-sleeve shirt and it was damn cold.
I might have to revoke my heretofore complete backing of REI. Out of all the dozens of bikes hanging from the ceiling, not one was a women's bike fitting my specs--aluminum frame, front shock, mountain but not too techy. The clerk didn't say none was a woman's bike--maybe if I'd asked for a racing bike I'd've seen one--but I don't think I was looking for anything that obscure. Also they had already sold out of a lot of models.
I am so crippled by nostalgia. When we went to DU Wednesday night, we parked by the English building, whose name I don't remember, and walked to Magness Arena, where the talk would be. When Moore came in, he ogled at the nearly 7000 people and and realized this must be a sporting hall. "Hockey," the audience yelled. While we waited beforehand (Moore was about 20' late for us and the preceding reception hadn't happened at all), RDC and I reminisced about parking at UConn, which was abysmal for students of course. You could pay your annual fee for a parking sticker and still be booted if the university decided your spot was necessary for an attendee at the ConnDome.
(The pavilion's name is now Gampel for the single largest donor. While it was still only planned, a dome at UConn, and being built, it looked like a condom with a reservoir tip (the crane tower out of the top of the roof). Hence.)
Because of course, a funder's attending a basketball game is so very much more important than a commuting student's attending a night class. Also, more shuttle buses plied the shorter distances between game lots and the Dome than did the greater distances between student lots and academic buildings, which shows priorities.
Anyway, RDC, who lived off-campus longer, grew much more familiar with the various lots than I. And, I am so proud, I did not consider my forgetting the letter names of the various parking lots at UConn to be a betrayal of my love for my alma mater. Now that's progress.
Where was I? Crippled by nostalgia, right. My bike, which is almost nine years old, is not one I ever developed much of a relationship with. It's served me well, gear shifts aside, and I like having it of course. I name my cars and I named my first bike (my first real (that is, geared) bike that I bought myself) but I never named this one or its predecessor (my third and second bikes, respectively). What am I being paralytically nostalgic about? That my next bike (which might be the one I try out on Thursday, by which time it will have been built) won't say "Scott's Cyclery/ Willimantic, Connecticut" on its frame.
Where was I? Freezing my ass off in the REI parking lot. I could easily have spent the entire afternoon in front of REI's (gas) fireplace reading the Colorado Hut to Hut and Cycling France books I whiled away RDC's bike-browsing with, but it was not to be.
We took the other, unnecessary lamp back to Restoration Hardware and browsed in Sur la Table for a while. RDC asked, "Doesn't that mean south of the table?" "Sud," I told him. "This is on the table." Just yesterday I asked him what vaqueros means after passing a store on east Colfax. I have already forgotten whether it means "blue jeans" or "cowboy." We found a roll-up pastry-rolling sheet, which is a fine and necessary thing for bread and pies as long as we have tiled counters. I eschewed bread pans, as anything that seemed thick enough to make a real crust was four millions dollars and the rough peasant loaves I formed on the pizza stone last week turned out okay. Whatever was wrong with them--plenty--would not have been solved with breadpans.
And in Whole Foods we bought a bag of King Arthur whole wheat flour for more bread, and if I don't use the cherries soon they'll probably get freezer-burnt and ruined. I would like to make a pie for friends who just adopted a baby they'll call Scarlett, because of how appropriate the color of a cherry pie would be, but RDC sagely pointed out that the first such attempt should not be sicced on outsiders. I should probably just make sour cherry jam and be done, but I don't think I have enough.
When we got home with the groceries and toys, I was stunned to see the thermometer at 30. I seriously expected to read 10. Okay, I wasn't wearing the right clothes, but the raw wind and humidity didn't help. It is too cold to have a fire, but we are snuggled under the fleece on the couch, reading Underworld and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and tucking our beaks into our wings and planning to have tomato soup for dinner. Because it's damn cold.
I finished The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and now I'm somewhat at a loss of What Next. The Home Despot Kitchen and Bath Remodel Book doesn't count. Right now I have Donna Tartt's Little Friend ready to go in my bag but I have lost some of my urgency about that. I guess I should have read it immediately, but I flew twice in the weeks after and it's large for a plane book. I also have Postmodernism for Beginners in my gym bag, because it's slim and easily interruptable.
I'm listening to David Denby?'s Great Books, about his experience taking Columbia's literature and humanities core classes again, 30 years after the first go. It's abridged, but it was RDC's last month's choice, and it's read by Ed Asner, which makes the narrator sound to me like he's 78 instead of 48.
Right now on my bedtable are Mary Anne Mohanraj, Torn Shapes of Desire; Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves; Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose; Paradise fucking Lost; Don Quijote, ditto; the King James Bible (Cambridge UP); Isabel Allende, Daughter of Fortune, which I am frankly not overly interested in; and Zadie Smith's White Teeth.
I have gorged on Great Yet Accessible recently--Byatt, Chabon, Saramago--yet I still am intimidated by Great--Milton and Cervantes--while fearing that purely accessible--Zadie Smith--will disappoint me, as James M. Cain just did.
I don't know what I did differently with the sponge this time but yesterday I made bread that's not even "bread" but actual bread. I am quite pleased. I went home at lunch to cast a dragony eye over my new stuff and have a sandwich on this bread.
From October of 2001 to March 2003. Paint and stuff, yep. I know we still need artwork on the walls and coasters on the table and vases on the bookcase and so forth, not least books in the bookcase. Having a whole new drawered piece of furniture that's not in the bedroom makes me think of Laura Ingalls-now-Wilder looking at the house Almanzo built for her, at the pantry with its shelves and drawers and the space for the butter churner and other things, as they should arrive. But I do think I might use those two big drawers for linen, since we have almost no linen storage. The little drawers will be for my camera and webcam and Palm Pilot synching thingie, since I don't use my study as much as I ought.
(Okay. Not that I would admit having anything to do with "Coming to America," but Samuel L. Jackson holds up a restaurant in it. I prefer his restaurant job in "Pulp Fiction.")
The new chair is excessively comfortable.
I just got another crop of crap from my sister. Some of it is the usual: any page of the L.L. Bean catalog with a retriever on a dog bed will find its way from her house to mine; and there's usually some pathetic or goofy thing advertised in the Sunday supplements. I, not getting a Sunday paper or a lot of junk mail, can seldom return the favor. I didn't even make a Catalog of Tackiness last Yule. But last week in the mail I did get unsolicited mail from someone offering Christian counseling. Enclosed were two tracts.
Ah, I thought. A gift for my blister.
CLH's latest stuff came yesterday, before I mailed mine, and she trumped me but good, without even trying. An oversize postcard asking, on one side, "Is Jesus Good?" with testimonials affirming this, and on the other a message soliciting addressees to a meeting of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Cambridge. Of course this is the sort of thing that she comments on extensively. Her address is circled, with this note: "I have no idea how I got on this list!" but I am happy to have read the card more carefully than she did: the fine print says that this was a mailing to the community at large and "You are not on a mailing list."
Wow. If Jesus has the power to take me off mailing lists to the point that he or his affiliates could truthfully say to me, "You are not on a mailing list," then maybe I should look this group up.
Speaking of Jesus, yesterday I also received a letter from my mother.
Parenthetically, she sent a note last week as well covering a newspaper clipping about the death of my seventh-grade history teacher, who cannot have been that old. Should anyone doubt that some teachers do perpetuate the societal ranking each new crop of kids brings to a classroom, here's what this one wrote in my seventh-grade yearbook (the tidbit is fresh in my mind because I just rescued my 1980-1985 yearbooks from my mother's garret): "You're ugly. J. Goodman."
Yesterday's letter from my mother was as impersonal as the post-it stuck to the obituary, but it showed two improvements: she signed it Mom instead of "Mommie" (I was never sure which annoyed me more, the quotation marks or the -ie), and she used subject pronouns. Often she omits these: "Am very busy. Am very happy. Just wanted to jot this down..." But the prize was the enclosure, an Al-Anon pamphlet, 24 pages on denial: "Alcoholism. A Merry-Go-Round Named Denial." I would really like to ask her to summarize this thing and tell me what she thinks about the issue and how it relates to her. But I am not currently in a beat-my-head-against-the-wall mood.
CLH is, though; she initiated another attempt to Communicate with our mother, sending the letter to both of us, and this pamphlet was our mother's response to me. She will never think for herself and never give us the respect of responding with a letter as carefully phrased and thought out, as reaching-out-to-someone, as those we occasionally send to her. She maintains that she is willing to talk but it has to be in person; at least that has been her excuse since we left her roof.
On the occasions of talking since, like the summer of 2001, she turns from us, says she's too busy or there's traffic or we shouldn't ruin our time together or what have you. My sister, magician that she is, elicited a promise from our mother that Saturday, when she goes home, our mother will talk to her and not make excuses. I suggested to my sister that she get our mother's husband out of the house as well, because our mother will use him as an excuse--that their conversation will disturb BDL--or an interruption--since BDL cannot fix his own peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and must be sucked up to.
I do enough beating my head against a wall on my own without involving anyone else in it.
Now, this I had no apprehension about. If Absolutely Normal Chaos isn't at the level of Walk Two Moons or even Chasing Redbird, well, how many books of that calibre can one author have in her? However, for her to be a step or two down from there is still better than most.
The protagonist is 13 again, and a girl again, but also this time a boy. Twins, though, so while two different people not exactly independent. She set up the Dickensian antagonists in an I hope impossible fairy-taley way, so their comeuppance would be entirely satisfying.
I would love to live in Ruby Holler, so I could chase a redbird and befriend Salamanca, or so I like to think. I loved Sal's grandparents, but I know details like the grandfather's driving and the grandmother's Peeby would drive me round the bend, since I'm intolerant like that. And even without them I would stand no chance against the accents. But I really want to know Sairy and Tiller in real life. (Of Tiller, of course, I was immediately fond in an automatic, Cynthia-Voigt-reflex, way.) But of course I already do, in Nisou's parents.
My cockatiel is better than your cockatiel. Also, this bathrobe is better than yours. Unfortunately, it's not mine. It's RDC's; since he's not here I get to wear it. When I gave it to him, I thought I was bringing him up to my standard, not surpassing it. But this terrycloth is heavier and warmer than my robe's and the skirt reaches the floor instead of mid-calf. And it won't be in stock again until next winter--the only color Lands' End had left when I, in a fit of jealousy, decided I needed one too was orchid, which turned out to be pink not lavender. So for the next six months I have to steal. Or the next two, because by May I'll want a summerweight robe again.
Also, Blake's oatmeal box is better than anyone's. We used to buy boxes of 40 packets of Quaker instant oatmeal, until the company started including foul flavors like Cinnamon Danish or whatever it was. These boxes, we discovered, were an excellent size for a Buddy Cave. It's been so long since we've bought such a perfect box--food grade, not too thick to gnaw on, a good size for the top of his cage or the table in front of the couch in the den--that he's destroyed, in proper cockatiel fashion, these caves. He has chewed the doorways so much that now anyone can look right in, depriving him of that wonderful I'm Running Away to My Secret Cave feeling. The cardboard's collapsing.
Well, Mommy's coworker saved the day. Tex eats a mixing bowl (I'm serious, a glass mixing bowl, way bigger than a cereal bowl) of plain oatmeal every day at work, in the hopes it will slough off the cholesterol in his arteries. When I spotted that nice big oatmeal box--fitting two 3.5 pound bags--I asked if I could have it when it was empty. Friday he gave me two such boxes (and this is a man with very little pet-tolerance at all, who thinks I'm insane for living with a bird, which I don't contest).
Now Blake has two new caves, a cage-top one and a downstairs in front of tv one. He spent most of the weekend in his new cave, seasoning or tempering it as one would a wok, except that instead of oil and heat he used song. He playing in his box all weekend, singing. He's such a good boy buddy.
The photograph is from a new angle, facing me in the chair with the fireplace end of the living room behind me. The chair is blissfully comfortable. Blake is right now in his cage having a snack, but the great thing about this chair is that his cage is right around the corner. It can contain his mess but when he or I get lonely, I can just reach up and around for him. And although we are officially in Separate Rooms, which is Very Wrong and Bad, we are actually closer with me here than when I'm sitting at the dining table.
He just loves being in his box. He wants you to talk to him and tell him he's a good boy and invite him to snuggle and have his head pet, so that he can prance into his box with an audience, but he doesn't want to be watched while in his box and he doesn't want you to leave the room. If you do, he'll come out and call for you, but as soon as you return to his line of sight and he confirms you're watching, he turns tail and retreats, prance stamp waddle, into his sanctuary. I don't see why it's a surprise that bird-humans are insane. It's the company we keep.
Yesterday was not a good bus day: first I missed my usual going-home one and then when the later one approached, it pulled over and put its hazards on. I threw up my hands and waited in the library for RDC to fetch me. There I found my two latest books, Crutcher and Creech. Which only postponed my immediate What Next after Saramago question. I haven't started Little Friend yet.
I'm listening to David Denby's Great Books, and I'd be pleased for him to stop at any time his whining about how stupid the freshling are. I acknowledge that a wisdom might come with age that cannot, or seldom can, come by any other means, but being 18 doesn't make you stupid therefore. It makes you 18. This is why I hate grown-ups.
I also started Stupid White Men and got partway through the prologue. I don't read Dave Barry either. Someone sent me a column about his main dog and his auxiliary dog once (summer after freshling year, probably, making me 19 and therefore unwise and puerile), and I read it to my parents (who are 30 years older than I but still amused), and because of that I tried to read some other Dave Barry, but it was all the same. I had expected or hoped Michael Moore to be more like Al Franken--funny but not juvenile. RDC suggests I soldier (ahem) on through the prologue because the actual chapters are better.
I'll do that, but Denby reminded me I've never read The Aeneid.
Or The Lysistrata. Or The Frogs or The Clouds. Or the entire Oedipus trilogy. Cycle? When he mentioned Euripedes and Aristophanes and Sophocles, I remembered doing reports on ancient Greek culture in ninth grade (I did mythology, natch) and being impressed with how interesting my classmates made the plays seem. Twenty years later (holy shit), I have still read only Oedipus Rex and Medea.
PSA reproved me in high school, for pity's sake, for liking depressing music. (The pity being that it's been that long: doesn't everyone like depressing music in high school?) I don't even remember which song I suggested to him, but he countered, "My favorite song right now is 'Walking on Sunshine'!" I know he was exaggerating, but he's still right. I mean, the Cowboy Junkies? Beth said their "Sweet Jane" makes her want to slit her wrists (approximately).
Today toward the end of my workout I let Dandelion play all its songs in alphabetical order. It's not a crime for music not to be workout music, but lordy lordy lordy. From the top, the Junkies "200 More Miles," Junkies "A Common Disaster," Waterboys "A Bang on the Ear," Godspell "All Good Things," Kate "And So Is Love," along with some Cocteau Twins and Passion and other tracks I now forget but which were all depressing as hell. Innocence Mission, probably. Roxy Music "Avalon." And I haven't even mentioned my current favorite album, Aimee Mann's Bachelor No. 2.
That is in fact why I stopped lifting weights. I have got almost as sick of selected tracks from Oil and Gold as I am of Ten, and I had Shriekback with me only for weeks instead of the years I've used Pearl Jam. But I can't remember Pearl Jam as anything but exercise music while Shriekback is fraught with other associations.
Part of the problem is that I have thus far copied only my favorites into Dandelion--Kate, Pete, the Junkies, Innocence Mission, Fumbling Toward Ecstacy (not really a favorite, but I think RDC thinks Sarah McLachlan would poison him should he touch her work, so it lives among my particular favorites), Godspell, Tim Easton (also not really a favorite, but he belongs with the Junkies, as does Animal Logic only because it backed Caution Horses until the tape died). I need to go through the main CD library. After which the situation will not improve: Little Earthquakes and Diva and Jagged Little Pill.
Sometimes a movie happens along that exactly suits my mood. I really want to reread this, in paper, because the audio version was lovely but I remember little of my listen twelve years ago. I remember a few lines: from a hunt, when she says, "Was this shot not a declaration of love?" which was such an alien mindset for me that it stuck with me, and the Kikuyu telling her they did not think she would forget about them, which again was such a peculiar way to convey their missing her that it stuck.
(In French, or so I understand, you don't say "I'll miss you." The verb, the concept of which I can't articulate in English, is reversed, so you say something like "You'll miss me" but you're speaking of your own emotion. Or something. Nisou messed up her English once, using the French idiom--her English gets more expat and continental all the time--which is how I learned that. Or thought I learned that.)
Anyway, lovely book or not, it's a lovely movie. I have known, since I first saw it as an innocent young thing of 17, that it has one of the sexiest lines in all cinema: "Don't move." It also has one of the strongest, when the governor's wife says of her own word, "You have mine." And one of the loveliest, when the protagonist tells Farah that she wants to hear him speak her name: "You are Karen, sabu."
Also, Michael Kitchen, who plays Berkeley, is dead sexy. I looked him up in imdb, where I learned that of course the name is spelled with an e. Clerk. Derbyshire. Damn Brits, spelling things before they shifted their vowels.
My sister got a cat and is soliciting names. It's brown and black and I asked in patches or tortoiseshell? and she told me more striated, like a bad dye job. Also it has a loud purr. I can't think of any cat names, though I did come across the term "prune whip" the other day and immediately begin to itch because I am sure that a cat in a children's book somewhere is named Prunewhip.
The thing that amuses me about this is that the last time (that I remember) someone asked for help finding cat names was a coworker in September 1996. I typed "cat names" into my search engine of the day--Alta Vista?--and came across Bryon Sutherland's Semi-Existence of Bryon. Bam! Online journals. Bryon, opheliaZ, Tracy Lee, Sage, Ceej, Diane, Willa, Jen Wade.
Anyway. I reminded my sister that pet names should end in -y. This is not strictly necessary, witness our dog Shadow, but mostly true. I told her about Blake's support group: "Hi. I'm Blake." "Hello, Blake!" "They named me for a Romantic poet, but they call me Blakey. Or Blakey-Jakey. It's really embarrassing. I wish they'd just named me Buddy at the start."
"Actually that should be more embarrassing for you," my sister rightfully pointed out.
Point being that among his many nicknames (which are a reason he can't say his name right, since he hears it only when I'm not calling him my bananaheaded boy), of which Buddy doesn't even count since it's nearly his actual name, the primary one is Puppybird. I'm not about to let him forget that he really should be a dog. (If I had a human child but not a dog, I'd do the same thing. That's probably illegal.)
So I suggested she name the cat Puppie.
Building a music library for Dandelion is empowering in all kinds of ways. I've got Learning to Crawl in there right now and I am all bouncey at the prospect of lots of listening to "Show Me" and "My City Was Gone" without "Thumbelina" in between.
Speaking of the Pretenders, after I got back from Momix last night (another entry), I couldn't sleep so I tried watching television. Nothing in TiVo appealed to me, "Winter Guest" being too depressing and "City of Lost Children" being way too scary. And having already lain down I could not possibly have got up to select a DVD. I found David Letterman and watched the Pretenders--of whose post 1983 work I am completely ignorant--perform from a new album. Eh.
Wow.
A while ago I noticed a cobalt blue convertible new Bug in the parking lot. Less of a while ago walking to the library at lunch I saw it and noted the sharp bob of the driver, and when later that afternoon I saw a New Person at work with such a bob, I asked if she had the Bug. (Someone else has a Mini Cooper. Not that I'm jealous of these sexy little cars, no.)
We chatted, and I noticed Pilobolus on her wall calendar. We spoke of dance and I told her about the most amazing dance performance I have ever seen, which was Momix dancing to Passion at UConn in 1993 or '94. Momix danced the entire soundtrack, dancing the creation of life as strings of protein and amoebas on stage, the rise of flowering plants, the evolution of animals, the invention of fire, the invention of the wheel, until the last dance, which began with three dancers suspended on three velvet ropes. The side two dancers finished being crucified and left, leaving the center one to finish his passionate death. I prefer to think of Passion as music for that dance, in fact, rather than for the wretched "Last Temptation of Christ."
Thursday she mentioned she had heard that maybe Momix was going to be in town soon. A quick web search placed them in Fort Collins Friday night. We got tickets in the last row of a small enough venue that they were perfectly fine seats.
Opus Cactus, lots of desert-oriented dances. They were tumbleweeds and gila monsters and raindancers and delicate blossoms and ostriches and sundances; they used native American and aboriginal Australian and African sounds. Why is it, I wonder, that purely memetic music bores me--I could never sit and just listen to Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" or Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker," and because John Williams borrows so heavily from Aaron Copland I have a hard time hearing Copland as himself and not as a potential soundtrack--but memetic dance I could watch for hours, maybe (although this hasn't been tested) without musical accompaniment? Maybe because I prefer visual to aural arts, I don't know. Maybe because dance involves athletic humans in tight clothing.
While the Passion dance is, because of the music, still the most amazing ever, this show was still spectacular and jaw-dropping and evocative and wonderful. I am so glad I saw it. Plus I had my first ride in a new Bug! Its front seat is roomier than Cassidy's.
The choreographer, Moses Pendleton, is broadly and deeply talented. So very talented that even his creations are talented: "An avid and original photographer, shows of Mr. Pendleton's work have been presented in [several cities]" (quoting the program).
Saturday I plied the junk and antique shops on south Broadway. I saw some really amazing quarter-sawn oak stuff and some not so amazing stuff. I bought a copy of The Official Preppy Handbook for two bucks. Something from it occurred to me a while ago so I looked it up to find that it's out of print. But it's so very very high school that I'm glad to have it.
Anyway, the author, Lisa Birnbach, lists preppy nicknames and suggests the given names they might spring from. She says "Bunny" might be for someone whose given name is Corcoran.
Huh.
A valid criticism I have read of The Secret History is that Donna Tartt has no idea of Californians, so the narrator rings false. I think she deliberately distances the narrator from warmth and regular human interaction, and that might make him, including his being from California and the California she places him in, ring hollow.
She was a classmate of Brett Easton Ellis at Bennington in the early '80s, when the Handbook came out. A main character in Secret History, set in an anonymous Bennington, is named Bunny Corcoran. I'm thinking she consulted the Handbook to make the New England seem New Englisher.
After several tryings-on sessions (with all the bikes suspended from the ceiling, and you're not supposed to use the hook yourself to fetch a bike down but get Farm Boy to do it) and research here and there and deciding against the Novara Bonita which might be intended for a woman but is certainly intended for a short woman who wants to sit up as straight as Miss Gulch and doesn't mind pink and also against several other makes and models, I wound up with a 15" hardtail 2003 Marin Palisades. RDC swapped its default with my wonderful cut-out saddle (that link is approximate; remember?) and moved the pannier rack to it from the Cannondale and I rode it to work today and its name is Shadowfax (because it's mostly white).
Last week I saw a magpie flutter by toting timbers for its castle. The blue jays (which seem well-established in Denver now) are being raucous again. Yesterday I heard and saw a robin singing (sometimes they winter through, but not this year; also, apparently our robins don't winter here but those that do are from farther north). The starlings are caterwauling--odd, since they're birds not cats--and the seed drops more slowly in the feeder.
I might have gone to the gym immediately after work, but I would have spent the entire time fretting about Shadowfax. The gym does have a bike rack, but it's against a blank brick wall instead of ten feet to the right, where it would be in front of the gym's office windows, and that brick wall is extremely close to a bus stop, so that I would see innocent waiting-for-bus-ism as suspicious loitering. Except I wouldn't've been able to see it, because of the brick wall. Hence the fretting.
So instead I came home and Blake and I worked on the front garden. I raked out its winter bed of fallen leaves, discovered new green on the lavender (the one plant that didn't grow at all last year) and on most of the other obviously happier plants. Today I have to call High Country Gardens to find out about how to trim my sophomore garden. (Blake's help consisted of commentary from the porch.)
My hair is too long for its length right now ("What does that even mean?" RDC asked) and needs its first trim. I have to make an appointment with Janelle, who I guess is my new Frank. I haven't had a Frank for ten years, since he was not One with the long hair project.
Anyway. Yesterday I walked out to get a sandwich, hair in a ponytail, nose in a book. It was 65. Today it's going to be 70. It's not going to be easy to Embrace the Down when it's over 60. Or when I'm working in the garden. Or on my bike. Fifteen fewer inches of hair has to be cooler than a braid to the small of my back. I can get it off my neck, which is vital; the wispies (that I asked for, I know) fall in my face and it might be time to invest in barrettes.
Yes! Walked out to get a sandwich! There are now, in addition to the grocery store, two whole restaurants in walking distance. They are even of a lunchy, sandwichy nature. Goddess knows when it was over 95 downtown, I was a big fan of staying inside over lunch, subsisting on whatever I had remembered to bring from home or could glean from the building's convenience store or sandwich shop. Out here, though, there are no trees to walk under in the heat, no buildings of the sort to cast a shadow (also, therefore, not such a heat sink), and no plaza right outside my door with trees to read my book under.
When I got back with my sandwich, Tex was just coming out with his lunch. We ate on our patio in the sun. I looked around and made the same observation yesterday, 11 March, as I made 8 January when it was in the high 60s and Lou and I went rollerblading and returned to a staff cookout (for, not of): there are no umbrellas on our patio tables. There will be no, or much less than there ought to be, outdoor eating unless umbrellas take up residence here.
Bitter, party of 150. Well, 120. Maybe a fifth of us prefer the new site.
And there will certainly be no hanging out outside if I Embrace the Down for the summer.
If I bike to work tomorrow, it will be the first time since high school (well, college, but that doesn't count) that I commuted to work or school under my own power for all five days.
College didn't count because walking across East Beach from dorm to classroom was about two feet. But why didn't I ever bike during grad school, at least the first year? (Second year I am absolved, since Spring Hill loomed between me and campus.) I didn't have a bike, I guess, Zeph being rusted into a hulk by that point. I borrowed RJH's hybrid for a spell but barely ever used it. I carried a lot of stuff and didn't have good panniers, I know. Once while I lived with NBM she drove me to campus when Fugly was being worked on and she ribbed me about my baggage: my regular backpack, a gym backpack (I had just done laundry; it usually lived at either of my campus jobs), and a stack of library books (probably I had just given up on yet another paper).
Anyway. I rode my new bike. Naming it Shadowfax might be overkill: I already always mount a bike from the left, as I would a horse (I've been on a horse I think twice), but naming the bike a) at all and b) after a horse and c) after that particular horse is making me think in horse-metaphor a lot more. When I started bike-commuting I started keeping my bike in the basement rather than the garage, which entails fewer locks to unlock and lock. Now every afternoon I think of stabling it (and I pat it on the saddle as I leave it). When I prop it (right side against the prop) and the front wheel falls left, I think of how a horse turns its nose to look at its human.
I am not so far gone that I hesitate to hang it from a hook in the indoor bike closet at work though.
where "fucking" is an adjectival modifier and not a verb.
Uberboss just excused me from reading any book that doesn't thrill me, like The Little Friend. I just can't get over that no one told Tartt to change Harriet's name. I mean, okay, it's only the protagonist, and it's not as if I have ever averred that someone's name affects their character, oh no. But damn. A twelve-year-old girl detective with that personality, named Harriet? This book might be a Louise Fitzhugh alternate universe.
Anyway, so I picked up Jane Eyre when I got home, because that book annoys me and I am insane. Because Charlotte Brontë didn't like Jane Austen. Because I'm not that much fonder of Jane Eyre than I am of Fanny Price. It doesn't annoy me as much as Wuthering Heights, which outright pisses me off for its overthetoppiness. I do like Tenant of Wildfell Hall, though, so the Brontës aren't a total loss.
The reason I always come back to Jane Eyre, though almost never the whole thing, is that I continue to try to puzzle out Mrs. Fairfax. Have you read it? Why not? Spoilers follow. Mrs. Fairfax knows there is a madwoman in the attic. She loves Jane, or is fond of her, and respects her as a good and proper young woman. But does she know that the madwoman is Mrs. Rochester? Mr. Rochester says, after the botched wedding, "Mrs. Fairfax may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no precise knowledge as to facts." Is her questioning Jane when she learns of their engagement meant as a warning? That is the last time we hear her voice directly; afterward when the wedding party return from the church Mr. Rochester rebuffs the congratulations offered by her, Sophie, and Adèle. Much later, after the fire, Jane tells her reader about Adèle but not about Mrs. Fairfax. She was such a priss to decent old Hannah that I wonder what her attitude to Mrs. Fairfax might be.
and the regular weekly crap I almost never do on weeknights.
Since posting initially:
Here, the part of speech "fucking" assumes is more obvious. Otherwise, ow.
Yesterday after my computer ate my book, full of tables and formatting (mine) and three months late (not mine), for the fourth fucking time, the computer folks deigned to give me a new CPU. It's damn loud. While someone was hooking it up, the monitor blinked in its annoying way, and he asked, "What's that?" I said, "That's my monitor blinking in its annoying (and loud, when I have the speakers on) way; sometimes it flips out entirely so that you can see the shape of the tube."
"Oh. I can get you a new monitor too." So he did.
"While you're here, can I ask you why my taskbar's autohide function never works?" I have it set to hide, and I expect it to display when I mouse to the bottom of the screen. It doesn't.
He told me it's because I have my windows maximized, so the taskbar shows up but behind the windows. I should have realized that myself, I know, but for fuck's sake. That's what the autohide is for, no? So I can use the piddly 17" screen to its capacity, and waste space for the task bar only when I want to use it? The same way I keep my email program, my web browser, my word-processing software, etc. all open at the same time but only display when I want? If I have to size a window to accommodate the taskbar, what is the point of autohide?
I love Macintosh.
I love iTunes, I love my iPod, despite their deranged use of capital letters. I just ripped The White Album without "Back in the U.S.S.R."
Yeah. Four blathery entries since I made the list of the weekend's chores. This would be why I seldom finish a weekend's tasks. Away with me.
RDC made us mocha lattes in the middle of the afternoon. I took a break and drank mine, reading The Little Friend and blathering, then returned to the front garden. My main project over the next few weeks (or sooner) is to plan my plantings this year, so I abandoned the grooming and consulted my gardening books and High Country Gardens catalogs. Gradually I noticed how badly my hands were shaking and connected that with an inability to concentrate and mild paranoia. It was 3:30, and I hadn't eaten since my morning cereal nor drunk very much. But I had had a powerfully chocolatey coffeey latte an hour before.
I dove for the kitchen and made myself peanut butter toast. It was medicinal, really!
I hadn't felt paranoia like that since I had Percocet four years ago after my wisdom-tooth extraction.
I took two quarts of sour cherries out of the freezer today. We were planning to snowshoe tomorrow but RDC isn't feeling well. He says he's feeling up to helping me make a pie crust, though. Sometimes I think he wakes up with a stranger every morning, because how after ten years he can continue to hope that teaching me anything kitcheny would require any less than his full strength I don't know.
So tomorrow, after pie- and maybe bread-baking, I'll clean the oven and fridge. Before, I'll upgrade my kitchen applet.
Check. My very first pie crust that didn't sulk and become delinquent before grumping off into a tough and unchewable texture. Or at least, so I hope. It's in the oven.
I called my mother to tell her. I told her I had good news, that I was not pregnant but she should sit down anyway. (I wouldn't want to incubate her hopes at all.) I only found out in November that when I was a wee tot, she and her friend (the one whose glance reassured my eulogy at Granny's funeral) made pies for the sorely missed Lymelight Diner. How can I not have known this, all the Thanksgiving Eves when I would peel pecks of apples for pies and watch her make pie dough and help spread butter and cinnamon and sugar on the scraps to make kisses? Her husband happened to mention it as we sat at lunch in the Bee & Thistle. So she told about splitting up the work, about her making the apple pies one week and her friend making the berry ones the next, and about using lard in the dough, about how the health inspector, visiting the house to issue a commercial baking license, first gave my sister and me the once-over. That probably is an excellent initial indicator, clean and happy kids. I always knew she made the best pies--much better than Granny's--(and never skimped on the telling her, either, not biting the hand that fed me apple pie) and it saddened me that I never knew that. Could I have forgotten?
So. RDC helped with the crust, verbally. I'm the only one who touched it, but he offered valuable advice like to freeze the pastry roller and spray it with Pam and to preheat the oven and not to stress the dough by rolling tooo fast. As soon as the pie went in the oven, I called my mother and we talked through my rolling out scraps. (I've never had scraps, before using only the Pillsbury premade crusts.)
My beleaguered mother. She asked me if I still had my hair in that "cute" cut she saw in January and I told her no, that I'd grown it a couple of feet since. In all honesty this is the same smart-ass answer I'd give to anyone, but since I know her question meant "I really like that haircut" despite its simultaneous undertones of "and thank god you don't look like such a hippie anymore," I could answer her accordingly. But I am constitutionally unable to cut her a break. However, she did seem to get the joke. Whew.
The pie's not out of the oven yet but the kisses have disappeared. Something went right, apparently.
The other day RDC and I arrove home at the same time, me on Shadowfax and he in Cassidy. I pulled up next to him as he unfolded himself, chatting about the day and the bike and watching two little boys--well, nineish, not so little--walk along. They were clearly on expotition (RDC blames me for his no longer being able to say "expedition"), one in camo, one in as close to hunter's-orange as he could get, both carrying backpacks full of, I was sure, vital supplies, both carrying weapons, striding along on their mission. I watched them, grinning. They gained the corner and looked up from their intent conversation. They saw me and one raised his plywood gun and aimed it at me.
"Please don't point your gun at me!" I exclaimed. "I have done nothing to you!"
He lowered his rifle immediately, waved sheepishly with his other arm, and called "Sorry!"
I grinned wide at him, still charmed. "That's all right."
And it was. Somehow, it still has to be.
This was taken in January (so that's the old box on top of his cage and about two shoelaces ago) but somehow I hadn't posted it yet. He is now perched on my toes, probably entertaining impure thoughts since I am wearing fleece socks with a fleece blanket on my legs, while preening. Blake's had a wonderful Sunday: housebound, reading parents, a new living room arrangement by which he can hop from the toes of the parent in the recliner to the table, across the table to the other parent on the couch, hot cereal and a bit of orange and a sour cherry.
I had my hair cut again last night. I wanted to see what it looked like a little shorter. I don't like it as much and would like it to my collarbones again. At least. I do miss a braid.
In the right pic, I'm on the phone with my sister, who is chez our father and notstepmother. Our notstepmother finally got another dog, more than two years after Sam died. Unlike regular-sized, black, setter and lab Sam, Ben is a Yorkshire terrier. Before my own visit in December, I tried to imagine my father with a Yorkie. Having actually experienced my father with a Yorkie (a Yorkie, what's more, with a ribbon in his topknot) has not improved my ability to imagine it. CLH told me today that though she has little time for him and he seems afraid of her, Ben can't resist her anyway. "Sounds like our father's kind of dog," I said: "'Oh yes, frighten and ignore me so I can try harder.'" Why can't we laugh like that about our relationships with our mother?
If my next haircut is in two months, I will be almost 35 and might want something a little more, I told the cutter. "Maybe some color," she suggested.
Er. Hair color is not only makeup but long-term makeup. It doesn't respond well to chlorine, which is what I have to swim in here. Chlorine is one bad chemical and hairdye is another. Not a good train of thought. However, when my hair looks particularly mousey I can see the appeal. She did a splendid job restoring Haitch's natural color on her very first visit, so I trust her skill as a colorist, but still.
When I first got it cut, at least two people asked if I had had it colored as well and one didn't believe my denial. Longer, in a braid, the undersides of the strands were exposed to sun. Shorter, loose, the unexposed sides show; they haven't been sun- and exposure-bleached. Or at least that's what makes sense to me. Maybe enough dye to make up for the highlights the sun hasn't had the chance to burnish yet. Hmm.
The photographs show my hair curlier than it was when I left the salon; they are post-snow today. Actually intra-snow. More than a foot fell overnight, a wonderful, atypically wet, dense snow. All the schools and many businesses including mine had snow days. I remembered to call the office before I even got dressed for the bus, and Dot Org was closed, closed, closed! I yipped and yahooed and yeehawed, because unlike schooldays, snow days from work don't have to made up from February or April or summer vacation. Also I pranced.
I took butter and molasses from the fridge to warm up. I did laundry. I tidied my study and vacuumed downstairs and put away the tottering stacks of CDs I've been ripping. I chose more books for the bookcase--Italo Calvino is someone RDC and I have in common so is a good choice.
Also I shoveled our sidewalk--city ordinance requires shoveling within 12 hours of significant snowfall--and the neighbor's and the other neighbors' and of course Babushka's. Either she heard me or was coming out to feed the birds anyway but she sounded almost scared as she called, "But who are you?" I shucked my hood, "I'm lisa from up the street, with the bird and the cherry tree and the cucumbers?" I didn't know how many more identifying details she might have needed, but she did seem to recognize me as soon as my hood came down. I haven't seen her since fall and she looked very old this morning. Perhaps she only lacked her teeth.
We snowshoed in City Park in the afternoon. First we banged on the overburdened trees with the snow shovel and a broom until they unbowed themselves. During this RDC wondered how many more layers we'd want for our walk. He went inside for gaiters and came out with snowshoes. They were a good idea. People were sledding on the puny little hill behind the museum--what does happen to people who grow up without sledding, without snowfolk, without fireflies, without frogs?--and about a dozen dogs were having the time of their lives off leash as their humans played in the playground, quite illegally. When we got back I shoveled us and Babushka again, another foot having fallen during the day. A neighbor's golden retriever bounded about, out of her mind with glee, while her basset hound stumped about much less pleased with life in snow well over his head.
Before and after the snowshoeing, I made cookies. Last summer a Charenton friend made ginger cookies of a quite whizbangy level of gingerness, but they lacked the essential ingredient of the best desserts, chocolate. These have a wonderful ginger bite but plenty of chocolate too. A Martha Stewart recipe, it assumed parchment on cookie sheets instead of Pam, and a high-end blender instead of a strong right arm with a wooden spoon, and "chocolate chopped into 1/4" pieces" instead of what that obviously means, chocolate chips. I did nothing to adjust for altitude, added less clove, and zounds, what a good cookie.
My notstepmother wants some; my father wants more of the peanut butter cookies I made him for Christmas. My sister just wanted to tell them about my adventures in being unable to make snowrocks.
Meanwhile, the snow is forecast to continue through tomorrow. It's over two feet in the backyard now but could always--please!--get deeper. A second snowday would rock my world. I'll find out in 11 hours.
<--Yesteday morning and yesterday afternoon-->
I am grieved to report that the precipitation, which had stopped about 11 this morning, has commenced again (it's almost 2:00) in the form of rain. Of the three times I shoveled, morning and afternoon yesterday and morning today, after I cleared the main accumulation from sidewalk and walk I would finish with a last scrape. I would start at the porch, clear the walk, clear the sidewalk, and then do Babushka, and by the time I finished that, there'd be another quarter or half an inch on the pavement. No more. The sidewalk is wet, not crusty; the trees are dripping.
This morning when I shoveled, my two neighbors brought their three dogs for their walks. The basset hound was even sadder (his ears!) and even the golden retriever, still wriggling with joy, obviously struggled across the drifts to greet me. What a New England cheap-ass way out of a snowstorm, to melt under rain instead of sun.
<--Last night and this morning-->
This morning I tried to unburden the trees again. Covered head to toe in Gore-Tex, I stood under the trees and lifted their branches with a long broom. One plum tree that to comply with city ordinance I should trim covers the sidewalk even without snow to make a cave out of it. It leans over more under the snow weighing its branches, and then its tips get buried again in the snow on the ground. Carefully, I freed it from its contortions. Though the two shield the sidewalk from accumulation somewhat, my de-snowing them of course dumps it down again. So I shoveled and shoveled and shoveled, a 48' long x 5' wide x 2.5' deep sidewalk plus a 20' x 5' x 2.5' walk plus however much volume I removed from Babushka. Anyone who says that isn't exercise can kiss my pearly white ass.
Before snowshoeing yesterday afternoon, we banged off the trees in the front, ignoring the cherry tree in back. As we looked out the bedroom window last night, I saw that a branch had cracked under the strain. Damn. These trees are 30 years old and toward the ends of their lives; they need better care than for me to forget to clear off the branches.
I think RDC took this without a flash; I was surprised to see it among the photographs this morning. With all the white on the ground and falling and the moon nearly full behind the clouds, the night was lit with a wonderful blue-white light instead of the unlovely orange of sodium. He took another photograph of me this morning shoveling again--he doesn't have a snowday as long as the snow spares the phone and electricity cables--but all that shows is the impracticality of my hair cut, with a couple of bangs falling into my face, too short for the ponytail. Which isn't a pony but a pug's tail.
Koroshiya rocks, but you knew that. After seeing what she did for Jared, I whined and stomped and asked whether I perhaps live in a snowshadow, thus deserving no banner? This despite her just--like, Tuesday, the last time the mailcarrier trekked to the house--sending me a mind-bending mix cd, mind-bending because the Smiths and General Public and I go way back, so to hear Love Split love and Harvey Danger do "How Soon Is Now?" and "Save It for Later" threw me. Not to mention, who the hell are these people? I am pathologically unhip.
So she sent me my own banner. Hmph.
Yesterday afternoon, after 36 hours of letting the snow tamp itself down under its own weight and a couple hours of rain, I scurried outside to get the final tally, except what with the weighing and the rain it wasn't. The official measurement for Denver was 29", though I don't know if that was downtown or at DIA.
About 5:15, the electricity wavered and came back. Two minutes later it was gone. At this point, the storm became much less fun. I don't think I've been without power in the winter. In the summer, one doesn't freeze. Previously, I haven't had a desert birdkin to keep warm. But the house keeps itself fairly warm fairly well, as long as outside is not windy or too cold, and we didn't expect the temperature to dip much below 30. The fireplace heats the living room splendidly and we would live in there. City water and a gas stove meant no worries about water or even cooking.
So the camping began. We cozied up the coffee table and chair next to the couch, to make room for the futon up from my study. This became our bed. We dug a path to the woodpile, thinking ourselves very clever for buying all that wood this fall, removed the tarp, and hauled a bunch of it inside, downstairs to drip dry in the furnace room. I was pleased with myself for actually having cleaned the bathroom and the birdcage this weekend, because I don't do those things nearly as often as I should and there's nothing like not being able to do anything about it to make a house seem grimy. I wished I had washed my hair after beating the crap out of my trees in the morning. We dug out the camping box, the box of matches, the candles, the flashlights, the headlamps. Our landlines are cordless thus need electricity, but we had our cellular phones.
As dusk fell and there was no light, Blake began to look around suspiciously. What were we doing? Didn't we know he's afraid of the dark? I lit a candle in the 5-armed candelabra and put it in the corner of the dining table closest to his cage. But he's afraid of candles too, and flashlights! I found a honeystick in the cupboard and hung it in his cage to keep him occupied.
We couldn't light the oven, which though gas has electric controls, but we could light the stove burners. We ran those with pots of water on top. After dinner (pasta with sauce out of the freezer), I washed up. So far, so civilized.
The house was cooling down, and while a fire would suck the remaining heat out of the house, there in the living room we'd be warm enough. So we lay the fire, newspaper twists like Laura Ingalls Wilder and the hay, scraps of lumber from the woodshop (!) since everything in the brush pile would have been soaked, dry wood from under the tarp. And a match.
This is where we found out the hard way that our chimney is so very old-fashioned, so wide and open, that it can get packed with snow.
About that the less said the better.
Not yet. I have read and cleaned and baked fabulous cookies and listened to music and have I mentioned that Blake is in some form of cockatiel heaven, with both parents home for three solid days? He did freak out yesterday morning when I went outside for two hours, immediately after getting up so without first properly bidding him good morning, but otherwise he's blissed out.
Twenty-four hours without outside communication just kind of worked out right now anyway. It would be clever for us to have a battery-powered radio, but this way we didn't find out that the war had begun until long after it had. I wrote to my heavies about my recent hausfrauing, whether it's making peace within myself or just ostritching. (I also decided that "to ostrich," as a verb, needs a "t" at least in the gerund form.) "Life goes on. Even in London in wartime. Especially, perhaps, in London, in wartime" (The Shell-Seekers).
I really like, in Maus, when, to his analyst, Art quotes Samuel Beckett, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness," and then they sit wordless for a panel before Art continues in the next, "On the other hand, he SAID it."
My fourth snowday in a row. About the one, I didn't worry, for me or for Dot Org. It pays a snow day as administrative leave, so I--unlike a lot of people from a lot of other jobs in town, I know--lost no salary. But four! I won't find out until Monday at the earliest what the fiscal consequences might be.
This morning after breakfast I put Blake on RDC's shoulder for a minute so I could go fill the birdfeeder. Blake screeched and flew after me, fluttering to the floor and waddling after. He spends days with his daddy, on his lap under the desk, so I don't know how RDC suddenly became so inferior. Now we're in the living room chair again, with books and a shoelace.
Also, it's snowing again.
Unfortunately, I probably won't; nor could I afford to. I dusted the living and dining rooms, whose horizontal surfaces had drifts of ash; I vacuumed the rugs and upholestery; I would have laundered the curtains if they had any chance of drying on the line; I washed the glossy paint of the hearth, discolored with smoke. I read some short stories; I tried to bake bread (without my kitchen chaperon, and a failure despite its being Donald Rumsfeld as I pummeled it); I cleaned the wood floors; I shoveled behind the garage in case we want to use Cassidy, I shoveled most of the patio, so the snow would melt into the earth instead of the brick; I set a five-gallon bucket under the corner of the porch that needs better gutters and dumped 15 gallons of meltwater into the front garden, sparing the house that much flooding. We walked out for coffee and read The Onion over mocha and vanilla lattes.
The two discolored streaks in the front landing floor are (I discovered today for the first time, almost three years in the house) come from tape. Someone taped what was surely television cable on the floor, between the hole they'd seen fit to drill in the floor, between the understair space where it entered the house through a basement window, and the living room. I had never noticed that the streaks were not permanent stains but dirt stuck to tape residue. Did people hate my house? Why would anyone drill through oak floors just for television?
They hacked holes through the floor for the new heating system too. The original air exchange has a wonderful oak grid; the floor in the dining room was built around it. Sometime later another furnace required another air intake to be cut in the living room in front of the window. This isn't particularly lovely, but it's inconspicuous. The current furnace's air intake is in the dining room, conspicuously in the traffic flow to the hallway, and under the unlovely metal grille the hole in the floor was cut without love or care. Sigh.
I'm still not sure about the living room wall. I can't believe that if the wall separating the living room from the front stairs is not original, more windows wouldn't originally been built into the exterior wall. The one small window and the ceiling light fixture suggest the wall is original; only its being drywall instead of plaster suggests otherwise but it might have been rebuilt after rewiring. I suppose when people build houses, they might not think about refinishing floors. But there's about a foot of floor in the stairwell between the wall and the railing along the staircase, a foot in which a floor refinisher cannot reach. That strip is discolored with age and a millimeter or two higher than the resurfaced area. I have no idea whether the floor will be able to handle another refinishing in another couple of decades. I hope so.
I can't claim that we've taken the best possible care of the floor ourselves. The very day we moved the furniture in, we marred it. The couch from the apartment became the downstairs, den couch. It had to go through the front door (wider than the back), through the length of the house, through the doorway between kitchen and back landing, and down the back stairs (wider than the front). The doorway wasn't quite wide enough, and the corner of the couch gouged a wiggling foot-long line in the floor.
I don't know what we should do in the kitchen. I don't want to tile or lino it but the wood is extremely sad. I need to get more or better area rugs for in front of the fridge and the dishwasher, and when the area rug in front of the stove is up--last weekend I hosed its pad and beat the crap out of it (that being my thing)--you can see that the floor under it is less worn.
One of the kitchen toys we bought along with the pastry sheet is a set of measuring cups. Sturdy, simple stainless steel measures, but to me its chief delights are its 2/3- and 3/4-cup measures.
The local news featured the frivolities of the snowfall: snowfolk and snowshoeing to walk the dog. Another snippet showed people sledding off their rooftops onto drifts. The images, therefore, were of rapid swooping movement across a field of white. I've mentioned that Blake warns us of Bad Dangerous Flying Stuff like the occasional escaped balloon overhead or things on TV like the flying monkeys in "The Wizard of Oz." Well. Sure enough, Blake loosed a warning shriek. This is why we have Tivo: so we could rewind it and make him shriek again.
It's a fact that the only people who are killed by sledding people on their televisions are the ones who don't live with cockatiels.
We went gallumphing through City Park again today. The Sky Terrace at the museum was "closed due to inclement weather," which we found hideously unfair. It was, in fact, in the high 50s and sunny and I should have worn shorts instead of jeans with my gaiters. So instead we gallumphed to ground level on the west side, four storeys down. I really hope that this dump means the mountains keep their white peaks well into summer. Last year I think by May you could see no white from the city. Mt. Evans has lost much of its contour under its mantle and I hope it doesn't find them again until July.
This morning as I ate my breakfast at the table and Blake ate his on his cage, he shrieked as I have seldom or never heard him shriek before, with panicky fear (not the alert call of the roof sledders the other day) as he leapt into the air and fluttered.
I followed him into the living room, calling quietly to him, and he dashed as fast as his dashiest waddle would close the distance between us. His crest was bent nearly in half, it was so high, and he was panting through his beak, body attenuated, breast heaving. He didn't want a full body scoop-snuggle but to be on my shoulder where he could watch and hide behind my head.
Our birdfeeder has become a birdfeeder-plus. RDC has seen it a couple of times but when I turned, my hand cupped over Blake's head like a horse's blinder, it was my first time to see the peregrine falcon perched on the nectarine tree, on the lowest horizontal branch from which the birdfeeder is suspended. I wanted to dump my little boy on his daddy so I could watch the raptor, but Blake was having none of that.
The falcon hoisted itself up and dropped into the evergreen tree before leaving. It's amazing. I would be so pleased if our birdfeeder were a regular stop on its hunting rounds. I know. I know that I said that about the squirrels, that I planted the sunflowers for them, and that I turned out to be lying. But housefinches and housesparrows are so much less important than birds of prey. I might be upset if its first victim (it hasn't been successful here yet that we've seen) were a chickadee or a junco, rarer and prettier than either housething.
It took a long time for Blake to calm down. He wouldn't be coaxed to the kitchen windowsill at all, even after the outside birds had returned to their black oil sunflower seeds. He certainly doesn't like crows and magpies aren't much better, but a falcon--where does his fear come from? Instinct, of course; if Australia doesn't have peregrine falcons (does it?) it must have butteos and eagles of some sort. But I still call Blake a very clever boy, cagebound and housebound as he is, for recognizing such a predator.
Beautiful. Snow to the eyebrows, just as it should be.
From this to this. Saturday, the mountains looked like this from City Park. Sunday, the mountains looked like that from Rocky Mountain National Park.
I do love the dark blue of the sky, the wind lifting the snow off the peaks, how the sun glazes the skin of the snow into liquid, the patterns on the surface from the melt underneath, the vertical thrust of cliff without snow.
I really don't know what to do about graphics.
Anyway, 5 miles easy snowshoeing.
And also this, Long's Peak across Bierstadt Lake. This is the halfway point, and where we stopped to fuel and water ourselves. We saw people feeding gray jays and I said nothing.
The day before, in City Park, I did not say nothing. A woman called for her daughter who had strayed far from the museum toward the pond. The mother, not dressed for snow, called, and the girl, tromping around in said snow, didn't obey, and they yelled back and forth
("Don't go any farther! Come back here!"
"Why!"
"Come back!"
"Why!")
and after closing half the distance between them having to listen to this I was sick of it and hollered at the girl, "Because she said so!" Which really helped, I know: it enforced the mother's inability to discipline her child and the girl's lack of need to obey her parent and the rudeness of random strangers and "because I said so" is no reason whatsoever. But they were yelling across 1/8 mile of snowy park, and my, I felt better for yelling. The downfall of society, that's me. Last I saw, the girl was moving, as if dragging a large dead tree behind her, in the general direction of her incompetent mater.
Thank you, Beth, for telling me the tag to make images work.
The airport died--that's such a silly name, too easily confusable with the place the planes are--and I have no internet access at home unless I umbilicle (the verb form is spelled -cle instead of -cal, I just decreed) myself to the server. Or something. So count on my being quiet for a while.
The other day as I scampered the half-mile between bus stop and work, I looked up briefly from White Teeth to see that the vehicle leaving a driveway for a road was indeed going to stop for me the pedestrian. He was. I noted briefly, "Oo, white van--must be a sniper," and was back in the book when, 20 feet later, I heard a voice.
The driver said, "Hey, I know you! You're the lady who waits for the bus on X Avenue near Y."
"Yep--that's me."
"Do you work here?"
"A little farther on," I evaded.
"I drive out here all the time--I could give you a ride."
I laughed, thanking him, turning away. How do I handle that? He didn't set off any warning bells--older, decent grammar, probably the last of the decent-to-strangers generation (sniper's van aside).
This morning as I stood at the bus stop, the white van pulled up and the passenger side window came down and the driver offered me a ride. I had not thought of what to say; what would I say? Smiling I hoped self-deprecatingly, "I am sorry, sir, but I really can't accept a ride from a stranger."
He nodded, waving and pulling away. "I got no problem with that."
I do though. If people don't accept kindnesses from strangers, strangers will stop offering them. The chances that he would harm or even threaten me are, I'd wager, slim to none, as are, nonetheless, the chances that I would get into a stranger's car. He was just being nice. I hate that I can't accept that nicety.
I feel like a heel.
In the past three months, two different people I work with have got engaged. In both cases, the man asked the woman's father's permission before asking her to marry him. What the hell? Long Island, Virginia, I get that some things persist in some regions and cultures longer than in others. Both men asked the father, not the parents.
That the men asked the fathers before asking the women makes no sense to me, yet only as I began to write this did it occur to me that it should strike me as equally stupid that the men asked the women instead of vice versa. That that it didn't shows the mores I have kept.
We scampered downtown aiming for the Bonnard exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. We gave up on that because, just before 1:00 when we arrove, the next available entry was at 2:40; plus the member's line was ridiculous: it issued tickets to members for the exhibit but also sold memberships--so the member's line was almost as long as the non-member's line. Meanwhile, will-call had no line--yet that volunteer couldn't assist at the other two lines, returning to his post when a will-call person showed up?. So we'll register on-line for a time next Sunday and pick up our tickets at will-call, which had better not have a line then either.
RDC wanted to try the Appaloosa Grill, where I went for lunch once with Trey. It was okay, but not okay enough to be open on Sunday and plus it didn't have outdoor seating. So instead we ate at Marlowe's, on the patio, in the just-warm-enough sun or the cloud-over-the-sun stiff breeze. I had a spinach, walnut, blue cheese, and duck salad. Yum.
The Museum of Contemporary Art is closed Sundays; the Byers-Evans house would close at 3:00 and it was 2:20. So we just went to the library.
Nisou and I talked yesterday and I told her I had just acquired Animals Dreams and Pigs in Heaven. She set me straight that Pigs is the sequel to Bean Trees, not Dreams, and I exclaimed in dismay, "You mean I have to read another book? Noooo."
The library didn't have Bean Trees though. But I got Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and last year's Newbery A Single Shard and Creating the Not-So-Big House and When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden.
I think I should start flexing again. The sunlight is back; if I go to the gym for an hour then I work an extra hour, if not 30 minutes; and I can still have some time in the garden when I get home--as can Blake, if it's warm enough. "In the garden!" as the voice of Mrs. Craven said.
Oh! Yeah, absolutely: Tex out for two weeks means no daytime gym unless I drive or figure out someone else to mooch off, and I know CoolBoss won't be going either. Cool. On the 11th of April, then, I will start landscaping in the other half of the front yard.
The mountains are slathered with white, the sky is blue with white polka clouds, the s are snapping, and it's in the high 50s. I sat outside in the the warmth of the sun with White Teeth and my lunch (spinach salad with chicken and cheese). Bliss.
For afters I had some Hershey's Mint Kisses, which are my primary weakness. Now that I have determined that chocolate with mint is superior to chocolate with peanut butter (years of serious study led to this conclusion), the next debate will be between chocolate with raspberry and chocolate with blueberry. Really, blueberry wins hands down, but raspberry has the advantage of availability.
I biked today, and even in the morning my thin Old Lyme sweatshirt was too much. I lost my long-sleeved t-shirt somewhere along the line and need to replace it. Perhaps at REI tonight; it's time for Shadowfax's 30-day tune-up. I have to find out whether I can wait for this check-up or must leave it. I didn't bike-commute yesterday but intend to for the rest of the week.
Okay, partly this struck me because I had just begun Barbara Kingsolver's new book of essays Small Wonder, in which a torturer says, "We can milk roosters here; and bears lay eggs." And partly, as I drowsily thumbed through a Pottery Barn catalog, because it's so stupid. I know this is really Mr. Gradgrindy of me, but an egg- (or other small object-) containing rooster (with a small opening in the back to insert same) is Why No One Knows How Stuff Works.
In college sometime I saw a child with a plush toy (I can't quite call it a stuffed animal, even though "stuffed" here is particularly apt) that was up the spout. The animal you bought--a nice non-threatening domesticated species like a dog, cat, or horse--came with three babies, unless you were really lucky and it had four, or really lucky and it came with five. This reminded me of Veruca Salt's quest for a Golden Ticket, just to keep buying until one turned out right. Besides that, the really offensive part was that the animals had slits in their bellies, and the babies got tucked into the belly for storage or could be removed. My conclusion was that the Caesarian Section Surgery Company must have promoted that toy, to make a generation grow up thinking that's where babies ought to come from. And be reinsertable.
I broke Buddy's heart again by leaving as soon as I'd showered and snacked. I bussed downtown, not biking because I just don't trust Shadowfax unattended in downtown, and plus there isn't a bike rack outside Capitol Books, and I would have to a) train myself to lock up at Capitol and then go through the entire unlocking ritual, ride the mere three blocks to the 'brary, and lock up again. Or b) leave the bike at Capitol and walk across the state capitol complex after dark to return to it (no thank you) or c) leave it at the 'brary to begin with and walk thence to Capitol and back.
It's good I didn't choose c) (taking the most time), because who knew Capitol closes at 6? I ducked inside at 5:53, without my list because I'm a nidiot. I remembered my priorities, at least: no Bean Trees, but The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, check, and The Toughest Indian in the World. Small Wonder, Kingsolver essays not fiction. Checking the sf shelves for Card or Gibson or Stephenson, I found the first two Green Sky books. They are the really cheesy pulp format, a little shorter even than regular pulp, with bad paper, but I am pretty sure they're out of print so I snapped them up.
I began Fistfight walking to the library. I'll like that.
For the first time, I went downstairs at the library, to the conference center. The stairs are at the west, Denver Art Museum end of the building, and when I got to the bottom to looked to my right in surprise. I never knew there was an underground passage between the library and the museum. I would have explored immediately but someone addressed me:
"Are you confused too?" probably taking my pausing and looking down the passage in nostalgia (how I would have loved that as a child!) for lostness.
"No," I said. "I just never knew there was a tunnel between the library and the museum."
"Sweet," said the bearded young man dismissively, after a quick glance. "I was looking for the internet computers."
I directed him to either the main fiction hall or the nonfiction floors above, where there would be fewer people.
"Thank you ma'am," he finished.
Criminy. I never thought I'd be 34, did you?
So then "Stagecoach." I knew when I sat down in the second row, right side (because of Haitch, I always sit on the right side of a theatre now) that I would never opt to watch a movie, thankfully only a 96' movie, in such a chair. I dealt because I am, ma'am, apparently a grown-up now, until a few minutes into the movie when a late arrival needed to stand right in front of me asking the people in the first row whether this seat or that was taken. Since the seats were empty and the movie had started, there's your answer, see? Then he sat down, right in front of me, after being all concerned about everyone else in the front row, clearly not caring about moi, than whom he was much taller and much much stinkier. Plus the two men behind me had not quite ceased their conversation, and they spoke like my father, self-affirming and the only person worth listening to. I rose with my stack of books, walked down around the back and up, and lay on the scratchy filthy carpet in front of the left side. The five books made an excellent pillow.
All I knew about "Stagecoach" was that it was nominated for best picture in 1939 (the library series is "The Golden Year of Film"). I only ever knew John Wayne as an old man and a cariacature of himself in all the westerns I watched with my father, and I have a hard time seeing him as a real actor. But it was quite good. It took me a moment to realize about the One Bullet Left and its best use. Introducing the movie, a librarian had mentioned its archetypes, such as the prostitute with the heart of gold. She kinda implied this was an element in the Western that "Stagecoach" invented, but I must have mistaken her, because also in 1939 there's Belle Watling in "Gone with the Wind."
The other day Uberboss said he had a book for me, couldn't remember the title, lots of literary hijinks (his word) and kind of skiffy (not his word) with time travel...
"Is it The Eyre Affair?" I asked. He was pleased that I knew it and brought it in the next day. I read the first few pages and it will be fun I'm sure; the epigraph of the very first chapter is an excerpt from a book that I promptly submitted to the Invisible Library whose author is Millon de Floss.
Yesterday he came in brandishing Atonement and asked if I were next in line for it. No, I read it in September and we hadn't talked about it. We both liked it better than Amsterdam and I admired how its three sections worked so well together, as distinct in style and content as each is, and he praised its craft.
---
Saturday night Lou and her partner had a birthday party, renting out a bowling alley for their few hundred closest friends and coworkers. They know everyone: a mayoral candidate was there and another easily could have been invited. At one point I was chatting with a coworker, who occasionally leaned forward and rubbed the shoulders of another coworker (down one level on the bowling floor) to the point that my observation changed from "whatever" to "huh." Finally I sought out CoolBoss and said, "I have a gossip question for you." I whispered the two names in her ear.
"Where have you been?" she mock-demanded. "For two years now."
Where I've been, by the way, is sitting in my cube across the hall from one of the two and across from her, who is good friends with the other. My only defense was that I am not a gossip at work.
I have been commended at performance evaluations for not involving myself in office gossip and politics, and that's an image I want to maintain and cultivate. For the first time (that I know of) something is going on that could affect me directly, with two factions each reasonably supposing I am privy to the other, and the more people think I know nothing, the better off I am.
---
Yesterday Egg left for a week in Paris and the Loire valley. Her flight was at 3; she didn't leave the office until after 1. It's less than a half-hour to DIA, but eesh. Believe me, no one would have died if she had delegated or postponed a thing or two. This is why I'm usually content to be support staff. This job ceases to exist at 4 o'clock (or 4:30, flexing with a half-hour lunch), and that's a-okay with me. Another reason I like her is that, when she hugged me g'bye and I said "Bon voya-gee!" she knew who I was being.
Blake is hopping from knee to knee on RDC's lap, bobbing excitedly because he (the verb will clarify the antecedent) is reading "Tinturn Abbey." (Blake loves for RDC to read aloud.) I am agog at this.
Guess where we might go this summer.
My sister asked me Saturday if I liked Wind in the Willows. "It's okay," I said, "not one of my special favorites." I am not doing so well with the Quelling Impulsively Honest Answer In Favor of Weighing Actual Import of Question Before Opening Piehole.
She wanted to give me a copy she found in a used bookshop in Marblehead, a 1968 British printing with Arthur Rackham illustrations. Last year she gave me a bubble machine for my birthday, and she was really disappointed I didn't consider it the best gift ever (she has been pleased to note that it has featured prominently in all my outdoor festivities since, though).
I didn't say anything about Arthur Rackham vs. Original and therefore Right Ernest Shepherd decorations. I didn't go on about how the second half, with Toad getting all Napoleon-like (I don't mean Bonapartesque, I mean like in Animal Farm), depresses me. Ratty and Moley messing about in boats, that I like. Ratty and Moley finding Otter's child sleeping in the curve of Pan's arm as he pipes in the dawn, that I like. Toad driving a car and escaping from jail disguised as a laundress, not so much. I just left it at "not one of my favorites."
She wanted to give me a Foundational children's book printed in my birthyear, and probably all my recoiling is my own baggage. She didn't say anything about its being Valuable other than that it was a used and rare (so not necessarily both) bookstore.
I don't want to own a Valuable book. If a book is valuable monetarily, it had better be because it's someone or other's Book of Hours from 1361 and illuminated with gold leaf and lapis lazuli. In which case it belongs in a museum (cue Indiana Jones). If a volume of Leaves of Grass is valuable because, I'm making this up, Wilfred Owen carried it into the trenches, it belongs in the Owen library. If a collector puts a dollar amount on it because it carries someone's signature, and you buy it for the signature not the content, then that's not true value. I love my copy of Possession more than I used to because now it has A.S. Byatt's signature on it, but that's emotional value to me because she spoke to me, we exchanged pleasantries, while she touched and held and signed the book. (It's also irreplaceable because for as much as I know you can only buy the book with Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow instead of Sir Edward Burne-Jones's The Beguiling of Merlin on the cover. Aha--no, though the painting remains, the cover design is tainted witha Major Motion Picture thingie.)
Last year in Books of Wonder I saw a complete first edition of Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six. Five or seven thousand dollars, if I recall. Now me, I'm dragonny with my books, bad at lending, bad at returning, prone to hoarding. But I can't imagine those four books being in any individual's private library, because what're you going to do, read them? Read them to a child, and risk the damage that makes cardboard books such a good idea for the very young? Read them in your armchair and risk losing one among the cushions? Read them with a stick of candy and drool all over the colored plates of precious stones and then not have Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle around to help you steam open the pages? Or, and this is the real sacrilege, "own" them but never ever read them because you might damage their physical selves, ignoring their content? I can't get behind that.
I feel guilty about Acquiring more children's books (when it's acquisition more than possession, a word I use deliberately). Especially picture books. I keenly feel the absence of Corduroy and, now that I rediscovered it, Umbrella from my library. But I do feel that it would be Wrong to Acquire books when they'll go mostly unread. There are many, many picture books that add to a Compleat or Representative Collection of the Necessary, but the only one I crave is The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.
All that is because I just don't reread picture books very often (except Harold and the Purple Crayon). The Wind in the Willows is not a picture book. So maybe I was reluctant to be given it again for a different reason. As a matter of fact I have two reasons. One, I had it on my Amazon wishlist last year and my notstepmother gave it to me for Christmas (along with The Grapes of Wrath because she Understands the multifacetedness that is I. (She called that list intimidating. Sorry.)) Aiming for the G shelf with the book in paw, I laughed quietly at myself because, I now bothered to notice, I already owned it. It's heretical, isn't it, to own a book and not know it, to the point that you ask for it again because you're a grasping, acquisitive, dragonny sort? I'm going to pass my notstepmother's brand new book on to Emlet, keeping the used one because it's used. My sister's gift should be valuable for its sentiment--that she gave it to me, having selected it for her reasons--and it would be, except I would feel guilty for owning two copies of it (and I would have to keep the other for the illustrations).
Two, NCS gave a version of it to me, lo these many years. I finally read it the summer I lived with Nisou (another reason it's not sacred to me is that I didn't read it until 1988), and we loved the scene with Otter's child and Pan piping. She gave me a Picasso print of Pan piping (it's been on my wall ever since). I told NCS about that, and of course Pink Floyd, his favorite band, had an album entitled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. So he gave me a version, and I say "version" because the illustrations were just so wrong. The Rackham ones, from Amazon's sample pages, look okay; they're just not Original Shephard. Those in NCS's version I remember to be Off. (My memory could not possibly be tainted, oh no, especially considering the book did not long stay in my can't-say-possession--I think not even until I finally broke up with him nineish months later. Lord, but I was emotionally dishonest to us both.)
So anyway. Lots of baggage re Wind in the Willows particularly, assorted guilt about acquiring rather than possessing books particularly children's books.
In this entry, to which I referred above, I said The Story about Ping was the oldest book I own. In my own personal mythology, this is true, the way HPV is my oldest friend even though, say, SEM is older than she. I mean that book is the one longest in my possession.
Also, just above I say I don't want to own a valuable book. I don't know if it is valuable, but certainly the actually oldest book I own is a sight older than any other. It was printed in the 17th century; the date is in Roman numerals. Of a sort: the D is not printed with a single D but composed of an I and a backward C. RJH, whose book it was, could not parse it, and I glanced at it and suggested the cipher. He was really impressed. I was pleased he was impressed, but I really didn't think I was so very clever to have worked it out. He did, though, and that book was his wedding present (a masterful touch).
When I worked in Phoebe I checked out a stack of books for a little old woman whose name was Lois Darling. "That's almost the name of one of my favorite children's book illustrators!" I exclaimed. Louis Darling, it turned out, was her husband. Louis and Lois, a coincidence almost too Darling for words. Yeah. (Louis Darling illustrated Beverly Cleary's books until his death in the early '70s; the third or fourth Ramona book is dedicated to him.) She was an illustrator as well and it was my exuberance at meeting her that inspired her finally to assemble an exhibit of their work for display in the library, as she had promised for many moons. Her last project before her death in 1989 was a replica of Ratty's boat, which she donated to the Mystic Seaport Museum. When I brought Nisou's two sets of frainch parents to the Seaport in 1996, I enquired about that boat. It wasn't on display--I suppose there's not a lot of whaling signficance to it.
All of these things I have told before.
RDC and Blake were in the living room, Blake on the windowsill and RDC in the chair. Blake emitted his scream of bloody terror and launched himself all the way to the sunroom, the length of the house (that's on a full wing trim). The falcon was just launching from the ground by the nectarine tree, not yet successful that RDC could see.
Which bird should we call Frightful in this scenario?
It must be difficult for a raptor to stoop from whatever height into the 15' foot gap between houses, through the branches of one tree or between the two trees, and come away with a meal. I might be confusing raptor statistics with lion ones, that 90% of hunting attempts are unsuccessful?
If I replace the old tube feeder with the new, allegedly more squirrel-proof feeder in the nectarine, maybe I can put the tube one in a more open spot in the backyard, for easier falcon-feeding.
I am so proud. Also grateful. Last week Melissa mentioned a clearance sale at J. Crew. I went and looked, and it was manna for the Ross shopper (yammer re exploited resources and near-slave labor for my vanity).
I have a new skirt! A new winter skirt, when winter clothing is so tedious I usually can't bear to shop for it, even for skirts, and alternate between a short gray one and a long black all season. Winter clothing is tedious because it is black, or because black is so practical it is also tedious, or something. This new skirt is longer than ankle-length: in fact it breaks like a pant leg on the top of my foot; it has a long enough slit that I can still take a full stride; it is unwaisted. It is wool lined with acetate; the weave is sharkskin (whatever that means). Furthermore, it is not black. It is olivey brown.
Also a sweater about which I am not as excited. It is, after all, not a skirt or a dress, so inherently less interesting. Very thinly woven merino wool, so thinly woven you can see my ivory-colored bra through it--otherwise I suppose no one would ever know I wear one. J. Crew called the sweater "camel" but I would call it toffee. (Isn't one of the lists in Microserfs J. Crew colors? All I can remember right now are two from the soup flavors list, Beak and Creamy Dolphin.) If it were really camel it might be more interesting. My usual button-down, though crew- not v-neck.
I didn't select the pieces to go together but they do, and here I am in my new togs fresh out of the box, in a skirt that is not black or grey and a shirt that is not grey or lavender or periwinkle or that peachy rose that I refuse to accept as pink. It's shocking.
Today I wore my new clothes, figuring that since I froze the other day in premature spring clothing I'd be cozy. Wrongo. I baked. Even Egg, who is tall and attenuated and always chilly, was warm.
The thin sweatshirt that was a fine weight for the morning ride was too much this afternoon, and I had not had a proper shower for 2.5 days: Monday evening after the gym I washed but didn't shave, Tuesday morning I declared myself still clean, and this morning I showered at work where I have no razor. Leg stubble I can handle. Pit stubble makes me cranky. I am so Usan.
I swapped out the storms for screens on three sides of the house. I don't particularly consider this more than halfway through, though, because the north side is the most annoying. The front's easiest because it all happens on the porch without a ladder; the south side is fine because the ladder fits neatly on the sidewalk; the back is fine because the ladder's on the patio and that's where the back door is. In contrast, the ground on north side of the house conspires with the ladder to break my neck, and I have to trot the windows around three sides of the house to hose them--waiiiiit a minute, one of the perks of getting the swamp cooler properly plumbed last year was that we have hose fitting there. Well, I still have to haul them back anyway to spare the living room my clumsiness, and the back stairs are wider and shallower than the front ones.
Something right has happened with the resistance training, because the wide windows (this isn't an Unfortunate Event, I promise) that have been tricky to handle before are not so tricky now. They're not heavy, but their width and the being on a ladder and the fragility used to be more difficult to juggle than now.
I cut down some raspberry canes, hosed all the storms down (the dust in the sills being black since it's primarily auto exhaust), polished and waxed (not really) the inside sashes, raked the north front yard clean in preparation for tomorrow's digging, washed and line-dried the living room curtains, hauled the patio furntiure to the "grass" there to hose and scrub it, and emptied the Hestia hearth ash into the compost. (That last is my fond name for the outdoor fireplace, a copper or copper alloy bowl in a frame we bought last summer.)
I figured the compost could do with a dousing, so I trained the hose on it to carry the ash into its depths. I heard rustlings from deep within and I figured the water was settling layers. Last year when I watered the trees with a spike, I was used to the water erupting at the surface a good reach away from where the spike penetrated. I figured something similar might be happening, but no. The rustlings became scrabblings from higher up, and two pairs of beady little eyes looked at me in apprehension before the mousiekins leapt out and away. I planned to turn the compost this weekend, but damn, there might be a nest in there. Why can't they nest in the woodpile?
In the middle of all this we went to the Bonnard exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. His paintings are fabulous, lush with color, vibrant with light, and reluctant to show their images. I was not so overwhelmed with his lithographs and pen & ink, because really he's a colorist. Boy was he a colorist. Initially he seemed like a cat person, but then in later paintings dachshunds appeared and I was happy. Also his earlier paintings are set in Paris, where he was a flâneur, a connoisseur of everyday life (we both read Edmund White's Le Flâneur after our trip last year); later ones are set in the country.
A new hall of mirrors has been installed in the ground floor of the museum. It reminded me, I said to RDC, of "Cube," except, as he pointed out, they're not moving all over trying to kill us. You slip booties over your feet--or I did both of us since RDC is gimpy these days--and enter at the right aft end of a 30-foot passage. All the surfaces are mirrored, so above your head you can see yourself underfoot. It's pretty wild. Then you exit on the left fore end--it's shaped like a periscope--and scamper into Bonnard.
We had wanted to have tea at the Brown Palace in the afternoon, but they were booked, the lazy sows. So we ambled down to Larimer and the Del Mar Crab House where we had oysters and a crab melt for me and a soft-shelled crab sandwich for him. I don't understand why soft-shelled crabs come in sandwiches. They're already breaded. Also, a soft-shelled crab fits on a hamburger-type bun but this one--"Why do they serve it on a hero bun?" I asked, and then shook myself. We had just passed the gyro cart, so maybe the sound was in my head, but I even call the things you get at Subway grinders, not subs, and heros--I have no idea where in the country they're called heros. Somewhere, though nowhere I've lived. Dunno where that came from.
I ordered my plants from High Country Gardens. They'll arrive in the days before Mother's Day weekend, a fine time to plant. I'll have that Friday off again. So that's done. They're all low-water shrubby type things, and I hope I chose a good variety of colors and bloom times. The one bit that scares me is the vinca I ordered for the easement. The description says it's an aggressive spreader and shouldn't be planted near anything else, which makes its insular position in the easement a fine one, but I don't think we're allowed to erect any kind of stakes and a string fence to protect it in its infancy from people getting out of their cars (we plan to gravel the two feet closest to the street), and planting it means opening up the groundcloth which might mean an onslaught of bindweed.
I am going to go find a good movie to watch while I iron the curtains. That'll be the last remnant of the smoke-filled house incident gone.
I approached the front yard with a shovel and a hoe and a swan rake, actually wearing boots because I anticipated a boot-on-the-shovel method of digging.
Oh-ho-ho.
I might have been better off with a sod-cutting plough. I did maybe a third of the area I intended before the hoe broke. I worked for a while with a fork and trowel before stopping. I'll attempt the rest tomorrow after the epoxy dries the hoe into one again. I hope.
I noticed another branch off the evergreen and one cracked off a plum, and just now, when I'm quite Done for the day, looking out the bedroom window, I noticed another small one broken off the cherry tree. Lest anyone think my beating the crap outta my trees was in vain, I should point out that these broken branches were higher than my reach, unless they were on the evergreen, which I ignored, or the cherry, which I forgot about. So I hauled a bunch of plum branches to the back and started cutting them up for the brush pile I mistook my left forefinger for a branch and decided I was too tired to see or cut straight. So I stopped.
RDC oiled the patio furniture and it looks miles better. And I finished swapping the windows. Last night I melted the care tag on one of the curtains into the iron, so I rehung the washed living room curtains wrinkled. RDC suggests either melting or sanding the polyester off the iron, since isoprophyl alcohol won't touch it; I favor buying a new iron.
I finally hung the new birdfeeder. The birds have already decided that the New and Different is not a threat and I can't wait for a squirrel to try it.
I had lunch with someone the other day who repeated someone else's description of two adjacent houses, one covered with anti-war signs and the other with a U.S. flag and a Marines flag, as "dueling houses." I said, because this really gets me, "I don't know why those two concepts have to be perceived as opposing."
Can o' worms, party of four.
She asked what I meant, and I said that a silver lining from last September was that anyone could fly the flag without being misunderstood: the whole country could claim it. But now it's shifted back to "belonging" only to a certain faction or mindset.
She didn't know what I meant, which I found frustrating since she agreed with the "dueling" perception. While I paused, thinking how politely to communicate the contradiction I saw in her stance, happily someone else got my back by saying that yes, she had flown her flag immediately after September 11th but not during the action in Afghanistan, "because I didn't want...," she paused,
"...to be misunderstood?" I suggested, and
she nodded, "anyone to think I supported that bombing." Explaining herself further, she said she sees that the flag represents jingoistic support of the conservative end of the spectrum rather than patriotism. I nodded, glad to have someone articulate the thought.
We then explained jingoistic: simplistic, reductionist slogans that quash discourse, such as "My country right or wrong" and "America--love it or leave it."
I didn't know how to communicate the contradiction I saw between the first person's a) perception of the flying the flag and peace as dueling concepts yet b) disagreement with the notion that the flag does not belong to all patriotic citizens. I am tongue-tied when it comes to polite but impassioned debate.
(And of course anyone should fly the flag and not be concerned with What Someone Might Think, but I think it's testament to how much the flag does "belong" more to conservatives that being misunderstood is so valid a concern.)
I brought it upon myself though. I had mentioned seeing a recent abuse of the flag that pressed all my buttons.
I hate car flags. I hate that they are made of flimsy plastic, that the wind rends them to tatters yet their owners don't replace them even when the stripes are half gone, their disposability. This most egregious offense yet was a U.S. flag on the left rear door of a car, with a Denver Broncos football team's flag on the right rear door.
These people didn't even know that the flag should always be on its own right and higher than any other domestic flag or pennant. I left unsaid the obvious, that football, stupid waste of time or not, should not be (by flag height) thus equated to the ideals of the United States of America, let alone (by being on the right) supersede them. Isn't knowledge of right treatment of the flag basic civic knowledge?
In later September 2001, I saw a photograph of a sidewalk outside the U.S. embassy in Canberra. (I think. Somewhere in Australia anyway.) A flag lay on the pavement, a carpet for letters and candles and flowers people had lain there in support of us in our crisis. I recoiled at that photograph, on a gut level, because that the flag shouldn't be on the ground is instinctual to me (speaking of jingoistic), then reprimanded myself: other countries are less goose-steppy about their flags and it's kindness, so accept it. I made the mistake of telling my father that, trying to explain what I saw as a fault in my reaction. He--he who told me I was in for a world of hurt in my idealism, who was my first opponent when I realized how ineffectual "America--love it or leave it" is as a statement of purpose, who taught me how to treat the flag--couldn't get past its being on the ground: another failure on my end to communicate my thought.
I don't see that similar ignorance or abuse by citizens or resident aliens, when committed with similar kind intent, is okay. It's yours. Treat it well.
What I mean by Hard Work Day is the picture book Alan Arkin (the actor) wrote about his son, but it seems the edition with the real illustrations is out of print and it's been reissued with new (i.e. wrong) illustrations. So no link for you, OMFB.
I ripped out the rest of the front yard, out to the tree and down to the sidealk. And you may ask yourself, even if you haven't been listening to Remain in Light, well, why did you do this? Okay, that doesn't go into the rhythm of "Once in a Lifetime" so well.
Last year I used a rototiller, which involved two trips in one day to Home Despot--a farther one than our usual, with a rental center--the return trip being mid-afternoon and therefore interminable, gasoline for the rototiller and us to breathe, nearly ripping out the sprinkler heads (do we know where they are? we do not), and, let's be honest, my getting RDC to do the actual rototilling, because that thing was a lot stronger than I am and clearly in the Hot or Sharp Category.
This year RDC has a wonky knee and I might be stronger than last year but in principles as well as physically and if I despise snowblowers leafblowers snowmobiles and jetskis I shouldn't cop out with a rototiller either. Also the sumac tree's roots are right on the surface. I'm not overly fond of the tree--its bark and inedible fruit are both orange--but it's a tree so it stays.
I have seldom wanted to be Dr. Dolittle's next Tommy as I did today. Not that talking to moles would have helped. I don't think Colorado has any. I don't need to add one to my list of quasipets--the invisible, cocker-spaniel-sized elephant, the hypothetical dog, and the eventual goat. And the penguins. So I did it. I am the human rototiller. Except I overturned maybe two inches instead of six.
Then I cut more deadweight from a plum tree and trimmed all the deciduous deadfall to fit neatly into the brush pile. That made me feel vaguely like SNL's Anal Retentive Chef but really that pile can't get any bigger than it is. Since it was all dead I didn't have "Gone with the Wind" in my head either but the Grinch, from when he saws bits off Max's antler.
I also hoed the vegetable and south gardens, added the leftover edging from last year to the new garden, dumped all the clots of grass from the front under the cherry tree in what I'm sure is a very attractive manner, and brought the last of the cleaned storm windows to the coal cellar while bringing most of the firewood back out.
I'm tired.
What is the world coming to? Neve Campbell cast as Salamanca Hiddle with Sarah Michelle Gellar as Phoebe in a cinematization of Walk Two Moons? A reportedly not fat kid as Stanley Yelnats and a reportedly not African-American kid as Zero in the cinematization of Holes? Avoiding the cinematization of Ring of Endless Light was easy, and Sigourney Weaver as the warden is pretty brilliant casting. So I might not die. Unless I have to see the movie of I Capture the Castle. I would just fall over and expire.
RDC is going to the east coast soon, to work in Boston for a week and then go to Connecticut. He'll see his best friend and his baby one day and spend another with his aunt and uncle and see his grandfather. He has just persuaded his aunt and uncle to go to New York to see the Matisse-Picasso exhibit at the MOMA. I am envious but not jealous, which is fine. He was debating the ethics of cajoling his aunt and uncle into doing this. They're not afraid of the city, as my relatives are; they saw the huge van Gogh exhibit at the Met; they brought him to the Tutankhamen exhibit when he was a child.
Really, that was the deciding factor for me. He asked me if I would be jealous, and I said no, I would be happy for him. I will always regret that I didn't see Tut; unless I ever go to Cairo, I never will. He must go.
His aunt said they could train back afterward and eat in Connecticut. That cracked me up, because that's what she wanted to do when we went east in November as well: to join us in the city on Wednesday during daylight and then train home in time to eat dinner. In Connecticut. Leaving New York City. To eat in Connecticut.
And now I can die happy, for I have met Howie the Dog.
The move has meant everyone at work has new neighbors, and so I have got to know different people. (The woman I saw "Bowling for Columbine" with? Barely knew her name before October.) So I was passing the time of day with someone ages ago and saw on her shelf a picture. A picture of a dog. Of Howie the Dog.
Howie the Dog is half basset hound and half dalmatian. He has a slightly larger than average basset shape, dalmatian spots, and a basset's loveability (I have seldom heard of or met a dalmatian with a nice personality). In the photograph, he was sitting, which always looks ridiculous (read: loveable) in a basset anyway, with his head turned up a little so his ears looked even longer, and had slightly lifted one paw, kind of demurely.
I was in love.
This woman lives nearby and I pass near her house on my bike commute. I have been kind of hopeful that what finally happened yesterday would eventually happen. As I turned onto the bike route, at the bottom of a slope a short block away was a long, low, spotty dog, on a leash with two humans. There could be only one. I yelled, "Howie!" and sped down the hill.
My coworker took a moment to recognize me in helmet and sunglasses but I tumbled (on purpose, I feel I should clarify) off the bike and into Howie's lap, or vice-versa. What a great dog. He loved me immediately, tried to burrow under my skin to get closer, and eagerly welcomed all my fondling and cooing. (Oh, and I met her husband. I'm sure he is very nice but suspect he was taken aback by my rambunctious exuberance.) Howie is black and white, like magpies and penguins and some painted ponies; and he is spotted but has nearly solidly black ears, which a dog ought to have if it possibly can. He even matched my bike, I observed aloud, white with black, except he was not a hardtail. His entire stern, not just his tail, wagged joyfully. He clearly had not been pet or flubbered or loved in any way at all in simply years, very shocking behavior on his parents' part. He needed to be skritched and made to kick his leg by rubbing his belly in the right spot (literally: his markings made it easy to locate and remember the right place) and of course his ears folded in many different ways. One day, I will count all his spots and tickle them all.
O My Friends and Brothers, I like me like that. My coworker is fairly used to me bounding into her office to tell her new fun gossip or telling outrageous stories. It is rare these days for me to be so confident that my behavior is perfectly correct and that if it's wrong I don't want to be right. Meeting Howie the Dog was therefore uplifting in two ways.
Allons en Europe!
RDC has a business trip (let us all slap our palms to our foreheads in sympathy) to Paris. Two years ago I didn't go to Northern Ireland with him and I've never particularly gotten over it. We were going to go away for my birthday anyway, either a day's drive to South Dakota to see Crazy Horse and Mt. Rushmore or a Surprise for me that RDC was plotting for me in Colorado, and, as my sister said last night, Rapid City, Paris, what's the difference?
I'll take the TGV to visit Emlet for the days that RDC is working. Nisou and SPG are going à Bretagne over the weekend, so unless Nisou brings Emlet to Paris instead he still won't get to see them, but these are details we have yet to hash out.
I am going to see the chapel that Melissa recommended last time, and eat glace on the Île de St. Louis as Lucy recommended, and go the Louvre and the Rodin and maybe the Pompidou and the Tour d'Eiffel.
Wheeeeeee!
Yesterday when I took a shower when I got home, Blake pouted until I caught on. I filled up his spray bottle and gave him a thorough shower. He was begging for it even when I just tested to see if this was what he really wanted (by casting a sopping hand's worth of droplets toward him). Because showers involve me in the altogether as well as the buddy, you get to see only the intense post-shower preen.
Here we are on the couch in the sunlight. (See how much better the rug looks in sunlight? Not ochre!)
Observe the damp feathers on his neck, all spikey.
I was trying to get him to look up at me because his preening face is so adorable (much like most of his faces). All the feathers that usually warm his lower mandible instead angle back; we call this his muttonchop look and he looks nineteenth century.
He was having none of my interruptions though. When I gave up and poked him in the breast to force him to look up, he did so with his bitey face on, crest lowered, scowling. Not so cute.
He finishes up an all-over preen with a good head scratching. See the little foot? Sometimes when his toe gets into the right angle of his jaw he gives himself the yawns.
After enough preening, he was ready to prance. He loves the space between the couch and the wall. It's ceiled by the couch arm. The webcam is a great way to keep an eye on him, to ensure he doesn't suddenly get interested in the power cords. He hasn't been yet. He can't resist thin round cables, like the lower end of a Macintosh power cable or a FireWire or headphones, but electric cords don't intrigue him.
Yet.
He's not Howie the Dog. I know. But he's still adorable in his own way.
This bit should go with a photograph above but I'm padding. On the table behind him you can see Culture of Fear and--very appropriately--Blake's chief fear, a promotional toy RDC picked up at a conference. It is not big, it is not blue, but it is a squeezey, stress-ball, golf ball-patterned thing, and he hates it. We keep it in easy reach for when we want to chase him out from under the dining table or keep him away from our sexy feet.
OMFB, I have to be quicker with the cam, like not keeping it in a drawer. I was sitting in the reading chair and had just fetched Blake down from his cage (when he wants to be picked up, he forgets how to elevator down the bars to the stand but paces helpless on the top of his cage, so you have to get up to get him instead of just reaching) when he started scratching his head and jaw so much he gave himself the yawns. He yawned for about three minutes straight, with RDC and me just staring at him in wonder at his adorability. We did not drool, but nearly. Blake was actually tired too, not just reflex yawning, and he wanted to tuck his head but he can't yawn from the tuck. So after every yawn he'd turn his head a little more into the tuck, but face more forward for the yawns, and if I ever manage to catch video of that instead of still photographs, I will strap every one I know into a chair à la Alex until they admit that my buddy is the cutest ever possible yawner.
Whoo. I'm listening to PALM: Pick a Lane, Motherfucker, a mix Trish made, and while I am spared the hell of stop-and-go traffic on a daily basis, this might actually get me back in the gym. She is all edjimicating me, music-wise. I've mentioned my unhipness before, yes? or it is otherwise screamingly obvious? Mudhoney, Weezer, Wheatus, the Offspring, Soul Coughing, Foo Fighters. It's all new to me. She is clearly trying to drive me insane, because if Me First and the Gimme Gimmes' covering "Leaving on a Jetplane" nearly broke my head, and Mudhoney's cover of "Pump It Up" is--while not nearly so mind-bending--possibly enough to drive me over the edge.
Anyway, she and Jared picked me up Saturday night and they had the Obligatory Meeting of the Bird. Blake preferred Jared, who is taller (making Blake higher) and wore fabric easier to climb than Trish's. He chucked a little, refused to be pet by such rank amateurs as these, and performed only by bowing to the candelabra (and immediately trotting back to the edge of the table begging to be picked up again). They also had the Obligatory Trot through the House, and Trish won my undying affection by declaring Formigny the Clue House, because of its staircases (short and secret passagey) in opposite corners.
Trish voting for Japanese, I brought them to Japon. Whose chef's name is Wayne Conwell. And which had these beaded metal string curtains which looked like they should be the manes of the Heavy Metal My Pretty Pony. Over dinner, we, by which I mean Trish and I, commiserated with each other about the Johns of C (Cusack and Corbett). Then we gossiped about journals, except none of us had anything particularly new. Then it was late (for me), we were three people sitting around a small table over a drink, so I suggested we all drink to each other's legs. Trish had already abused me for not having seen "Office Space" but I abused her worse for not having memorized "Jaws" and not getting my joke. But Jared did. It was muchos fun.
We all wound up back at my house after midnight, so we officially comprised a very small, very short EasterCon. Just like the cool kids.
My body hating me as it does, I woke at 6 after getting to bed at 1. Instead of admitting how long I stayed inside trying to nap (difficult, what with the two cups of Earl Grey in the morning), I shall only admit that the one thing I accomplished was compost.
I assembled a new bin RDC brought home and turned the compost, putting all the raw stuff in the new one (which does not yet have squirrel and mouse holes bitten through it) and putting all the almost-dirt in the old one. The almost-dirt is going to be only almost-dirt, but I filled up the new one with leaves. I just read that you should shove a bunch of your leaves in a trash bin and attack it with a weed whacker, just like those little hand-held, single-serving blenders, and that will be handy to reduce the volume of my leaves.
I say all this to postpone the ugly truth. I killed a mouse. Or more. I've known for months that mice live in my compost bin, where they have asparagus stumps and orange rind and whatnot to feast on. I suspected they would, in this season, be nesting. But I turned the compost anyway, chasing out two grown mice as I pitchforked all the natal dirt. My last step is always to wet the compost, this time with the five-gallon bucket of roof drippings from Saturday's rain. Heavier stuff sinks, lighter stuff rises. Lighter stuff like a bald, eyes not yet open, but pretty big considering the size of its presumable parents, baby mouse corpse.
It was not a Frisby. It just can't have been.
I know intellectually that there is probably something better to do on a stormy Monday night than play boat in the living room with my buddy, maybe a plate of cinnamon toast, and a satisfying haul of books from the 'brary, and my computer, but right now I can't think of what that might be.
John Banville, The Book of Evidence; Neil Gaiman, Coraline and Sandman (vol. 1); Avi, Crispin: the Cross of Lead, and Joseph Krumgold, ...And Now, Miguel. Also Words to Outlive Us, a book of first-person accounts of the Warsaw ghetto, and The Age of Napoleon, because France is a blank slate for me between 1429 and 1914, except maybe Louis XIV-XVII (the high Louis) and 1871.
My plan, this week, is to grow moss. Which means to prove that I have neither self-respect nor willpower nor discipline when I don't have a chaperon. I intend to eat meals the size of my head, frequently; to read a bunch of books, probably more of the children's than the adult's variety; and to set anti-landspeed records for inertia. Yesterday the obvious excuse not to work outside was the rain; today it's the wind. Also today it's that I got really fucking frustrated at Microsoft Word today, having manually to format shit that would be automated were my software to behave correctly, and then keeping my tongue when after that, the authors wanted to change this and that which meant I redid a lot of that formatting. Tomorrow, though, I might have to get up. Because there's just one small problem in my plot to devolve into an invertebrate, and that is that there is not a lick of chocolate in the entire house.
Did The Bar Sinister, which was written as a sequel to the BBC "Pride and Prejudice" rather than the book, name Darcy's harlequin Great Dane? This dog appears in the miniseries, not the book. A black and white harlequin Great Dane (are harlequins ever another color combination?) who rivals all other dogs in gorgeousness as Howie the Dog rivals them in adorability. I am still looking for its picture but this and that are similar.
I mentioned Just There horses before. I notice that right after Darcy trots through Meryton on his all-black horse, a villein paces through on a Just There horse with a white blaze and socks, I think to mark their contrast in quality.
I just got off the phone with my mother. She told of the antics of my sister's cat, whom my sister brought home over Easter. My sister's had Kitty (sadly, not an alias: no one has been able to come up with a better name) for maybe two months now and brought her home twice. Our mother persistently refers to the cat as "he." Of course it doesn't really matter: the cat is asexual. And it's not as if "Kitty" as a name offers any clues about gender. But still. Is it just me? Is remembering this so difficult? We anthropomorphize our pets--I wrote "whom" instead of "which" automatically, and so would my mother except she'd say "who"--in so many ways that this should be one. At her first masculine pronoun I interjected "she," possibly rudely, but in a way that almost anyone else I know would have run with ("'She,' right, as I was saying, loves to birdwatch..."). My mother instead required a tangent excusing herself. Perhaps she does this to dissuade me from interrupting her or from correcting her at all. Perhaps she is just incapable of learning or remembering: if I ever correct her again (and I will), she will not remember--any more than she remembers the cat's gender--that she already explained herself (twice now).
Her excuse is that all cats in the house--Granny's exSqueaky, her husband's exMurray--were male. So? All the dogs except Stanley, who was a package deal with my father, were female. Knowing the cat's gender is a part of knowing the cat, and her inability to grasp this simple fact illustrates another reason I'm glad not to have spored: if I had a son, would she never remember his gender because there ever were only girls in her house?
I told her about Howie the Dog though. She appreciated that. But I forgot to tell her that my friend's year-old baby's first utterances have been barking.
Who is responsible for the weather?
I was going to dig out the other bit of the front yard today. I'm not overly enthusiastic about doing this, since we already have problems with drainage in that corner and I'm not a landscape or hydraulics engineer or whatever I'm supposed to be to arrange the ground properly. Also I should rip out that easement, though I didn't order enough ground cover for it. I didn't any evening this week because the weather supported my slugdom (wonderful, wonderful rain!); forecasts called for a warmer and drier Friday. But it is 40 degrees and cloudy.
I think I might walk down to Cherry Creek and look for a skirt--a grey one, naturally--because for Paris I have either my allegedly undyed linen one, very pale, very thin, not a good material for traveling nor a color for wearing several days in a row nor a weight for possible chilliness or rain; or my denim skirt, which is too American. I made the mistake of describing it thus to my mother.
"What's wrong with being American?" she demanded querulously.
"Nothing, of course. What I mean there is that it's denim, it's the equivalent of wearing jeans except it's a skirt, so it's too casual--as the U.S. is casual--and I know you would no more wear jeans traveling in a foreign capital than I would." (I don't know. Maybe now she would. But she didn't pack jeans to go to England in 1981.)
Of course if I can't find the right skirt I'll justify the denim by being appropriate in all other respects, durability and nonwrinklyness and skirtiness.
And then I might bus to downtown and watch a matinee of "Holes."
Because it's damn well too cold to muck about in the muck. Warm muck, that would be okay. Maybe tomorrow.
Yesterday a package awaited me on the porch. I left my sister a message that it had arrived and that I wouldn't open it until my birthday, but when we talked last night she had me open it. She wanted me to have the things before going to Paris (my entire family fear I am not going to survive this trip, so if I don't that should be ascribed to my family's Gut, a powerful if temperamental organ of prescience). She told me, as I cut the tape, that it was a bunch of stuff equivalent to the crap she mails me from the Sunday supplements. "A Thomas Kinkade Christmas train?" I asked.
No, but a t-shirt with a train on it. I first thought it was Thomas the Tank (Steam?) Engine, but it's the Smile Train, a charity her friend runs to fund corrective cosmetic surgery for kids with cleft palates and the like. Also a pitcher with a pattern of squares that I recognized (as I was meant to) as reminiscent of our mother's lemonade pitcher. A citronella candle in a periwinkle metal sand bucket. More bubbles for my bubble machine. A purple pen from Liberty Mutual. A lavender box of tissues. Another rubber duckie, this one from the Colonnade whose rooftop pool she uses. A shaven? chenille pillow that neither of us was sure I'd like but that exactly matches both the slate blue pillows and the wine-colored throw on Dim the Couch. (I didn't name my furniture. Someone else did.) So overall it was like a Yule stocking, except a birthday one. It was great, and everything made me laugh.
Also there was the yellow rose I took from my grandmother's grave, all finished drying now.
The English Book of Common Prayer says, "In the midst of life, we are in death." For us that day it was "In the midst of death we are in life." After the service when first my great-aunt and then my other great-aunt and then my mother took yellow roses from the flower arrangement, my sister and cousin and I decided to do so as well before the family stripped it entirely bare. The wreath looked as bedraggled as you'd expect after being tugged at and dismembered, and the three of us chortled mirthlessly at everyone's (and our own) heresy and disrespect, and mirthfully as we invented words for our grandmother, who would pretend to disapprove but suppress a smile and let us see her doing so.
Is it only an Irish thing, to be so close to laughter at or after a funeral? I think not; grief can often lead to hysteria. I do like that Irish short story about the wake, and is the dancing master's wake? Because as people drink and dance at the wake, they decide the guest of honor, loving to dance as he did, should partake of the festivities, so out of the coffin comes the corpse to partner his mourners in their dancing. The story's probably meant to illustrate how we're all drunks with no sense of propriety, but me, I'm glad for when a joke can shine through clouds of grief.
CLH and I laughed, because yesterday was a month and a day before my birthday. But this is what she gets for being so hyperprompt.
After last Saturday's rain, the basement rug got wet and we brought it outside Sunday to dry. Except I didn't bring it in Monday so it's been wet all week. I am pretty sure I foresee a replacement. But I have to go attack it with the wet-dry vacuum and see if it's salvageable. Plus today it's sunnier but the sun will have a better chance at bleaching or killing the mold or just finishing the drying job if I use the wet-dry vac now. My other tasks today are digging the edging into the north front garden and digging out the easement and the strip between the sumac tree and the property line. I'm really not enthused about doing these things. So I'm babbling here.
It's not so babbly to say that "Holes" was pretty good. The casting was great (except that the actor who plays Stanley's mother annoys me), the story and the mood were faithful to those of the book, and the music fit well. It fit well now, in 2003; my only criticism is that it will date the movie more than necessary. Or maybe only if it's cringeworthy. I just watched "Roxanne" for the first time in a million years and that 1987 mood music was terribly intrusive, like Yaz in "The Chocolate War" or "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" in "Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid."
It is babbly to say that I found a black jersey skirt, just what I wanted--at T.J. Maxx. Cherry Creek is not a very good mall, as no mall probably can be, and Cherry Creek North is waaaaay too expensive a neighborhood to shop in. I went into Bryn Walker, a (shocking!) independent (I think) clothing store in the mall, and I found a skirt I loved because its rear hem fell nearly to the floor while the front hem hit only a mid-ankle.
Then the saleswoman suggested a pair of pants, and what the hell, I don't actually own pants that aren't jeans, for yoga, or part of a suit, so I did. She loved them (or professed to) on me and my "cute shape." She was rounder than I am and it's just a Fact that Salespeople Lie and that if she were thinner herself she wouldn't've said I have a great ass. Since I spent my entire childhood in mortal fear of floodwater pants, I cannot get behind this cropped thing. But I didn't take them off yet.
I tried on a shirt (that she called a "top," which usage makes me itch in a vague way) that did not disguise the bosom nearly as much as I require my shirts to do. There might even have been, by means of clinginess, emphasis, when I have spent my entire boobed life deemphasizing. It was also black, and I should maybe stop shopping with my mental mother. "Don't wear black next to your face" is an axiom I believe in anyway, and I don't wear red. Not because it makes one look like a whore, which is my mother's credo, but because red with any yellow to it doesn't work with my skin tone and red with any blue to it reminds me of my mother's beloved maroons and roses.
But in the black shirt and pants, I tried on a straw hat with a wide brim and slightly peaked crown, and I mourned Audrey. Then the saleswoman wrapped a scarf around my shoulders, and holy shit, I looked--well, I'll say it, I looked pretty good. I looked really good. I looked stylish and as if I didn't dress at Ross. Also I didn't look dumpy and dowdy but attractively curvy, which is a pleasant change.
Her next push was for different shoes. Another reason for me not to wear the pale linen skirt is that I am going to bring one pair of shoes for the week, my black Dansko clogs, and I Don't Wear Black Shoes with Pale Colors. (Which is why I didn't buy a beautiful pink linen dress at Casual Corner, besides that pink linen doesn't travel or hold up for a week any better than undyed linen). She wanted me to try on a pair of mary janes with a flat footbed. Yeah, flâneuring around Paris in new shoes without proper support. That sounds good.
Meanwhile she was telling me she just wouldn't let me get the skirt, that I must get the pants instead. Meanwhile the other customer (in the two-salesperson store) was making a purchase of six hundred and sixty-four dollars (more than my plane ticket). The pants were sixty bucks, as was the skirt; I hadn't looked at the booby shirt's price tag nor that of the scarf or the hat or the shoes. Dumpy and dowdy is cheaper and takes less space on an international flight. Damn. I asked her to hold the skirt and pants and vamoosed with empty hands.
I took the bus downtown, ransacked Ross and T.J. Maxx before "Holes," and found yet another in my long-running series of black jersey skirts, sturdier than the Bryn Walker one, ankle-length though without the fabulous sweeping hem, unwaisted. Also a black linen "top" with white embroidery on it (for my white linen skirt, because my mental mother won't let me buy a piece if it doesn't work with something I already have).
After "Holes" I walked down to the Tattered Cover (take that, Barnes & Noble! which is right under the movie theatre) for Emlet: Make Way for Ducklings and a charming book about a squirrel who paints with his tail, inspired by everything he sees through the windows at the Met. (I do secretly still love the sunflower-beheading, nectarine-raiding, tomato-nibbling squirrels.) This squirrel's name was Micawber, and what could be cuter? But they didn't have Giraffes Can't Dance, so I still haven't seen that. And a Paris guide or two, based on what seemed best from the 'brary.
The rug is almost dry, but I wonder if the sun will be able to shine the smell out of it, or if the smell lasted only as long as the wet. I suspect we'll find out the hard way.
I ripped out some of the bit by the porch, trying to spare the grape hyacinth and the tulip that I would like to transplant when the big silver sage goes in there. I put in some edging, but not more because I didn't rip everything out. I didn't rip everything out because the soil's still so wet (excuses excuses...) and would dry into its clumps. And that's really it.
Otherwise Blake and I sat in the sun and read Toni Cade Bambara. I wasn't wearing much, it was 73, and I was hot. Is that usual?
Last night I watched the Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine cinematization of "Jane Eyre." Orson Welles was Citizen Rochester, all kinds of dark and brooding, and I wonder that he wasn't cast as Heathcliff in 1939 instead of Laurence Olivier. This was made four years after "Citizen Kane," which certainly made its influence felt. The set was Xanadus Lowood and Thornfield, and Mother Citizen played Mrs. Reed. (That was Endora in "Bewitched"!) Orson Welles cannot have been all that mad at "How Green Was My Valley" (which won "Citizen Kane's" Oscar) because Mrs. Morgan played Bessie. I do not understand why Joan Fontaine was considered so Plain and Unremarkable as to be the second Mrs. DeWinter and Jane Eyre both, plus the wife in "Suspicion." Her characters just didn't have good luck with their husbands' first wives, did they? But she was quite pretty, and her sister certainly held up well, given this year's Oscar appearance.
The movie was a hatchet job, adaptation-wise. What really cracked me up was that at every huge departure from the given plot, Joan Fontaine would narrate a paragraph highlighted in a book, strongly implying she was reading straight from the book. The paragraphs above and below the highlighted ones were also not Charlotte Brontë's. I don't require a book to be faithful, ya ya ya, except that Jane does not live up to her childhood pride and self-respect, even as given in the movie: she accepts gifts of dressmaking fabrics (that aren't black or grey) from Mr. Rochester during their engagement; she returns to Gateshead as she vowed, at 10, never to do; she writes a humble letter to Mr. Brocklehurst--though, upon leaving Lowood, she declared herself forever free of him as well. The absence of the Riverses is one thing; the absence of Jane's strength of character quite another.
I wonder if that wonderful harlequin Great Dane was cast in the recent "Pride and Prejudice" because Mr. Rochester's Pilot in this "Jane Eyre" was such a dog?
Sunday I went to see the "Amazing Caves" IMax at the Museum of Nature and Science. I was okay for almost all of it: the repelling down a cliff to a cave mouth in Arizona, the unstable ice cave in Greenland, even most of the cave diving in Mexico. Only when a cave diver removed her tanks to squeeze them before her through a hole and then followed them did I get squeamish, if not actually queasy.
Afterward I strolled through the park and signed a petition near a demonstration for an off-leash area. It really is ridiculous that dogs can't run and play in city parks, as children may. No wonder they have behavior problems (as inactive children do): they're not permitted to be who they are. A coworker was there with her two Frisbee dogs, and there were a three-month-old hound mix (spotted, with big ears: my favorite of the bunch), two Newfs (not with Frisbees), many border collies and heelers and mixes, a sleek doberman, labs and lab mixes, easily two dozen dogs. And the only ones who barked (and that incessantly) were two dustmops--they must have been so jealous of the real dogs of worthwhile sizes and commensurate physical ability. A Newfie might not be a good Frisbee dog, but at least it can rescue a drowning fisherman.
My notstepmother's Yorkshire terrier is at least somewhat of a dog, and my father has certainly encouraged his more aggressive behaviors (like trying to chase away all the birds who live in their hedges). Now my sister has Kitty, and of course there's Blake. My sister observed, "The kids' table at Thanksgiving is going to be a nightmare now."
For the past few days we've had normal--that is, as I remember from my first few years here--weather: sun during the day building to an afternoon storm. I recently read that for the past few years those storms didn't happen in part because the weather had so much less moisture in the mountains to get started with. I think late April might be earlier to start, but I do love the rain. Yesterday there was a brief thunderstorm just as I wanted to bike home, with hail. My Macintosh consultant-cum-bad weather rescuer rescued me, and a fine thing because the streets were flooded. It didn't rain that much, but the storm sewers (stupid things, drawing off all that water just because not enough ground is permeable) are clogged, seemingly always.
Denver Water has a site now where you can find your historic usage--inexplicably arranged in reverse chronology--and compare yourself to the average user. The average household uses 9,000 gallons in the winter and 23,000 in the summer; we use 7K and 13K. The average household is 2.7 people. So we beat the average comfortably, which is fine, but I know we could conserve more.
We don't catch the pre-hot shower water in a bucket. I don't know about the state of our pipes, if they're sufficiently insulated to shorten that pre-hot flow. I run only full clothes- and dishwasher loads, and I probably could conserve more water if I didn't use a dishwasher at all, but I would sooner replumb my house to redirect all graywater to the toilet and the hoses than give up a dishwasher. We replaced the dishwasher our first summer with one that allegedly uses less than average water and electricity. The clotheswasher came with the house and I wonder if replacing it with a horizontal axis one would be worthwhile.
The appliance we are thinking of replacing is the swamp cooler. Right now it makes RDC's study freezing and grimy and the rest of the house bearable. If we got a new one and mounted it on the roof, using the existing ductwork from the solar panels (is that possible? we'll find out), said new one would be quieter, use less water, and cool most of the floor more effectively. But that's the thing: his study needs to be cool enough for him to work in and the bedroom cool enough to sleep in; the solar heat affects the kitchen, dining room, and living room. The floor fan--ten years old and still humming, and clean because a filthy fan is icky--would probably draw cooler air into the bedrooms better than it does the solar-warmed air.
This summer we won't save anything on water and might use more: establishing a xeriscape uses less water only assuming you used to water the grass it replaced. I did not. According to Denver Water, we used more in the summer of 2000, when at least RDC made some attempt to preserve the grass, than we did in either summer since, when there was a vegetable garden and no bothering with grass.
Next year we deal with the backyard, ripping out the pathetic, weed-ridden remnants of bluegrass and planting buffalo and gama grass plus, replacing one raised bed and building another. This year, whatever doesn't need nurturing and isn't bindweed can frolic at will.
The other day a someone asked me over the phone what I'm planting this year. Flowering shrubs, I told her, and she repeated that to someone in the room with her. "Oh, rhododendrons?" he asked and she relayed. "No," I replied, "rhododendra don't do well in Denver." He began to offer suggestions.
First of all, I hate two-way phone conversations. I won't be the mediator between whoever's on the phone and whoever's standing next to me. I hand the phone off for almost anything more than "RDC says hi." Second, the plural is rhododendra. Third, "oh, rhododendrons?" because that's the only flowering shrub in the world?
I restrained my response, not to make the friend the mediator and because I had no idea how politely to say that in addition to amending the soil as he recommended, I would also have to alter the climate, making it more humid, and lower the altitude, making the sun less harsh, or at the very least suddenly have a 30-year-old shade tree. I guess I could have just stated these facts, but stating them without sarcasm, or evenly without sounding antagonistic, was beyond me.
I maybe should work on being able to confront people, to address them. Mostly I favor a pointed silence.
I don't recall my mother's being as rude on the phone as she is now before her second husband. I have attempted to view this sympathetically (she wants people to know, and to reaffirm their knowledge, that she and BDL are so very involved with each other at every moment) but, unsurprisingly, failed. Often she'll initiate a call to me but be talking to BDL when I answer and greet her. I've asked her why she calls me despite having more pressing need of conversation with BDL. And she'll always explain why, just this once, she needed to talk to him right then--despite having dialed me half a minute before. I don't mean that we're on the phone and BDL calls "I'm going to the store, do you need anything?" and my mother says "Oh yes, could you get a jug of milk and I think we're out of sugar." I mean we're on the phone and she might interrupt even her own sentence to me (my own to her are always fair game) to tell him what we're talking about. Can't this wait? If he hears juicy gossip or a compelling debate, can he not wait until after the call to be filled in?
When I'm on the phone with someone and RDC needs to tell me something Right Then, I'll generally excuse myself for a moment, listen to him telling me briefly that the house is on fire, and return to my call. The problem is that my mother is so damn deaf or inattentive that when I excuse myself she doesn't hear. My parents both are fond of calling me before work "because I know you're home," despite being repeatedly informed that RDC sleeps later than I do. (This makes him a slackabed, not differently-houred.) If I need to get some clothes, I'll tell her that she should keep talking but I won't respond for a moment while I'm in the bedroom with a still-slumbering RDC. Invariably she needs this repeated, by which time I'm in the bedroom and not talking but grabbing (not deciding among) garments.
Would this bother me as much if it weren't she committing the offense? I don't know. Sometimes when I'm on the phone with a friend, a housemate, human or animal, adult or child, might interrupt her. When it's a kid or a pet, I want to know what my niece or nephew is doing to cause the quickly quieted ruckus. It's part of the story. When it's an adult, I honestly can't recollect that anyone else I know will allow, let alone initiate, an interjection that disrupts our conversation.
BDL is extremely immature, it's true. He thinks nothing of interrupting an in-person conversation--a sentence, not a pause--to show you his orange-peel dentures. So maybe I should make child-allowances for him. Nah. My sister doesn't: if she and my mother are talking in person and BDL interrupts my mother's very sentence, she will shut up immediately because he is The Man. My sister will ask her, "Oh, were you done? I thought you were still talking," and at least my mother seems to accept this correction of her doormattitude. If he interrupts my sister, she doesn't shut up until she's finished her thought. (My sister's sensitive to interruption for this very reason--maybe too sensitive to it in animated conversation.)
Ursual LeGuin wrote something in The Eye of the Heron that I really like and try to live by. It could be just so I can feel virtuous and martyred (just like my mother), which scares me. It was something about having enough self-esteem that others' insults or demands matter less. I should add that passage to my Explanations page. A pointed silence with eyebrows raised disdainfully into my hairline is not what Ursula LeGuin meant, though, I'm pretty sure.
Oh.
Oh my.
Oh my goodness.
Apple's new music store, OMFB, is what I've been waiting for. It still has gaping holes, mind you: it has some Corey Hart but not "Sunglasses at Night," some Til Tuesday but not "Voices Carry": not the one-hit wonders. Lots of the songs I'm looking for I haven't had since I arrived at college and starting taping people's vinyl over the compilations I built off the radio, full of the hiss of low recording quality, FM background noise, and my dog suddenly scratching herself or my mother calling for me.
I paused for a long time at Journey. Journey was a guilty pleasure of mine in high school, it being heavy metal and not something that I, as a wannabe prep, could admit to. Later I learned from a real high school metalhead (the one I married) that no boy ever liked Journey but pretended to because that was a chick band. Oh. I forewent Journey for now. I set myself a ten-dollar limit to indulge my nostalgia this evening.
It didn't have that song by the Call, I think, that's in "The Lost Boys." Nor the Cult song I wanted. I didn't get Echo and the Bunnymen, because I want all the Songs to Learn and Sing and the Music Store doesn't yet have it complete. No "Welcome to the Boomtown" by David and David. No Flock of Seagulls. I didn't get Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" because I couldn't decide among the several remixes and clearly the original 2:51 is not long enough.
The take: Animotion, Obsession; A-HA, Take On Me; Big Country, Where the Rose Is Sown and In a Big Country; Dennis DeYoung, Desert Moon; Dexy's Midnight Runners, Come on Eileen; John Waite, Missing You; Madness, Our House; Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, If You Leave; Smithereens, Blood and Roses; Modern English, I Melt with You; Violent Femmes, Blister in the Sun; and Weather Girls, It's Raining Men.
That was just too easy.
Yesterday we each put in twelve hours on the house and garden and bikes: I ripped the sod from, added spent garden soil to, lay groundcloth in, and edged with brick one side of the north front garden, lay a path of stepping stones through it to the north side of the house, clipped cherry sprouts from under their parents, and cleared the last leaf, twig, and mulch debris from the porch and side gardens. RDC swapped the ski for the bike racks on Cassidy, and in the rackless interim, we made a Home Despot run for compost, brick, and the makings of a pegboard. Breaks from my sod-busting and -hauling were holding down the other end of pegboard and 1x3s.
RDC brought the last of the firewood back outside, vacuumed the back basement, emptied the shop vac (discovering a hair clip I'd been missing), fortified our bike tires with Tuffy strips, of whose worth if not spelling I am certain of. When I scampered to the coal room to get my old Cannondale (where the Tuffies were), I admired the new lightswitch that doesn't spark or buzz or anything.
I was really unenthusiastic about ripping out the last of the front yard. I measured and staked the property line and if anything shortchanged us, but I absolutely don't want to impinge on those neighbors. I'll pull the south neighbor's bindweed when it gets too close to my garden, but not the north neighbors': they might find the bindweed flowers too pretty to kill. They have trodden on our downspouts while mowing our grass, knocked the "Please Do Not Block Gate" sign off our back fence while shoving unbundled, unbagged yard waste into the dumpster (last fall while I hoed out the vegetable garden, listening incredulously through the fence), blocked our gate with unflattened, unrecycled cartons, flouted the watering restrictions all summer long, and are altogether unapproachable. At some point I would like to ask them please to stop throwing water away, first because overwatering is wrong and emptying the clippings directly into the dumpster illegal and immoral, and second because my leaf pile is almost gone (my compost pile is hot! glory be!) and I'll need browns soon.
But I did it. I still have to edge, really delicately along the property line.
As dusk fell we put the bikes and tools away and showered. Mm, shower. RDC's other critical task had been lunch, which we ate around 3:00,* late enough that all we wanted now was dessert. I suggested walking to Licks, and RDC wondered if that was nearer or farther than the gelato place in Cherry Creek North (nearer) but after showering decided the corner store would have all we needed. We scampered out, debating flavors. We got two pints, because we're grown-ups and can, but mostly because he is a heathen who prefers Swiss Almond Vanilla to Mint & [Oreo].
We watched "Road to Perdition," which considering it had Tom Hanks was quite good. He didn't overact (Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan). At the end of this sentence I am going to spoil the endings of both "Perdition" and "Ryan" to explain why it was good: his last words were not "Earn this." Safe now.
Besides ice cream we also bought a Sunday Post. So today, in marked contrast to yesterday, we got up at 10 instead of 7, it is cloudy instead of sunny, I actually read 100 pages of a book (I have ignored Book of Evidence all week because I wanted to read it in a big chunk) instead of browsing through travel guides, and we are slubbering around the living room with bathrobes and newspapers and lattes. Also we might go to the gym.
*Hey, that sentence could easily be misread as using "which" for a conjunction: "Task was lunch, but we didn't eat until three," instead of "task was lunch, which meal we ate at three."
I rode to work but had to get my chauffeur to bring me home. I still don't know how to shoe Shadowfax and its rear tire was flat. Again.
Saturday when RDC inserted the Tuffy strips, he unknowingly pinched the tube when he reset the rear tire; Sunday we were going to ride our bikes to the gym but Shadowfax came up lame. We had no spare tubes or patches, so we drove instead, and first to REI for supplies. Sunday night I finally had a lesson in bike maintenance, learning how to pop the bead of the tire out of the wheel, find the puncture in the tube, apply a patch, etc. Biggest obstacle: filthy hands.
Monday I rode to work, without patch kit or pump, and in the afternoon the tire was flat, the patch having skittered off its mark, which was on the inner, concave wall of the tube. Perhaps those patches adhere best where they don't get wrinkled. So I have a spandy new tube.
Now all I need is my own patch kit and pump and willingness to get road mire all over my hands.
(Why Denver has its city elections in May I have no idea.)
I didn't remember about voting until I was two blocks on my way to work. This is why driving is evil: if I had been on my bike, turning around and going to City Park Pavillion would have been no problem at all. But I drove because I am going to make a CostCo run at lunch.
The park I know so well on foot or by bike, the Martin Luther King statute, the Robert Burns, the other, metaphorical one, the Museum of Nature and Science, the zoo, the rose garden, the lilac shrubbery, the pavillion, the pond on the south side of the zoo that should be plumbed for new disease-bearing (or -curing) microbes, the bigger pond in which my friend's brother-in-law's father swam and contracted polio 50 years ago, just like FDR, the playground named for a little boy who drowned in that pond, the not exactly great lawn that's the best place to fly a kite...that park is a great black hole to me in a car.
I knew about the parking lot behind the pavillion. Weddings occur there, and concerts and other events: trucks must be able to bring in equipment and no one could expect a wedding party to trek across the goose poop-addled expanses of turf. How to get there, that was the problem. I turned west onto 15th, two blocks south of the park's border. I should have turned north and got on 17th, but much of City Park South is having new sewers dug in and some of the roads, including those with traffic lights that enable a left turn, are closed. I turned north on York, the park's west border. I remembered a road on that side, under a gate like l'Arc de Triomphe (somewhat smaller). But no, that road was closed. I knew 23rd, the northern border, would be no good: it's all zoo and sports fields and museum. (Only now does the access road along the south side of the zoo, that approaches the pavillion, accessible between zoo and museum, occur to me. The construction of a parking garage would have confused me anyway.) South on Colorado again, I turned right into the museum. I found another road looping through the park, gated off. Okay. Now west on 17th again. Almost at York, therefore after skittering around the full perimeter of the park, I turned into the park at the "Esplanade" (there is no water), circled Robert Burns, parked, illegally I'm sure, in the MLK circle, and scurried the rest of the way to the pavillion--still with no idea how to get to the parking lot.
There's a reason voter turnout is low. If I'd remembered, I could have walked over at 7:00 like a civilized person and not been late to work. But I wasn't tragically late and I took a sprig of lilac for my hair, so it worked out.
Cars are evil. I voted. There will be a run-off election in a month. Further reports as events warrant.
Today the new books came in and I brought an armful to the staff meeting to distribute. CoolBoss challenged who would find the first typo, because we always find something. The meeting began but I paid only half an ear as I thumbed through the book. I found a formatting error on page iii, for pity's sake: the footer under the Table of Contents is left- instead of center-aligned--mine. Bleah. I continued to read it through and immediately I turned the leaf of page 21 I gasped. The entire table swiveled to me. Mutely I pointed out to CoolBoss to my left. She gave the exact same gasp. "First sentence of page 22," I squeaked. Everyone turned to the page. There were no other gasps.
It's not an error of fact. It's not a misspelling or misgramming (hee!) or misformatting. It's just...wrong.
On the other hand the other two books that've come out in the past month are perfect. So far.
I have previously declared I don't like opera, but I said that based on two exposures, both Puccini. Last night I saw Don Giovanni and now it's "I don't like Puccini" or perhaps even "those two Puccinis." I hardly dreaded the prospect of an evening of Mozart, but I wasn't looking forward to it as RDC was. Mostly I was anticipating being able to wear my dress.
Right now I hear the Commandatore intoning "Don Giovanni," which scene is in "Amadeus," but it's overlaid with another "Amadeus" scene, with Mozart dictating his Requiem Mass to Salieri, singing "maledictum," which scans the same. Because I am a real eddicated opera-goer.
So I got to dress up! And really, isn't that the important thing? I even wore nail polish, though it's a bit of gilding the sow's ear to polish my short, broken nails in their ragged cuticles. It was only my skin color but shiny. I wore a tiny bit of eyeshadow, a tiny bit because once the first daubs went on correctly, any additional stroke might have either gone wrong or been whorish so I stopped. And the mascara was still on my eyelashes six hours later, a first.
My hair refused to be either curly or flatly curvily obedient. I pulled into a French twist and mourned aloud that now that it is nearly long enough for that style, I don't have a twist comb (and it's not long enough to use sticks in). I picked up a barrette RDC gave me two years ago, a slightly concave, oval, broad ring of silver, whose silver-topped wooden pin goes in one piercing, under the hair, and out the other piercing. RDC came in to look, loved the twist, and fastened the pin. And it held! It wouldn't've held for, say, dancing, but it held for sedate dining, strolling, and sitting. Silver and wood might have been Wrong with my ultrafake rhinestone and pearl and silver earrings, but did I care? I did not.
The real coup was my dress. Last spring, rootling through Ross, I found, OMFB, the most beautiful dress ever. At Ross. Yes, I know. Celidon. Silky satiny floor-length full skirt, a shimmery but not sparkly shell top. The shimmery layer attaches at the shoulders to some kind of underpinning fabric that connects the shoulders to the waist of the skirt. I am probably not explaining it adequately, but it means that the weight of the skirt (which is considerable) and of the dress as a whole is on the shoulders, not at the waist, that the bust is not fitted or exposed, and that waist is suggested but not defined or constrained. I wore the same silvery grey shoes I bought for the 2000 fall weddings, which were only passing serviceable with strategic bandaids and a dose of talcum powder. Floor-length skirt: the way to go. (I am aware I match the wall.)
We dined at Adega again. I would make such a good fabulously wealthy person, except that I might not be allowed to do my own gardening or wear shorts overalls. I love good service. Also I love good food. RDC had a fish whose name I forget, with crab and pea tendrils (pea tendrils?). I had goat cheese and asparagus tortelloni with salsify, which I learned is a root vegetable like a parsnip and also called oyster root for its briny taste. I considered whether it would be couth to tip the bowl to my mouth, not to miss a drop of broth.
Talcum powder: the reason I was able to walk from public conveyance to restaurant, to theatre, to conveyance again. Stupid shoes. On the way we met my COO and her kids. She'd recently given the oldest "Amadeus" for his birthday, hence their presence. I remarked to the youngest that we were supposed to have met three years ago when her mother brought her to the Tattered Cover for the midnight release of Goblet of Fire (no surprise we missed each other in the press) but maybe we would see each other this June.
The set was modernized in good ways. Instead of scenery, on the floor and backdrop were huge scrawls of all the names in Don Giovanni's little black book. The actual catalog was a Palm Pilot in Leporello's hand; people carried firearms instead of swords (though a musket and pistol are in the text); and the dresses...actually, the dress. Donna Anna wore black mourning; Zerlina wore red in a flamenco-ish style; but Donna Elvira's dress I lusted after.
(Yes. Opera is all about costuming, mine and others'.)
Stiff, nearly gun-metal gray but pretty anyway, four buttons in a square closing the bodice, wide neck, stand-up cloak collar, long to floor but, because it was cut like a coat, opening from buttons to hem revealing a sheath underneath. Stunning.
The program told me a couple of things to listen for: how themes in the overture, which by legend Mozart wrote at the last minute, are repeated and developed later on (which might mean the legend is not true or that he did, as reputed, have everything composed in his head but just not notated yet) and how, when Don Giovanni is seducing Zerlina, her music changes into his until, as she succumbs to him, they are singing the same notes. Also that he wrote the opera to suit the voices he knew would perform it.
The other day I used the word "spatch" for perhaps the first time in this site. I deplore my underuse of this invention. It's a spot or patch of territory you claim for your own. If it's not at your house, it could be just Yours anyway, like the bit against the slopey rock on East Beach across from my dorm Holcomb, or under the little sapling outside the first Denver apartment, or under the one particular linden tree on the plaza outside Dot Org's previous building, or the one bit of grass on the concave side of the parapet enclosing the patio at the new building. At Formigny, the reading spatch is in the backyard in the shade of the neighbor's tree.
Spatch. It makes your mouth happy. It makes your butt and your book happy to have a favorite place to read with a name to it.
This one ranks with her comment to me when I was in high school and newly disdainful about her preference for elevator music, predicated by a Muzak version of, say, "Let It Be" assaulting my ears and my asking her, respectfully I am so sure, why not listen to the original versions of songs. She said, "How do you know my music didn't come first?"
My mother called Saturday while we were in the garden. I didn't call her back during the weekend, so by Tuesday evening when she called again she was worried. I called her Wednesday morning over breakfast, apologized for not returning her call over the weekend, and explained that we had been at the opera yestreen (another underused word, though not my invention). She asked how that was and I commented about not liking opera before, maybe because before was Puccini but now was Mozart and she said,
"But you liked 'Phantom of the Opera.'"
That campaign I'm to be no more sarcastic to her than I can help? Severely strained.
Granny would have been 85 today.
We woke to six inches of snow. I thought the blizzard in March would have done away with the weakest branches, but undressed branches that withstood three feet of snow and my clobbering could not manage six inches of snow with their leaves on. We lost about a third of the cherry tree and a major branch of the larger plum.
But that wasn't the only reason I cried while plying the pruning saw.
High Country Gardens was to have shipped my plants the week of the 4th. I thought that meant Monday the 4th, so when they hadn't shown up by Thursday I was nervous. They arrived Friday, but so did a freezing rain; Saturday it snowed; Sunday, despite melting snow, clumping soil, and my impending absence, they had to go in. And so they did.
Vinca major for the easement, not enough to fill it in but a start, and I have to remulch it and make some sort of gravel border along the street. The plants right now are far enough away from anyone exiting a car--instead they're on the dogs peeing, sidewalk side--but the hope is they'll spread. A couple of salvia, a couple of penstemon, an agastache, and a catmint for the north side, not nearly enough to fill it in. I was modest buying plants, but there is also the neighbor's lamb's-ear sometime soon, and though it might be too hot (according to books, not to actual life) to divide last year's catmint, they are top-heavy and middle-thin and look like they might want to take over the world. Also a Spanish broom against the porch on one side and a decorative sage on the other. Now they just have to survive a week without watering and the season in soil I might have scarred by working while saturated: it's clay enough to have clumped.
The planting was interspersed with dashing downstairs to stem the tide, by towel and vacuum, of the flood in the northwest corner of the basement. RDC says this didn't start happening until the summer of 2001, and theorizes the foundation might have cracked (more) during the extremely dry years of 2000-2002. I didn't remember exactly when it started, but I know we didn't bother buying a rug to cover the tile in the front of the den until we had the television set up, which wasn't until late in the summer, and that the first we knew of the leakage was my wondering aloud why the rug was wet after a torrential rain (Denver's preferred form).
We shoveled all the snow away from that side of the house (in shorts and Tevas); we increased the length of the gutters on the ground to move the flood further from the house, and placed buckets under, ahem, leaks in the gutters. I don't know what we're going to do, but it's a serious problem.
One of my first tasks when we get back is to dig a drainage ditch. PVC pipes, gravel, grading, surveying. Oi. Or something.
Is "strike" feminine? It is now.
Because of the strike, it took us two hours through thick traffic to cover the 30 kilometers between the airport and La Défense. Happily RDC's work had arranged for transportation, so from Dulles we didn't worry about that leg.
One time years ago Haitch and I could not remember the names of the four "Cosby" daughters and the one we couldn't remember then is the same one I can't remember now, Tempest Bledsoe's character. Sonya, Denise, ?, Rudy. When we finally remembered, I decided that the next time I picked her up at the airport I would have one of those signs that chauffeurs carry, with that name. (I never did do that.) Anyway, this time we were met by a driver with such a sign. I felt like a movie star.
He was a really nice man, a good conversationalist, with quite serviceable English. I could tell only that his French wasn't native, but RDC guessed that Spanish was, and after that they chatted happily in a medium I couldn't follow. Which was good, because I had been awake for 20 hours and wanted to sleep, but Miguel was much too friendly for that. He had an Eyewitness (different publisher, same exact style) guide to the Louvre, in French, and I would have loved putting myself to sleep attempting to read that in a moving car, but it was not to be.
When I saw the map of where RDC's business meetings were going to be, I thought, by the angle of the Seine, that we were going to be near le Tour d'Eiffel but on the right bank. Nope. Downstream of le Tour, the river makes a hairpin curve and turns north again, and we were staying on the left side, in the very businessy district called La Défense. It looked much like any business district I've seen in the States, except not. Except better.
Immediately outside our hotel door grew un grand pouce. I didn't go find out what it was supposed to represent, because I already knew. If you squint you can nearly see the onion field at the top.
Because he had a business dinner that evening, RDC needed sleep; and though we both knew you Don't Sleep on first arriving, we both happily did, for five hours. We had planned no more than le Tour d'Eiffel that first day, but between 3:00, by which time we had woken and showered, and stopped at a café for lunch (croques monsieur--maybe messieur), getting back by 7:00 for dinner meant that we got, by foot since the mé wasn't going, only as far as halfway through the Bois de Boulogne. Which was still a very nice walk.
RDC scampered off. I found a faux little shop for croissants and jus d'orange for the next morning and happily went back to bed until 6 the next morning, though not so much to sleep. Either the nap or Something meant I did not adjust to the time difference for about three days.
She looks exactly the same, except 15 months old and a toddler instead of four months old and an infant. She has about eight teeth, and more hair, which is truly golden and not blonde, and her eyes are blue not green, but she looks exactly the same. She looks like someone who likes to toddle here and there and decapitate chives especially when someone exclaims "Pop!" She loves Nana, who is a giraffe, and she loves to turn the pages of books (usually all of them at once). She is remarkably (I think) adept with her fork and spoon, and adores yogurt. She dropped her spoon, I thought because of slippery hands, and I retrieved and handed it to her; she made steady eye contact and quite deliberately dropped it again. I barked with laughter and Nisou shushed me: I shouldn't encourage her. Nisou knows when Emlet has woken up in the morning because she will pull out the accordion bear that plays Brahms's "Lullaby" as it contracts. She tells long stories that unfortunately I could not understand, as she is still learning to string syllables into words: "Lo lo lo lo lo" and "Bababababa."
She looks exactly the same and totally different, with a year's worth of learning inside her.
I think I propositioned a cabbie. I meant to ask if he would take me to my hotel. (I asked because the taxis closer to Gare Montparnasse had been reserved and I didn't know what was going on with the strike). I think I asked him if he would take me in my hotel. Or something. Um, no. After we got that confusion as cleared up as it was going to be, he had to look up rue de l'Échelle on his map. I had the street number of the hotel, wrong, as it turned out. There was nothing at 11. It was 7. I probably crossed a numeral 7, all suave and continental, and then mistook my 7 for a continental numeral 1. Though how I doubled it I don't know. Anyway the hotel was only the block before, easily found.
RDC had left me a note and the key. I happily threw myself into the room, onto the bed, to nap before his return in about a half hour; and then into his arms when he got back. For supper we found a little restaurant in the rue Moliere and he had a good red wine and we had decent chocolate mousse.
I love Paris. Anyone can love the central, walky, best-preserved area of a city, and paint me a tourista but I love Paris. I love the architecture. It's mostly of a piece in this main, oldest, central part of Paris, but a good piece, 17th century, four and five stories, shops at ground level, living and office space above, shutters and window boxes, lovely. "I am here as a tourist." I am so shameless that I quote "A Room with a View" about tourism.
Friday we went to the Louvre, which was supposed to open at 9. Because of the strike it didn't open until 10:10, and then the ticket-printing machine we chose ne marche pas. We brought our half-printed tickets, whose timestamp though nothing else was legible, to the information booth. There helpful people helped us, in two steps, one of which lasted long enough that before the second step I asked, in flawless idiom and accent, ahem, "Combien temps?" Of course I have no idea what that actually means but I was understood, and a clerk told us "deux minutes." Two minutes later, indeed, we were on our way.
There was a special exhibit of da Vinci's notebooks and cartoons. I loved seeing his rough draft work. He was like, and I don't mean to be profane, Mrs. Barrable from Coot Club, whose own letters she would unconsciously interrupt with sketching. I confuse, because I suck, some of his notebooks with others of Michelangelo's that we saw upstairs. One of the men interrupted his doodling with the odd line of Petrarch. Since I couldn't even ask how much time it would take for our tickets to be fixed, my French was not at a level to translate much of the commentary about the work. But it was still remarkable to look at.
After that we did the Cliffs Notes to the Louvre: the Venus de Milo, the Victory of Samothrace, the Mona Lisa, and its two Vermeers, The Lace-maker and The Astrologist. The Wreck of the Hesperus I didn't track down, but my attachment to it comes solely from A History of the World in 10.5 Chapters, which I haven't read since 1991. And some stuff in between, Italian Renaissance paintings and a chamber devoted to Michelangelo's notebooks and an Egyptian tomb and some remnants of the crown jewels. At least England had three centuries of Empire after its Revolution to rebuild its collection of sparkly rocks for my viewing pleasure. France, not so much.
We found lunch in a cafe in the Place à Malraux. Nearby in le Jardin du Palais Royal, RDC indicated the square with a sweep of his hand, the black-and-white striped columns of different heights, and said, "This is where they grow their columns." He pointed to some circles set into the ground. "These have already been harvested."
He retreated to the room to nap and I would have joined him if I had harbored any hope of success. Instead I went ShopPING, because I was in Paris. A store near the café sold Tintin stuff, which is ridiculously marked up in the States, so I bought myself un petit Milou. (I found out when I got home and replaced Babe with Snowy on my monitor at work and brought Babe home, that Blake is afraid of Babe. And in return for acknowledging that the French pronunciation of Tintin is better, can we please all admit that Snowy is a better name than Milou?)
Last time, walking from la Place de la Concorde and to Musée Picasso, we detoured just a moment into a kitchen store. It was very close and my first place to try this time for my main task, a butter dish for my sister. (That's what she asked for.) The closest thing I found this time turned out to be a terrine dish, and a clerk recommended a shop just across the way.
The china shop I found myself in was one of the few businesses I encountered in which no one spoke English, and even with my stupid French we all got on fine. I spoke with three different clerks, besides greeting them: yes I had seen the back; please could you pack that for travel; thank you for writing out the sum (dix-neuf quarante-neuf wasn't so hard) and I don't want the receipt thank you. So I hope ma soeur likes son cadeau. I bought some books at the Louvre bookshops for some of the shorties in my life.
The other treat of this trip, besides going at all and seeing Emlet, was to see my old college friend KREL and her family. Her husband picked us up after work, which was a kindness I hardly expected, and we introduced ourselves and it was all pleasant and comfortable from the start. He brought us back to their lovely apartment in the 16th arrondisement and the next person I saw was not KREL but her older daughter, who threw herself at us, and then the younger, and then KREL herself, who has not changed one iota in the ten years since I last saw her. She must have a portrait up in the attic somewhere.
Her children are spectacularly adorable and charming and, which reassured me about Emlet, completely bilingual. There are some things they know how to say in one language but not another, but they chattered easily in both. I have worried that my absence of French will leave me unable to talk with Emlet after her "Lo lo lo" and "Ba ba ba" resolve into speech, but these two girls are in the same position, Usan mother and French father, and they speak both languages as well as any monolingual child of their ages might.
We had two wonderful dinners with KREL, at a brasserie on the Trocadero Friday with just the tall folks and en famille Saturday, which meant I got to sing ELL to sleep. Also it was RJH's birthday, so we called him in Connecticut, startling him rather.
In between, on Saturday, RDC and I wandered over the Île de la Cité and the Î Saint Louis.
We visited the Sainte Chapelle, and when Melissa tells you to go somewhere, you should go. It felt intimate even with a crowd, and then the school group left and it felt even smaller. We toured le Crypte Archéologique, more than two millennia of buildings and walls and roads and the edges of the island. We went through Notre Dame again, this time with time to go through the treasury with the Holy Hand Grenade and a human femur (whose, it did not say). I was, cue foreshadowing, coming down with a cold, and not interested in queuing in the rain for a climb to the top--despite having just read The Hunchback of Notre Dame--which is titled with Hugo's intended protagonist in French, just Notre Dame de Paris--which was my main reason for a second visit.
By the Pont St. Louis we crossed to l'Île Saint Louis, which is as touristy as Commercial Street in Provincetown if not quite so tacky. RDC startled me by wanting to shop by actually going into shops instead of just looking in their windows. We had crêpes in a little hole in the wall, and eventually ice cream at Berthillon's, just as everyone, and I do mean everyone, I know who has been to Paris, commanded us.
I am pretty sure I have never eaten an ice cream cone while walking along in the rain, but I wasn't going to miss the chance. That was some good skeam.
Sunday I was definitely sick. We scampered into the 7th arrondisement toward the Musée Rodin (which gets points for being one of the few sites with its own site), where we planned to meet KREL at 10:30. A walk like this is the sort that makes me resent Usan cities, but resenting anywhere for being insufficiently Parisien is about the stupidest possible attitiude. It was Sunday, there was little traffic, many places were closed, but a little boulangerie that was open sold the most tempting array of noshables I have ever seen. We both spotted a pastry and--okay, my French is really bad, so I'm proud of these little moments where a Frenchie and I understood each other--I asked, "Ces sont aux pommes?" where I mentally patted myself on the back for saying "aux" (and heard the "x" in my head) instead of "avec." The clerk said, "Non, poires." Pears are good too, so we bought those and called them breakfast and devoured them.
A reason I was anxious to go to the Rodin was the jardin aux roses. Is that grammatically correct? Whatever. Mid-May is now the perfect time to go to Paris, because of those roses. The house itself is lovely but the grounds are endless roses, heavily perfumed and smelling even stronger in the misty rain. I managed not to think of Petals on the Wind for some hours. We saw Le Penser et Les Burghers de Calais and the gates of the Inferno, which had the Thinker on top. I only just learned that Le Penser is Dante. We saw Balzac a few times and The Kiss, the Eternal Idol (which I prefer to the Kiss for sensuality), and Springtime.
We also saw KREL and her older daughter, who continued to bewitch me. She drew everything--really well--and I asked her for a drawing for my refrigerator.
I really liked The Hand of God because the hand was finished while the marble it loosely clasped remained unworked, The Danaide for her hair and back, and The Secret for the unknown within the hands. I was not so much taken with his drawings and was glad they were not his day job.
After that we separated, the Parisians to a baptism and we to a special exhibit of Magritte in the Tuilieres. This I would have liked better if I had not been ill. Often and often I do not get Magritte's point, and nearly as often I don't find the paintings aesthetically pleasing. But there were many that I did (La Magie Noire, La clé des champs--translated not as the Key of the Fields but as the Door to Freedom, which means I will never understand idiom) and RDC really enjoyed it, so that was fine. Magritte drew a lot of birds, or bird-like thingies, always a good thing. Les Grâces naturelles and its variations I particularly liked, birds growing out of leaves. (Searching for images, I found a Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy named Magritte. Though neither Labs nor dalmation/basset crosses nor black, Ridgebacks are gorgeous dogs.)
Saturday and Sunday had had sprinklings of rain and sun. Monday, in contrast, pissed with rain, and these fucking smokers have got to stop. Both of these conditions made leaving very easy. But flying, with dry air and changings of pressure, when my ears and sinuses were clogged, was less than no fun.
Home. Home home home home home by early evening.
Besides that I really should have scheduled a day between transcontinental travel and work, I was actually sick. So I was home at noon when the phone rang. My new best friend missed me so much she couldn't go to sleep without talking to me.
It was very endearing.
Both of us had some sort of relapse and I could face neither my bike nor contacts on Friday morning. I have to find my bus route new, less frequent times. But I drove. I should have remembered to call Peaberry's for a big bag of grounds, but I didn't; instead I went to the post office with my presents.
Also I had to carry something home which wouldn't've been convenient on a bike.
We had three lay-offs last week. So today when I saw UberBoss quietly walking up to my cube, slowly, eyes down, my breath caught. It resumed a moment later when I realized that everyone else in my department was also converging on me. After we all laughed at me for that confusion, pour mon anniversaire, they gave me a card and a wee potted rose.
Much better than being laid off.
The Colfax bus makes for good anthropological research.
We were maybe two minutes late to meet Jared and Trish and I called Jared to tell him we were almost there. It was all very hip and now as, when RDC and I got to the top level of the Pavillions, there was Jared checking his messages.
Greetings were greeted and then Trish put a bag into my hands, wishing me a happy birthday. She gave me a penguin (and chocolate). Presents!
I recently learned that baby platypuses are called "puggles" and recently decided that baby penguins, being fuzzier than their parents and cuter, should be called puppies.
My penguin puppy is named Josephina because I am reading The Age of Napoleon and Josephina's is next door to the Market, where we ate.
Then we went to see "The Matrix Reloaded," about which too little cannot be said.
Remembering, I pounced on Trish: "Mo had a finger puppet of Beaker in her latest entry! I want one!"
Making me excessively happy, she told me they were at Starbucks.
We were in downtown Denver at the time, never more than two blocks from a Starbucks. I dragged her in, she pointed me in right direction, I snapped up the only Beaker in the bunch and removed the stripey stick of candy from his butt. Then I noticed there was someone already at the register. "Oh I'm sorry am I interrupting maybe just a little?" But I wasn't. I offered him the candy anyway, but he didn't want it; I gave it to Trish.
Despite its being my birthday weekend, I had to pay for Beaker. "Twenty-five?" inquired the non-customer I had non-interrupted. The cashier shook his head, "Now you're flirting."
The thing is though, since he was making friendly-like and obviously thought the mock guess of 25 was young for me, to the extent he thought he was flattering, he was actually insulting. But I am all about Owning My Age and he and the cashier, whose skate-boarding convo I had non-interrupted, were making friendly-like, and at least I don't look so decrepit as not to be worth flattering at all.
If that makes any sense.
Most of the conversation today concerned the house falling over into a swamp. My mother called to wish me a happy birthday, and I was content to listen for the ninetieth time about how buying a rose bush from disease-free stock is so worth the money and how long she's wanted a magnolia bush and exactly how they're going continually the amend their soil to keep their hydrangea blue and also how they have a store of a toxin that's apparently now illegal but which they use with impunity. My father called to wish me a happy birthday, and I told him about the swamp and heard about his cucumbers and tomatoes and in-laws (the last of which he is not growing nor perhaps even cultivating). My sister called to wish me a happy birthday and we debated whose fat is more attractive (she thinks she's fatter than me now, which I doubt, but her spongey bits have always been more appealingly arranged) and bemoaned the lack of decent television of a Sunday afternoon and swapped pet stories.
I recently learned that I have been falsely impugned. My immediate reaction was to wish (though not to plan) to clear my name. I will say nothing, however. Of course this is a rationalization for a pre-existing habit of non-action (read, for cowardice). Or not: I could be being sensible. I know the facts, and I really want that to be enough for me; it shouldn't matter what slander the slanderers believe.
It's not though. Privately, though aloud and to non-involved others, I mutter blackly. I'm working on that. I would work harder if the private muttering weren't funny or if it didn't help with the public silence.
Two 3.8-mile city rides.
I am taking my life in my hands to commute by bike, even over established, signposted bike routes. Denver's particular driving quirk is to run red lights--to keep going straight through the yellow, so that people waiting to turn left do so on the red, on the mutual red and even against the opposing's green. I know to watch for that.
I don't expect cars to come to full stops at stop signs, especially in residential areas like those the bike routes go through. I don't rely on blinkers. I am shocked--still--by how many people look left when turning right on red, for cars on the road they're turning into, but not right, where a cyclist might be waiting. And if the light turns green in that time, so that the straight-going traffic (including the bike that's been there longer than the right-turning car that didn't even see it as the driver approached the intersection) has the right of way, the driver will turn.
Making eye contact is critical.
This occurred to me, for the first time and in so many words, the other night as I demolished the brush pile into manageable fagots. We await the verdict of geotechnical and structural engineers on the fate of the foundation; we need to contract with a landscape engineer about the north side of the house because neither of us foresees the exact grading called for; and lots of the brickwork needs tuckpointing.
It doesn't matter.
I have always wanted a house. I have always wanted a house the way some people have always wanted a child. Blind to the responsbilities, ignorant of the challenges, unknowing of the maintenance. This house isn't the one I expected, but now it's mine. Mine, yet still its own, with its own individuality that I'm responsible for, to preserve and improve and pass into the future.
It's an imperfect analogy, of course, but fitting in another way. I never questioned whether my desire was right to act on. Lots of people want kids but don't weigh whether their parenting resources are sufficient. I wanted a house but didn't consider whether my mechanical, design, landscaping, gardening, and overall housekeeping skills were up to the task. I just blundered willfully into the job, trusting to love and devotion.
But so far we're doing okay. And I don't regret it for a second.
On the way I got grounds from Peaberry's Coffee, which has to be a more regular stop for me. I had no idea coffee grounds were as green as they are. I can get rid of the leftover bad mulch with enough grounds. And, I realized, there's a Starbucks kinda on the way, and a Diedrich's not too far out of the way. I would rather ask the Diedrich's: I can prop my bike outside and keep an eye on it while I picked up my stash. I need enough for, say, 25 square feet, 3 inches thick. Let's see how long it takes me to figure out the volume.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
6.25 cubic feet of coffee grounds.
Stuff I?ll actually do:
Kinwork:
Lisa:
Stuff I keep putting off
Read
Exercise
Updated 29 June
This afternoon, grumpy and tired, I retired to the chair where I intended to spend the evening. Through the open window I heard a passerby leap at a plum tree with a rip.
At the next moment, he turned up the walk to the house, with a big Tupperware chest under his arm, a child roped into one of these ridiculous door-to-door solicitation programs that I hate: adults profit in money by teaching children who shouldn't be out on a schoolnight to harass residents, who donate out of pity; the children learn nothing useful and are exploited for pennies.
Before he got to the steps I had called, "I don't want to buy anything, thank you." He turned away, turned back, and asked if I was sure. At that provocation, I added, "And don't rip at trees."
I was just practicing. I figure I can get a lot meaner pretty quick.
He asked, pointing, "Are these yours?"
I didn't say that they're their own. Instead I said, "Whose they are doesn't matter. You shouldn't hurt them."
Who's teaching them that?
And it was the smaller plum, the one that doesn't overhang the sidewalk and requires a leap from a 10-year-old to reach. We were on the swing last night, eating our supper, watching people walk up to the park for the Sunday concert (that we forgot about again). A group of maybe six walked by, ducking the overhanging branch of the droopy one. "I don't know about your tree, man," one said to us, probably more politely than she would have spoken of it if she hadn't seen us.
I forget how low it hangs. I can walk under it without ducking my head. You just have to walk single-file and be shorter than, say, 5'10". Is that so much to ask? We keep saying we're going to hire a tree surgeon at least for the nectarine. I expect the others could stand a once-over too.
And ha, I prevented one dog from peeing in my garden. A human tugged a leashed dog away from the garden when she saw me on the swing. Ha. Score two for the mean old lady.
And I have to fence off the easement, illegal though that might be, until the vinca is stronger. The one that died was from its mother's womb untimely rip't by someone unloading an air-conditioner from the backseat of a car as RDC watched from inside the house while conducting an uninterruptable conference call. By someone, more specifically, who lives across the street, so I wonder why he didn't park on that side so his car door faced the right way. If I'd seen him I'd have yelled. Score three for the mean old lady.
Voting by bike: much more sensible than voting by car. Shadowfax and I entered the polling place together and were the only voters until we left, when I met a black-and-white dog named Harrison. One of the judges asked if I rode to work, and if so how far, and what a good distance, and how nice that it was uphill in the morning so downhill in the afternoon.
Cars are not bases for conversation.
This is so wild. A week ago yesterday it was suddenly 94, and I thought, well, that's that then.
It hasn't broken 80 since. It's cool and cloudy to the point of overcast in the morning. In fact, in the morning, it's overcast to the point I think I don't want to bike. But get this, now I have no choice. There's not the bus to fall back on any more, tra la, at least not from a block away. Now I have to walk a mile--if it's a mile, 10 long blocks anyway--to another bus. Anyway, there's no reason to walk and bus when I can bike. And I biked when it was 25 degrees and sunny, so almost 60 and cloudy really shouldn't be such a challenge.
Since before we moved here, the mayor's been Wellington Webb. You can't go wrong with a name like that.
"John Hickenlooper" just doesn't have the same resonance. It's Dutch and means something like "fence-leaper" according to him.
Welcome, Mr. Mayor.
I had my hair cut this afternoon. I am not cut out for the pretty or for the high-maintenance cut. I like my cutter and am glad to have found one to return to, and I am glad that whoever gave me the Big Cut in January knew style, but for the every day, I neither repeat it nor live with it. It was a little wilder even than this when I left the salon, and the rain didn't help the frizz settle.
Almost as soon as I got home, RDC had dinner on the table. One of the things I can't do with my hair down is eat. I skewered it with three fake tortoiseshell chopsticks and ate as it fell down my nape. After dinner I twisted it again but pinned it from another angle. There is now one pin in it and it's secure. Hallelujah, and just in time for summer (which might start by Monday). Even the ponytail touched my neck and didn't capture my fringe. This is close to a French twist and it's all captured. This is a style I can live with. And damn it, I still find it much more flattering back than down.
(Haitch, she got goosebumps when I told her.)
RDC has recently bought a bunch of tunes he hasn't had for years from the iTunes store. When I got home today, both times, he was listening to Bob Dylan. I've tried, people, but it hasn't worked yet. That is, it hasn't worked for me. Blake loves his music. Happily the entire flock agrees about Neil Young and Janis Joplin.
Blake sings along. He bobs and dances. There is no kind of a bad mood (and when he's pissy, he's very very pissy) that loud rock'n'roll doesn't fix.
One of the songs RDC downloaded is Neil Young's "Powderfinger." Considering how strongly I feel about The One Right Original Way, there is no justification for my preferring the Junkies' version of this song. Except that they're my favorite band, and except that Young's tone does not at all fit the subject matter. He could be singing about having a beer at the corner bar as he croons, "Just think of me as one/ who never figured/ to fade away so young/ with so much left undone." When Margo sings it, you know somebody's about to die.
Blake doesn't care. The version RDC got is live, and there is nothing Blake loves better than live music. He is just like the Humbug in how much he craves adulation, and all those cheers and whistles he knows are for him.
Just shopping.
I went into an accessories store because my hairclips are all either bent or broken. I was looking specifically for a French twist comb. I found a smaller hairclaw and a larger, a pair of curved hair sticks and a something or other that will work (as do the sticks) for a French twist. The only comb they sold had too many teeth and was clear plastic with rhinestones, and I am not going to prom any time soon.
A French twist is the only way I know to put up my hair that's not in a ponytail or with a claw; a ponytail requires me to skin the hair back too harshly and a claw looks sloppy and doesn't hold as securely as a twist. It's not a true French twist: it's too short still or too layered, the fold goes diagonally instead of vertically, and the ends of the hair peek out, but that's the principle.
Janelle does a lot of undercutting, or something, "for movement," and maybe the hair swings better but it doesn't braid yet, as long as it is. At least it's calmer now, a day and a half later. This is my dilemma. I love a French braid, but I'm letting her cut it for down instead of for a braid. Layers and undercutting are the only reasons I can think of for shoulder-length hair not braiding.
I also bought myself a summer-weight bathrobe with some birthday money, which, ha! puts me ahead in the superior bathrobe category. If it warms up--it might snow tomorrow--RDC's will be too heavy, all summer long. It's white and looks, I hope, not too much like a doctor's smocky coat. I am reminded of the Glamour Shots leather jacket and how much that looked like a bathrobe.
And I finally brought the stupid wine bottle thingies to Bombay Company. They were gifts (with the price tag still on) and they're not my type of thing at all, nor RDC's, who would decide, being the one who drinks wine. He said he saw in the Louvre, in the collection of royal household objects near the remnants of the Crown Jewels, something like these bottle necklaces, but I am fairly confident I would not use such things even if they came in gold and diamonds like the Bourbons' set. I can't bring up the Bombay Company, but that's no loss. I have store credit that maybe I could use nearer Yule, for a tree ornament.
What can I say, I think decorating trees is fun and decorating bottles is ridiculous. Chacun á son gout.
Last night I danced my beloved "I don't have to work tomorrow!" dance.
Today I am working in the sense of Getting Stuff Done, but not in the sense of For The Man. It's not 10 yet and I have started laundry and begun another batch of ginger-chocolate cookies (some for a hosueguest and some for an ill coworker) and have just sat down with a cup of tea that RDC made for me an hour again when I was knee-deep in cocoa and cinnamon.
The more I get done today, the less I have to do tomorrow, so the more time I can spend at the People's Fair. Which is kind of like the grand prize being a week in Cleveland, and the second being two weeks. Or however that Beckett line went. Was that Beckett? Whoever.
Dr. Bob graduated. The brazen debauchery was several people in a hotel room, a lot like high school, though unlike high school in that everyone (else) had a baby. Nearly: I gave CGK a backrub: she's got almost two months to go but is huge and uncomfortable. One baby stayed home with a grandparent so I still haven't met him, conveniently the one I am least personally interested in. I can't believe we were thinking of joining No Kidding: if you like your friends, surely you like your friends' children. Conversation flitted between DU gossip and children and teaching and reading--children being only the newest, not the only, topic of conversation.
And I just talked to my mother. She ran into my childhood friend's father, who reported that HPV had twin boys in late May, and also into Michael's grandmother, who said that that childhood friend just had a son. Last I knew about him, he and B were still dating, ten years after high school, so I wonder if she's the other parent.
Apparently my mother and HPV's dad didn't talk long--only long enough to establish that HPV's partner is female, big news for my mother and confirming my longheld guess, but not long enough for anything about the children, like their names or exact birthdays. But I'm glad to know as much as I do and must dispatch essential books immediately.
Also I talked to Nisou a bit this morning. Emlet has discovered how to scale the couch, and she went swimming for the first time last weekend and loved it. Thank the gods. I remember how much she enjoyed her bath at four months, how her body elongated and how she smiled and wriggled. My beautiful little girl.
And in most excellent news, my youngest child and a friend (whom I remember but didn't babysit) are roadtripping home from Arizona to Old Lyme and will stop here Monday night. It will be a tight fit, because we have another friend arriving tonight for several days, but they're young and a night on camp mattresses on the living room floor instead of the already-spoken-for futon won't kill them. I haven't seen her in five years and am most stoked.
I have been missing, I always do miss, the sort of broad community of friends and acquaintances I had in Connecticut--that I still have, though scattered to the four winds. When a friend says he and his family camped with the other families from daycare, when I see the photographs of Nisou's four godchildren--each from a different family--in frames, I feel that lack.
It existed for me only in latter years at UConn. I left Old Lyme when I called it escape. I never belonged to the circles I admired, of the intelligentsia library board members, the patricians of town, my babysitting's family broad reach of school and library and church involvement. Even at UConn I was an outlier, but I knew so many pivots I felt included.
Eventually last night or really this morning, we left the hotel room for the three-year-old to sleep, and RDC and Dr. Bob and SPM and, uh, Alias and I sat around the lobby and talked for another while. The talk was more DU gossip and fantasy baseball and Six Feet Under and someone's boss who was "an insane cunt--no offense" (because I'm an insane cunt? I let that go) but also someone's feeling every June when someone else, but not he, graduates. Of the four DU students, the non Dr. Bob three are ABD and have been for some time. It's been on my mind and I had brought it up to CGK as well: almost eight years here and for what? After eight years I call the fourth Alias because I don't know him well enough to give him an alias?
For a strong marriage and a great house and a garden from scratch and Blake, SPM pointed out, not letting me pity myself. Yeah. But his confession about June was the first personal statement I have heard anyone I'm not married to make, in person, in months.
I want to be quite clear here: I do not ache for or crave a child, I do not hear ticking, I experience my friends' children with affection and amusement but not desire. I do recognize that parenthood would likely hurl me into a community, but it's the community I want, not the child.
It's in my hands, to volunteer or join a bicycling group or open up more among coworkers and RDC's classmates.
It's always surprising to me how a task expands to fill the time available. I managed to be showered and and dressed by the time RDC's coworker arrived, with the house as clean as it ever gets. But barely.
We bussed downtown and had bison burgers at the Wynkoop, again filling all the space available. Except I ordered the pasta salad alternative to french fries and I am very proud. RDC has a theory that french fries are almost never good but that you always order them because they ought to be really good and you continually hope not to be disappointed. There is also the It Will Still Be There Tomorrow rationale of food avoidance that I haven't quite grasped yet.
I bailed soon after dinner and left them to their pub crawl. I bussed home and read Bleak House until Blake and I were thoroughly asleep. Meanwhile, RDC and Denton worked their way home from My Brother's Bar by way of tequila and a 3:00 breakfast at Pete's Kitchen. Speaking of filling the space available.
I guess we're fond of repeating photographs, same setting, disparate times. Or not: this is the first time in seven years we've done this one. Our usual repeat is a map hut in various levels of snowpack. Anyway, in June 1996 we spent our first anniversary camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. That's a really bad scan, isn't it? We looked for the right rock this time but failed.
Okay, I say that deliberately sounding like Mr. Emerson in "A Room with a View." Ooops.
I had not seen RKC for five years, since she was 17, and her friend Sarah for longer than that--probably since 1995 at CKC's high school graduation party. RKC is all tall now, I think the tallest of the three, I think even a smidge taller than I.
Sarah was never a victim of mine but she remembers getting piggyback rides, which I hardly doubt. The best game a babysitter can play is to be human furniture or a cat jungle gym. They both remember when I used to carry all three of my girls around at once, RKC being one of the carry-ees and Sarah being impressed when she witnessed it. When I was 18 and strong as hell, they were 9, 7, and 5 and I could stagger a few steps with them slung about my various limbs.
Since last time, RKC has graduated from high school, attended college, and most important devoted a year to AmeriCorps, which seems to have been one of those life-changing events that shapes your whole future. I love being so proud of her.
It was also tremendously reassuring to have her here. They drove up from Tucson by way of Albuquerque, and RKC opined that "Colorado could not be more beautiful." That, coming from another Old Lyme native, who therefore knows natural beauty when she sees it, was wonderful to hear--especially since they only drove up the interstate, alongside not through the Sangre de Cristo and other lumpy bits.
She said she'd thought she'd got used to the desert enough to find it beautiful, but as soon as she saw the green of the Colorado mountains she realized what she'd been missing. I know I have to get over my geographical assumptions--considering how irritating I find it when people insist that Denver's in, not next to, the mountains--but if Colorado is green (to a Connecticut eye) compared to Arizona, then I think the Grand Canyon is as much of that state as I need to see. But then in Animal Dreams there are orchards and flowing water, so not all of it can be sere and ochre.
They had been in the car--she's keeping up the family tradition of Volvo station wagons, I was glad to see--all day and I suggested a stroll around City Park. This they also liked, the pond and the pavilion and the view from behind the Museum of Nature and Science. Stormclouds rolled through, though it was clear over the mountains, which could not but improve the view.
We had a really nice visit, though too short. And I learned that the middle one--whom I haven't seen for four years--plans to visit in August.
Fiona Shaw plays one of my favorite characters in "Persuasion," Mrs. Croft. I finally bothered to look her up and she plays Aunt Petunia Dursley as well.
It's called acting, I know. But it's the same startlement I felt when I realized that Daniel Day Lewis played such unlike characters in "My Left Foot" and "Room with a View" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," or that Jonathan Pryce, so endearingly geeky in "Brazil," was the foxy shill for Infiniti cars.
Why must there be such campy caricature in every single Jane Austen adaptation? in "Persuasion," Sir Elliot is portrayed as quite silly, rightly silly, exactly silly enough, but Elizabeth Elliot is over the top and not nearly as attractive as either Anne or even Mary, which doesn't suit the family dynamic. In "Pride and Prejudice," Caroline Bingley isn't nearly as attractive as she ought to be, and it's not just that she overspends on her wardrobe. And no one who married Mr. Hurst could possibly sneer at the Bennets.
Okay, that's two. I don't count "Mansfield Park"--of course Fanny Price is not palatable to the contemporary audience but she doesn't take nearly as well to "Oh and I happen to be the author in her youth" as Jo March does in the latest "Little Women." "Sense and Sensibility" is well cast. Gwyneth Paltrow doesn't look like Emma Woodhouse nor Toni Collette like Harriet Smith nor Euan Macgregor like Frank Churchill nor what's-her-name like Jane Fairfax (or she did, plus about ten years) but at least they're not campy. The only one I don't have is the Kate Beckinsale "Emma."
Satire, yes; foolishness, yes. Camp, no.
Now I'm done with "Persuasion" and I've cranked up "Sense and Sensibility," which I've worn a groove into. Man I love this movie.
Besides that Jane Austen fetishism is my usual state of being, one of my birthday gifts finally arrived. My mother-in-law gave me a gift certificate to Amazon and I indulged myself with The Making of Pride and Prejudice (and Out of Africa and Quincunx). I am all about paying attention to the man behind the curtain.
I thought that the girls would quite possibly be vegetarian so I was glad I had made Enchanted Broccoli Forest Green Green Noodle Soup. But it needed pesto, so Monday at lunch I bought basil (and some fruit for them to take with them because I was slightly in loco parentis (which is in fact how I justify calling them "girls")).
Only on the way home did I remember that in May the food processor died as it valiantly attempted to mix up dough for lasagne noodles. You'd think I'd've remembered, because half the soup--onions, zucchini, spinach--needed to be liquefied as well. The blender worked well for that (and for once prudence prevailed so I happened to be holding the top down when I switched it on), but it wouldn't work for pesto.
But then I remembered that people did make pesto before Cuisinart.
We have a hand-held thingie, something that fits in the palm with a six-bladed wheel. I sliced up the basil with that, then mashed up one (just one! though large) clove of garlic, enough pine nuts, enough cheese, a dash of salt, in the mortar and pestle. And then mixed it up in the basil. And it was so much better than usual. Maybe because I didn't overgarlick it, but I don't think so. I prefer to think it's because pesto prefers to be made the old-fashioned way.
I cooked. Again. Baking cookies doesn't count--that's dessert. I made the soup on Saturday, though it went uneaten until Wednesday. Tonight I made something from Almost Vegetarian, which I have to say, as a cookbook featuring allegedly healthful recipes, falls well short of its intention. Everything is packed full of dairy.
I made asparagus tips with a leek and scallions and parsley and orteggio (a circular, shallow dish of dime-sized pasta) and a dallop of yogurt (!) and some wine and muenster to melt into it at the end. Melting the muenster was the bad part; RDC was scornful of so primitive a method of adding cheese and thought it was going to be melted in wine first.
Sticky and too rich but I cooked it fine. Hey, I was proud.
I want to know--maybe not to learn, just to know--how to get a week's worth of food out of a set of ingredients. Two thirds of the leek and chives went into the compost--can you use leek leaves for stock? I still have a cup of leftover chopped onions from the soup that I didn't put in tonight's dish because it was already oniony enough.
My sister cracks me up. Yesterday she emailed me saying she couldn't believe she'd had no response to the spinach story. She did the phone equivalent of sending the story to my yahoo account (which I seldom check), which is calling my cell phone (which I almost never turn on). So I turned on my cell to check my messages.
"I'm not even home yet and she's already making me crazy. This morning the phone rang at eight o'clock and it was her and I couldn't understand her before staggering into the living room where I have better reception. I asked her what she had to call me at the crack of hell about, and she got all flustered and said, 'Well, now I've forgotten.' But then she remembered that her spinach crop is so bountiful this year that I can take as much of it as I want. So she's waking me up three days before I go home to tell me I can have spinach."
Reportedly it's been soggy in New England this June and jumped from cold and wet to hot and wet. I am so glad I plan to go home in September, when the weather (barring hurricanes) is more dependable. Our father's home this week too though. Our mother's throwing a Father's Day picnic for her husband this year, and I don't know how my sister plans to juggle seeing our actual father on Father's Day with our mother's expectations about seeing her husband. If I lived near both sets of parents and I saw my notstepmother on Mother's Day instead of my actual mother, the hurt would be vast and percussive--and justified. I wonder whether my mother can make the parallel.
CLH left a postscript in a second message: "If it's all right with you, when I tell her how irritating the spinach thing was I am also going to tell her how inappropriate of her it was to inquire about the state of the gate-leg table during the turmoil of your house falling over into a swamp. 'They ripped off the leaves and are using them as flotation devices in the swampy areas.'"
Me, I fume until I snap, because I find trying to communicate to her the source of my bad feeling and her role in it so frustrating. More frustrating than fuming and snapping? I'm not sure.
(And yes, my mother did so inquire. She called me on my birthday, which was nice of course, and I told her I wasn't in a particularly birthday mood because of the uncertain state of the house. I told her about taking everything out of the furnace room to so we could see the whole thing, and calcium sulfates, and type 5 concrete, and the crystalline structure, and the cracking of the floor, and the disintegration of the support column behind the furnace. She asked, "Now where is the gateleg table in all this?" RDC and I have considered living in Blake's cage or maybe the garage if the house goes. Silly us, not to consider the primacy of the table.)
My sister works fast. I called my mother's house to tell her about the shocking new development (that I cooked) and hear that the only reason I don't take more readily to this innate female skill is that RDC forcibly keeps me out of the kitchen, and also to talk to my sister, now home for the weekend.
My mother asked about the house and I told her what I told her before, about fixing the drainage and supporting the porch beam and replacing the columns. This time I was able to tell her that RDC was, as we spoke, routing a plank to fit under the porch beams, a nice manly activity I expected she would appreciate, to keep the porch roof up, and she asked, very solicitously, if it was actually falling down. "No, but it would if we didn't fix it." She was all concern this time, unlike last, and I knew CLH had already spoken to her.
Our mother passed the phone to my sister, who (after leaving her earshot) filled me in on lunch with our father (new malapropisms: "cosmatose" for "comatose," as in drinking to the point of, though whether anyone actually had a cosmopolitan I doubt, and "shitake," which is the sort of wave created in the pool when his apparently overweight notstepdaughterinlaw jumps in) and so forth.
I asked CLH how she'd broached the table topic, since it was obvious she had. "Well, I told her you were a little offended [note: amused enough to tell CLH, since any slight mother-error becomes story fodder] that that was her question when you told her about the house. She said, 'Well, I was concerned about the table,' so I pointed out that you were telling her about the house and she was concerned about a piece of furniture."
I know dwelling is unhealthy. But laughing about it, even if we're not quite to laughing it off, has to be good for us, right?
James Spader will never be anyone but Steff. And I hate Steff. I'm not sure if "Sex, Lies and Videotape" would have stood a chance with someone other than him in it; and in the two minutes of "Less Than Zero" I watched I thought Steff was a good choice to play Rip; but for Steff to be in "Secretary" didn't work for me. At all. I wondered who told him a bad Christopher Walken imitation would be a good idea. Because it wasn't.
Wow.
When RDC wants to lure me into an evening of playing boat (i.e., not moving from the couch because of the sharks in the floor, a holdover from my sister's or my being being sent to our room not to move from our bed but the other freely sharing in the exile, thence not to stir from the bed, because of the sharks), he'll announce that there's nothing on but Jane Austen movies with Peter Gabriel soundtracks.
The fact that "The Last Temptation of Christ" is unwatchable has nothing to do with this. And I don't think he's seen "Birdy," but that doesn't matter because it's the book, not the movie, that's better worth knowing.
Peter Gabriel love aside, Long Walk Home approaches but does not touch its movie's brilliance. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is one of the best movies I've ever seen, with three of the most natural child actors I could ever imagine. It makes for particularly good watching so soon after reading Pigs in Heaven.
Hey! "To Kill a Mockingbird" has a C.M. rating! True to the saying, the rule is thus tested. It's euthanasia.
Moonshadow's time is 10:38. I started scribbling a little after 10. I bet one snort of cockatiel dander that, despite the actual differences in the times I saved-to-publish these four entries, this one will show the same time, 22:10 as the first three. Why?
By the time rain began and I got up to lower the north windows, at 3 o'clock, it had been thundering and lightninging for a longish time. I only closed the two on the right: if rain came in the two on the left it would fall on us in bed. Meanwhile we wanted the cool air, and it wasn't windy so the rain just dropped straight down.
The storm was far away, judging by the lapse between light and sound, but huge: the thunder was tremendously loud despite the distance, and each outburst was neither a simple clap nor even a roll but a seconds-long rumble. I am looking this up now, but my guess is that the higher the storm builds, the longer the path lightning travels from cloud to ground, thus the longer the thunder. But that doesn't make any sense, because the difference it takes lightning to go 20,000 versus 50,000 feet must be wee. But more distance would mean more gases to expand. So maybe not so nonsensical.
After the rain started, the sound and light show ceased or moved on, so I fell back asleep thinking it couldn't've rained very much. But the front garden is flattened and detritus marks the high-tide mark near overburdened storm drains.
I am so enjoying this summer.
It had not thundered all damn day but any public organization has to protect everyone from no chance at all, so the pool was closed for lap swim. A lifeguard was present nonetheless and she suggested one of the indoor pools.
Indoor pools in the summer? People are freaks, they really are.
I will figure this out.
I just used the Ohio Public Library's tree identifier finally to determine that the Other tree is a European mountain ash or rowan. I had no idea. Rowan sounds so sexy and romantic and this tree is orange: the bark has an orange tint and the fruit is orangey, in wee little clustered berries that, according to Ohio, birds eat. We call it the Other tree because we don't like it much. I thought, from my tree identification guidebook, that it was a sumac.
I have used the Ohio site before trying to establish a species of tree I love here, with such a scent. A couple were planted by a new housing development on my bike commute and I bet if I ever could find its architect or designer, they would know. In the meantime I'm going to go through the tree identifier name by name.
Okay, none of those. The closest I've found, the narrowleaf cottonwood, doesn't mention the tree's shoots. Like a quaking aspen or our cherry tree, whatever tree I'm after spreads with shoots; when I discovered that I realized that identifying it mattered less since I wouldn't plant it.
I'm sick! Sick! Besides that I say that anyway, because of a movie or "Bloom County" (The Onion recently ran an article about someone whose pop culture references stopped in 1988 but I go all the way to 1994), it's more fitting to say now because I'm reading This Perfect Day, in which nonassimilated members of the society are "sick." And I didn't think of this in previous readings, but that's a nod to Erewhon, in which criminality is sick but illness is criminal. Hence you say someone's "got the socks" (i.e. stolen a pair of socks) as a euphemism for having a cold. Hence Blake's "getting the flaps."
Anyway.
Where would I be without that word?
I'm sick! Sick! This morning it was pouring (again! I should have planted a tree this spring, but in the window of time when you do that, before it heats up, not that it's done that yet either praise be, we didn't know what the water situation was going to be. Ironic, innit?)--
I'm sick! Sick! This morning it was pouring so I drove because I am made of sugar and will melt, thank you Kymm. NPR or CPR was fundraising so I switched to KBCO and then to one of the "classic" rock stations. A song was just beginning. A song I knew really well. "Wow!" I thought. "I haven't heard 'I Will Follow' in years!" Because I hadn't. And still haven't, because the song was, in fact, "Two Hearts Beat As One." I haven't listened to U2 much since 1992, well after Bono's Christ/Elvis complex began to bother me, and I only just bought War digitally. And then I plugged in my iPod, that being its point, and listened to the album from the beginning. "Sunday Bloody Sunday," "Seconds," "New Year's Day," and then I was at work. At my desk, I skipped "Like a Song..." because I decided, with 20 years' remove, that the song sucked. Then "Drowning Man." Then I skipped "Refugee" because I didn't like it even then, and "Red Light" too. But "Surrender"! That was my anthem! My angsty teenage anthem, baby!
But that's not even the sickness, OMFB. No no no no no. Listening, I wondered if I could find setlists from the Unforgettable Fire tour on that newfangled thing they've got nowadays called "the web." I looked. I knew it wasn't tenth grade, because in tenth grade my first concert was Duran Duran, and then I broke my arm. It was eleventh grade, spring, and I bought a $15 ticket from a schoolmate for $20 and considered myself hard done by. Here I found two dates for Hartford Civic Center, 20 and 23 April. I considered, for half a second, which of the two I had attended. And then I remembered. It had to be the 23rd, the birthday of my high school crush.
Of course I also remember the phone number of my childhood best friend, even though I haven't dialed it since about 1980. That's just how my mind works. I remember in kindergarten when Miss Pancera (who got married the next summer, and I have never been able to remember her married name, even though I saw her occasionally throughout my entire elementary school tenure, because that is also how my mind works) asked my phone number, I gave HPV's, because that's the one I knew.
And maybe I'm not that sick. 23 April sticks out as a date not because it was the crush's birthday but because on 23 April 1985 I saw U2 but on 23 April 1984 I was having surgery on my broken arm. I for damn sure remembered that contrast. (Remembering that I noticed the coincidence of dates doesn't strike me as being as sick as remembering an obsolete birthday.)
But I am still fairly pathe. The exclamation "You're sick! Sick!" is what Milo yells at Opus after Opus ran up thousands of dollars at 1-900-DIAL-aMOM. I reread my Bloom County anthologies far too many times. And it's a pity that the past tense of "reread" is indistinguishable in print from the present tense. Because that is past tense, OMFB. Just not past enough.
By the way, the set list was
11 O'clock tick tock
I will follow
Two hearts beat as one
Seconds
MLK
The unforgettable fire
Wire
Sunday bloody sunday
The cry
The electric co.
A sort of homecoming
Bad
October
New Year's Day
Pride (In the name of love)
Knocking On Heaven's Door
Gloria
40
But can that be right? I remember Bono singing some lines from "Ruby Tuesday," a song I didn't know. I probably had to ask someone at school what that was, or I didn't ask because that would have been uncool but remembered and wrote down the lines. Maybe they didn't do the whole song.
If nothing else the Addams Family movies were well cast, and Wednesday's slow smile at camp has always struck me as one of the best and scariest smiles in moviedom.
I'm watching "Harold and Maude" for the 90th time and it's clearly been too long--maybe only once or twice since Haitch gave it to me for my birthday in 1997? 1998?
Because when Harold smiles after Candy runs screaming is indisputably the best movie smile, scary or not, ever.
Also, "They're my species." Also, "So I'll always know where it is." Also, "Go and love some more."
Sometime during college--it must have been in college because my father was living in the house again and he subscribed to cable with HBO--"Harold and Maude" came on a pay channel one later afternoon and I began to watch it (again). Eventually both of my parents joined me, and though I don't understand how anyone can begin watching a movie for the first time elsewhere than from the beginning, I was much more pleased that it captured their attention. The computer dates amused my father most and the staged deaths amused my mother not at all. But they were both captivated, and I was so grateful and relieved. I have always since used "Harold and Maude" as a gauge. If you prefer cats to dogs, we can maybe talk. If you don't like "Harold and Maude" you have no soul.
We just got it on DVD, which has two theatrical trailers as special features. The first one has a collage of shots with "If You Want to Sing Out"; the second gives the whole damn thing away. And neither features That Trailer Voice saying "In a world..."
One of the reasons the house is falling into a swamp is improper drainage. Today I took the first step in correcting that by receiving five cubic yards, 2.5 tons, of dirt, tipped into the street against the curb in front of the house.
Now then. The city pools close in the middle of August when the lifeguards go back to school but the pools do not open in the middle of May when they leave school. Why? It's a mystery. No, they open in mid-June--last Saturday to be precise. I swam Saturday, we went mountain-biking Sunday, and then Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the only post-work lap swim times, there were thunderstorms (or at least a tiny little smidge of rain three miles away that we had to be protected from) so swim was canceled.
So today I was all stoked for a noon swim--there is a noon lap swim every day, although the adults who want lapswim generally have jobs that prevent their taking advantage of it, and why do I live in the land o' no lakes again?--so after the dirt's 11:15 arrival I barrowed only three loads from the great big pile before biking over to the pool.
The great big piercing blue sky that Denver generally has all day clouded up fast as the dozens of littl'uns vacated the general swim. In ten minutes the overcast was complete. I swam .7K before we were whistled out, and for goodness sake, a thunderstorm in the middle of the day? That just doesn't happen here. I shucked my suit, regained my shorts and (white) tank top, Tevas and sandals, and biked home as fast as I could through pouring rain, gusty winds, and maybe some thunder and lightning.
My great big pile of dirt in the street wanted to swim away already. Denver might not get a lot of rain, but it really enjoys its downpours. I grabbed tarps from the lasagne mulch in back, from over the leaf pile, from under the brush pile. I dug a trench through the dirt for the lake that already had formed on the upstream side to drain. I hastily reattached all the long gutters that're supposed to divert the water from leaking into the basement--those I'd removed that morning so the wheelbarrow could get through.
I dashed into the house to swap sunglasses for contact lenses and sopping wet white--though muddy--tank top for something more practical and opaque. Just as I emerged, the rain, true to Denver form, dripped to a halt. It's rain, and I cannot resent it. But I maybe did give the sky the stink-eye a couple of times.
So my next barrow loads were of mud as I tried to buttress the pile from further erosion. My gloves were soaked from the lake and the stream and the ditch, so I shucked them. But when my shorts had got so filthy I could no longer wipe the mud onto them for a better purchase on shovel or wheelbarrow, I gave up.
I broke for dry clothes and a sandwich over a few minutes of "Sense and Sensibility." I have really worn a groove in it--it crashed twice and I restarted Moondshadow, taking that as my hint to get back to work. Twice more in the afternoon, thunderstorms passed through, though only with showers, and I took the second rain as a signal to stop for the day.
So here I am, in warm sunlight, on my porch swing, listening to Crosby Still & Nash and now the Waterboys, eating cherries, and not reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.
I am loving this summer.
I haven't mentioned it because I hadn't seen the evidence in the rock yet, but now I have so I will. Haitch and McCarthy are engaged, and the subject line refers not to any conversation or visit, I am happy to say, but to the design of the ring. The extremely sparkly stone--that's clarity, right?--is tension-mounted in titanium so there is no metal beneath or around it. Light can enter it from almost any point except two, at 9 and 3 o'clock where the band touches the…rim or whatever you call the transition from the round top to the pointed bottom.
We toasted them with the champagne KREL and her husband gave us in France (that I schlepped in my carryon wrapped in my nightgown, so I'm glad that went well) and fed them raspberries from the garden (yesterday's take made two layers in the bottom of the same style of bowl). Also I gave her her French KitKats. And she gave me my birthday presents: a chocolate and raspberry candy bar, a book of essays on northern New York (I love local books), and moose cookie cutters, big and wee.
I brought them into the kitchen to join them with my other moose cookie cutter. "Oh, I didn't know you already had one," said Haitch, perhaps disappointed.
"But now I have a whole moose family!" I exclaimed. All three have the giant palmate spreads of antlers that mark them as meeses, so it's quite authentic in the lisaverse that they're a bull, cow, and baby. When SEM discovered in college how squeamish I was about giving birth, he accessorized the worst possible baby for me: claws, tail fins, and velcro, and there might have been antlers.
We had dinner at Mizuna, which used to be Aubergine. I don't know why I was the designated driver on the way, except I had had only a sip of champagne while the others had finished the bottle, since I cannot parallel park, even by Braille, unless the space is big enough for a yacht.
Mmm, food. RDC had made me tea in the post-dirt pre-dinner hosing-off period, and I sucked down some Advil, so I was even awake for this meal. I had a goat cheese and morel and some green sprouty thing salad with my first fava beans; RDC had paté; Haitch had some kind of potato and corn pasta; McCarthy had macaroni and cheese, at Haitch's request, so I could try some.
Macaroni and cheese is one of my continued finickinesses. I didn't like noodles or cheese as a child, so after I was grown and loved both and lived with a good cook, I figured hey, pasta, cheese, what can go wrong? I don't know, but I still didn't like it, until last night. It maybe helped that this mac & muck, as my sister (whose favorite food it was) called it, was made with mascapone cheese and studded with lobster. Maybe.
Then RDC and I had prosciutto-wrapped scallops with a shiitake-potato-fava garnish and McCarthy had halibut and Haitch a vegetarian sampler, and we all finished with a flourless chocolate cake covered in crême fraiche. How do you spell that? Whatever.
The restaurant did crumb the table and refold your napkin if you left the table, but it did not provide the far more practical service of a valet with a handcart to roll you back to your car.
Besides that I'm a freak who wakes up early when she doesn't have to and that it's the shortest day of the year, that is.
A family of magpies in the cherry tree outside my bedroom window. Five baby magpies whining mag? mag? mag? mag? mag? etc. while their parents ate and tried to encourage the babies to eat instead of begging to be fed. The babies have short tails and are scruffy but already have their adult white bibs and black hoods.
Now, them I don't mind sharing the cherries with. But yesterday I staggered into the backyard to find a squirrel sitting up on its hind tentacles in the grass beside the raspberry canes, just scooping fruit into its fiendish little mouth. I shooed it off, but it just looked at me; I stomped and yelled scat so it scurried--slowly, but it's a squirrel--first to the vegetable garden, with me quite close to it, clapping my hands and saying "Shoo!" and "Scat!" and "Git!" (so much better with an i than an e in that context) until it finally hopped the fence. Blighter.
Which reminds me that Haitch said she had considered a squirrel and nut set of cookie cutters before the moose ones but then realized that wouldn't be such a welcome thing. No, probably not, except then I could bite a whole bunch of squirrel heads off, not in the messy geeky way either.
Which also reminds me that Haitch is about to read Geek Love. Good. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets…." What a great book.
Okay, now I'm getting up. Dirt and Order of the Phoenix and yet another deceptively sunny day that will cloud over at 11:57 a.m. await.
When I emerged from the pool I thought I had a most viscous water clog in my left ear. Maybe after twenty years of breathing to the left my right ear is trained enough to shed water, but when the left gets plugged, it stays plugged. The ride home was interesting. I dashed inside for a drop of isoprophyl alcohol to break the surface tension: no dice. Huh.
Then I admired RDC's handi- and footiwork: while I was gone he had dug a ditch along the property line and stomped grapes all over the fill I had barrowed into place on Friday and Saturday morning. Besides a barrowload for the raspberry patch, there was nothing for me to do until the fill settled down so the sections could take more--nothing…for me…to do…on the house. It was very strange. So Blake and I settled on the porch swing to read Cadmus and Harmony with my head tilted to the left.
RDC was still muddy so I ran his errands inside, like to refill his water bottle and fetch scissors to snip open the silicone he was patching a gutter with. Every time I got up I noticed I was more disoriented in a way people with hearing loss must somehow accommodate. So I gave in completely to nappitude, bringing a floor pillow and the picnic blanket to the swing for more comfortable left-sided reading. Or napping.
I heard Blake greet someone, "wheet wheet!" and I thought RDC was on the steps taking off his boots. But no, I heard him from farther away, "Do you need me to sign for that?" I sat up, not quite awake yet, off-kilter. "It's what you've been waiting for," he told me.
The mailman stood at the mailbox by the door with a box. I grinned and slid it from under his arm with a grin and my thanks. And there were the scissors, fresh from silicone duty. There was no more sleeping.
I did get up, though, when the sun reached more than half the swing. I read for a spell in Vito before realizing it would go better if I weren't wearing sunglasses. I was really out of it. When RDC came in, he suggested an ickier cause of my hearing loss. The next step, warm water and hydrogen peroxide, did indeed fix me. Gross.
Blake and I then joined RDC on the patio, where he was grilling asparagus and bison bratwurst (the point of that eludes me--why disguise bison? But it was in the fridge). I took a bowl and gathered raspberries to snack on and sat reading before dinner--after chasing RDC around the backyard and swatting him with my book, which he tossed onto and then retrieved from the garage roof.
We left Harry Potter on page 178 and Blake very disappointed--two nights out in a row, three for RDC--and hopped on a bus toward downtown.
I feel a little disloyal to Old Lyme but glad too, because, not before time, I really like my city. I love being able to use public transit to a hopping downtown with a Pride Fest and at least something going on every summer weekend. The Pride Fest might have meant the bus turned around several blocks before Auraria, but it was a lovely walk, through Larimer Square with its chalk-paintinged street and over Cherry Creek.
The last time I came here--I wrote this between sets in a little notebook CLH gave me, so "came here" instead of "went there"--also the first time, in December to see Peter Gabriel, the bus dropped us at the Auraria campus and we hoofed the short distance to the Pepsi Center. There is no traffic signal nor even a pedestrian crosswalk between that last stop of a major bus route and this major destination. So we jaywalked. This time, I didn't know where in the complex the attractively named Universal Lending Pavillions at the Pepsi Center Complex would be but I figured a large tent would give itself away. It did. Will-call was obvious too, and overall I liked the Pavillions immediately because it was like the Fleet Pavillions in Boston where I saw the Cowboy Junkies with CLH. And because this place is right on the South Platte, there is a breeze. That's not so unusual for Denver in the evening, but it is for New England, so it was pleasantly reminiscent of the coast.
When we arrove, RDC wanted a beer. Despite Denver's having the highest proportion of brew pubs per capita in the country, Coors is still just up the street. So he got the only premium option, Killian's Red, which he described as Coors with red food coloring, and I got a water. Noshing being my weakness, I looked around in dismay at the foods offered. My sister would have been happy, but I need chocolate not salt. Finally, tucked away in a corner, I found an ice cream stand. Adequately supplied, we sat down just as Robert Randolph and His Family Band took the stage.
I only just learned about this band and I'm not sure if RDC has known about them for long. If I may quote William from "Almost Famous," he is incendiary. He and his 12-string steel guitar smoked. He and his band played only five songs, but they all evolved through jams. I wasn't sure of the titles, but setlists are why I brought the little notebook:
Then Susan Tedeschi came out. I've known about her only since January and I don't know all her song titles either. These might be obvious lines from the choruses:
This is ridiculous--neither the News nor the Post reviewed the concert, so I can't track down songs. In sum, good show, good guitar, glad Robert Randolph played with her, glad RDC liked her, startled to find out that her speaking voice is high and squeaky, considering how throaty and deep her singing voice is.
Nope. I have nothing more to say. I'm tapped.
Partly this is true. Partly I have poisoned myself with hydrogenated fat today so am feeling headachy and ill and down-in-de-dumps, and by god I have got to stop quoting Bloom County. At least the first part, "headachy and ill," is from September, not that Rosamund Pilcher is such an improvement.
When I'm alone in the house, I'm less tidy than when I'm not alone. Partly it's courtesy for my housemate, partly it's that the presence of the housemate keeps my sluggishness and my entropy in check.
Usually when I come home, Blake is not my first stop. Usually when I arrive, I go into the bedroom to drop bag and shoes, into the bathroom to pee, and only then into RDC's study to kiss him and take Blake and then change my clothes and make his supper and get the mail and so forth. When RDC is away, Blake is my first stop for two reasons: he's right there, by the living room window where I rolled his cage in the morning, and he's been alone all day.
Yesterday, I did go outside after I got home but only to bring out the trash and gather raspberries: only out the back, using the spare key that lives convenient to that door. This morning, I looked for my keys. Usually I lose them by throwing them on my bag instead of clipping them to it, so they get lost in a pocket sometimes. Not so. I tried to retrace yesterday's path: did I drop them on Blake's cage stand' My bag lay near the coffee table: did I drop them there to mar its finish' Did I put them on the mantel, there to be lost among baby shower and wedding invitations and anniversary cards' The most likely place was the dining table, or from there to have fallen onto a dining chair. No. The bathroom counter' The nightstand by my bed' My skirt pocket' The kitchen counter'
They have to be somewhere in the house: I got into it last night. But today I'm using the spare car key and the spare house key, and if I lose those I'm screwed. I clipped them into their zippered pocket as soon as I exited the car this morning.
Said CoolBoss when I got to work: 'But you drove' Today's Bike-to-Work day!' And so it is, but today at lunch, since I didn't do it yesterday evening, I am going out to get gravel to fill the last of the ditch. Also, since RDC is away, I have been a lazy toadstool, see letting house drift into entropy, and driven. Monday I brought him to the airport, true. Yesterday I wanted to get home early enough to spend some time with Blake before my swim, but it was 55 and I didn't swim.
CoolBoss also asked if losing keys was a pattern for us--just a few weeks ago I zoomed out on my bike at 2:00 in the afternoon because RDC had locked himself out of the car in front of Whole Foods, to rescue him as he had rescued me from bad or at least less than ideal weather. No, that was the first time he ever in his life locked himself out of the car--the keys were on the passenger seat where he dropped them before messing with his phone headset or getting the shopping bags out of the backseat. ('You two belong in Boulder,' she opined. 'Canvas shopping bags, Whole Foods, biking to work.') I used to lock myself out of Fugly early on, but since she was an '80 Omni with pull-up locks, as long as I could find a wire coathanger I was okay.
I don't, or I haven't yet, locked myself out of my house. I do often lose my keys, but only inside the house. If I lose these spares I'm screwed. SPM has a housekey and I should maybe keep one at work, but the Cassidy key I'm using is the 'valet' key--it works the ignition but not the glovebox. It lives in the house for just such occasions, since I lose my keys more often than we mistrust what valets we use.
The reason to do housework on weeknights is so it's done for the weekend. I'm not proud of spending the week rereading Harry Potter and watching television, but so it went. By the weekend I was way too much in my head and mindless crap like that wasn't keeping me out of it. Now, Sunday evening, the house is clean (even the bathroom and the birdcage), the weedcrop is weedwhacked (except for the bachelor's button, which is too pretty to be a weed), the trees and gardens are watered, a quart of cherries are in the freezer, the day's raspberries are in a bowl near to hand, the laundry's done (though just piled on the bed with its flipped, notated mattress and clean line-dried linens), groceries are bought and away, the drainage ditch is full of gravel, and if 80 pounds of birdseed are still in Cassidy, well, the baby shower was really nice.
Which is how I prefer to be. I raced (relatively speaking) home, swapped work stuff for swim stuff, pedaled slowly to the pool, swam 1.7K, came home to dinner on the patio, picked a quart of cherries and a handful of raspberries, fed me and RDC the latter and pitted and froze the former, folded and put away laundry that I took from the dryer only this morning, and here I am.
At the pool swam a man in my lane, the slower of the two medium lanes. He more thrashed than swam and he could not keep to the right. Also he was too slow for the medium lanes. A length and a half after I noticed him, he ran into me several yards (meters, whatever) from the shallow end. He stood up. I faced oncoming swimmers and told him, quite kindly I thought, that he needed to wear goggles so that he could see to keep to the right. Although he did not physically speak like a stupid person, his content was stupid: he didn't know the word for goggles (he sounded like a native Usan though), he hadn't noticed you should keep to the right, his eyes hurt but he hadn't connected that to his lack of goggles. I gestured for him to move on, out of other swimmers' way; he either didn't see or didn't comprehend. I gave up and walked to the end and that he followed. He said he wasn't used to the pool's being roped off and I told him about general swim and lap swim. I referred him to Gart Bros. for goggles and pushed off, pleased with how frustrated I hadn't been at his numskullery.
Swimming, I tried to figure out his deal. He could have been just not as bright as average, on the left side of the bell curve, without being left enough to be mentally disabled. Had he just had a shock? A concussion? Could anyone be that blasé?
Some time later when I took a water break, I heard him in the next lane over saying to another swimmer, "I was too slow for that lane and they kicked me out." I had said nothing about his speed at all. And if he thought he was too slow for the slower medium lane, why would he move into the faster medium lane instead of into the slow ones? And I didn't ask him to leave the lane.
I somewhat wanted to say, at least to the other swimmer, that I didn't kick him out, that he could swim neither straight enough for lap nor fast enough for four of the six lanes. I didn't, because she probably had noticed and I have that much self-respect. I don't have so much that I could just gloss over it, thus this.
Blake is so happy that his daddy is home. Unfortunately RDC's day began with a 7:30 conference call, remotely accessing others' computers, meaning he was stuck at his desk. He preemptively covered Blake in the bathroom, because besides Blake protesting whenever he doesn't his own way, he also is compelled to respond and compete with the whiny baby mapgies infesting the neighborhood. RDC called me when he was free again. Instead of napping or moping or breaking his heart or whatever he usually does when covered up, Blake sang and chattered, showing what a sweet and wonderful buddy he is. He kept asking, "You're a good boy buddy?"
As soon as I joined them in the living room tonight, Blake wanted me. "Oho," said RDC. "He's done with me." But between work and swim and cherries, Blake hadn't seen me all day either. He is now making his beloved nails-on-a-chalkboard sound, grooming his beak as he gets sleepy on my shoulder. The very picture of a contented cockatiel.
When we first moved here, everything was migratory. We had about as much crap as any two average English grad students and the Best Value U-Haul and I packed extremely efficiently, thus with room for nonperishable foods. In our first months in Denver, we finished off a lot of migratory pasta. I don't know how we came to have a badger in the oven (I think it might have chewed through the wires one time when we were going to feed ABW and KRW baked chicken; instead we fed them delivered pizza), but it came along too.
And so it's gone, over these past eight years, finding migratory items, with decreasing frequency. I guess we don't have a lot of use for isoprophyl alcohol, because last weekend when I took it from the cupboard I recognized the old-style Stop & Shop price sticker on the top. That it was Stop & Shop brand to begin with probably clued me into its being migratory. I commented to RDC that this was probably the last of the migratory stuff.
Saturday I polished a silver barrette I seldom wore with my hair really long: too much hair to make a ponytail with the barrette and my occasional attempts to draw the front hair back into a barrette and leave the rest loose seldom lasted. I wore it to the baby shower, since it was cool enough to wear my hair down. This morning as I brushed my teeth I noticed the little jar still on the sink instead of put away down in the laundry room, with Stop & Shop sticker on its lid.
That's a lifetime supply of silver polish, unless I acquire actually silver silverware. Or maybe it would work on the floor lamp, whose hood is getting fingerprinted. Yes, knowing that I'll always have something migratory in the house is comforting to me.
Today I did one of the stupidest things I've done deliberately since I was grown. Or at least since Friday, when RDC gave Shadowfax egg-beater stirrups (at my request). And not counting the rollerblades. RDC took the car to DIA for a long day trip, back and forth to Tucson, and I already mentioned going to the Dead tomorrow [except I accidentally deleted that, so I didn't, but we are], and really I should've mailed it Saturday but we went to Grand Lake instead.
I had to send it today, so I pedaled (unclipped) to the package store--I love saying that--with a care package for my sister under my arm. I was fine, and thank heavens, because if I had spilled it would have been my sister's fault (in our parents' eyes) as much as my 1992 car accident was, since it was her care package I was sending.
(1992 car accident: driving back from the surprise birthday party she threw for her boyfriend in Boston, half mile from home, passing (on the left) the braking, left-signaling other driver, passing on the left despite the left turn signal, because he must be turning right onto the residential street rather than left into the restaurant because who would be going to the restaurant at midnight, three hours after it closed? No one except its cleaner. Both of the 'rents gave CLH shit for that, like my carelessness was her fault.)
Care package: a child's jigsaw puzzle of a duckling, because it was there and a nice quiet game she probably can't injure herself with, except I forgot about Curious George eating the puzzle piece until just this moment. Plus she hates birds. A book of crossword puzzles with a rainbow cover, and a package of "pencil pillows" coordinatedly colorful.* A bag of individually wrapped Wint-O-Green lifesavers, because what is a stocking without them?** A package of Newman dark chocolate peppermint cups. Animal Dreams and Poisonwood Bible and Why Girls Are Weird, the last of whose first non-entry scene is Anna washing Dale's hair because he just hurt his hand. CDs of John Denver and Barry Manilow because they will make her laugh and PJ Harvey (thanks Trish) just in case. Um. A tin of Before the Kiss mints in a tin with Klimt's The Kiss on the lid. Did I mention I just bought Nisou a shower curtain with The Kiss on it? Well I did. Then I saw the mints and thought that would be a good follow-up but somehow wound up with two tins. My sister gets the spare. A candle holder that, frankly, has been in my Goodwill box (along with that travesty of a jacket I foisted on Jessie some time ago) for a long time. A store credit to Bombay Company for the princessly sum of not quite eleven bucks that I scored when I finally brought two wine bottle necklaces, for chrissakes, back to that Land of the Laminate. (Both the candle thingie and the necklaces were Christmas presents. I am the regifter.)
I have not been to an interesting store since before I got The Call alerting me to the Need of the Care Package, so what she got was what I had in the house or could score at Rite-Aid when I picked up prescriptions, plus Pamie's book.
I could have found good swag at the Tattered Cover if I hadn't been scurrying. Between the Tiny Wooden Hand and the hair-washing, Why Girls Are Weird might be just what my sister needs. It will be interesting to see if someone who's not Among the Initiated likes it.
* and ** My sister just sliced her hand open, hence the care package. Her right hand. Crossword puzzles and individually wrapped lifesavers might not have been such hot ideas.
Moving on. So I need to get hold of the second Addams Family movie. They lose their house and have to move out, and there's a scene where Thing, the hand, trots down the sidewalk on its fingers trailing a little red wagon filled with one-handed thingies. I want to get her that stuff. I want to know what Ned Flanders sells in the Leftorium and get her that too. And then there's the "M*A*S*H" where Charles is so proud of his painstaking work enabling someone to walk again, even if he slacked on the hand a bit, not knowing that the soldier is actually--sob!--a concert pianist. So Charles finds him left-handed piano sheet music--amazing what you can find in a mobile army surgical hospital in the short window of time a soldier would have convalesced in one. Not that my sister has a piano or remembers any more than I do of our lessons with Mrs. McNamara ("Swans under the Willows, "My Favorite Things," and "Three Blind Mice," me).
I can say this because she doesn't read this (she tried it and stopped, disappointed that it wasn't all of the calibre of "Breathing Stuffed Animals): I boxed everything up in the box that her last year's birthday present came in, the Super Bubbler. She was really disappointed in me that I didn't find this as amusing as she did. I'm a grown-up: I'm not going to use that in the house on my hardwood floors and upholstery! Or outside, all that soap film to harm plants with? Plus the concept of blowing bubbles with a motor instead of with your breath is faintly heretical, isn't it? Like using a leafblower instead of a rake, a motor instead of a sail. Plus it's loud.
But, CLH notes with satisfaction, I have used it at every outdoor gathering I've had since. Which is two, last summer: a cookout with Clove and Dexy, who I knew would enjoy it and did, and Haitch's graduation party, when little kids ran through the bubbles and emptied the bottle into the large stockpot I'd put out as a water dish for the dogs. Dogs with diarrhea from drinking soap: just what I want in my backyard and what their owners wanted to take home with them. This year for my birthday CLH sent me a box of stocking-stuffer type stuff that was all just super, and one of the things was a large bottle of bubble juice. Ha.
So she'll be amused by the box I used. Hey, it's the only one I had in the house of the right size. Damn it.
So Ebay has this beautiful handmade Tiny Wooden Hand for $35, and frankly if she hasn't read either Pamie's site or book, would it be funny? Otherwise I can buy a gross of plastic backscratchers for two bucks. I exaggerate, but she might not be getting a TWH. Also I need to find the titles of appropriate sheet music.
But the box won't even get there until Friday. Perhaps by then I shall have completed a second box. I have already contracted to drive to work on Wednesday, after a late night with the Dead, and at lunch I plan to find one of the Other Targets. I've seen one, probably a mirage, not too far away. Ours is closed for expansion until October, and the line in our house is that that was the only one on the whole planet.
I am taking suggestions for subsequent care packages, though the hook and the pirate keyboard are probably the pinnacle of possibilities.
By the way, she says Kitty really likes the splint. It makes for good scratching. There's a cat for you, always looking out for your best interests. "Oh, you're injured? That cast looks like a good scratching post." I am not one to talk: RDC had to go around like Napoleon last winter because Blake found his cast deeply, deeply enticing. It moulded RDC's hand and wrist into the buddy-scoop position! What could be better?
Why the hell am I still awake?
Five cubic yards of fill, 2.5 tons, in three steps, 20-21 June, 29 June, and this evening.
When RDC came home the 30th, after a full week away, he asked why I had not moved all the dirt. I had blocked out my frustration with the project in the intervening 36 hours and forgotten why, exactly, I had stopped. "I was tired?" I guessed. Wrongo. I remembered as soon as I started again. I fucking stopped because there was no more fucking room on the north side of the house. I did not order five cubic yards, no. I voted for three. Three, I grant you, might have been inadequate, since all but one wheelbarrow-load that landed in the raspberry patch is in fact on the north side. But five has taken some trampling, and some gentle grading of the slope on the north front, and quite a bit of fill against non-tarred bricks, where it cannot stay.
When we started this project, you could see two tiers of black, that is tarred, brick on that side of the house, where bad drainage had gradually eroded the soil. Or, I should say, not before we started but after I had removed all the stone previous owners have tried to improve drainage with. Certainly dirt should cover those two layers, but no higher. I worry about the grading, whether it's sufficient to keep rain, should any fall again, from the window wells.
I should also say I don't know how dirt solves the problem. I understand about grading, about sloping the dirt primarily toward the property line but also from back to front. But dirt, even clay dirt like this, still is water-permeable. Water still drains down through the soil. It just has to go through more soil before eventually finding our foundation with its probable crack. Yea. If it had been just RDC's brilliant plan I maybe would have objected, but since it was the structural engineer's I credited it.
There's been no rain to test anything since 20 June. We'll see.
This might not be the final step. We still might need to dig a ditch.
I don't understand why they call themselves the Dead. When the remnants first toured without Jerry Garcia, only the next summer, they called themselves the Other Ones, but it might not have been everyone. I once wrote "the other one" as the return address in a letter to my mother, so I understand why, Jerry-less, they were Other. Besides, there was the song. But now, just "the Dead"?
It reminds me of that scene in 1984 when Winston and Julia have been reading Goldstein's book and they say "We are the dead" and the Thought Police reply, "You are the dead."
Anyway. I changed into my paisley tank top and sweatskirt. (Both of these are miracle garments, the latter because it hasn't given out yet and the former because it's the sort of thing that fades after a few washings but I've had it for 11 or 12 years now and the colors are still strong and I wear it all summer long.) And into my Sneetchified Bear's Choice earrings, dime-sized dancing bears punched from silver, dangling below a couple of chunks of polished quartz, Sneetchified because one has a phosporescent star on its belly. I parted my hair diagonally and braided pigtails, which worked surprisingly well on a first attempt.
(Apparently a Dead show is like the opera, where sartorial matters are so vital.)
SPM came over and the three of us zoomed off to Red Rocks, there to meet Alias, whom I have decided to call Begonia. Alias is male, but despite its ending in -a, Begonia is appropriate for another reason than just the song "Scarlet Begonias." A parking lot attendant waved us into place, and what a place: they weren't placing cars immediately next to campers, so we had a car-spot in between to set up coolers and chairs for socializing with the camperfolk, whose vehicle shaded this idyll. We ate and drank and shoved the remaining beers into RDC's and SPM's CamelBaks to sustain us (well, them) in line, which we joined soon enough (Red Rocks is all unassigned seating).
Red Rocks. Hot and dusty, but the shade, once you're in some, by grace of either a camper or the sun's gradually inching behind the monoliths, counts. Plus the view doesn't suck. Swallows and swifts and bats and the city steamrollered flat on the plains below twinkling first in the heat by day and later by artifical light.
My escorts, or whatever you would call it, I guess I was theirs as the built-in designated driver, finished their beers and a bottle of Maker's Mark in line, and criminy, may I never get SPM mad at me. Well likkered up, he told the most hysterically scathing stories. But we're English grad students, or nearly, so occasionally a story would require the right phrase from Yeats' "Second Coming." It was very amusing. Also, since we found out too late that no water containers without a factory seal would be permitted, I got a little shower with the remnants of the drinking water. Damn hot. It was, after all, a lap swim night.
Also, how the scene has changed. I say this so authoritatively, having attended a total of six shows between 1993 and 1995, plus two Jerry concerts. But as we stood in line, we spoke of children, of how brilliant one is and how another just wants blocks and another is such pals with his dad, of houses and maintenance and real estate, of work (managerial, not sustenance) and so forth. I was reminded of when Ruth Anne borrowed Chris-in-the-Morning's motorcycle and fell in with some Hell's Angels-looking bikers, one of whom wore a patch over his eye, and how their conversation bikerishly accepted this 80-year-old woman into its midsts and evolved from "Easy Rider" to having to get home to a child's school recital and how relieved the patched one would be when the stye in his eye cleared up.
So, the show. I was worried about Joan Osbourne. In the summer of 1998, I went to Lilith Fair with Haitch and KMJ, Haitch for Sarah Mclachlan and Natalie Merchant and I for them but less so and primarily the Cowboy Junkies, who were also KMJ's reason. The Junkies' abysmal sound did not further my campaign to convert Haitch, I'm sorry to say. I am also sorry to say that during Joan Osbourne, during "What If God [were] Watching/One of (whichever it is) Us?" I was compelled to make a munchie run. I loathe that song, not only for grammatical reasons.
Begonia had seen them Monday as well, and said they sucked. "Baby Blue" is not an up song for third in the first set. They played Deal, Sugar Magnolia, and Box of Rain, the first one of RDC's absolute favorites besides "The Wheel" and the latter two mine or ours and Sugar Magnolia being one of the two songs RDC is required by marriage articles to dance with me during (the other is the Junkies' "Anniversary Song"). I am willing to believe bad renditions are worse than none. Traditionally their sucking one night should mean a much better show the next night. I wondered, and I wondered more when I saw setlists in front of everyone's microphone and more in front of Osbourne's, or perhaps they were lyrics.
They came out and took their places. I asked who was playing keyboards, and SPM suggested, "Linus?" I thought he was making a PigPen joke--Pigpen died, as do all their keyboardists, and now they're killing off the next Peanut--but he was making a Schroeder joke. Either way was okay. They began to play, and the crowd whooped as it recognized "Friend of the Devil." But then Bobby began to sing, and I buried my face in RDC's Phil Lesh & Friends t-shirt (only one of the four of us wore tie-dye, heretical). So, so, so wrong. Lyle Lovett can sing "Friend of the Devil." Bobby should not.
Throughout the show, Bobby sang less and Joan Osbourne sang more, and that was really good. Not as good as Susan Tedeschi (I would warrant), who could even play guitar and occupy herself thus instead of by twitching her skirt around, which was Osbourne's primary means of entertainment. But good, better than Bobby. Joan was Different But Okay where Bobby Sounded Wrong. I stopped calling Osbourne Donna, anyway. She has a much better voice than Donna Godchaux.
-Jam
-Friend of the Devil
-Mississippi Half-Step ~~>
-New Speedway Boogie (this is when Joan's voice began to assert itself more)
-Night of a Thousand Stars (a Phil Lesh & Friends song we heard last summer)
-Looks Like Rain (sung by Bobby, and a ridiculous choice showing the danger of setlists because there wasn't a damn cloud in the sky. Also Bobby was trying to look like Jerry, having grown a beard and mustache and even a little potbelly. Mostly he looked like Charlton Heston as Taylor in "Planet of the Apes." Scarily enough, they bear a strong mutual resemblance. This was RDC's "What If God Whatever" song and he vamoosed in search of drink.)
-Deep Elum Blues
-Good Morning Little Schoolgirl
-Stagger Lee
-Mr. Charlie
second set:
-Playing in the Van
-Shakedown Street
-Built to Last (another of RDC's unfavorites. He made a beer run.)
-Truckin'
-Reuben and Cherise, a Jerry Garcia Band song (sung by Joan)
-Take It Home by Midnight (?), sung by Mickey. No: Baba Jingo
-Drums. This is a perennial favorite of mine, and this was a great one. I'm not sure that Bill is as cutting edge as Mickey, but he was game. They had drums like the Kodo Drummers', and it was amazing.
-Space, very shortly, and I was glad I peed during the break instead of waiting for Space, as was my habit. Space~~>Happy Birthday to You (with no singing), because it was Joan's birthday. Some kids brought her out a cake and there were flowers.
-Comes a Time (another JGB sung by Joan)
-Uncle John's Band, which made me very happy
~~>Playing in the Band
-Lovelight
encore:
-Brokedown Palace, which made RDC very happy since it wasn't "U.S. Blues."
And then we went home. Home by 1, perversely awake before 6 with a second-hand smoke hangover. I am such a grown-up for being so tired.
I still do not have an emotional connection to this band. Six shows, two Jerry shows, one death, two Furthur Festivals, five years and then Phil Lesh & Friends (with Ratdog, bleah), another year and everybody, but no. I was happy for RDC to have a good show, it was fun to hang out with Begonia and SPM and RDC, but I didn't tear up, as I did when Peter Gabriel began "Here Comes the Flood" or shout with perfect glee, as when he started "Solsbury Hill." I am there for the music, not as a tagger-on wife or lone invasive chick, so I didn't feel like I didn't belong, anyway.
Friday we bought two objets d'art from the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, a photographic print for over the mantel and a covered bowl now on Charlie Walnuts the bookcase.
Saturday we went to Grand Lake and kind of brought Blake. He likes going for rides in the car and we wanted to bring him for a ride that didn't end at camp. He most certainly noticed his surroundings, though if he could comprehend any of the landscape I would not guess. We brought his towels to screen him from scary things like dogs and hot things like sun, but forgot about wind. We used a beach towel as a wind screen and so his crest calmed down, no longer blown to one side by the wind.
Sunday he was glad to stay at home though. As were we, except for my swim and ice-cream date.
Monday RDC spent a long day in Tucson and I--oh yes, the accidentally struck entry--finished the dirt, picked and pitted and froze cherries, and ate an exceptionally unhealthy dinner, even for me, comprising toast with elderberry jam and, instead of or, an apple sliced with the remains of the cheese, species forgotten, I had bought to go with the devoured Granny Smiths. Then the cheese was gone but the apple wasn't, so I added some slices of romano, because why not? And it was good. And a bowl of cherries. And then a bowl-bottom of chocolate chips, which were enough caffeine to keep me up until RDC got home after midnight reading Devil's Larder.
So I started Tuesday tired, which wasn't a good plan.
I recently said to..someone, I forget who, that RDC was required to do whatever it was by marriage articles. The person was surprised and I pointed out that I was kidding.
Mostly.
By marriage articles, which is a fiction in my head, RDC is required to:
- Fasten my necklace or bracelet and then kiss the back of my neck or my wrist
- Dance with me during "Sugar Magnolia" and "Anniversary Song"
- Accept that the car will always have a platypus in it
- Pluck the (so far, solitary) hair that sprouts from my (so far, not yet a) wattle.
I think that's all. So far. I can't think of what I'm required to do. I've become a Deadhead, mostly and by extension. I've learned to like lots of even those Woody Allen movies with lots of Woody Allen in them instead of just "Radio Days" (from which he is mostly absent), some Ernest Hemingway especially For Whom the Bell Tolls, and, heaven help me, I'm beginning to give on the Bob Dylan issue. I should ask him.
Well, it's been almost eleven years. Even if I can't name my obligations I must be fulfilling them.
Recently UberBoss marked his 15-year annniversary at Dot Org and wanted to take my department out to celebrate. A gracious idea, but hardly fitting for him to treat us. Luckily CoolBoss just earned an honorarium at a speaking engagement and that was enough--for the twelve of us, since we have interns this summer for the first time ('nother story, that).
So we went to Indigo, which used to be Papillon. When it was Papillon RDC and I went once, in 1999 maybe or 2000. We weren't impressed, and you really are supposed to be impressed. Is it the same chef? I forget. Anyway. I had a tarragon chicken salad sandwich with dried cherries and sprouts and maybe walnuts? which was fine, not spectacular. The really interesting thing was the appetizers we shared as a table: popcorn with wasabi peas, almonds? I think I'm transposing my nuts, doesn't that sound painful? and something else. Also--separately--calamari.
It was a yummy meal and a fun one. I sat across from Lou, who swapped travel stories with Intern #1 on my right.
Part of the nother story that is the interns was the question, "How are we going to tell them apart?" (not mine). I think, because he's often the funniest one, it might have been UberBoss who said, in honor of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Intern 1, Intern 2, Intern 3. They are, in fact, quite easy to differentiate. Which is another part of the intern story.
Lou is so cool. She left the States in 1984 with a thousand dollars and came back in 1987. "And you'd spent it all?" UberBoss asked, mock incredulously. Today's stories were how she got from China to Tibet to Nepal, there finally to Kathmandu, with neither language nor money nor passport, the latter two of which had just been stolen. In Kathmandu at least English was often provided.
So the point of the subject line is that RDC called in the midafternoon suggesting coquillages et pommes frites for dinner, at Le Central, one of our old favorites. I was dubious but thought that a swim might restore my appetite.
It didn't really, but that's why I had the second, third, and fourth stomachs installed.
Never eating again, that is, until breakfast Friday morning, over which I wrote the above.
Don't mind me, OMFB. This is merely the only way I'll be able to find the list again.
AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DE FL GA HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WY.
That was easy. That I can do without thinking. I can't do it in statehood order. I am pretty sure Connecticut wasn't third, but I often think it was since it is third smallest though Delaware is not first of that list. Statehood order, of the top of my head: DE, PA, the other 11 not including ME and VT (showing shocking disloyalty to New England), the general clean-up of the east and southeast-eastern midwest, KS in 1861 and WV sometime during the Civil War, CO in 1876 (the Bicentennial State, yo), and then the rest of them, ending with NM AZ AK and HI.
More to the point,
Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada, Nebraska, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii. 030713: RDC emptied his briefcase and found the three states I had been missing. Now I have them all up to Alabama, which just came out. 031223: What do diamonds have to do with Arkansas?
Tex came over to my cube asking what I guessed would be on Alabama's. I had no idea whatsoever, and it's easy for me to wax disparaging about the South. So I said whatever, couldn't be anything good. It's Helen Keller, and he was tickled that I had shown my true colors. But please. No one thinks, "Gosh, you know, Helen Keller wouldn't have been such a brave, determined voice for the blind and the deaf and the otherwise disabled, wouldn't have graduated from Radcliffe summa cum laude (or magna? I forget), wouldn't've traveled the country speaking out and meeting Great War veterans, if she had been from any other state than Alabama."
Connecticut's design is by far the best, of course. The rounded treetop fits the coin well, of course, but it's a tree! There is nothing better than a tree! Plus there's a stone wall, very appropriate, that balances the caption. All of the designs so far have been either about the Revolution, if they could manage it, or used icons of the state. Pennsylvania's is boring, but at least it is the Keystone State. Ditto Georgia--a peach? New Hampshire's is iconic, Virginia's is pretty if a bit of a stretch, since it wouldn't be Jamestown's bicentennial for another seven years after first minting, I know North Carolina and Ohio nearly came to blows about which would claim flight (holy shit, they're nitpicking on Capitol Hill about which state can claim it), Vermont's is pretty lame but at least people do associate syrup with the state in a way they don't associate Helen Keller with Alabama. Etc.
Anyway. I'm comfortable with having been mean about Alabama, but I love Helen Keller! I wasn't being mean about her! Really!
"Buddy" is an adjectival noun sometimes. There are buddy toenails, buddy clippers (for the toenails), buddy fluff (in drifts on the floor, on our shoulders, or stuck to his beak), buddy eyelashes, sweet buddy basil breath, buddy greens, buddy dishes, two buddy windowsills, the buddy bedtime, buddy poopers (an essential accessory, some bit of junk mail for the buddy poop), the buddy foot (lifted and waved in a request to be picked up), buddy yawns, the buddy box and the variety of buddy caves, buddy flaps, buddy sneezes, buddy chow, the buddy spray bottle (for showers), and of course the buddy beast himself.
Last night after I finally got home from work, the pool, and Le Central, Blake had a thorough head petting and then some buddy fun with a 5280 magazine. It might be almost as good as the Utne Reader for whatever the magazine equivalent of a fabric's "hand" is: a good snap in the beak from good substantial paper, and also, a lenient mommy expecting to vacuum the next day who doesn't prevent the confetti production.
I am lying on the couch (yes it's a gorgeous day out, your point?) reading and napping. Blake is on my naked left shoulder (most of me is in the navy satin pyjamas my MIL gave me for Christmas). He's mostly napping too, and I roused when I felt him stir. I reached for him and held him out over the pooper. He did his prepoop stretches, left wing and leg, right wing and leg, both wings up over the back, and pooped. I sleepily moved my right arm back toward my left shoulder, but before he was close enough to hop back, I stopped my arm and inspected my shoulder more closely.
I know this means I have enough fat to make this possible, but if so I never want to be thin: I have a perfect little buddy footprint in my shoulder. One, because he was napping, damn it. The other was tucked warmly into his belly feathers. A buddy footprint. Than which nothing is cuter. There's not much plantar surface on a buddy foot. But there's some, I know, because it's imprinted in my skin, and a little halfmoon where some weight must have rested on the cuff on his bent leg.
Should I have the vet remove his cuff? Not that anyone has ever harassed me for having a possibly stolen-from-the-wild bird but I like it for proof that no, he wasn't, he was born into prison thank you.
A little buddy footprint, there on my shoulder.
Or something. Tendonitis is much more likely than carpal tunnel syndrome, which is just so trendy anyway. I mention this only to give context about why anyone took my blood pressure Wednesday afternoon.
I had a smoke hangover, I drove because I was damn tired, I was going to go to Another Target at lunch but I went to the doctor instead [see medical care, not seeking of, because no transportation to and fro], and did I mention it was damn hot and I was damn tired?
Nevertheless, my blood pressure, at 1:15 p.m., was 88/54. Could the tech possibly have done that right? I've been falling over after standing up too fast for years now, but that's nearly dead, isn't it?
Then she took my pulse. I doubt its accuracy because she held her finger to my wrist for maybe 15 seconds but I think 10 really. Sixty. 60. Again, nearly dead.
As we stood in line, SPM told stories. He talked about the daughter of some friends, who is three with the vocabulary of a five-year-old, and how she will very clearly state what she wants. She has the entire Baby Genius series, and SPM listed them, "Baby Einstein, Baby Mozart, Baby Beethoven, Baby John Holmes."
I knew he was making a joke but I didn't know its nature.
This is even funnier, considering that last winter he and his wife mentioned the porn catalog I had left for them back in September when they watered our plants while we were in Grand Teton. I was flummoxed as to what they could possibly mean and realized, some hours later, that the only catalog I would possibly have had that I would have assumed to be of interest to them was The Common Reader. The raciest it gets is Anaïs Nin and Colette.
So Baby Porn Star was pretty funny.
The other thing I learned is the word "ganja." I am certain I had never heard it before, and I would love to know its etymology. Marijganja? I don't know.
Still not shopPING. I don't think going to Ross counts as shopPING unless you wind up with a ballgown for fifteen bucks.
I found a suit for which I need shoes. I have brown leather sandals for summer and black leather clogs for winter. The latter work--as far as I'm concerned--with my winter suits, olive green, houndstooth, eggplant, chocolate. The former do not work with summer suits. I also have an icey lavender-grey suit that I need shoes for. Shoes bore me so utterly. I can tell mine are wrong but I have no idea what might be right or where to find such Right things.
The suit is summer weight, skirt above the knee, jacket either short-sleeved or unsleeved, and the color--the color is shell pink. It is tragic, but that's a good color on my pasty skin, summer or winter.
I also found a knee-length "natural" linen skirt and a white linen shell with some eyelet. The shell is stunningly similiar to the black shell with white embroidery I bought in May. Same label. Do you call it eyelet? Perforated. Different pattern any.
The real score is A Perfect Skirt. Pale buff, sueded rayon, nice and substantial, ankle-length, and it fits perfectly slightly below the waist and at the hip and, though not a miracle worker, it makes my butt look okay, like an attractive if oversized thing rather than an object that moves at a different speed than the rest of my body and has a distinct gravitational field.
I told Haitch and my sister I hadn't clothes-shopped since Dot Org left downtown. This is not true: I bought a sweater in November and a sweater and skirt in the later winter and some other clothes in May. Somehow none of this counts: the sweater was a specific errand, the May excursion was for a specific thing too even if it yielded more than the long black skirt, and the winter stuff was online. It's not that it doesn't count as much as it does that I'm spoiled.
I had Blake on the porch while I watered tonight (I watered the south xeriscape for the second time this year), and back on the porch after that and tidying up inside. We read on the porch swing until dusk and after I opened the house to the cooling evening, we retreated here to the basement. He puttered about in his tray and his box, finally eating his dinner, chewing on the piping on my pyjamas, clawing his way up to my lapel for head petting.
When he jumped to the arm of the couch and peered onto the table beside, I knew what he was after. I lifted my big cup for him to drink from. Hey, I used to share with my dog, and birds don't have spit. He looked at it suspiciously and I knew why: ice cubes. He doesn't like ice any more than he likes snow, which he has seen only by the handful brought in from outside for his inspection (or just to frighten him). I poured some water into my empty juice glass, but even without ice on its surface the water was cold.
I could see him debating in his tiny brain which was worse, cold or thirst. Thirst won. He dipped the tip of his upper mandible--which has blood and nerves to its tip--into the cold, then worked it off with his tongue or let it drip into his lower jaw.
I'm keeping water in the juice glass to warm up, sans ice.
Jesus GOD Usans are single-minded.
I'm watching ABC World News. It's Bastille Day, maybe that's why ABC noticed the Tour de France at all. The newscaster said, "Lance Armstrong had a harrowing day in the Tour de France today. He had to swerve out of the road because his closest competitor crashed right in front of him!"
The competitor, who apparently has no name or country, might be out of the damn race with road rash at the least, but poor Lance! he had to swerve!
I love cycling, don't get me wrong. I know next to nothing about it other than that male cyclists shave their yummy, yummy, yummy, and did I mention lickable, legs. Is there something else to know?
Anyway. Years ago I pointed this out to CLH: "A plane crashed in India today with 400 aboard. Three Usans were killed." Three hundred ninety-seven other people don't matter at all, apparently. Some time later CLH found and sent me a cartoon illustrating just this concept, with a penguin newscaster showing some sort of catastrophe among polar bears saying, "Luckily, no penguins were killed."
She named her cat Kitty, which is unusually lacking in imagination for her, but of course Kitty has multiple nicknames such that the actual name is only for show (cf. Blake, Buddy).
I love my sister because she has got bored with calling Kitty "Lambchop" and has moved on to "Choppage of Lamb."
It was 94 today. Do I remember accurately from childhood that it was seldom in the 90s in Connecticut, that humidity not heat made summer hellish? Or did it often get that hot there? Anyway, 94 here is a reasonable temperature as long as you do sensible things like loll about in the shade of a large tree with a pitcher of ice water and a book or eighteen months of a new journal to read. It is not so good to drive in, though if your father's birthday is Friday and you have not yet motivated to acknowledge it by post that's a good reason to get in the damn car and go shopping.
It is now 8:30. It's still over 80, but in a sundress I had no idea still fit (though I doubt it suits me as well now as it did in 1989 when I bought it), sitting on the porch with Blake in his cage on the swing beside me, I am perfectly comfortable.
It is, in fact, a beautiful evening. The neighbor with the golden retriever and the basset hound (my new snow-measuring unit, you remember) strolled by and I greeted her (yes, I know her name in addition to her dogs'). A new father (well, new to human fatherhood, he's had Sam the lab since we moved) has gone by too. I congratulated him--we passed their house on the way back from the Arts Festival just as his mother-in-law arrived with flowers, is how I knew the baby had been born--and he invited me to drop by and meet the baby, but that's got to wait for seven weeks at least: new babies unnerve me and they're not cute enough to bother about. The kids in the rented house passed as well, with their shrunken golden retriever. I don't know their names, the kids' or the dog's. The dog looks like its legs were shot off in the war and its paws sewn onto several inches up, it's adorable. There was also a three-year-old on a trike, but I have my priorities.
Long summer twilights on the porch swing.
But if my other neighbors water their new sod again, well after the permitted period of daily-for-two-weeks-after-planting, I will have to spank them.
Later. Here returneth the golden retriever and the basset hound and their human, in their typical end-of-walk pattern: the retriever trotting out ahead, bounce bounce bounce, the hound trailing well behind, lope lope lope.
It's dark now. Actually it's not, but it's dark enough that Blake is scared. In we go.
Five hours ago when I got home Blake begged for Vito. He loves the reading chair, which is unfortunate since his favorite activity on said chair is foot-wanking, which is quite tiresome as well as ticklish. Also there was important television-watching for me to accomplish, hence the ABC News story above, and not to forget the "Friends" reruns I might watch even if RDC were home if the reruns were worth his whining and undisguised disgust. (But this week? is the pilot. After that I might be done. I hope.)
At 7:30 when I emerged from the basement hoping the earth's surface had cooled, I brought Blake outside. This he certainly preferred to the basement (he's chewed away almost half of his--formerly my--hatbox, so he doesn't have a Fortress of Solitude so much as a Half-Shell in which you might find the Boston Pops), but it still wasn't Parental Contact.
Closer to 9:00, it was darkening and so we came into the light, child. (Fact: I have never seen all of, or even most of, "Poltergeist.") Only then did I settle into Vito. I myself prefer Vito toward the end of Blake's day, when he's more into snuggling than wanking. And so, indeed, he just spent the last hour plus having his head pet and snuggling into my neck. Only when I disturbed him by moving my left arm to type instead of read did he realize, whoa, bedtime, and scrabble across to my right shoulder, the one closer to his cage. It is, after all, 10:19, and a cockatiel needs his beauty rest.
So does his mother, but first I had to say, blissful hour of gently stroking a cockatiel with my chin! No wonder my blood pressure is nearly negative: buddy-cuddling. I should rent him out to the hypertensive.
10:58. The sun set more than two hours ago. I should emphasize that I have listened to my swamp cooler on the outside, and it's no louder than a box fan, before I say I loathe the neighbors. If they--and not to be too outlandish here--say, opened a window once in a way, they wouldn't need a fucking air conditioner, let alone one that rattles on the 2x4s propping it up. But they finally turned it off.
(It only ran for an hour that I'm aware of. But damn, that thing is ten times louder than the sun.)
I was going to say "rabbit pellets" but I've read Watership Down too many times for that to have any other connotation but one that's a little stronger than I actually feel.
Athena mentioned the other day that she has Go Lean Kashi for breakfast, so--since this would probably give me the same fitness results, you know, even though I'm not also exercising quite so much--I decided to look it up. How different could it be, I wondered, than the kashi I've been eating since I joined the gym in January and looked for a cereal with less sugar than Cranberry Crunch?
It has more calories per smaller serving size and more sodium. It also has lots more protein and fiber. That I knew by reading the panel. Today I poured some into a bowl and discovered it also has rabbit chow in it. Those half-inch cylinders of solidified bran. Yeah.
I halved it with regular kashi, and it's not that bad. It doesn't look much worse than the ribbed lozenges of RDC's cereal that I love to watch Blake dismember. (I say I've seen a lion eat a gazelle with more surgical precision than he shows eating a wedge of orange. When he's gnawed a hole through a little pillow of cereal such that the ribbing really looks like, well, ribs, I get to think that again.)
Verdict: tastes better than rabbit chow.
I haven't seen either for a long time. I remember watching "Return of the Jedi" with SSP, so in 1990 or 1991, and already the 1983 Rancor looked as cheesy as that version of "Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde" when Jeckyll falls behind a sofa and Hyde rises.
Anyway, last night ranting about the neighbors' air-conditioner I couldn't remember the Emperor's line about the hatred being strong in Luke and that being a reason he would join the Dark Side. Then one of my own lines occurred to me "Hate the [Someone]" and I knew it was a photo caption but I couldn't remember from what.
Tonight, again at 9:00 sharp, they (grr) turned on the hell machine. With my windows open, I can take advantage of their watering, because their sprinklers act as evaporative coolers and the chilled air zips into my house, thankyouverymuch. Again, the "Hate the [Who?!]" line occurred to me, this time with its context. That's what I need: 24 hours and the same circumstances to remember something.
(A million years ago, driving to a movie probably at Trinity with ABW and KRW and RDC, somehow none of us could remember a particular Yes song for a particular reason. We were just passing the Mansfield Depot on Route 44 at this point in our conversation. Time passed. Something like weeks or months later, passing that exact same point with the exact same people (probably going to our next movie), the answer--the lyric, the meaning, the memory, whatever--surfaced and I blurted it.)
"Hate the waiter!" came up as a "Say 'cheese!'" substitute when my sister and I were in a photo booth. Division 16? that former firehouse and now former restaurant on Boylston, near Mass Ave, near the Cheri, and stop me before I reminisce further, had a photo booth. I may never have been in one of those coin-fed, four-photographs-to-a-strip booths. We had just had miserable service, either at Division or wherever we had fled from. So just as the warning light flashed I cried "Hate the waiter!" and we growled and made fangs at the camera.
Hold on a sec. Excuse me, Blake (he is tucked on my lap).
Got it. First picture: I'm trying not to laugh, so my face is about to burst, she's cracking up, hand demurely over her mouth; second, we both look scared; the third is Hate the Waiter. I think I allowed her the first picture of the four for herself. When was this picture taken? My hair is long enough to pull back but she hasn't started growing hers yet. I'm behind her and can't tell what I'm wearing or even my earrings, which might not be helpful anyway considering how long I wear my clothes. Hmm. Acne inflaming my forehead: 1991-92 school year. Grad school, feh. No pressure.
Please for next time remember not to open old photograph albums when RDC is away. At the least I was reminded that today, today, is NAV's eighth birthday, and I don't have the Vs' email address! And also reminded that I need some sort of wallet-size photo pages for an album for all those pictures of newborns I get. (Can I tell any of them apart? Could I even if everyone didn't use the same pink and blue rainbow hospital background? I could not). I found a 5x7 of my father and his sister my namesake and wedding pictures that I haven't put into an album yet even though the marriages have long since dissolved and really, there must be a drug for this. Or a disabled parking permit: hello, I'm crippled by nostalgia.
Enough. To bed to bed to bed. To sleep, perchance to dream. Maybe instead of "Shakespeare in Love," my usual RDC-is-away movie to watch in bed I'll watch "Richard III." Since, just for closure's sake, I don't have any of the Star Wars movies.
But that reminds me, the Boulder Shakespeare dealie is putting on Cymbeline this summer. Don't let me get superstitious about days on which that play is staged.
Yesterday morning I filled the birdfeeder and -bath. Yesterday afternoon I glanced out the window and saw that the feeder was still nearly full. Then I saw that the anti-squirrel part was down.
This feeder has been great in the months I've had it. An inner tube holds seeds, and an outer tube on a spring has strategically placed fig leaves. If a squirrel gets on the feeder, its weight is enough to pull the outer tube down, covering the holes; when the squirrel leaves the spring draws that tube up again. I haven't often seen a squirrel on it--they learn fast--but the few times have been great: once they negotiate the thin hook from the branch and the thinner loop of wire from feeder to hook, there they are on a closed feeder! Whee! They scrabble around with the seeds not half an inch under their tentacles but still ungettable-attable!
Welcome to my small world, in which that passes for entertainment.
I could not figure out in a quick inspection what had gone awry. Before dissecting the birdfeeder I am going to have to scrub it. I don't mind filling it and then washing my hands, but prolonged manipulation through its filthiness is more than my fastidiousness can take. I stood the feeder on the patio to Deal With Later and proceeded with my evening (which went City of Ember and then Oscar and Lucinda on the bus and then "Pirates of the Caribbean" and then Peter Carey on the bus again and then City of Ember until I finished it just before midnight).
This morning I glanced out the window to a herd of sparrows and finches on the nectarine branch, on the windowsills, forlorning looking to that empty bit of air below the hook. I had already thought what a commotion there must have been yesterday as they perched on the feeder only then to realize they had no access. They are not parrots, these birds. They are like the aliens in "Toy Story," as I've said. Not overly bright but admirably single-minded.
What the hell. I fetched the old feeder from the garage, filled and hung it.
Ahoy there, "Pirates of the Caribbean"! I mostly thought you were great and could ignore your illogicalnesses! After all, I make up words like "illogicalness," so I'll overlook that two men could not walk along the seabed carrying a boat upsidedown over their heads for an air supply. But especially in the late eighteenth century, no one would say "hung by the neck until dead." Hanged, damn it!
The old feeder must be exactly what the squirrel engineers who must have plotted the new feeder's demise had in mind. I can just imagine the committee meetings over the last several months, the deliberately accelerated evolution of an opposable thumb, the forging of a small pair of snips for the spring.
Yesterday Shiny Happy New Coworker and I stood by the printer waiting for our jobs. She said, "You have the best clothes."
I was flabbergasted, oh yes I was. Not so much that I couldn't thank her, but pretty much. I was wearing something new, at least.
When do two garments become a suit? This is a skirt and a shell (note: I hate the word "top" for "shirt") that together cannot be a suit because the upper half is not buttoned, is neither jacket nor vest, is sleeveless. Of course I do not want it to be an "outfit" but the two pieces are clearly not "coordinates" (oo, more concepts to loathe!).
Tuesday I told CoolBoss about my Sunday shopping spree. Wednesday I wore the new pink--well, I'll call it a suit--and told her this was one of my new things. She said oh! with some relief, because when I told her "pink," she thought--she groped for a term--I supplied "'Legally Blonde' pink"?--and yes, that's what she thought. Okay, pale pink is bad enough, concept-wise, but aesthetically it's a good choice for my pasty skin. Barbie pink is beyond the pale (oh, I slay me).
Then when a few minutes later I reported this compliment to her, let's just say that, after six years (despite this period's leaving her with the impression I might wear Barbie pink), she was familiar enough with my wardrobe to understand that while this was a very nice compliment, it was a little odd.
Of course, Shiny Happy New Coworker has only been around since spring. Let her experience my winter wardrobe--black with a side of grey--and repeat that comment.
Still, it was nice.
When I told the story to my sister last night, I was a little more dramatic (moi?). "She must be on crack," I said, and my sister, ever so much less diplomatic than CoolBoss, agreed.
But I had another story to tell my sister! When I scurried out for the bus last night, my hair escaped my leather barrette (which, hooray! I can wear again--my braid had got too long to fold into it). I stood there, on Denver's most notorious street, twisting my hair up. I heard a noise behind me and turned to see a cyclist stopped on the sidewalk. Standing in front of the bench, I was blocking the way. I apologized and stepped aside. "Oh no honey I was enjoying it! I just want to stay here till the show's over." By this time I had switched on my Ignore function and hoped fervently for the bus and calculated the distance between me and the nearest open door. He moved on, not before saying, "If your boyfriend don't know you sexy with your hair up, he crazy."
So here we have figurative and actual crackheads with the compliments.
In "Shakespeare in Love," Geoffrey Rush as Philip Henslowe always wants to know when in Romeo and Juliet the pirate king will appear.
He starred as le Marquis de Sade in "Quills," which also featured Kate Winslett.
Kate Winslett starred in "Titanic." In this movie, which had a sinking boat, she yelled "Jack!" a lot.
Yesterday at the library I picked up the copy of City of Ember that I had had the library find for me. I mourn my absence from the central branch and its stacks of stacks and decided to Browse and find a book the old-fashioned way. Oscar and Lucinda occurred to me, and lo, it was there, in an edition old enough, hooray, not to have a movie cover. I read City until it was time to catch a bus (to go see "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl") and then on the bus started Oscar, which I had brought because it was small enough to fit into my bag.
Oscar and Lucinda was made into a movie, some or all of which I watched without knowing about the book. Whatever parts of it I didn't watch I didn't because I hate Ralph Fiennes, both his acting and his face. Whatever parts I did watch, I did because of Cate Blanchett, whom I adore.
Joseph Fiennes as Shakespeare omits the pirate king entirely from Romeo and Juliet. In "Shakespeare in Love," he does not sleep with Elizabeth Regina; in "Elizabeth," with Cate Blanchett in the title role, he does.
So Geoffrey Rush had to make an entirely new movie in which he could play a pirate king! So he could slit more throats, as he did in "Elizabeth"!
This movie's heroine, though not much this side of daft, at least didn't yell "Jack" too much, though there was a scene where she could not save her Will (see, Shakespeare again) from the collapsed hold of a ship, just like in "Titanic."
And so is proven the interconnectedness of all things. The end.
My mother-in-law's friend, the one whose cancer inspired me to cut my hair, came last night to the end of her struggle. She was 47.
No rain had fallen for the four weeks between 90 minutes after we took delivery of five cubic yards of fill and two days ago. Friday evening the thunderheads delivered their goods here instead of east of here, and we had a deluge.
Temporary no-parking signs close off one bit of our street for construction. We watched two float past on the torrent, spinning, lifted clear despite their manhole cover-sized bases.
The catmint lay under the brunt, flattening their ears back in distaste. My potted cherry tomato plant got drowned--I didn't realize how poorly I had provided for its drainage. The pears are noticeably bigger today; the last of the overripe cherries were beaten from their pips, and I had a nightmare about getting lost in the weeds of the backyard.
And the basement stayed dry as a bone.
Home. Bounce Shadowfax down to basement. Throw shoes and gloves and helmet into crate on landing. Peel clothing out of pannier and throw pannier on crate. Rescue Blake. Strip off bike clothing. Turn on swamp coooler. Shower. Make buddy chow. Collapse into Vito.
Damn it's hot.
Blake preened on my knee for a little but of course went for my foot when I stretched my leg out. I wondered briefly why he prefers my left foot to my right, but it's probably because I keep the right leg folded much more often. I wouldn't let him make with the friendly-like with my foot but threw him back onto his cage, where he is now whining. He is my child and it would be incest but mostly he tickles.
Trish said someone hit her site looking for a particular phrase she'd heard me utter. I searched myself and yep, there she is at the top of the list. I also read actual cockatiel sites, most of which said "It's normal, they have no shame, don't encourage it and don't punish it and yes, they do probably consider your face and your hands or feet to be separate entities." One cockatiel-advice site featured--let me guess, a conservative fundamentalist dumpy inorgasmic female--asking how to get her cockatiel to stop "because that's just NASTY."
I really hate people sometimes.
"Florp" as a title was supposed to be all about my adventures in Vito whence I am not moving for the rest of the evening. It shall not be a euphemism for cockatiel self-abuse--oh, the irony--because said activity doesn't require one.
It's still hot. I still haven't moved. I should probably read Oscar and Lucinda instead of blathering though.
Shyeah. 5280 and Westword, approximately, both said this place had the best burgers in Denver (apparently never having been to the Cherry Cricket). We went, nearly going to a new? or at least previously unobserved, Frenchie bistro or maybe Tamayo. Ted's patio faced east, so we stuck to the original plan. We were seated and handed menus and thereafter left to fend for ourselves. Eventually a waiter showed up and desultorily took our orders after reluctantly omitting his routine about bison's nutritional information. We live in Denver, we're aware.
Parenthetically, in Grand Teton last September way up in Cascade Canyon as we stopped to eat our lunch (which was not bison), somehow a passing hiker asked if we happened to know where he could buy bison meat. He was in Grand Teton and Grand Teton is in Wyoming: the only meat they don't sell there is human. I ducked my head, not to be sarcastic at him; RDC told him he could probably find it at any grocery store in Jackson or certainly the higher-end ones. The man asked how he, RDC, could be sure, since, tragically, we had neglected to conduct a thorough survey of foodstuffs available in the area. Because this is the west, I said. "I live in the west," he returned. He was wearing a Berkeley t-shirt. Geographically, he was right; culturally, he was way off. I ducked my head again unti he went away.
So anyway. My lemonade was good. When an expeditor brought our food, RDC asked for another beer and I had to ask for my burger to be fixed: I had asked for cheddar, not just mushrooms. I had ordered it rare and expected a fresh burger, because you can't melt cheese on a hunk of meat without cooking it more. My cheesified burger arrived by expeditor again; RDC's beer never did and I offered him some lemonade; the waiter never checked to see if the temperature was okay (it wasn't: I am used to restaurants not taking "rare" seriously enough but gray is not seriously at all). The fries were dry.
The burgers, overcooked or not, were excellent. Reportedly they also have the best milkshake in town--which isn't much of a challenge or even a statement, here, malheuresment--but I could not fit one in.
We had a drink afterward in the Samba room, RDC some rum and mint and sugar cane thing and me lemon-spiked water. (I feel bad asking for water: charge me for it, but give me a sugarless, caffeineless, alcoholless drink.) On our way back to 16th Street, I tried to prop up the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory's bear. He's very large, the St. Bernard of bears, and he has a leash around his middle (certainly not "waist") since Denver disapproves of bears roaming its downtown. But it has a severe c-curve to its spine, like the only pool regular who uses a snorkel because of how much he'd have to bend his body to breathe directly, and I always try to prop him up. Through the window I spotted globs of raspberry and chocolate and I darted in to buy one. They were about to close and offered me both, since they wouldn't be good tomorrow. I accepted one, with many thanks, without lucre exchanging hands. (I should remember to go there every night at 8:59, possibly wearing disguises like Count Olaf so they don't clue in.)
A 2.1, torso-stretching swim, and only one glob of chocolate instead of two! And no milkshake! So I'm thin now.
The ripping out of the street continues, today accessorized by the breaking off of major branches from our plum and the silver maple across the street. RDC yelled at the driver, who ignored him, and so found the foreman and yelled at him. There will be no more branches broken off.
Later in the morning, RDC glanced out the window and saw three people standing on the sidewalk, looking and pointing at the house. He went out to the porch and said hello in a much different tone. It was the Fosters, the former owners of the house I found two years ago.
They talked about the house for a while. The Fosters were sorry to see the state of the evergreen, which does look quite pathe without its two spires. It was their Christmas tree one year, and they transplanted it. Pity about the three feet of snow. They seemed to like the garden, but I theorize they were being polite. Very little of the south half is currently in flower, and the north half is only started. Plus there's the north side of the house, currently raw unlandscaped fill.
They declined RDC's invitation to come inside, possibly not wanting to see the house with 20 years of change (and a good thing, because Blake's cage was extremely foul and smelly. I scrubbed it this evening.)
When I talked to Mr. Foster before, he said that they came to Colorado occasionally. And here they were. Not, this time, only for their vacation. In 2001, a librarian noticed my address, told me she was my house's family's former babysitter, and sent the owners--the Fosters--the note I enclosed in a card to her.
She died.
Is there any good reason I had never been to the Cache la Poudre before Saturday? I cannot think of a single one. RDC has fished there almost since we moved here and always said it was gorgeous, but somehow I never accompanied him. The day before we adopted Blake, two months after we arrived here, we explored the South Platte in Cheesman Canyon a little; I have gone with him several times to the Lower Williams Fork (of the Colorado). I have seen, several times, the particular, quite low spot of the Continental Divide with the ankle-deep Colorado on the west side and the Poudre on the east, within Rocky Mountain National Park. But I had not seen the Poudre as anything more than that wee streamlet until Saturday.
From my perspective, coming upstream, it seems like the road joins the river where the latter emerges from the foothills, and they climb together up Poudre Canyon for quite a distance. The river, playful, follows broad, shallow, slow curves, bounces in whitewater, and jumps small falls. The road, much tamer, still gives wonderful views and sneaks through a tunnel in unreinforced living rock. Two thousand feet up, at Big South, a sharp bend, the river is let alone--the road climbs on to Cameron Pass--and a trail leads from Big South to the river's genesis in the Park, twelve miles away.
We hiked a distance--not the twelve miles, nor even the seven to where a washed-out bridge would have turned us around anyway--up the Big South trail until we found a good fishing and reading spot. RDC caught (and released) trout after cutthroat trout and I sat on a rock in the middle of the river, my feet in the water and my nose in Oscar and Lucinda, except when I emulated Dante and found the perfect view over my head.
It was a good day.
This morning on NPR I heard a segment about Ashton...I've already forgotten his surname...who is The Voice for movie previews. This reminded me of a few things. Last week when I entered the theatre for "Pirates of the Caribbean," I did so just before the previews began, late enough that I couldn't sit in my spot. My spot is in the middle of the first row of stadium seating so I can put my feet on the railing in front of me. Ahead of the railing is floor space for wheelchairs and a few seats for companions of the chairy. I sat at the end (the left end, sorry, Haitch) of the second row, with a seat, not a railing, for my feet, but no railing is less important than farther back. Next to me was a little boy, maybe five, short and light enough that his legs weren't enough weight to keep the seat down. He sat folded in his seat, knees over the edge, and his father told him to sit up. I smiled, remembering how much more comfortable furniture used to be when it was bigger, and grinned at him. He told me he was too short and the seat didn't work. I said that sitting that way might come in handy if the movie was scary, and he wasn't short, he was five. I also told him I missed being that short. "You do?" he was flummoxed. "Why?" I told him that I miss riding on the back of my mother's bike.
(And I do. I was so sad when, as a new school year started, my mother told me I was too big to go to preschool in our accustomed manner. Now there are those follow-along half-bikes so that kids too big for the tow-behinds (none of those either!) but too small for solo can still come along. Not 30 years ago.)
He told me his father's bike had been stolen, and his car seat. I commiserated and hoped they could get better ones, and so we were friends by the time the previews started. I had wondered whether sitting next to a little kid was going to make me crazy, but he shut up as soon as the previews started.
During the previews it was a she-grown-up behind me who complained about each subsequent trailer, about their quantity. Wouldn't the ticket-taker tell you exactly when the feature itself started, if you asked? I'm sure you could avoid trailers if you really wanted. During the movie itself, a couple of times the kid leaned to me to tell me something, but when I put a finger to my lips and with the other hand pointed at the screen, he subsided. So there's a well-behaved movie kid for you. I meant to ask him afterward about one time he wanted to tell me something--actually I wanted to compliment the father on a well-behaved kid, but the father started reprimanding the kid immediately the lights came up for offenses I couldn't imagine and didn't stay to hear. I wanted to ask the kid about one of the times he sought my ear: it was when Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom defy the laws of physics to use an upturned boat as an air bubble, and I like to think that the kid and I had the same thought there: "Just like in 'Toy Story II!'"
Way back when we saw "The Pianist" at Chez Artiste, we saw a trailer for "Russian Ark." I've kept an eye out for it since and Friday I noticed it had arrived. We arrived hours beforehand because, of course, this time I was with Mr. Exaggerates the Time It Takes to Get Anywhere in Town. Wee example: we left the house just before 7. We stopped at Wild Oats for illegal concessions and I paused between the bulk foods aisle (chocolate-covered almonds and chocolate-covered ginger) and the check-out saying we should get a card for Sooby, whose daughter arrived Thursday. "We don't have time," said RDC. It was 7:05. Wild Oats is about 1500 South Colorado, Chez Artiste is 4100 South Colorado. I selected a card, we paid for our food, we drove down, we bought drinks, we sat down. It was 7:20. The movie started at seven forty-five. In addition to smuggled goodies, I had Oscar and Lucinda. RDC had his Palm. So we read. After 7:30, three young women sat directly behind us, though the auditorium was not nearly crowded enough to warrant that. Though they were (clearly, from their conversation) about to start college, they had not lost their high school ways: the vituperative attacks, the round-about self-aggrandizement through vicarious flattery, the inability to gauge their volume (okay, like I have that skill either) when they dropped their voices to comment on how much RDC and I must hate each other, not to talk before a movie.
Mrs. Miniver was right: "It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye to catch."
I expected, as I had with the five-year-old, disturbances from the peanut gallery during the movie. They were absolutely quiet. In fact I made more noise during it than they did, because as soon as the lights dimmed, the movie began, so I couldn't open my slick plastic bag during previews as is my wont but had to during the credits. There were no trailers. How very, very odd.
"Russian Ark" was great. Technically spectacular, because of the cast and the costuming and the orchestration and the dancing and the 96-minute single shot. Also bizarre, because possibly deep within the recesses of my brain more Russian remains than the words for tea, but, please and thank you, and goodbye. ("Yes" and "no" I knew before making my attempt.) I want to see it again, because I doubt I will ever get such another guided tour of the Hermitage in real life.
A friend's father-in-law would support an amendment to criminalize -burning. My friend's counter-argument is that on Fourth of July he--the father-in-law, but presumably also the friend--wipes his mouth on napkins, and how can burning be so much worse than that?
If you burn the , I damn well hope you're doing so to exercise your First Amendment rights. If you use a napkin, you're probably only showing ignorance through patriotism, like those who display a any which way, flouting the code.
So this comes as no surprise.
Last night I delivered RDC's old bike to an underfed, deserving intern (both adjectives do apply, but it was to an underfed moose and a deserving porcupine that Harold gave the remainder of his purple pies) and scampered for some groceries. When I left, just after 8, I saw the most amazing sunset. Actually I didn't see the sun, behind thousands of feet of storm clouds, at all. It gilded the translucent edges of two prominent towers and its light streamed between them, their two broad shadows striped the sky all the way to the eastern horizon, light, dark, light, dark, light. The eastern horizon was here marked by the Cherry Creek Mall, and it was still fabulously beautiful. It didn't hurt that, away to the west, in the mass from which the towers grew, lightning streaked.
The flat still makes me nervous, that there is nothing to contain me should I leak outside my own edges. But being able to see miles of sky, horizon to horizon, and an entire bowl of sunset rather than a wedge, makes up for a lot.
I searched for that book I mentioned the other day. I had "Jane Eyre" and "girl closet tray read" and lo, I found it: It All Began With Jane Eyre: Or, the Secret Life of Franny Dillman, by Sheila Greenwald. If the book itself doesn't have that tone (I'll find out when it makes its way to me through the library), its title sure does. Deliberately, I'm sure.
Finding it made me grin. So did my first episode of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" last night, which I thanked Eliza for. So did my first swim, rather than only immersion, though in only fake, rather than real, water, in over a week, just a leisurely mile but enough.
So did this:
I love its little punk-ass haircut. Which I have just (the next day, watching Blake, perched on my shin, preen in a sleepy kind of way, and fluff his plumage in a sleepy kind of way) realized is vaguely cockatielian, which is so a word.
And its jauntily angled nose.
And its little blind stare.
Also, it tasted good. It grew, I plucked it, it modeled for the camera, I devoured it with salt. Such is the life of a tomato.
Well, Blake's more than a friend, but that's the phrase. He likes the cave, the space under the arm of the couch, between its side and the wall. Back there, he's easy to clean up after. Today, sitting on the couch, I set up his box at the open end of the cave as a Buddy Containment Device. He can't wander all over the floor if he's penned in by his box, or so went my reasoning. I'm not as bright as a cockatiel, though: the first time he got bored, he nudged the box aside and trotted out on the wall side, my clever little thing; the second time, I braced the box with my tall glass of water, and he nudged the box forward and emerged on the couch side; the third time, he gathered his strength and did a standing jump from floor to box top, six inches up, scampered across its top, and hopped off the opposite end. At least all of these ways were noisy enough that I could hear him and recontain him otherwise.
Thank goodness I was cooking dinner: an obvious and also honest excuse to cut short my conversation with Babushka. It is tomato season and she damn well knows it, so she opened the door and said "Yoohoo, honey!" (she's forgotten my name again) and came right in. I had been moving between porch swing and kitchen and not locked the door: a mistake. I picked six tomatoes today, including Mr. Nose; I gave her three. I didn't give her any cherries this year but selfishly kept them all myself. I can't begrudge her a decent homegrown tomato or three.
The project itself doesn't have an easily googleable site, but "CBS Sunday Morning's" story about all that can be produced from one tree made me happy.
In other tree news, I drove partway up Mt. Evans today, aiming for the West Chicago Lake trail. I didn't like the look of its dirt road so instead strolled around Echo Lake and found another rock in another creek to sit on while reading another book. Under more trees, I should say.
When we were kids, we were sent to the back of the station wagon to sleep during the second feature of a drive-in. My sister sneaked awake once and saw "Audrey Rose," the lurid plot of which she detailed to me and which became the basis of many later games. Maybe because of it, this is how CLH and I decided we should have a code word so that when one tried to haunt the other, she could give the name to prove the haunting was genuine and not someone else's trickery. That code word is probably the one secret I will take to my grave.
I never saw "Audrey Rose." Until now. I recorded it a couple of days ago but only just talked to my sister. I didn't know if watching this movie, like riding an upside-down roller-coaster, was something I needed to do with her. But I at least have her permission.
Because of the subject matter and the age of the child, it's hard not to see "The Exorcist" all through this. Because of the lead actress and the age of the child, it's hard not to see "The Goodbye Girl" too, and that's one bizarre pairing of movies. Anthony Hopkins is the lead actor, so it's hard to dismiss it as trash outright. Yet, at least, 30 minutes in.
[Later.] Definitely more "Exorcist" than "Goodbye Girl," no surprise there. Gee, I wonder how those big windows high over Park Avenue will come into play.
[More than halfway through.] Oh cool, Higgie-baby is in this. I know John Hillerman only as Higgins, and--who was just saying this? maybe Kymm, though she understands acting and I can't get past my typecasting--he and David Ogden Stiers sound so wrong to me in their native Usan voices. I probably would have the same issue if ever I heard James Marsters as someone other than Spike.
Conversation with Egg and an intern (the newly biked one) this morning. Egg had just seen "The Philadelphia Story" for the first time. Much enthusing on both our parts plus reenactment for the ignorant intern was necessary. [Logically, it should be "were," but that sounds wrong. Have I been corrupted?] Through Jimmy Stewart, we got to "Airport '77" and other cheesy crap to watch in the '70s, so "The Donny and Marie Show" was but a short leap--unlike the conversation, which was a long gossipy reminiscence on a Monday morning. The intern (who is Mormon) said that besides polygyny, the Osmonds were the worst thing for the LDS' reputation. Here I refrained from commenting that harassing people on their doorsteps probably doesn't help either but instead observed that I didn't remember any Mormonism in the show particularly. My first exposure to the religion was in the Great Brain books. "I remember those!" exclaimed Egg. Of course she does: we're only a year apart, whereas most of our childhood television was lost on the intern, a decade younger.
So I explained the books to the intern (much as Egg and I had, in tandem, quite a while earlier, explained "The Philadelphia Story"), how in the little town of Adenville, Utah, the preponderance of Mormons necessitated each boy (Sweyn, Tom the Brain, and John the narrator) to be able to beat up those Mormons in his own age group. And the Brain's swindling and crime-solving. Egg exclaimed at how much I remember, and the intern has--big surprise--also noticed it. She said something about "how much you remember, when I'm ready to go on to the next thing."
I cracked right the hell up. That is such a perfect description of me. I laughed and laughed and laughed and teared up with laughter and laughed in that unstoppable, face-aching way, and she was laughing too and insisting she hadn't meant it like that. I knew that she didn't mean it maliciously, but the subconsciously rendered, absolutely perfect description of what it's like to be around me, reduced me to hysterics.
Then the intern asked me how I can keep all of that in my head, that he would go insane with so much going on. I told him I don't know the capital of Angola, which more important to daily life [whereupon I shut up, continuing in my head, "than the Fitzgerald boys' middle name (which is Dennis)," but I didn't want to prove his point too much, did I?]
A Formigny screen or storm window hangs from two tabs at the top and then, once the frame is fully into place, is secured by a hook on the screen to an eye in the sill. Mostly: they are old, and some of the hooks and eyes are missing, stripped out, whatever. This morning as I sat at the dining table and Blake ate his breakfast on the kitchen windowsill, I sneezed. This startled Blake and I heard him flap once and then utter the cockatiel equivalent of a human "hmph" of frustration. I was already up and after him: his flap had delivered him three inches left and four up onto the screen, from which he hung by claws and beak, with tail splayed out. Remind me to check that the hook and eye are quite, quite secure.
In the future, people will not wear clothes but instead stick Post-Its all over themselves.
What a fantabulous day. Get this: it was perfectly sunny all day, but not blazing hot even in the sun.
We walked to the farmer's market for tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches, plums, butter-and-sugar corn, and two pounds of basil. Our own tomatoes and cucumbers will be ready soon but not our nectarines or plums. (If you guessed a rodent with tentacles and a tail, yep.)
Then I inaugurated the new food processor: basil + piñon + romano cheese + elephant garlic (milder) + olive oil + salt = a couple of ice cube trays lined with plastic wrap filled with pesto, now in the freezer ready to stave off the bleakness of winter basillessness.
New food processor! New food processor! New food processor! Cuisinart, quite strong motor, two work bowls, three blades. The last one died in May as it struggled with perhaps too much pasta dough. I discovered in the meantime that pesto tastes much better when made with a mortar and pestle, but basil in bulk is available now and pesto in bulk is nothing I want to prepare without electricity. Plus the mortar holds less than a pint. So.
After that--which process spared me yet another opportunity to learn to change my bike tires, hooray!--we set up the new tent, which is snazzy although less exciting than the new food processor, not needing repetition, because it will entail camping. It has a moonroof! It has a vestible without really a vestibule (you keep your muddy boots between the fly and the tent but don't have to turn a pretzel to exit the damn thing. Also you can unzip the doors--two, one for each occupant, hooray!--with one hand: they're curved instead of cornered. There's an attic (a little shelf made of screening) for glasses; luckily there're also a few pockets along the sides, since the attic obscures the moonroof. The fly can roll down in seconds if the weather turns (completely covering the moonroof). It sets up about as easily as the...whatever the people's name was...tents in The Hero and the Crown.
Then I weeded! in the middle of the afternoon! in the sun! without dying of sunstroke! I clipped out all the old raspberry canes because, who knew, a second crop is coming in. There is one little baby pumpkin coming along, so I removed the other blossoms. (Last year, the mystery plant that turned into a pumpkin was huge before it was orange. This year, it's wee but already yellowy-orange. I didn't mark which squash I planted where, so because of the color I wonder if this is the Casper variety I planted.) I snipped the cherry sproutlets, ripped out whatever it is that has dandelion leaves but also pokey little irritants, not quite thorns but bad enough, ripped out some maybe-mums that do way too well on way too little care to be anything but weeds and that were crowding the rosemary anyway.
Then I emptied the garage. Kind of. Its perimeter is lined with this and that, but its perimeter is what the masons need access to. Some stuff I brought inside, and I am sick of moving stuff from here to there, and other stuff I piled in the middle, which the mason said was fine. I got to throw out some crap, always a plus.
I was soaked in sweat by the end, because of work not because of sun.
Today is Blake's hatchday! To celebrate we are going to glue an eggtooth on his beak and pluck out his tail so he fits when we fold him back up into an egg.
I don’t do this often. Bear with me, OMFB. The first thing I remember was being held against my will in some bizarre religious culty thing (RDC is reading Jon Krakauer’s new book Under the Banner of Heaven, about a murder in a Mormon context). In my small bedchamber, a persistent swain pressed his suit in the most unwelcome self-assured courtship since Mr. Collins’s of Elizabeth Bennet. (After her volunteer vacation in Togo three years ago, Egg received the most hysterical postcard from an utter stranger who must have got her name and address from another Togolese, with a cut-out three-quarter photograph glued on, trying to woo her, saying something about how even though he didn’t meet her he experienced the beautiful scent wafting in her wake. She is in western African this week for work and I enthused with her just before she left that maybe she could meet him this time.) The next day, as I knew it in the dream, I had escaped, and I had a newborn (it was Blake's hatchday Monday). There was no coitus, no pregnancy, no birth, but I knew it was mine. I wanted to be rid of it before it needed to eat because I was afraid if I nursed it, I would bond with it. Here are the ways it was like Blake: it moseyed about (and, unlike Blake, nearly fell down the cellar stairs), it was kind of toilet trained (one mosey was to poop somewhere that wasn't-on-me), and it kind of talked (like Blake, but more like the cat in Half Magic). It could do all this despite being merely a day old, and I liked it and told it how brilliant it was. It was a girl and I thought I might name it Emily but then I would reprimand myself that the sunflower was Emily (I had a sunflower yesterday). I wound up in a house belonging to a woman who looked like Chloris Leachman (we watched “Interiors” last night and apparently Geraldine Page reminds me of Chloris Leachman). I finally nursed it when it needed to be fed. While it fed, I realized, “Hey, I'm on the pill! That must be bad for the baby.” Following rapidly on the heels of that brilliance was “Yeah! I'm on the pill! I can't have a baby.” Whereupon I woke up.
With, interestingly, neither horror nor relief nor longing but disorientation and then amusement.
A while ago I bought a pen with a light in the tip so you can write in the nearly dark. I have never used it in my paper journal because, as my sister says, if it's not violet, it's not recognizably my handwriting. I woke, I pulled my journal from my backpack (which lives by my bed) and the pen from the drawer, and wrote four pages.
One and a third geological ages ago, either my boyfriend's grandmother or his friend's wife had a butter-keeper: the lid has a bowl that fits upside-down into cup, you have some water in the cup, you put butter in the bowl, and lo, room-temperature butter that's slightly cleaner than leaving it on the counter all the time. I've been wanting one since and remembered to put it on a gift list my mother asked for before last Yule. She found one for my birthday and sent it in the box from the store, with her usual inability to pack such that the lid, chattering against the bowl on its journey, arrived in three pieces (shh).
Meanwhile, when I went to France in May my assignment for my sister was a butter dish on a pedestal. (I have no idea what she meant.) I bought her one, not what she had in mind but she liked it, and it arrived entire because both the shopkeeper and I know how to ship.
Meanwhile, my mother had been harping that the one piece she needed to complete the yellow Florentine pattern Depression glass set she and Granny had been trying to complete for years--for my lifetime, I am sure--was the butter dish lid. She had the base but needed the domed lid. I timidly ventured into eBay a-looking. In the 1.75 years since I broke my favorite ornament, it has never come up for bid, though I could have bought dozens of the Kurt Adler Polonaise Boot with Presents. So I added a search for this thing. It came up once before and my maximum bid didn't even meet the seller's reserve price, which I thought was ridiculous, since the final bid was ten times the starting price. Another came up a few weeks ago and zounds, I won it.
I dislike auctions in general: they are too close to gambling. But I got the thing for my mother, although, as my sister pointed out when I bitched about the first auction, what's the point, because it will live in a cupboard so crowded that nothing on display can be seen, and she doesn't appreciate nice gestures anyway, and it came from a gas station to begin with. I had the seller (who frayed my nerves by never responding to my emails telling him I had sent payment, that I would like to know when he received payment and shipped the item) ship it to her, and he did, and I told her a package would arrive that was her Christmas present and she could open it either now or on the proper day.
She opened it yesterday. She left me voicemail sounding not particularly enthused, which is unfortunate considering how much she worried this particular bone.
So now we all have a goddamn butter dish and can get off each other's backs.
I will be so glad when the street construction is done. We've had pounding that shook Formigny, such a sturdy little brick house that even the Wolf couldn't blow it down, and I figured it was a good thing the masons would start their work after that was done. The other morning the Trojan Rabbit rumbled along the street before we even got up, a wheeled behemoth or maybe a conveyor-belted one, not that I got up to see. Remember how in "Jurassic Park," they know the Tyrannosaurus Rex is coming because the Jello wiggles? Or perhaps a more highfalutin example is the opening scene in "Richard III" when Henry VI is supping at his war table and notices the wine is a-tremble moments before Richard's tank comes through the wall. Anyway, that's been our house.
The most beautiful noise in the whole wide world is that of a washing machine deciding, after stopping midcycle and not starting again despite being rebalanced and having its drum jiggled and eventually having its clothes removed and wrung out and dumped into a plastic bag-lined hamper ready to go to a laundromat and its lid closed and its dial turned and pulled again (just in case), to run.
I added this to the list of stuff I don't get:
Wearing gear from a team you don't belong to (relatively mild, really), or from a school neither you nor anyone you know attend or care about (less mild), or with the initials of the New York Police Department or the Fire Department of New York just like that worn by those who actually have committed themselves to those departments (not mild at all, that one).
For a few reasons we decided to leave a day later. One of the several benefits was making the drive in daylight: the climb to Bailey, over Kenosha Pass into South Park, a break for lunch in Jefferson or Fair Play, at a diner cum general store cum post office. Resolved: to stop thinking of Colorado as Denver plus a stretch of interstate to the regular ski mountains or another stretch of smaller roads to Rocky Mountain National Park. Also: to take better advantage of knowing how much more to Colorado there is.
I had seen South Park a few times before, the remarkable flats leading back to the plains and the long drop down, Mt. Elbert looming in the distance. This time we didn't turn toward Salida (an exit from the mountains) but west toward Monarch. I might have done better with blinders on: Monarch Pass was scary. But in that case I would have missed the snow.
Prosaic as I am, when I look around to these small towns, the homesteads without the towns, I wonder about their fresh produce. Weekly or monthly mail I can figure. If only monthly, though, do they get tomatoes and spinach and asparagus only monthly as well?
After four hours of painted horses, parched, sage-covered hills, creeks a-jump and a-burble, foothills and mountains, we reached Crested Butte. On almost every postcard I wrote that this was the most beautiful bit of Colorado I had ever seen, and that was true because I hadn't seen Telluride yet.
One of the things I miss here is forests, both their presence and their views. I've always preferred deciduous to coniferous trees in general, but somehow I knew the problem with Colorado forest wasn't just that they're mostly evergreen. Here in southwestern Colorado, the forests appealed to me much more, and I immediately saw why. More moisture means more deciduous, more aspen and cottonwood (including my favorite, redolent narrow-leaf black willow), but also more Colorado blue spruce instead of the drier eastern slopes' Ponderosa and lodgepole pine: the green of the forest is more blue than yellow. It was soothing to the eye (like poppies).
Crested Butte is in two parts: Crested Butte, full of Victorian, mining-era buildings, with shoppes (pronounced "shoppies," natch) and galleries and restaurants, and Mt. Crested Butte, nothing but ski condos and hotels, three miles north and directly under the eponymous mountain.
Geographically, I'm not sure what the difference is between a butte and a mountain or a butte and a mesa, but I know a mountain and a mesa aren't the same. Crested Butte is relatively independent, descending to the valley floor on all sides instead of being one peak of many (butte not mountain), and it's not flat on top (butte not mesa) even where it's not crested (like a cockatiel or a dinosaur, take your pick).
I don't know how a ten-mile round trip could possibly include 12 miles uphill one way, but it did. North of Crested Butte, north of Mt. Crested Butte, north of Gothic (a ghost town revived for the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory), we headed for Copper Creek trailhead. We did not park at the base, no no no, because apparently the jeep track passes for a road that RDC wanted to take Cassidy up.
(Monarch Pass went on for a long way, was vaguely snowy, had narrow, sharp curves and no guard rails, but it was paved smoothly. This wasn't even gravel, like Guanella Pass, nor washed-out blacktop like the state forest road to Uncas Lake. This was nothing that a vehicle should be taken up, four-wheel-drive or otherwise. We went up and Cassidy did fine. Like Olivia Steinbeck in East of Eden with airplanes, this is something I continue not to believe in even after experiencing it.)
Gorgeous. This is how everywhere should be, with surface water and lots of trees and, get this, about a dozen people along our entire several hours on the trail (I know I'm part of the problem, but part of my problem-causing is that I like it deserted). Sallows and blue spruce and cottonwoods on the north-facing slopes and sage and bear grass on the south-facing and Indian paintbrush and campanula and did I mention the creek and the lake?
The last mile up lasted about twelve times as long as I wanted. I plodded. Steep is one thing. I don't know what the grade was: "plenty" about sums it up. RDC wasn't quite up to speed and listed somewhat, and unfortunately strained his knee. I was determined to get to the top, and so was RDC, and so we did.
Why we had packed only one sandwich apiece instead of all of them, I don't know. But I am damn glad I had my own 64-ounce Camelbak bladder.
From the map, we thought we were close to the Canyon; from the guidebooks, I, at least, had different expectations about what the reservoirs would be like. First, we weren't close but two hours and 90 miles away. Second, I was delusional to hope that Blue Mesa reservoir would be any different from any other water dammed in high arid land. Water, imprisoned into an unnatural form, low along its shoreline, below hills so dry the scrub sage is less than spotty, looks not dammed but damned to me.
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison was much better. What other major canyons in the United States haven't I seen? Glenwood Canyon and the Grand Canyon; the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone; now this. I haven't seen Yosemite, and there must be others.
When we arrove, it was cloudless and hot. While we were there, clouds formed and rolled in. Light rain began to fall, and then more. At the downstream end of the south rim, we stopped for a torrential thunderstorm. To the west, where the canyon plateau fell away into a 60-mile view, we now could not see even to the next bend in the river, but during a brief lull we saw that lightning had sparked a fire on the north rim. The rain closed in again, pounding the car, and when it finally ceased the smoke from that one had lessened, but not gone out--a fire could simmer in the sap of a juniper or piñon through a worse deluge than that--and a second fire, a little farther east, had started. A ranger, who had waited out the storm along with many civilians, said around a wad of tobacco in his jaw that they'd have to hike in to ensure they were out. I would not have felt as assured without the chaw.
The Canyon was only recently upgraded from monument to park, and even if it had had marked trails down, there was no way, capital No, capital Way. We took pictures from the rim, at Dragon Point of Painted Wall, where because of the small fires it looked somewhat like the dragons were breathing the smoke in the air, as well as that on the wall.
We never do this: just hang out by the pool all day on vacation. We did this day, such a novelty.
I can't recommend the Sheraton in Mt. Crested Butte. A king mattress fits across two twin box springs, but the hotel doesn't spring for king-sized pillows or king-sized fitted sheets or even fitted sheets at all or indeed sheets that aren't pilly. We didn't sleep well during our stay: the least movement untucked the minimal tuckage, just for starters.
There was a pool, smallish and not particularly cleanish, with a fine view of the butte, without shade. But that's me: it's a pool, and I would have preferred to laze the day away by a creek or a pond. But even fake water is better than no water. I explored the beautiful old Victorian village in the morning, checking out books from their library (in super old building that was a school until nine years ago) and shopping a bit, and then joined RDC by and in the pool. I stood in five feet of water, arms and chin on a towel on the deck, and read Second Summer of the Sisterhood.
There are worse ways to spend a day.
We fled the short-sheeted Sheraton for a lovely bed and breakfast in Ouray. The China Clipper's nautical theme was incongruous in the middle of the mountains, and felt more like a small hotel than a B&B, but the bed was high (there was a little wooden stepstool on what was therefore clearly RDC's side), the atmosphere non-corporate, and the view of the canyon wall from the porch an excellent way to rest your eyes over the top of your book. Our room was the Southern Cross (#8 in the virtual tour), and I noticed that in the Sheraton, we usually had CNN on, while at the China Clipper, the television remained blind and mute: corporate v. non-corporate.
But damn, that was a long drive, and we had a leisurely start to the day, so all we did was wander about the town and, get this, shop. Can you call it shopping when you don't buy anything? Or is it shopping if you go in instead of just looking through windows and have not ruled out the possibility of buying? Crested Butte, Ouray, Silverton, and Telluride all were born mining towns in the late 19th century and the architecture shows it. Now, with the mining nearly not happening, they survive on tourism. This time, I'm sorry to say, we fit more into the sightseeing demographic than the active one, but the sightseeing was fine and the shops were mostly shops, not shoppes, and the galleries good.
(Only Ouray's main street, part of U.S. 550, is paved. There are no traffic lights. There is no McDonald's or Wal-Mart in San Juan County. There is Billy Goat Gruff's Biergarten, though.)
On the way to Ouray, we did not stop at Ridgway State Park, whose photographs lie. This our guidebook had proclaimed "the crowning jewel" of Colorado state parks, which bodes poorly for all the rest of them and for the state. It looked just as much like a reservoir as any other and its roped-off swim area, visible from the state route, was the size of Cherry Creek reservoir's, such that even if you ventured in (which I never have, preferring my swim water separate from my sewage water and please don't ask where my drinking water comes from), you could not swim any distance, or away from paddling peeing children, or in water deep enough not to be murky from disturbing the bottom, or out of the roped area without being run down by a foul motor boat or "personal water craft."
We had our best meals yet, service and food combined. In Crested Butte, the Wooden Nickel's service was surly (though the prime rib was good); the Gourmet Noodle's and Bacchinale's marinaras abysmal (RDC dove into the kitchen when we got home to make real sauce) though cheerfully served; and the Idle Spur was depressingly empty though the elk chops were tasty. Our first meal in Ouray, by contrast, was lunch at Le Papillion Bakery, which served po'boys! I regretted not sampling its desserts. At Buen Tiempo for dinner, I had a seafood mixed grill with a wonderful fruit salad. I had never eaten anything called "mixed grill" before (I would have said "mixed seafood grill") and all I could think of was The Corrections--I think the transposed adjectives indicate that "mixed grill" is really its own dish. RDC had something way hotter than I can manage--the one forkful I ventured made me regret my wussy palate. The next night's dinner happened at the Coachlight, a hokey enough name that I could not help thinking of the late Chop House in Flanders, Connecticut, an unfair slight to this not nearly as pathetic place.
The first stop on the Million Dollar Highway was Box Canyon Falls. Whole trees jammed one spillway; whole hillsides had been softened by floods. Then up and over the Million Dollar Highway to Silverton, where I bought a rock.
I always get a rock for Haitch, or usually. This time it had entirely slipped my mind through Copper Creek and Black Canyon because I suck. Then, as we crunched through Silverton (which, like Ouray, has one paved road, or none because it was being resurfaced at the time), we saw a rock stand.
Ages ago in Denver we saw what would have been the perfect photograph if it had been possible to capture the image without its subject's notice. A shorty, nowhere near 10, had a lemonade stand on his corner lot. Apparently business wasn't brisk, because his expression rivaled Puddleglum's for pessimism.
These kids were too young to be discouraged. I think. If the older was even five, I'll eat my hat. They were dazzlingly towheaded and fairly shone out of the empty lot where they had set up shop. It looked an unlikely spot as we drove by, but I hadn't noticed the traintracks like a spine in the road. RDC said, "You should get Haitch a rock." Oh yeah.
So we investigated the rail station (the Saybrook train station looked only slightly less decrepit last time I looked) and looked at some old rail cars (including one ambulance car still running on a 1918 Cadillac automobile engine) and then looked through town. We looked into the town hall (which has a great dome I would have photographed if there hadn't been a jumbo potted tree directly under the rotunda) and the one-time prison and now museum. Repeating our strange new habit of poking around town, we did that, which is basically the historic walking tour. This jaunt also included its Carnegie library, which was just fine, especially its nonfiction room in the basement.
Upstairs, I spotted a book I showed to RDC to rival the legendary Tact for Dummies: Virgin Planet, a seeming combination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland and...that short story that's a twist on the saying "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" (the blind doctors want to remove from his face the one or two bulging, soft tumors that they are sure are causing his dementia). The back cover matter of Planet proclaimed an astronaut's crash landing somewhere that had been man-less for 300 years. Apparently this man faced the same difficulties Taylor does on the Planet of the Apes. Lord. (Of course now I regret not borrowing it, but please, it's bad enough I interrupt Goldbug Variations with Second Summer of the Sisterhood. I don't need to encourage myself.)
So anyway. I made sure to walk by the two young entrepeneurs. They had wee little chairs by a wooden crate. The older pawed through the bills and change they'd collected in a coffee mug, probably not yet having mastered arithmetic (or maybe he or they had: they were businessmen). So I asked the younger, "Where do your rocks come from?"
"The mine." Duh. They were clearly not from the empty lot behind him.
"How much are your rocks?"
He began to pick up rocks from the array on the crate. "This one...is two dollars," putting it down and randomly picking up another hunk of granite, "and this one...is two dollars and fifty cents,"...pausing as in Godot's "Endgame before picking up, with difficulty, the largest of the rocks about the size of my fist, "and this one...is five dollars..."
I had already picked out the one I wanted, a yellow quartz, so I touched it and asked how much that one was.
"A quarter."
I managed to stifle my laughter until I was around the corner and in the car again. That was the funniest thing of the whole trip.
The funnest part of the whole trip was next. Back up and more down to Ouray, north of Ouray to a not-quite-town called Orvis. We were looking for Orvis Hot Springs. Our aim was County Road 3 off State Route 550. Believe me when I say this were driveway-level turn-offs. We saw a sign that said "Orvis Springs" and thought that was it.
It was not. The sign actually said "Orvis Springs Inc. Custom Meat Processing." We thought, for heaven's sake, all we want to do is soak. Where do they get their meat anyway? And we drove up a long driveway that probably also counted as a county road and passed a shed outside of which stood a frame with a grate set into the ground below. I recognized it not because it looked like anything I've seen in (pictures of) slaughterhouses but because it was a larger version of the game room in the kitchens of Chenonceau. I know you hang small game for a day or two to facilitate dressing, but these were elk- (or human-) size hooks. We had turned to hightail it the hell out of there as a man approached us on a tractor (which we could outrun, as long as his other brother Daryl didn't show up wielding a chainsaw, because believe me, the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" jokes kept coming). The man, with the weary smile of one who has had to deal with this once too often, directed us back out to the state road and to the next turn-off.
It's easy to miss Orvis Hot Springs because it's in a little dell and its privacy fences are cloaked in green. It needs the privacy fences because, praise be, the entire outdoor area is clothing-optional.
We spent the next three hours in a 40' long, four- to five-foot-deep, pebble-bottomed, 99- to 102-degree pond, surrounded by mountains, sage, hollyhocks, sunflowers, cottonwoods, and willow, occasionally being rained on, moving now closer and now farther from a plume that fed in unadulterated, hot, mineral (but not sulphury) water, and we did this unimpeded by the known carcinogen that is a bathing suit.
And the next day we went home.
From Ouray we detoured to Telluride. The way led among mountains in more dire need of an orthodontist than any I have seen before, between working ranches and resort ranches and ghost ranches, through quaking aspen and gambel oak, up the San Miguel river, and into another mostly preserved, mostly Victorian town (with some architecture that wouldn't be out of place in Aspen, and some even in Anonymous Suburb, U.S.A.)
From Cascade Canyon last year I remember glacier-fed creeks tumbling down hillsides, and one of those is the prominent feature of Telluride, visible from anywhere in town at the end of the canyon. A private residence improbably perches halfway up Bridal Veil Falls. From partway up the ski slope by gondola, you can see the young craggy mountains (whose names I forget), lapsed volcanoes like Little Cone, and other unimaginatively name hills like Bald Mountain that cradle the town.
Passing signs for it, I had no idea how anyone could fit an airport into the narrow canyon; from the ski slope I looked down on its single, short runway on a conveniently placed plateau that must make for gnarly approaches and departures.
The town is so crunchy! Boulder is not, actually, crunchy anymore. The Ramseys lived there: QED. In Crested Butte and in Telluride, wild mushroom festivals were going on. Telluride has a movie festival, a bluegrass festival, and Widespread Panic just played. How Spreadheads afforded Telluride, even camping, I do not know. But when we come into our money, we're moving there.
Coming down just the sixty miles thence to Montrose--well, I wished the whole state looked like Telluride. Montrose is flat and arid, eh. From Montrose to Delta didn't turn my head either, and just east of Delta, Colorado looks as much like the barren former seabed of Utah as anything else that I never want to see again. (I just don't do deserts or near-deserts well. I can live with that.) We were in the Gunnison Gorge area, but you'd never know there was a river within a million miles.
But then, oh, but then, we started to climb again. Colorado's geography changes so rapidly, so dramatically, and so much over the state, that I am ashamed it took me eight years to learn this for myself. After Hotchkiss, the altitude enough to trap the clouds, the land blossomed. Cherries and apples and peaches, vegetable crops, livestock: beautiful country. We passed through a coal-mining town that brimmed with stories. I regret to report that even Paonia Reservoir, high enough to be surrounded by forest, still looks like a reservoir. Mostly, the climb to and the drop from McClure Pass was staggeringly beautiful. There is a campground along the North Fork of the Gunnison which looks both fishable and swimmable and went on the list.
East from Montrose, lightning beckoned us up and chased us down the peaks. We had rain, lovely rain, sporadically throughout the drive. (We had rain nearly every day. I loved all of it.) We cut the trip short because, what with RDC's knee and antibiotics, hiking and camping weren't happening--next time, we camp either in Poudre Canyon or along McClure Pass. These several days were a gorgeous introduction to an area I want to see more of, and see more deeply, and find places to swim in. I will never ice climb, but Ouray in the winter must be even more spectacular; I am not a gazillionaire, but Telluride in snow (without diesel fumes) probably blinds one with beauty. Not a bad last sight.
There are more pictures in the gallery.
Denver Events, as Reconstructed: we got home, I brought my first load inside, I left the car unlocked and the doors open while I inspected the pear tree (denuded) and the tomatoes (booming) and the raspberries (not quite ripe yet) and the garage (tuckpointed but not acid-washed). I returned to the car for more stuff, emptied the car into the living room, and breathed. I showered and shampooed and shaved, and wrapped myself in my bathrobe, and, amidst piles of dirty laundry, sleeping bags, Nalgeen bottles, fishing tackle, etc., wondered aloud, "Where's my wallet?" which had the effect of convincing both of us I had left it in Montrose, either in the store or in the peer or on the car.
Montrose Events, as Reconstructed: I left RDC to fuel Cassidy and went into the shop to case it for peers, snacks, and drinks. Exploration of its nether corners yielded no peer of either persuasion, so I asked a clerk, who said they were outside round the corner. I tried the female one, whose door I could not budge, and returned to the car, somewhat shamed of leaving RDC to both pump and squeegee. We both went back to the store and out again. He and I serially used the same facility, with him guarding me while I violated gender protocol. We bought Gator-Ade and Dove Dark Chocolate and retreated to the car, whence we did not emerge until nearly Glenwood Springs, where we made use of a McDonald's, and not again until Denver.
Did I drop my wallet on the initial pass-through of the store? on the roof of the car when I offered to squeegee? in the peer? RDC thought I left it in the peer, because he would have remembered seeing it in my mouth (where I hold it, lacking pockets, not to put it down) and he did not.
When my keys run away, I generally panic and give them a day to their own devices. I use the spare house and car keys and then, finally, make one more assay into my bag where, invariably thus far, they have hidden in some recess. My wallet has never run away before, but anonymous keys are a lot less scary to lose than a wallet. I would have to drive all over the state to reaccumulate all my library barcodes, for one thing. Someone else could enter the Botanic Gardens in my name and maybe spit in the lily pond! My first step was to google "tMontrose Conoco" and RDC's to place holds on the credit and debit accounts.
To clear my head, I continued to unpack. Sorting laundry. Hanging up parkas. Searching the car, like the undercarriage of the passenger seat where, it turns out, Rarities, B-Sides, and Slow, Sad Waltzes emerged several months after I replaced it (so I gave it to JGW, thereby converting yet another person to the Cowboy Junkies). Picking tomatoes. Showering. We were both in the kitchen when I lifted my Camelbak bladder from the counter to rinse it, exposing the wallet beneath, which did not skitter away quite fast enough. I pounced.
Stress kills my appetite anyway, and what fortuitous timing: there's nothing in the house to eat but cherry tomatoes.
I love this. CoolBoss's son asked her what the double-fingered, two-handed quote gesture means. She said it indicates quotation marks but that the gesture usually indicates irony, so he asked what irony is. He is eight, and she floundered a bit before saying something about "unusual development." Her son asked, "So it's like a caterpillar?"
So far he trumps both Troy Dyer (could the name be any more symbolic, O ruined existentialist city?) and Brian Krakow.
Ethan Hawke as Troy in "Reality Bites" says, "It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning."
Brian Krakow in "My So-Called Life" defines "ironic" as "Um, when you realize the, like, component of weirdness in a situation."
I like better that it's a caterpillar.
Good grief, this is as stupid as wanting to make a stuffed animal tiger and selling it with the label Hobbes. Or stupider. I just got "The Two Towers"--I am that much a sucker for marketing and consumption--which came with a booklet selling the obvious crap, like elven brooches and Arwen's pendant and a truly unspeakable vomitation of porcelain and pewter and also RDC's Christmas present. All of that is offensive to my aesthetic taste, because the "jewelry" is costume, not of elvish or dwarfish quality and the vomitation is...unspeakable and the chess set is tacky and so forth.
I don't mind the idea of a Hobbes: Just as "Calvin and Hobbes" burst into syndication, HEBD gave SEM an enormous bear, about the size of a St. Bernard, whom he dubbed Hobbes. I mind a mass marketing of, rather than an individual relationship with, Hobbes. Similarly, I don't mind the copyright violation that Bill Watterson did mind when folks made t-shirts reprinting the strip where Calvin and Hobbes dance in their sunglasses. I don't even mind non-Watterson Calvin and Hobbes interpretations that respect their spirit, like their playing with Max where the Wild Things are. I have always despised those violations featuring, fr'instance, Calvin and Snoopy and Opus, bleary-eyed and weaving, captioned "I get by with a little help from my friends" or Calvin, drunkenly pointing and saying "What about that one?" and Hobbes nearly puking, captioned "Friends Don't Let Friends Beer-Goggle." (To be honest I haven't seen these since college.)
So. Selling a mock-up of the One Ring violates the entire principle of The Lord of the Rings and, I daresay, "The Lord of the Rings" too. One ring. One. Also, it's bad! It's evil! It's wrong! And it gets fucking destroyed!* It doesn't exist!
* What, you didn't know that?
The icing on the cake is that it's in mere 10K gold.
Yesterday a brief, intense rainstorm burst out just around 4, so if I hadn't been flexing I'd've been caught. It had cleared enough by 4:30 that I got wet only by my tires hurling puddles up at me. Because I take my bike into its native environment so often its big chunky treads are necessary.
Then last night it was cool in a pleasant kind of way and we were going to have supper outside. I went downstairs to do laundry and watch "Sex and the City" (so RDC wouldn't have to) and when I came up again, half an hour later, it was cold! Cold cold cold! I closed windows for to keep the heat in, not out. Wild.
Later in the evening rain began again, loud because I still haven't spread mulch on the groundcloth on the north side of the house (which laziness was, at first, a good thing, because walking on mulch would have pissed off the masons, but which is now because I haven't gone to Home Despot to buy edging--I have to dig 30' of edging in so the mulch doesn't wash into Their yard). It rained and rained and rained, and now it's 10 in the morning and still merely 56 degrees, and though the weather will of course warm up again, it is fall.
Also it's been overcast enough for the past two weeks that we haven't seen Mars.
RDC remarked tonight about something I had entirely forgotten: when we discussed getting our wedding rings engraved, his suggestion was "Quid pro quo."
It turns out that the tree I've spotted along my bike root and admired for its height, tulip or trumpet shape, tough-ass leaves, and graceful droop is, in fact, American elm. This boggles me: I thought they were extinct.
Lyme Street used to run through a tunnel of elms, but they all died by, I expect, the '50s. Now it's overlaid with utility lines, much less attractive. And hotter.
ÜberBoss is certain any healthy, thriving elm I have seen must be sprayed early and often. I prefer to believe people don't use fungicides, at least not as many households as have these trees, nor the city on the several trees on public property, so was ready to believe they were another species, despite what I deduced from various identification guides. But sprayed or not, they're elms.
Then I looked closely at the tree in the alley because I was ripping out the not-ivy climbing creeper that's grown into it. It's an elm. An American elm, not a Siberian or Chinese. It's diseased, with beetles at least, and the fungus will follow in the beetle-weakened vascular system.
This comes up because I want to plant an elm in the front yard, but not if it needs any kind of -cide to survive.
We had a parting dinner out at Tamayo, on the deck overlooking Auraria and the mountains and the sunset, and talked about what I might do when I get back. I'm just noting that.
Today I had lunch with Karen and Mr. Karen, who were in town on their day to a wedding in Vail. Among the meal's other amusements was Mr. Karen's trying to think of a song on Peter Gabriel's So called "Chicken Run," so mangled had my comment on the animators become.
Then RDC picked me up and brought me to the airport.
Friday night at midnight Saturday morning my sister picked me up. I threw my bags into her back seat and got into the front, accepting from her hand a plate of still-warm oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (milk in a travel mug awaited me also). "How much for the whole weekend?" she asked. This took me a minute to process, making me as difficult to joke or communicate at all with as our mother.
I know my role as aunt, so as soon as we got into CLH's apartment I called for my niece. Kitty is, of course, adorable and purrfect and my sister has her picture up everywhere and I told CLH about the psychologist in Maus. When CLH first adopted her, she said she had intended a grey cat but Kitty's purr won her over. Maybe because she expected the sleek prettiness of a grey cat, she said--at the time--that Kitty's coat looked like a bad dye job. She looks like a tortoiseshell to me, and the purr really is something, and of course she is the prettiest kitty ever.
Over the weekend, the weather was flawlessly, perfectly gorgeous--as it would be the whole week until the last day--and we went to see Thomas Gainsborough at the MFA and to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (I had never been) and she showed me all the community gardens in the Fens behind MFA. Also we went on the Swan Boats, me for the first time. The Gainsborough was not so much what I like, a bunch of portraits. CLH prefers people to landscapes, or did for Gainsborough anyway, which makes sense since that was his fame. What I remember is that one of the pieces is the cover of the Penguin edition of Sense and Sensibility.
I learned at least two things about my sister: that "Sense and Sensibility" is also one of her favorite movies and that blue sky through green leaves is also one of her favorite colors. I am so glad to know we have such vital things in common.
We talked about Margaret Dashwood and reinvented the course of the Volga and I told her about Emma Thompson's and Ang Lee's two commentaries. We talked about Margaret Atwood too and why CLH didn't crack Oryx and Crake and how we both didn't like Blind Assassin. We wandered up Newbury Street and along Charles Street and I asked how her friend's restaurant Vesuvius is going and she knew what I meant because we were passing it but its name is Torch and she cracked up. Well, it had something to do with fire (isn't Vesuvius the restaurant in "The Sopranos"?) We ate lunch at the Gardner and somewhere on Boylston near Dartmouth and dinner at the Top of the Hub and a picnic from Whole Foods on the Esplanade.
Also we looked at the photographs she had from our aunt who died a year ago. She had already culled her favorites and I selected some for me. (I want a scanner. Now.) I have photographs of my father in the Army, and how he got in needing glasses that thick I don't know. I have photographs of my paternal grandparents traveling to see my father off to Korea, with Bump-bump not wanting have his photograph taken and slouching in work pants, shirt, and cap, and my grandmother properly suited, befitting the honor of the occasion. Among the photographs is one of me as a 14-year-old boy, which is my favorite.
We called our mother from lunch on Boylston. It was her and BDL's anniversary, which the Good Daughter remembered. They weren't home, so we nattered into their answering machine, so I got to score as many GD points as CLH did. Heh.
We called our father from the Esplanade two days later. RSH told CLH something so ridiculous she spluttered with incredulous laughter, and this is how her relationship with our parents is so much better than mine. If Dad had told me the same thing, on my own, I would have said, "Oh really?" and fumbled for better follow-up questions. Whereas when our father told CLH that as one of his duties as quartermaster of his branch of the VFW, he was going to call Bingo once a month, she could laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. He has retired and lives in Florida, yet he distinguishes himself as somehow other than a Florida retiree. And he will continue to do so even though he is Mr. Bingo. That's funny. He cannot enunciate for shit, such that when a friend would telephone the house and Dad would answer, the friend would almost invariably ask, once we got on the phone, "Did I wake up your father?" and ask timidly, because he's scary-sounding too. Yet he has to call letters and numbers clearly enough that a bunch of Florida retirees can understand him. That's funny too. So CLH laughed. I wouldn't've laughed, for fear of hurting his feelings. It makes me a fairly boring conversationalist. CLH, on the other hand, knew she could tease him without hurting his feelings, so did.
One night we went to the Top of the Hub to eat. I have been to the top of the Pru (and the Hancock) several times, but I never ate there. I have to have a clothing tangent here--it becomes pertinent (to me) later on. When I dressed Saturday morning in a short natural linen unwaisted skirt, I discovered my sleeveless button-down L.L. Bean shirt was stained. CLH lent me a fitted short-sleeved ribbed t-shirt. Fitted, as in would betray my belly if I forewent sucking it in and would inescapably betray the fact of my bosom. I wore it, having recently realized (or decided) that baggy is only acceptable over skinny, because baggy over bulge makes you look fatter where fitted over not actually fat yet but not skinny either just makes me look like me. CLH said that I looked like an After photograph in "What Not to Wear." That made me happy. For dinner, I wore my own long ivory sueded Nearly Perfect Skirt (only nearly because there's a seam down the center) and another loan from my sister of a fitted three-quarter sleeved (which I pushed above the elbow because I am only human), ribbed, slightly shiny, scoop-necked shirt. When I emerged, she said, "I don't think I've ever seen you look sexier." Whoo! "It reminds me of a day I was home from college, in the early summer, and I saw you out the kitchen window walking to the clothesline in this white bathing suit. It must have been the year everything changed about you, because I exclaimed something or other and BJWL looked out at you and back and me and said 'yep.'" I told her, laughing, that I remember that white bathing suit; on the day she remembers I would have been 16 or 17 (I was a late bloomer). I tried to find it again for years and I only just recently ditched white as my tank bathing suit color in deference to it. Its primary attraction for me was that it had side panels of dense mesh so I tanned on my sides too, though less.
There were plans for Walden Pond or a whalewatch, and the weather was so beautiful it might have been criminal to stay in the city and not be near water, but it was a really good time with my sister. Also I got to pay for meals with her--but I still carried everything. We decided that I am a camel in a china shop. One of my mother's more frequent exclamations is that I am a bull in a china shop. Since historically CLH has paid and I have carried, I have been the camel for years. Thus, camel in a china shop. My family role. I'll see if ACOA has such a listing.
Tuesday I dropped CLH off at her new job downtown, before sunrise even, and was on my way. At 8:30 in Old Lyme, I looked for breakfast but it didn't happen. Hallmark's offers it only on weekends, and a couple of other places weren't open yet. I miss the Lymelight. But I got to the beach before 9.
I walked out to Griswold Point, or what's left of it. There are curves of sea grass where land used to be. What land remains was covered in cormorants and sea gulls and plovers and terns and there no dogs can get at them, but there's less habitat overall. It was stunning and gorgeous and perfect in every way, breezy and sunny and warm in the sun and cool in the breeze and when I got back to the town beach I dove in. Lordy. I have not been at the beach in September for some years. The day after BJWL's wedding, I invited folks to the beach and TJZ came and ABW came with baby NKW, but it was cloudy and chilly. This was perfect.
People swim in artificial water for exercise and to cool off. Does anyone go into fake water to enjoy being in the water? I don't see how, the dosed water feels so wrong against skin. This was something else. This was perfect. I swam with no fear of jellyfish or jetskis, I floated in salt, I bounced in the strange formations called "waves" that Old Lyme only gets in September (and presumably over the winter, but even I swim only May through September).
When I started shivering I got out and lay in the sun until I decided dehydration and hunger weren't helping me to warm up. By this time the new café across from Phoebe was open, so I had a tomato and cheese bagel and a liter of water and shivered at a patio table in the sun as I read the paper. When I ordered, hugging my arms to myself and turtling my head into my shoulders, the proprietor asked, I think incredulously, if I was cold. It was a gorgeous day in the 70s by now--how could anyone be cold? "I just got out of the water," I told her. The wet hair might have been a give-away, but maybe not: there are showers. I went into Phoebe, listening to the grandfather clock strike the hour, looking through the children's collection, glancing at the new adult fiction, before heading to my main goal, the old reading room. I nodded to Phoebe, still smiling her Mona Lisa smile over the fireplace, and breathed. Eh: it's air-conditioned now, so no real air even in the summer. The geneaology room smells right, at least: no air conditioning can combat books that old.
Then I hied me to Uncas. The road is passable! One of Connecticut's means to balance its budget is to "return certain parks to a natural state," i.e., a reduction in services. There were never any services in Nehantic State Forest anyway, praise be, except to pave, in the most slapdash way, the road. It's now dirt and the smoothest drive I have ever had there. I spent four hours there, sunning and swimming and reading and looking at the sky through the leaves* and being almost entirely alone. Once two men arrived, which made me a little skeevey, but the older just told the younger about fishing here and then they left; another time when I was in the water a man showed up with a baby in a front-pack and a dog on a leash and soon left. Later a family came paddling by in a canoe. No smokers, no screaming kids, no one else in the long term. Peace. Water and sun and utter quiet. Not silence, because of the wind in the trees and the birds, but quiet, with just the wind in the trees and the birds: perfect.
My mother got out of work at 3 so I headed for the house. I remember this as an unstressful half hour, anyway. ABW showed up with her two boys, my mother went off to an optometrist appointment, and ABW and I gave the boys a choice: the beach, with waves and better castle-building sand, or a lake with warmer water and a playground and not very good sand. They opted for lake, so we went to Haynes Park at Roger's Lake, and thank goodness it was after Labor Day or my willy-nilly parking in town lots at beach and lake couldn't've happened. My mother and I would occasionally swim in Roger's Lake, but up in Town Woods, when she didn't want to drive all the way to Uncas, but I haven't been in the shallow, tepid water at Haynes Park since Hurricane Gloria, when after three days of yard clean-up and no electricity I biked over with a bar of Ivory. We attempted to build castles (too coarse a grain), to volley a ball in lacrosse-y baskets, and to seesaw. A 150-pound woman can teeter but not totter when at the opposite end are a 7- and a 4-year old. They scrunched waaaay back and I sat waaaay forward, ahead of the handle and nearly at the fulcrum, and that worked somewhat better. But not much. And then someone dumped a bucket of water on me, so then it was war! After a staggeringly healthy dinner at Hallmark's (fries and a mocha shake for me), they dropped me off at the house and ABW set off with a cargo of exuberantly yelling boys.
I spent the evening with my mother and BDL and that seems to have been fine too. Tedious as usual, but no tenser than usual. It was only after I reminded my mother of my plans for the rest of the week that the stress level ratcheted up, or that's how I remember it now. I had told her that I was traveling to see other people, Charenton and RPR and TJZ, who had guests or a trip to Vermont or baptisms that precluded their coming to UncasCon, but she didn't pay attention or believe or whatever. Now, this makes sense: hurt that I chose to spend so little of my time with her, she acted hurtly, and I got mad for feeling however guilty I felt, and maybe guilty for not feeling guiltier, and the vicious cycle continues.
My mother had Wednesday day off and so I had asked her for Wednesday and (not through) Saturday. This was agreeable, and we spent several hours of Wednesday together. I woke at 7:00 to find the car in the driveway but the house empty, including the cellar, where by this time I did not want to find her collapsed. Nor at the clothesline nor in the camper but finally around the front of the house weeding. She did not garden at all when I was growing up, and it's nice that she is now. One of the awkwardnesses in conversation is that she is so focused on her chemical-induced successes and proud of the open spaces created by murdering perfectly healthy century-old hardwood trees. I cannot encourage chemicals or slaughter, nor do I criticize (to her face, behind her back being so very much more admirable), so I am left with "Ah" and "This is a very large tomato" and similar inanities.
Over breakfast my mother (asked to see and) looked at some of my photographs of the house and garden and of southwest Colorado last month and of Emlet in May. She declined help in the creation of pancakes but glanced at me where I sat at the dining table assembling an iPhoto album to demand that I smile, Lisa! Because when someone isn't smiling, for whatever reason, decreeing that she do so is kind and effective. She showed me Granny's photograph albums and allowed me to select a few--so now I have family photographs from both sides! She had already let CLH go through them and I lusted after one on CLH's wall, of Granny in her 20s perched laughing and leggy on the hood of a car. This is why I need a scanner, so all of us can have all of them.
Then we went to the beach and walked farther than BJWL had ever been, past the sundial even. I showed her where Griswold Point used to be and remarked on the cormorants, which I don't remember seeing before. She said they have always been around. Maybe they have and I used to think they were loons, because I knew loons swim low in the water. But loons are farther north and fresh water. I wasn't much of a birder before I moved to Colorado--but wait (it occurs to me now, almost two weeks later): if, as she herself said, she had never been past the sundial into the bird sanctuary, how would she know whether cormorants had always been there? It was another spectacular, crisp, sunny, breezy, exactly warm enough day.
But not one that couldn't be improved by criticism. I picked up some litter, a shotgun casing and other bits of plastic, as I had the day before both here and at Uncas. She actually asked why I was doing that. "Because it doesn't belong here?" I responded, surprised why? at the question. She tsk'd about how dirty it must be--she was picking up seashells from the same beach--and forbad it on her property and didn't know why I should do it. "It's everyone's responsibility," I said, evenly: I am much less likely to make like a blowfish--puffy and spiky--at her concerning unmotherlydaughterly things, especially things as impersonal as litter, and particularly when I am perfectly confident that I am doing right.
I left at 4. RPR had called to change her day, and when I called Charenton to change their day, JUMB said that was swell--though she wouldn't say swell--and if I arrived in time could I accompany her in her car to the garage and drive her home. Of course.
I stopped just north of Norwich to gas up, and this is when the vacation took a u-turn. I think I mean that in the U-Haul sense, not in the shape sense. I pushed the button in the door panel that released the fueling door, a feature new to me, and I thought the button should have popped back up but then figured maybe it wouldn't until I clicked the gas cap closed--CLH had told me you have to turn it past where it feels shut. I gassed up, I turned the gas cap and clicked it closed, I closed the fuel door (mistake number two). When I got back into the cabin, the button had not popped back up. I tried to manipulate it up, but, ham-fingered as I am, managed only to dislodge it entirely from its mount. There was now a gaping hole in the door panel. Huh.
I drove to Charenton, JUMB and I drove to Tony's and dropped off her car and asked the mechanic to look at mine. He tried the ignition key a couple of ways as a work-around, but no dice. If I would leave the car there, he could try to fix it, but he had a full day tomorrow so he couldn't promise it would be done then. Huh.
I drove us back to Charenton, at which point the fuel gauge read 3/4. Norwich to Charenton to garage to Charenton: one quarter of a tank. Yoikes. I didn't remember how much gas I had leaving Boston, but clearly until the door was fixed I couldn't leave Storrs, not even to drive three towns north to see RPR, nor drive anywhere but Boston. I calculated: I would drive to the garage in the morning and walk to campus--three or four miles?--and walk back at the end of the day. JUMB suggested that LEB might be able to pick me up from the garage, and I called and of course she was willing to do this. So I tried to put i broke my sister's car out of my mind for the time being and enjoy my evening at Charenton.
We had shad and conversation and JUMB's bread and APB's stories and conversation and tarte aux poires and pictures of Emlet's visit in August and of the play ZBD had written and directed (full of princesses and dragons, of course), starring SPG, and conversation. My heart went pitter-pat: I had gorgeous weather and good swimming but no Emlet, no Nisou, no SPG, and now maybe no RPR and MPR, TJZD and RED and Soulmate, or UncasCon. I proudly showed my pictures of Bump-bump and Granny and got to explain how Bump-bump got his name (he bumped foreheads with CLH, whom he adored, and she named him), and APB brought out some of theirs going back four generations, and we hot-tubbed under a full moon and a blazing Mars. And I woke up even before the rooster, an efficient sort who crowed while it was still pitch dark.
In the morning JUMB presented me with Charenton's own "Pretty Virgin" maple syrup and dosed me with coffee and sent me on my way. I had to tell the mechanic I didn't know what year the car was, or what its plate number was--though it was probably the only one with Massachusetts plates--and he had to tell me he didn't know if he would be able to work on it that day. If I had arrived as a stranger instead of under the wing of a regular customer, I would have had no hope, I think. Leaving the car was hard: not that I could fix it myself, but this put it totally out of my hands. LEB picked me up and off we went to campus, where, I realized, I would spend more consecutive hours than I had since 1994.
The new office spaces completely threw me. There are holes through floors--deliberate ones--for air and light. And televisions in the old library (office space since before me). I greeted my former cronies and got the schedule for the only undergraduate I know, the middle child of the woman whose illness inspired me to donate my hair, because I had promised to look her up, but I was in no mood to chat with anyone, let alone a 19-year-old woman whom I haven't seen since before her mother died. Then I found publicly available computers, one with a nearby plug for my phone, now sad and voiceless. I emailed everyone I knew was coming to UncasCon, canceling because of uncertain transportation and expecting my sister to be mad that I broke her car, and stressed at RDC by phone. He suggested not stressing, and finding a VW dealership nearby who might have more experience or at least knowledge of how to bypass the broken switch, and also not stressing. The closest VW place was in Glastonbury, for pity's sake, in the opposite direction from Boston, and claimed to be available no sooner than two weeks out and in that case only for cars purchased there. The serviceman did tell me how a mechanic could get to the gas door through the trunk, anyway. That made me hopeful I could fuel the fucker.
I am a little too good at stressing and a little not good at anything else. And behind me the televisions displayed memorials, because it was Thursday, September 11th, and so I got to feel even guiltier for being so self-involved on such a day.
Emailing was time-consuming. The web interface for penguindust takes so damn long and has no spam filters and sifting through 450 headers looking for the 15 I wanted was more than I wanted to deal with. I didn't think to, say, ask anyone I emailed for a phone number, but then, I wasn't going to have access again to retrieve replies anyway. I canceled immediately instead of later because I was...overly stressing? or just being efficient and taking responsibility for the situation? Whatever. Possibly mistake number three, but probably I should stop enumerating them.
I had left the car to be serviced, I had let everyone know who needed to know, and I needed to get away from the televisions and out into the sun. I had been told, but forgot, that English is no longer in JHA (which is going to be demolished, along with HRM, long the two ugliest buildings on campus, hooray for instance of Change is Good!). I climbed to the third floor and immediately sensed Change. Aha, it now houses Linguistics. No wonder the doors are boring and undecorated. (I was traumatized by a Linguistics professor. I know now that the subject matter is interesting, but he did his best to disguise that fact). So I scampered to the new building, which houses English, Statistics, and Geography, which subjects all complement each other quite logically. Enough of all the foreign languages and Journalism being in the same building as English! What sense did that make?)
I found the office, I tracked down the bulletin board listing the professors, their office hours and room numbers and class times. Happily, RJH had office hours right then. I scampered downstairs and found his door ajar. I rapped, he called, "Come in!" and, OMFB, we were both ecstatic at the sight of each other. Though we're both lousy correspondents, as he said, "It feels like we were friends in another lifetime," because time and distance drop away when we're together. How I do adore him.
Ironic, innit, that nothing has changed in 12 years, that I still invade his office to compel him to entertain and shepherd me through various emotional crises. This time, again, he was talking me down from the same sort of nauseous panic: if Change Is Bad, well, then, good, because that hasn't changed. And, of course and always, he makes me laugh. I suggested he record it so his office would sound right.
I had to tell RJH this one: The courtyard in the Gardner is amazing. All bluey-lavender and white flowers, a mosaic patio, statuary, a fountain; it's just beautiful. CLH and I stood and gazed for a long time, and we looked at it from every window as we passed through the rooms. French windows (RDC said, "In France they probably just call them 'windows'" but Nisou tells me they are portes-fenêtres, door-windows) overlook the courtyard from almost every room, and as we looked out from the Dutch or the Italian room, CLH said, "Quote something from 'Room with a View.'" So I did, exactly in context because that's how much of a freak I am: "Come away from the window, Lucy, you will be seen!"
*Two days later at Uncas, of course this one repeated itself frequently: "My father says the only perfect view is of the sky over our heads." (It might be "real," not "perfect.")
RJH responded that his favorite line is "Excuse me, my dear, but it seems to me, you're in a bit of a muddle." This he left in the carel in the library where I worked for him, in Latin for me to English out, one very long time ago. And mine is "But I've got to go to Greece! The ticket's bought and everything!" And the wonderful thing about RJH is that he knows exactly why that's my favorite: that reasoning is why I entered the grad program.
We talked and laughed and he wrote a quiz and I read and he went to class and I walked up to the top of Cemetery Hill to kill some time before RCD got out of her class. I hadn't been up there since…probably RDC's and my farewell lap around campus, if then, but likely years before.
After I left RJH's office for the last time, in the later afternoon, I was after food, my first since a slight breakfast, and news of the car, and books. I stopped in LEB's office for the third or fourth time, but the garage still hadn't called. While LEB and I gossiped, the garage did call. The car was fixed. I should have pulled the levery button up instead of down (mistake number one), but it was fixed, a simple matter of popping the door panel off and resetting the thing. It was all okay. The relief was abrupt and physical and I didn't even try not to tremble.
LEB offered to drive me to the garage right then, but I felt grovel-y enough with the two shuttlings that I could not have her disrupt her day more. I called JUMB ("all okay") and RPR ("tonight is a go"). I bought a couple of Clif Bars and apple juice, because apple juice is what I drink when I'm miserable. Possessed of cell coverage, I called RDC and then my sister.
I had avoided that last step out of trepidation. But CLH was not at all mad. Well, she was, at Volkswagen, because the button had broken before, and her dealership--just like the one in Glastonbury, though without the excuse that it didn't come from there--also said "two weeks," until she--contrary to me in similar situations, evidently--got in someone's face and reminded him that one of the car's selling points was the dealership's service. Even though I pressed instead of pulled the lever, she didn't think it was my fault
In front of the Benton Museum, under trees, near a trickling fountain, I slowly ate and drank and talked to my sister. She outright commanded me to use the car as she had intended me to do and to stop beating myself up.
So. I canceled to be responsible, I didn't try to uncancel because I thought that would be presumptuous. I went back and forth on this. A lot. Which I will spare you, gentle reader.
I got to RPR's house and talked to the barking dogs. I met the new puppy and admired how he seems to be extending the older dog's vivacity. She showed me all that they've done to the house and I admired the lovely painting job I did on the staircase last summer (I think I only primed it). We talked about the impending Little Stranger (hooray!) and I admired its little kidney-beanness with a thread of spine in the ultrasound. It is a remarkable thing, an ultrasound. Also I patted her not-yet belly and later rubbed her back until she went to sleep. It is interesting to me how different women take to pregnancy. I admire or sympathize or just observe quite happily from the sidelines. If the dogs are any indication, she is going to have the most well-behaved child ever. She picked up two treats, and the dogs ran out to their kennel and sat down to await their treats. At bed-time, she picked up two treats, and the puppy ran for his crate and the older for his pillow and they both sat down to await their treats and immediately lay down to sleep. It was a little freaky, but being owned by a whiny, overly indulged cockatiel, I can only wish and delude myself.
I was completely oblivious to MPR's arrival late that night, but again I woke absurdly early, a bodily manifestation of stress. I got to witness one of their Who's on First routines before we all left for work or errands or breakfast with RJH in Willi (me). I tore myself away from that gabfest well in time to get to Old Lyme before my mother's noon lunch period. She was unavailable, so I took myself back to the beach for another flawless afternoon. I made almost no progress with Goldbug Variations because it was much more important to watch the waves. The wind was strong enough that I avoided swimming for fear of freezing to death after I got out, but then I saw an older man splash in. If he could do it, I could, and so I did. It was, of course, wonderful and bracing and restorative, and when I got out I froze and put on my fleece and lay in the sun.
The first call I had made on Thursday was to TJZD, because she lives way the hell west, opposite to Boston. If I might have risked a return to Old Lyme, no way would I venture to Fairfield County. CLH specifically commanded me to go visit her, and I did. Perhaps I would have reinstated UncasCon if also specifically instructed? Anyway. The drive down was fine except just east of New Haven, where construction jammed traffic. I had water, patience, loud music, and an automatic transmission, so I was fine.
I saw pictures of Soulmate as a little boy where he looks exactly like RED. When I complimented Soulmate on RED's charming adventuresomeness and winning grin, he said it was mostly to TJZD's credit. But I had seen photographs and even a chalk painting, and he had a lot to do with this baby. The five of us, the three adults and the baby and the dog, walked to the playground of a nearby school, where we accidentally crashed the back-to-school picnic, and then another grouping, TJZD and I and her 13-year-old neighbor and her best friend, went to a carnival at her school, with cheap rides and rip-off games and a white elephant sale. We sent the girls off to ride nauseating rides and laughed at ourselves when we realized we would rather spend our time at the tag sale.
True to all church white elephant sales, the scariest things in the world lurked in wait. The most disturbing was a foot-high statuette of a child who looked like a Precious Moments reject and had entirely black, glass eyes, like Charles Wallace's on Camazotz (except black, not blue), like spice-eaters of Dune (more appropriate than Camazotz, because it was the whole eye), like Quint's description of a shark's eyes, "black, lifeless, like a doll's eyes." When we returned later to show it to the girls, someone had actually faced the hideous thing to the wall of the tent, which we should have thought to do. Yeah. So instead of riding rides (but I have never liked rides with spinning within spinning, even before I became such a grown-up), we mocked tchotchkes. We're old.
Not so old that I couldn't talk books with the girls. The neighbor had a bearded dragon, so we could talk about Holes; and she was about to start Walk Two Moons, which I praised possibly more highly than Holes; and the younger's mother was pregnant with her when the mothers met at the older's baby shower, so I told them about Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; and one talked about a principal's unfairness and plus they were best friends, so I recommended Bad Girls.
In the morning I drove through pissing, peeing, or at least slobbering rain back to Old Lyme.
When I got back to the house at 9:41, my mother and her husband were just getting into the car to leave. If I had bothered to communicate with her since Wednesday afternoon I would have learned that Granny's sister-in-law's funeral was Saturday morning. As it was, they were about to head off and my mother asked if I would get in the car right then and go with them.
"I have nothing even vaguely appropriate to wear," I said, my clothing for the week being my beloved grey sweatskirt (currently), short natural linen skirt, long ivory skirt, and overalls.
"She won't care, but just put some feet on, we'll be late." I also hadn't showered since Friday afternoon, wasn't wearing underwear of any sort, and hadn't washed my hair since Thursday morning. Possibly, to honor my great-aunt's memory, attending her funeral even as I was would have been better than not attending. More probably, I should have called my mother to let her know my movements: she continued to expect me home every night despite the itinerary I had given her as recently as Wednesday.
Being able to blame my nonattendance on superficial reasons of wardrobe or on my rudeness or on my callousness is better for my mother to do than to know the ulterior, ultimate reason: even if I had been close to this great-aunt, even if I had been clean and dressed, even if going wouldn't mean sacrificing last minutes at the beach, in no case would I have voluntarily entered that car to be engulfed in the clouds of my mother's Miasma (I don't know her scent, but that's a fitting name).
Whew. I let myself into the house and closed off my nose and eyes as I got a glass of water and the phone.
Outside, I called AAC. Having canceled UncasCon, and with its being rained out anyway, I did the same as I did at UConn on Thursday, see more people longer than I otherwise could have. She was only too pleased to have a reason not to do her painting project and I cleaned up and was on my way. Possibly I project onto my three girls the head-shakingness I felt when my mother installed the second bathroom in her house years after my sister and I left: the house they grew up in was small for three kids, while this new one is roomy but inhabited by only 40% as many people as lived in the previous. And it is lovely and spacious and lofty and gorgeous and meant to look like a barn, with salvaged 100-year-old beams throughout and lots of open space, and a nautical mood to the decor. A set of drawers in the kitchen is shallow but wide and deep, for table linens and silverware, and AAC was pleased it recalled to my mind a map chest. She was also proud that I knew the purpose of the faucet over the stove (though without a drain as well, is a pot-filler so necessary? I guess it saves 50% of water-lugging).
AAC was an excellent baby-sitting mother by asking if I had pictures of the house, since RKC had said it was so charming. She spotted the album entitled "Blake" and looked at him, and she laughed at the one called "Nieces and Nephews," since none of those people is a blood relative, and she laughed further when she saw I had pictures of my sister's cat among them.
And of course, I got the latest dish on my girls.
My mother said they'd be home before 2:00, so I made sure to be back by then. I considered a detour to Uncas, but I had already canceled on everyone and my insanity does not extend to swimming in cold rain. Warm rain, maybe. So instead I went to the beach, where it was not raining. Really it was a good trip beachwise, because for years I have been home only in the summer when jellyfish make Long Island Sound not so nice for swimming. I returned to the house and was repacking my bags on the deck in between raindrops when they returned.
I apologized for not calling. Her expectations for my tenure in Old Lyme were delusional, and I had told her my schedule, but since I knew she had these expectaions and wouldn't register anything to the contrary, I should have kept her informed--silly me, telling her a thing only once and acting accordingly instead of calling to counter, repeatedly, "but I thought you were staying here." She told me about her various family and I told her about mine, and her criticisms of me continued, and I continued to neither lash back (yet) nor learn how to deflect it.
Wearing a tank top, I was shaking out a canvas bag over the deck railing and my mother said nothing about particles of beach sand destroying her loam, which was good, but she did say, disdainfully, "You certainly do have your father's shoulders." If I were male she would not find so much fault with however true that observation is. And would she have me be craven-shouldered? Into this bag I put clothes for Sunday and toothbrush and syrup Charenton had given me and jam my mother'd given me. Clothes out and backpack crammed in, it would be my carryon. "Oh, so that's how you pack clothes, is it?"
I wish she would just outright say: "I don't like the way you pack your clothes" or "You look like a slob all wrinkledy like that" (this the woman who thought utter slovenliness suitable for a funeral) or "I just don't like you so I'm going to pick you apart bit by bit but I still don't understand why you don't spend more time with me." But then, I also cannot, or do not, say, "Ma, your constant criticism pisses me right the fuck off and hurts me to boot."
Except that I did. Wednesday at the beach, she asked, "Why aren't you wearing your hair in that nice style I saw back in January?"
I seethed. I said, "It's the same exact fucking cut it was in January. It's in a ponytail because we're at the beach." Then I tried a diversionary tactic and continued, "Actually my haircutter wants to take it two inches shorter, but I've refused so far."
"Is that why you jumped down my throat?" Woohoo, she actually called me on my tone and cussing! However, I don't think I'm unreasonable to infer that she thereby tried to blame my alleged defensiveness on my haircutter rather than on herself.
"No, it's not. If you can't hear the criticism inherent in your question, you're deafer than I think. Try to rephrase it."
She fumbled but couldn't do it. I explained to her that her saying my hair isn't in "that nice style" works out to mean she thinks it's in a not-nice style and it is not a pleasant or positive or necessary comment. She denied this. Whatever.
Friday night I mentioned this exchange to TJZD as an example of my mother's usual criticism and my, for once, instead of only seething at her, trying to explain my problem with her statement right then, instead of later in a letter when she'd call it "dwelling" instead of "a response carefully thought out and not in the heat of the moment." TJZD said her mother would say the exact same thing and think it a compliment, because after all she's saying something nice about you--though eight months ago and in contrast to now. We laughed.
So on Saturday after the clothes-packing crack I told my mother about telling that to TJZD and that how her mother would think it was a compliment. "Well, it is a compliment," BJWL interrupted.
"Of how I looked eight months ago," I pointed out again. "It's negative now." CLH got the logic immediately as well.
The other day I heard someone correct a child who said, "[Whoever's] mother brang us." She corrected, "She brought you." In the first sentence of the paragraph, is it clear enough that "whoever" is an indefinite pronoun, that I don't remember a name which is not pertinent to my point? My mother said something about funerals being a chance to see family. (She didn't mean that the reunion element superseded the mourning and consolation elements.) I agreed, commenting that on several occasions when I have seen someone's pleasant, even rather smiley, photograph of a large family group and asked the occasion, they'll say, "It was someone's funeral, but that was the last time we were all together." She followed my sentence with this question: "Oh, They forgot whose funeral it was?" She is mind-numbingly difficult to communicate with. I told her, in dulcet tones of annoyance, that the subject of the funeral was immaterial to my point, which was in fact to agree with her, that funerals are occasions when everyone is together so let's take a photograph of all the cousins. If people actually wore somber colors to funerals I might not mistake such photographs for ordinary family gatherings anyway, which is another thing.
Why is it, when my mantra otherwise in life is "Change is bad," that I so fervently hope it can be brought about in my mother?
Then I wasn't staying in Old Lyme long enough this day to suit her either. I might have stayed longer, but there was a game at Fenway and so I would have to get to Boston early enough to find a neighborhood parking space. "But CLH has a parking space behind her building," she protested, since I am a habitual liar. I didn't say "not anymore" because that would be telling her my sister's business and defending myself from false accusation, which I endeavor not to (want to) do. My other option was to arrive after the game, but I was tired. Weary from beating myself up over apparently nothing, from regretting that I had canceled UncasCon and wouldn't see HEBD and ZBD, and from sleeping poorly and eating worse. I was weary, and I was ready to go home.
I had Jessie's number and considered calling her and trying to get in touch with Molly to put together an impromptu BostonCon, but, driving, I realized that I was too tired even to drive, let alone go out and be merry and not talk about my mother all at the same time. For slumming and slandering, I wanted only my sister.
CLH and I ate potato skins plus I dug through all the various candy she keeps in a silver wine bucket looking for the chocolate stuff. Tragically, a lot of the chocolates had picked up the flavor of the powerful Wint-O-Green Lifesavers. (Note to self: exclude Wint-o-Green from future stockings in favor of chocolates.)
Also tragically (after the chocolates), Kitty's new name is Benedict Kitty. CLH and I were watching the Lana Turner "Postman Always Rings Twice" and I was rubbing her scalp when Kitty deigned to join us and lay down along my leg, not CLH's. In the morning, when I picked her up to say goodbye and made kissy noises, she gave me little kitty kisses back even long enough for photographic proof. Then CLH tried the same thing but Kitty would have none of it. It must be that cats are evil, as everyone knows, because otherwise, since CLH is the good daughter and I the bad, Kitty would like CLH better.
The Chicago leg was only normal, but when I emerged I saw a flight to Denver at the next gate in 15 minutes, rather than in the next concourse in 90 minutes, as I had scheduled. I scored an exit window on the earlier and called RDC to tell him and finally finished Goldbug Variations, damn. We arrived in Denver almost 30 minutes earlier than expected, so RDC hadn't left the house yet. I trained from B to A concourse, because you have to, and walked from A to the terminal, because I had time.
RDC and I arrived at the arrivals area at just about the same time, and I carefully held in my belly to give the full effect of the Perfect Skirt and the Okay, Okay, I Admit That I Have Breasts Shirt as he drove up. I expected to do the hug-kiss thing once I got in the front seat, but no, he got out and came around to the back. This was not because he was bowled over by the sight of me but so that I could get the full effect of him.
He grew a Van Dyke in the ten days of my absence.
After RDC picked me up, we went out for lunch. That was enough for him for the day but later I heated up some pasta with marinara. Of course Blake needed to share so I rinsed off a piece for him, a bit of pasta the length and diameter of the outer two joints of my thumb, which he ate all of. The residue of sauce had enough garlic in it to give Blake severe garlic breath--a first for him and an experience we don't want to repeat, since he spends so much of his time on our shoulders--for more than a day.
RDC grew the van dyke for a joke, and yep, I was startled. It wasn't quite long enough not to be scratchy when I first experienced it, and I opined that if he didn't hate it, it might be amusing to let it go for another week, past scratchiness. I think he was really looking forward to my coming home not just because I'd be coming home but also so he could finally thoroughly shave. It was scratchy on the inside, as well as on the outside, and he removed it little more than a day later. I was relieved, yes indeedy.
Today I wore pants. Yes, it's true. Back in July I went on a second shopping expedition that I didn't mention, it being less than a week after the shopping spree that I did kind of mention. I went to the Colorado Mills, which is an entire "mall" of "outlets." I ventured into the Geoffrey Beene store because three years ago my sister gave me a shirt from there, dark lavender polished cotton, that I absolutely adore. One of the things on my mental list of staples was a pair of khakis to replace the frayed, seven-year-old ones from the Gap. I tried a pair of actually fashionable rather than conservatively traditional pants. They have no waist band, which is a fine thing in my head. They are flat-fronted, which should make Haitch happy. They fit, not quite snugly, but certainly more fittedly than I usually allow. They are also, OMFB, size 8, which makes Geoffrey Beene my favorite source of sizing inflation.
Today I finally wore them (with the GB shirt). Egg looked at me and exclaimed that I looked nice today. I said, "I'm wearing pants!" kind of proudly, the way I claimed that I grew a lot overnight and she realized that yes, this certainly was a momentous occasion. Also I figured out the first element of the "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" drinking game: you have to drink every time Carson says "pant" for "pants."
Also Egg is leaving. At the end of September. I am bereft.
I have accompanied RDC before on his semiannual expeditions for clothes but not this time and perhaps not again until I find an equivalent store for me, where the stock is stylish and high quality, where there are clothing and shoes, where a salesperson will assist you and a tailor fit you, yet you still have all your arms and legs when you leave.
Instead I sat across the street, on a patio under a tree, drinking coffee and petting dogs and reading Dostoyevsky. I did check on him once after my initial errand, a new bra. I found him with two saleswomen and a table covered with a new jacket, trousers, shirts. I really liked the jacket and said so, then left to him to what would have been, for me, wolves except that he is good at dealing with pushy salespeople and that, at that store, helping you is actually their job instead of an imposition.
I did have a salesperson fit me before I looked for the stupid harness. I felt like I couldn't breathe in the band size she assigned me, and speak not to me of demi-cup or push-up bras, which should be called push-out. I found another of the sort I like, in the size I say I am rather than that she thought I was (I say bigger band, smaller cup size). Dunno what happened to the previous one, probably nailed up over a bar somewhere.
Neither of us expected to be thrilled by John Singer Sargent, me because he did a lot of portraits and RDC because he's too close to an Impressionist. We did go, finally on the last day, and while we weren't thrilled, a couple of paintings stood out: the play of light on water in Venice canals, the intensity of sun reflecting down an icy, stony, wet mountainside into your eyes, the corner of a building rendered rapidly but with much detail in watercolor.
We spent most of the afternoon downtown, wandering and eating and reading, an ideal last day of summer. We glanced at Oktoberfest in Larimer Square: the featured beer was Coors. Bah. We read and browsed at the Tattered Cover. I came away with Embers, which someone back east mentioned; and The Parrot's Theorem, which I think is going to do with mathematics what Sophie's World did for philosophy, and of course I picked it up because of the title. I started it over a late lunch at the Wynkoop (even though I had Crime and Punishment in my bag) and interrupted RDC's reading Al Franken by exclaiming that a parrot can't eat two pounds of Brie in one go and also about the maths. It's translated from French into British English, and I appreciate that it thereby keeps a foreign flavor and it's why I just said "maths" instead of "math." Or maybe I'm rebelling against Carson.
I put a coat of paint on the new beams of the porch as soon as I got home. Just as I finished cleaning that, RDC had dinner ready (dorado, which is the new, Spanish name for the dolphin fish since its English name had obvious problems and its Pacific name, mahi-mahi, never caught on, with sun-dried tomatoes and wine and pine nuts, and yellow squash, and brown rice), and after I cleaned up that and cleaned up myself, I was done. A hint that I haven't been getting enough exercise: cramps really hurt.
Blake and I retreated to the living room with Westword, Ms., Harper's, and Crime and Punishment. The first three were fine but in the novel people were speechifying about whether commission of crimes is ever justified and I wasn't paying enough attention. So I resorted to television. I had recorded, heaven help me, some unreality shows, "Trading Spaces" and "Queer Eye" and a new one, "Clean Sweep." They are why TiVo was invented, but I hope even if I had 'flu (why is it given an initial apostrophe, for the in-, but not a final one, for the -enza?) I wouldn't watch these start to finish. I do like make-overs, but to see those all I need is the last five* minutes, muted. This is true for "What Not to Wear" as well. The process in Queer Eye, unlike that in the others, is still vaguely amusing, and it is the only one on which I can see a drinking game based: you drink every time Carson says "pant" instead of "pants." Didn't I already say this?
* Edited two days later: I first wrote "last final" because of final and five peskily sounding alike, also because I clearly have been tainted by Spirit Airlines announcing its "last and final boarding call."
Panic in the dining room roused me from sleep. A dream delayed my waking and disorientation delayed my actually getting up, and apparently I was still half asleep when I extricated myself from the covers: the first foot on the floor skidded forward from underneath me, the other leg was still in the bed, and down I went, all my weight on the folded joint of my hip, making me gladder I'm not older or weaker. Calling to Blake all the while, I found my feet and made them go, found the dining room switch and light flared out, found the covers of the cage and yanked them off. Supporting myself on the back of a dining chair, I was on the hinge side of the cage door when I opened it, and so when Blake fled the phantasms in his cage, he flew away from me and landed heaving on the hard floor. I limped to pick him up and tried to cuddle him, but he wouldn't make himself so vulnerable as to close his eyes and present his head for petting. We sat, waiting for his breathing to slow, his pulse to calm, his posture to relax, his plumage to fluff enough that I could not see his eyes from behind, waiting for me to see if I still worked. I crooned to him and gradually his crest lowered. I was quite ready to go back to bed, but he did his various Cockatiel Evasive Maneuvers to avoid stepping off my hand onto his perch.
More cuddling, more crooning, more maneuvering, until I was merciless. He stood on his perch, leaning down to look at whatever monster had arisen from the floor, in a scared little stance that made me feel crueler, and I turned down the light for him to settle down for a minute before I recovered him and returned to bed. I don't know how long he stays awake after one of his nightfrights, but I was awake for a long time.
This morning I was surprised to find myself almost not sore, and not bruised at all. But it's a reminder to keep up my bone mass density.
Someone in an online forum I skim linked to a smut story. Sometimes the spoken flavor of its written words works, sometimes not. Sometimes a grammatical error--not a stylistic nuance--flares out and trips the narrative flow, as here: Someone has told the narrator he reminded her of a basenji. "What she was referring to I guess was my ears, which basenjis, according to the little picture in the dictionary, have big ones and so do I."
That's what I call a which splice. There are comma splices, someone joins two independent clauses with a comma and calls them a sentence. The previous sentence is an example of a comma splice. The which splice is a similar animal, in which the speaker conscripts the "which" as a conjunction. The clause following the "which" may or may not be independent grammatically, but it is usually dependent in thought, as in the Basenji example.
I have not yet come across the which splice in a standard publication. In speech, yes; and then in personal email, where in my experience writing follows speech patterns more than it does in longhand; and now in writing not traditionally published but paid for and on the web.
I don't claim to be a genius of logical syntax and pristine grammar myself. I just found, and I thought had admitted here but I guess not, an email, a posting to an online discussion group, in which I said, "The words now in my head is 'poser' and 'cheat.'" (I was talking about Barbara Ehrenreich, not another journaler, sorry no gossip here.) I think I wrote the sentence with one predicate nominative, decided it needed another, added the other and the -s to "word," but didn't think to change the verb. That's stupid and clumsy.
I do that often--just yesterday I found an instance where I tried to substitute a real verb for a form of "to be." I didn't strike everything I should have, and so I posted "...they were occurred while I read...." That's bad editing compounded by no proofreading, but I create clumsinesses like that too. Also I recently came across something more distressing: I wrote "in their." And I catch myself--I hope always--two or three keystrokes after impaling the possessive its with an apostrophe. But I shouldn't do the impaling to begin with. Anyway, I the pot am aware that the kettle and I are both cast iron.
Except that I am a well-seasoned piece of cookware, I know the benefits of a good oiling, and I don't want rust spots to form or, having formed, to stay. I don't call corrosion character.
Now, having disclaimed, the pot balances on a soapbox to declaim. Using "literally" as an intensifier instead of a modifier hurts, because English loses a necessary modifier to gain yet another intensifier. That's my coworker's particular peeve, but she uses which splices and pronounces the t in "often." A correspondent just bitched about corporate jargon like "thinking outside the box," but also wrote "your welcome" in the same email. I cannot remove the post from my own eye, but I can distinguish it from a mote. I got into a spat some time ago about the relative badness of "I wish I would have done this other thing" but couldn't come up with any examples or--this is my actual point, that I suck as I writer--properly articulate why it's a problem beyond saying "It sounds bad."
Over the past few days I've come across a few examples where that confusion of tense makes for unclear writing, makes syntactically unclear the order of actions when the significance of that order is the thought being communicated. Finally I understood the nature of the problem.
"I wish I would have done this, because if I would have done it, I could have done that as well."
All of the actions in that sentence occurred at the same time. Whereas with correct tense (or is it voice?), their order is clear: "I wish I had done this, because if I had, I could have done that as well." It's not just a wordier way to phrase the same tense, as "I am doing this" and "I do this" are. It's a different meaning.
So. I can be technically correct, if I try. More often I am blowsy and run on. More important, even when I am technically correct and, rarely, concise, I do not communicate a thought well. Effectively, evocatively, meaningfully, lastingly well. But I can damn well edit somebody else.
This morning I brought Blake for his annual well-check, the first time I have accompanied him in at least three years. In 2002 and '01, he had his check while boarding, and maybe in 2000 as well. He's healthy and I know it, but he is not a plant.
I usually bring him in his entire cage, which is tall enough that from the highest perch he can see out the car window. This time I decided on the much more convenient (for me) travel cage, about the size of a cat carrier. Stupid me: he could not see out the window, did not like that one single tiny bit, and let me know it the entire way. Sorry, buddy.
His veterinarian, whom I maybe haven't spoken to in that long, commented again on what a great personality he has. He asked if the bird is as outgoing and friendly all the time as he--Blake--was being with with him, who is, as an avian vet, very much a parrot person. Pretty much. When he encounters non-bird people, mutual nervousness compounds into a hopeless relationship--my sister, Nebra, Lou, and CoolBoss--but when he meets anyone who shows the vaguest interest or even calmness around him, he's Mr. Sociable.
The weekend after I cut my hair the shower wouldn't drain and we had to have a plumber come in. On a Sunday morning. After the plumber had snaked the last of my two-foot hairs from the drain (the picture of the tail that I donated disgusted my sister enough that I didn't bother to take a picture of that clump), Blake insisted on meeting him. Two years ago when a police officer was in the house taking a statement after we had been burgled, Blake wanted to meet him too. Hi, please take us seriously, and if you could just ignore this yelling thing that rules the roost.
His plumage is in great shape, his eyes and ears and nares and vent are clear, he chucked enthusiastically and bowed to his doctor, he weighs 93 grams ("medium to medium-plus, which is fine"), and the vet observed without further comment that he is eight, so I guess I don't have to worry about his age yet.
I tried to be good. First I went to the Bookies, the unfortunately named but independent children's book store. They had ordered a scant nine and those nine were, surprise surprise, gone, so I contented myself with books for shorties instead. What does an almost-seven-year-old read, or have read to her, after having had The Silmarillion read to her, by her choice, after hearing first The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings? Then I resorted to Barnes & Noble and bought what I was after. I had a coffee and read some there; I looked for a non-bar with outdoor seating along Pearl Street and decided I would shiver anyway; so, yes I'm a terrible person, I went to the mall and ate in the California Pizza Kitchen. Which I pronounce at least half the time as "California Pizza Chicken" because I am a latter-day Spooner.
Also I bought a pair of shoes, of girl shoes. I realized that the shoes I want for the new pants are Dansko clogs, of course, but they cost more than I was in a mood to spend. I bought a much cheaper pair of shoes in the meantime, at no savings at all because I will get the clogs as well, some time this fall.
I talked to my mother today for the first time since I left Connecticut two weeks ago. She asked what we were doing this weekend so I told her how I had intended to paint the porch swing but discovered, while scraping it, that it's painted in oil, which I've never used before at all and we don't own any of, so that put the kibosh on that project and I cleaned out the fridge instead, and RDC put the swamp cooler to bed for the winter. She asked what a swamp cooler was and I briefed her. I asked her in turn what she'd been up to, and she told me about a painting project and about planting a slew of bulbs, and about attending her aunt's funeral. All of these things I already knew about, but listened to again anyway, because that's how it goes.
She asked, after her description of the services, "Did I tell you that Aunt G died?"
"Mom, I was there the day of her funeral, remember?"
"Well...," she thought back. At the start of the call, after the usual weather opening--rainy and humid and warm there, cool and brightly sunny and perfect here--she asked, "You brought the good weather back with you?" Now she said, "I do remember that you were here for the best weather of the year..." so I prompted, "I got home just as you were leaving and you wanted me to come with you?" This she did not remember.
Does she really not remember? She remembers that Aunt G died and that she went to her funeral, but does she really not remember my [lack of] involvement? Or is this her memory-block, applied because she would prefer not to recall my lack of involvement? Honest question here: does she truly not remember, in which case no wonder she considers my lingering responses "dwelling," or is she being coy?
RDC suggests she probably honestly doesn't remember, "because how many times has she asked you, and have you told her, what a swamp cooler is?" Yep.
She also asked how the garden's doing, so I told her that we're so overrun with yellow squash that I was thinking to make bread from it. Yellow squash bread should follow, according to the grocer's baker, a pumpkin rather than a zucchini recipe because its texture is more like the former; however, the pumpkin bread recipe says to cook the squash first, too much effort, so I just foisted it off on Babushka instead (except I said "our poor elderly neighbor who's always glad of our extra produce," since I didn't expect her to remember Babushka's name). She said that she had lots of zucchini bread recipes and would I like her to me them? I said, "No, thank you, because, as I just said, it needs a pumpkin not a zucchini recipe and that I gave it away anyway."
You would think that knowing she doesn't remember things not only two weeks past but just two sentences past would make it easier for me to cope with her, would enable me to adjust my expectations of her actions and responses. Apparently, however, I continue to be unwilling to cut her any slack. As, in fact, she cannot cut me any, disappointed in my appearance, skills, and choices as she is. But probably she just forgets who I am, so that the presence in her life of someone whom she misunderstands and disapproves of so thoroughly continually surprises her by her [mine, that is] failure to conform.
Later: And the fact that my mother cannot expend the effort to remember such a rare occurrence as a visit home is, damn it, reasonable cause for resentment.
This is, of course, the real reason I don't use the webcam that often. How many pictures of a yawning cockatiel does anyone need? At least 12. Note the turns, trying to find the side of my leg from which the tip of his tail will not touch the chair. Note (row one, second picture) the scratching-the-head-induced yawn. Note that the more open the beak (the later into the yawn), the greater the distance between feet and head as the head tries to capture the yawn.
More than 12: in this particular yawnfest, I snapped the cam 30 times. My response time and that of the cam are poor, so I didn't capture all thirty yawns. But I got to watch them, OMFB, so yours is the poorer existence.
Did you start yawning at the sight? Or at least by reading the word "yawn*" so many times? I am extremely susceptible to catching yawns, even cross-species, even in print. That would make me the sucker, not y'all.
A satisfying day, though not without its frustrating elements. I woke well before dawn, which I am sure has something to do with my not having had a lick of exercise since Wednesday, and since before that if you don't count, as I shouldn't, bike-commuting. The Parrot's Theorem was waaay out in the dining room in my backpack and I don't do well reading stuff I want to think about when the point of my reading is to go back to sleep. I lay restive and grumpy for a while before remembering I had Nobody's Fool on my bedtable.
It's there because RDC got it for his latest audio and I'm listening to it too and I always like to have the book with me as well if I can. I've mentioned before that repeated readings will turn up faults, and I noticed another one: sometimes Sully has a watch, sometimes he has not. Does it matter? Nope. Luckily RDC doesn't mind the voices. Sully sounds gruffer than I imagine him, but gruff probably works for a 60-year-old smoker. It's Mrs. Peoples's voice that grates, because she's made to sound like an old biddy. But he likes the book, which means that we can stay married. Hey, another thing to add to the marriage articles: Thou shalt like Nobody's Fool and "Sense and Sensibility."
Speaking of which, I just reread Persuasion because sometimes you just have to. It struck me (for the first time?) that this is the only Austen book in which you don't know the protagonist's dowry straight off. Fanny Price has nothing of course; the Bennet and Dashwood girls each have one thousand pounds, which is piddling; Georgianna Darcy and Emma Woodhouse each have thirty thousand pounds, which I expect would be the upper limit for the untitled gentry; part of the excess of Sense and Sensibility is that Miss Grey has fifty thousand, which is also the fantastic amount Elizabeth Bennet teases that Col. Fitzwilliam should require unless his older brother fell ill; I don't remember how much Catherine has. But how much has Anne Elliot, daughter of a baronet? Austen doesn't say until the last chapter, when we learn that of course her spendthrift father can give her but a fraction of the ten thousand which is her due. It was interesting to me that this important fact was left so late, but Austen's point is that Anne and Captain Wentworth are past all that thanks to Wentworth's success. His booty earns him an annual income of only a thousand pounds, which doesn't seem so grand, but that's Elinor Dashwood's wealth, so it's probably adequate.
Persuasion is so very satisfying. I love the changed 23rd chapter because it gives some sense of Mrs. Croft's delighted hope, in which her fluttering makes her satisfyingly reminiscent of Mrs. Gardiner's not so subtle voiced wonderings.
But it was Nobody's Fool I read this morning.
So I read and maybe dozed fitfully and didn't get up, if you don't count RDC's alarm going off at 7:00 and my sister calling at 8:15, until almost 9:30, when I finished the book (again). So I figured I had wasted the day. But I had not.
This is what I got done: two garbage bags of clothes, mostly RDC's, and one of shoes, also mostly RDC's, one flatbed scanner, one 5-disc CD player, three other electronic pieces whose identity I forget, one Brother Electronic typewriter (from 1986, a high school graduation present from my father), one box assorted household goods (a drill, various books, some pots and pans), and one pair extra-torture ski boots, are now in their new charitable homes. The clothes we thought fit to wear are about two-thirds what came out of RDC's wardrobe; the rest became rags or trash. He weeded! Even a Jerry Garcia design tie, which I think now maybe should have gone into a box of souvenir clothes.
When I added his retired tie-dyes to this box, I weeded out some of mine: I kept concert shirts for Joshua Tree and Unforgettable Fire (I am not made of stone), but I ditched my UConn Co-op staff shirt and one from the UConn Women's Center and another from the Ivoryton Playhouse. The latter two, being half polyester, I never ever wore, and the first I wore only at work. Breaking the crippling cycle of nostalgia, that's me.
First stop, get rid of all that. Second stop, Belcaro Paint, ejected from the Belcaro neighborhood by the invasion of Home Despot. I selected some paint strips for the water closet, the back landing, and my study. I actually bought paint for the water closet. Third, a supermarket where I further divested myself of Bag Lady status by turning in my bag of bags, and accepted the 9% fee to get rid of almost $30 in coins. Now only parking-meter silver is in the car ashtray and only foreign coins and tokens in the change basket on the dresser. Wheeee! And while at the regular supermarket, I bought (with the coin cash) exciting things like bleach that we don't get at the elitist food store.
Then I checked out a store called, apparently incorrectly, Scrap 'n' Stamp, which had only scrapbooking stuff but satisfied my curiosity. Besides, I am going to do something Different for my Yule card this year. Then Home Despot, where I remembered some things but not others, and Wild Oats, where I scored vegetable pulp and a picnic that I brought to Cranmer (Sundial Park). I did not score roasted salted bulk peanuts, also not available at Whole Foods, which probably means not available anywhere in town, which means I have to use their peanut grinder, which turns out product inferior in both texture and saltiness to that which I made on my own.
However, my picnic was delightful. Wild Oats commissary usually doesn't hold a candle to Whole Foods, which makes more of its ready-made stuff on-site, but it had a New Thing that was wicked good, Veggie Tortellini. Zucchini, green beans, spinach, and cheese tortellini, in a hot-diggety-dog garlicky pesto. I read Ms. (the best of the selection at Wild Oats, and it really could spin less like a top than it does) and ate and watched a chocolate Lab catch a Frisbee tossed repeatedly for it by someone not entirely one with the Pet Concept: she held a towel to pick up and throw the drippingly slobbery disk, which diminished her range considerably.
I stopped at the coffee shop to pick up grounds, as I had arranged in the morning, and a Brambleberry Tazo because the having been awake for 10 hours already was taking its toll. Blake and I read Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them on the porch swing until yellowjackets harassed him (have parrots died of bee stings? Do parrots, free or cagedly captive, get stung? I should have asked the vet), whereupon we adjourned to the couch, and later downstairs to facilitate napping. Also because Franken was pissing me off with puerile hyperbole.
In the late afternoon I re-emerged to lay another lasagne mulch: vegetable pulp (I acquired at least three gallons grocery shopping last night, plus today's) and sunflower seed husks and coffee grounds and pine needles on top. Inside, I scored wallpaper with the wheely-bob tool. Blake was on my shoulder at his insistence, which I used as an excuse not to proceed with the wallpaper solvent but instead to call myself done for the day.
There are two instances of wallpaper in the house: in the furnace room and in the water closet. The [a] kitchen sink is original to the house, so I don't know why the waste pipe from the sink is external to the furnace room wall (the dishwasher drains to the sink so shouldn't have required new plumbing?). Probably because the basement wasn't finished when the house was built. Anyway, someone drywalled around the pipe, so we have a rectangular tube angling along and down the wall. Later, the earth cooled, and someone decided that a nice strip of wallpaper border with birdhouses on it would dress up the pipe attractively. Three and a half years ago, I saw that and resolved to remove it immediately. Today I did: it peeled right off. Maybe I shouldn't've peeled it, but I peel sunburned skin prematurely. That bleeds, and my hypothesis is that since the wall doesn't bleed, peeling wallpaper off it can't be nearly as harmful as premature sunburn peelage, which hasn't killed me yet. Though it has scarred me, and peeling this strip left some backing on the drywall. I will practice in there with the solvent and to prepare for the water closet.
Which is, as I've said, truly a water closet. One of the Before pictures I took this evening (too late, since a section had already come loose plus it was dark out) is of my foot on the wall opposite to the toilet (I took it while seated on the closed commode.) That's how big the room is: the length of a toilet plus a leg by slightly more than the width of a toilet, and its ceiling is lower than elsewhere in the basement. Hence water closet. Tomorrow I dissolve and scrape and dissolve paste and scrape and wash and rinse and wash and rinse and wait. After the wait, I patch whatever I have to patch, and sand.
Then paint.
Somewhere, I need to find a sign to hang on the door announcing a W.C. I would look for such a thing now but the day's major frustration is that the airport is acting up, denying me internet access. So I think I'll go cozy up with some peanut butter toast, Pantalaimon, Blake, and Al Franken, and call it a night.
I'm watching a program on the History Channel, "Russia: Land of the Tsars," and among the academics lending any historical credibility is Larry Langer, University of Connecticut. I was in the laundry room when he spoke for the first time, and I recognized him, incredulously, by voice rather than face or name. I had him for Russia to 1905 (big surprise) as a...sophomore? Yes, sophomore fall, a year before I should have taken an upper division class. I took two that semester, and I am grateful I was allowed to: they inspired me to become a college student rather than the super-high-school student I had been as a freshling.
Russian history was my first love, before English (history) I think. Or alongside. My favorite high school history teachers both emphasized Russia in world history classes (to prepare us as good citizens to fight the Cold War). We read Nicholas and Alexandra and Dr. Zhivago and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Those I loved, and Fathers and Sons with Professor Langer; however, in Russian Lit, not with Langer, Eugene Onegin and Dead Souls both bored me to tears.
The History Channel values entertainment more than history. The title still of the show is supposed to read "Russia: Land of the Tsars," but thanks to mindless substitution of Cyrillic letters for Phonetic ones that they vaguely resemble, the word "Russia" isn't. The backward-R letter is "yah," the not-U letter is "ee." Yah-ee-ssia. It's akin to the insertion of punctuation for dubious aesthetic effect.
Distressing Blake mightily, I spent the morning in the water closet removing stripey wallpaper. The nozzle of the bottle of solvent didn't work, so I squirted the gel onto the wide scraper and slathered it on the walls that way. The wallpaper came off easily, but most of the backing did not. Blake nearly had laryngitis from shrieking and whining (anyone want a cockatiel cheap?) when I broke at noon.
More coffee grounds. Home Depot again, for another bottle of solvent whose nozzle I tested, and heating register covers, but not ceramics glue. Bloodbath and Beyond for brackets and a curtain. When RDC and I recently examined the back landing, he picked up a curtain rod I freed from the sunroom almost two years ago and wondered why we had never thrown it out. Aha, it turns out that I kept it on purpose, not because it could be ignored behind the vacuum cleaner, because it would come in handy today: I hung a heavy curtain between the den and the laundry room. The doorway used to have--a door. I wouldn't have a door again, but the back of the basement doesn't need to be heated. This curtain might make the room cozier, blocking drafts and holding in the warmth from the space heater.
I had lunch from Einstein Bros. bagels with a book that I brought with me. There are several new nonfiction books that look really interesting, including one on the Bounty whose author is doing a reading Wednesday, but I didn't indulge. For now. Instead I indulged in dogs, an unusual terrier mix with a curly tail and unterrier snout, and more time with more pettable English mastiff named Greta. Her human and I talked for quite a while--he's lived in Hong Kong and traveled all over Asia and nearly bought a cattle ranch in Ecuador and made for a pleasant hour of stranger-chat.
While we sat chatting, lots of other passersby wanted to meet Greta. She obviously loved all the children she met. One little girl commented, "It looks like Fluffy!" Which she did, in shape of head, besides that she had only the one head and a brindle coat. Greta's human asked who Fluffy was, and I told him Fluffy was a Cerebus in the first Harry Potter book.
The girl's father contradicted, "That dog's name wasn't Fluffy."
The girl and I protested that yes, the three-headed dog was named Fluffy.
Now, it turned out (eventually), that the man was thinking of Hagrid's regular dog, Fang, who is a mastiff, and Greta did look more like Fang than Fluffy, being a one-headed mastiff not a three-headed CGI. I can't fault the girl for thinking of Fluffy first, since it has more page and screen presence than Fang. I can fault the father for insisting that the three-headed dog's name wasn't Fluffy.
After they left, I told Greta's human about a recent zoo trip. I was watching a resident, not captive, gopher, because it was little and cute and right at my feet, instead of over a moat, like the ruminant in front of whose enclosure I stood. A series of passersby asked what I was watching. "A gopher," I would say. The majority, spotting the animal, would reply, "Oh, a chipmunk!" In the Crested Butte newspaper I read a column by a park ranger who's been stationed all over the Rockies, on the frustration of not being believed when she answered certain questions ("How big do deer need to be before they're elk?"). Ah, the tribulations of being a know-it-all. It might have been a ground squirrel at the zoo, though the lines of spots among its solid stripes really do indicate gopherhood.
Anyway, I got home and attacked the water-closet for another three hours. The two drywall walls were relatively well-behaved, though (nooo!) the toilet has to come out to do the wall behind it properly. The exterior wall is plastered brick or cement block, and wallpaper does not come tidily off plaster. I'm not done scraping yet, but nearly.
When we first moved into the house, we saw many traces of the previous tenant. She told us that the one thing she never got around to doing was painting. As far as the main walls of the house were concerned, this was true. But she decorated quite a bit. The chute cover in the coal cellar is the most obvious example. On field of blue bordered in green, painted in red, are painted a flower, her nickname, and the word "Boogie," which might be her son's nickname. The saloon doors into the sunroom were the same primary red, as is the edge of the hardwood floor in the back landing, as is the frame of the window in the water closet. Stripping the wallpaper revealed another instance of tagging. Just to be clear, the W.C. had been painted white, then someone streaked it (as if cleaning off a brush) with a mix of the blue and green of the chute cover, and saw fit to tag it with her name in white. The coal cellar, home of off-season window parts, painting supplies, and beer carboys, is easily ignored. But I have got to get that toilet up so I can paint the room properly, because there is no way I'm putting up with that name over my shoulder every time I need that facility.
Lordy. If Kucinich, Sharpton, or Lieberman, but especially Kucinich, becomes the Democratic candidate, whatever advantage television gave to handsome Kennedy obviously will no longer be a factor. Can't a representative either own his baldness or get a better hairpiece? No, now I feel bad: a department of peace? If a Department of Homeland Security is possible, certainly one of peace is.
Wesley Clark, the most attractive of the bunch, just said, "There's not enough forces there." So he's out. I require my president to match his verbs to his predicative nominatives. He said Bush decimated the EPA, but honey, he destroyed more than 10% of it. He's not really out.
Al Sharpton was never in, but he's out even more. "I disagree with he and Governor Dean and Senator Kerry." "Their children has gone to war." Plus he's just a showman, as much as Schwarzenegger.
Lieberman was a lousy running mate for Gore because neither of them ever spoke in other than a monotone. At least as veep Gore didn't speak often, and Lieberman wouldn't've had to. Connecticut or not, I can't get behind Lieberman.
Gephart--well, I'd have to rewind to hear whatever his first grammatical mistake was. His second speech was fine. He should dye his eyebrows darker. He's too much inside the beltway
Kerry's not Kennedy. Does he know that? Oh, he cracked a joke! He gets points for that.
Edwards's accent is too strong. Also: "Every one of us are against George Bush." Someone, I think Clark, said, "Each of us want to be president."
Carol Moseley Braun speaks well and isn't freaky looking. But seriously speaking, the first black Usan president will not be a woman, and the first woman president will not be black.
Which leaves me with Dean. Of course.
I went to a Dean Meetup last Wednesday. I brought 6.5 years of professional Dot Org knowledge to bear when, as the organizers gave addresses of representatives whose support of Dean we were to solicit, I spoke up to give and advocate using, the proper etiquette in both address and salutation.
Later. Fuck. Dean, solid Yankee that he is, just said "idear." Three times.
Has it ever occurred to me before to compare the convenience store visit by Veronica Sawyer in "Heathers" to that by whatsername in "Reality Bites"? Definitely dancing to "My Sharona" is superior to the flirtation in the former.
I thought Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, overall, was Blake's absolute favorite. It turns out he's never heard Nevermind before. Poor little guy, I don't know how I'll break it to him about Kurt Cobain.
My sister called me yesterday to tell me to watch City Confidential on A&E: an episode entitled "New London, Connecticut." It's a true crime show, her kind of thing not mine, but when she called me seven minutes in, there had just been snippets of Old Lyme. So now I'm watching.
It sets New London in its social place among the suburbs around it with a lifelong New London resident saying how those in surrounding towns look down in New London and a woman who married into an Old Lyme family saying that she will probably never be accepted by lifelongers as an Old Lymer. To the first, I say New London is a city, not a town, so yes, townfolk are afraid of it; to the second, I hope a native of anywhere is proud to be a native of that place. I recognized which scenes were from Old Lyme--mostly from along Lyme Street, easy-peasy, even if that café wasn't open in 1994 when the crime took place. Finally the narrator acknowledges that not everyone in the surrounding towns has a yacht the size of an aircraft carrier. Thank you.
Wow, listening to these people I understand why I have an accent in Colorado. I never thought so, though I accepted people's saying so. I expected to hear a Midwest twang here, but I seldom do, probably because so few people are native to Denver. Someone just said "vister" instead of "vista." Ack.
I swear the narrator is stoned. There is no other reason for him to slur and use slang.
Recently I participated in a Usual Suspects interview project. I was asked five good questions, but I gave only one a good answer.
You talk about Blake with such enthusiasm and affection that I can't help but anthropomorphise him. Help me out. If the feathered gentleman were a person, what sort of person would he be? How would he look? What would be his career and interests? Would he be a person you'd like to know, or the neighbour from hell?
This is my favorite question, so I left it to last. Perhaps it will cheer me enough that I can flesh out the two scary last questions that I skimped on. All they needed was a little prestidigitation. Blake is so much a parrot and I have adopted so many of his mannerisms it's easier to think of me as one of them, instead of him as one of us.
RDC recently remarked, “We shouldn't anthropomorphize animals so much. They hate that.”
What would he look like? He would have muttonchop whiskers like a Dickensian villain (because when he preens, he angles the feathers that usually lie sleek under his beak out away from his face, exposing his lower mandible). He would wear breeches--we call the thick fluff (for egg-incubating) around and behind his thighs his bloomers, but bloomers are for females and breeches for males. In 1850, would an old-fashioned Dickensian villain still wear breeches? I'll say yes. Also a swallow-tail coat, no matter the time of day, with epaulets. He might have eczema or another condition that would have him constant attending to his skin (instead of feathers). Scrofulous. Less ickily, he would be a fop, obsessed with his eccentric wardrobe. He would have dandruff. He would have a Tintin-esque quiff. He would walk around with his hands clasped behind his back, except I can picture him using a walking stick (the kind with a sword in it). Possibly because I'm overdoing the Dickensian villain thing, I see a monocle too. Prominent eyes, certainly. Unlike Bill Sykes or Mr. Gradgrind, though, he would have excellent teeth, straight and white and strong, and he would smell good.
He would be an explorer, particularly a spelunker. I'm not sure he'd be successful, because (like any pigeon you see on the sidewalk) he finds purposefully moving in a straight line quite a challenge. But he would explore the great dangerous unknown, and most especially honeycombed caves. He would need a faithful assistant, like a Sancho Ponzo or Pinky, to wait to rescue him, because he might have narcolepsy. He would never go anywhere very cold, because he would be deeply afraid of snow. And perhaps honeycombed caves wouldn't be a good idea, because he would be afraid of both total darkness and of flashlights and candles. But cliff-dwellings, canyons, and overhangs, he would know all about. He certainly would be in charge of all expeditions, because he likes to manage things, and he has very particular ideas about who is allowed to touch what. Oven mitts might not part of the paraphernalia, but knives would be, and those are his to wield.
If caving didn't pay the bills, he would also sing. I can't picture him singing in subways--cavelike though they are--but I can't imagine that he would have a good enough voice, or write good enough songs, to make a regular living. He would sing, though, somehow. Especially in his caves. Perhaps he could be an acoustical engineer for a cave chorale. That he would form and be the soloist for. Perhaps also he could consult for the Ministry of Silly Walks. Or he might be an interior designer, again unsuccessfully, because the clientele who believe everything should be lemon yellow or sea green or artistically draped with dishtowels or socks would be few. Or a book critic, a very literal deconstructionist.
If he were old enough, he would have served in the war as a spotter.
What kind of person would he be? Self-important. Annoying but irresistible, so enjoying company that even though he's pesky and demanding, people would be drawn to him. Like Sir John Middleton in Sense and Sensibility, except he wouldn't shoot birds for sport. He'd be an optimstic curmudgeon, verging on the neighbor from hell--not wanting kids to play on his grass or dogs to pee in his garden and playing loud music (but only during decent daylight hours)--but you'd want to know him because he would have frequent parties full of chattering company and tasty food and goofy games and musical entertainment. He would be able to play most musical instruments at least rudimentarily, though his specialty would be brass and his favorite the French horn.
He might look villainous, but he actually wouldn't be. He would solicit your admiration ("Do admire my freesias!") but he would be generous with his in turn. Also, he would call everyone "chap."
You'd even want his company when you were sick, because he would know the value of a companionable silence and a quiet shared nap. Plus his sneezes would always be louder and wetter than yours, proportionally, so you wouldn't feel as sick.
I cannot touch my toes. I can barely sit up straight with my legs straight. I cannot lean very far over one straight and one bent leg. It has been two days since I shocked my hamstrings, and they are making their displeasure known. Stairs hurt. Putting my feet up on my usual under-desk footstool (a copy box) hurts. Ow.
RJH said last night that when he asked his students what they read for pleasure, he heard only crickets and church bells. This reminded me about how little I read actually during school. I did my school reading, but what did I read for pleasure? Slaughterhouse Five freshling year. I know a hallmate my sophomore year lent me Aura and The Awakening and that's when Stephen King's Eyes of the Dragon came out too. I know I read Tolkien and Less Than Zero and The Big U. over winter break freshling year. I know I reread the favorites that I brought with me--Ayn Rand, Watership Down, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, the usual. Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes, of course. In grad school I read and reread for pleasure to the exclusion of my actual work. But aside from the occasional, post-midterm indulgence from the Paperback Trader's "Not for Browsing" shelf, what books did I discover on my own during school?
When I kissed RDC goodbye this morning I told him I left him a present outside the house. He clearly could not think what this might be. He asked, "Front or back?" I told him it was outside any window he wanted to look out of. "It snowed?" I nodded. "It was 80 yesterday." I nodded again, even though it was only 75, sunny, powerfully windy with Chinooks, and dry enough for three fires, two visible from the city.
Yet I rode anyway, OMFB. It was 29 when I got up at 6:30 and 27 when I left an hour later. I wore shorts and a thin sweatshirt and my new gloves and I was fine. Later, at my desk in tights and a skirt (the worst suffering of the morning being the donning of tights over just-showered skin), my thighs itched and tingled as the blood warmed them.
Two 3.8-mile city rides.
House:
Errands:
Reading:
Kinwork
Lisa:
Someone asked me if I thought a joke was okay. I thought maybe one demographic would feel oppressed, which the querier was ready to shrug off. "Someone's got to be oppressed," I offered and cracked up.
He didn't get it.
On any road trip my sister and I take, there might be Elvis Costello, Patsy Cline, or the Cowboy Junkies. The one constant is Godspell.
After a year and a half of hanging out mostly upstairs or in the den, this weekend I reclaimed my study. There had been the occasional thwomping onto the futon to watch "My So-Called Life"* or read a book, or the rare occupation of my desk by present-wrapping or coloring book coloring, but I haven't regularly hung out in my study since I got a laptop. It is now dark at 5:00, and somehow I find myself here, writing and reading and listening to music.
The room still needs to be painted. Would painting it a color less objectionable than the current bastard cousin of blue be stupid since replacing the swirly green carpet is not yet a project I'm up for?
I haven't given up on the water closet yet. RDC is convinced the walls cannot be salvagedbut must be papered, and I hate wallpaper on some principle I can't articulate. Damn it, I am going to scrub and patch the two do-able walls--one of which didn't have paper to start with. And scrub over the toilet and prime just to cover the tagging. And generally debate the fate of the under-window wall.
Blake's happy to have another study to play in. He spends his days in RDC's office, either in or on his cage, or in a cave on a shelf in a bookcase, or on the chair seat between his legs. On my desk, I keep stuff he can gnaw on, like snippets of cardboards or blowcards, and he loves throw pens off the desk, and then there's my desk organizer thingie, with shells and stones and his old tail feathers and a little Snowy. Snowy's on a keychain and, with his front right paw lifted in his jaunty stride, does not stand well, so he leans on a piece of seaglass. Blake clambered up on my pencilbox and tugged on the bone in Snowy's mouth. Besides being in one molded piece, Snowy isn't one to give up a bone, so he tumbled down on a startled Blake. When Blake figures out that his feathers are up there, plus my little pewter knight, Snowy won't be guard dog enough to keep him down.
* I firmly believe that movies should be in quotation marks and books in italics, to distinguish between, e.g., "A Room with a View" and A Room with a View, and have treated television series like movies. But television shows have episode titles, like magazines (italicized) with articles (in quotation marks). Writing The West Wing's "War Games" but then "My So-Called Life" is inconsistent. It's a problem.
I was wondering, as I do around every Veterans' Day, how many World War veterans are left. From the first, twenty-seven British ones, few if any Australian or New Zealandish, a handful of Canadian, while Usan numbers are harder to find. There are more from the second, but I found out last night there is one fewer than before.
In fifth grade we had to interview a veteran. I interviewed my across-the-street neighbor. I don't remember anything about the interview except its very end: why I remember it at all. I must have asked the assigned questions, or maybe I had to make up some, which I'm sure were not overly insightful. I know he served in the Pacific and retired an officer. What I remember is Mr. H asking, "Don't you want to know if I got any medals?" He had received a Purple Heart at least and maybe a Bronze Star.
The Hs were good neighbors. They built their house when I was about three, a ranch with a paddock for their teenage daughter's taupe and pinto horses. Their driveway touched the road at two places, both within sight of my house (my boundary), plus it was paved, so it was a wonderful place to learn to ride my bike. Trick-or-treating, young enough to be with my mother, I turned from their front door and saw, I swan, a witch on a broomstick fly across the moon.* Also, they gave nickels in addition to candy.
They had a Christmas party once and I got to try something my father would never let me do: a guest left a smoldering cigarette on the kitchen counter and I touched its pretty orange glowing tip. Now I knew why my father wouldn't let me do that.
They had a toy poodle (for her) and a Weimaraner (for him). Long before William Wegman, I startled more than one Weimaraner human by knowing their dog's breed.
Later, when their daughter married (my cousin, as it happens) and had three children and divorced, the Hs had the children all the time. So they built a pool, to which they welcomed the neighbor children--me and my sister and two boys much younger. First we could come only with our mother, and after a year or two of not drowning, since we were older teenagers, just on our own, and eventually I was allowed to go by myself, wonderful in those pre-car days when the biked miles to the beach took forever in the heat and I was flat-out forbidden to go to the lake alone. Once when my mother and I went over, they were having a cookout so we turned around, but they invited her to join their party and found a lobster for her. I might have had a bite.
In return for this bounty, we gave them jam and cookies for Christmas.
When I flew to a college program when I was 17, we got up waaay before sunrise to drive to the airport, and there was Mr. H getting his paper. Four years later when I left the house at 5:30 every morning to go to work, there he was getting the paper. Getting up early after 40 years in the Army was a habit he never broke. Several days ago my mother noticed that the Hartford Courant remained in its tube after sunrise. Then last weekend she saw a moving truck. The next morning she brought the paper to the door, knocked and poked her head in and announced herself, and Mrs. H called her in.
Mr. H died very quickly, without much pain, with scarcely enough time to be diagnosed before he died. The moving truck was not to bring in a hospital bed, for Mrs. H with her repeatedly broken hips, but to move in the eldest of the grandchildren, her husband, and two young children, because they are going to live with Mrs. H now.
The last time I spoke with my mother before this was to learn that my great-uncle died. It was his wife's funeral that I declined to attend in September. My remaining great-aunt had told my mother she didn't want to be the last of the three siblings and their spouses--but she is the youngest and a woman. Her demographic sealed that fate, but in ten months, in two spates six weeks apart, she lost her husband and her sister, my granny, and then her sister-in-law and her brother.
I feel bad that I can remember enough to eulogize Mr. H when I could not my grandmother's siblings. I remember talking to my great-aunt-in-law after Granny's funeral and admiring her bravery and her certainty. I remember my great-uncle could not tell my sister and me apart (I'm not sure if he ever could). I barely remember my great-uncle-in-law at all, just a smiling face at the other great-people's annual Christmas party. My great-aunt looks very much like Granny, minus eight years, though my mother tells me she's aged a great deal in the past year, and who wouldn't.
I remember.
* A couple of days later I realized that the full moon does not rise early enough to be up when a little kid would go trick-or-treating. But it could have been a waxing moon.
My first taste of lobster (which I liked, because hey, butter!) was either a bite at the Hs' cookout or the tip my father got once from a fishmonger. I just don't remember which happened earlier. My father worked for the power company, and during an outage, after a lightning strike or a car crash or whatever, my father's crew restored power to a fish market. In gratitude for their fast work that let him keep his stock, or in acknowledgment that linemen--they were all men--on call get up at three o'clock in the morning and work without sleep for days after a hurricane, he gave every man however many lobsters.
It's good stuff, lobster. I can distinguish it from chicken even. I've withdrawn from the drawn butter camp, because what the hell, why cover delicate flesh in butter? Why not drown your bread in it instead?
I did that once during "Wizard of Oz." I bought my own stick of butter so I could use as much of it as I wanted--breaking up a pack of butter cubes after squeezing the Charmin, pirate of the grocery aisles as I was--and popped popcorn for the big yearly broadcast. I dipped each kernel in a bowlful of melted butter. Damn good, that was.
Lordy, I love iTunes. I just bought Dream of the Blue Turtles, which I've owned on a tape dating to 1985 or whenever Sting released it, and ...Nothing Like the Sun, which I've had on a crappy dub since 1987. I gave Soul Cages one listen, decided it depressed me (what a surprise: I bought it in 1991), and, I believe, never listened to it again. Ten Summoner's Tales is fine. Last night I listened to Dream, and oh my it's so '80s. But now I'm listening to Nothing: "Lazarus Heart," "They Dance Alone," "Fragile," "Sister Moon," a cover of "Little Wing." Sigh.
Plus I just bought Reckoning, soon after getting Murmur. I have missed them so much. Also I listened to snippets from Green, so vital a part of the 1989 soundtrack, yet unlike with all the other pivotal albums released or new to me that year--Passion, Sensual World, the Indigo Girls' first and also Melissa Etheridge's, Elvis Costello's Spike, my introductions to the Waterboys by way of Fisherman's Blues and This Is the Sea and to Joni Mitchell by way of Hissing Summer Lawns and Wild Things Run Fast--I can do without Green. This surprised me.
What decade is it?
A friend just lent me Beth Orton's Central Reservation. It is, if possible, even more barbituate blues than the Cowboy Junkies. And I like it! It dates, of course, from the previous millennium.
This weekend I watched "What Dreams May Come," which I had wanted to see when first released. It was cinematically beautiful, but considering how his task had been described, Robin Williams didn't put forth much effort in effecting it. Williams's inability to function in his painty heaven was unfortunately reminiscent of "Hook," and I only know Annabella Sciorra from "The Sopranos," so her becoming unhinged was just typecasting.
That also dates from the previous millennium.
But the next Netflix flick is "Lost in La Mancha," which ought to be super and is this year's, so mleah.
I do things like write "rights" for "writes" that scare the piss out of me. Occasionally I do things that reassure my sense of myself. Today as I approached Colorado Boulevard, I spotted a slouchy young man slouching toward a perfect cone (not pile) of leaves on a tarp on the verge. Judging from his appearance, I suspected he was going to scruff through the leaves. As much as I pitied whoever's work he was going to undo, I was a little envious too. He noticed my glance and probably my judging as he aimed right for the tarp, bent, and picked it up by its corners. By this time I was abreast of him. "Oh," I cried, "I thought you were going to stomple through them!"
"Aw, wouldn't that be fun!" with a regretful smile and hoisting the tarp to his back. "But then I'd have to rake them all up again."
Of course he was slouchy, dressed in layers against the changing temperature and for his labor. I'm glad that, given my previous expression, my tone was right for him to understand that stompling leaves is fun.
And I invented "stomple," just kind of accidentally. Stomp, which came from my thinking he was scruffy, and trample, which is how you destroy a pile of leaves.
Stomple!
When I started at Hateful, my first assigned task was one of dubious taste (as were most of the very few I ever had): to write letters to everyone whom they hadn't hired for that position. Looking at the cover letters and résumés, because I hardly scrupled not to, to avert my eyes from all but name and address, I could only think "Well no wonder they hired me." It didn't say much for me in comparison to be be so clearly superior in verbal dexterity and even vocation.
We have some strong candidates and we have some interesting ones and we have some other ones. That's probably already saying too much.
Tragically, the webcam does not work with the new system. Otherwise I would show--would have shown last night, when it was fresh out of the chair and not slept on or twice helmeted--my haircut. It is...short. I can just, just, scrape it into a stubby pigtail. I showed RDC a picture of me from October 1991, a bit more than year into the growing (which officially started August 1990), and my hair was longer then than now. It cups my chin.
I don't think I'm the type to change hairstyles this often (twice in one year).
RDC said I looked like Amélie. CoolBoss and Intern, who knew why I was scarpering 20' early yesterday, liked it; and even Tex noticed.
He noticed and then he asked as if confirming, "And you colored it too?" Um, no. Dye is make-up. When I did the big chop in January, another coworker was convinced I had colored it, and I think she didn't believe me when I denied it. Tex I could show: I pulled it into its usual not-down-ness, and he saw how the color changed depending on whether it was loose or back.
The usual not-down-ness is out for the duration of this cut. I kind of like the swing at my jaw, but I don't like the blinder effect. It's not short hair over the ears but it is over the ear. It does tuck behind the ears, at least.
I am embracing the down.
Sometime during college someone had an installation in the art school called Black Plastic: a human-sized maze of it, inside of which was utterly dark, dank, close, and clingy, because pollution is bad. Looking into my back yard now, I am reminded of that, except in blue.
A blue plastic tarp covers the woodpile, so the wood will be dry on those wet days when we most want a fire. A tarp covers the vegetable garden so that it does not serve as a catshitter of massive proportions all winter long. A folded one covers the lasagne mulch so that bindweed cannot grow up through it, although maybe I can take that off now for the winter. Another is under the remaining pile of needles and sunflower seed husks that have not found their way into lasagne mulches yet.
The most prominent tarp is that covering the brand-new leaf pile. Yesterday I very carefully groomed the front gardens and easement. The vinca is thriving, sending out shoots and sprouting all around. I'm very pleased. I took out the groundcloth so it could spread and battled bindweed thereafter; I'm hoping that after a few seasons of my assiduous plucking, the vinca will dominate on its own. It's tangled enough that getting the leaves out without ripping out shoots that haven't rooted yet was a quite delicate task. I can't wait to plant the other easement, because under that plum tree bare dirt plumes up from the rake's tines. I worked with rake and hands in the north front garden, trying to get leaves without mulch and not hurting the plants; I was less gentle in the better established south front garden and to the catmint I showed no mercy. Raking the north side of the house was easy, since it's covered in landscaping cloth. The south side was extremely rewarding, with two trees protected from the wind dropping all their leaves into a thick carpet whose absence made such stark contrast that I knew I was done. I did just a bit in the back yard, the south fence and the raspberries: the cherry tree hasn't dropped its leaves yet and I'm all about not duplicating effort. All of this made quite a pile, artfully crafted to touch neither the fence nor the garage and rot them by contact. I soaked it, shrinking it by a quarter at least, but it's still about four feet high.
I need to get yet more coffee grounds and vegetable pulp to wed the leaves with, to create the child, dirt.
RDC and SPM saw Phil Lesh & Friends at the Fillmore last night. This morning, with the remnants of his voice, RDC told of how they were tighter than the Dead ever were. "Because Bobby wasn't there," I said. I don't like Phil Lesh's own songs much: they're just basic rock and roll and not very interesting to me. But his covers of Garcia/Hunter and Weir/Barlow songs are fantastic. Phil can't sing and neither could Bobby but at least Phil knows enough to rely on other vocalists.
I'm extremely fond of SPM, and yesterday evening I discovered--for the first time?--something that made me fonder: love of '80s music, in addition to, not exclusive of, Deadheadism. We played 30-second iTunes snippets of Level 42 and Howard Jones and a-Ha and Toto and Asia and did not quite drive RDC screaming from the room, but nearly.
But then it all came crumbling down. As they got ready to leave, RDC pulled his--my!--leather jacket from the closet. "But what will I wear?" I asked. "Not this!" he replied merrily. "But it'll get all smoky!" I whined. SPM erkled: his jacket, lined in sheepskin, would also pick up a lot of smoke. He put it on: a corduroy jean jacket. I remarked that looking like Ponyboy Curtis should be some consolation (N.B.: except for the jacket, he doesn't, being tall, stocky, short-haired, and 20 years older), and just to stay out of old churches. But SPM didn't know who Ponyboy Curtis is at all! And when I said The Outsiders, he only knew the movie, not the book.
I wanted the leather jacket because I was going to a Howard Dean birthday party (i.e. fundraiser). My whine that it would get smoky at the concert but presumably not at the party held no water: when I got home I stripped in the living room and dashed into the shower and I am so glad I didn't wear contacts because lordy do people still smoke. The party happened in a Capitol Hill apartment, a great space with a porch facing west, oak woodwork that had never been painted over, a fireplace with shelves on one side and an inglenook on the other, and I was the only woman and nearly the only straight person. That was kind of interesting.
One man admitted to knowing little about Dean but asked questions about his background and stances and I told him my focus: not that his policies are secondary, but Dean wants to return the process to the people instead of corporate interests and that is his primary appeal for me.
He's shorter than Bush fils, though. Historically, the taller candidate has won. Gore is taller, and Gore won, but Bush proved that the rule of tall as well as the rule of law can be toppled. So maybe Dean has a chance.
Zounds. I just changed the leading in the style sheet, from 120% of line height to 150%, and that seems to have fixed the display problem--that minor one by which text wouldn't display.
Yesterday I cheated on Blake. I went to Hobby Lobby for lunch (and found oh! just the most unnecessary purse-shaped memo pad for my sister's stocking) and detoured into the parrot store. I would have bought the seed mix they picked up after Colorado Seed and Pet went under, but clerks were in front of all the bulk bins with large boxes so I just flirted with the birds.
A military macaw said "Hi!" as soon as I walked in, so I said "Hello!" back. I offered to pet its head, but it only wanted to step up. I don't step up a) big birds b) that I don't know c) onto work clothes, so we were at an impasse. I introduced myself to a double-yellow-headed Amazon named Daisy who wanted, despite being in a cage, to have its head pet. Very very much. It climbed up to the top corner, held onto the two walls with its two feet, and ducked its head to the side to grasp another bar with its beak, and exposed its neck. And I pet another bird's head! I did. I'm very bad. Amazons are not as soft as cockatiels. However, they dislike having their toes (so much bigger than a cockatiel's and that much more tempting!) touched nearly as much as my cockatiel does. Also, perching in a corner like that exposes the belly, and I for one cannot resist tickling a parrot's belly when I have access to it. It is easier to get to the hairs between the pads of a dog's hind paw and tickle those, but I'm a tickler.
I did look at buddy toys while I was there. I think we stopped making him toys out of balsa wood colored with food dye because he got bored with them. All he's wanted for ages is magazine blowcards and a peacock feather and of course his box anyway.
Today is a First Saturday. Usually the only dates I make note of are the Fourth Mondays: every fourth Monday since I was 19, I have got my period. There have been a couple of intermissions, but I've been on the pill pretty much straight for 16 years. Until today.
Today, I did not take a breakfast treat upon arising. (When I first went on it, there was a snack food called the Stella Dora Breakfast Treat, hence the moniker.) Today, I declare hormonal freedom. Too bad I have no mountaintop from which to proclaim it; a website is anticlimactic. Happily, that's the only thing about today that is.
...get down tonight.
Finally! We might not get much, but we're getting some, and there was much rejoicing.
This morning as I toweled my hair (which is, strangely, nearly sufficient to dry it), I cocked my head because surely that couldn't be what it sounded like...? I peeked out the window. The goofy neighbor was indeed raking his leaves through two inches of snow. They are really unclear on the concept, these people.
"I was shopping in Norwich--and you know there's nowhere to shop in Norwich--and I had all four of you girls with me, except you were little, 7, 6, 5, and 4, and I had Granny with me, and she was about 80. Then the car broke down--don't ask me how I had all of us in one car--and I called BDL, but his car had broken down too. Isn't that weird?" my mother asked.
"No, it doesn't sound weird. It sounds like you're worried about your responsibilities. You were more responsible for CLH and me when we were little than you have to be now, as you would have had to be for the German Shepherds, and you had to be more responsible for Granny when she was old than when she was 60. But you can't be responsible if the environment is bad and if the mechanics of your life are breaking down."
Meanwhile, I had an anxiety dream that I didn't tell her. Lots of people have naked anxiety dreams: vulnerability, embarrassment. Although I am clad, usually I have registered for a regular college courseload but somehow forgotten to attend one or more classes all semester long. If there's anything I can do to fix it, I cannot get to the right place in the right time to do so: there are ten minutes, and I keep getting distracted and I can't move fast enough. All of that is fairly obvious.
Last night I combined all the threads of my anxieties. I had attended some of my classes but I'd forgotten I'd registered for a couple. The usual "Can I withdraw? Will the professor show mercy, since I didn't perform badly but just forgot to go? Can I walk faster without someone asking me for directions?" antics ensued, this time in the altogether.
Later I realized that I'd been attending English and history and whatever other class--Women's Studies or poli sci--but had forgotten to attend anthropology and French. That's pretty easy to parse too.
In the summer of 1990, I happened to be in my mother's line of sight when I happened to have one of my dizzy spells, which happen sometimes when I get up too fast. It was a particularly bad one: I didn't just lose my vision for a moment and clutch at a nearby wall for balance, as usual, but actually spasmed for several seconds as my body tried to hold itself erect without my brain's help, and then fell abruptly, with no visible attempt to break that fall, as I lost equilibrium.
I cannot imagine how frightening that must have been for a mother to see.
She freaked and refused my word that really, this was nothing, just tremendously low blood pressure not getting juice to my brain when I get up quickly after a period of inactivity. She insisted that I consult her doctor. I had no medical insurance at that point and insisted in turn that if she wanted me to go she could pay for it. Isn't that a beautiful example of mother-daughter relations? It was so typical too.
I went, and it was the single most thorough examination I have ever had. Not that he did bloodwork or anything--he flipped my eyelid back briefly and dismissed my mother's concerns of anemia--but I felt like he was there, listening, assessing, more than any doctor I have had since. And oh, that's right, the summer of 1990 was the first I spent under my mother's roof without benefit of four-footed meat. The other thing she didn't believe me about but accepted grudgingly when I repeated the doctor's assurance on, was that chicken and fish and dairy would supply all my protein needs. Her initial fears were that I was pregnant or that not eating meat had rendered me rickety.* The doctor agreed with me, though he put it in medical terms, about the low blood pressure thing.
* That was a mathematical "or," which contains the ugly "and/or," so that sentence is grammatically correct. I hope.
Anyway. It's kind of a cool feeling, my faintiness. Although I've been clutching walls for years now, not every time I stand up but several times a week, I was never able to duplicate the way-cool sensation of that summer afternoon--until this morning.
I threw myself out of bed, grabbed my water glass, and headed for the bathroom. Three steps away from the bed, I started shaking or spasming. I made enough noise hitting the wall, dropping the plastic cup, and eventually thumping to the floor that RDC noticed from under his pillows. In a moment, when my blood caught up with my brain, I could respond.
This makes rescuing Blake from his nightmares interesting. I hurl myself out of bed towards him, fifteen feet away, as quickly as I can, hitting the lightswitch on the way; but sometimes I compound his fright with the noise of my full weight dropping to the floor amidst the covers I'm pulling off to show him that there are no dragons. Eventually I'm going to have to modify that response or I'll break my hip.
"Ben-Hur" is a featured movie in "The Celluloid Closet" and no surprise. I just found out Gore Vidal wrote part of the screenplay. I just looked that up because I'm reading Ben-Hur courtesy Project Gutenberg, and there's no homosexuality written into the movie, OMFB. It's all there in the book. When Judah and "the Messala" have their falling out: "Messala offered him his hand; the Jew walked on through the gateway. When he was gone, the Roman was silent awhile; then he, too, passed through, saying to himself, with a toss of the head, 'Be it so. Eros is dead, Mars reigns!'" (chapter II)
Gentle men are not all homosexual, but this is certainly part of a body of evidence: "The thoughtful reader of these pages has ere this discerned enough to know that the young Jew in disposition was gentle even to womanliness--a result that seldom fails the habit of loving and being loved" (chapter VI).
It was 20 degrees and I rode my bike to work. Shady spots of road had still had ice and snow on them. Once, stopping at a stop sign, I fell, and my bike skittered over the ice away from me and would likely have been hit if a car had been on the perpendicular street. I'm here to tell you that I love my bike helmet, and without my helmet I might have a nasty goose egg, or even a cracked egg, on my head. Then, as I biked one way and a 11-year-oldish boy walked the other and I passed him, he yelled at my back (I'm pretty sure at me, since there was no one else on the street), "Bitch!" I was wearing a helmet and sunglasses and a face mask, so even if I had a mean expression, he couldn't've seen it. I know I've seen him before, walking probably to school, but I'm certain I've never been unkind to him. I know I ought to conclude that he is just a pubescent boy experimenting with malice and power plays, but I can't quite whole-heartedly do that because part of me is still 11 myself.
Reading The Times (of London)'s style guide, I learned a few things. Some points are merely differences between British and U.S. English (The Times says "English" and "American," as if this side of the pond speaks a different language altogether), some are basic definitions and solecisms (aggravate, affect and effect, "animals and birds"), and some are things I would screw up--unless those are ones I don't immediately recognize as British usages and so am just Usan about? Also apparently I have changed the spelling of "British" to "Britsh," not quite "kitsch." Hmm.
ad nauseam
I have probably spelled it "ad nauseum." So much for naming that whale Ablative.
allege
Avoid the suggestion that the writer is making the allegation, so specify its source. Do not use alleged as a synonym of ostensible, apparent or reputed.
anticipate
Not to be used for expect. It means to deal with, or use, in advance of, or before, the due time. To anticipate marriage is different from expecting to marry.
Apennines, Italy
(not Appenines)
bail out
(As in to bail someone out of trouble; also bail water from a boat); but bale out of an aircraft by parachute, to escape. NB, bailout (one word, as noun).
Usan Merriam-Webster says you bail out of a plane and bale only hay and such.
bated/baited
Note the important difference - bated breath; baited hook.
I looked up how else "bate" can be used other than with "breath." A falcon can bate its wings, i.e., beat them impatiently. Also cockatiels, since I love applying falconry jargon to parrots.
Beduin is plural. The singular is Bedu
Oh.
beg the question
Do not confuse with "ask the question". To beg a question is to evade it.
Aha! I was recently talking with Haitch about examples of "begging the question." This is a different meaning of the phrase than I am used to.
bight
A curve in a coastline or river; bite involves teeth.
I wouldn't've confused them because I didn't know the word "bight." Now I do and will look for occasion to use it.
birthday
People and animals have birthdays; everything else has anniversaries.
Now now. The Times rails against solecisms like "birds and animals" but says that "animals have birthdays"? Including those animals, like insects, most fish, amphibians, most reptiles, birds, and three mammals, that hatch from eggs rather than are born?
blame
Take care with this word; blame is attached to causes, not effects. So say "Bad weather is blamed for my bronchitis," not "My bronchitis is blamed on bad weather."
Is this British? I might say "I blamed the weather for my bronchitis." I'm probably wrong.
bluffers
Be very cautious. The Bluffer's Guide/Guides are trademarks, rigorously protected by their publishers. So generic phrases such as "a bluffer's guide to ..." must be avoided
The British equivalent of Dummies books? Does "bluffer" mean the Usan "bluffer" in British English, to bluff your way through whatever situation with help of this guide? Or does it mean "duffer" or "stupid person"?
Bush, George W.
Do not use Jr. President Bush at first mention, then Mr Bush or the President. Refer to his father as the first President Bush or George Bush Sr.
I understand why not to use "Jr.," since they have different middle names. I don't understand why "Sr." is okay.
cagoule
But kaftan
I looked up cagoule: a knee-length waterproof garment, like a parka but long. I have no idea what they're getting at here.
Ceylon
Now Sri Lanka. The people are Sri Lankan, the majority group are the Sinhalese.
I wouldn't call Sri Lanka Ceylon, but I would have no idea what to call the people.
clothing
Say menswear, women's wear, children's wear, sportswear.
Why?
comparatively, relatively
Avoid using as synonyms of fairly or middling.
consensus
The word is a cliché that should be avoided wherever possible.
is it ever okay? Doesn't it have one right meaning?
coruscating (not corruscating)
Sparkling or scintillating, not abrasive or corrosive.
I didn't know it meant anything at all.
crisis
Always try to find an alternative for this greatly overworked word. Its use should be confined to a process reaching a turning point. A crisis does not deepen, grow, mount or worsen, and is never a continuous state such as a "housing crisis". Economics are never "in crisis"; "crisis situations" are never to appear in The Times.
deny
Does not mean the same as rebut (which means argue to the contrary, producing evidence), or refute (which means to win such an argument).
diagnose
Take great care: illnesses are diagnosed, patients are not.
England, English
Beware of these when the meaning is Britain, British.
Right. Such as "British English."
fuchsia
I bet I get this wrong all the time
jubilee
This is from a Hebrew word, who knew? "A year of emancipation and restoration provided by ancient Hebrew law to be kept every 50 years by the emancipation of Hebrew slaves, restoration of alienated lands to their former owners, and omission of all cultivation of the land."
Last Post
Like Reveille, is sounded, not played.
last, past
Last should not be used as a synonym of latest; "the last few days" means the final few days; "the past few days" means the most recent few days.
Logical, but I had never thought of it. A Britishism?
major
Do not use as a lazy alternative for big, chief, important or main.
majority of
Do not use as alternative for most of.
massive
Avoid as a synonym of big.
may / might
Do not confuse; use might in sentences referring to past possibilities that did not happen, e.g., "If that had happened ten days ago, my whole life might have been different". A clear distinction is evident in the following example: "He might have been captured by the Iraqis--but he wasn't," compared with "He may have been captured by the Iraqis--it is possible but we don't know."
minimal
Do not use as a synonym of small; it means smallest, or the least possible in size, duration, etc.
motocross
There is no r in the middle syllable, even in Usan. News to me.
nerve-racking, not -wracking.
Ooops
recrudescence
Do not confuse with resurgence or revival. It means worsening, in the sense of reopening wounds or recurring diseases.
reportedly
Avoid this slack word, which suggests that the writer is unsure of the source of the material.
responsible
People bear responsibility, things do not. Storms are not responsible for damage; they cause it. Avoid the phrase "the IRA claimed responsibility for the bombing"; say instead "the IRA admitted causing the bombing."
Because the IRA are not people, but storms?
rigmarole
Not rigamarole.
Oh.
shambles
Take care not to overwork this strong word, which means a slaughterhouse and, by extension, a scene of carnage.
Cool.
slay
A Biblical word, not to be used in headlines for kill or murder.
I can't say, "Oh, I slay me" anymore? Very sad now.
vagaries
Aimless wanderings or eccentric ideas, not vicissitudes or changes (as in weather).
wrack
Means seaweed or wreckage and must not be used as a synonym of torture; thus, racked by doubts etc.
Here endeth the lesson.
Tex just bought some sort of toilet-locking device because his youngest child, unlike the older two at her age, has shown interest in this watery danger. You have to close the lid in addition to the seat for the lock to activate.
I told him that was excellent practice, for his son to learn to lower the seat (and lid) and for his middle daughter to learn to lower the lid. I think closing the lid is a fine compromise for both genders when the male has not been well-trained. I have to remember to thank my mother-in-law again for raising RDC in a house with herself, his sister, his grandmother, and female roommates and their daughters. My previous men were either one of two brothers or only children, and, I expect, would not be reflexive seat-lowerers.
Occasionally RDC has taken ski vacations with his best friend, who has got mock-angry with him for lowering the seat even when no females are around. It is automatic for him to put down the seat, and I am grateful. Only a few times in all our years together have I sat on a cold commode in the dark. Unfortunately, two of those times have been in the past week. Is he slipping? I sure am. The first time, he said, he had in his half-asleep-itude forgot that step because he was moving the bathmat off the heat register. Okay. This morning, he is still asleep so I haven't asked yet. I'm just glad the toilet got scrubbed yesterday. Am I actually going to have to practice my own suggestion of compromise, and remember myself to lower the lid? Hmph.
I just had an argument with my little tiny youngster of a coworker (he's 26). He was asserting that Cat Stevens wrote "Cat's in the Cradle." It was a perfectly amicable knock-down-drag-out fight, of course, but I was right and he wasn't so you can bet I didn't let it go. He said this song was on the same album as "Where Do the Children Play?" Possibly I am more intimately familiar with Caution Horses than Tea for the Tillerman, but it's a near thing. (The Junkies devotion exists despite their lack of any song with my name in it; "Sad Lisa" is on Tea). I don't know So or Sensual World as well as I know Tea, for pity's sake. Shyeah. Plus I live with a man who grew up on Harry Chapin. Intern and I quick-draw googled on our two machines, vying for supremacy. I found lots of cites that an early MP3 had been mislabeled, hence the proliferation of this lie. I also found, on Cat Stevens's own site, mention of an album I had never heard of called Cats Cradle, which I think might be the cause of--not responsible for-- this heinous lie.
This all came up because he didn't know about "Harold and Maude" either. I have told him that by the time I see "Red Dawn" (which he references more than you would think), he has to see "Harold and Maude."
Among my other pop-cultural touchstones of which he knows nothing: Bloom County, "Northern Exposure" (well, he'd heard of it), "M*A*S*H" and "Say Anything." Egg and I tried to explain--well, re-enact--"Philadelphia Story" for him. McTeague, the Great Brain, etc. Also he asked if David Sedaris wrote Confederacy of Dunces, which twisted my brain, but then he explained why (favorites of a sibling's). Meanwhile he has kindly informed me that P. Diddy and Puff Daddy are in fact the same person. I am so glad we hired him. The office with neither Egg nor Intern would be extremely lonely.
I thought I took most of the impact on my left hip and I also noticed I struck my helmet but today it's my left upper arm that's sore. Tex has a nasty habit of smacking me friendlily on the arm--the left arm, since that's the side he usually has access to--and a couple of times today I had to ward him off.
There is nothing like having a cockatiel tucked and dozing on my shoulder, watching his eyes close from the bottom up, resisting the urge to nose into his breast and snort in an extremely nap-disruptive kind of way.
I'm just watching the end of "Dead Irish Writers," a particularly good episode of "The West Wing," and marking time for the next six minutes.
Dude.
(You know, I don't say "dude" that much, my slang having petrified before that. I might be being sarcastically hyperbolic.)
I have never ever even merely wandered by, let alone read or even be familiar with, two of the three nominees for the legacy Diarist Awards. Emily has been writing since the dawn of time; her own formative years and the medium's have kept pace with each other. So there's no question of who I would vote for, but I am so far out of the loop.
And fine with that, but--one of three? Dude.
Netflix is making it waaay to easy for me to indulge my less savory movie tastes. iTunes facilitates the '80s music; Netflix the movies (my mentioning "Heathers" a while ago? yeah).
So I've seen this movie once or twice. The first time I saw it was with Bill--not Billy from the roof, malheuresment. I hadn't read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas yet--I wouldn't meet Hobbit for another two weeks. The last time I saw it was with a woman I made slight temporary friends with when Judy Blume came to the Tattered Cover to sign Summer Sisters.
Somewhere in there I realized that Judd Nelson's character slept in a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas tee-shirt. Of course rewatching movies is valuable: it's only this time that I realized Billy carries Fear and Loathing in his pocket.
It's not December, but it is after Thanksgiving, and therefore it begins. If I didn't have to ship anything, I would be ecstatic.
I mailed Emlet's package air, being ten days too late to trust surface. And a good thing, because when I talked to Nisou on Thanksgiving, she said the books I sent--in late September or early October--had just arrived. Those two were Frederick and an alphabet book of artistics masterworks. For Yule I gave Emlet books (Dandelion and A Baby Sister for Frances among them) and a puzzle and Not for Kids Only and some clothes and a bald eagle and a bison (American animals).
Envelopes are addressed and cards printed. Now comes the long period of procrastination in which not enough will be written.
I know what I want to give to this person and that person, so all there is to do is obtain and ship these things. I found the most beautiful book for ZBD. CLH and I are doing only stockings for each other this year, though I have a couple of other ideas. I need goofy stuff for our cousin, who is coming for Chick Weekend in December (she writes it "chic weekend," which I'm not sure is a joke or a misspelling).
Either Blake's nutrition has gone out the window--a distinct possibility, since he's a carbohound like his mother and even his favorite vegetable (or most favored element of his twice-daily chow) is corn--or he's having a minor moult. A few contour feathers, a racing stripe on the windowsill, and, tonight's prize, his longest crest feather. He grows four, so he doesn't look scalped when he's shedding, as Percy, who grew only two, did. (Percy's crest feathers were brighter yellow and maybe longer, but Blake's crest is altogether fuller.)
Do you think he would tolerate a used basset hound?
Jed Bartlett just asked a retiring English teacher if, when she taught Beowulf, she taught it in the original Middle English or in translation.
"The West Wing" is not "Northern Exposure." It's not even "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." But it is "West Wing." Or at least it was. Once the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff perpetuated the myth that the eagle's head on the Great Seal of the United States turns from the olive branch to the arrows in time of war. Once there was a representative who had taken the seat of his deceased wife. I don't mind when it changes the name of a newspaper (it got Denver's wrong), and I certainly don't mind when it spins Dot Org with an anachronism--that it mentions Dot Org at all is cool enough for me. "West Wing" certainly shouldn't get government information wrong, but Beowulf is common knowledge, damn it.
It saddens me to say that I have found yet another flaw in "The Last Seduction." First I rewatched "Every Girl Should Be Married," its polar opposite. Then "Last Seduction." Spoiler: At the end, when Mike's lawyer says he believes him but there's not a scrap of physical evidence to back up his version of events, all Mike can think of is the name on the apartment building's doorbell. A while ago I had wondered about the fake Trish letter. He wouldn't've shown it to Bridget, because he doesn't want her to know about Trish, but maybe it doesn't exist anymore--and a good graphologist would be able to distinguish between Bridget's imitation and Trish's genuine hand--because he destroyed it upon receipt. Then there's Trish [her]self: and avoiding a capital murder charge is sufficient reason to expose your accidental marriage to a man, isn't it? Anyway, the bit of physical evidence I thought of yesterday he might still have had in his wallet, the note on which Bridget wrote their fake names together, backward.
But it's still a brilliant movie.
I am aware that no one thinks anyone else's pet or child is as engaging as the owner thinks. Especially when someone says that their pet is the sweetest, funnest little guy ever, but then doesn't let the pet socialize because she's petrified he might get squashed in the crowd and she doesn't particularly want him shitting on anyone either.
With that said, Blake is such a joy.
The setup: I was sitting downstairs on the couch, feet on the ottoman, with Blake's crates--wooden four-sided boxes RDC knocked together in 1993 to hold stereo components now serving as occasional tables--alongside, short end to short end, between ottoman and chair. On one crate was an oatmeal box serving as a buddy cave, on the other, the buddy tray (vegetable chow, spinach, apple slices, seedballs) and my water glass (from which he also drinks).
Blake was in his box, preening or singing or just hanging out, when something--not a phone call or a sneeze or the heat snapping on--startled him and he ran out of his box, onto the crate, toward the next crate, which didn't abut the first in perfect alignment. He didn't see that, and so fell, wheeling a bit just like Wile E. Coyote before dropping (fourteen inches) to the floor.
I howled. Presently he pranced into view, bobbed his head, and clucked at me. I apologized, picked him up, and kissed his belly. I love my buddy.
Nisou's sister had a baby girl today. She is named her for her maternal grandmother. Everyone is well.
Where the fuck was this Albert Gore in 2000? In his endorsement announcement, he spoke with vigor, nearly passionately. His hair was disheveled. This Gore could have won more decisively than 2000's Gore.
There is a basset hound mix in Greeley whose human just died. She's mixed with Australian shepherd, which is not such a good dog option. There's a basset hound, full blood and older so maybe safer, 280 miles away in Wyoming.
But today Blake had a yawnfest. Dogs yawn. I've seen it. However, no dog yawning has ever been as cute as Blake yawning. Dogs don't tuck under your chin. Dogs don't sing in their boxes. Dogs don't bow while you brush your teeth.
Dogs go for walks. Dogs are big enough to hug. Dogs--particurly Labrador retrievers and basset hounds--have floppy ears instead of icky reptilian holes in their heads (though charmingly covered by orange feathers). Dogs have oversized paws instead of ugly scaly feet, and when you trim their toenails, they don't shriek and kick to the point you fear they'll dislocate their hips. Dogs snore. Dogs aren't afraid of pigeons.
Are dogs as fascinating to watch? Do dogs make rattling-of-sabers sounds as they preen and rearrange their tail feathers? No? Damn.
I never thought I'd be 35 and dogless. Sigh.
CLH and I were talking about Shadow. She really was not the best behaved of all possible dogs, but she was still the best dog. No dog has ever been 26, I know. She would have liked a basset hound.
Happy birthday, my Shadow puppy.
Blake is singing in his box. My mother once had a dog who could kind of say "Lauuurrrrra," which was not its name; Blake can say both his own names.
And the goose is getting fat.
The 15th is late to get a tree, and this year for the first time we didn't slaughter, tote home, erect, and decorate it all the same day.
Monday I did get the lights on, and arrayed all the ornaments on the couch partly so I could admire them but mostly because I always pack the tree skirt at the bottom of the box. For cushioning, but also because it enables the arraying and admiring. Also I finished wrapping all my sister's stuff.
Tuesday we decorated. I contemplated the ornaments and was sure we didn't have enough. RDC gave me one of my presents early. I love this one. It's on the heavy side, it shades from blue through indigo to violet, and it's traced with silver in a, to me, Tolkieny kind of way. Also I made peanut butter cookies for my father. If they crumble on their way to Florida, I figure they'll still eat well.
I am physically incapable of buying ornaments for others without buying one for myself. Also it's got a perky bill.
A neighbor made this for me when I was about 11. Cardinals always nest at Yuletide. Speaking of, we had our trees trimmed, which was painful for me too, and I had the trimmers leave the bird-feeder branch on the nectarine, but the pine tree is gone and so are the birds. My poor chickadees!
Granny must have taken a Yule crafts class in 1978. This barn that she painted, my Little Drummer Boy little sled, and the plaster ornaments that look like cookie-cutter cookies all say "dew 1978" on their sides. She gave me all those that year, others to CLH, and a thingie saying "Noel" or "Yule" for the front door to my mother.
Others she kept and I inherited. I like this one, besides because she made it, because it looks like an extra from "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." And I like the other one too.
CLH gave me a hedgehog some years ago. I hope all my packages, which I didn't mail until Wednesday, get to Vermont and Albany and waythehell upstate New York and Boston and two places in Connecticut and two places in Florida by Wednesday.
This was in a batch of Granny's ornaments. I used to have a few of these clip-on animules and it seems to be happy there.
I bought this last year or year before. For myself. While ornament-shopping for others. I am not made of stone.
RDC asked me please not to break this one. Damn straight, it took 20 months for its replacement to show up on eBay. I would have got medieval on anyone who outbid me, but luckily I seem to be alone in my dreadful taste so won it handily. I don't care that it's stupid, I love it.
We had enough ornaments. Kinda. It is not slathered, but it's not sparse either. It's a balsam fir so smells delicious, but its branches are so dense and tend toward the vertical so much that some ornaments could not find a home. I was going to try to make diagonal stripes with the wired ribbon but I figured vertical was sufficient.
And so, for the first time, we have a tree by the window. It is gorgeous and tall (I had to hack some off the top to jam the star on) and I suggested to RDC that we could continue to get bigger trees in future years if only we lay them on their sides. We could work up to a 24-foot tree laid diagonally in the living room. Or even bigger, if we moved the dining table and used that room too.
I'll be back, I'm sure. For almost a year now I've written frequently, if not at length, if only a sentence about a book I've read or modest exercise I've shuffled through. There are a couple of things I don't want to talk about here until I've hashed them out elsewhere; hashing will take effort and time and I don't want to jinx myself. They're good things, or should be.
Apparently all I needed was to give that permission to myself. Hence, a couple of stories.
Tuesday Intern and I were waiting for the bus together for 15 minutes longer than we should have because we missed the bus we were aiming for by about 45 seconds. In the chat, he divulged that the best present his parents could give him would be a bunch of toilet paper, because buying it seems so petty and is a terrible reminder that he's not living at home anymore. A lightbulb went off in my head.
Friday I drove and suggested to Intern that I give him a ride home punctuated with a stop at my house to give him his present (which I had announced the existence of before, because I'm hideous with surprises). He was hesitant, but he wanted to meet Blake too (who wouldn't?) and I am sure he recalled a dumpster into which he could deposit whatever I had in mind if it wasn't to his taste. So first there was the mandatory admiring of my tree, which I again refuse to be modest about--actually first was my mourning as we pulled up under the shorn outside trees--and second was the Meeting of Blake, who had got so offended when I came home and spent a minute in the living room with my guest instead of fetching him right off that after dutifully climbing onto Intern's finger he immediately hopped back to me for his proper measure of snuggling, and third was scampering down to the basement and my saying "Merry Christmas" and handing a 36-pack of Costco toilet paper into his arms while he laughed. Also he met RDC, who was much more sociable than Blake. Then I drove him home.
So that was a success.
I say this hoping my father and notstepmother haven't found this site. If you have, don't read this until after Thursday. (I keep thinking Christmas is Wednesday.)
My sister's gift to our father (and notstepmother) is a photograph album, more his photobiography. She received family photographs from Aunt Namesake and included those. (I would have found that difficult, greedy and grasping as I am, but CLH said, realistically though scarily, that she would get them back eventually. We both swallowed hard.)
There is a photograph of the Ascendancy great-grandmother who married our decidedly-not-Ascendancy, plain Irish, immigrant great-grandfather and was disinherited for his sake. (Similarly, our maternal great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Rockefeller was disinherited for marrying our great-great-grandfather (whose daughter I hazily remember: she died when I was five). We are peasants from way back and on both sides.) A photograph of our great-grandfather holding our infant maternal grandmother; his face is just not one that gets made any more. Photographs of her girlhood; of her beloved big brother, our great-uncle, whose story I want to tell here but for which I want a scanner; of our father and his siblings as children (all wearing glasses before their fourth birthdays; I'm grateful again to have my maternal line's myopia rather than their compound of problems, and mystified again how my sister at nearly 40 (!) can still have perfect sight).
A picture I'm jealous of, since I could never be in it: my father's cousin, sister-in-law, brother, father, and wife holding his first daughter. I, the second daughter, was born after his father died.
A large section of pictures of CLH and me:
* With puppy Sagi. My mother has a series of snapshots of us mauling the poor thing; in one, I in no more than a diaper am holding the dog, and in the next, my hand is raised to hit CLH who is now holding the dog. This latter is the one in the album, of course.
* With grown and aged Shadow in her beanbag in front of our father's chair, in which I sit with CLH on my lap. Over the chair is a photograph portrait of Dad's father.
* At my high school graduation and her college graduation and my wedding, all with him, and the last time he saw us together, at his brother's in 2001.
* The two of us in Boston and Old Lyme and Aspen over the years.
Also pictures of CLH on her own and of me on my own and with RDC, including this one of us going to the opera. Last weekend our materal cousin was looking through the album, I hope out of interest and not just courtesy, and when she turned to this page said "Great dress!" I replied, "That dress? Fifteen bucks at T.J. Maxx!" and my sister exclaimed "Good story, Jwaas!"
Because most of my stories, like the one I've just told here, are overly long and filled with tedious unnecessary detail and have no particular point. Whereas that one merely communicated the glee of that dress at that price. My sister is my biggest fan. Whereas I was proud of myself for fibbing about the name of the store, since the actual one, while operating on the same principle, isn't nationally recognizable.
I picked up Blake's tray (a foot by less than a foot, with a half-inch lip; it started its life as part of my dorm fridge) the other day and asked RDC what were those desiccated hairy things? He had bought broccoli sprouts to put on sandwiches. We always share foods with Blake--the sandwich bread, some lettuce or spinach, a wisp of cheese--and that's how RDC discovered what extremely yummy things sprouts are. Except they mummify even faster than spinach wilts.
They snap in the beak, they shred well, they stick to the wall when you whip your head back and forth to clean it (like a wet dog shaking), so even if they weren't tasty, their physical attributes would make them a favorite. My little buddy.
The last page of my father's album features his grandchildren: Kitty sunning herself in my sister's ivy-covered window, and Blake preening his tail. Of course.
RDC just digitized our wedding video, eight years old, already deteriorating, and not of high quality to start with. His uncle took it and gave us a copy, I'm pretty sure. I didn't know he was taking it until I spotted him during our first dance, which was unsurprisingly dreadful. I asked RDC, when he told me he'd digitized it, if the dance was as cringeworthy as I remember. He said that the most embarrassing moment was when I wouldn't let him feed me cake.
We didn't have an argument about something that happened 8.5 years ago, but we had stiff words: he said it was embarrassing that I wouldn't let him feed me, that I held his hand away from my face with both of mine, that I didn't trust him just to put a little frosting on my lips to kiss off. Hmm. Whereas what I remembered was not knowing about this "little bit of frosting" ahead of time and fearing that he would smear me. "You didn't trust me," he translated. I didn't argue that, but why would he think I wanted frosting on my mouth?
So I started the video, jumping up to remove cookies from the oven every few minutes, and finished the cookies sometime during the wholly unorganized because unplanned receiving line. I figured I had already found the most embarrassing moment: my mother's shrill voice commanding everyone to "look over here," over and over and over again.
Then I brought my computer downstairs to finish watching it with him. The dance was terrible, but either RDC's uncle didn't catch my first, displeased reaction to spotting the videocamera or he tactfully edited it out (which might be why we have only a copy). There is only my saying, "Arrest that man!" and RDC at my ear--he was whispering that any protest would be undignified because, in fact, also taped. He was correct, though I was right--I didn't want video--and I shushed.
The toasts were okay, EJB's short and sweet and my sister's welcoming us to Colorado and praising RDC for putting up with "that laugh." That footage does include the worst moment of the tape, RDC's aunt approaching the lens to urge her husband closer, thereby giving a really dreadful close-up.
Then the cake-cutting, and yes I was watching to make sure I was right, always a nice way to treat wedding relics. RDC fed me first, bringing his hand to my mouth, and I took a bite. Then, with audible encouragement from at least two identifiable voices, he approached his hand to my face again, frosting forward. So ha, I did have cause to fear the oh-so-tacky smearing, and that's when I leaned back and pushed his hand away before, for form's sake though with basilisk eyes, I stopped outwardly resisting. He put a little frosting on my lips and kissed it off. When I fed him, I held the piece of cake still so he could control his bite rather than have to work around my moving it toward him.
Then we kissed and made up, both on the video and in person.
Not the most embarrassing but the stupidest moment is the bouquet toss. The only things I had forgotten to bring with me were not on my list: garters. RDC's grandmother gave me one that might have fit around my lower arm when I was eight. Also, my uncle gave me the garter he caught at my parents' wedding--what he was doing going for the garter when he was already married I couldn't say--and I would have worn that as my Something Old if I had remembered it--but not thrown it, a keepsake meant for CLH. Without a garter, we had a co-ed bouquet toss. That might have been funner if we could have coordinated a throw better. We released the bouquet so late that it landed nearly at our feet, while everyone bunched up to catch it stood at least 10 feet away. CLH and SPG were equally determined to get it, so they tussled amusingly.
I think I have mentioned before that I completely bollocksed the old-new-borrowed-blue poesy. My dress was new, LEB lent me a pearl choker, I forgot the old garter, and RDC's aunt had lent me diamond-and-sapphire earrings but I preferred faux-pearl-and-rhinestone pendants that went with my dress better, dangling for its neckline and pearly for its fabric. I had my sapphire engagement ring of course, but CLH wore that during the ceremony.
We seem to be muddling along all right despite that inauspicious beginning.
Plainsong made me laugh out loud once as two people unused to anyone other than each other try to make conversation with someone new.
RDC and I were talking about "Return of the King." He said he had expected the matter of the ring to be resolved at the end of the first movie. I asked him if he knew there were going to be two other movies--living with me, he ought to have--and he said yes; I asked what he thought the other two movies were going to be about, then? He said, "Some other ring?" and I laughed and laughed and laughed.
A while later he asked if I recognized that "some other ring" was a Baldrick answer. I hadn't. I laughed again.
I have been refreshing his memory, since he hasn't read the books and saw "Fellowship" two years ago in the cinema and "Two Towers" whenever it came out on DVD (I still don't have the extended version). He was confusing Saruman and Sauron, so to remind him of who is who, I recalled the battle between the two wizards, Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee, smiting each around in the white tower, "and remember how you said that since it was filmed in the southern hemisphere, Gandalf should spin the other way?" He remembered that. Other characters are Agent Smith, the Aerosmith chick, the Alice Cooper guy, and Sallah.
We were looking at animals for a baby and an almost-baby we'll see tomorrow. I swooned over a lemur and an elephant and an ostrich. RDC frowned when he saw more of the ostrich than its generic head. "I thought it was a vulture," he said, "It's ecologically sound for when the other stuffed animals die."
When I put my grandmother's clip-on koala to the tree, I remembered mine, mouldering among other keepsakes. Today I added another koala and two raccoons. (I figure they're arboreal and like being in Yule trees even though they don't sparkle.) I noticed my koala's off hind leg was about to fall off. RDC suggested, "We can have it for dinner."
I am married to Ebenezer Scrooge.
I decided to make like Linus van Pelt (or Emily Blair) and read the Christmas stories as given severally and contradictorily in the gospels. Fifteen of the first 16 verses of Matthew are begats, the generation of Jesus Christ, ending with "And Jacob begat Joseoph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ."
Why is Joseph counted in the genealogy of Jesus, no matter how good a stepfather he was?
I have been sneaking snorts of buddy fluff. Often when he's preening and facing away, I can get my nose into his breast for a sniff or two before he notices and beaks me. He's in a forgiving mood today, I guess: he was on my shoulder and I had my nose in his shoulder joint and my lips against his breast for a couple of minutes and he just let me. I really doubt basset hounds smell as good.
If I got up at midnight to see, it would be very bad luck to spot him genuflecting. It would also scare the piss out me, because cockatiels don't have knees.
I first typoed "kneeds." Ha! Cockatiels have plenty of those.
I am watching the Loony Tunes' Golden Collection, since my mother-in-law, perspicacious as she is, did not fail to notice the want want want note under that item in my Amazon wishlist. Bugs Bunny is arguing with an umpire: "I was safe!" " Yer out!" "Safe!" "Out!" until finally Bugs says "Out!" so the umpire contradicts "Safe!"
This reminds me that I lost an argument ("Is not!" "Is too!") to NCS once by falling for the exact same trick. I hang my head.
When my sister was home, she looked at the cards on the mantel. My mother's husband got a Christmas card from his boss, with a gift certificate to a local restaurant and a note: "Your awesome." BDL is a high school janitor, which makes his boss a high school principal. My sister clearly is not always the Good Daughter, because she was disgusted by this. My mother said she had noticed as well but not said anything because BDL was so pleased by present and compliment.
Having bad grammar and spelling doesn't make you a bad human being. It just means you shouldn't be in education.
We got a card from a family whose mother, who has a B.A. in elementary education, is homeschooling her young brood. The return address, on a preprinted label, read The Brood's.
The other day I glanced at a stack of address labels in the Dot Org mailroom. Dot Org works closely enough with government entitites to warrant printed address labels to capital cities, to offices near capitols, yet Dot Org, someone at Dot Org, cannot distinguish between "capital" and "capitol"? And I, happening by to photocopy something, was the first to notice the error in a stack of labels half gone?
My mother's husband gave her a cellular phone for Christmas. Being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, she is. That's not what I'm proud of.
What I'm proud of is this: a while ago BDL was given a hand-me-down, surely obsolete computer from his school. Its price was right, even if nothing else is. Today she told me that BDL finally set it up on a table in the...work room? My sister's former bedroom has, besides the computer, quite a snazzy sewing machine in it, both machines thus far unused. The room of misfit technology, then. She told me it was just on a table so far, not aerogonomically [sic] correct or anything, and I asked, "So you know that the monitor faces front, right?" and she laughed! She even continued, "Yes, it's all set up, with the keyboard in front of the monitor, hee hee, and everything."
She asked about presents. I told her that, as RDC retreated to the couch after the Great UnMasking with a stack of new books clasped to his bosom, I asked him, "But what will you read tomorrow?" and she understood the implication of far more than a day's new material.
Really, I should have got her remarried off years ago. We'd have an entirely different relationship.
I skimmed People or a similar rag in the grocery line the other day. It said that Brooke Shields has a daughter named Rowan Francis. Eh? I figured People had made an error, so I just looked it up. According to Extra, that's the girl's name. Francis, not Frances.
Looking it up, I see that although Frances was "standardized" as the spelling for females, females have always been named Francis too. Well. Okay then.
A woman I used to work with had a sign hanging in her cube:
"When it comes
To Francis, sir,
It's 'i' as in 'him'
And 'e' as in 'her.'"
Just before midnight, we paused our game of Taboo,* switched the set from DVD (either "Dead Again" or "Henry V": Clove was in a Kenneth/Emma mood) to Dorian Gray's Rocking New Year's Eve, and tried to pour sparkling cider for the non-champagne contingent. The cider needed a bottle opener, and RDC dashed upstairs to get it. I paused the ball drop at 11:59:02 to allow time for the dash and pour.
Besides that the ball had dropped two hours before, how much of an insult to time was it to Tivo the time-delayed drop?
* Taboo really isn't much of a game if you have any command of synonyms or culture. I couldn't say "Dutch" but I could say "Don Quixote tilted at ---" and go on to the next word.
Conversation over lunch led to RDC saying, "I always said I was going to be an inventor when I was a kid."
"What did you say you were going to be when you were an adult?"
"The kind of person who beats his wise-acre wife."
I was reading a site about basset hound rescue and care and came across something about anal sacs, which sometimes become impacted and need to be emptied (you hold the tail up and squeeze and whatever it is, which the site admitted was "smelly," comes out.
That took the bloom off the rose somewhat.
But Clove said this happens to their dog too and they have the vet take care of it. That sounds reasonable to me. The next impediment was one of the site's dog-readiness questions: Is the decision to adopt a basset hound a unanimous one?
It's really not. RDC wants an eventual German Shepherd because he knows to what degree their obedience and discipline can be honed. I say, and he knows, that we haven't the space, inside or out, for a Shepherd. That's why I downgraded from Labrador Retriever, myself. At basset hound, I want a used one, older, to ease myself into a parent relationship with a dog, and he suggests that a puppy is more trainable and will have grown up with a cockatiel and won't have emotional trauma.
The dog's been shelved for now (in the public dog library). Alas.
This morning, with Blake on my shoulder, I scraped and spackled more of the watercloset. There's more I won't do until I have convenient hot water again, and some of the walls need joint compound, spackle's tougher cousin, but I could do some. I spackled and then I trimmed some 90-degree angles where a previous painter had let a long bead of paint dry, and I scraped the scar of a one-time phone line (?) off the ceiling. Spackling is boring (Blake just preened), but the scraping made noises that he had to imitate.
A basset hound would not be able to help like that.
It is nearly long enough to put up again after November's choppage. I mean, I can put it up, but it's nearly long enough to stay up even if I, say, move. So here it is, up, and when I looked at myself in the mirror I wondered if I could deal with hair actually as short as this looks, because I liked this effect. I don't mean to look like Norman Bates, either, I was just hiding my chin.
But I can't hide my eyebags.
The setting: the Children's Museum of Denver. The players: JJM and JPM, who will need aliases, and me.
The first scene: a room with a road carpet (? a rug printed with roads to zoom cars along) over here, Duplo blocks over there, and a lot of wooden blocks in the corner. JJM said JPM would like the cars and Duplo and I said, "Goody, blocks for me." I did two things with the blocks: one, putting them all away in their cubbies, like with like, because I am all into organizing--magnetic poetry and proverbs, stuffed animals--which JJM knew from at least Thanksgiving, when my playing with JPM's toys consisted mostly of nesting the five-sided cubes--and two, building low towers for JPM and other kids to knock over. I would cry "Yea!" and applaud at each topple (and quietly feel slightly proud at detaching myself from my creations). One little boy wanted to demolish a tower, but his grown-up, thinking that would be rude to me, called to him not to knock the towers over. How should I have told the man that it was okay, that that's why I built them? I even built them wide and low with the thinnest blocks on top, for minimal toe-smashage.
Mostly I was stowing away the blocks, though.
Our next stop was a 30' wall covered with giant fridge poetry-style magnets of letters, numerals, and words, thoroughly jumbled. I approached the board to assemble JPM's name, and JJM observed to her son, "Uh-oh, this one could take Lisa days." (I hadn't even told her about the measurer's comment yet.)
I howled with laughter, partly because it was true but mostly because, damn, on first seeing it, I didn't think to order and sort the characters, but as soon as she said it, I felt the need.
Later, I mentioned dismantling the tree and dealing with the cards, putting photographs in albums etc. JJM said, "You keep photographs of other people's children?" Or something like that. Not contemptuously, but mystified. And yes, yes I do. This struck me as so obvious I didn't know how to explain it. I used as an example a card we both received: "If you saw Begonia, Ms. Begonia, and Baby Begonia at a party and happened to take a good snapshot of them, you might put it in an album, right?" She allowed as how that was so. What's the difference?
I freely admit I am a freakishly, unnecessarily over(-)tidier of blocks and magnets and books and DVDs and lists. I cannot see in any wise whatsoever how keeping pictures of my friends' children, as well as those of my friends, is freaky in the slightest.
I have two paintings of Granny's that I need to reframe. When my mother first offered them to me I should have noticed how cheesy the frames were, how integral they were not to the paintings and how easily the canvases lifted out.
The two have been sitting on the curb of my study since my mother sent them (with a jar of elderberry jelly on top), next to an 8x10 photograph of my mother and her husband that she also sent, maybe as a Christmas present. The red poppies will wind up in the sunroom, and the slender jug on the blue and olive background in the landing, when you look left on first entering the house.
Torpor:
1 : APATHY, DULLNESS
2 : a state of mental and motor inactivity with partial or total insensibility : extreme sluggishness or stagnation of function
Turpitude:
: inherent baseness : DEPRAVITY
The latter word I learned from Bloom County.
The other day I wondered if I was projecting my inability to function after 10 p.m. on a friend. I was not: she too shuts down and longs for her bed.
Torpitude: the craven propensity to take too many naps or need to go to bed earlier than normal people. My first new word since "stomple."
I finally raked up the cherry leaves, though I have to do the whole lot again. Also I thoroughly cleared out the former gravel bed on the south side of the garage for a new vegetable bed. It was so warm that Blake came out and helped me.
I really liked the narrator of The Human Stain, no one I had ever heard of named Arliss Howard (also Debra Winger). I am not so much enjoying the narration of American Pastoral--and why would Audible have two different narrators when both books are "by" Nathan Zuckerman? Especially since Nathan Zuckerman exists in The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
The reason I don't like this narrator is--well, one of them--why do people pronounce the g in words like "sing" and "thing" as much as they do the k in "sink" and think"? The velar nasal, ŋ, is a sound on its own, not a diagraph. It's [ng], not [ng-g]. Hmm. (The phoneme is represented in IPA as an n with a long, slightly hooked right leg, but both ŋ and ŋ might not display correctly.)
Today season 4 of "The West Wing" started on Bravo. I didn't like the character Bruno before, I think because of his personality. I haven't seen "West Wing" since I started listening to American Pastoral, but as soon as I heard his voice I knew. Ron Silver. Now I'm going to project Bruno's character onto everyone in American Pastoral, and the book doesn't need another strike against it.
This morning for whatever reason--I did have one--I asked Intern if he knew about Flowers in the Attic.
He replied, quite seriously, "Is that by the same guy who wrote Where the Sidewalk Ends?"
---
Minutes later I was able to tuck what remained of my brain back between my ears and sit up. The Giving Tree. My Sweet Audrina. Lafcadio. Petals in the Wind. The Missing Piece. If There Be Thorns. Falling Up. Seeds of Yesterday. Where the Sidewalk Ends. Garden of Shadows. The Light in the Attic. Shel Silverstein wrote 'em all.
<--Before and After -->
And the chip. In early third grade I fell off the jungle gym and broke my front two teeth. It must have been third grade, because Center School didn't have that jungle gym before then. Maybe second grade, because I did already have my adult teeth, possibly as late as fourth. Mrs. Newman, my beloved speech therapist, came and sat with me in the nurse's office until my mother arrived. The front two teeth were capped--I've alluded to this twice before--and what mystifies my mother and me is that no dentist since has ever detected any trace of said capping, despite my vivid memories of the fall, the blood, the "wust" taste, and the tape-recording, despite my mother's memories of being called, racing to the school, and having me capped.
Anyway, eventually I managed to chip off a corner of the right front tooth again. For ages I considered it Character. Didn't Sally J. Freedman's teacher have a deliberately chipped tooth? I was thinking it was the father's secretary in Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing but Peter was befuddled by, not envious of, her beauty routine. It's been a while since I considered it Character. I have been able to justify it, in my own head, as repair, not make-up. And today I had it done.
(The title is from Geek Love.)
Dot Org has a director, my ÜrBoss, and an executive committee (like a board of directors), whose membership, including its officers, rotates. So while the latter is completely refreshed every few years, ÜrBoss has been with Dot Org since its inception more than a quarter of a century ago. Occasionally the committee meets in Denver, and occasionally occasionally there is a function. Tonight, we dedicated the building; and when I found out that a magnum of champagne wouldn't be smashed on the cornerstone, I had no expectations.
Though I am no fan of urban sprawl and have only grumpily dealt with the move out to the hinterlands, this evening I clapped as loudly as anyone, and maybe longer, when the president announced that the building will be named for ÜrBoss, after his retirement, which sad loss we all hope won't be for years and years and years.
I talked to Haitch, who reminded me that I love Blake even when he's a footboy. We had a shower together--Blake and I, not Haitch and I--and the post-shower preening distracted him. I watched him fuss in a spatch of sun on a corner of the dining table, shaking off clouds of dust, and talked to CLH, who might come to Denver again.
I told her CoolBoss's latest two lines: Friday when I, dressed in a suit and wearing makeup for the executive committee's presence, bared my teeth at her, she said, "They look really good, except you've got lipstick on them." Later, talking about the next Big Top, which will be held in Salt Lake City this summer, she said, "Lisa, you have to go--you're the only one who won't mind no drinking." CLH has met CoolBoss a couple of times and likes her; now she likes her more.
Before the phone calls I smeared joint compound on the water closet walls so tomorrow I can sand them. Unlike scrubbing, smearing isn't so loud that I can't listen to American Pastoral. So that got done.
Then I walked out to feed some friends' cats. It was a lovely walk, and I sat on their couch with a glass of water and Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself prepared to cuddle some lonely kitties. They were having none of that, but two in turn (I swear the third is invisible) drank from my glass--after they had eaten their disgusting cat food. At the end I did get some Charley-love. Maybe by tomorrow they'll appreciate me more.
I stopped into the Park Hill Co-operative Bookstore and came away with some treats: Because of Winn-Dixie, which I've read but did want to own; What's Bred in the Bone, which had been my goal at the library (my next stop); a Newbery Honor that I haven't read, Dragon Wings by Laurence Yep; and a great Twinkie treat, A Royal Pain by Ellen Conford.
The library yielded two Douglas Couplands (Hey Nostradamus and All Families Are Psychotic) and A Great and Terrible Beauty, which I think Melissa recommended. Or not: I find no mention of it in The Usual Suspects. Well, I heard about it somewhere.
And now after a satisfying though dogless walk I am home with Blake, reading cheesy YA fiction and watching "The Sea of Grass," one of the few Hepburn & Tracy movies I haven't seen and supposedly one of the best.
I love them all, some in spite of themselves, some more than others.
Adam's Rib
I don't love this as much as it might deserve. I have a hard time not resenting Spencer Tracy sometimes, and I can only wish their relationship was as equitable in real live as on screen.
The African Queen
My earliest favorite. Adventure and romance and victory against the bad guys!
Alice Adams
I haven't read the Booth Tarkington book and I understand the movie's happy ending is not at all that of the book, just as Magnificent Ambersons got butchered. Screen filler.
A Bill of Divorcement
"You mean, there's insanity in the family?"
Break of Hearts
I just recently tried to watch this, but the print was so terrible I couldn't bear it.
Bringing Up Baby
Cary Grant, so what could go wrong?
Christopher Strong
The eventual fate of either of the heroines in The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly?
The Corn Is Green
A Delicate Balance
Despite Paul Scofield, I didn't like this. Maybe it was just too painful, maybe it didn't translate well from stage to screen.
Desk Set
Prescient and charming and she's not under Tracy's thumb.
Dragon Seed
Wow. Despite the same problems of Caucasians playing Asians that plague a contemporary viewer's experience of this and the cinematization of another Pearl S. Buck novel, quite a powerful movie. And because I hadn't read it first, I didn't find it as fraught with inadequacies as the mangling of my beloved Good Earth.
The Glass Menagerie
Grace Quigley
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
The Technicolor glares, and I can't quite separate it from knowing she never could bear to see it.
Holiday
I love it. They're both like Dinah Lord all the way through instead of only at the end.
The Iron Petticoat
Keeper of the Flame
This one's Plot Twist was obvious a mile away. I am a later generation of movie-viewer.
Laura Lansing Slept Here
The Lion in Winter
Although it's impossible to say for certain, certainly among my very favorites.
The Little Minister
It's waiting for me on TiVo right now. I think it's the sort of thing I should proof during.
Little Women
She's a great Jo.
Long Day's Journey Into Night
I haven't seen it in many years, since before the love really blossomed.
Love Affair
Love Among the Ruins
The Madwoman of Chaillot
The Man Upstairs
Mary of Scotland
Katharine Hepburn playing Mary Stuart Valois Darnley Hepburn. What could be better?
Morning Glory
Is it in this or in "Stage Door" that she speaks of carrying calla lilies on her wedding day? That was one of the captions in my wedding album.
Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry
Olly, Olly, Oxen Free
On Golden Pond
I haven't seen this since its cinematic release, I think. It might have started the Kate love. I'm not sure I connected this woman with Rosie Sayer though.
One Christmas
Pat and Mike
My least favorite Tracy pairing. It's not just that it's about sports, or even mostly. It's just cheesy.
The Philadelphia Story
I can't give this anything but love, baby.
Quality Street
One of those that I have watched out of sheer determinedness to see all of them.
The Rainmaker
I tried to watch this once. I'll try again.
Rooster Cogburn
The Sea of Grass
This was good for a while.
Song of Love
Just as "Casablanca" freaked me out because it paired Charlie Allnut with someone other than Rosie, Victor Laszlo with Rosie was weird. But it was good.
Spitfire
I didn't pay much attention to this, which I just saw last week, because Kate's Pennsyltucky accent was so atrociously bad.
Stage Door
I confuse this with "Morning Glory." One of the several I saw at the Wadsworth the summer of 1992 with ABW and RDC, when the only one I remember is "Bill of Divorcement."
State of the Union
A great movie
Suddenly, Last Summer
Elizabeth Taylor can act. Between this and the O'Neill, I figure Kate had enough Freud.
Summertime
Sylvia Scarlett
Cary Grant, so what could go wrong? They could wind up not together, that's what.
This Can't Be Love
The Trojan Women
True Love
Undercurrent
This could have been so much better, with such a concept and cast. Ah well.
Without Love
Better than I expected.
Woman of the Year
I suppose when the movie came out Tracy's character was more sympathetic. No more.
A Woman Rebels
Much better than I expected, though that iceberg thing, or the production code, meant I rewound a couple of times, not having picked up cues its original audience would have parsed correctly and been shocked by.
Another before and after, thought this is a before and middling instead of middling and after.
The paint wants a second coat on the walls and trim, though I think that of the ceiling is okay, and the window wants scraping. It's a lot pinker than I planned, though I still like it, but it clashes with the adobe-hued floor. A rug would be nice, if I could find one to reduce instead of emphasize the clashing.
Another coat on the walls and trim, the window scraped, floor moulding, a new lightswitch and light fixture, a curtain and rug, and, of course, a new toilet, and then it will be done.
Oh, and a door. The door will be flat white, like the ceiling, unless I can find some eggshell white. (The arch between living and dining rooms is flat white, and I should get some eggshell white to do that, plus this door.) It's on sawhorses in the furnace room waiting for its next coat. And a sign for the outside of the door, a W.C. sign.
Three months for a room smaller than a closet (and it's not done yet). I am smokin'.
P.S. Tex said the wallpaper and curtain looked like they were out of "Leave It to Beaver."--21 January.
P.P.S. This morning I took my box of 96 Crayola crayons into the watercloset. The closest match to Benjamin Moore's 2005-50 "Pink Eraser"--which looked so attractive and reasonable on the swatch--is lavender (bottom row, eighth from the right). The W.C. is darker than Crayola's lavender, but that crayon matches the tone and hue if not the saturation. --22 January.
Of all the movies and books I've mentioned to Intern in the past seven months, such as Egg and I acting out "Philadelphia Story" for him and all three of us reminiscing about "Breakfast Club," the one I thought he really needed to see was, of course, "Harold and Maude." He saw it, and he liked it. The only one he's recommended is "Red Dawn."
It's not a fair trade, which both of us knew going in it wouldn't be; still somehow I expected it to be more intelligent than, say, dirt. Alas, it's stupider than "War Games" and lacks that movie's charm. Intern described it being as fundamentally '80s as "Weird Science" and "Some Kind of Wonderful," but I just painted my bathroom pink, for pete's sake. (Maybe that makes me a pinko?) I knew it wouldn't be my type of movie but I didn't expect to be bored. Well, maybe the time and my age are wrong: I was devastated by the equally bad, and made for TV, "The Day After," which I saw in 1983 at age 15. (I realized it was bad when I rewatched it many years later. "Threads," though, I bet is still effective.)
I suspected this movie when I learned that the operation to capture Saddam Hussein was called "Red Dawn." And yes: the possible locations were called Wolverine.
Today's acquisitions: one (1) new toilet, Eljer "Savoy" model, which name cracks me up--and the other model was "Patriot," which also cracked me up, one (1) toilet seat, one (1) wax seal, one (1) extra wax seal, and one (1) package of four (4) toilet shims; two (2) eight-foot lengths of pre-made molding for the watercloset; four (4) bulbs for the lamp in the den, 40 and 60 watts; several (x) painty appliances; and two (2) crown molding ledges that we hung, with frustration at the stupid mounting system but no snapping or swearing, in the dining room.
I asked Haitch once if the dining table was too big for the dining room. She hedged that it was the right size for a dining table. It seats six without its leaves, and there is no space in the room for a handy bar or sideboard. One corner has a six-foot corn plant, another presently has a fern (exiled from the sunroom for the interminable building of the breakfast nook), the third a door, and the fourth has the buddy cage on the buddy stand on the buddy rug.
So now we have two ledges. They don't hold anything really useful, like glasses and decanters, but they could as occasion demanded. Right now they hold pretties: a platter we were given for Yule, a plate RDC brought me from Ireland, the champagne glasses we had at our wedding, the bread plate I made at Color Me Mine, another plate friends brought us from Italy, and a copper plate with a Pacific Northwest-style orca hammered into it.
We weren't in the mood to deal with the toilet, which means we have to deal with it one of the next four evenings or have a houseguest with just the one.
I know that the narrator's nasal whine did American Pastoral no favors, but that doesn't stop me from editorializing myself when I'm reading aloud to RDC.
Last year when I read him Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, I muttered when the farm was referred to as "Mr. Fitzgibbon's" rather than as "the Fitzgibbons'." I also snorted when Justin told Mrs. Frisby to slide down a post like a fireman's pole, because of course she'd know exactly what that is.
Last night we finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This time my annotations were obvious: when Aslan paces up from the Fords of Beruna to the Hill of the Stone Table, I said "Gethsemane" a lot (the first time, RDC said, "Gesundheit" so I kicked him). When Lucy and Susan joined him, I said "Mary and Martha" instead of their names. During the Easter Sunday romp, among the joyous leaping and bounding and laughing, I added, "And Susan stuck her hand in his side." Naturally I had to make Susan the doubting Thomas, since she's the lipstick-wearing baddie who doesn't make it past Revelations.
We are doing the kitchen. Packing its contents, removing the tile, getting rid of the dead downstairs fridge, bringing the working fridge down, setting up some small appliances downstairs in a temporary kitchen so also doing something about the utility sink so that it turns off without nine billion psi of wrist-wrenching pressure, removing the cabinetry, removing the countertops, repairing the walls, removing and hiding the dishwasher, disposing of the range and sink and insinkerator, buying and installing a hood, (paying someone for) installing new cabinetry and countertops, installing a range and sink and insinkerator, reinstalling the dishwasher, repairing the window, painting the walls, tiling between the countertops and cabinet bottoms, and possibly buying a new upstairs fridge. And doing something about the lighting.
We have a plan and the beginnings of a timeline; we have chosen cabinetry and countertops and hardware and wall color but not tile; and we have four months before it gets too hot to work inside.
Yesterday we chipped off the first three tiles just to see how it would go. Today I chipped off several more before dinner. While I cleaned up after dinner, Blake continued helping. I will remove tiles starting on the north wall with tools, and Blake will continue working on the south wall with his beak, and we will meet in the middle. I think "middle" will be "one tile east of Blake's starting point," but I appreciate his effort.
I started packing the kitchen, just a little. The china, into a sturdy plastic crate with lots of poppy stuff; the cookie and cake stuff like the spritzer and cutters in the box the sander came in; and bundling stuff like milkshake glasses and my grandmother's sugar bowl and creamer into one cupboard for when I get more boxes and packing stuff.
RDC applied a last bit of joint compound in the stairwell; when it dries I can sand it all and finally prime and paint that.
We got a quote on the cabinetry installation and, with that, now know the basic major expenses. "Minor" expenses are the hardware for the cabinetry and the tiles for the backsplashes and any under-cabinet lighting.
I still haven't replaced the watercloset door or razored the window and the trim still needs another coat plus I got some color on the white ceiling, but nevertheless I feel like after a pause of many months--since the gardens went dormant for the season--we are finally making progress on the house again.
I sanded the front landing in a respirator and safety glasses, swept the walls once, hosed myself off (my eyelashes were white), puttered about for a while while more dust settled, swept the walls again without the respirator or glasses, hosed myself off (my nosehairs were white), read, then damp-mopped the surfaces, then scrubbed them with TSP-substitute.
Tomorrow morning, the first coat of primer.
Also, in my brilliance, I painted the outside of the watercloset door in semi-gloss and the inside in flat (not even eggshell) white. When I do the trim in the landing I'll gloss the door. Define it, you know. I did razor the window clean. And we replaced the toilet, seating the new one much more thoroughly so it doesn't wobble. I hope I never have to replace another toilet. The wax seal between toilet and waste pipe gets extremely nasty over time. The first layers come off on the scraper like fresh earwax, pliable and not overly gross, but the inner ones are like the big chunks of dried earwax that that mouthbreather in third grade always had, that he could make a Bernie Botts' Every Flavor Bean out of.
But it's done for this time, as of Tuesday night, and the current project is not repellent at all, and I am showered and shampooed and cuddled in fleece and making dinner and probably will finish She Is Me tonight.
Yii. I have Sinéad O'Connor in my head because I am so aware of the difference in my outlook today. I have these hiccups of blee that I love, that I remember being my usual state of being, that haven't been for a long time.
So yesterday my psychiatrist and I (that would be one of the things I've been not 'fessing about, and the difference in my mood is why I'm 'fessing now) talked about why I'm not as comfortable socially as I once was. I have become, shockingly, an introvert, in fact if not by nature.
I told her three incidents from the class I took at Metro.
The first I told when it happened: that I mistook a classmate I had already thought looked like Sabrina for Sabrina. I think I wanted to tell her (Shrink) that I did see a potential friend there but already didn't know how to court the prefriend when that incident nixed (in my mind if not in fact) any chance of that happening.
The second happened the first day of class and set the tone for the remainder. The professor gave a spiel about how far feminism still has to go and had some clippings from recent papers to illustrate her point. One was Mr. Someone saying that sometimes it really is okay to hit your wife. Most of the class seemed to know who the speaker was, and his apparent celebrity meant that people would look up to and emulate him. I had no idea who the name was, so I raised my hand and asked, "Who is Shannon Sharpe?" He is a Denver Bronco football player, and my not knowing that, and probably quite obviously not caring about knowing it, that began (many of) my classmates' dislike of me. Shrink and I have spoken about cognitive distortions, such as my limited ability to react appropriately because I'm so busy being insecrure and overinterpreting (speaking of Cathleen Schine, "so literal-minded and fanciful at the same time… a black hole, sucking up the world around me to metaphorize it out of all recognizability") and however much that is true (very), I damn well didn't mistake or exaggerate the hostility of particularly three of them.
Once feeling brassy and superior, as we walked into the classroom, I asked one of the three whose murmurings whenever I raised my hand were the loudest, what that button on her backpack meant (MET with a slash through it--something about how the nickname for Metropolitan State College of Denver should not be Met). From my usual front right seat, I easily saw her in the opposite corner telling her companions why she spoke to me at all, and if she'd known it was me addressing her from behind as we entered the room single-file, she would have--here she jabbed backward with her elbow. Not just dislike: hostility. Whatever. For good or ill, I felt superior to them and their dislike of me amused rather than distressed me. Whereas, another time that semester in my commute home, I was so distraught when a random other bus passenger told me off, in quite foul language, when I asked him please not to stand on my foot, that at my transfer point I called Haitch asking her to come get me rather than spend another instant on public conveyance.
The third incident--well, it's just a good story when I was already talking about the class, so I didn't resist it, even though it has nothing to do with How I React When People Like or Dislike me--happened one Monday evening after I had spent the weekend in Aspen with CLH, who had flown in for a friend's wedding, and not done the assigned reading. In class, the first several people the professor called on to comment on the reading could not answer--no one else had done the reading either--so she systematically called on everyone, about the readings page by page. Because she naïvely used alphabetical order, it was easy to gauge what reading she would ask about by the time she reached H, so I nonchalantly skimmed it so that I could answer. An easy trick that continued not to enamour my classmates of me.
Shrink observed that all of these stories are about How Others Perceive Me. Yeah, pretty much. I like to be perceived well, and probably haven't enough inner resources to keep my esteem high when I don't get feedback. Maybe.
Speaking of feedback.
Last Saturday morning, I woke from an amusing if startling lascivious dream. I dreamt that RDC had loaned me out to JGW, and it was extremely erotic if not lewd, and amusing because JGW, while a great fellow, is no one I have ever found compellingly attractive. But RDC had been gone for over a week and JGW was due in a week so that explained that. Later that day, JGW called to report when his flight was due, and he asked me if I had a bed all warmed up for him and whether I had one of my hugs ready for him. As I told Nisou when we talked later, it sounded especially flirtatious to me.
Yesterday JGW arrived, and I returned from being shrunken in a contemplative mood that quickly dissipated into merriment. The three of us went to the Cherry Cricket for the best burger in Denver--well, three of them--and conversation. Flirting, I remarked that I cut my hair and mocked offense that he hadn't noticed. He said, "Well, your hair was never your most outstanding feature," and though I knew--I knew--he wasn't insulting my hair, he saw he'd have to explain himself. He said, "I'm probably going to embarrass myself here..." and continued to exonerate himself by speaking of the total package (I had anticipated my laugh or smile or eyes) and saying the hair was just what topped it off. I evened out the embarrassment by confessing the lascivious dream.
What am I getting at here (besides wanting to commemorate and publicize an extravagant compliment)? That if someone I did not trust as much as I do JGW had said something that sounded that much like an insult, no amount of follow-through explanation on their part, no matter how much I intellectually knew they meant something positive, could assuage my hurt. I don't mean only flirtatious comments either.
I mean that it's much easier for me to deal with people when I already have some foundation with them. Last month in Boston we played Pictionary and I was teamed with my sister's friend. My sister and cousin trounced us, but Friend and I got some brilliant ones ourselves (she guessed my "drench," which is extremely difficult to draw). I felt an immediate connection with Friend not because of anything in her personality but because of our tie through my sister.
I suppose that's universal, that it's easier to form a tie with someone when the initial boundary has been breached already, but I'm confronting the fact that I didn't use to mind that boundary, the fact of it, its presence. I used to be able, or to want, to bridge it. Now I don't bother, don't bother to make the effort.
I miss not having the social circle here that I had in school, but it's not moving that deprived me of it (though knowing no one here except RDC's schoolmates whom I was anxious not to alienate didn't help). It's the confidence I lost during My Bad Year, when I leaned way too much on way too many people, lacking discretion and restraint and even what slight tact I had cobbled together up to then.
Since then, I have been so anxious not to commit the same offenses that in the limited new social environments I find myself in, I am on my Best Behavior, and that's not fun, either for me or the society. Having to Watch myself all the time makes me anxious that I will Fail, and it's been easier to avoid the failing by not making the effort.
Which is pretty much the theme of my life. My epitaph will be "Change Is Bad" and "Crippled by Nostalgia," and a reason I am crippled by nostalgia is that Back Then, all this Having Friends nonsense was easy.
Shrink gave me a list of irrational thoughts that someone invented or compiled, and while I don't know what credence to lend the list (since I know nothing of its author), I do know I indulge in about 80% of the thought patterns listed.
I was kinda thinking, "Oh great, another thing to beat myself up about. Ain't I better off not knowing I am failing in these additional several ways?"
Cognitive distortions indeed.
I'm so anxious about people that recently at work when I, for a rarity, had to spend the day on the phone, I was getting sweaty and nervous at the prospect of each perfectly reasonable, professionally founded, call.
I know that Change Is Bad is a major reason I haven't attempted to find a more challenging, probably better paying, higher status job--although, as I told JGW this morning, I work less than 40 hours a week and get four weeks of vacation a year and have zero stress (semiannual evaluations and occasional phone calls aside) and that's worth the lower pay and status. The lack of challenge is probably no good for my mind or esteem, of course.
Do I have a thesis here? Probably not.
Anyway. I tapped a few notes this morning, when I was feeling bouncy and like my old Tigger self; now it's after eight and I ache from scrubbing the walls and being vibrated by the sander (that sounds not just painful but possibly maimful, doesn't it?) and I should see if I have a thesis yet.
Nah.
While at the Cricket JGW told his favorite lisa-goes-skiing story: RDC, he, and I at Ski Sundown. JGW remembered that I had been skiing fine for several runs but then choked on an easy green (and in Connecticut, the greens are really easy) and skied through a group beginner-skier lesson, and got yelled at by the instructor for my troubles while JGW and RDC both tried to excuse me and I shamefully apologized. RDC told EJB's favorite lisa-goes-skiing story: at Keystone, EJB was giving me a lesson on a blue run. I fell. I did not stop. Once at Whiteface in New York I fell and could not stop myself--and a perfect stranger dashed down in front of me as a brake. Thank you, whoever you were. I had yard-saled and, if he hadn't stopped me, would have had to trek back upslope to retrieve ski and ski and pole and pole. This time, at Keystone, my skies stayed on my feet, and I saw EJB grab my poles, so I continued falling with impunity. Basically I sledded down the slope, several hundred feet, on my front. As I now told JGW, I was getting down the slope and my feet didn't hurt, so skiing-wise I counted myself ahead of the game. Sledding's always more fun than skiing.
I referred to the Sundown incident as JGW's favorite lisa-story and he said no, it was his favorite lisa-skiing story but that his favorite lisa-story overall had to be the naked hottubbing at the wedding. I think it amused EJB and JGW so much because they had previously though RDC was marrying a prude, since I don't drink. Sometime during the afternoon, when most people were out front playing volleyball or croquet, I walked about with a bag disposing of plates and cups. Around back, I found APB and EJB talking about how possibly to enclose the deck, EJB in the hottub observing the Charenton stricture against bathing suits. That stricture was fine when it was just the two of them, but he was extremely startled when I skinned down and joined him. Last night in the Cricket, I told JGW I didn't remember him around the tub, and he said, "Believe me, I walked by" (presumably after EJB left and several other women joined me).
After the Cherry Cricket we met SPM and Begonia. Begonia's been going to this bar forever and the owner stood us a round of drinks and then a round of the same shots Begonia had had before we arrived. Five shots. Five people at the table. One of those people being me.
Moments later, RDC called my sister to tell her that I had had my first shot--an Alabama slammer, or something, Southern Comfort and something that tasted like Pez or presweetened Kool-Aid. Soon after that I left, having had enough smoke for the evening and leaving the men to reminisce about the Grateful Dead, to pass out from my imbibing, as RDC said.
De-smoked, I settled in to "Mary of Scotland" and TUS-chat. Between amiable, familiar friends in person and a common airing of grievances on the board, I did feel quite chatty, and some of my favorite Suspects were there. I chatted! I never chat.
So anyway, this morning I woke up nearly giddy. I am not still: that would make me manic. But I am happy, and happy to be so.
House:
Errands
Kinwork and Lisaism
Reading:
I am not, as we know, a football watcher. Today, however, I am not doing a damn thing more. If only there were still chamberpots. So here I am. Laptop, Douglas Coupland, and Superbowl TiVoing. When I started to watch "CBS Sunday Morning" and saw it would have a story on Superbowl ads, I tuned live tv to CBS and, what the hell, hit record. There's still Douglas Coupland and "Mary of Scotland" and "The Little Minister" until it's time to fast-forward in search of ads.
When CBS came on, someone was singing a tribute to the Columbia, which tribute was fitting though the performance a trifle twee. I don't know how Josh Groban could look familiar to me, but he did. He looks like Adrien Brody.
When did "The Star-Spangled Banner" become an easy-listening melody? Where is the shame in singing it as written? For all that Roseanne Barr's baseball version was foul and mean-spirited and out of tune, at least it followed the notes.
And what you learn from television! From "CBS Sunday Morning" again, Princess Leia is Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher's daughter? And Elizabeth Taylor was her stepmother for however long that marriage lasted? And she was married to Paul Simon for an instant in 1983? If Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor are friends now (and they are), does that mean Carrie Fisher and Edie Brickell are buds too?
Well, 2004 wasn't like 1984 either: no Mac ad at all. Oh, and New England won, which should make my father happy. And my sister too, I guess.
I was late leaving the house and rushing. I didn't rush enough to catch my bus; I walked the full four miles. Then we had a new person start and what with one thing and another I had a busy day. It wasn't until I was within a block of the house that I wondered about Blake. I could remember giving him fresh food and water and wheeling his cage in front of the living room window so he could look out, but...
I forgot either to put the stick in his door (which means that if he hops hard onto the dishes that latch into the door, he can bounce the door open) or to close the door at all. This I saw through the window as I raced up the steps, because his cage was empty (or full of everything but bird). I opened the door carefully not to squish him, then proceeded through the house at a trot, calling for him. The toilet had no cockatiel in it. I glanced into the bedroom: there he was.
He had spent the day on my fleece sock by the bed. He didn't seem particularly hungry or thirsty and in fact just wanted to return to his sock. His tail was filthy because he had squatted horizontally on a sock instead of standing vertically on a perch and occasionally taken refuge under the dusty bed (for a nearer ceiling than the actual one), so the most traumatic thing part of the experience was my taking an old, dampened toothbrush to his precious tail.
Good thing I don't have a dog.
I am going to sleep, watch two "West Wings," do something about my emailbox, sleep, paint the landing ceiling and trim, sleep, call RPR's baby shower, sleep, buy something for another baby shower and go to that in person, sleep, empty the cupboards around the stove (three of four done), and sleep, and that will be Saturday. Sunday I hope to snowshoe, finally, and cap the day at Hot Sulphur Springs. Also I am going read Everything Is Illuminated.
Coordinating the kitchen work is going to make my eyes bug out of my ears. After I empty those particular cabinets, they need to come off the wall, which will damage the plaster. An, I hope, multi-talented electrician will inspect the kitchen and attic (which means emptying RDC's closet, removing the rod, and setting up the ladder) next week and give a price to install the hood. At that point, the hood begins to make its way to the house, either within a week from the distributor or in a couple of months from the manufacturer; and as soon as the hood is a certainty, we can order the cabinets, which will also take six to eight weeks to arrive. In the interim, we repair the plaster.
I found two methods to repair plaster. One talks about plasterboard so I think actually means drywall. (Perhaps I can use that method to repair the hole in my study ceiling.) The other relies on luck: "Cut around the hole, making sure not to damage more plaster." It doesn't give any tips about how not to damage the plaster.
And I thought tiling the backsplash would happen at our own pace, after we had Other People install the cabinets and countertops and replaced the range, but it has to happen before the range goes in. That means we have to decide about tiles before the counter goes in, before we get a feel for how the counter will look in the room.
I toted a 12-inch square piece of Blue Pearl granite about the store and RDC saw that the cobalt blue sink did not match. So the sink will be stainless steel. Also we upgraded from a drop-in to an undermounted sink. The Great Indoors gave us a much more manageable three-inch square sample to take home. It goes really well with the pale blue on the back landing that I plan to apply to the kitchen.
After emptying the cabinets, my next step is to look at tile, bringing the granite chip and the Behr* Ocean Air paint card and the, sadly, mere catalog photograph of the cabinets along. It's actually a fun prospect.
But I begin to see why redoing a kitchen will always burgeon beyond the four- to six-week plan people think about.
* Yeah, Behr. I decided to paint the landing while standing in Home Depot, hence violating the vow we took never to buy Behr again. Besides, the front landing will be in Behr as well, the same sage as most of the upstairs.
** I'm not going to link the color because it displays online as green, whereas on the chip and the wall it's blue.
RDC wants to get me a phone that takes pictures, which would enable even more pictures than the iSight, so there'd be a lot more of these. That might get excessive. Here we have me on the chair, Blake tucked on my chest, the edge of a book tucked between back and arm of chair, and the arm of the chair (I want to emphasize that that's not my arm).
When I woke up this morning I was really disoriented and almost dizzy from bizarre dreams twisting together "What Dreams May Come" and "Angels in America." I called CLH so she could talk me into the present. I slept late, which is one reason my dreams were strange (either I'm more awake at the end of a long sleep, so I remember them more, or--my preference--my mind is using up the dregs of its material), and between that and the long sister-chat, I ditched the idea of painting the landing ceiling. It will wait.
I did go for a walk in the Preserve for the first time in maybe two years. I had avoided it because I remembered, I guess wrongly, from the last time I went, signs announcing new houses in the middle of a hairpin loop that had housed raptors and coyotes and waterfowl and kingfishers in wetlands: the big They were going to fill in the ponds. But either I misremember or the signs were for two mansions that have gone up on the built-in side of the canal, and which are palatially gargantuan but not on wetlands.
In the horse field--the particular horse field with the Przewalski (is it possible for a civilian, even a wealthy one, to have a Przewalski? that's what it looks like) and the donkey and the regular horse--I saw a rough-legged hawk, and at the apex of the hairpin, I overshot my planned turn-around point because I saw I think a Swainson's hawk. Also I might have spotted a peregrine falcon.
There were, however, no dogs. I was walking along in shorts, tank top, an unbuttoned denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and hiking shoes over about four inches of well-trampled snow. But this is Denver: the sun was out and I drove with the window down and was perfectly warm. (Let us not speak of my subcutaneous fat.) The occasional people I passed wore fleece and sweaters and even hats and long pants and were clearly freaks who thought it was too cold to bring their dogs out.
I walked and listened to Underworld and missed Haitch.
Then I visited my favorite library branch. Its architecture is perfect, for one thing, with a separate children's room and lots of window seats and nonfiction on another floor so you can research in quiet, but in addition to its browsable stacks, its main draw is the reader's adviser, a smiling woman named JoAnne who reminds me of my publishing professor.
I picked up Michele Roberts's The Looking Glass, which CLH recommended; The Beans of Egypt, Maine, very popular when I worked at Phoebe; J.M. Coetzee's new Elizabeth Costello; and a couple of volumes of Jane Austen because I have, ahem, never read Lady Susan.
Then I was late for the baby shower. I zipped down to Babies Are Misspelled and Grammatically Incorrect Depot, selected a present by triangulating the factors of registry request, price range, and proximity of item to check-out counter (and it sells wrapping paper too!), and promptly got lost in the Land of AllTheSame. Climbing Tree deliver me from Highlands Ranch and its beige McMansions. I thought that by continuing south of BAMaGI Depot I would find the highway, but apparently I crossed it without noticing as I looked for the Depot--I am used to approaching it from the east and using a Krispy Kreme for a landmark (I have previously visited that hellish pod place in Haitch's company, hence the doughnut stop). In Highlands Ranch, University and Colorado Boulevards intersect instead of running parallel. I ended up approaching the house by following the directions backward, but I got there only 20' past the start time.
I got to meet three newlings: Clove's...Pynchon (too young to be other than iguana-y), Margaret's...Buckbeak (six months old and very sociable), and Begonia's Scarlett (with the little palm tree pigtail most little girls have). I was grateful for Spenser, who has never failed to delight and amuse me even as rarely as I see her, because during Jack and Diane's unwrapping we kvetched (quietly, in the back) about the paraphenalia. Of her blanket, she said, "Needs neither instruction nor assembly." She asked what my "Prince Lionheart Diaper Depot" was about, and I explained my triangulation. Then she looked askance at me when I knew what a Boppie is. But she spoke of Trundlebundlers so we were both suspect.
But my favorite conversation happened with a woman whom I had previously seen only through Haitch. She came to Haitch's graduation party at my house last summer, and recognized me immediately today, but nevertheless had me mixed up with someone else. She came in right after Dexy and Clove with Pynchon and first saw me greeting the baby so after saying hello sequed to, "And how is your little one?"
I paused. This was an ambiguous and probably misguided beginning. "He's fine, thank you...."
She now had a gender, so could ask, "How old is he now?"
I grinned--this was fun. "He was eight in August."
"Where is he today?"
"At home. In his cage."
She laughed, clearly thinking I was being sarcastic. Someone with more guile than I could have kept it going longer, and if I had met Dexy's eye I couldn't have strung it to this point.
"I'm sorry," I explained, "I am quite seriously literal. I do have a little boy whom I love and adore, but Blake is a parrot, not a human."
We laughed and it was fine.
Doing the post mortem with Haitch over the phone later, I told her about an interview of Mohammed Ali I saw. He likes to show a disappearing handkerchief trick to people, but he doesn't like to deceive anyone so always follows up by demonstrating the fake thumb that is the trick's secret. I felt a little like that, delighting in the person's courteous small-talky mistake but not wanting to take advantage of her.
Also Haitch misses our walk.
Yeah.
No snowshoeing and no hot sulphur springs: the windchill in Grand Lake is going to be -20, and the gusts will approach gale strength. So instead I will paint and demolish some cabinets and hope that next weekend is warmer and sunnier. Four days of snow between now and then, as forecast, would make for great snowshoeing next weekend.
Probably because I saw JoAnne who reminds me of my publishing professor--oh, and also because yesterday Haitch's professor made the same mistake about Blake that mine did*--last night I dreamed of the latter. CLH, who organized my wonderful 30th birthday party, led (my class? a group of dream-strangers?) us onto a school bus that brought us to a wonderful, Charenton-like house. Charenton-like because of the fruit growing everywhere, but Green Knowe-like in architecture, with a little bit of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle thrown in for magic, and Phoebe for nostalgia. Everyone suddenly knew how to cook and created a feast with the produce of the gardens that everyone else had gathered, and we all pitched in with our various talents like the Country Bunny's 21 children. The occasion was a Great Expectations-style wedding: seemingly unplanned but perfect and sweet and filled with love. I don't know from what mental recess I pulled a groom for my professor--I think he was an amalgam of my favorite Phoebe patrons.
Now that's a dream.
* When we bought the house, I sent change-of-address cards to everyone announcing that Lisa, RDC, and Blake had moved. My professor, with whom I was in mere year-end card contact, wrote congratulating me on the house but mostly on the offspring she assumed Blake represented. I responded, thanking her and confirming that while yes, Blake ruled the roost, he was our pet and not our child.
I'm sorry, Haitch, but this is allegedly my "journal," so you'll have to cope.
I usually read myself to sleep. This means that I read, fall asleep, refuse to admit I've fallen asleep for the first few times RDC asks if I'm asleep, and finally mark my place, drop the book on my bedtable, and switch off the light. Often I refuse to admit I'm asleep because the marking and moving and switching might wake me up. Last night I woke from a dream in which I had finished my chapter, moved the post-it that is my bookmark, dropped the book (sometimes I lean it on the bed slat, against the table), and turned off the light. Like Calvin, waking from a dream in which he had already got up, eaten breakfast, and run for the bus, I grumbled that my dreams had become way too literal.
This morning I was grateful to my alarm clock (which hey! means I slept all the way to 6:30!) because it woke me from Yet Another high school dream. Can't I be done with these people yet? Taking French. Being the butt of this one's joke and that one's faux sympathy and the others' perfect blind eyes.
Last entry I mentioned a lamp my mother gave me, for high school graduation, as part of my expected dorm furnishings. Eighteen years, OMFB! Make it stop!
Gael Cooper linked to an Ask the White House session in whose transcript the contraction "they're" is written as "their."
That's at least one person whose spelling was left behind.
Oh goodness. No child left behind. I had never thought of the apocalyptic novels and that phrase before. If it wasn't deliberate, it's at the least a happy accident for them.
It just started while I sat in the living room and ate my breakfast over the morning surf (doesn't that sound like I watched the sun rise over the ocean?). Who knows how long it'll last, but it's falling thickly, not just flurrying. Please, snow, snow! I want to plant a tree this spring.
If there is anything happier than a cockatiel with a shoelace, especially when he has not had a shoelace for several weeks, I have yet to see it.
There is also the tile-gnawing cockatiel. Now that we want to encourage kitchen demolition, he can chew on all the grout he wants. But he still expects to be reprimanded for it, so he'll point his eye at you, beak bared (this would be "fangs bared" if he had any; the facial expression is the same), ready to defy you.
Oh, and the "No, I'd prefer to stay where I am, thank you" cockatiel. If he is on your finger and you would like him to step off onto someone's shoulder, or onto the top of his cage, or onto his windowsill, or down anywhere when he does not want to go, he is quite expert at simply refusing to step off while leaning back the better to keep his grip as you rotate your finger forward to tip him off.
I got a late start and thought I would get nothing done before lunch. How wrong I was.
Carrying the hamper down to the laundry room, I was disoriented by the dropcloth bunched at the bottom of the stairs that disguised where the floor began. I stepped out, expecting floor, instead of down to the final step. Ow. Extreme ow. On three points, I crawled upstairs, toward the phone, in sight of Blake, in sunlight. By the time I lay supine on the living room carpet, my subverbal moaning had evolved into sobbing. I steeled myself to unclench my hands from my ankle and examine it. It was the right shape. I could move it in any direction. I didn't need Willoughby to ascertain if there were any breaks. In fact the initial burst of pain subsided quickly, and it soon could bear weight.
So I wrapped it up tight and put another coat of paint (embarrassingly, "December Lace") on the front landing ceiling, up both ladders to be careful of the edging. There.
Then I had a lunch date with a friend of a friend. KMJ left Denver in 1998 and I last saw her in 2000, but we keep in touch and when her friend Paul recently moved to Denver, she gave him our email address. Someone raised her eyebrow at this--a date with a man I'd never met before without RDC, who was out of town--but at least called it an adventure instead of quite a rendez-vous. Paul was charming, a good conversationalist, funny. After bison burgers at the Wynkoop, where he taunted me about his Canadians burning down the president's house during the war of 1812, which I dismissed as their being colonialists following Mother England's orders, we wandered around the Tattered Cover, where I bought books entirely forgetting to use the gift card I was recently given (The Good Earth in a trade paperback) and discovered that one of Paul's favorite books is José Saramago's Blindness. I'm a fan.
As soon as I got home, I broke Blake's little buddy heart by immediately leaving again to see "Girl with a Pearl Earring" Chez Artiste. It was okay. It attempted to keep the spirit of the book, but it failed to convey the chemistry unspokenly explicit in the book. What else did I expect? I do hope Colin Firth doesn't become the new John Corbett, so beloved as Chris in the Morning that he's cast as Perfect Man even if he doesn't fit the role ("Sex and the City," "Serendipity," "My Big Fat Greek Wedding").
The ankle didn't break my heart. It hurt, but it would heal. What broke my heart was my pretty pretty iBook Moonshadow, which wouldn't start when I got home. And my Macintosh consultant was away.
Sunday I started painting the walls and trim. I know you're supposed to do trim first and then walls, but I wanted results. Flat off-white on the ceiling and even semi-gloss blinding white on the trim don't make for contrast against primer. Eggshell moss green does.
Plus I chipped off more tiles and packed up more kitchen.
Egg and I cite to each other uses of "literally" as an intensifier rather than a modifier. I recently emailed her:
Arkansas is considering a user fee on ATMs, like a nickel a use. This is problematic of course because how to collect it? When you take $20 out of the bank, does the machine dispense $19.95? Anyway, Tex said, "This is literally nickel-and-diming people." Happily, he didn't continue "...to death."
Also, ÜrBoss described a situation between Dot Org and another party but (diplomatically) didn't name other party. We discussed the occurrence in staff meeting, and Ernier (hey, we have a new Egg! his name is Ernie. He is Not You, but he seems fine) said,
"If ÜrBoss wouldn't have named the party, I would have known it was X because [such-and-such made it obvious]."
He had a valid point to make (though content is never what I discuss myself, only style), but I was too distracted by his confusing mood with tense. I have been trying to find examples of this for ages. He should have said, "If ÜBoss hadn't named the party, I would have known it was X...."
His usage strips English of its fading conditional or subjunctive (I never can keep them straight), don't you think? Saying "if ÜrBoss wouldn't have named..." wouldn't have been correct even if his meaning had been this:
"If ÜrBoss wouldn't have named the party [meaning, in the past-tense meeting he did not do so], I would have [because it needed to be named]."
I think there could be a correct meaning for that construction to express, but damned if I can think of one.
23 February, from another site: [Someone has not done something.] "I wished that he would have done thus-and-so." I don't even know what tense the second predicate is. The first is perfect (or past perfect?), because it's a completed action? Bah.
I don't have the words to describe what I mean because I know the language natively rather than having been taught it and have an ear rather than a learning of grammar. RDC has or had a really useful Spanish text called something like English Grammar for Students of Spanish, meaning to explain all the stuff you know because you speak it but do not understand well enough to implement in another language (especially one, like Spanish, that has so many more tenses than English). I should look up the names of the tense or mood I mean.
Perhaps because I am not as in love with The Sun Also Rises as RDC, I delight in any occasion to say, "Isn't it pretty to think so," because overuse of this phrase makes it less special. Kind of like in For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose most famous line I tried to read without 60 years of cliché robbing it of its power: "The earth moved."
RDC's favorite line from The Sun Also Rises, at least when he's talking to me, is "The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs." We strolled through Cooks' Mart yesterday and I picked up a stuffed animal, a dog with a halo or crown sewn firmly to its little doggy skull, and released it, horrified. (Banzai's hat is attached to her head with one stitch, which doesn't bother me quite so much.) I asked RDC if he saw the stuffed dog I'd just looked at. His face lit up with opportunity to use his line.
"Don't say it," I unkindly cut him off.
Meanwhile, right behind him, another browser said to her friend, "You always say that!" which cracked me up.
I remarked on the maimed dog, I went on to say, because in Whole Foods the other day I saw an affront to all deities and decency: an aromatherapy bear which is supposed to be microwaved whereupon it will be warm and scenty for two hours.
Later that day we passed the Build-a-Bear workshop, luckily along the opposite corridor. The vivisection shop is next to a couple of children's clothing stores and Neiman-Marcus so I usually can easily avert my eyes.
Who comes up with these concepts, anyway?
House:
Garden
Errands
Kinwork and Lisaism
Reading:
I don't know yet what I lost or what can be recovered. The worst thing is digital photographs. Most people probably could resend whatever pictures they've sent, but I hate to ask, having lost them through my own stupidity. The other thing is the additions and corrections to my address book that happened during year-end card-swapping.
Merp.
So. Saturday we took everything out of the kitchen (and the house) except the fridge, and moved the dead fridge out from the basement; Sunday we hurled money at Home Depot and CostCo; Monday we moved the working fridge from kitchen to basement, and sealed the kitchen off from the rest of the house, mostly. It has three doorways: one, to the sunroom (where the dishwasher pines for me), which is the house's spleen? gall bladder? the one that's nice to have but you can do without? is sealed, but needs to be breached once. because the bills are in there. Two, the dining room doorway, is entirely taped and sealed: no construction dust in the finished parts of the house. Three, to the back landing, is taped on the top and one side. It is strange to have to go to the kitchen from the dining room by way of the basement and two flights of stairs, front and back, but we will survive.
Our "kitchen" is now the back of the basement. The back of the basement has been a workshop for some time: it has a long countertop over four cupboards and an open area with a sawbench and a toolbench and my bike, narrow shelves in one corner, cut to fit around plumbing, a fridge in another corner, a watercloset, and tub-and-sink room.
I laid some planks over the tub, making space for a dishdrain and paperplates. I've been pretty good (it's Day 4) about scraping dishes into the trash and washing them immediately after I use them, but we're not going to use a lot of dishes: mostly Blake's, since paper ones don't hang in his cage right. The microwave's at the shelved end of the long counter, the coffee grinder and the toaster. I might dig out the popcorn popper too. We had used the shelves as yet another pantry, for warehouse-size purchases of Pellegrino and craisins and soy milk, but now they're primary storage. The workshoppy element means that we might have sawdust in our food, but that's good bulky fiber.
The cabinets are due March 25, and today They said they would like to install them the week after they arrive. That means all the wiring and plumbing and plastering and painting has to happen between now and March 18, when RDC's nephew, mother, and her husband arrive for several days. The water plumbing is, supposedly, not a huge hairy deal, and the gas plumbing can wait, if it has to, until after the cabinets are in place, since the range, not a cabinet, will be in front of the gas. The plastering is scariest to me partly because we've never done it before and mostly because, since it doesn't involve forces that could burn or blow up the house, I'm going to be doing it.
After the cabinets, They have to measure for the countertops, and I have no idea how long the wait will be between template and installation.
Sometime in between all this we will coarse-sand the floor, install a ventilation hood and range, repair the ceiling, rip out and replace the window frame, install track lighting on the ceiling (yet not remove the glarey recessed floods, a design duplicativeness that I am not One with) and build a new windowsill (extra wide for cockatiel pleasure). After the cabinets and counters are in place (and the new sink undermounted, as we are nothing if not slaves to trends), They will be gone, and we'll fine-sand and otherwise finish the floor. And then ruin it by rolling in a new fridge.
Last night RDC suggested that since we will be at this point On a Roll, we should commence with the bathroom. Ha!
This happened three weeks ago, the day before my iBook blew a gasket. I was reversing out of a parking spot at work when I noticed a couple of crows on the nearly flat roof on the building next door. Because of its shallow angle, the roof had kept the night's snow; because of the lip on the roof, it had kept much of its melted snow as well. The crows were bathing in snowmelt, and being as goofy as any other bathing bird.
I probably thought of it now because today RDC sent me a picture of a freshly showered buddy doing his drowned dragon impression. I should have showered him a few days ago: he's been smelling especially good. Intern asked what he smells like. Dusty, I said, but not like a dusty room--like a dusty cockatiel. Soft and sweet and...dusty. The dustier the better, but the dustier the more Blake wants a shower. You can distinguish, or we can, between his "I'm bored because you're in the shower and not paying attention to me" yell and his "I'm attracting your attention to the fact I want a shower" yell.
These crows probably didn't get as silly as Blake. I didn't see them turn nearly upside down with their heads between their feet and their tails in the air, but that's probably hard to do on a flat surface like a roof instead of on a finger perch. But they were very silly. They slid the short slope, flapped heavily back up, and slid down again; they fluffed their feathers out, making themselves look much bigger but not for the reason a cat might--to intimidate with size--but to get water deep into their plumage; they hunkered into the slush and probably would have appreciated a rubber ducky.
RDC was on his way to Amsterdam--one reason I succumbed to the convenience of driving--so I couldn't call and tell him about it. Instead I called Tex and made him look out his window, whereupon the crows immediately flew off, one to the lamppost right in front of the building. I told him to look to his left and the tracks on the roof. "Those are theirs?" he asked. He wasn't as delighted with the spectacle as I was, since he didn't witness it and isn't a bird person, but he understood why it was interesting and funny and enjoyed my pleasure in it. So today I made him (and Intern) look at the picture RDC sent me of the freshly showered buddy.
Yesterday we went to a first birthday party that, when we arrived, was a usual first birthday party--more adults than kids, including two fathers and their children without the mothers, which unfortunately is still worthy of note, because I travel in an enlightened crowd. Then the ratio flipped, and that was funner.
This was only the second time I have seen Gethen, and I am a huge fan. A pile of the cone-shaped birthday hats lay by the birthday cake, and I offered her one. She was uncertain. I modeled one, with difficulty since they and their elastic were child-sized, and said "how about it?" Her look was one of superb disdain, and I howled with glee (probably confirming her opinion of me as a poorly haberdashed loon).
Blake is eating carrot.
Every batch of buddy chow includes one bag of Bird's Eye Mixed Vegetables (corn, peas, string beans, carrots). He regularly hurls from his dish the stupid beans--although he likes fresh beans from the garden. The carrots, being smaller, he usually eats around without hurling. I know he likes carrots, occasionally raw ones because of their gnawability, absolutely carrot tops when they are available (for the same reason he likes peacock feathers), but I've never seen him eat a piece so meditatively and thoroughly. He usually gets his beta carotene from yam.
I don't suppose I saw a lot of photographs of other black Labs during my dogs' lives, before the web. Photographs of Labs in books are of show dogs who don't wear collars so much that they don't have impressions in the fur around their necks, of posed show dogs, full face or perfect profile, very few snapshots. Of course I easily can distinguish Belle from Sagi from Shadow, not only because of my age and other time clues in the photographs but also because they were so different in body--puppy vs. lean adult vs. chunky all her life and eventually old enough to bearded.
No Lab I've seen on the web has looked like my dogs. I tell personality from movement, and even without that, only in still photographs, no smily, portly Lab bears more than general resemblance to my beloved Shadow. I suppose the fact that she was too chubby to sit straight and instead would sit on one leg (which must have exacerbated her hip problems) is a major clue in any photograph. I miss my dog.
Either I have been better trained to distinguish among dogs than among cockatiels, or cockatiels all look alike (at least all normal gray males). Lots of the photographs I see of other people's cockatiels look a lot like Blake. So seeing my little buddy eat carrot made me wonder if he had been swapped.
Nah. They don't all look alike. This one's ear patches are smaller than Blake's. This bird was supposed to be a cock but it turns out to be a hen. Her yellow is about as bright as it should be but the arrangement of her feathers makes her obviously not Blake, and I link to the photograph instead of the whole page because another photograph on the page is of a bappie with a...ruptured air sac. Simon is 20 and looks a lot like Blake, and though Bo on the same page doesn't look like a hen, she doesn't have enough yellow on her head (especially behind her ear patches) to look like Blake. Blue looks like Blake, but who would allow a parrot to perch on a fan that could cut its toes? though Izzie, on the same page, has more black in his beak. Now, Ivan looks like Blake, including the goofy smile. Oh, I can't continue to go through those pages--so many have such tragic stories of human stupidity, boiling water and Teflon fumes and open doors and careless treading. And several Google searches for permutations of normal gray cockatiel male turn up "lost" advertisements which is enough for me today.
It bears repeating that no matter their color, all cockatiels--all the healthy ones, I suppose, anyway--smell really good, which dogs don't; and naturally Blake smells the best. This I affirm being intimately acquainted only with Percy otherwise. When we adopted Blake one of the first things I did was sniff him, and the scent almost made me cry. It had been less than a month since Percy died, and I painfully missed that smell.
Lastly, you can tell I'm a sicko because I think these little dudes are cute.
Yea! I can braid my hair again! Janelle cut my hair last week, taking off a half-inch but strategizing for growing it out. It was dreadfully shaggy, not having been cut since November and that cut being--immediately I left the salon--extremely cute and hugging my chin but nothing I could style on my own. It's been a year of various lengths from chin to collar bone and now I am certain I want at least collar bone. Previously she had cut it to be loose, for "movement," and this meant that although none was higher than my chin (the minimum for braiding) some bits were shorter than other bits and so short locks would stick out of any plait. Now, despite the recent loss of that half-inch, it is beginning to be all of a length.
It's not an attractive braid by any means, and cannot be braided off my scalp but ends at the nape in an elastic and another inch or two of leftovers, but I have missed plaiting my hair. I am too old for pigtails, and I don't like the center part that two pigtails give me and never mastered the part on a bias and diagonal pigtails thing anyway; so other than the small braid within loose hair, I have been unbraided for a year now, and I have missed it, the process, the result, the motion, the sensation.
I miss Granny too, but I do not require of myself to mourn forever. She's the one who taught me to braid to begin with, and I am glad to return to a braided life.
Even if I've said this, it bears repeating that when I say "we," I generally mean the opposite of the royal we. I mean that RDC did it. That doesn't mean I don't do anything, though.
We rewired the kitchen to distribute the amperage more safely and sensibly, added a junction box in the attic to be wired eventually to another circuit in the breaker box, drywalled over holes we'd cut for the wiring and supports for the hood, patched the ceiling, decided to forego the track lighting for now because it was complicated enough to be affecting the timeline; swapped out the kitchen storm for the screen, emptied RDC's closet for attic access and rehung everything, primed both sides of the shelves--tricky because they're all slatted and prone to beading, not to mention requiring scraping and razoring of all the previous beading--and one side of the doors, swept out the kitchen (once), tidied up my study and the laundry room and the garage and the furnace room, did a lot of laundry, scrubbed the buddy cage, knocked together a couple of shelves to use my study closet space more effectively, read 90 pages of The Stone Raft (the dog showed up! its name hasn't been decided yet, either Faithful or Pilot), and listened to several hours of War and Peace. I did the things after the semi-colon. And we both went to Mezcal, a new restaurant! a good one! with atmosphere, and not nearly as low-rent as most of the stuff on our stretch of Colfax (such as the adult bookstore and arcade across the street)! that I like! that was hopping! and walked by a new, Climbing Tree be praised, bookstore; and we saw that a yoga studio is slated to open next to Witz coffee shop; and we watched "Holes."
Also I took two "West Side Story" breaks, half yesterday and half today, because Blake cannot help in the kitchen or with primer and was feeling quite neglected. The instant I sat back on my heels to gauge books on the bookshelf, he scrabbled from my shoulder to under my chin, clearly requesting snuggling and attention. This evening after his supper and some playing in his box, he returned to the under-chin spot and tucked immediately.
RDC's new headphones are amazing. I tried them once, and the sound quality was great, plus I heard no external noise at all. I saw RDC's mouth moving but heard not a damn thing besides Susan Tedeschi so assumed he was gaslighting me. He waved a bandana in front of Blake, who of course yelled, and then I believed. I could not use my iPod while scrubbing the cage so instead played "West Side Story," loudly, over the washing machine between me and the den and the jigsaw in the kitchen. RDC came downstairs after one tool or another while I jigged from here to there doing this and that. "What are you dancing to?" he asked, loudly over Robert Randolph or Moe or Umphrey's McGee or whatever he was listening to--all he could see was me prancing without aid of headphones. "The dance at the gym!" I replied, probably meaninglessly to him who, sadly, is not a "West Side Story" fan.
Last Thursday we went to Barbie and Sabrina's booksigning at the Tattered Cover. Besides being a really pleasant evening altogether--tapas beforehand at the Fourth Story and dessert afterward at Mel's, seeing Butterfly and Danger Kitty and Margaret and Spenser and of course Barbie and Sabrina, finally using a gift card for War and Peace and The Brothers K--it afforded a few minutes between tapas and signing to peruse the 85%-off table in the rear of the event space.
One title made me seize the book and hoot. I might have perused it more but I was actually speaking to people (and have I mentioned how much better I am feeling these days? Verging on confident even). What I gleaned was this: Lyme Disease and the S.S. Elbrus: Collaboration Between the Nazis and Communists in Chemical and Biological Warfare.
What an absolute wackjob Rachel Verdon, its author, is. First, the theory at all. Second, even aside from the mediocre design, the lack of copyediting on its very first page convinced me that Elderberry Books is a vanity press (and so it is). Third, one of her first premises, that Lyme Disease was allegedly new in the '70s, is nothing anyone believes. Fourth, even I could see through some of her rhetorical devices (paraphrase: Such and such happened in November 1963 and so was clearly part of the JFK assassination), and anyone could see through her paranoia (robber barons and the military-industrial complex targeted Glastonbury, Connecticut, unsurprisingly her hometown; also unsurprisingly she has had Lyme Disease). According to her, many neurological illnesses, such as Lyme Arthritis and multiple sclerosis, are the result of Mengele's experiments and shipped into the United States at the following ports: Portland, OR; New Orleans; New York; and Boston.
Elderberry claims "Rachel Verdon has been much in demand on national airwaves to discuss her blockbuster new book: Lyme Disease and the S.S. Elbrus. Read it for yourself and see what's got the nation's media in a lather." I'll get right on that.
Last night I put away the year's correspondence. In the next few years all my rubber-banded bundles will expand into a third box, but not if I keep losing letters. One entire bundle is missing. I confess that once I threw out some people's stuff, years ago when I lived in small apartments and wanted to postpone expanding into two boxes and only people whose stuff I did not cherish and would never reread. But I would never throw out NBM's correspondence, so where is it? I figure I accidentally bundled her with someone else, which leads me to the daunting task of going through each bundle looking for incongruous handwriting.
I think the first piece I have from her is a construction paper heart, a Valentine from when she baked several huge (dinner plate-sized) chocolate chip cookies for her son and his friends junior year, followed by the occasional thank you and 15 years of Christmas cards. Damn.
One part of the project went well. I finally made a shelf (all hail Liquid Nails) so I can put the boxes across the depth of my closet instead of along the width, and I weeded out a lot of old job-search stuff and organized my writing and layout samples. That sounds like more than it is. My samples are the two magazines in which I have articles and a dozen or so books from Dot Org in which my name appears (in the acknowledgments, for designing graphics and doing layout). It's not much but it's all I have. And now it's tidier.
Okay. Most important, Blake will probably be okay. But for a while he wasn't, and he is my little trouper buddy.
Saturday the 20th we worked on the house in the morning and in the evening picked up RDC's nephew, mother, and her husband from the airport. We drew pictures, went to the zoo, tried to figure out Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, stayed at Keystone for a few days (where we snow-tubed, skied, took a private ski lesson (me) and a group snowboard lesson (RDC2)), and toured a (non-cyanide) gold mine and panned for gold on the way home Wednesday 24th.
When I brought Blake to camp I told the vet we'd pick him up either Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning. Nevertheless when RDC2 and I arrived Wednesday at 4:30 to fetch him, they hadn't trimmed his talons and wings yet. The vet techs did so while we waited, and, therefore, did it fast and, evidently, carelessly.
I noticed immediately that Blake stood on only one foot in his cage in the car, but we've occasionally nicked the quick ourselves and he has favored the affected foot for a few minutes and then been fine.
This time he was clearly not fine. He limped, putting barely any weight on his right foot. Especially after being three days at camp, he wanted to do all his usual buddy things, like walking the plank (the foot of the bed), prancing on the couch, and bowing, but he couldn't. He could not grasp with that foot, meaning he could stand on flat surfaces but not perch. Not bearing any weight on it meant that pooping was difficult and could not be done with proper ritual: he could not stretch his whole left side but only the left wing because he could not stand on his right foot, nor his right side but only that wing because he couldn't flex his leg back. Wednesday night, for the first time ever, we slept with him in our bed, on RDC's chest, because standing worked better than perching.
Thursday morning we arrived at the vet well before 8. Blake's doctor saw him after only a short wait and palpated the entire leg, from hip joint through the drumstick and each toe. He felt no bone damage and hypothesized soft tissue injury. He lent us an aquarium for a confined flat surface, recommended a tightly rolled towel as a soft quasi-perch with a greater circumference, and said if Blake hadn't improved by Saturday we should bring him back for x-ray. How anyone restrains a parrot for x-ray is beyond me, and happily it hasn't yet been necessary.
By Saturday, Blake could walk almost normally, and just before I called his doctor he lifted his bad leg over his wing to scratch his head. His appetite never wavered, which was his vet's other question. Today, he repelled up a towel on its hook, slower than usual and with a few false grips but all by himself; also he can bear his whole weight on that leg so as to scratch with his left foot, and to stretch the left side, and he can almost flex the right leg fully backward in the usual manner. He even roosted on only the bad leg, which must be a relief to his overworked left, though only for a few minutes. Tonight we might let him sleep in his cage like a bird instead of in an aquarium like a spotted gecko.
The biggest indicator that he feels better is that he has stopped being so clingy. He wants to trot and prance and go on expotitions, and he has done some singing in his box.
My best and dearest little gecko boy.
My ski instructor said, about halfway through, that I was doing well. He didn't mean ski-wise necessarily but instruction-wise. He said, "By this time, most women are either yelling at me or crying." What men might be doing, I don't know. I should have called him on that, but I was too busy being glad to be better than I usually am at taking criticism.
RDC2's snowboarding lesson didn't go as well and he bailed. He wants to try skiing next time because snowboarding was so hard. His uncle and I and probably his instructors told him that skiing is harder to pick up than skiing, and all of us told him that part of his difficulty came from his dehydration, and that no, Sprite does not replenish your fluids well enough. He flat out refuses to drink water, and he would not drink the lesson's offered Gator-Aid because an instructor half-diluted it with water not to overwhelm his system.
My skiing day started out cloudy, so did I think of sunscreen? I did not. Did it stay cloudy? It did not. So besides becoming tubercular from sanding, I also had leprosy of the face. Hence the atypical apastiness in the photograph.
The mine tour--the Phoenix mine near Idaho Springs--was really interesting. I learned new words, like winze, a steeply inclined passageway connecting a mine working place with a lower one, and that the surfaces of a mine tunnel are called the back, ribs, and belly. This mine, when it is operational, gets three ounces of gold per ton of not-gold, whereas the strip-mines up by Yellowstone that use, or want to use, cyanide to separate the gold get sixteenths of an ounce per ton.
We panned for gold--the miner said that that a few times a year someone actually picks up a nugget--and I picked up some pretty rocks.
Friday night we paid Intern in cash and Tommy's Thai to have RDC2 for the evening while the four of us went to Adega. Sweet heaven, that was a fine and tasty meal. Well paced, well served, and most of all well cooked. Succulent, subtle, and fucking delicious. JHT didn't connect our having mentioned it when he saw its mention in the inflight magazine article, so he was pleased that we had already planned it.
Earlier in the week I couldn't lift RDC2's 85 pounds to my hip to dance with him as my mother danced with me--I needed him to stand on something so the lift was only horizontal not vertical. Sheesh. When I arrived at Intern's house, they were watching "Princess Bride" and he wanted to stay, somewhat to watch the end, only a few minutes away, but mostly because he was tired. His sleepiness gave my pride a reason to squat to lift him from the couch and carry him the block to the car, where I reassured him we had the movie at home.
JHT had lit on the fact that Intern is Mormon, and so asked, "Shouldn't they have been watching 'Princess Brides'?" We began--sorry, Intern--mercilessly to riff on that: Kramer vs. Kramers, Twelve Monkey Brides, Brides of Frankenstein, and my personal favorite (because it was the best as well as being my own), Seven Brides for One Brother.
Last night looking back on the floor over which we'd just taped resin (rosin?) paper, RDC said it was neater than he wraps my presents. My presents have that pesky third dimension.
After confirming the need or desire for it Friday on my way home from work, this morning I brought RDC2's leftover groceries to the nearby elementary school: an unopened gallon of cow milk, drinkable sugar-laced yogurt, and sugar-laden puddings, the latter two in ridiculous packaging. Tomorrow I will bring the juices, in unrecyclable boxes and bags, because everything at once was too much to manage on my bike.
In addition to the dairy stuff, I brought my clarinet. I have not touched it since eleventh grade, so I won't miss it--what I miss is any dedication to homemade music. The secretary expressed her thanks for the instrument, which the school needs badly. I hope they do enjoy it.
Ever since I can remember, I have dreamed about my period the night before it arrived. Especially when I was off the pill, this was a handy consideration my subconscious showed me.
Last night? No period dream, just a nightmarish, "Brazil" style melding of Black Hearts in Battersea and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Today at work? Thanks for nothing, brain! Better luck next time.
These days I am drinking out of Nalgeen sippy water bottles, since the hope is they get dirty more slowly than glasses. Blake recognizes it as a water vessel, and he is accustomed to asking me for a drink if I have forgotten his water dish. He pranced up to it and bowed, so I removed the top--a sipper in the screw-on cap with a half-dome meant to keep the sipper clean--and poured water into the half-dome from the bottle.
He eyed it and me and it and me again. This was Different and Strange. Finally he gave it a try, and ended up drinking quite a bit, drop by drop (and I drank the rest). And then he helped me pick out pencils to color on birthday cards. He really is the sweetest cutest boy.
Except that it was an hour too short, the weekend was relaxing and productive and quiet.
How old I sound. There's an old "Peanuts" strip--from the ‘50s, I would say, because--if memory serves--Snoopy still looks like he does here in the first two rather than the in later strips--in which someone is trying to get Snoopy to play fetch and Charlie Brown says that because he is older now, he's more interested in quiet pastimes, like 20 Questions. At the mention of that game, Snoopy's head snaps around.
Anyway. I tried to talk myself out of going to Margaret Atwood but I had promised CGK that I would go and fetch a lower number than she herself could get arriving later (coddling a parent, I confess). When I got there I found Spenser (really, why did I alias her so? I haven't the foggiest) and gave her the number to give to CGK, planning to leave, but true to form Spenser cracked me up so I had to stay. We came up with a new band, Alexander Pope and the Beats. Because "The Rape of the Lock" really could be a rock and roll song, couldn't it? Then I suggested "Absalom and Achitophel," because yes I confuse together everything I had in Restoration and 18th Century Lit.
I did not wish to have a book signed so hadn't even brought my Oryx and Crake. I had in my bag only What's Bred in the Bone, which cracked me up. Not even Canadian women, only Canadian men for me.
When Atwood arrived, I was pleased to see she seemed friendlier. On her last tour--did I see her for Blind Assassin?--she was out and out mean. Perhaps by now she's stopped being resentful of being asked about writing science fiction. She allows as how Oryx and Crake is "speculative, like 1984," not science fiction. Even though it's all based on science and she made nothing up. Oh, sure you didn't, honey, because there actually are green-skinned, blue-genitaled, purring, ruminant modified human beings. You didn't make that up. Pat pat pat.
Spenser asked a good question, I thought. She said Steven Spielberg has said that if he'd made "Schindler's List" first, he wouldn't've made all the dinosaur movies (I hope that wouldn't mean "Jaws" and Indy'd be struck too). Does O&C's Cassandra complex (I paraphrase) make another Robber Bride or Cat's Eye seem to mean less? Atwood said no.
I scarpered immediately afterward, grocery-shopped, and made like a hermit for the rest of the weekend. I meant to return Blake's aquarium to the vet Saturday, but the range hood doesn't come until Tuesday and the vet can wait such that I don't have to make two trips to McMansionville.
I watched the final four episodes of "24" while painting fiddly slatted pantry shelves and doors. I scrubbed the entire kitchen, carefully not to drip on the new cabinets. I primed the east, short wall of the kitchen (it has no cupboards touching it) and the bit of wall around the door on the south side (also no cupboards). Not the ceiling, because eek, the cupboards--also because I found a bit of bubbled paint I had to scrape off and patch with wallboard compound--and not the rest of the walls, because eek, the cupboards, and of the trim, only that associated with bits I did (four doors and some floor moulding).
I uncovered, raked, weeded, hoed, and otherwise pummeled the original vegetable bed and planted beans, carrots, and spinach along marked lines (to distinguish between baby plants and weeds, I hope). I raked and weeded the south bed and planted some flax seeds. Should I cut down the sage? I suppose so. I noticed that the raspberries are still spreading, which made me happy; and that of course so is the cherry tree, which did not. I spent some little time laboriously pulling out and snipping baby cherry trees. Sorry, tree. Blake is so happy to be back outside in the fresh air and sun. He's still no help with the actual gardening.
Another of my hausfrauisms was to fill the liquid soap dispenser with the last from the big gallon jug. I filled the jug with warm water and used that diluted soap to scrub the patio furniture. I should have done that under the cherry tree, to water it, instead of on what's left of the grassesque, which doesn't need any moisture for weeds to thrive. Oh well. I like "grassesque." It reads like maybe I planted blue fescue. But I didn't.
I caught up with where I'm supposed to be for the TUS Ulysses seminar. I can't claim to catch more than a smattering of Joyce's cultural references but I do like piecing the action together on the minimal interior-dialogue cues. And I loved the Hamlet debate. This week's reading (episode? chapter? 10) is longer than previous weeks' readings, and I think begins to be even screwier.
Speaking of screwier, what was I just reading that made me think of Turn of the Screw? I try not to think of The Turn of the Screw at all. It must have been one of David Gifford's annotations and come from a source earlier than James. Shakespeare again, probably. Also, twice now in The Annotated Ulysses has been mention of the poem or song "If a body meet a body comin' through the rye." Yes, I like Ulysses, even though it breaks my brain.
Last night I was reading in Vito the Reading Chair with Blake playing in his box at my feet (on the recliner). Ulysses tires me, I admit, and a couple of times I nodded off, snapping awake when my head fell over. At some point Blake took himself out of his box and sat on my knee, waiting for me to notice him. I picked him up and put him on my intercostal clavicle for headpetting, but I continued occasionally to doze off, waking now not because my head fell over but because Blake would, quite understandably, snap at my hand when it dropped on him. Poor buddy.
The one grocery I forgot was butter, despite having obtained a dozen thirsty sesame bagels. This was a tragedy. I scampered out to the nearby 7-11 and thought of recent conversations about how to eat cheaply and healthily. At Whole Foods on Friday I overheard what was surely a visiting parent comment to his Denver resident child that he couldn't believe the selection. I repeated that compliment to the produce guy, who is always pleasant and eager to slice samples. Mr. Produce said the parent was probably from some one-grocery-store town on the plains. Maybe, but you could live in the middle of Denver, lack easy mobility and funds, and come across no more fresh produce in a week than an occasional overripe banana at the local 7-11. It didn't have butter either, and cream cheese is just Wrong, so I tried the grimy little grocery a couple of blocks away. I checked the butter's expiry, but if I die I'll know it's because of scary butter. Or excess of perfectly good butter, of course.
Speaking of scary butter, while RDC2 was here I chased him around the house with a scary banana, one that had gone quite brown and soft while we were away. I mentioned that to my mother under the category of Amusing Anecdotes with Nephew and she didn't understand the point. RDC2 is 10, and a scary banana is icky...does this need explanation?
This weekend I also slept a lot. When RDC is gone I sleep with all my animals on his side of the bed, all of them minus either Hamlet or Pantalaimon, who sleeps on my side with me. When we went to the zoo RDC found me an okapi in the gift shop. I say "Wapiti wapiti" like someone trying to start a stubborn, early model car--and I can never say "wapiti" just once--and RDC and I both say "O Kapi My Kapi," like Walt Whitman (well, like Robin Williams). Unfortunately, the stress in "okapi" falls on the first syllable. Sigh. Also this is a standing okapi, and how do you put a standing animal to sleep? I don't know. Also it cannot fit comfortably with the main five, so it will have to live downstairs with Tigger and Opus and Madeline and Josephine the penguin puppy. And it's not an it. Her name is Ophelia.
(Besides my animals, I also sleep with Moonshadow. This weekend I fell asleep to "Pride and Prejudice" Friday, "Sense and Sensibility" Saturday, and "Persuasion" Sunday. This is why I'm not allowed to have a television in my bedroom.)
Oo, and I reorganized the nonfiction. It's not all the nonfiction: most of it is critical or literary theory and in RDC's study, and about two shelf-feet's worth is in the living room bookcase, and the reference books on camping and birding and cooking are in the living room and sunroom. (One day I will get book cataloging software and be very happily geeky.) The nonfiction I reorganized is mostly mine: history, literature, anthropology, cultural studies, feminism.
I ought to organize by proper LOC numbers. Or not. I have a biography of Rachel Carson next to Silent Spring; and Boswell's Life of Johnson next to Boswell's Dictionary; but I have several memoirs and biographies without a counterpart. Jon Krakauer is still in fiction by author, but Touching the Void is not. Does The Tao of Pooh belong with the Tao de Ching or withWinnie Ille Pu, or does the latter with the Latin grammars and dictionaries and not with The Pooh Perplex?
Partly I am a librarian because I like information management. Mostly because I like books. Some because I like reading to kids. Plus there's a large wedge of fiddly organizing that I geek out on.
I rearranged the den so I could put up the sawhorses and paint with movies on in the background. Right now the dropcloth covers most of the floor and some shelves are scattered about, and I'm sitting on the floor with my laptop on one. Because I am hard at work, clearly. Blake has been enjoying this New and Different Set-up because he can go on expotition to the rocking chair and gnaw on its dangling cushion-ties but still see me.
The shelf is about two inches high and near my laptop is a paper cup with two inches of cranberry juice in it. Blake just now trotted over and reached up with his beak to the rim of the cup, ready thereby to pull himself up to the shelf. As if he can't easily hop two inches, but I guess he needed Up at that one spot and no other. I rescued the cup in time and offered him his water dish (currently his food is on furniture higher than mine: what does that say?), but he wasn't interested. So I offered him the cup.
Blake is the pet, and I am the human. I know this. I just don't practice it.
When Blake was injured, he was an incredible Velcro boy. RDC has been away this week and Blake has continued to be such a Velcro boy that earlier this evening he flew (fluttered) from the top of his cage (which I had rolled to the kitchen doorway so he could see me) all the way to me, except "all the way to me" was too far for his stubby wings, and he nearly landed in a roller pan full of Behr Ocean Air eggshell-finish latex paint (but I caught him). Right now he is tucked on my shoulder and I am not going to bed but watching actual live television because I cannot bear to get up and disturb him. Also, earlier he had a yawning fit.
I reserve the right to change my mind, especially if he ever does land in the paint or succeeds in diving into the toaster because he wants his chunk of bagel now, but right now I am content for my dog to be only hypothetical.
The summer after sophomore year of college, I lived with Nisou in an MIT fraternity house. The point was that we could get better jobs in Boston than in Storrs or Old Lyme. Nisou went to a job fair and scored a regular, full-time, temporary job in one of the umpteen local colleges' registrar--a perfect fit, given her school-year job. I did not do this but did the same thing I've been doing all my life: coasting. I earned my keep, kind of: my rent for the two months was $400, and we were allowed to eat out of the pantry, so I subsisted on freezer-burnt minute steaks, bananas, and 35-cent hearth buns from Au Bon Pain. I had a series of job, ranging from door-to-door canvassing for MassPIRG to telesoliciting for the Massachusetts State Republican Party. (That kind of cracks me up, me, that not the jobs but the companies ranged widely.) Mostly I worked in dead-end, extremely temporary jobs. For example, I got fired from a drugstore because my count was more than $2 off my tape.
(If I recall, it was $53.17 off. The manager figured out and reconciled the 3.17 or whatever the spare change was; the more serious was, of course, the fifty. The manager didn't even think I had stolen it but that I had mistakenly given too much change to someone (two 20s and a 10? I certainly could have done so, but with two different denominations?); I have always believed I gave someone too many lottery tickets.)
I worked in retail--I loved my job at the hat store, which was only Sunday afternoons but which I kept through the entire period. I was a receptionist in a SuperCuts sort of hair salon. I worked in food service, as a waitress at a supper club on Comm Ave and as an expeditor at hotspot on Newbury. If I had had any doubts about me in college, that summer erased them.
Tangents as usual. My point is that I did not work hard at finding a job. Story of my life. I sent all my paychecks home, and I did manage to pay my share of my junior year, but only because of my scholarships and my father did that bill get paid. It was my first summer without a beach, in a city--you'd think I'd've kept that in mind seven years later--and working evenings left my days to be spent in air-conditioned libraries and bookstores. In the children's and juveniles' sections, because again, coasting.
All of this is my justification--and what an admirable one!--for how many Sweet Valley High books I can recollect. I found a site of plot summaries.
Thirty-six.
Realistically, this represents about four afternoons tucked into an out-of-the-way corner with my chin on my knees. Maybe six.
Thirty-six.
Next I'm going to see how many Sweet Dreams Teen Romances, with which I wasted many a 12th grade lunch period, seem familiar. You know, aside from all of them, since they were all the same plot.
RDC has a bruise on one arm, acquired somehow while traveling. After we got up this morning he examined a mark I put on his shoulder. "It's almost symmetrical."
I hadn't been thinking of it at the time, but I decided its placement was a little higher the way owls' ears are placed, not quite symmetrically, so they can triangulate the sounds of their prey better. I said, "Symmetry is very important."
RDC said, "It's fearful."
I replied, "No, that's symme-try."
We had to name our pet after someone. Maybe I should have held out for Tennyson.
---
Before the family arrove, I bought new towels and actual washcloths, since we had previously had exactly two. Now we're using the new ones, and it's quite a treat to use unshredded, still hemmed towels. I bought periwinkle blue because RDC likes blue and I like periwinkle, and I didn't think we'd have a buddy problem because yellow and green have been his favorite colors before. But this morning we discovered a new fixation for him, the periwinkle blue washcloths. Wonderful.
---
We went to Witz, the newish coffeeshop, for breakfast, orange juice and swanky coffee and a blueberry scone (me) and a ham and cheese burrito (him). I finished What's Bred in the Bone and RDC reread part of Foucault's The Order of Things because he just saw Las Menenas at the Prado last week (and the first chapter of Order is about the Velazquez. Someone was playing the grand piano and I am so glad to have a nearby coffee shop. I hope it and Mezcal signal new and better things for the neighborhood.
Just before we left, an old, bent man entered. He carefully stowed his stick in a corner, arranged his jacket over an armchair, dropped a library book in the seat (Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie), and went to the counter to order. Carefully, he carried a plate with a pastry to his table. I fetched his cup full of coffee on its saucer and placed it by him. He thanked me kindly.
Why do I always feel bad about doing that? I am sure he appreciated the gesture and didn't consider me interfering. I think because I really don't want to be stooped and wanting a cane myself.
---
To get to Witz, we walked through two and more inches of spring snow! Hooray! The garden is going to go boom. It's a good wet slooshy snow, and around the bases of trees are stains, not from dog pee, but from all the dirt that has accumulated on the trees since the last significant precipitation--months ago--and now rinsed off.
---
I went to the gym! Goodness me.
We've been receiving The Denver Post on Sundays for weeks now. I have no idea why. A few weeks ago when we went to the zoo I gave an almighty leap at the jump-measuring place because I hoped I could improve on a previous performance. Your standing long jump is supposed to be at least your height, and I am taller than four feet. This time I did manage five feet plus a little, but--I am a 35 and decaying fast--I leaked a little. I whispered this to my mother-in-law to make her laugh, and she did; so did JHT, who overheard, except he laughed louder, not having to empathize. Later that afternoon, when I got back from renting my skis, DMB gave me something she'd torn from the paper, a research solicitation for women with incontinence. I laughed like a drain.
Today I read some of the paper, but if a paper is going to arrive on our doorstep, couldn't it be The New York Times? The front page had stories about DU hockey and a war widow while stories about the Japanese hostages, the September 11th commission, and protests in Taiwan were buried elsewhere in the front section. DU and the widow belonged in the "Denver and the West" section, which I enjoy. It's just not a paper with a national or international perspective.
Mostly the weekly wodge of newsprint means that Blake gets fresh flooring more often than previously.
---
RDC primed the ceiling and I put another coat of white on the closet shelves, which are a pain in my ass. I am halfway through War and Peace, anyway, which I wouldn't be if the shelves were less annoying.
Counters on Wednesday!
---
I weeded, since the weeds as well as my darling plants are thriving in the moist soil. I expect the vegetable seeds have been drowned, but potatoes are sprouting in the compost. I don't have a good idea of how potatoes grow. I mean, I understand how a plant grows from a potato, but how a plant develops other tubers in the course of a season I don't know. Do they spread a lot? How do you know where a potato might lurk? Would they work in my south garden? I have been tempted to grow potatoes ever since Nisou responded to my surprise that her family grew them with praise of the bite-sized baked potato.
---
The clevernesses in The Well of Lost Plots are often too clever for my best enjoyment. I do, of course, appreciate that Lenny is allowed to spend his free time in the park set aside for the overabundance left over from Watership Down.
Whereas the clevernesses in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses are far more clever than I will ever be equal to. Is there anything Joyce didn't know? How much everyone hates Leopold Bloom, and why, is grating. The Irish history lesson was nothing new: I am my father's daughter, and there are some exaggerations I took in on his knee. Or at his other heel, his left one being occupied by a dog, on our long ramblings in the woods.
Yesterday I remembered that this is one of the periodic large-item pick-up weeks. The city makes a run on one day in each of these weeks, and the quantity of stuff in the alley decided me that I hadn't missed the day. So last night I put out most of the old cabinets. They'd been in the garage for some time, except the few taken away in an earlier LIP week, and then I moved them to future second vegetable bed when the new cabinets were delivered to the garage.
On that spot, they were meant to act as weed suppressants, but the bindweed didn't get the memo. When the Grinch saw that Christmas arrived without presents, it came without tags, it came without boxes or bags, he realized that Christmas didn't come from a store and maybe meant just a little bit more. Me, I observe that bindweed grows without sun, without air, without water, and I realize this does not make it warm and fuzzy like Christmas but evil and bad and wrong. Like I didn't already know.
Still hoping, I pulled all the weeds and lay the drawers and doors (which I won't dispose of until we build the new bed) over the spot. Since bindweed clearly scoffs at the weight of full cabinets, that of mere parts will not deter it at all. But they'll block some light, at least. Another marker of bindweed's evilness is that despite it seeming like a plant that would photosynthesize, it grows just as green in dark oppression of a cabinet's weight as it does in unfettered grass.
Anyway, the good change there is that the old cabinets are gone.
Inside, another good change is that RDC finished painting the ceiling, just in time for today's good change, the installation of the countertops (and therefore the sink and its fixtures).
Another good change is the yearly miracle. The yellow storksbill is beginning to flower, and the large mats of thyme are about to burst into a mass of tiny bluey-lavender blossoms, and the vinca, which is spreading just as aggressively as I hoped, is the flowering kind. Only one plant, from the first planting last May, is so audacious as to flower, but eventually the easement will be a riot of lavender blooms in deep green foliage. (Yes, most of my garden is lavender and blue. I do have some yellow and white for contrast and emphasis. A change from that color scheme would not be good.) It's doing so well I will transplant some to the other easement, where it won't have the advantage of mulch and rototilling but won't have to compete with bindweed.
Since last Hallowe'en, our neighbor has had a prop in her yard: a glaring, gaping head, two hands, and two sets of toes, as if coming out of the earth. She decorated for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and St. Patrick's Day, with the dead guy still in the grass. Finally, last weekend the dead guy left the yard. It was Easter. Coincidence? I think not.
While I was talking to RPR today on the phone, I was washing dishes in the downstairs bathroom sink. ("You still don't have a kitchen?"--we haven't spoken since her shower in early February.) Blake, as usual, sang as the water ran. RPR said that when she first heard him--whose song is not singy but squeaky--she thought I was being particularly diligent with a dish, getting it squeaky clean.
More importantly, eight pounds twelve ounces! She is something like 5'2" with small bones. Ow. But the baby is the most beautiful ever, of course, with a full head of black hair, steel gray eyes, and exactly a miniature RPR; plus she demonstrated how brilliant she is by immediately nursing like a pro.
Okay, this was the freakiest fucking dream ever. My usual anxiety theme, but instead of its suddenly being the end of the semester and my realizing I forgot to attend some number of my courses, something totally...not. The emotion this dream evoked was so powerful that despite waking twice, the waking became part of the dream, intense relief, but followed by yet another tragedy. I have had high school and college anxiety dreams, about social and academic problems, I have dreamed about my family's deaths, about torture and pain and loneliness and the screaming heebie-jeebies (whose origin I just looked up: coined in 1923 in a comic strip, benign).
I have a pen with a light in the tip so I can write in the otherwise dark. I often write my dreams, because writing helps me remember them and remembering them helps me figure out what my brain is working on. Plus they're fun. Sometimes. Sometimes they're fun because I laugh at myself: still mulling over that?
This was horrifying. The betrayal was deep, it was all my fault, people would shun me in all possible ways, I had hurt people I loved. I woke up sweating and shivering.
And what was the dream? I had, again, omitted to follow through on an obligation, and the repercussions would ripple everywhere to everyone. What I had done was to forget that I was supposed to perform in a duologue production of "Guys and Dolls" (which I don't know and have never seen in any wise). My stratagem of not writitng it down at the time, or when I got up, or at all during the day until now, has served its purpose: I now remember almost nothing about it except the strength and the anguish of my remorse.
What the fuck was that about, I'd like to know.
I finally began a kitchen photo album, added several photographs to Blake's album, and a few to the garden from this year. The kitchen thus far has only tediously detailed before pictures. I intend not to post any afters (or durings) until it is after, but there's a peek* at the cabinets in the Blake album.
* This was "peak" until 12 May 2004. I blame this on CoolBoss, who composed a headline--"A Peak Ahead"--not about mountains but about forecasting. I hang my head.
My poor mother. She says that she and two women from her church are awaiting children to be born, all within April sometime. The other two are having maternal grandchildren but my mother can play along with only her cousin's grandchild and her daughter's friend's child.
Sorry, Mom. Helping you keep up with the Joneses would be among the last reasons I'd spore. Not, to give her credit, that she adopted that Tone this time, but I do kind of feel for her. With two heterosexual, undiseased daughters, she never expected not to have any.
I stopped working for the UConn registrar ten years ago. I never took a chemistry class in college (or high school). Nevertheless, as I read a selection of actually published examples of Bulwer-Lytton quality prose, I pegged one item as from UConn at the first alphanumeric:
"127Q-128Q. General Chemistry
Either semester. Four credits. Three class periods and one 3-hour laboratory period. (Students who have passed CHEM 137 or 153 may take CHEM 128.) (Students who have passed CHEM 122 will receive only 2 credits for CHEM 127 but 4 credits will be used for calculating QPR scores. A student who has a very high standing in CHEM 122 may be permitted, with the consent of the instructor, to take CHEM 128 without 127.) CHEM 127 is not open for credit to students who have passed CHEM 129 or 137 or 153; and CHEM 128 is not open to students who have passed CHEM 130 or 138 or 154."
(The CSUs employ UConn numbering for interchangeable courses.)
Alphabetizing thousands of registration scan-tron sheets over six years and staffing nine bouts of Add-Drop shoved certain course numbers deep into my brain, especially since every Bachelor of Science candidate had to take this pair of classes.
This morning I finally figured something out and declared, "I'm brilliant!" but of course being brilliant is of little solace unless I can crow about it to someone so I made Intern come over and look at what I had done. He listened quite kindly, following about two inches of my ell* of explanation, and when I wound up, he did my happy dance with me and then asked, "So do you have any snacks?"
I cracked up. He's seriously been talking to my sister: "I'll listen to your story if you give me a backrub while you tell it." I haven't laughed at myself so hard since--well, probably since I saw my sister in December, but certainly workwise--Egg said that thing.
* When I wrote that I just pulled a measurement word out of the air, but an ell! Because I, ell jay aitch, do tend to overexplain and at length, don't I.
Gossip. I love the gossip. I have my guilty-pleasure trainwreck journals, and I am not above dissecting them with friends. I love dishing about people actually in my life as well. There are, however, lines--perhaps arbitrary to an outsider but logical to me--that I keep to one side of. I hope.
I know two pieces of (offline) information right now and I am determined not to pass them on. When I'm brilliant and solve a problem, I want to crow, but there's nothing helpful here. One is only a tidbit that could be taken as part of Someone's larger drama if I passed it on to the Other Person who made me a confidante. The other is a matter of public record and has been published, and is much worse.
The element that disturbs me most--indicative of my own self-involvement, given the nature of the information--is how I received it. I maintain a web page for a group. Someone whom I barely remember after a proximal acquaintance 20 years gone, who maintains a page for a related group, told me. She has presumed before on the similarity of our pages' intents, asking me to intrude on the privacy of someone in my group for information about that person's relative in her group. The fuck, I wondered. The chiseler could ask my groupmember on her own if she though the information so vital to possess. And on what basis did the chiseler assume intimacy between me and my groupmember, and worse, between herself and me?
I didn't reply to the previous request and I won't reply to this. I could wish for greater involvement with my group, but I'm not going to buy it at the expense of others' public humiliation and private pain and of my own dignity and sense of decency.
I have 10 years of said dignity and decency to stand on, though that base wobbles on the 25 years of indiscretion preceding it. The element disturbs me because the chiseler and I occupied similar roles in our groups during their heyday. I do not want to occupy--and I don't--or to be seen to occupy, that position anymore. Nor that of an obsequious chiseler.
I should really get over high school. As if that weren't obvious (where "that" antecedes both what I need to get over, and, just as obviously, the setting for the above groups' formation, where the role I refer to is not that of class gossip).
RDC and I went to My Brother's Bar last night and I was a chatterbox. I told him what Shrink said, that she would like to see me self-confident again, "as you were in college," and I amended, "...yet acting in age-appropriate ways."
Age- and context-appropriate and, as I said above, with a little more discretion.
But not entirely repressed. We went to Brother's so I could try on new Tevas at REI afterward. The only thing wrong with my current, 10-year-old pair is that the Velcro has lost its grip, but can they be restrapped? I don't know. I tried on Merrills and Tevas and Chacos and, in each pair, skipped across the area to the shoe-testing bit of fake rock.
I am feeling better because one, I didn't particularly notice if anyone thought I was too old and fat to skip, and two, fuck 'em if they did. Also I am more sensible than I was in college, because I wouldn't've skipped if skipping would have been in the way of a more crowded store's activity.
I was looking for hiking sandals but most of the shoes I found had river soles. "I can't find my sole," I told RDC, after much looking. Then I realized. "I had to leave it on the dock!" A homophone pun doesn't work if the person hasn't read the right book. That particular scene in that particular book just wrenches my heart of my chest, and I thought, oh shit, so much for that good mood. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
As we left, we passed through a display of canoes and kayaks, one of which we'd like to have eventually (with a lake to use it on). RDC suggested Blake could perch on a strut and come along. Blake probably would hate it, and besides, the least wind would land him in the drink. RDC didn't drop it right then but considered whether Blake might be able to do this or that, and eventually I had to hit him in the head with a shovel but not before my mind was full of terrible imaginings.
Not too long ago, either of these things, remembering the leavetaking at the dock or picturing another way Blake could die, would have crashed me. I do think a means of societal control is to keep people complaisant and distracted, and it's not a struggle for me to remain angry and concerned yet, so right now I appreciate that these two incidents merely ended my giddy mood instead of blackening it.
It is appropriate that I have an epiphany while reading Ulysses. This morning I realized proof of God--not my amorphous Gaia ideal but the typical occidental monotheistic dealie who pre-empts evolution.
Evolution cannot have created human breasts: they are too ugly, cumbersome, inefficient, and purposeless to have come into being by any method as gracefully ruthless as that. Other mammals can engorge only when they need to feed their young, but breasts are an evil perpetrated on humanity by a vengeful, perverse, sadistic, heterosexual male god.
/rant
There are plenty of breasts that are proportionate and shapely and a pleasure to their bearers. Mine are not.
When RDC2 was here, at least twice he didn't want to leave someplace because he was too tired to move. I wouldn't've brought a child to McCormick's at all, but it was a Sunday and I don't know a lot of babysitters, so along he came. He resisted for a while our suggestions to put his head on the table and sleep but succumbed before his meal arrived. When it was time to go, he resisted being woken and wanted to stay, perhaps using his grilled cheese as a pillow.
Friday when we gussied up and left him at Intern's for the evening, he claimed to be too tired to move when I picked him up at midnight--although he was awake and watching "Princess Bride"--so I obligingly carried him like a child half his age to the car.
Right now I am not getting up, even though if I did I could read Gilligan's Wake in bed, because I have a sleepy cockatiel on my ankle who huffs whenever I move. Shit, he just tucked as I saved this. Now I can't ever get up.
Both my mother-in-law and I have created monsters.
What a charming restaurant. We ate in its potagér, surrounded by nothing yet in bloom for a kitchen garden but beautiful and scented anyway, with Siberian forget-me-not and lilac and I think a Penstemon strictus (it looked just like mine) that I groomed. Two of us had a nettle and spinach soup (primarily spinach, which was good) and then yellowtail tuna with hazelnuts and Jerusalem artichoke and also fennel, which was quite daring of me, and RDC had the special, a Hawai'ian fish whose name escapes me, with plenty of morrels.
I stole a morrel from RDC's plate. "You have no morals," our acquaintance observed. (I could call him either Vancouver, where he's from, or Toronto, where he met KMJ who recommended us to him when he moved here, or Wynkoop, where we first met. None of those works. How subtly to ask someone's middle name?)
For dessert RDC had crème brulée and I had a slice of flourless chocolate cake--quite predictable choices for each of us. Our third had a rhubard something with basil ice cream. I've seen basil ice cream around but never ventured so far until now, when I asked for a spoonful. The basil just explodes on your tongue, it's amazing, but I didn't like the aftertaste.
I have no idea what brought this up yesterday, but as RDC and I were eating sandwiches at Heidi's Brooklyn Deli before funding another Home Despot timeshare, a couple of our acquaintances at UConn came up.
Oh no. Now I remembered, so I'm going to do that thing that my sister hates.
Like all good campuses, UConn's had its characters. A street person wandering by in Denver reminded me of whatever his name was who panhandled at the Willi Food Co-op. He reminded me of Paul, a fixture at any food function, who would often pay to eat in the cafeteria at Shippee--a women-only dorm--who walked as if on Thorazine, always wore a parka no matter the weather, and was off-putting in several ways. Although not as many ways as Physics Phil, who was as much of a lech as Paul was but for men instead of women (UConn had equal opporunity sociopaths), and whose untrimmed beard he groomed only with his overgrown nails.
Physics Phil reminded me of ROTC Rob, of whom RDC didn't know at all until Rob hooked up with our neighbor a few doors down from our first apartment, the tenement. When we first moved into the tenement, my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend were living in that other apartment--and when they left it, these acquaintances--the ones who sparked this entry, I'm circling around--moved in.
RDC, being not as much of a gossip as I am, was unclear on all the drama attendant on this couple. But when they came up, neither of us could remember if they got married because they were pregnant or if the pregnancy just happened really fast. I suppose I should be proud of myself that I cannot remember such a meaningless detail ten years old and so far outside my own life. It's either that or my brain is decaying.
Anyway, I looked them both up. The things you find on the web. Like me. Hi lurkers!
Can I just say, because I haven't told a story in so long, that the man, whom I'll call Faun because The Marble Faun was the one Hawthorne text he hadn't read, had Liked me when he first arrived at UConn? In his first days at UConn, he took a temporary job for my office’s beginning-of-semester cattle call, and that’s how we met and when he vaguely crushed (as he told me later). It was my senior year and I was newly single, but a much different single than my naïve freshling self--instead of looking for men to crush on, I was oblivious to those who liked me. My attention, it’s true, was elsewhere, and my singlehood didn’t last long.
Our casual acquaintance happened in the humanities building, where he and I were English students, graduate and undergraduate. Two years later I was a graduate student myself, single again, and friendlier with Faun. He was interesting and attractive but intimidating and not among that year’s noncommittal yet fraught with baggage dating victims. Late in the fall he hooked up with another English department acquaintance of mine, and the usual amount of time later she told me she was pregnant with intent to keep.
It didn’t take much imagination for me to consider what the implications my own dating Faun might have been. I was fond of him, because he was brilliant and weird and opined that the ties of an ex-friend of mine ran the gamut from A to B, which I cracked up at and failed to recognize as Dorothy Parker. But if I had, might I have wound up pregnant instead? Or as well. Yii. A lesson, not that I needed one, that casual hook-ups were not my way.
A month after that child was born, a new school year was beginning. The first time I met a new graduate student, she had lovebites all over her neck and shoulders and I was impressed at her wearing a boat-necked shirt without embarrassment. The biter had been Faun. Two years to the due-date after his daughter was born, he had another with this woman. What RDC and I couldn’t remember is how many months before the son was born they got married.
Anyway, what I found on the web suggests that he is still interesting and brilliant and that they are still married though each now to someone else. Tex called me scary, and I’ll cop to scary for remembering and being curious about people whom I have not seen or communicated with for a decade, but I don’t consider googling for three minutes and skimming publicly posted, personal pages scary stalking. Just mildly stalky curiosity.
ROTC Rob, though, he was a scary stalker. He, like Paul, would eat in Shippee caf because it was a single-sex dorm, although since he lived in a large dorm and therefore had a meal plan, at least he didn’t have to pay extra for commissary chow. After the first incident--leering, immature flirting, deep breathing, inappropriate remarks, cornering a hallmate in the elevator, whichever it was--that brought him to our attention, my next-door friend Michelle told me she knew him as Grocery Boy, because he worked in the supermarket she shopped in and would utter cheesy come-ons to her as he stocked tuna cans even when her mother was right there. My roommate took Tae Kwon Do and during stretching exercises was randomly partnered with someone who caressed her feet in a non-stretchy, non-Tae Kwon Do manner, didn’t stop when she told him off, and showed no remorse when she asked to be repartnered; he turned out to be ROTC Rob. He leered--focused, menacing scoping with pouting and tongue--at every (white) woman in my hall, all ten of us, before first semester was out, and I’m sure the entire dorm knew about him and avoided him.
After my ex-boyfriend and his girlfriend, after Faun and the mother of his son, the next tenant of the nearby tenement was a woman I didn’t know. She looked fairly skanky but even so, when I noticed ROTC Rob there regularly--that apartment was two buildings from mine and between it and campus--I was surprised anyone would find him that worthwhile.
Worthwhile enough to reminisce about but not to google.
Oo, MIT has a nest of maybe red-tailed hawks, and the clearest web-cam I have ever seen trained on it. Right now a parent is standing over the two? chicks, watching and guarding and also preening its extremely fluffy belly. I am a bird sicko, wanting to cuddle with a raptor. I know this.
This is how the CD my sister and I made for our mother turned out:
Fiddler on the Roof, Prologue, Tradition
Because whenever we do something because we've always done it, we sing the chorus.
10, 000 Maniacs, My Sister Rose
More a sister song than a mother song, but a family song.
Aimee Mann and Michael Penn, Two Of Us
More a couple song than a family song, but pretty
Beatles, Julia
About John Lennon's mother
Cat Stevens, Where do the Children Play?
Well, where do they play?
Cowboy Junkies, Musical Key
"My mother's hands were always cool and soft..."
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Teach Your Children
"Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you."
Innocence Mission, Medjugorje
"You're everywhere
Everywhere"
About the Virgin Mary, so religious though not her religious. Also pretty.
Shirley Horn, Summertime
My mother told me she sang this to me when I was a baby. I can't quite imagine it, but it makes me happy to think of her singing "And your ma is so good-looking, baby/ She's a-looking good now."
Joni Mitchell, Love,
With a Biblical source even: "As a child I spoke as a child/ I thought and I understood as a child/ But when I became a woman/ I put away childish things."
Kate Bush, reaching out
"See how the flower leans instinctively/ Toward the light./ See how the heart reaches out instinctively/ For no reason but to touch." Also pretty
Kate Bush, this womans work
"I stand outside this woman's work,/ This woman's world./ Ooh, it's hard on the man,/ Now his part is over./ Now starts the craft of the father."
Louis Armstrong, What A Wonderful World
"I hear babies cry, I watch them grow/ They'll learn much more than I'll never know/ And I think to myself what a wonderful world"
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Our House
"I'll light the fire, while you place the flowers/ In the vase that you bought today."
Michelle Shocked, When I Grow Up
"Uh huh, that's what I said a hundred and twenty babies/ We'll raise ‘em on tiger's milk and green bananas..." I love this song. It's so silly and loving.
Shriekback, Cradle Song
A lullaby: "May the fire be your friend and the sea rock you gently,/
May the moon light your way till the wind sets you free."
Godspell, By My Side
Our favorite song from our favorite musical.
Sting, The Lazarus Heart
About his mother: "Every day another miracle/ Only death will tear us apart"
They Might Be Giants, Birdhouse in Your Soul
Another delightful love song: "Say I'm the only bee in your bonnet/ Make a little birdhouse in your soul."
Fiddler on the Roof, Sunrise, Sunset
I should have had just songs from musicals, though I can't think of an appropriate one from "Sound of Music." This is about parents watching their children grow up seemingly in a day.
The Waterboys, The Stolen Child
She used to be Irish, and Yeats is beautiful. "Come away, human child to the water and the wild/ With a faery, hand in hand/ For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
I am going to have to restrain myself mightily. My sister probably is moving in with our mother and BDL. The stories, they will flood in, and I have not enough thumbs for the dike. Already we have discovered that she--an LPN--had never heard of Tourette's Syndrome ("that sounds serious") and that a wooden toilet seat must be left up "to let the wood breathe."
Yesterday I strategically suggested a trip to CostCo after work, achieving the dual purposes of more contact lenses for me and not having to bike home in 35-degree rain in no more than a t-shirt. (Today I took the bus, and possibly will bike home.)
When we got home there was snow too, dime-sized flakes that melted at contact with any surface. I filled the birdfeeder for the second time that day, a dispensation I wouldn't have made except for the unseasonable cold in nesting season. (I hope my robins are okay--robins are nesting in one of my plum trees!) We watched sparrows and finches shelter on the windowsills and utility lines under the eaves. RDC wanted to offer them the house, which I think would be fine. We need a sparrow to eat the moths that have suddenly erupted. Last year was a peak in the miller moth population and this year enough are left over that sparrows, so excited in their pursuit of fluttering yumminess, do not think to dodge traffic.
This morning I watched a soaking wet squirrel on my neighbor's windowsill groom itself. It's so unfair that they can be so cute. It washed its face like a cat or a rabbit, it pulled its tail through its claws to comb it and applied the water it wrang out to its hind feet, the muddiness of which I never would have thought would bother a squirrel.
Also at the bus stop I met a four-month-old golden retriever puppy named Mason.
It is entirely possibly I am way the fuck too easily amused. I am proud, though, to have proof that if I had a video camera, movies of Blake are not all I would film. I do have a love-hate relationship with the little fuckers, but this morning I was glad to see this one.
I showed one picture to ÜberBoss and he giggled (he has a great giggle). Actually I emailed it to him and I heard him laugh from my cube, when one of the worst things about the new building is that I am farther away from him than across the hall and therefore hear his giggle less. Haitch, stop reading now. Anyway, he told me that in his first Denver apartment, he kept seeing wet dead squirrels in the alley until finally he asked his landlord (who lived on the other floor of the house). The landlord shamefacedly admitted to having tired of bringing the squirrels he'd captured in Havahart (non-lethal) traps to City Park so now was drowning them, trap and all, in his bathtub.
The worst part of that story to me is why the fuck do these people bring their squirrels to City Park? I live too near City Park to think that's a good idea. The best part is, of course, the irony of drowning Havaharted squirrels.
Haitch and McCarthy were in town today for McCarthy's defense. She called the house to get my work number, which I had been too foolish to provide earlier, and she and RDC talked, and then she called me at work to set up a meeting time and place. I asked if she and McCarthy would have time to see the kitchen before they leave tonight (without me--I am not going to her unshower in Oklahoma tomorrow, which makes us sad). She cracked up, because that's exactly what RDC asked. She said, "It's not important that I see RDC or Blake but I have to see that hood."
I picked her up at noon and we spent the afternoon shopping after toasting Dr. McCarthy. Lord, I miss shopping with Haitch. The camera did not come out to document our hideous finds, as it has before, but our negligently omitting to document them did not mean they were less hideous. We did not find her wedding shoes, but we did debate various possibilities of Things On The Head, like veils and tiaras and earrings and necklaces and hair.
Her hair! is longer than mine. That is so odd. She accompanied me for my mourning-donation chop, and I have seen her only once since, last May right after she and McCarthy and their square of sidewalk all got together. It is only just longer, but in three months when I see her next hers'll be way longer (especially after my pre-wedding cut).
A bunch of us had dinner at Mezcal afterward. I asked the server to take a picture of the seven of us, which she did, the seven of us in the lower left, the giant chihuahua painting in the upper right, and two quarters of the poorly framed shot wasted. And that chihuahua is scary.
The red-tailed hawk bappies are thriving and huge at MIT, but the robins in my plum tree are not. I have not seen the parents in days. I did find one half of a robin's egg in the yard, but I can't tell if it hatched normally or was cracked by a crow or a foul evil cat or by a fall. Without the parents, even if a chick did hatch, it's dead now. Hooray. So I'm watching the hawks again.
I grow the most brilliant children. My youngest just graduated with a 4.0 and stopped at the Formigny B&B with her roadtrip companion on their meandering way east. I disappointed her companion with how few embarrassing babysitting stories I had, but I lived up to the warning she received from my children's mother at graduation this weekend that I remember every book I've ever read and will talk your ear off and never wear shoes (straight out of the car, she pointed at my feet and observed, "No shoes!"). The entire family is going to Ireland ("Do you need to bring a babysitter?") and my oldest is starting a global jaunt from there. My middle and oldest just went to the March for Women's Lives in D.C. In another family of victims, one sister got a job in her field, no mean feat, and the other is a high school chemistry teacher--hooray, because there can't be too many female ones. (Our high school had no female science or math teachers. Actually a majority of the teachers were male, and I wonder if that's because our teacher salaries were higher than average.)
RKC is looking forward to reading for pleasure again. Because she just took two semesters of Portuguese I told her about José Saramago ("Read those of his books with dogs"); because we were sitting in the living room I pulled The Golden Compass from the shelf and shoved His Dark Materials down her throat; because we both like Lemony Snickett I told her Sunny's best word from Slippery Slope, "Buscheney," meaning someone without regard for others; and because she said she wanted to read The Giver I actually gave her my copy. I told her that while it's great for kids, as an adult she might be disappointed by the holes in its structure. "And not good Holes either." She's also looking forward to Life of Pi and The DaVinci Code.
For graduation I gave her Sandra Boynton's version of Oh, the Places You'll Go!, Yay, You! because while Dr. Seuss is of course superior, everyone gives everyone that. Also a little card version of The Book of Questions to entertain herself and her friend in the car, "If You Were a Cereal, Which One Would You Be?" And, because I am a child of the '80s and my sister's suggestion of a Mother's Day present reminded me I could do this, two mix CDs, RKC & A's Roadtrip 2004 and RKC Graduation. Making the mix CDs occurred to me yesterday at work, and the first song I thought of belonged in both mixes, Cat Stevens's "On the Road to Find Out," which is good because, reading the song lists, RKC said, "Oh, I love Cat Stevens!" (and then, "Who is Kate Bush?").
Yeah, I made a mix tape for someone 13 years my junior. I was going to say, "I am sure I shall be monstrous glad of Miss Marianne's company, whether Miss Dashwood will go or not, only the more the merrier say I, and I thought it would be more comfortable for them to be together; because if they got tired of me, they might talk to one another, and laugh at my odd ways behind my back. But one or the other, if not both of them, I must have," but I didn't, because that book thing, you know.
(That book thing didn't stop my quoting to my new reading-friend-at-work (we sit mostly silently, but together, reading books we have propped on our meals), yesterday, after I coaxed her out of lunchroom onto the patio and into a stiff breeze, by way of apology, "She is abominably rude to keep Charlotte out of doors in all this wind. Why does she not come in?" She is a reading companion, so she understood, so mleah.)
Today as we strolled through the park I saw two boys, about nine, hurl a stout branch into the pond amongst a stampede of ducklings. The newlings fled, churning their little drumsticks and chirruping, and I don't think any was hit, but the hurler was certainly aiming for them and not just throwing an object to make a splash. "That's terrific," I said to them--they had so little shame that they did this despite being our being so close they could hear a regular speaking volume, and they turned to my voice. "That's just what I like to do around babies, to throw sticks at them. You should be very proud."
Hellions. Apparently I am out to correct stupid behavior, one event after another.
For my birthday I got a hooked-up stove! It arrived Saturday and just getting it into the kitchen was an adventure. There were two delivery men, a short wiry one and a tall skinny one, and the skinny one really could not manage his share. Also the kitchen counter protudes into the doorway, which we knew, but so much so that the range had to go up and over it, which was a surprise. Skinny nearly dropped it, but RDC supported it. There it hulked, the gorilla in the room, for only two days. The universal fitting kit wasn't universal, but RDC was able to find the connection bits he needed at a specialty plumbing shop. So Monday afternoon he and SPM got it into place, with gas and electricity, and Monday night he made his grandfather's favorite dish of sausage and peppers.
(What you're not supposed to notice, but which I will not scruple to remark upon to all and sundry, is now it becomes obvious that the left wall cabinet was installed too far to the left. While the hood and stove are flush to their cabinets and counters, the hood is not centered over the range. What stands out is that between left cabinet and shelf are four inches and on the right, two and a half. It is a more important error than the notch in the tile...sshhhh.)
Is it common for permanent, established, on-the-grid residences to use propane instead of natural gas? My mother assumed it was the former, while the latter strikes me as obvious. Even rural areas of Connecticut are on the gas grid, so it shouldn't've been so mysterious to her.
I also received a fresh batch of pictures of Emlet, who continues to be delightfully beautiful (but apparently in for quite a shock when Siblet arrives next month), and a phone call from KREL in Paris, and a gardening hat from my mother (which I asked for, floppy and with a wide crown, and which she embellished with a lavender ribbon, and which would be perfect except it doesn't absorb sweat), and a check that will become books from my father, and from my sister a book of historic photographs of Old Lyme that would have been much better with a few more useful captions and a few less foolish ones about the lack of computers in 1930.
My mother-in-law, DMB, is moving house. Her husband has an African Gray parrot who lets no one but the husband touch him. Taz's cage is enormous and apparently they don't have a travel cage for him, so this morning, DMB used a perch to step him up and bring him out to the car. His flight feathers haven't been trimmed in a long time, and Taz usually doesn't go outside farther than the screened-in porch (this is Florida), so I guess he thought, Hey, freedom! and he flew. Not very far, just across the street (eek!) and over the pond (double eek!) whereupon he got tired and landed (unspeakable eek).
Parrots can't swim.
But this one could flap long enough for neighbors to emerge at DMB's screaming (she can't swim (!!!) and is afraid of water, especially since these artificial lakes in Florida can contain alligators and water moccasins) including the neighbor's guest, who flung off his clothes, dove into the pond, swam out to the bird, and swam back holding him over his head.
Back on shore, Taz announced to his rescuer, "Good job!"
Later, DMB shook her finger at Taz and said, "Just you wait until I tell your daddy what you did!" and Taz whispered, "Uh-oh."
I don't know whether Taz has ever said "good job" before. I know he knew "uh-oh." I love that he can remember and utter contextually correct phrases.
---
Blake does not like being got up in the morning. The usual thing is for us to remove his covers, open his door, and say good morning. Occasionally he's ready to come out and will sashay a little out from his sleepy spot to be stepped up. Most often he stays in his sleepy spot having a little morning groom and stretch. While he does this, we get his breakfast--fresh seed and pellet mix, fresh water, heated up buddy chow.
This morning I was downstairs watching the news (an easy habit to have fallen back into with the kitchen in the basement for three months) with my cereal. RDC uncovered Blake, gave him his breakfast, and then came down the back stairs to make coffee. When he went back up with his coffee, he called to me asking if I had the buddy. I leapt up the front stairs and found Blake pacing the landing.
He is probably physically capable of hopping down each step, though the full flight at once might be more exertion than he is used to; but he has never done and might think he can't. (It took him a long time to realize he could hop up and down between the den floor and my study floor.) He is used to yelling when something is Wrong, like being Alone, as here. He usually yells before fluttering down from his cage. He usually yells before coming to the front door to look out at us, if we have been in the front garden too long, or pacing the back landing if we've been in the yard. Maybe this morning the stealth jump was deliberately sneaking because he knows we don't like him wandering and grazing unsupervised. But I prefer to think he was lonely and getting as close to us as he could.
One of the news blurbs was on the national geography bee held yesterday. The final question was "Peshawar, a city in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, has had strategic importance for centuries because of its location near what historic pass?"
I'm quite sure I would have known that even if I hadn't just read The Kite Runner, because the country's been in this little skirmish over there...? So I suppose it was random and earlier questions were harder. What grieved me is that the CNN morning newscaster thought her co-newscaster was ohsointelligent for knowing it was Khyber Pass. She decided to ask him, after he said he sucked at U.S. geography, which five of the state capitals were in cities that begin with A.
This is Dot Org basics and therefore easy: Atlanta, GA (he worked for CNN and didn't get that!); Augusta, ME; Annapolis, MD; Albany, NY; and Austin, TX. After a commercial break a viewer and maybe their own graphics team had noticed that the map in their reveal placed Atlanta in Alabama. But no one seemed to mind that their flag would have had only 48 stars, that the map excluded Alaska and Hawai'i. That's a common thing we have to deal with in our 50-state maps, that the outlying states don't like being shoved into the Gulf of Mexico or wherever is convenient, and maybe it's bad that they're not to scale either.
The new software trainer at Dot Org is a big improvement. He devised a map-generating tool that I guess is handy for people who don't know what state is where. I still think my method is easier and results in better maps, but I have demonstrated it to enough people, even here, who confuse Mississippi and Alabama or New Hampshire and Vermont--though not quite North Dakota and South Dakota--that his text-based rather than my map-based tool is the better choice for them.
I read somewhere sometime about an experiment that concluded that cats really are physically capable of seeing color but that it's an extraneous skill that they have to be trained to. I don't know whether that's true, but I remember the analogy in the report: that humans can learn to knit with their feet, but what's the point?
Today I came into work wearing a violet knit dress and Intern, who is severely color blind, asked what color it was, guessing blue. I compared my skirt to two different books, one navy, one purple, and he guessed that the purple was the darkest when really it was the brightest (to me). I told him about the cat thing, suggesting that when someone razzes him about being color blind he can tell them they're knitting with their feet.
From an information page about peregrines nesting on their builidng:
"People have been fascinated by Peregrine Falcons for thousands of years. Nearly decimated by pesticides, recovery programs such as the one in Rochester, NY, are helping to increase their numbers. Enter the world of Peregrine Falcons and learn more about these magnificent birds of prey."
"To destroy" already has so many synonyms that it doesn't need another when that other's meaning is so handy and specific. Whom do I sue?
Also I added this to the list of things I don't get: Referring to potential residences as "homes." A home is a concept and cannot be bought; a house or apartment or condominium or yurt is a physical entity and can be.
We did not tile. Instead we were as Murkan as Murkan can be and shopped on a Saturday: drawer organizers for the wide drawer, a new garbage can for the kitchen (stainless steel of course, and oval instead of round, very hip), new yard and camp chairs, a wedding present, mason jars for coffee, a cage for the sponge that suctions to the side of the sink, a spool for paper towel (the one disadvantage of undercabinet lighting is that it precludes undercabinet paper towel), and two sets of new sheets.
I read Ulysses during a brief rainstorm; raked up months of sunflower husks to start a new lasagne mulch; satisfied my whitehead-popping, sunburn-peeling itch by grooming the neighbor's easement of bindweed (when you pull a tendril out from under groundcloth and wind up with a handful? I love that); unpacked more kitchen and organized it; and watched "Big Fish."
It was a good day.
RDC and I had dinner with Trish and Jared last night, or two separate dinners because of an incompetent host. There was monkey vivisection and smacktalk and gossipy speculation. And forgetting that Trish cooks and to let her know I received her birthday card and the usual dose of lisa-suckage.
It began to sprinkle on my way home. I should not apply stain if rain is forecast during the next 24 hours, and I don't like to pressure-clean if I'm going to freeze in the blowback. So that was my excuse. I transplanted the jasmine that the neighbor gave us, we ate spinach from the garden, and I read Watership Down. Also I put away two-day-old laundry (only occasionally do I get it away the day I do it). Blake was a beast with two back toes, falling in lust first with the washcloth (I bought new, periwinkle blue washcloths when the fam came in March, but did not bring Blake to vet colors) and then with laundry. He spent a lot of time in his cage, pacing and whining, because he would not play nicely in his box or with a peacock feather or be pet (and to turn pages with one hand and pet with the other constitutes a perfect evening for me) or listen to music with his daddy. I will use the old washcloths if I have to but the new ones are still cushy. Hmph.
My neighbor gave me a jasmine because he is kind and generous. The jasmine is hardy only to 20 degree Fahrenheit, which means it should come inside over the winter, yet it wants to climb, which means it should live outside where it can climb. Also it is very tall, and my pots are either pretty for inside or big for outside. Well, I have until fall to get it a pot of adequate size and prettiness, but I am not an indoor plant person. And since it was a gift from someone I like, its probable death will be guilt-inducing. Hooray.
One thousand five hundred ladybugs supposedly were in that bag. I shook them into the lower branches of the cherry tree and left the net bag and the raffia in a crook for them to finish escaping from. The leaves do look better--maybe because the hosing rinsed off some goo as well as less grippy aphids, since I don't see scads of ladybugs around. What eats ladybugs? Any meat-eating bird, I figure. We have flickers and robins and starlings in abundance.*
Tomorrow is supposed to be hot and I will pressure-clean if it's not cloudy.
* I have not seen "Rocky Horror Picture Show" in years. When will I be able to say "in abundance" and not hear Frank N. Furter in my head?
Months ago we bought tickets to see David Grisman at the Botanic Gardens. Yesterday the Junkies finally posted more tour dates. There is one show in Colorado. Both Grisman and my Cowboy Junkies are on Friday August 27th.
RDC, prince that he is, said we could probably sell the Grisman tickets--Grisman is more him and Junkies more me, though he like them too--but we bought the Grisman tickets first and we've never seen him but we've seen the Junkies a slew of times, me eight and him six. He was sweet to offer.
But still, fuckity.
We might have left earlier and made the evening reception, but I needed my head shrunken first, so we set out a little after six. I had not been over Independence Pass since 1998 or so. It's still gorgeous and hairy and windy and loopy and absent guardrails. The Arkansas River looks tempting and there might be stretches where bodily contact with the water, rather than wading overalls and boots, or boats only, is permitted.
In Shrink's waiting room I wrote in my paper journal: I didn't think about this until I chose my next book. I only thought that I had already started it, a few pages at least, and that it's a reasonable vacation book. But I first read Tracey Chevalier in October 2001, the last time we went to Aspen, the weekend we started bombing Afghanistan. Now I am going back to Aspen with my last unread Chevalier, The Virgin Blue, and we are still at war, and Afghanistan is still in rubble.
I still love Aspen. I know our habits there are unsustainable--but I love it. Sunday on the way home, RDC suggested stopping in Vail for a late lunch, and maybe Beaver Creek for coffee, for a trifecta of towns we're only kidding ourselves about. I don't know Beaver Creek at all, but I don't know if I'll ever get over my feeling that Vail got rolled out like so much Play-Do and baked like polymer clay. Or puffy paint, while Aspen feels like a town where people live. And where they can't afford to live, and where they don't actually live, but which is a damn sight prettier than Vail would be even if it didn't have I-70 slap through the middle of it.
Anyway. As soon as we were down out of the Pass, I could smell the black willow cottonwood trees I so love. It makes me want to run alongside a fence. (I am not really allowed to make Sound and Fury jokes.) That's the predominant smell. Also aspen, also ponderosa pine. But mostly this specific species of cottonwood.
Three blocks away from our hotel (the Hotel Aspen), we ate a late dinner at the Hotel Jerome bar. In addition to the Texans whose volume and hairspray and assumptions about go-cups gave them away, and the upper crust so crusty and inbred that the men actually have evolved to grow less body hair on their chests where their knotted sweater arms hang and their faces betray what Toulouse-Lautrec's body did, there were the Aspen crew that I knew, the privileged poor who ski by day, wait tables by night, and manage to prolong their early 20s lifestyle into their 30s.
Besides black willow cottonwoods and people who ski without health insurance, I love Aspen for the stars. Okay, I could get them anywhere outside of a city, but they just add to Aspen's loveliness. And we had a 270-degree view from our patio.
Another plus to our hotel was its proximity to the Main Street Bakery & Café. Not that anything public is too far to walk, but only two blocks is a fine thing. On our entering, CoolBoss waved, and we joined eight or so Dot Orgeristas for breakfast. I am not so good with work folk outside of a work setting, because in my head at least I am demure at work, not laughing The Laugh or swearing or telling raucous jokes or telling stories nine tangents long or at least doing these things only to well-broken-in coworkers and no more than two or three at once. RDC is much better at that, so breakfast was not merely stupid small- or work-talk.
Most people were getting a late start as well because of the reception the night before. We could have done something outdoorsy if we had finished our breakfasts before noon, but no. My sister had told me that one of her friends--happily, RDC's and my mutual favorite from her 18 months here--now owned a jewelry store, named This. I looked This up in the phone book, where it wasn't; I called her and she told me its name under the former owners had been This but its friend-name, well, she couldn't remember That. So I strolled into a jewelry store and said I was looking for one that had used to be called This but its new owners, Friend and Wife, had changed its name? This was Aspen, so of course those jewelers knew the new name. We went into New Name, where Friend wasn't. He was at his fly-fishing store--he had been a guide when we first met him. And there he was, glad to see us, inquiring after my sister, admiring our sleuthing.
Oh, and my earlier epiphany. I had this one, recently, while reading Ulysses, but upon stopping into the bakery where an earlier one bloomed (I slay me), though this time for lemonade, I had to mention it.
We were visiting my sister for the first time upon moving to Colorado. We went into the bakery, where CLH and RDC each ordered a chocolate chip cookie and I a brownie sundae--which they didn't offer on the menu, but I asked if they would just shove a brownie (which they had) into the bottom of a bowl of ice cream (they offered both paper bowls and ice cream) and charge me whatever à la carte and I would just call it a sundae. Soon enough my sister and husband had finished their cookies and wanted some of my sundae, which I did not want to share. They had had theirs, and this was mine. CLH insisted, explaining, "We're grown-ups now. If we want more, we can have it."
My epiphany was not that as an adult I could have more, but that I could share without resentment. I had aspired to this as an articulated concept since I read Ursula LeGuin's Eye of the Heron, but this was the first time I knew I was practicing it.
After a late breakfast and due at the gondola by 4, we didn't do much in town besides find my sister's friend and poke about in a cookery store. Then we strolled along the Roaring Fork trail for a while, sucking in deep breaths of aspen and black willow cottonwood and everything else on offer in a high-altitude riparian environment. Then we repaired to the hotel to dress.
I have got to get new dress shoes. It doesn't help that I am not fond of shoes. One pair of grey satin pumps would go with every single one of my best dresses, since every one of them (four) is an ice tone. I found the current pair almost four years ago and they are, besides stained, fucking uncomfortable, bearable only with doses of talcum powder and bandaids on my heels, which latter I forgot. We walked less than half a mile? to the gondola and at the top I asked at the lodge for a band-aid. A band-aid, because at that point only my left heel was cut through. By the end of the night, my right heel was sliced through too.
Anyway! The top of Ajax Mountain is no sucky place to get married. Snow-capped mountains ring the top. They were not as capped as in 1995, when friends of CLH got married up there; the photographs she brought to my wedding were the first I saw of Aspen. But they were white and shiny and lovely. The ceremony was funny and perfect; and the bride lovely of course.
I love that almost every wedding dress I have ever seen is exactly right for its bride. This wedding and EJB's are the two loveliest I have seen (except my own). They had in common gorgeous settings (this one far more spectacular), personally perfect services (EJB's had far better grammar), gracious service (this one had better food as well), but also they had nothing in common other than us and another pair of attendees--one woman works with TMB and is the cousin of this groom. And how each dress suited each bride, but that's something every wedding has in common.
The bride tugged me and others behind a pair of microphones to be back-up singers during "Mustang Sally." The next day when we ran into Ernie and his wife Seahorse, who had not stayed that long, for breakfast, I said I didn't have the moves to be a back-up singer.
"All you need is a tight black dress," Ernie suggested.
"I have one of those," I said. "It wasn't tight when I bought it [1990], but it's tight now."
"I have that dress!" Seahorse said. "Damn drycleaners."
RDC did say that throughout the wedding he noticed that I was much more comfortable talking with strangers than I have been in recent years. I am not sure that's true. On the gondola going up, we chatted with another couple, and the three of them were out-Colorado-ing each other so I shut up. It might be state pride, which is fine and which, oceanless as Colorado is, I could participate in, but it sounds like boasting. But otherwise I was chatty. Mostly with my coworkers and their spouses, but also with spare people. And during a tussle with another guest, which might be too hairy a story to post, though I don't think fast on my feet, my refusal to confront or to escalate or to speak disdainfully didn't leave me anxious and shaky. Instead I shook it off. And that is certainly better.
A side note: another road trip, another celebrity death. One major figure we haven't been away for is John Kennedy Jr. And slightly less major, Johnny Cash. The actor deaths in threes we tend to be home for too. But to date, Elvis Presley, Jerry Garcia, Princess Diana, Mother Theresa, Frank Sinatra, Charles Schultz, and Ronald Reagan.
The tussle concerned a child, which led me to think about its taking a village to raise a child. Someone--not the tussler--suggested that if I can't name the kid, it's not my village. I respect someone's thinking that I was out of line, though of course I don't share it; I do not respect the name division.
One time at a neighborhood ice cream shop, I saw a toddler playing on the bike rack as if it were a jungle gym. He was close to the curb and ignoring the street inches away. I walked over with my cone, keeping on eye on the kid before a parent came out of the store and thanked me. I couldn't name that kid; was its safety not my concern? A few years ago a man watched his grown male friend lure a little girl into a public lavatory; the man knew the friend was going to rape and kill the girl but did nothing to prevent the friend's actions or to alert anyone who would safeguard the child. He could not name the child, but he damn well shirked his responsibility to her.
At the Vietnam Memorial, a very little boy crouched at my feet and picked up a photograph someone had left below the names. I crouched myself to address him eye to eye. I asked, "Is that yours?" and he looked around in consternation. His father had been several feet away and now came to scoop him up and take the photograph from his hand. "He doesn't understand," the father apologized to me. "No, of course not," I replied. And that was that. I shouldn't have said "No, of course not," though. That didn't express what I thought, which is that the the boy was being a little boy, which is a fine thing to be, but having picked up and examined this curiosity, he shouldn't be allowed to keep it.
That's my ongoing problem in unrehearsed speech in unexpected situations, that I don't think quickly enough to respond cogently and evenly.
On Sunday after breakfast with Ernie and Seahorse, we drove down the Roaring Fork valley, drier and wider and drier yet, into Glenwood Canyon, from which we climbed (not a climb but a steep hike) to Hanging Lake.
Pretty.
I banged my knee on the way down. I have not had a scraped knee in some time and was feeling way too much like a grown-up. Now I have scabs on both knees and am feeling more like myself.
I am getting the house in shape for my sister and a small party we might have on Saturday. I had planned to take two days off, but now we have administrative leave Friday: when the federal government closes, the other office closes. I do not know if the other office had the same days off we had in March of 2003 when they didn't have our blizzard, but we do have this Friday off. I am not sure why anyone is in shock: Reagan was 93 and surely his death comes as no surprise.
CLH doesn't arrive until midnight but I took the two days of vacation anyway: five-day weekend, shweet. This morning RDC and I hiked in Red Rocks, lovely in green still. We saw a sharp-shinned hawk and a rufous-sided towhee and heard lots of meadowlarks.
I still have to weedwhack and scrub and make the bed and so forth.
If she wants to watch the funeral on Friday I am going to go to the zoo by myself. Princess Diana's funeral happened to be the day of our mother's second wedding and as I pried my sister away from the television I teased her that it was inconsiderate of her, Mom, to schedule it so. (She did understand that I was teasing.)
This afternoon as I weedwhacked and mowed, I felt the occasional drop of rain. Certainly there were piles of clouds over the mountains and in the foothills this morning, and by afternoon they had released themselves onto the plain. I was showering off when RDC came in to tell me the tornado sirens were going off.
Into the downstairs bathroom went Blake in his cage, his travel cage should we need it, his styptic powder, a tupperware of food, and my backpack of my current book, journal, Moonshadow, Dandelion, my camera, a different shirt and better bra. Also Booboo, wrapped in my blue hoodie, and light hiking shoes.
We watched the storm from our front steps and on the television, which is how this entry came to be written. Local stations split their screens between the storm and the arrival in Washington of Reagan's body. What I am struck by is how closely Blake seems to be watching television.
He watched the six horses pull the caisson from the White House to the Capitol, a half hour slow march. Every time I glanced at him from making CLH's bed or dusting, he would be in the same spot, his head cocked the same way. Eventually I made his dinner and came to sit with him while he ate, and he ate with one eye on the screen (not that he could ever keep both eyes on the screen). He's still watching the honor guard carry the casket from the street up into the rotunda.
Oh! It's not that he's watching flags flapping as much as he's listening to the music. Besides rock n' roll, Blake loves a march. A military band has been playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" adagio for ages now.
We hung out with an Aspen friend, we explored trendy Potter Highlands, we wandered through the Botanic Gardens, we ate Cricket burgers, we shopped, we hung out under a tree in the park with books, we ate at Adega, we had a cook-out with her friends and ours, we hung out around the outdoor fire, we explored a street fair, we had more burgers and milkshakes too, and we had dinner with a couple of RDC's coworkers.
It was a good enough time that I have forgotten all our bons mots, which were plenteous.
Still with its Disney moments, probably nearly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read it (which is fine), better than the previous two, with one major problem: the fourth member of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs was never explained, nor the shape of the Expecto Patronum spell. Also, Alfonso Cuarón has watched a lot of Monty Python and Hitchcock and hasn't forgotten his "Wizard of Oz."
Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint still can't act their ways out of paper bags, though Emma Watson is coming along nicely. Michael Gambon is a much more vigorous and less cariacaturey Dumbledore. Despite the improvement in director, this is solely a plot movie.
And fun.
From my semester of astronomy in high school, I remember only that it was hard (that and the viewings in our own observatory). It involved math, which wasn't my thing. I had expected to be thrilled by physics, to talk about Newton and Galileo, and was similarly disappointed by math-heavy formulas calculating acceleration--three feet per second per second? mass multiplied by what equals what?
But I still like stars and planets, and I still like Copernicus and Einstein--their discoveries, their processes, their clean deductive minds.
For some years now I have asserted that the full moon is never in the sky at the same time as the sun. I do not remember where I picked up that factoid, and I figured it was about time I researched its accuracy. This is not completely satisfactory. It does confirm that the full moon cannot be high in the sky immediately or soon after sunset, which is the gist of my assertion, but does it mean that half the moon and half the sun both can be visible at their opposite points of horizon? Most places are not so flat that you can see a full 360-degree plane.
Anyway, that search led me here, where I learned again that Venus rotates opposite to its revolution. Now I'm trying to think how that would affect weather and evolution on Earth. Oo, a science fiction "plot."
(Someone told me once that science fiction, apparently unlike all other fiction, is based on an idea. He didn't elaborate at the time, but I filled in the blanks: What if a planet had insufficient water? Dune. What if Germany and Japan had won WWII? The Man in the High Castle. I remember that morsel because even at the time I thought it was bullshit but didn't know how to assert it. What if a girl had muddy drawers? The Sound and the Fury. What if a woman's first impressions of a haughty man were wrong? Pride and Prejudice. What if Frank Cornish's secrets were finally revealed? The Lyre of Orpheus. (Perhaps because at the time I had not read these, I could not assert this?) An idea is different than a premise, but I can't think of a science fiction "idea" that's not actually a "premise," just as in straight fiction.)
How would everything had evolved differently if Earth rotated and revolved in different directions? How much does the direction of our revolution affect us? If rotation were reversed, ocean currents and winds would be different to the point of opposite, but if rotation were the same and revolution turned face, what effects on a planetary level would there be? Any, before Earth's course disrupted the solar currents?
CLH's loves RDC's comment "You shouldn't anthropomorphize animals--they hate that" because she anthropomorphizes more than anyone she knows. I say that because probably everyone anthropomorphizes more than anyone else they know because only everyone is in their own head. That was confusing to write--and to read too I suspect.
Anyway, CLH was talking about how Kitty's facial expressions change, the tilt of ears, how the eyebrow and cheek whiskers are held, the angle of the head. That's all well and good, but can cats (and dogs) shift their facial fur hair by individual hair? Blake can change individual feathers on his face, it seems like. He can't moue his beak as a regular pet can its mouth, but he can move each bit of filoplume independently. His crest is his major indicator, but he can tweak his plumage with great precision and delicacy.
Also his feathers are long enough to get mussed, unlike cat and dog fur. (It's obvious my experience is with short-haired pets.) An eyebrow feather can hang over his eye like a fringe. His crest can be shoved to one side like--this is my invention--my father's comb-over in a stiff breeze.
And I know dogs and cats speak with their whole bodies, with their posture, when they need to, but a bird emotes with its whole body all the time, not just when it's awake and alert. If a dog is awoken, it'll open an eye and roll it around, and if it's startled maybe it'll jump up (my dog was not among the world's most active, obviously). But a bird--a cockatiel, anyway--will always use its whole body: the puffy, downy chick pose of dozing, with the feathers puffed up, the neck pulled in, the beak almost hidden by feathers; the guard-bird who has just seen a seagull on television and is sleek and slender; the scaredy-bird who has just seen The Exercise Ball or the Falcon at the Meta-Birdfeeder and looks like Alice when she's drunk the potion.
Okay, I have to go to work, but Blake is on my lap in the dining room, listening to his newly-returned daddy snoring in the bedroom, cuddling under my typing arm among folds of terrycloth bathrobe, poised for his after-breakfast nap, and I cannot bear to get up. I have to, and the beakless chick swee'b (I called Percy Swee' Pea, and Swee' B doesn't have the same ring but the swee must continue) will turn into the growling lion of Uwokemeupistan. Obviously, I prefer the former.
I see a shrink biweekly. Hi, my name's Lisa, I'm overindulged. Anyway, I started seeing her in October. Since March, she has made roughly every other appointment and canceled the others, or not canceled them, such that I show up at her office only to be told she's out. She has some sort of onging medical thing, or so I gather, because the first time was "a medical emergency," and when I said next time that I hoped it was okay, she said "It is being taken care of."
Every other appointment. She's made fourof my nine appointments since March.
Also, in late May she asked if I was getting anything out of therapy, because she's not sure. So now I'm second-guessing everything I said to her until then and since because I am clearly doing something wrong.
My sister took an instant, unmet dislike to her, one because you don't blow off your patients like that, and two because she should have known that to say something like that to be would make me nervous and insecure about the thing that's supposed to help me get over my nervous anxiety.
Also, her name is Dr. Hu.
I am not going to sack her--maybe because I am not so devoted to shrinkage that missing these appointments fucks me up, which would make both my sister and Shrink right. But I am glad of the Lexapro and I want to keep it.
RDC has said I seem more comfortable around people lately. My self-loathing has decreased, though I still eat garbage and don't exercise. I'm not beating myself up about stuff as much, and while I now have the impression that I did something wrong earlier this week, I can't remember what it was. That's a good thing, that I am not turning it over and over in my head and crippling myself with guilt.
I know I'm way too acclimated to Colorado but it was damn humid today. Sweat actually trickled down my face instead of evaporating. It was sticky and not an effective means of cooling. And I felt buggy as I worked in the yard, which I hardly ever do. Sixty percent! I weep for me.
I weeded the vegetable garden, groomed the south fence of bindweed, added perhaps two gallons of vegetable pulp to what probably cannot be a lasagne mulch since I'm adding its layers gradually, and gathered a small bowlful of raspberries (slightly more than yesterday).
Last night Blake was in the living room with RDC as I dismantled his cage: he wasn't in it, he didn't want to be in it, but he didn't like the fact I was messing with his turf. (He could hear my activity.) While his house was in the dishwasher, he could forget his territorialism, but when I began to assemble it again he recommenced whining. As soon as I got the basics assembled I put his box on the roof, and he hopped from my shoulder to thither and pranced into it and huffed at me while I arranged his perches and toys.
Today he's been sweet all day. I am sure that if everyone had a cockatiel to entertain, oral hygiene would be a major hobby. Flossing, brushing, and gargling are just so much more fun when there's a buddy on your shoulder bowing and bobbing.
Now I am downstairs with Blake on my shoulder. He has just had a yawning fit and is now on my sternum, just under my chin, where I can pet him with with little lip nibbles.
I understand he is a rarity among parrots to be so affectionate, but I really can't imagine life without a buddy.
I don't know what gets into me. I meant only to watch some news over breakfast, snugglified because it's still cold. Instead I watched most of a sentimental woe-is-me movie from 1952, Invitation, with Dorothy McGuire (whom I didn't recognize as the mother from "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"; if I had I wouldn't have lasted any time at all) and Van Johnson, whom I know only as Spike from my beloved "State of the Union."
Also I downloaded part 8 of War and Peace. Which means I am only 75% done. It might not be as bad as I think it is if I only listened to it more than occasionally. It's why I should cook, so I can listen to it in the house. The match that I wanted to happen could happen now, and I know Napoleon falls, so maybe I could stop listening! There would be much rejoicing.
But the scene with the black-eyed little girl in Quention's section of Sound and the Fury is straight out of War and Peace. Countess Rostov isn't nearly as bad as Caroline Compson, but she tends that way.
Michi said she was feeling lucky and that she would push her way to the front, but when we arrove at the Tattered Cover around 6, there was no hope and the line was insane. We were herded as through a sheepfold around the perimeter and up the stairs and around some more (I picked up a title something like Grammar for the Completely Unclued) and we grabbed some floor two rooms away from the hall. In this way, going to a David Sedaris reading was a lot like listening to him on NPR or through an audio book, a broadcast, disembodied voice. It was also a lot not like either of those, because occasionally those people in his presence laughed when the rest of us did not. At a gesture? an expression? We will never know.
Waiting, we entertained ourselves with the quizzes at the end of each chapter of the grammar book. The first chapter was on capitalization, and the book claimed that the one properly capitalized sentence of the mutliple-guess four included the words "Dominican republic," not Dominican Republic. Have I been spelling this wrong all my life?
Sometime in elementary school (I hope no later than fourth grade), we were assigned a project in the school library that the librarian, not the teacher, reviewed. (I can't remember the teacher, hence not the grade, but the librarian was the perfectly friendly but intimidating-looking one whose half-glasses sat on her really tremendous bust.) I remember that Mrs. Bust was surprised I finished whatever it was, probably a reference and geography project, so rapidly and then said, "And you capitalized everything right too." That's why I like to think it was no later in elementary school than fourth grade. Capitalization is simple and follows rules, unlike spelling, which is a sense much more than it is a subject. I got a little glow, of course.
The CIA World Factbook has an entry for the Dominican Republic, in which it mentions "The Dominican economy," following a normal pattern, and gives the conventional form as "Dominican Republic." Britannica's entry capitalizes both in its title, mentions the Dominican peso, and capitalizes both in a sentence: "The Dominican Republic was originally part of the Spanish colony of Hispaniola."
Well, this book also claimed that apostrophes properly do occur in "the 1970's" and in "the 70's," as in temperature; it didn't mention how stupid "the '70's" looks although that's correct according to their pattern nor how Class of "86" is hypercorrection nor what to do when you need quotation marks within quotation marks such that perhaps quotation marks within italics would set off the phrase under consideration more clearly than nested quotation marks.
So mocking that was fun.
David Sedaris was also fun. He read two essays from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, about cleaning apartments in New York City and about seeing "The End of the Affair" in Paris with Hugh. Then he read from his diary, which was better for me because new. He told us about finding, in Budapest, an obscene monkey masturbating with a penis as large as its banana. Because it was just as nasty as it could be, he said, he gave it to his brother, Paul, who of course loved it. A visiting sister found it so repulsive Paul hid it in her luggage, in her decaffeinated espresso. She didn't discover it the next morning, however, since she drank caffeine before traveling on to her in-laws' place. Her father-in-law has beginning Alzheimer's but still can do simple tasks, like make coffee. Also he's a retired Baptist minister. Sedaris also told us his ruminations after reading an article his sister (the same sister; I like to think that Lisa is his favorite) sent him on people who want to be amputees. He used a term for it, o-something-philiac, but that is not a Google search I want to do. [28 June 2004: I can always count on PLT to delve into something prurient: the word was "apotemnophile." Teehee, I said "prurient," for dubious humor of which see below.] Sedaris said that unlike transsexuals, who are born into the wrong body, these people are born into the right body...just too much of it.
See, I'm not David Sedaris.
Afterward, Michi helped me find books and animules. For SFR, I got A Snowy Day and When the Elephant Walks; for SLG, Pat the Bunny, Hop on Pop, and Is Your Mama a Llama? and a pink pig with enormous trotters. (SLG is Emlet's new sister, and Hop on Pop might be better for Emlet since she can speak, and so ma filleule doesn't feel left out, also A House for a Hermit Crab.) A birthday card for Intern, an arrival card for SLG, yet an anniversary card for my husband slipped my mind.
Then we were starving, but it was 9 so Denver was closed (the Market on Larimer and Max BurgerWorks on Lawrence). Before we ordered at Sam's (a faux diner), Intern and one of his brothers came in; they said hi but sat elsewhere. Michi and I decided on breakfast for dinner and I ordered pancakes and bacon. My order came with two eggs, which I hadn't noticed, rather than poison myself, I told the server to give them fried to the skinny guy in the last booth. Intern came over to chat some more and said "dope!" * when I told him eggs were on their way, but when my three fucking enormous pancakes and four slabs of bacon arrived, the cook hadn't made the eggs because the server didn't think I was serious. Maybe she thought I was just making fun of the skinny guy--Intern is really staggering nonexistent from front to back. So when Michi's toast came on a separate plate, we sent that down the end.
* "Dope," like "bomb" as a good thing, is slang that not only passed me by but also that I never heard personally in the flesh. Then Intern came along and I smile like a geriatric when he describes something as dope.
Meanwhile, I was tucking away my pancakes and Michi her huevos rancheros. She reminded me as I picked up a piece of bacon that when we arrived, I had said not to order any pork. I turned guilty to the pig, then picked it up and shoved it head first into the bag so it couldn't see. Then neither of us could remember the name of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's table manners-teaching pig, though of course I realized I had offended this pig the same way the messy eater's mother had (although I hadn't fed the pig anything). So afterward we had to stop at Barnes & Noble to look up the pig's name. I wondered if B&N might be closed (since it was after 10, ooo) and was glad that (thank you again Kymm) I had them in my house if need be.
Need wasn't--that pig's name is Lester. SLG's pig doesn't yet have a name, but he, or the Tattered Cover bag he peeked out of, attracted the notice of another couple in the diner. She asked if we had just seen David Sedaris and we chatted about him. I promise that, for once in my life, I did not drag the conversation out. It was not I who brought up politics. The man--easily in his 40s, note the lack of apostrophe since nothing is dropped, damn it--said had just registered to vote for the first time. My face did that thing that it does that I don't regret not controlling this time, and he said, observing this, that he didn't believe in it. This was clearly our exit and we scarpered.
I asked Michi what she did the day she turned 18. Register to vote, of course. Now, I didn't register the day I turned 18 because in 1986 my birthday was on a Sunday (it was the day of Hands Across America, which I still think was stupid to stop in New York City instead of continuing to Boston so I could have had a hope of participating), but it didn't take long. I also didn't give blood the day I turned 17 because Old Lyme had drives only every 56 days, but whenever I did go no one there knew me nor would take my blood because lacking a driver's license I couldn't prove my age, damn it.
So that was a fun night.
Number nine, number nine, number nine...
We each gave the other a card with a dog on it: he a bulldog wearing a flowered bonnet and I a basset hound with its ears held up like a rabbit's. Also mine came in a silvery envelope, stainless steel to match the kitchen, I said. He gave me Eats, Shoots & Leaves and I gave him a last-minute impulse buy (because this is the first time we've done anything more than cards, I think) from when I bought the basset ears: a deck of George W. Bush cards. These will go with his Friendly Dictator Trading Cards which pack was a text in a class once.
His card read, and I quote,
Then we went to Bistro Vendrôme, whose patio even looks vaguely Parisian, since it's in a pedestrian courtyard with a garden. It's surrounded by three-story Old West buildings instead of five-story baroque ones, but that was close enough for us. I had chocolate-hazelnut crepes for dessert. Yum.
Wednesday Tex wasn't in the office for staff meeting, and I was glad because CoolBoss used my HumanDictionary function when she needed "prurience" defined. I asked for someone to pitch out the worst of the reality television shows, and then I said that these shows appealed to the public's prurient interests, and prurience was the noun for base and usually gratuitously sexual interest. The example was "Lawmakers in furor over prurient turmoil" and she rightly questioned turmoil being prurient.*
This discussion might have made squeamish Tex squirm, so I was glad he wasn't there. Except that naturally on Friday when he asked me what had happened in staff meeting, I was compelled to needle him so said, "I had to define 'prurience' and I'm really glad you weren't there." He said, "What?" and I flipped his dictionary open, pointed out the word, and left the room just as his phone rang.
* I don't know if there is a technical term for misassignment of adjectives. Recently CoolBoss asked me why a divorce couldn't be called "amiable," and I more felt than could articulate why. Because people and dogs are amiable but relationships and concepts are amicable, like divorces and treaties. You might say "an amicable gathering" but you'd say "a gathering of amiable people" or "an amiable gathering" where "gathering" was a grouping word rather than a description of the ties among the people.
Later in the day Tex asked what constituted a divine period. Was I on a crystal clear, snow-covered mountain top, communing with the sun or something? We got that cleared up by my clarifying that I had had to define 'prurience,' not that I had had a divine period, for pete's sake.
But this allowed me to tell a recent amusing story. When CLH was here, we had lunch with an Aspen friend who now lives in Denver. As the three of us chatted, I announced, "I think I'm getting my period." I left them at the table to go a-questing for supplies. We were at trendy 32nd and Lowell, which means that clothing, books, gee-gaws, and antiques were available to me, but tampons there were none. I drove to Walgreen's, picked up a box of 40, and scampered to the counter. Except that someone evidently had shop-lifted one out of the box, whose end was therefore loose, which instability I didn't notice until 39 tampons suddenly skittered underfoot--under my own feet and those of at least four people, including a man and children, around me. I debated for a tenth of a second whether to gather them, decided fuck no, returned for another box, and beat a hasty retreat with a box of 20, that having been the last 40 (or 39).
CLH and her friend were amused, of course, and CLH told us an incident from when she worked at Souper Salad, fishing in her apron pocket for a pen to take an order and poising a tampon over her order form to write with because she hadn't looked at what she'd retrieved.
Tex told me in turn about a coworker's being pulled aside by apparently a new employee of the TSA who had not been properly briefed and whose cultural background rendered him a lot less likely than, say, Tex, to know certain things. The TSAer, searching her purse, extracted a tampon and, waving it, demanded to know what this was. I can picture Coworker's efforts to restrain herself from saying, "You want me to show you how that works?" and instead calmly to inform him that it was a feminine hygiene product.
Anyway, I'm glad we got that cleared up.
In Erewhon, Samuel Butler describes a culture where illness is illegal but criminality is a sickness. Therefore to gloss over someone's slight indisposition without getting them in trouble, you'd say "he's got the socks," i.e., stolen an insignificant item. We use this for Blake when he's got the flaps.
What I mean is that I Don't Get Sick, Especially in the Summer. I know very well I did get sick over July Fourth two years ago, but I like to pretend that that didn't happen. Thursday night I thought I bit my lower lip because I am clumsy, but I am probably catching RDC's cold: when my immune system is compromised, I get cankers. A canker just inside my lower lip swells it enough that I bite the lip. Yea! So now I might be getting RDC's cold.
Which means that this is the fourth weekend in a row we're not tiling the kitchen; RDC doesn't feel steady enough to operate the saw and heaven knows what butchery I'd commit even if I were 100%.
Last Saturday, RDC slept until late after the Dead show in the rain at Red Rocks after returning from Vancouver at 2:00 a.m. Friday; the weekend before that CLH was here; the weekend before that we went to Aspen; the weekend before that it was too cold to get sprayed by the wetsaw. This is just never going to get done.
And then we're not going to paint until the tiling is done, and even after the tiling, there's moulding to be made for the floor and scrim to be removed from the cabinets before the painting can be tackled. This is, I repeat, never going to get done.
So I am just going to flobber (my favorite neologism, inspired by flobberworms in Prisoner of Azkaban) about today, headachey and muscle-weary.
This is so cool.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a honeybee colony in a silver maple across the street. Silver maples grow really fast, so new neighborhoods in Denver were once planted thickly with them, but because of their growth rate they have weak wood and are prone to breakage and holes. So we have lots of natural nests for starlings and squirrels and bees. This hole is about seven feet up, and I was concerned what might happen if the city discovered it. (The property-owners probably wouldn't: they might as well live in suburbia for all they use their front yard but enter through the back near the garage instead.)
The colony explained where the scores of bees who love my front garden live. My catmint especially but everything else as well regularly hums with bees.
Just a little while ago I glanced out the screened front door and saw them swarming. The noise was terrific. First I worried for the original nest: did this swarm represent some few survivors? But the original nest seemed fine, still with traffic. Less traffic than I have observed before, but I don't pretend I had been keeping a close enough eye to gauge the difference.
I wrote to an acquaintance who has just begun to keep bees and then commenced to google. It seems likely that, with all this rain and consequent spike in nectar production, the hive is doing well enough that 40% to 60% of the bees, including the queen (who can fly?) or perhaps a virgin queen, have left to seek new quarters. For now, they are clustered high in my European ash tree, along a stretch of branch, forming a living cylinder about the size of a three-liter bottle. Over the next few days, scouts will search for a new home, and then they'll all move.
My concern is that they'll find a way into the attic. I would love for them to continue to live nearby but I do not want them in the house, in the attic, in the structure anywhere. And I am not about to become a backyard beekeeper, which seems like a full-time occupation, and which furthermore would probably lead to my divorce. RDC is not so much a fan of bees--spiders are his job and bees mine.
But honeybees are nice. They aren't mean, like yellowjackets, and they make honey, and there'd be a lot less to eat around the world without them. Plus, while they swarm, they have no brood or honey to defend and are much less likely to sting (I just read that).These are European bees, bigger than the native American ones that aren't big enough to fly far enough to pollinate fields as big as Usans plant (a factoid I think I learned from Sue Hubbell's A Country Year: Living the Questions).
Anyone want a swarm of bees? At this point all you'd have to do is somehow erect an extension ladder without disturbing them--the cluster isn't near the bole--and clip their branch into a container. Simple.
It feels like it's about to rain. What will that do to them?
I expect the sequels and prequels to Rebecca suck as much as those to Jane Austen's novels, but I am intrigued. Why did Maxim marry Rebecca to begin with? How could he have been so misled? And I just watched a cheesy Cary Grant movie, "In Name Only," similarly with an interloper; and I wonder why his character married his first wife. It's based on a book probably even more cheesy, Memory of Love by Besse Breuer, and maybe that has more background. Or not, because that title sounds like teen Harlequin shlock.
Danvers is a fright, isn't she?
The fridge finally arrived. With it, four sets of roller indentations and one dent in the newly refinished kitchen floor.
Hooray.
Blake is dozing on my shoulder. He shakes and a minor dust cloud rises, filling my nostrils with sweet buddy dust. He grooms the tendrils around my ear, because really my hair is a mess. He tucks, and then wakes up again to puff or chew his beak.
And I'm supposedly to get up and go to bed?
The biggest disadvantage to parrot companionship is not the uncontrollable shitting. It's not being allowed to sleep together.
I just found this. It's exactly a year old and I never published it.
It occurred to me that my list of shit I don't get is much longer than my list of stuff that pleases me. This struck me on Friday and on and off over the weekend I was able to think of three things:
That wasn't the original third one. The first third one inspired me to start this entry. Then I forgot it, because I'm such a deeply troubled, bitter soul.
Three things, people.
Later...
