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, malheureusement, 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 four-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.
