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.
PSA reproved me in high school, for pity's sake, for liking depressing music. (The pity being that it's been that long: doesn't everyone like depressing music in high school?) I don't even remember which song I suggested to him, but he countered, "My favorite song right now is 'Walking on Sunshine'!" I know he was exaggerating, but he's still right. I mean, the Cowboy Junkies? Beth said their "Sweet Jane" makes her want to slit her wrists (approximately).
Today toward the end of my workout I let Dandelion play all its songs in alphabetical order. It's not a crime for music not to be workout music, but lordy lordy lordy. From the top, the Junkies "200 More Miles," Junkies "A Common Disaster," Waterboys "A Bang on the Ear," Godspell "All Good Things," Kate "And So Is Love," along with some Cocteau Twins and Passion and other tracks I now forget but which were all depressing as hell. Innocence Mission, probably. Roxy Music "Avalon." And I haven't even mentioned my current favorite album, Aimee Mann's Bachelor No. 2.
That is in fact why I stopped lifting weights. I have got almost as sick of selected tracks from Oil and Gold as I am of Ten, and I had Shriekback with me only for weeks instead of the years I've used Pearl Jam. But I can't remember Pearl Jam as anything but exercise music while Shriekback is fraught with other associations.
Part of the problem is that I have thus far copied only my favorites into Dandelion--Kate, Pete, the Junkies, Innocence Mission, Fumbling Toward Ecstacy (not really a favorite, but I think RDC thinks Sarah McLachlan would poison him should he touch her work, so it lives among my particular favorites), Godspell, Tim Easton (also not really a favorite, but he belongs with the Junkies, as does Animal Logic only because it backed Caution Horses until the tape died). I need to go through the main CD library. After which the situation will not improve: Little Earthquakes and Diva and Jagged Little Pill.
Sometimes a movie happens along that exactly suits my mood. I really want to reread this, in paper, because the audio version was lovely but I remember little of my listen twelve years ago. I remember a few lines: from a hunt, when she says, "Was this shot not a declaration of love?" which was such an alien mindset for me that it stuck with me, and the Kikuyu telling her they did not think she would forget about them, which again was such a peculiar way to convey their missing her that it stuck.
(In French, or so I understand, you don't say "I'll miss you." The verb, the concept of which I can't articulate in English, is reversed, so you say something like "You'll miss me" but you're speaking of your own emotion. Or something. Nisou messed up her English once, using the French idiom--her English gets more expat and continental all the time--which is how I learned that. Or thought I learned that.)
Anyway, lovely book or not, it's a lovely movie. I have known, since I first saw it as an innocent young thing of 17, that it has one of the sexiest lines in all cinema: "Don't move." It also has one of the strongest, when the governor's wife says of her own word, "You have mine." And one of the loveliest, when the protagonist tells Farah that she wants to hear him speak her name: "You are Karen, sabu."
Also, Michael Kitchen, who plays Berkeley, is dead sexy. I looked him up in imdb, where I learned that of course the name is spelled with an e. Clerk. Derbyshire. Damn Brits, spelling things before they shifted their vowels.
My sister got a cat and is soliciting names. It's brown and black and I asked in patches or tortoiseshell? and she told me more striated, like a bad dye job. Also it has a loud purr. I can't think of any cat names, though I did come across the term "prune whip" the other day and immediately begin to itch because I am sure that a cat in a children's book somewhere is named Prunewhip.
The thing that amuses me about this is that the last time (that I remember) someone asked for help finding cat names was a coworker in September 1996. I typed "cat names" into my search engine of the day--Alta Vista?--and came across Bryon Sutherland's Semi-Existence of Bryon. Bam! Online journals. Bryon, opheliaZ, Tracy Lee, Sage, Ceej, Diane, Willa, Jen Wade.
Anyway. I reminded my sister that pet names should end in -y. This is not strictly necessary, witness our dog Shadow, but mostly true. I told her about Blake's support group: "Hi. I'm Blake." "Hello, Blake!" "They named me for a Romantic poet, but they call me Blakey. Or Blakey-Jakey. It's really embarrassing. I wish they'd just named me Buddy at the start."
"Actually that should be more embarrassing for you," my sister rightfully pointed out.
Point being that among his many nicknames (which are a reason he can't say his name right, since he hears it only when I'm not calling him my bananaheaded boy), of which Buddy doesn't even count since it's nearly his actual name, the primary one is Puppybird. I'm not about to let him forget that he really should be a dog. (If I had a human child but not a dog, I'd do the same thing. That's probably illegal.)
So I suggested she name the cat Puppie.
Building a music library for Dandelion is empowering in all kinds of ways. I've got Learning to Crawl in there right now and I am all bouncey at the prospect of lots of listening to "Show Me" and "My City Was Gone" without "Thumbelina" in between.
Speaking of the Pretenders, after I got back from Momix last night (another entry), I couldn't sleep so I tried watching television. Nothing in TiVo appealed to me, "Winter Guest" being too depressing and "City of Lost Children" being way too scary. And having already lain down I could not possibly have got up to select a DVD. I found David Letterman and watched the Pretenders--of whose post 1983 work I am completely ignorant--perform from a new album. Eh.
Wow.
A while ago I noticed a cobalt blue convertible new Bug in the parking lot. Less of a while ago walking to the library at lunch I saw it and noted the sharp bob of the driver, and when later that afternoon I saw a New Person at work with such a bob, I asked if she had the Bug. (Someone else has a Mini Cooper. Not that I'm jealous of these sexy little cars, no.)
We chatted, and I noticed Pilobolus on her wall calendar. We spoke of dance and I told her about the most amazing dance performance I have ever seen, which was Momix dancing to Passion at UConn in 1993 or '94. Momix danced the entire soundtrack, dancing the creation of life as strings of protein and amoebas on stage, the rise of flowering plants, the evolution of animals, the invention of fire, the invention of the wheel, until the last dance, which began with three dancers suspended on three velvet ropes. The side two dancers finished being crucified and left, leaving the center one to finish his passionate death. I prefer to think of Passion as music for that dance, in fact, rather than for the wretched "Last Temptation of Christ."
Thursday she mentioned she had heard that maybe Momix was going to be in town soon. A quick web search placed them in Fort Collins Friday night. We got tickets in the last row of a small enough venue that they were perfectly fine seats.
Opus Cactus, lots of desert-oriented dances. They were tumbleweeds and gila monsters and raindancers and delicate blossoms and ostriches and sundances; they used native American and aboriginal Australian and African sounds. Why is it, I wonder, that purely memetic music bores me--I could never sit and just listen to Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" or Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker," and because John Williams borrows so heavily from Aaron Copland I have a hard time hearing Copland as himself and not as a potential soundtrack--but memetic dance I could watch for hours, maybe (although this hasn't been tested) without musical accompaniment? Maybe because I prefer visual to aural arts, I don't know. Maybe because dance involves athletic humans in tight clothing.
While the Passion dance is, because of the music, still the most amazing ever, this show was still spectacular and jaw-dropping and evocative and wonderful. I am so glad I saw it. Plus I had my first ride in a new Bug! Its front seat is roomier than Cassidy's.
The choreographer, Moses Pendleton, is broadly and deeply talented. So very talented that even his creations are talented: "An avid and original photographer, shows of Mr. Pendleton's work have been presented in [several cities]" (quoting the program).
Saturday I plied the junk and antique shops on south Broadway. I saw some really amazing quarter-sawn oak stuff and some not so amazing stuff. I bought a copy of The Official Preppy Handbook for two bucks. Something from it occurred to me a while ago so I looked it up to find that it's out of print. But it's so very very high school that I'm glad to have it.
Anyway, the author, Lisa Birnbach, lists preppy nicknames and suggests the given names they might spring from. She says "Bunny" might be for someone whose given name is Corcoran.
Huh.
A valid criticism I have read of The Secret History is that Donna Tartt has no idea of Californians, so the narrator rings false. I think she deliberately distances the narrator from warmth and regular human interaction, and that might make him, including his being from California and the California she places him in, ring hollow.
She was a classmate of Brett Easton Ellis at Bennington in the early '80s, when the Handbook came out. A main character in Secret History, set in an anonymous Bennington, is named Bunny Corcoran. I'm thinking she consulted the Handbook to make the New England seem New Englisher.
After several tryings-on sessions (with all the bikes suspended from the ceiling, and you're not supposed to use the hook yourself to fetch a bike down but get Farm Boy to do it) and research here and there and deciding against the Novara Bonita which might be intended for a woman but is certainly intended for a short woman who wants to sit up as straight as Miss Gulch and doesn't mind pink and also against several other makes and models, I wound up with a 15" hardtail 2003 Marin Palisades. RDC swapped its default with my wonderful cut-out saddle (that link is approximate; remember?) and moved the pannier rack to it from the Cannondale and I rode it to work today and its name is Shadowfax (because it's mostly white).
Last week I saw a magpie flutter by toting timbers for its castle. The blue jays (which seem well-established in Denver now) are being raucous again. Yesterday I heard and saw a robin singing (sometimes they winter through, but not this year; also, apparently our robins don't winter here but those that do are from farther north). The starlings are caterwauling--odd, since they're birds not cats--and the seed drops more slowly in the feeder.
I might have gone to the gym immediately after work, but I would have spent the entire time fretting about Shadowfax. The gym does have a bike rack, but it's against a blank brick wall instead of ten feet to the right, where it would be in front of the gym's office windows, and that brick wall is extremely close to a bus stop, so that I would see innocent waiting-for-bus-ism as suspicious loitering. Except I wouldn't've been able to see it, because of the brick wall. Hence the fretting.
So instead I came home and Blake and I worked on the front garden. I raked out its winter bed of fallen leaves, discovered new green on the lavender (the one plant that didn't grow at all last year) and on most of the other obviously happier plants. Today I have to call High Country Gardens to find out about how to trim my sophomore garden. (Blake's help consisted of commentary from the porch.)
My hair is too long for its length right now ("What does that even mean?" RDC asked) and needs its first trim. I have to make an appointment with Janelle, who I guess is my new Frank. I haven't had a Frank for ten years, since he was not One with the long hair project.
Anyway. Yesterday I walked out to get a sandwich, hair in a ponytail, nose in a book. It was 65. Today it's going to be 70. It's not going to be easy to Embrace the Down when it's over 60. Or when I'm working in the garden. Or on my bike. Fifteen fewer inches of hair has to be cooler than a braid to the small of my back. I can get it off my neck, which is vital; the wispies (that I asked for, I know) fall in my face and it might be time to invest in barrettes.
Yes! Walked out to get a sandwich! There are now, in addition to the grocery store, two whole restaurants in walking distance. They are even of a lunchy, sandwichy nature. Goddess knows when it was over 95 downtown, I was a big fan of staying inside over lunch, subsisting on whatever I had remembered to bring from home or could glean from the building's convenience store or sandwich shop. Out here, though, there are no trees to walk under in the heat, no buildings of the sort to cast a shadow (also, therefore, not such a heat sink), and no plaza right outside my door with trees to read my book under.
When I got back with my sandwich, Tex was just coming out with his lunch. We ate on our patio in the sun. I looked around and made the same observation yesterday, 11 March, as I made 8 January when it was in the high 60s and Lou and I went rollerblading and returned to a staff cookout (for, not of): there are no umbrellas on our patio tables. There will be no, or much less than there ought to be, outdoor eating unless umbrellas take up residence here.
Bitter, party of 150. Well, 120. Maybe a fifth of us prefer the new site.
And there will certainly be no hanging out outside if I Embrace the Down for the summer.
If I bike to work tomorrow, it will be the first time since high school (well, college, but that doesn't count) that I commuted to work or school under my own power for all five days.
College didn't count because walking across East Beach from dorm to classroom was about two feet. But why didn't I ever bike during grad school, at least the first year? (Second year I am absolved, since Spring Hill loomed between me and campus.) I didn't have a bike, I guess, Zeph being rusted into a hulk by that point. I borrowed RJH's hybrid for a spell but barely ever used it. I carried a lot of stuff and didn't have good panniers, I know. Once while I lived with NBM she drove me to campus when Fugly was being worked on and she ribbed me about my baggage: my regular backpack, a gym backpack (I had just done laundry; it usually lived at either of my campus jobs), and a stack of library books (probably I had just given up on yet another paper).
Anyway. I rode my new bike. Naming it Shadowfax might be overkill: I already always mount a bike from the left, as I would a horse (I've been on a horse I think twice), but naming the bike a) at all and b) after a horse and c) after that particular horse is making me think in horse-metaphor a lot more. When I started bike-commuting I started keeping my bike in the basement rather than the garage, which entails fewer locks to unlock and lock. Now every afternoon I think of stabling it (and I pat it on the saddle as I leave it). When I prop it (right side against the prop) and the front wheel falls left, I think of how a horse turns its nose to look at its human.
I am not so far gone that I hesitate to hang it from a hook in the indoor bike closet at work though.
where "fucking" is an adjectival modifier and not a verb.
Uberboss just excused me from reading any book that doesn't thrill me, like The Little Friend. I just can't get over that no one told Tartt to change Harriet's name. I mean, okay, it's only the protagonist, and it's not as if I have ever averred that someone's name affects their character, oh no. But damn. A twelve-year-old girl detective with that personality, named Harriet? This book might be a Louise Fitzhugh alternate universe.
Anyway, so I picked up Jane Eyre when I got home, because that book annoys me and I am insane. Because Charlotte Brontë didn't like Jane Austen. Because I'm not that much fonder of Jane Eyre than I am of Fanny Price. It doesn't annoy me as much as Wuthering Heights, which outright pisses me off for its overthetoppiness. I do like Tenant of Wildfell Hall, though, so the Brontës aren't a total loss.
The reason I always come back to Jane Eyre, though almost never the whole thing, is that I continue to try to puzzle out Mrs. Fairfax. Have you read it? Why not? Spoilers follow. Mrs. Fairfax knows there is a madwoman in the attic. She loves Jane, or is fond of her, and respects her as a good and proper young woman. But does she know that the madwoman is Mrs. Rochester? Mr. Rochester says, after the botched wedding, "Mrs. Fairfax may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no precise knowledge as to facts." Is her questioning Jane when she learns of their engagement meant as a warning? That is the last time we hear her voice directly; afterward when the wedding party return from the church Mr. Rochester rebuffs the congratulations offered by her, Sophie, and Adèle. Much later, after the fire, Jane tells her reader about Adèle but not about Mrs. Fairfax. She was such a priss to decent old Hannah that I wonder what her attitude to Mrs. Fairfax might be.
and the regular weekly crap I almost never do on weeknights.
Since posting initially:
Here, the part of speech "fucking" assumes is more obvious. Otherwise, ow.
Yesterday after my computer ate my book, full of tables and formatting (mine) and three months late (not mine), for the fourth fucking time, the computer folks deigned to give me a new CPU. It's damn loud. While someone was hooking it up, the monitor blinked in its annoying way, and he asked, "What's that?" I said, "That's my monitor blinking in its annoying (and loud, when I have the speakers on) way; sometimes it flips out entirely so that you can see the shape of the tube."
"Oh. I can get you a new monitor too." So he did.
"While you're here, can I ask you why my taskbar's autohide function never works?" I have it set to hide, and I expect it to display when I mouse to the bottom of the screen. It doesn't.
He told me it's because I have my windows maximized, so the taskbar shows up but behind the windows. I should have realized that myself, I know, but for fuck's sake. That's what the autohide is for, no? So I can use the piddly 17" screen to its capacity, and waste space for the task bar only when I want to use it? The same way I keep my email program, my web browser, my word-processing software, etc. all open at the same time but only display when I want? If I have to size a window to accommodate the taskbar, what is the point of autohide?
I love Macintosh.
I love iTunes, I love my iPod, despite their deranged use of capital letters. I just ripped The White Album without "Back in the U.S.S.R."
Yeah. Four blathery entries since I made the list of the weekend's chores. This would be why I seldom finish a weekend's tasks. Away with me.
RDC made us mocha lattes in the middle of the afternoon. I took a break and drank mine, reading The Little Friend and blathering, then returned to the front garden. My main project over the next few weeks (or sooner) is to plan my plantings this year, so I abandoned the grooming and consulted my gardening books and High Country Gardens catalogs. Gradually I noticed how badly my hands were shaking and connected that with an inability to concentrate and mild paranoia. It was 3:30, and I hadn't eaten since my morning cereal nor drunk very much. But I had had a powerfully chocolatey coffeey latte an hour before.
I dove for the kitchen and made myself peanut butter toast. It was medicinal, really!
I hadn't felt paranoia like that since I had Percocet four years ago after my wisdom-tooth extraction.
I took two quarts of sour cherries out of the freezer today. We were planning to snowshoe tomorrow but RDC isn't feeling well. He says he's feeling up to helping me make a pie crust, though. Sometimes I think he wakes up with a stranger every morning, because how after ten years he can continue to hope that teaching me anything kitcheny would require any less than his full strength I don't know.
So tomorrow, after pie- and maybe bread-baking, I'll clean the oven and fridge. Before, I'll upgrade my kitchen applet.
Check. My very first pie crust that didn't sulk and become delinquent before grumping off into a tough and unchewable texture. Or at least, so I hope. It's in the oven.
I called my mother to tell her. I told her I had good news, that I was not pregnant but she should sit down anyway. (I wouldn't want to incubate her hopes at all.) I only found out in November that when I was a wee tot, she and her friend (the one whose glance reassured my eulogy at Granny's funeral) made pies for the sorely missed Lymelight Diner. How can I not have known this, all the Thanksgiving Eves when I would peel pecks of apples for pies and watch her make pie dough and help spread butter and cinnamon and sugar on the scraps to make kisses? Her husband happened to mention it as we sat at lunch in the Bee & Thistle. So she told about splitting up the work, about her making the apple pies one week and her friend making the berry ones the next, and about using lard in the dough, about how the health inspector, visiting the house to issue a commercial baking license, first gave my sister and me the once-over. That probably is an excellent initial indicator, clean and happy kids. I always knew she made the best pies--much better than Granny's--(and never skimped on the telling her, either, not biting the hand that fed me apple pie) and it saddened me that I never knew that. Could I have forgotten?
So. RDC helped with the crust, verbally. I'm the only one who touched it, but he offered valuable advice like to freeze the pastry roller and spray it with Pam and to preheat the oven and not to stress the dough by rolling tooo fast. As soon as the pie went in the oven, I called my mother and we talked through my rolling out scraps. (I've never had scraps, before using only the Pillsbury premade crusts.)
My beleaguered mother. She asked me if I still had my hair in that "cute" cut she saw in January and I told her no, that I'd grown it a couple of feet since. In all honesty this is the same smart-ass answer I'd give to anyone, but since I know her question meant "I really like that haircut" despite its simultaneous undertones of "and thank god you don't look like such a hippie anymore," I could answer her accordingly. But I am constitutionally unable to cut her a break. However, she did seem to get the joke. Whew.
The pie's not out of the oven yet but the kisses have disappeared. Something went right, apparently.
The other day RDC and I arrove home at the same time, me on Shadowfax and he in Cassidy. I pulled up next to him as he unfolded himself, chatting about the day and the bike and watching two little boys--well, nineish, not so little--walk along. They were clearly on expotition (RDC blames me for his no longer being able to say "expedition"), one in camo, one in as close to hunter's-orange as he could get, both carrying backpacks full of, I was sure, vital supplies, both carrying weapons, striding along on their mission. I watched them, grinning. They gained the corner and looked up from their intent conversation. They saw me and one raised his plywood gun and aimed it at me.
"Please don't point your gun at me!" I exclaimed. "I have done nothing to you!"
He lowered his rifle immediately, waved sheepishly with his other arm, and called "Sorry!"
I grinned wide at him, still charmed. "That's all right."
And it was. Somehow, it still has to be.
This was taken in January (so that's the old box on top of his cage and about two shoelaces ago) but somehow I hadn't posted it yet. He is now perched on my toes, probably entertaining impure thoughts since I am wearing fleece socks with a fleece blanket on my legs, while preening. Blake's had a wonderful Sunday: housebound, reading parents, a new living room arrangement by which he can hop from the toes of the parent in the recliner to the table, across the table to the other parent on the couch, hot cereal and a bit of orange and a sour cherry.
I had my hair cut again last night. I wanted to see what it looked like a little shorter. I don't like it as much and would like it to my collarbones again. At least. I do miss a braid.
In the right pic, I'm on the phone with my sister, who is chez our father and notstepmother. Our notstepmother finally got another dog, more than two years after Sam died. Unlike regular-sized, black, setter and lab Sam, Ben is a Yorkshire terrier. Before my own visit in December, I tried to imagine my father with a Yorkie. Having actually experienced my father with a Yorkie (a Yorkie, what's more, with a ribbon in his topknot) has not improved my ability to imagine it. CLH told me today that though she has little time for him and he seems afraid of her, Ben can't resist her anyway. "Sounds like our father's kind of dog," I said: "'Oh yes, frighten and ignore me so I can try harder.'" Why can't we laugh like that about our relationships with our mother?
If my next haircut is in two months, I will be almost 35 and might want something a little more, I told the cutter. "Maybe some color," she suggested.
Er. Hair color is not only makeup but long-term makeup. It doesn't respond well to chlorine, which is what I have to swim in here. Chlorine is one bad chemical and hairdye is another. Not a good train of thought. However, when my hair looks particularly mousey I can see the appeal. She did a splendid job restoring Haitch's natural color on her very first visit, so I trust her skill as a colorist, but still.
When I first got it cut, at least two people asked if I had had it colored as well and one didn't believe my denial. Longer, in a braid, the undersides of the strands were exposed to sun. Shorter, loose, the unexposed sides show; they haven't been sun- and exposure-bleached. Or at least that's what makes sense to me. Maybe enough dye to make up for the highlights the sun hasn't had the chance to burnish yet. Hmm.
The photographs show my hair curlier than it was when I left the salon; they are post-snow today. Actually intra-snow. More than a foot fell overnight, a wonderful, atypically wet, dense snow. All the schools and many businesses including mine had snow days. I remembered to call the office before I even got dressed for the bus, and Dot Org was closed, closed, closed! I yipped and yahooed and yeehawed, because unlike schooldays, snow days from work don't have to made up from February or April or summer vacation. Also I pranced.
I took butter and molasses from the fridge to warm up. I did laundry. I tidied my study and vacuumed downstairs and put away the tottering stacks of CDs I've been ripping. I chose more books for the bookcase--Italo Calvino is someone RDC and I have in common so is a good choice.
Also I shoveled our sidewalk--city ordinance requires shoveling within 12 hours of significant snowfall--and the neighbor's and the other neighbors' and of course Babushka's. Either she heard me or was coming out to feed the birds anyway but she sounded almost scared as she called, "But who are you?" I shucked my hood, "I'm lisa from up the street, with the bird and the cherry tree and the cucumbers?" I didn't know how many more identifying details she might have needed, but she did seem to recognize me as soon as my hood came down. I haven't seen her since fall and she looked very old this morning. Perhaps she only lacked her teeth.
We snowshoed in City Park in the afternoon. First we banged on the overburdened trees with the snow shovel and a broom until they unbowed themselves. During this RDC wondered how many more layers we'd want for our walk. He went inside for gaiters and came out with snowshoes. They were a good idea. People were sledding on the puny little hill behind the museum--what does happen to people who grow up without sledding, without snowfolk, without fireflies, without frogs?--and about a dozen dogs were having the time of their lives off leash as their humans played in the playground, quite illegally. When we got back I shoveled us and Babushka again, another foot having fallen during the day. A neighbor's golden retriever bounded about, out of her mind with glee, while her basset hound stumped about much less pleased with life in snow well over his head.
Before and after the snowshoeing, I made cookies. Last summer a Charenton friend made ginger cookies of a quite whizbangy level of gingerness, but they lacked the essential ingredient of the best desserts, chocolate. These have a wonderful ginger bite but plenty of chocolate too. A Martha Stewart recipe, it assumed parchment on cookie sheets instead of Pam, and a high-end blender instead of a strong right arm with a wooden spoon, and "chocolate chopped into 1/4" pieces" instead of what that obviously means, chocolate chips. I did nothing to adjust for altitude, added less clove, and zounds, what a good cookie.
My notstepmother wants some; my father wants more of the peanut butter cookies I made him for Christmas. My sister just wanted to tell them about my adventures in being unable to make snowrocks.
Meanwhile, the snow is forecast to continue through tomorrow. It's over two feet in the backyard now but could always--please!--get deeper. A second snowday would rock my world. I'll find out in 11 hours.
<--Yesteday morning and yesterday afternoon-->
I am grieved to report that the precipitation, which had stopped about 11 this morning, has commenced again (it's almost 2:00) in the form of rain. Of the three times I shoveled, morning and afternoon yesterday and morning today, after I cleared the main accumulation from sidewalk and walk I would finish with a last scrape. I would start at the porch, clear the walk, clear the sidewalk, and then do Babushka, and by the time I finished that, there'd be another quarter or half an inch on the pavement. No more. The sidewalk is wet, not crusty; the trees are dripping.
This morning when I shoveled, my two neighbors brought their three dogs for their walks. The basset hound was even sadder (his ears!) and even the golden retriever, still wriggling with joy, obviously struggled across the drifts to greet me. What a New England cheap-ass way out of a snowstorm, to melt under rain instead of sun.
<--Last night and this morning-->
This morning I tried to unburden the trees again. Covered head to toe in Gore-Tex, I stood under the trees and lifted their branches with a long broom. One plum tree that to comply with city ordinance I should trim covers the sidewalk even without snow to make a cave out of it. It leans over more under the snow weighing its branches, and then its tips get buried again in the snow on the ground. Carefully, I freed it from its contortions. Though the two shield the sidewalk from accumulation somewhat, my de-snowing them of course dumps it down again. So I shoveled and shoveled and shoveled, a 48' long x 5' wide x 2.5' deep sidewalk plus a 20' x 5' x 2.5' walk plus however much volume I removed from Babushka. Anyone who says that isn't exercise can kiss my pearly white ass.
Before snowshoeing yesterday afternoon, we banged off the trees in the front, ignoring the cherry tree in back. As we looked out the bedroom window last night, I saw that a branch had cracked under the strain. Damn. These trees are 30 years old and toward the ends of their lives; they need better care than for me to forget to clear off the branches.
I think RDC took this without a flash; I was surprised to see it among the photographs this morning. With all the white on the ground and falling and the moon nearly full behind the clouds, the night was lit with a wonderful blue-white light instead of the unlovely orange of sodium. He took another photograph of me this morning shoveling again--he doesn't have a snowday as long as the snow spares the phone and electricity cables--but all that shows is the impracticality of my hair cut, with a couple of bangs falling into my face, too short for the ponytail. Which isn't a pony but a pug's tail.
Koroshiya rocks, but you knew that. After seeing what she did for Jared, I whined and stomped and asked whether I perhaps live in a snowshadow, thus deserving no banner? This despite her just--like, Tuesday, the last time the mailcarrier trekked to the house--sending me a mind-bending mix cd, mind-bending because the Smiths and General Public and I go way back, so to hear Love Split love and Harvey Danger do "How Soon Is Now?" and "Save It for Later" threw me. Not to mention, who the hell are these people? I am pathologically unhip.
So she sent me my own banner. Hmph.
Yesterday afternoon, after 36 hours of letting the snow tamp itself down under its own weight and a couple hours of rain, I scurried outside to get the final tally, except what with the weighing and the rain it wasn't. The official measurement for Denver was 29", though I don't know if that was downtown or at DIA.
About 5:15, the electricity wavered and came back. Two minutes later it was gone. At this point, the storm became much less fun. I don't think I've been without power in the winter. In the summer, one doesn't freeze. Previously, I haven't had a desert birdkin to keep warm. But the house keeps itself fairly warm fairly well, as long as outside is not windy or too cold, and we didn't expect the temperature to dip much below 30. The fireplace heats the living room splendidly and we would live in there. City water and a gas stove meant no worries about water or even cooking.
So the camping began. We cozied up the coffee table and chair next to the couch, to make room for the futon up from my study. This became our bed. We dug a path to the woodpile, thinking ourselves very clever for buying all that wood this fall, removed the tarp, and hauled a bunch of it inside, downstairs to drip dry in the furnace room. I was pleased with myself for actually having cleaned the bathroom and the birdcage this weekend, because I don't do those things nearly as often as I should and there's nothing like not being able to do anything about it to make a house seem grimy. I wished I had washed my hair after beating the crap out of my trees in the morning. We dug out the camping box, the box of matches, the candles, the flashlights, the headlamps. Our landlines are cordless thus need electricity, but we had our cellular phones.
As dusk fell and there was no light, Blake began to look around suspiciously. What were we doing? Didn't we know he's afraid of the dark? I lit a candle in the 5-armed candelabra and put it in the corner of the dining table closest to his cage. But he's afraid of candles too, and flashlights! I found a honeystick in the cupboard and hung it in his cage to keep him occupied.
We couldn't light the oven, which though gas has electric controls, but we could light the stove burners. We ran those with pots of water on top. After dinner (pasta with sauce out of the freezer), I washed up. So far, so civilized.
The house was cooling down, and while a fire would suck the remaining heat out of the house, there in the living room we'd be warm enough. So we lay the fire, newspaper twists like Laura Ingalls Wilder and the hay, scraps of lumber from the woodshop (!) since everything in the brush pile would have been soaked, dry wood from under the tarp. And a match.
This is where we found out the hard way that our chimney is so very old-fashioned, so wide and open, that it can get packed with snow.
About that the less said the better.
Not yet. I have read and cleaned and baked fabulous cookies and listened to music and have I mentioned that Blake is in some form of cockatiel heaven, with both parents home for three solid days? He did freak out yesterday morning when I went outside for two hours, immediately after getting up so without first properly bidding him good morning, but otherwise he's blissed out.
Twenty-four hours without outside communication just kind of worked out right now anyway. It would be clever for us to have a battery-powered radio, but this way we didn't find out that the war had begun until long after it had. I wrote to my heavies about my recent hausfrauing, whether it's making peace within myself or just ostritching. (I also decided that "to ostrich," as a verb, needs a "t" at least in the gerund form.) "Life goes on. Even in London in wartime. Especially, perhaps, in London, in wartime" (The Shell-Seekers).
I really like, in Maus, when, to his analyst, Art quotes Samuel Beckett, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness," and then they sit wordless for a panel before Art continues in the next, "On the other hand, he SAID it."
My fourth snowday in a row. About the one, I didn't worry, for me or for Dot Org. It pays a snow day as administrative leave, so I--unlike a lot of people from a lot of other jobs in town, I know--lost no salary. But four! I won't find out until Monday at the earliest what the fiscal consequences might be.
This morning after breakfast I put Blake on RDC's shoulder for a minute so I could go fill the birdfeeder. Blake screeched and flew after me, fluttering to the floor and waddling after. He spends days with his daddy, on his lap under the desk, so I don't know how RDC suddenly became so inferior. Now we're in the living room chair again, with books and a shoelace.
Also, it's snowing again.
Unfortunately, I probably won't; nor could I afford to. I dusted the living and dining rooms, whose horizontal surfaces had drifts of ash; I vacuumed the rugs and upholestery; I would have laundered the curtains if they had any chance of drying on the line; I washed the glossy paint of the hearth, discolored with smoke. I read some short stories; I tried to bake bread (without my kitchen chaperon, and a failure despite its being Donald Rumsfeld as I pummeled it); I cleaned the wood floors; I shoveled behind the garage in case we want to use Cassidy, I shoveled most of the patio, so the snow would melt into the earth instead of the brick; I set a five-gallon bucket under the corner of the porch that needs better gutters and dumped 15 gallons of meltwater into the front garden, sparing the house that much flooding. We walked out for coffee and read The Onion over mocha and vanilla lattes.
The two discolored streaks in the front landing floor are (I discovered today for the first time, almost three years in the house) come from tape. Someone taped what was surely television cable on the floor, between the hole they'd seen fit to drill in the floor, between the understair space where it entered the house through a basement window, and the living room. I had never noticed that the streaks were not permanent stains but dirt stuck to tape residue. Did people hate my house? Why would anyone drill through oak floors just for television?
They hacked holes through the floor for the new heating system too. The original air exchange has a wonderful oak grid; the floor in the dining room was built around it. Sometime later another furnace required another air intake to be cut in the living room in front of the window. This isn't particularly lovely, but it's inconspicuous. The current furnace's air intake is in the dining room, conspicuously in the traffic flow to the hallway, and under the unlovely metal grille the hole in the floor was cut without love or care. Sigh.
I'm still not sure about the living room wall. I can't believe that if the wall separating the living room from the front stairs is not original, more windows wouldn't originally been built into the exterior wall. The one small window and the ceiling light fixture suggest the wall is original; only its being drywall instead of plaster suggests otherwise but it might have been rebuilt after rewiring. I suppose when people build houses, they might not think about refinishing floors. But there's about a foot of floor in the stairwell between the wall and the railing along the staircase, a foot in which a floor refinisher cannot reach. That strip is discolored with age and a millimeter or two higher than the resurfaced area. I have no idea whether the floor will be able to handle another refinishing in another couple of decades. I hope so.
I can't claim that we've taken the best possible care of the floor ourselves. The very day we moved the furniture in, we marred it. The couch from the apartment became the downstairs, den couch. It had to go through the front door (wider than the back), through the length of the house, through the doorway between kitchen and back landing, and down the back stairs (wider than the front). The doorway wasn't quite wide enough, and the corner of the couch gouged a wiggling foot-long line in the floor.
I don't know what we should do in the kitchen. I don't want to tile or lino it but the wood is extremely sad. I need to get more or better area rugs for in front of the fridge and the dishwasher, and when the area rug in front of the stove is up--last weekend I hosed its pad and beat the crap out of it (that being my thing)--you can see that the floor under it is less worn.
One of the kitchen toys we bought along with the pastry sheet is a set of measuring cups. Sturdy, simple stainless steel measures, but to me its chief delights are its 2/3- and 3/4-cup measures.
The local news featured the frivolities of the snowfall: snowfolk and snowshoeing to walk the dog. Another snippet showed people sledding off their rooftops onto drifts. The images, therefore, were of rapid swooping movement across a field of white. I've mentioned that Blake warns us of Bad Dangerous Flying Stuff like the occasional escaped balloon overhead or things on TV like the flying monkeys in "The Wizard of Oz." Well. Sure enough, Blake loosed a warning shriek. This is why we have Tivo: so we could rewind it and make him shriek again.
It's a fact that the only people who are killed by sledding people on their televisions are the ones who don't live with cockatiels.
We went gallumphing through City Park again today. The Sky Terrace at the museum was "closed due to inclement weather," which we found hideously unfair. It was, in fact, in the high 50s and sunny and I should have worn shorts instead of jeans with my gaiters. So instead we gallumphed to ground level on the west side, four storeys down. I really hope that this dump means the mountains keep their white peaks well into summer. Last year I think by May you could see no white from the city. Mt. Evans has lost much of its contour under its mantle and I hope it doesn't find them again until July.
This morning as I ate my breakfast at the table and Blake ate his on his cage, he shrieked as I have seldom or never heard him shriek before, with panicky fear (not the alert call of the roof sledders the other day) as he leapt into the air and fluttered.
I followed him into the living room, calling quietly to him, and he dashed as fast as his dashiest waddle would close the distance between us. His crest was bent nearly in half, it was so high, and he was panting through his beak, body attenuated, breast heaving. He didn't want a full body scoop-snuggle but to be on my shoulder where he could watch and hide behind my head.
Our birdfeeder has become a birdfeeder-plus. RDC has seen it a couple of times but when I turned, my hand cupped over Blake's head like a horse's blinder, it was my first time to see the peregrine falcon perched on the nectarine tree, on the lowest horizontal branch from which the birdfeeder is suspended. I wanted to dump my little boy on his daddy so I could watch the raptor, but Blake was having none of that.
The falcon hoisted itself up and dropped into the evergreen tree before leaving. It's amazing. I would be so pleased if our birdfeeder were a regular stop on its hunting rounds. I know. I know that I said that about the squirrels, that I planted the sunflowers for them, and that I turned out to be lying. But housefinches and housesparrows are so much less important than birds of prey. I might be upset if its first victim (it hasn't been successful here yet that we've seen) were a chickadee or a junco, rarer and prettier than either housething.
It took a long time for Blake to calm down. He wouldn't be coaxed to the kitchen windowsill at all, even after the outside birds had returned to their black oil sunflower seeds. He certainly doesn't like crows and magpies aren't much better, but a falcon--where does his fear come from? Instinct, of course; if Australia doesn't have peregrine falcons (does it?) it must have butteos and eagles of some sort. But I still call Blake a very clever boy, cagebound and housebound as he is, for recognizing such a predator.
Beautiful. Snow to the eyebrows, just as it should be.
From this to this. Saturday, the mountains looked like this from City Park. Sunday, the mountains looked like that from Rocky Mountain National Park.
I do love the dark blue of the sky, the wind lifting the snow off the peaks, how the sun glazes the skin of the snow into liquid, the patterns on the surface from the melt underneath, the vertical thrust of cliff without snow.
I really don't know what to do about graphics.
Anyway, 5 miles easy snowshoeing.
And also this, Long's Peak across Bierstadt Lake. This is the halfway point, and where we stopped to fuel and water ourselves. We saw people feeding gray jays and I said nothing.
The day before, in City Park, I did not say nothing. A woman called for her daughter who had strayed far from the museum toward the pond. The mother, not dressed for snow, called, and the girl, tromping around in said snow, didn't obey, and they yelled back and forth
("Don't go any farther! Come back here!"
"Why!"
"Come back!"
"Why!")
and after closing half the distance between them having to listen to this I was sick of it and hollered at the girl, "Because she said so!" Which really helped, I know: it enforced the mother's inability to discipline her child and the girl's lack of need to obey her parent and the rudeness of random strangers and "because I said so" is no reason whatsoever. But they were yelling across 1/8 mile of snowy park, and my, I felt better for yelling. The downfall of society, that's me. Last I saw, the girl was moving, as if dragging a large dead tree behind her, in the general direction of her incompetent mater.
Thank you, Beth, for telling me the tag to make images work.
The airport died--that's such a silly name, too easily confusable with the place the planes are--and I have no internet access at home unless I umbilicle (the verb form is spelled -cle instead of -cal, I just decreed) myself to the server. Or something. So count on my being quiet for a while.
The other day as I scampered the half-mile between bus stop and work, I looked up briefly from White Teeth to see that the vehicle leaving a driveway for a road was indeed going to stop for me the pedestrian. He was. I noted briefly, "Oo, white van--must be a sniper," and was back in the book when, 20 feet later, I heard a voice.
The driver said, "Hey, I know you! You're the lady who waits for the bus on X Avenue near Y."
"Yep--that's me."
"Do you work here?"
"A little farther on," I evaded.
"I drive out here all the time--I could give you a ride."
I laughed, thanking him, turning away. How do I handle that? He didn't set off any warning bells--older, decent grammar, probably the last of the decent-to-strangers generation (sniper's van aside).
This morning as I stood at the bus stop, the white van pulled up and the passenger side window came down and the driver offered me a ride. I had not thought of what to say; what would I say? Smiling I hoped self-deprecatingly, "I am sorry, sir, but I really can't accept a ride from a stranger."
He nodded, waving and pulling away. "I got no problem with that."
I do though. If people don't accept kindnesses from strangers, strangers will stop offering them. The chances that he would harm or even threaten me are, I'd wager, slim to none, as are, nonetheless, the chances that I would get into a stranger's car. He was just being nice. I hate that I can't accept that nicety.
I feel like a heel.
In the past three months, two different people I work with have got engaged. In both cases, the man asked the woman's father's permission before asking her to marry him. What the hell? Long Island, Virginia, I get that some things persist in some regions and cultures longer than in others. Both men asked the father, not the parents.
That the men asked the fathers before asking the women makes no sense to me, yet only as I began to write this did it occur to me that it should strike me as equally stupid that the men asked the women instead of vice versa. That that it didn't shows the mores I have kept.
We scampered downtown aiming for the Bonnard exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. We gave up on that because, just before 1:00 when we arrove, the next available entry was at 2:40; plus the member's line was ridiculous: it issued tickets to members for the exhibit but also sold memberships--so the member's line was almost as long as the non-member's line. Meanwhile, will-call had no line--yet that volunteer couldn't assist at the other two lines, returning to his post when a will-call person showed up?. So we'll register on-line for a time next Sunday and pick up our tickets at will-call, which had better not have a line then either.
RDC wanted to try the Appaloosa Grill, where I went for lunch once with Trey. It was okay, but not okay enough to be open on Sunday and plus it didn't have outdoor seating. So instead we ate at Marlowe's, on the patio, in the just-warm-enough sun or the cloud-over-the-sun stiff breeze. I had a spinach, walnut, blue cheese, and duck salad. Yum.
The Museum of Contemporary Art is closed Sundays; the Byers-Evans house would close at 3:00 and it was 2:20. So we just went to the library.
Nisou and I talked yesterday and I told her I had just acquired Animals Dreams and Pigs in Heaven. She set me straight that Pigs is the sequel to Bean Trees, not Dreams, and I exclaimed in dismay, "You mean I have to read another book? Noooo."
The library didn't have Bean Trees though. But I got Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and last year's Newbery A Single Shard and Creating the Not-So-Big House and When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden.
I think I should start flexing again. The sunlight is back; if I go to the gym for an hour then I work an extra hour, if not 30 minutes; and I can still have some time in the garden when I get home--as can Blake, if it's warm enough. "In the garden!" as the voice of Mrs. Craven said.
Oh! Yeah, absolutely: Tex out for two weeks means no daytime gym unless I drive or figure out someone else to mooch off, and I know CoolBoss won't be going either. Cool. On the 11th of April, then, I will start landscaping in the other half of the front yard.
The mountains are slathered with white, the sky is blue with white polka clouds, the s are snapping, and it's in the high 50s. I sat outside in the the warmth of the sun with White Teeth and my lunch (spinach salad with chicken and cheese). Bliss.
For afters I had some Hershey's Mint Kisses, which are my primary weakness. Now that I have determined that chocolate with mint is superior to chocolate with peanut butter (years of serious study led to this conclusion), the next debate will be between chocolate with raspberry and chocolate with blueberry. Really, blueberry wins hands down, but raspberry has the advantage of availability.
I biked today, and even in the morning my thin Old Lyme sweatshirt was too much. I lost my long-sleeved t-shirt somewhere along the line and need to replace it. Perhaps at REI tonight; it's time for Shadowfax's 30-day tune-up. I have to find out whether I can wait for this check-up or must leave it. I didn't bike-commute yesterday but intend to for the rest of the week.
Okay, partly this struck me because I had just begun Barbara Kingsolver's new book of essays Small Wonder, in which a torturer says, "We can milk roosters here; and bears lay eggs." And partly, as I drowsily thumbed through a Pottery Barn catalog, because it's so stupid. I know this is really Mr. Gradgrindy of me, but an egg- (or other small object-) containing rooster (with a small opening in the back to insert same) is Why No One Knows How Stuff Works.
In college sometime I saw a child with a plush toy (I can't quite call it a stuffed animal, even though "stuffed" here is particularly apt) that was up the spout. The animal you bought--a nice non-threatening domesticated species like a dog, cat, or horse--came with three babies, unless you were really lucky and it had four, or really lucky and it came with five. This reminded me of Veruca Salt's quest for a Golden Ticket, just to keep buying until one turned out right. Besides that, the really offensive part was that the animals had slits in their bellies, and the babies got tucked into the belly for storage or could be removed. My conclusion was that the Caesarian Section Surgery Company must have promoted that toy, to make a generation grow up thinking that's where babies ought to come from. And be reinsertable.
I broke Buddy's heart again by leaving as soon as I'd showered and snacked. I bussed downtown, not biking because I just don't trust Shadowfax unattended in downtown, and plus there isn't a bike rack outside Capitol Books, and I would have to a) train myself to lock up at Capitol and then go through the entire unlocking ritual, ride the mere three blocks to the 'brary, and lock up again. Or b) leave the bike at Capitol and walk across the state capitol complex after dark to return to it (no thank you) or c) leave it at the 'brary to begin with and walk thence to Capitol and back.
It's good I didn't choose c) (taking the most time), because who knew Capitol closes at 6? I ducked inside at 5:53, without my list because I'm a nidiot. I remembered my priorities, at least: no Bean Trees, but The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, check, and The Toughest Indian in the World. Small Wonder, Kingsolver essays not fiction. Checking the sf shelves for Card or Gibson or Stephenson, I found the first two Green Sky books. They are the really cheesy pulp format, a little shorter even than regular pulp, with bad paper, but I am pretty sure they're out of print so I snapped them up.
I began Fistfight walking to the library. I'll like that.
For the first time, I went downstairs at the library, to the conference center. The stairs are at the west, Denver Art Museum end of the building, and when I got to the bottom to looked to my right in surprise. I never knew there was an underground passage between the library and the museum. I would have explored immediately but someone addressed me:
"Are you confused too?" probably taking my pausing and looking down the passage in nostalgia (how I would have loved that as a child!) for lostness.
"No," I said. "I just never knew there was a tunnel between the library and the museum."
"Sweet," said the bearded young man dismissively, after a quick glance. "I was looking for the internet computers."
I directed him to either the main fiction hall or the nonfiction floors above, where there would be fewer people.
"Thank you ma'am," he finished.
Criminy. I never thought I'd be 34, did you?
So then "Stagecoach." I knew when I sat down in the second row, right side (because of Haitch, I always sit on the right side of a theatre now) that I would never opt to watch a movie, thankfully only a 96' movie, in such a chair. I dealt because I am, ma'am, apparently a grown-up now, until a few minutes into the movie when a late arrival needed to stand right in front of me asking the people in the first row whether this seat or that was taken. Since the seats were empty and the movie had started, there's your answer, see? Then he sat down, right in front of me, after being all concerned about everyone else in the front row, clearly not caring about moi, than whom he was much taller and much much stinkier. Plus the two men behind me had not quite ceased their conversation, and they spoke like my father, self-affirming and the only person worth listening to. I rose with my stack of books, walked down around the back and up, and lay on the scratchy filthy carpet in front of the left side. The five books made an excellent pillow.
All I knew about "Stagecoach" was that it was nominated for best picture in 1939 (the library series is "The Golden Year of Film"). I only ever knew John Wayne as an old man and a cariacature of himself in all the westerns I watched with my father, and I have a hard time seeing him as a real actor. But it was quite good. It took me a moment to realize about the One Bullet Left and its best use. Introducing the movie, a librarian had mentioned its archetypes, such as the prostitute with the heart of gold. She kinda implied this was an element in the Western that "Stagecoach" invented, but I must have mistaken her, because also in 1939 there's Belle Watling in "Gone with the Wind."
The other day Uberboss said he had a book for me, couldn't remember the title, lots of literary hijinks (his word) and kind of skiffy (not his word) with time travel...
"Is it The Eyre Affair?" I asked. He was pleased that I knew it and brought it in the next day. I read the first few pages and it will be fun I'm sure; the epigraph of the very first chapter is an excerpt from a book that I promptly submitted to the Invisible Library whose author is Millon de Floss.
Yesterday he came in brandishing Atonement and asked if I were next in line for it. No, I read it in September and we hadn't talked about it. We both liked it better than Amsterdam and I admired how its three sections worked so well together, as distinct in style and content as each is, and he praised its craft.
---
Saturday night Lou and her partner had a birthday party, renting out a bowling alley for their few hundred closest friends and coworkers. They know everyone: a mayoral candidate was there and another easily could have been invited. At one point I was chatting with a coworker, who occasionally leaned forward and rubbed the shoulders of another coworker (down one level on the bowling floor) to the point that my observation changed from "whatever" to "huh." Finally I sought out CoolBoss and said, "I have a gossip question for you." I whispered the two names in her ear.
"Where have you been?" she mock-demanded. "For two years now."
Where I've been, by the way, is sitting in my cube across the hall from one of the two and across from her, who is good friends with the other. My only defense was that I am not a gossip at work.
I have been commended at performance evaluations for not involving myself in office gossip and politics, and that's an image I want to maintain and cultivate. For the first time (that I know of) something is going on that could affect me directly, with two factions each reasonably supposing I am privy to the other, and the more people think I know nothing, the better off I am.
---
Yesterday Egg left for a week in Paris and the Loire valley. Her flight was at 3; she didn't leave the office until after 1. It's less than a half-hour to DIA, but eesh. Believe me, no one would have died if she had delegated or postponed a thing or two. This is why I'm usually content to be support staff. This job ceases to exist at 4 o'clock (or 4:30, flexing with a half-hour lunch), and that's a-okay with me. Another reason I like her is that, when she hugged me g'bye and I said "Bon voya-gee!" she knew who I was being.
Blake is hopping from knee to knee on RDC's lap, bobbing excitedly because he (the verb will clarify the antecedent) is reading "Tinturn Abbey." (Blake loves for RDC to read aloud.) I am agog at this.
Guess where we might go this summer.
My sister asked me Saturday if I liked Wind in the Willows. "It's okay," I said, "not one of my special favorites." I am not doing so well with the Quelling Impulsively Honest Answer In Favor of Weighing Actual Import of Question Before Opening Piehole.
She wanted to give me a copy she found in a used bookshop in Marblehead, a 1968 British printing with Arthur Rackham illustrations. Last year she gave me a bubble machine for my birthday, and she was really disappointed I didn't consider it the best gift ever (she has been pleased to note that it has featured prominently in all my outdoor festivities since, though).
I didn't say anything about Arthur Rackham vs. Original and therefore Right Ernest Shepherd decorations. I didn't go on about how the second half, with Toad getting all Napoleon-like (I don't mean Bonapartesque, I mean like in Animal Farm), depresses me. Ratty and Moley messing about in boats, that I like. Ratty and Moley finding Otter's child sleeping in the curve of Pan's arm as he pipes in the dawn, that I like. Toad driving a car and escaping from jail disguised as a laundress, not so much. I just left it at "not one of my favorites."
She wanted to give me a Foundational children's book printed in my birthyear, and probably all my recoiling is my own baggage. She didn't say anything about its being Valuable other than that it was a used and rare (so not necessarily both) bookstore.
I don't want to own a Valuable book. If a book is valuable monetarily, it had better be because it's someone or other's Book of Hours from 1361 and illuminated with gold leaf and lapis lazuli. In which case it belongs in a museum (cue Indiana Jones). If a volume of Leaves of Grass is valuable because, I'm making this up, Wilfred Owen carried it into the trenches, it belongs in the Owen library. If a collector puts a dollar amount on it because it carries someone's signature, and you buy it for the signature not the content, then that's not true value. I love my copy of Possession more than I used to because now it has A.S. Byatt's signature on it, but that's emotional value to me because she spoke to me, we exchanged pleasantries, while she touched and held and signed the book. (It's also irreplaceable because for as much as I know you can only buy the book with Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow instead of Sir Edward Burne-Jones's The Beguiling of Merlin on the cover. Aha--no, though the painting remains, the cover design is tainted witha Major Motion Picture thingie.)
Last year in Books of Wonder I saw a complete first edition of Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six. Five or seven thousand dollars, if I recall. Now me, I'm dragonny with my books, bad at lending, bad at returning, prone to hoarding. But I can't imagine those four books being in any individual's private library, because what're you going to do, read them? Read them to a child, and risk the damage that makes cardboard books such a good idea for the very young? Read them in your armchair and risk losing one among the cushions? Read them with a stick of candy and drool all over the colored plates of precious stones and then not have Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle around to help you steam open the pages? Or, and this is the real sacrilege, "own" them but never ever read them because you might damage their physical selves, ignoring their content? I can't get behind that.
I feel guilty about Acquiring more children's books (when it's acquisition more than possession, a word I use deliberately). Especially picture books. I keenly feel the absence of Corduroy and, now that I rediscovered it, Umbrella from my library. But I do feel that it would be Wrong to Acquire books when they'll go mostly unread. There are many, many picture books that add to a Compleat or Representative Collection of the Necessary, but the only one I crave is The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.
All that is because I just don't reread picture books very often (except Harold and the Purple Crayon). The Wind in the Willows is not a picture book. So maybe I was reluctant to be given it again for a different reason. As a matter of fact I have two reasons. One, I had it on my Amazon wishlist last year and my notstepmother gave it to me for Christmas (along with The Grapes of Wrath because she Understands the multifacetedness that is I. (She called that list intimidating. Sorry.)) Aiming for the G shelf with the book in paw, I laughed quietly at myself because, I now bothered to notice, I already owned it. It's heretical, isn't it, to own a book and not know it, to the point that you ask for it again because you're a grasping, acquisitive, dragonny sort? I'm going to pass my notstepmother's brand new book on to Emlet, keeping the used one because it's used. My sister's gift should be valuable for its sentiment--that she gave it to me, having selected it for her reasons--and it would be, except I would feel guilty for owning two copies of it (and I would have to keep the other for the illustrations).
Two, NCS gave a version of it to me, lo these many years. I finally read it the summer I lived with Nisou (another reason it's not sacred to me is that I didn't read it until 1988), and we loved the scene with Otter's child and Pan piping. She gave me a Picasso print of Pan piping (it's been on my wall ever since). I told NCS about that, and of course Pink Floyd, his favorite band, had an album entitled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. So he gave me a version, and I say "version" because the illustrations were just so wrong. The Rackham ones, from Amazon's sample pages, look okay; they're just not Original Shephard. Those in NCS's version I remember to be Off. (My memory could not possibly be tainted, oh no, especially considering the book did not long stay in my can't-say-possession--I think not even until I finally broke up with him nineish months later. Lord, but I was emotionally dishonest to us both.)
So anyway. Lots of baggage re Wind in the Willows particularly, assorted guilt about acquiring rather than possessing books particularly children's books.
In this entry, to which I referred above, I said The Story about Ping was the oldest book I own. In my own personal mythology, this is true, the way HPV is my oldest friend even though, say, SEM is older than she. I mean that book is the one longest in my possession.
Also, just above I say I don't want to own a valuable book. I don't know if it is valuable, but certainly the actually oldest book I own is a sight older than any other. It was printed in the 17th century; the date is in Roman numerals. Of a sort: the D is not printed with a single D but composed of an I and a backward C. RJH, whose book it was, could not parse it, and I glanced at it and suggested the cipher. He was really impressed. I was pleased he was impressed, but I really didn't think I was so very clever to have worked it out. He did, though, and that book was his wedding present (a masterful touch).
When I worked in Phoebe I checked out a stack of books for a little old woman whose name was Lois Darling. "That's almost the name of one of my favorite children's book illustrators!" I exclaimed. Louis Darling, it turned out, was her husband. Louis and Lois, a coincidence almost too Darling for words. Yeah. (Louis Darling illustrated Beverly Cleary's books until his death in the early '70s; the third or fourth Ramona book is dedicated to him.) She was an illustrator as well and it was my exuberance at meeting her that inspired her finally to assemble an exhibit of their work for display in the library, as she had promised for many moons. Her last project before her death in 1989 was a replica of Ratty's boat, which she donated to the Mystic Seaport Museum. When I brought Nisou's two sets of frainch parents to the Seaport in 1996, I enquired about that boat. It wasn't on display--I suppose there's not a lot of whaling signficance to it.
All of these things I have told before.
RDC and Blake were in the living room, Blake on the windowsill and RDC in the chair. Blake emitted his scream of bloody terror and launched himself all the way to the sunroom, the length of the house (that's on a full wing trim). The falcon was just launching from the ground by the nectarine tree, not yet successful that RDC could see.
Which bird should we call Frightful in this scenario?
It must be difficult for a raptor to stoop from whatever height into the 15' foot gap between houses, through the branches of one tree or between the two trees, and come away with a meal. I might be confusing raptor statistics with lion ones, that 90% of hunting attempts are unsuccessful?
If I replace the old tube feeder with the new, allegedly more squirrel-proof feeder in the nectarine, maybe I can put the tube one in a more open spot in the backyard, for easier falcon-feeding.
I am so proud. Also grateful. Last week Melissa mentioned a clearance sale at J. Crew. I went and looked, and it was manna for the Ross shopper (yammer re exploited resources and near-slave labor for my vanity).
I have a new skirt! A new winter skirt, when winter clothing is so tedious I usually can't bear to shop for it, even for skirts, and alternate between a short gray one and a long black all season. Winter clothing is tedious because it is black, or because black is so practical it is also tedious, or something. This new skirt is longer than ankle-length: in fact it breaks like a pant leg on the top of my foot; it has a long enough slit that I can still take a full stride; it is unwaisted. It is wool lined with acetate; the weave is sharkskin (whatever that means). Furthermore, it is not black. It is olivey brown.
Also a sweater about which I am not as excited. It is, after all, not a skirt or a dress, so inherently less interesting. Very thinly woven merino wool, so thinly woven you can see my ivory-colored bra through it--otherwise I suppose no one would ever know I wear one. J. Crew called the sweater "camel" but I would call it toffee. (Isn't one of the lists in Microserfs J. Crew colors? All I can remember right now are two from the soup flavors list, Beak and Creamy Dolphin.) If it were really camel it might be more interesting. My usual button-down, though crew- not v-neck.
I didn't select the pieces to go together but they do, and here I am in my new togs fresh out of the box, in a skirt that is not black or grey and a shirt that is not grey or lavender or periwinkle or that peachy rose that I refuse to accept as pink. It's shocking.
Today I wore my new clothes, figuring that since I froze the other day in premature spring clothing I'd be cozy. Wrongo. I baked. Even Egg, who is tall and attenuated and always chilly, was warm.
The thin sweatshirt that was a fine weight for the morning ride was too much this afternoon, and I had not had a proper shower for 2.5 days: Monday evening after the gym I washed but didn't shave, Tuesday morning I declared myself still clean, and this morning I showered at work where I have no razor. Leg stubble I can handle. Pit stubble makes me cranky. I am so Usan.
I swapped out the storms for screens on three sides of the house. I don't particularly consider this more than halfway through, though, because the north side is the most annoying. The front's easiest because it all happens on the porch without a ladder; the south side is fine because the ladder fits neatly on the sidewalk; the back is fine because the ladder's on the patio and that's where the back door is. In contrast, the ground on north side of the house conspires with the ladder to break my neck, and I have to trot the windows around three sides of the house to hose them--waiiiiit a minute, one of the perks of getting the swamp cooler properly plumbed last year was that we have hose fitting there. Well, I still have to haul them back anyway to spare the living room my clumsiness, and the back stairs are wider and shallower than the front ones.
Something right has happened with the resistance training, because the wide windows (this isn't an Unfortunate Event, I promise) that have been tricky to handle before are not so tricky now. They're not heavy, but their width and the being on a ladder and the fragility used to be more difficult to juggle than now.
I cut down some raspberry canes, hosed all the storms down (the dust in the sills being black since it's primarily auto exhaust), polished and waxed (not really) the inside sashes, raked the north front yard clean in preparation for tomorrow's digging, washed and line-dried the living room curtains, hauled the patio furntiure to the "grass" there to hose and scrub it, and emptied the Hestia hearth ash into the compost. (That last is my fond name for the outdoor fireplace, a copper or copper alloy bowl in a frame we bought last summer.)
I figured the compost could do with a dousing, so I trained the hose on it to carry the ash into its depths. I heard rustlings from deep within and I figured the water was settling layers. Last year when I watered the trees with a spike, I was used to the water erupting at the surface a good reach away from where the spike penetrated. I figured something similar might be happening, but no. The rustlings became scrabblings from higher up, and two pairs of beady little eyes looked at me in apprehension before the mousiekins leapt out and away. I planned to turn the compost this weekend, but damn, there might be a nest in there. Why can't they nest in the woodpile?
In the middle of all this we went to the Bonnard exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. His paintings are fabulous, lush with color, vibrant with light, and reluctant to show their images. I was not so overwhelmed with his lithographs and pen & ink, because really he's a colorist. Boy was he a colorist. Initially he seemed like a cat person, but then in later paintings dachshunds appeared and I was happy. Also his earlier paintings are set in Paris, where he was a flâneur, a connoisseur of everyday life (we both read Edmund White's Le Flâneur after our trip last year); later ones are set in the country.
A new hall of mirrors has been installed in the ground floor of the museum. It reminded me, I said to RDC, of "Cube," except, as he pointed out, they're not moving all over trying to kill us. You slip booties over your feet--or I did both of us since RDC is gimpy these days--and enter at the right aft end of a 30-foot passage. All the surfaces are mirrored, so above your head you can see yourself underfoot. It's pretty wild. Then you exit on the left fore end--it's shaped like a periscope--and scamper into Bonnard.
We had wanted to have tea at the Brown Palace in the afternoon, but they were booked, the lazy sows. So we ambled down to Larimer and the Del Mar Crab House where we had oysters and a crab melt for me and a soft-shelled crab sandwich for him. I don't understand why soft-shelled crabs come in sandwiches. They're already breaded. Also, a soft-shelled crab fits on a hamburger-type bun but this one--"Why do they serve it on a hero bun?" I asked, and then shook myself. We had just passed the gyro cart, so maybe the sound was in my head, but I even call the things you get at Subway grinders, not subs, and heros--I have no idea where in the country they're called heros. Somewhere, though nowhere I've lived. Dunno where that came from.
I ordered my plants from High Country Gardens. They'll arrive in the days before Mother's Day weekend, a fine time to plant. I'll have that Friday off again. So that's done. They're all low-water shrubby type things, and I hope I chose a good variety of colors and bloom times. The one bit that scares me is the vinca I ordered for the easement. The description says it's an aggressive spreader and shouldn't be planted near anything else, which makes its insular position in the easement a fine one, but I don't think we're allowed to erect any kind of stakes and a string fence to protect it in its infancy from people getting out of their cars (we plan to gravel the two feet closest to the street), and planting it means opening up the groundcloth which might mean an onslaught of bindweed.
I am going to go find a good movie to watch while I iron the curtains. That'll be the last remnant of the smoke-filled house incident gone.
I approached the front yard with a shovel and a hoe and a swan rake, actually wearing boots because I anticipated a boot-on-the-shovel method of digging.
Oh-ho-ho.
I might have been better off with a sod-cutting plough. I did maybe a third of the area I intended before the hoe broke. I worked for a while with a fork and trowel before stopping. I'll attempt the rest tomorrow after the epoxy dries the hoe into one again. I hope.
I noticed another branch off the evergreen and one cracked off a plum, and just now, when I'm quite Done for the day, looking out the bedroom window, I noticed another small one broken off the cherry tree. Lest anyone think my beating the crap outta my trees was in vain, I should point out that these broken branches were higher than my reach, unless they were on the evergreen, which I ignored, or the cherry, which I forgot about. So I hauled a bunch of plum branches to the back and started cutting them up for the brush pile I mistook my left forefinger for a branch and decided I was too tired to see or cut straight. So I stopped.
RDC oiled the patio furniture and it looks miles better. And I finished swapping the windows. Last night I melted the care tag on one of the curtains into the iron, so I rehung the washed living room curtains wrinkled. RDC suggests either melting or sanding the polyester off the iron, since isoprophyl alcohol won't touch it; I favor buying a new iron.
I finally hung the new birdfeeder. The birds have already decided that the New and Different is not a threat and I can't wait for a squirrel to try it.
I had lunch with someone the other day who repeated someone else's description of two adjacent houses, one covered with anti-war signs and the other with a U.S. flag and a Marines flag, as "dueling houses." I said, because this really gets me, "I don't know why those two concepts have to be perceived as opposing."
Can o' worms, party of four.
She asked what I meant, and I said that a silver lining from last September was that anyone could fly the flag without being misunderstood: the whole country could claim it. But now it's shifted back to "belonging" only to a certain faction or mindset.
She didn't know what I meant, which I found frustrating since she agreed with the "dueling" perception. While I paused, thinking how politely to communicate the contradiction I saw in her stance, happily someone else got my back by saying that yes, she had flown her flag immediately after September 11th but not during the action in Afghanistan, "because I didn't want...," she paused,
"...to be misunderstood?" I suggested, and
she nodded, "anyone to think I supported that bombing." Explaining herself further, she said she sees that the flag represents jingoistic support of the conservative end of the spectrum rather than patriotism. I nodded, glad to have someone articulate the thought.
We then explained jingoistic: simplistic, reductionist slogans that quash discourse, such as "My country right or wrong" and "America--love it or leave it."
I didn't know how to communicate the contradiction I saw between the first person's a) perception of the flying the flag and peace as dueling concepts yet b) disagreement with the notion that the flag does not belong to all patriotic citizens. I am tongue-tied when it comes to polite but impassioned debate.
(And of course anyone should fly the flag and not be concerned with What Someone Might Think, but I think it's testament to how much the flag does "belong" more to conservatives that being misunderstood is so valid a concern.)
I brought it upon myself though. I had mentioned seeing a recent abuse of the flag that pressed all my buttons.
I hate car flags. I hate that they are made of flimsy plastic, that the wind rends them to tatters yet their owners don't replace them even when the stripes are half gone, their disposability. This most egregious offense yet was a U.S. flag on the left rear door of a car, with a Denver Broncos football team's flag on the right rear door.
These people didn't even know that the flag should always be on its own right and higher than any other domestic flag or pennant. I left unsaid the obvious, that football, stupid waste of time or not, should not be (by flag height) thus equated to the ideals of the United States of America, let alone (by being on the right) supersede them. Isn't knowledge of right treatment of the flag basic civic knowledge?
In later September 2001, I saw a photograph of a sidewalk outside the U.S. embassy in Canberra. (I think. Somewhere in Australia anyway.) A flag lay on the pavement, a carpet for letters and candles and flowers people had lain there in support of us in our crisis. I recoiled at that photograph, on a gut level, because that the flag shouldn't be on the ground is instinctual to me (speaking of jingoistic), then reprimanded myself: other countries are less goose-steppy about their flags and it's kindness, so accept it. I made the mistake of telling my father that, trying to explain what I saw as a fault in my reaction. He--he who told me I was in for a world of hurt in my idealism, who was my first opponent when I realized how ineffectual "America--love it or leave it" is as a statement of purpose, who taught me how to treat the flag--couldn't get past its being on the ground: another failure on my end to communicate my thought.
I don't see that similar ignorance or abuse by citizens or resident aliens, when committed with similar kind intent, is okay. It's yours. Treat it well.
What I mean by Hard Work Day is the picture book Alan Arkin (the actor) wrote about his son, but it seems the edition with the real illustrations is out of print and it's been reissued with new (i.e. wrong) illustrations. So no link for you, OMFB.
I ripped out the rest of the front yard, out to the tree and down to the sidealk. And you may ask yourself, even if you haven't been listening to Remain in Light, well, why did you do this? Okay, that doesn't go into the rhythm of "Once in a Lifetime" so well.
Last year I used a rototiller, which involved two trips in one day to Home Despot--a farther one than our usual, with a rental center--the return trip being mid-afternoon and therefore interminable, gasoline for the rototiller and us to breathe, nearly ripping out the sprinkler heads (do we know where they are? we do not), and, let's be honest, my getting RDC to do the actual rototilling, because that thing was a lot stronger than I am and clearly in the Hot or Sharp Category.
This year RDC has a wonky knee and I might be stronger than last year but in principles as well as physically and if I despise snowblowers leafblowers snowmobiles and jetskis I shouldn't cop out with a rototiller either. Also the sumac tree's roots are right on the surface. I'm not overly fond of the tree--its bark and inedible fruit are both orange--but it's a tree so it stays.
I have seldom wanted to be Dr. Dolittle's next Tommy as I did today. Not that talking to moles would have helped. I don't think Colorado has any. I don't need to add one to my list of quasipets--the invisible, cocker-spaniel-sized elephant, the hypothetical dog, and the eventual goat. And the penguins. So I did it. I am the human rototiller. Except I overturned maybe two inches instead of six.
Then I cut more deadweight from a plum tree and trimmed all the deciduous deadfall to fit neatly into the brush pile. That made me feel vaguely like SNL's Anal Retentive Chef but really that pile can't get any bigger than it is. Since it was all dead I didn't have "Gone with the Wind" in my head either but the Grinch, from when he saws bits off Max's antler.
I also hoed the vegetable and south gardens, added the leftover edging from last year to the new garden, dumped all the clots of grass from the front under the cherry tree in what I'm sure is a very attractive manner, and brought the last of the cleaned storm windows to the coal cellar while bringing most of the firewood back out.
I'm tired.
What is the world coming to? Neve Campbell cast as Salamanca Hiddle with Sarah Michelle Gellar as Phoebe in a cinematization of Walk Two Moons? A reportedly not fat kid as Stanley Yelnats and a reportedly not African-American kid as Zero in the cinematization of Holes? Avoiding the cinematization of Ring of Endless Light was easy, and Sigourney Weaver as the warden is pretty brilliant casting. So I might not die. Unless I have to see the movie of I Capture the Castle. I would just fall over and expire.
RDC is going to the east coast soon, to work in Boston for a week and then go to Connecticut. He'll see his best friend and his baby one day and spend another with his aunt and uncle and see his grandfather. He has just persuaded his aunt and uncle to go to New York to see the Matisse-Picasso exhibit at the MOMA. I am envious but not jealous, which is fine. He was debating the ethics of cajoling his aunt and uncle into doing this. They're not afraid of the city, as my relatives are; they saw the huge van Gogh exhibit at the Met; they brought him to the Tutankhamen exhibit when he was a child.
Really, that was the deciding factor for me. He asked me if I would be jealous, and I said no, I would be happy for him. I will always regret that I didn't see Tut; unless I ever go to Cairo, I never will. He must go.
His aunt said they could train back afterward and eat in Connecticut. That cracked me up, because that's what she wanted to do when we went east in November as well: to join us in the city on Wednesday during daylight and then train home in time to eat dinner. In Connecticut. Leaving New York City. To eat in Connecticut.
And now I can die happy, for I have met Howie the Dog.
The move has meant everyone at work has new neighbors, and so I have got to know different people. (The woman I saw "Bowling for Columbine" with? Barely knew her name before October.) So I was passing the time of day with someone ages ago and saw on her shelf a picture. A picture of a dog. Of Howie the Dog.
Howie the Dog is half basset hound and half dalmatian. He has a slightly larger than average basset shape, dalmatian spots, and a basset's loveability (I have seldom heard of or met a dalmatian with a nice personality). In the photograph, he was sitting, which always looks ridiculous (read: loveable) in a basset anyway, with his head turned up a little so his ears looked even longer, and had slightly lifted one paw, kind of demurely.
I was in love.
This woman lives nearby and I pass near her house on my bike commute. I have been kind of hopeful that what finally happened yesterday would eventually happen. As I turned onto the bike route, at the bottom of a slope a short block away was a long, low, spotty dog, on a leash with two humans. There could be only one. I yelled, "Howie!" and sped down the hill.
My coworker took a moment to recognize me in helmet and sunglasses but I tumbled (on purpose, I feel I should clarify) off the bike and into Howie's lap, or vice-versa. What a great dog. He loved me immediately, tried to burrow under my skin to get closer, and eagerly welcomed all my fondling and cooing. (Oh, and I met her husband. I'm sure he is very nice but suspect he was taken aback by my rambunctious exuberance.) Howie is black and white, like magpies and penguins and some painted ponies; and he is spotted but has nearly solidly black ears, which a dog ought to have if it possibly can. He even matched my bike, I observed aloud, white with black, except he was not a hardtail. His entire stern, not just his tail, wagged joyfully. He clearly had not been pet or flubbered or loved in any way at all in simply years, very shocking behavior on his parents' part. He needed to be skritched and made to kick his leg by rubbing his belly in the right spot (literally: his markings made it easy to locate and remember the right place) and of course his ears folded in many different ways. One day, I will count all his spots and tickle them all.
O My Friends and Brothers, I like me like that. My coworker is fairly used to me bounding into her office to tell her new fun gossip or telling outrageous stories. It is rare these days for me to be so confident that my behavior is perfectly correct and that if it's wrong I don't want to be right. Meeting Howie the Dog was therefore uplifting in two ways.
Allons en Europe!
RDC has a business trip (let us all slap our palms to our foreheads in sympathy) to Paris. Two years ago I didn't go to Northern Ireland with him and I've never particularly gotten over it. We were going to go away for my birthday anyway, either a day's drive to South Dakota to see Crazy Horse and Mt. Rushmore or a Surprise for me that RDC was plotting for me in Colorado, and, as my sister said last night, Rapid City, Paris, what's the difference?
I'll take the TGV to visit Emlet for the days that RDC is working. Nisou and SPG are going à Bretagne over the weekend, so unless Nisou brings Emlet to Paris instead he still won't get to see them, but these are details we have yet to hash out.
I am going to see the chapel that Melissa recommended last time, and eat glace on the Île de St. Louis as Lucy recommended, and go the Louvre and the Rodin and maybe the Pompidou and the Tour d'Eiffel.
Wheeeeeee!
Yesterday when I took a shower when I got home, Blake pouted until I caught on. I filled up his spray bottle and gave him a thorough shower. He was begging for it even when I just tested to see if this was what he really wanted (by casting a sopping hand's worth of droplets toward him). Because showers involve me in the altogether as well as the buddy, you get to see only the intense post-shower preen.
Here we are on the couch in the sunlight. (See how much better the rug looks in sunlight? Not ochre!)
Observe the damp feathers on his neck, all spikey.
I was trying to get him to look up at me because his preening face is so adorable (much like most of his faces). All the feathers that usually warm his lower mandible instead angle back; we call this his muttonchop look and he looks nineteenth century.
He was having none of my interruptions though. When I gave up and poked him in the breast to force him to look up, he did so with his bitey face on, crest lowered, scowling. Not so cute.
He finishes up an all-over preen with a good head scratching. See the little foot? Sometimes when his toe gets into the right angle of his jaw he gives himself the yawns.
After enough preening, he was ready to prance. He loves the space between the couch and the wall. It's ceiled by the couch arm. The webcam is a great way to keep an eye on him, to ensure he doesn't suddenly get interested in the power cords. He hasn't been yet. He can't resist thin round cables, like the lower end of a Macintosh power cable or a FireWire or headphones, but electric cords don't intrigue him.
Yet.
He's not Howie the Dog. I know. But he's still adorable in his own way.
This bit should go with a photograph above but I'm padding. On the table behind him you can see Culture of Fear and--very appropriately--Blake's chief fear, a promotional toy RDC picked up at a conference. It is not big, it is not blue, but it is a squeezey, stress-ball, golf ball-patterned thing, and he hates it. We keep it in easy reach for when we want to chase him out from under the dining table or keep him away from our sexy feet.
OMFB, I have to be quicker with the cam, like not keeping it in a drawer. I was sitting in the reading chair and had just fetched Blake down from his cage (when he wants to be picked up, he forgets how to elevator down the bars to the stand but paces helpless on the top of his cage, so you have to get up to get him instead of just reaching) when he started scratching his head and jaw so much he gave himself the yawns. He yawned for about three minutes straight, with RDC and me just staring at him in wonder at his adorability. We did not drool, but nearly. Blake was actually tired too, not just reflex yawning, and he wanted to tuck his head but he can't yawn from the tuck. So after every yawn he'd turn his head a little more into the tuck, but face more forward for the yawns, and if I ever manage to catch video of that instead of still photographs, I will strap every one I know into a chair à la Alex until they admit that my buddy is the cutest ever possible yawner.
Whoo. I'm listening to PALM: Pick a Lane, Motherfucker, a mix Trish made, and while I am spared the hell of stop-and-go traffic on a daily basis, this might actually get me back in the gym. She is all edjimicating me, music-wise. I've mentioned my unhipness before, yes? or it is otherwise screamingly obvious? Mudhoney, Weezer, Wheatus, the Offspring, Soul Coughing, Foo Fighters. It's all new to me. She is clearly trying to drive me insane, because if Me First and the Gimme Gimmes' covering "Leaving on a Jetplane" nearly broke my head, and Mudhoney's cover of "Pump It Up" is--while not nearly so mind-bending--possibly enough to drive me over the edge.
Anyway, she and Jared picked me up Saturday night and they had the Obligatory Meeting of the Bird. Blake preferred Jared, who is taller (making Blake higher) and wore fabric easier to climb than Trish's. He chucked a little, refused to be pet by such rank amateurs as these, and performed only by bowing to the candelabra (and immediately trotting back to the edge of the table begging to be picked up again). They also had the Obligatory Trot through the House, and Trish won my undying affection by declaring Formigny the Clue House, because of its staircases (short and secret passagey) in opposite corners.
Trish voting for Japanese, I brought them to Japon. Whose chef's name is Wayne Conwell. And which had these beaded metal string curtains which looked like they should be the manes of the Heavy Metal My Pretty Pony. Over dinner, we, by which I mean Trish and I, commiserated with each other about the Johns of C (Cusack and Corbett). Then we gossiped about journals, except none of us had anything particularly new. Then it was late (for me), we were three people sitting around a small table over a drink, so I suggested we all drink to each other's legs. Trish had already abused me for not having seen "Office Space" but I abused her worse for not having memorized "Jaws" and not getting my joke. But Jared did. It was muchos fun.
We all wound up back at my house after midnight, so we officially comprised a very small, very short EasterCon. Just like the cool kids.
My body hating me as it does, I woke at 6 after getting to bed at 1. Instead of admitting how long I stayed inside trying to nap (difficult, what with the two cups of Earl Grey in the morning), I shall only admit that the one thing I accomplished was compost.
I assembled a new bin RDC brought home and turned the compost, putting all the raw stuff in the new one (which does not yet have squirrel and mouse holes bitten through it) and putting all the almost-dirt in the old one. The almost-dirt is going to be only almost-dirt, but I filled up the new one with leaves. I just read that you should shove a bunch of your leaves in a trash bin and attack it with a weed whacker, just like those little hand-held, single-serving blenders, and that will be handy to reduce the volume of my leaves.
I say all this to postpone the ugly truth. I killed a mouse. Or more. I've known for months that mice live in my compost bin, where they have asparagus stumps and orange rind and whatnot to feast on. I suspected they would, in this season, be nesting. But I turned the compost anyway, chasing out two grown mice as I pitchforked all the natal dirt. My last step is always to wet the compost, this time with the five-gallon bucket of roof drippings from Saturday's rain. Heavier stuff sinks, lighter stuff rises. Lighter stuff like a bald, eyes not yet open, but pretty big considering the size of its presumable parents, baby mouse corpse.
It was not a Frisby. It just can't have been.
I know intellectually that there is probably something better to do on a stormy Monday night than play boat in the living room with my buddy, maybe a plate of cinnamon toast, and a satisfying haul of books from the 'brary, and my computer, but right now I can't think of what that might be.
John Banville, The Book of Evidence; Neil Gaiman, Coraline and Sandman (vol. 1); Avi, Crispin: the Cross of Lead, and Joseph Krumgold, ...And Now, Miguel. Also Words to Outlive Us, a book of first-person accounts of the Warsaw ghetto, and The Age of Napoleon, because France is a blank slate for me between 1429 and 1914, except maybe Louis XIV-XVII (the high Louis) and 1871.
My plan, this week, is to grow moss. Which means to prove that I have neither self-respect nor willpower nor discipline when I don't have a chaperon. I intend to eat meals the size of my head, frequently; to read a bunch of books, probably more of the children's than the adult's variety; and to set anti-landspeed records for inertia. Yesterday the obvious excuse not to work outside was the rain; today it's the wind. Also today it's that I got really fucking frustrated at Microsoft Word today, having manually to format shit that would be automated were my software to behave correctly, and then keeping my tongue when after that, the authors wanted to change this and that which meant I redid a lot of that formatting. Tomorrow, though, I might have to get up. Because there's just one small problem in my plot to devolve into an invertebrate, and that is that there is not a lick of chocolate in the entire house.
Did The Bar Sinister, which was written as a sequel to the BBC "Pride and Prejudice" rather than the book, name Darcy's harlequin Great Dane? This dog appears in the miniseries, not the book. A black and white harlequin Great Dane (are harlequins ever another color combination?) who rivals all other dogs in gorgeousness as Howie the Dog rivals them in adorability. I am still looking for its picture but this and that are similar.
I mentioned Just There horses before. I notice that right after Darcy trots through Meryton on his all-black horse, a villein paces through on a Just There horse with a white blaze and socks, I think to mark their contrast in quality.
I just got off the phone with my mother. She told of the antics of my sister's cat, whom my sister brought home over Easter. My sister's had Kitty (sadly, not an alias: no one has been able to come up with a better name) for maybe two months now and brought her home twice. Our mother persistently refers to the cat as "he." Of course it doesn't really matter: the cat is asexual. And it's not as if "Kitty" as a name offers any clues about gender. But still. Is it just me? Is remembering this so difficult? We anthropomorphize our pets--I wrote "whom" instead of "which" automatically, and so would my mother except she'd say "who"--in so many ways that this should be one. At her first masculine pronoun I interjected "she," possibly rudely, but in a way that almost anyone else I know would have run with ("'She,' right, as I was saying, loves to birdwatch..."). My mother instead required a tangent excusing herself. Perhaps she does this to dissuade me from interrupting her or from correcting her at all. Perhaps she is just incapable of learning or remembering: if I ever correct her again (and I will), she will not remember--any more than she remembers the cat's gender--that she already explained herself (twice now).
Her excuse is that all cats in the house--Granny's exSqueaky, her husband's exMurray--were male. So? All the dogs except Stanley, who was a package deal with my father, were female. Knowing the cat's gender is a part of knowing the cat, and her inability to grasp this simple fact illustrates another reason I'm glad not to have spored: if I had a son, would she never remember his gender because there ever were only girls in her house?
I told her about Howie the Dog though. She appreciated that. But I forgot to tell her that my friend's year-old baby's first utterances have been barking.
Who is responsible for the weather?
I was going to dig out the other bit of the front yard today. I'm not overly enthusiastic about doing this, since we already have problems with drainage in that corner and I'm not a landscape or hydraulics engineer or whatever I'm supposed to be to arrange the ground properly. Also I should rip out that easement, though I didn't order enough ground cover for it. I didn't any evening this week because the weather supported my slugdom (wonderful, wonderful rain!); forecasts called for a warmer and drier Friday. But it is 40 degrees and cloudy.
I think I might walk down to Cherry Creek and look for a skirt--a grey one, naturally--because for Paris I have either my allegedly undyed linen one, very pale, very thin, not a good material for traveling nor a color for wearing several days in a row nor a weight for possible chilliness or rain; or my denim skirt, which is too American. I made the mistake of describing it thus to my mother.
"What's wrong with being American?" she demanded querulously.
"Nothing, of course. What I mean there is that it's denim, it's the equivalent of wearing jeans except it's a skirt, so it's too casual--as the U.S. is casual--and I know you would no more wear jeans traveling in a foreign capital than I would." (I don't know. Maybe now she would. But she didn't pack jeans to go to England in 1981.)
Of course if I can't find the right skirt I'll justify the denim by being appropriate in all other respects, durability and nonwrinklyness and skirtiness.
And then I might bus to downtown and watch a matinee of "Holes."
Because it's damn well too cold to muck about in the muck. Warm muck, that would be okay. Maybe tomorrow.
Yesterday a package awaited me on the porch. I left my sister a message that it had arrived and that I wouldn't open it until my birthday, but when we talked last night she had me open it. She wanted me to have the things before going to Paris (my entire family fear I am not going to survive this trip, so if I don't that should be ascribed to my family's Gut, a powerful if temperamental organ of prescience). She told me, as I cut the tape, that it was a bunch of stuff equivalent to the crap she mails me from the Sunday supplements. "A Thomas Kinkade Christmas train?" I asked.
No, but a t-shirt with a train on it. I first thought it was Thomas the Tank (Steam?) Engine, but it's the Smile Train, a charity her friend runs to fund corrective cosmetic surgery for kids with cleft palates and the like. Also a pitcher with a pattern of squares that I recognized (as I was meant to) as reminiscent of our mother's lemonade pitcher. A citronella candle in a periwinkle metal sand bucket. More bubbles for my bubble machine. A purple pen from Liberty Mutual. A lavender box of tissues. Another rubber duckie, this one from the Colonnade whose rooftop pool she uses. A shaven? chenille pillow that neither of us was sure I'd like but that exactly matches both the slate blue pillows and the wine-colored throw on Dim the Couch. (I didn't name my furniture. Someone else did.) So overall it was like a Yule stocking, except a birthday one. It was great, and everything made me laugh.
Also there was the yellow rose I took from my grandmother's grave, all finished drying now.
The English Book of Common Prayer says, "In the midst of life, we are in death." For us that day it was "In the midst of death we are in life." After the service when first my great-aunt and then my other great-aunt and then my mother took yellow roses from the flower arrangement, my sister and cousin and I decided to do so as well before the family stripped it entirely bare. The wreath looked as bedraggled as you'd expect after being tugged at and dismembered, and the three of us chortled mirthlessly at everyone's (and our own) heresy and disrespect, and mirthfully as we invented words for our grandmother, who would pretend to disapprove but suppress a smile and let us see her doing so.
Is it only an Irish thing, to be so close to laughter at or after a funeral? I think not; grief can often lead to hysteria. I do like that Irish short story about the wake, and is the dancing master's wake? Because as people drink and dance at the wake, they decide the guest of honor, loving to dance as he did, should partake of the festivities, so out of the coffin comes the corpse to partner his mourners in their dancing. The story's probably meant to illustrate how we're all drunks with no sense of propriety, but me, I'm glad for when a joke can shine through clouds of grief.
CLH and I laughed, because yesterday was a month and a day before my birthday. But this is what she gets for being so hyperprompt.
After last Saturday's rain, the basement rug got wet and we brought it outside Sunday to dry. Except I didn't bring it in Monday so it's been wet all week. I am pretty sure I foresee a replacement. But I have to go attack it with the wet-dry vacuum and see if it's salvageable. Plus today it's sunnier but the sun will have a better chance at bleaching or killing the mold or just finishing the drying job if I use the wet-dry vac now. My other tasks today are digging the edging into the north front garden and digging out the easement and the strip between the sumac tree and the property line. I'm really not enthused about doing these things. So I'm babbling here.
It's not so babbly to say that "Holes" was pretty good. The casting was great (except that the actor who plays Stanley's mother annoys me), the story and the mood were faithful to those of the book, and the music fit well. It fit well now, in 2003; my only criticism is that it will date the movie more than necessary. Or maybe only if it's cringeworthy. I just watched "Roxanne" for the first time in a million years and that 1987 mood music was terribly intrusive, like Yaz in "The Chocolate War" or "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" in "Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid."
It is babbly to say that I found a black jersey skirt, just what I wanted--at T.J. Maxx. Cherry Creek is not a very good mall, as no mall probably can be, and Cherry Creek North is waaaaay too expensive a neighborhood to shop in. I went into Bryn Walker, a (shocking!) independent (I think) clothing store in the mall, and I found a skirt I loved because its rear hem fell nearly to the floor while the front hem hit only a mid-ankle.
Then the saleswoman suggested a pair of pants, and what the hell, I don't actually own pants that aren't jeans, for yoga, or part of a suit, so I did. She loved them (or professed to) on me and my "cute shape." She was rounder than I am and it's just a Fact that Salespeople Lie and that if she were thinner herself she wouldn't've said I have a great ass. Since I spent my entire childhood in mortal fear of floodwater pants, I cannot get behind this cropped thing. But I didn't take them off yet.
I tried on a shirt (that she called a "top," which usage makes me itch in a vague way) that did not disguise the bosom nearly as much as I require my shirts to do. There might even have been, by means of clinginess, emphasis, when I have spent my entire boobed life deemphasizing. It was also black, and I should maybe stop shopping with my mental mother. "Don't wear black next to your face" is an axiom I believe in anyway, and I don't wear red. Not because it makes one look like a whore, which is my mother's credo, but because red with any yellow to it doesn't work with my skin tone and red with any blue to it reminds me of my mother's beloved maroons and roses.
But in the black shirt and pants, I tried on a straw hat with a wide brim and slightly peaked crown, and I mourned Audrey. Then the saleswoman wrapped a scarf around my shoulders, and holy shit, I looked--well, I'll say it, I looked pretty good. I looked really good. I looked stylish and as if I didn't dress at Ross. Also I didn't look dumpy and dowdy but attractively curvy, which is a pleasant change.
Her next push was for different shoes. Another reason for me not to wear the pale linen skirt is that I am going to bring one pair of shoes for the week, my black Dansko clogs, and I Don't Wear Black Shoes with Pale Colors. (Which is why I didn't buy a beautiful pink linen dress at Casual Corner, besides that pink linen doesn't travel or hold up for a week any better than undyed linen). She wanted me to try on a pair of mary janes with a flat footbed. Yeah, flâneuring around Paris in new shoes without proper support. That sounds good.
Meanwhile she was telling me she just wouldn't let me get the skirt, that I must get the pants instead. Meanwhile the other customer (in the two-salesperson store) was making a purchase of six hundred and sixty-four dollars (more than my plane ticket). The pants were sixty bucks, as was the skirt; I hadn't looked at the booby shirt's price tag nor that of the scarf or the hat or the shoes. Dumpy and dowdy is cheaper and takes less space on an international flight. Damn. I asked her to hold the skirt and pants and vamoosed with empty hands.
I took the bus downtown, ransacked Ross and T.J. Maxx before "Holes," and found yet another in my long-running series of black jersey skirts, sturdier than the Bryn Walker one, ankle-length though without the fabulous sweeping hem, unwaisted. Also a black linen "top" with white embroidery on it (for my white linen skirt, because my mental mother won't let me buy a piece if it doesn't work with something I already have).
After "Holes" I walked down to the Tattered Cover (take that, Barnes & Noble! which is right under the movie theatre) for Emlet: Make Way for Ducklings and a charming book about a squirrel who paints with his tail, inspired by everything he sees through the windows at the Met. (I do secretly still love the sunflower-beheading, nectarine-raiding, tomato-nibbling squirrels.) This squirrel's name was Micawber, and what could be cuter? But they didn't have Giraffes Can't Dance, so I still haven't seen that. And a Paris guide or two, based on what seemed best from the 'brary.
The rug is almost dry, but I wonder if the sun will be able to shine the smell out of it, or if the smell lasted only as long as the wet. I suspect we'll find out the hard way.
I ripped out some of the bit by the porch, trying to spare the grape hyacinth and the tulip that I would like to transplant when the big silver sage goes in there. I put in some edging, but not more because I didn't rip everything out. I didn't rip everything out because the soil's still so wet (excuses excuses...) and would dry into its clumps. And that's really it.
Otherwise Blake and I sat in the sun and read Toni Cade Bambara. I wasn't wearing much, it was 73, and I was hot. Is that usual?
Last night I watched the Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine cinematization of "Jane Eyre." Orson Welles was Citizen Rochester, all kinds of dark and brooding, and I wonder that he wasn't cast as Heathcliff in 1939 instead of Laurence Olivier. This was made four years after "Citizen Kane," which certainly made its influence felt. The set was Xanadus Lowood and Thornfield, and Mother Citizen played Mrs. Reed. (That was Endora in "Bewitched"!) Orson Welles cannot have been all that mad at "How Green Was My Valley" (which won "Citizen Kane's" Oscar) because Mrs. Morgan played Bessie. I do not understand why Joan Fontaine was considered so Plain and Unremarkable as to be the second Mrs. DeWinter and Jane Eyre both, plus the wife in "Suspicion." Her characters just didn't have good luck with their husbands' first wives, did they? But she was quite pretty, and her sister certainly held up well, given this year's Oscar appearance.
The movie was a hatchet job, adaptation-wise. What really cracked me up was that at every huge departure from the given plot, Joan Fontaine would narrate a paragraph highlighted in a book, strongly implying she was reading straight from the book. The paragraphs above and below the highlighted ones were also not Charlotte Brontë's. I don't require a book to be faithful, ya ya ya, except that Jane does not live up to her childhood pride and self-respect, even as given in the movie: she accepts gifts of dressmaking fabrics (that aren't black or grey) from Mr. Rochester during their engagement; she returns to Gateshead as she vowed, at 10, never to do; she writes a humble letter to Mr. Brocklehurst--though, upon leaving Lowood, she declared herself forever free of him as well. The absence of the Riverses is one thing; the absence of Jane's strength of character quite another.
I wonder if that wonderful harlequin Great Dane was cast in the recent "Pride and Prejudice" because Mr. Rochester's Pilot in this "Jane Eyre" was such a dog?
Sunday I went to see the "Amazing Caves" IMax at the Museum of Nature and Science. I was okay for almost all of it: the repelling down a cliff to a cave mouth in Arizona, the unstable ice cave in Greenland, even most of the cave diving in Mexico. Only when a cave diver removed her tanks to squeeze them before her through a hole and then followed them did I get squeamish, if not actually queasy.
Afterward I strolled through the park and signed a petition near a demonstration for an off-leash area. It really is ridiculous that dogs can't run and play in city parks, as children may. No wonder they have behavior problems (as inactive children do): they're not permitted to be who they are. A coworker was there with her two Frisbee dogs, and there were a three-month-old hound mix (spotted, with big ears: my favorite of the bunch), two Newfs (not with Frisbees), many border collies and heelers and mixes, a sleek doberman, labs and lab mixes, easily two dozen dogs. And the only ones who barked (and that incessantly) were two dustmops--they must have been so jealous of the real dogs of worthwhile sizes and commensurate physical ability. A Newfie might not be a good Frisbee dog, but at least it can rescue a drowning fisherman.
My notstepmother's Yorkshire terrier is at least somewhat of a dog, and my father has certainly encouraged his more aggressive behaviors (like trying to chase away all the birds who live in their hedges). Now my sister has Kitty, and of course there's Blake. My sister observed, "The kids' table at Thanksgiving is going to be a nightmare now."
For the past few days we've had normal--that is, as I remember from my first few years here--weather: sun during the day building to an afternoon storm. I recently read that for the past few years those storms didn't happen in part because the weather had so much less moisture in the mountains to get started with. I think late April might be earlier to start, but I do love the rain. Yesterday there was a brief thunderstorm just as I wanted to bike home, with hail. My Macintosh consultant-cum-bad weather rescuer rescued me, and a fine thing because the streets were flooded. It didn't rain that much, but the storm sewers (stupid things, drawing off all that water just because not enough ground is permeable) are clogged, seemingly always.
Denver Water has a site now where you can find your historic usage--inexplicably arranged in reverse chronology--and compare yourself to the average user. The average household uses 9,000 gallons in the winter and 23,000 in the summer; we use 7K and 13K. The average household is 2.7 people. So we beat the average comfortably, which is fine, but I know we could conserve more.
We don't catch the pre-hot shower water in a bucket. I don't know about the state of our pipes, if they're sufficiently insulated to shorten that pre-hot flow. I run only full clothes- and dishwasher loads, and I probably could conserve more water if I didn't use a dishwasher at all, but I would sooner replumb my house to redirect all graywater to the toilet and the hoses than give up a dishwasher. We replaced the dishwasher our first summer with one that allegedly uses less than average water and electricity. The clotheswasher came with the house and I wonder if replacing it with a horizontal axis one would be worthwhile.
The appliance we are thinking of replacing is the swamp cooler. Right now it makes RDC's study freezing and grimy and the rest of the house bearable. If we got a new one and mounted it on the roof, using the existing ductwork from the solar panels (is that possible? we'll find out), said new one would be quieter, use less water, and cool most of the floor more effectively. But that's the thing: his study needs to be cool enough for him to work in and the bedroom cool enough to sleep in; the solar heat affects the kitchen, dining room, and living room. The floor fan--ten years old and still humming, and clean because a filthy fan is icky--would probably draw cooler air into the bedrooms better than it does the solar-warmed air.
This summer we won't save anything on water and might use more: establishing a xeriscape uses less water only assuming you used to water the grass it replaced. I did not. According to Denver Water, we used more in the summer of 2000, when at least RDC made some attempt to preserve the grass, than we did in either summer since, when there was a vegetable garden and no bothering with grass.
Next year we deal with the backyard, ripping out the pathetic, weed-ridden remnants of bluegrass and planting buffalo and gama grass plus, replacing one raised bed and building another. This year, whatever doesn't need nurturing and isn't bindweed can frolic at will.
The other day a someone asked me over the phone what I'm planting this year. Flowering shrubs, I told her, and she repeated that to someone in the room with her. "Oh, rhododendrons?" he asked and she relayed. "No," I replied, "rhododendra don't do well in Denver." He began to offer suggestions.
First of all, I hate two-way phone conversations. I won't be the mediator between whoever's on the phone and whoever's standing next to me. I hand the phone off for almost anything more than "RDC says hi." Second, the plural is rhododendra. Third, "oh, rhododendrons?" because that's the only flowering shrub in the world?
I restrained my response, not to make the friend the mediator and because I had no idea how politely to say that in addition to amending the soil as he recommended, I would also have to alter the climate, making it more humid, and lower the altitude, making the sun less harsh, or at the very least suddenly have a 30-year-old shade tree. I guess I could have just stated these facts, but stating them without sarcasm, or evenly without sounding antagonistic, was beyond me.
I maybe should work on being able to confront people, to address them. Mostly I favor a pointed silence.
I don't recall my mother's being as rude on the phone as she is now before her second husband. I have attempted to view this sympathetically (she wants people to know, and to reaffirm their knowledge, that she and BDL are so very involved with each other at every moment) but, unsurprisingly, failed. Often she'll initiate a call to me but be talking to BDL when I answer and greet her. I've asked her why she calls me despite having more pressing need of conversation with BDL. And she'll always explain why, just this once, she needed to talk to him right then--despite having dialed me half a minute before. I don't mean that we're on the phone and BDL calls "I'm going to the store, do you need anything?" and my mother says "Oh yes, could you get a jug of milk and I think we're out of sugar." I mean we're on the phone and she might interrupt even her own sentence to me (my own to her are always fair game) to tell him what we're talking about. Can't this wait? If he hears juicy gossip or a compelling debate, can he not wait until after the call to be filled in?
When I'm on the phone with someone and RDC needs to tell me something Right Then, I'll generally excuse myself for a moment, listen to him telling me briefly that the house is on fire, and return to my call. The problem is that my mother is so damn deaf or inattentive that when I excuse myself she doesn't hear. My parents both are fond of calling me before work "because I know you're home," despite being repeatedly informed that RDC sleeps later than I do. (This makes him a slackabed, not differently-houred.) If I need to get some clothes, I'll tell her that she should keep talking but I won't respond for a moment while I'm in the bedroom with a still-slumbering RDC. Invariably she needs this repeated, by which time I'm in the bedroom and not talking but grabbing (not deciding among) garments.
Would this bother me as much if it weren't she committing the offense? I don't know. Sometimes when I'm on the phone with a friend, a housemate, human or animal, adult or child, might interrupt her. When it's a kid or a pet, I want to know what my niece or nephew is doing to cause the quickly quieted ruckus. It's part of the story. When it's an adult, I honestly can't recollect that anyone else I know will allow, let alone initiate, an interjection that disrupts our conversation.
BDL is extremely immature, it's true. He thinks nothing of interrupting an in-person conversation--a sentence, not a pause--to show you his orange-peel dentures. So maybe I should make child-allowances for him. Nah. My sister doesn't: if she and my mother are talking in person and BDL interrupts my mother's very sentence, she will shut up immediately because he is The Man. My sister will ask her, "Oh, were you done? I thought you were still talking," and at least my mother seems to accept this correction of her doormattitude. If he interrupts my sister, she doesn't shut up until she's finished her thought. (My sister's sensitive to interruption for this very reason--maybe too sensitive to it in animated conversation.)
Ursual LeGuin wrote something in The Eye of the Heron that I really like and try to live by. It could be just so I can feel virtuous and martyred (just like my mother), which scares me. It was something about having enough self-esteem that others' insults or demands matter less. I should add that passage to my Explanations page. A pointed silence with eyebrows raised disdainfully into my hairline is not what Ursula LeGuin meant, though, I'm pretty sure.
Oh.
Oh my.
Oh my goodness.
Apple's new music store, OMFB, is what I've been waiting for. It still has gaping holes, mind you: it has some Corey Hart but not "Sunglasses at Night," some Til Tuesday but not "Voices Carry": not the one-hit wonders. Lots of the songs I'm looking for I haven't had since I arrived at college and starting taping people's vinyl over the compilations I built off the radio, full of the hiss of low recording quality, FM background noise, and my dog suddenly scratching herself or my mother calling for me.
I paused for a long time at Journey. Journey was a guilty pleasure of mine in high school, it being heavy metal and not something that I, as a wannabe prep, could admit to. Later I learned from a real high school metalhead (the one I married) that no boy ever liked Journey but pretended to because that was a chick band. Oh. I forewent Journey for now. I set myself a ten-dollar limit to indulge my nostalgia this evening.
It didn't have that song by the Call, I think, that's in "The Lost Boys." Nor the Cult song I wanted. I didn't get Echo and the Bunnymen, because I want all the Songs to Learn and Sing and the Music Store doesn't yet have it complete. No "Welcome to the Boomtown" by David and David. No Flock of Seagulls. I didn't get Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" because I couldn't decide among the several remixes and clearly the original 2:51 is not long enough.
The take: Animotion, Obsession; A-HA, Take On Me; Big Country, Where the Rose Is Sown and In a Big Country; Dennis DeYoung, Desert Moon; Dexy's Midnight Runners, Come on Eileen; John Waite, Missing You; Madness, Our House; Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, If You Leave; Smithereens, Blood and Roses; Modern English, I Melt with You; Violent Femmes, Blister in the Sun; and Weather Girls, It's Raining Men.
That was just too easy.
Yesterday we each put in twelve hours on the house and garden and bikes: I ripped the sod from, added spent garden soil to, laid groundcloth in, and edged with brick one side of the north front garden, lay a path of stepping stones through it to the north side of the house, clipped cherry sprouts from under their parents, and cleared the last leaf, twig, and mulch debris from the porch and side gardens. RDC swapped the ski for the bike racks on Cassidy, and in the rackless interim, we made a Home Despot run for compost, brick, and the makings of a pegboard. Breaks from my sod-busting and -hauling were holding down the other end of pegboard and 1x3s.
RDC brought the last of the firewood back outside, vacuumed the back basement, emptied the shop vac (discovering a hair clip I'd been missing), and fortified our bike tires with Tuffy strips, of whose worth if not spelling I am certain of. When I scampered to the coal room to get my old Cannondale (where the Tuffies were), I admired the new lightswitch that doesn't spark or buzz or anything.
I was really unenthusiastic about ripping out the last of the front yard. I measured and staked the property line and if anything shortchanged us, but I absolutely don't want to impinge on those neighbors. I'll pull the south neighbor's bindweed when it gets too close to my garden, but not the north neighbors': they might find the bindweed flowers too pretty to kill. They have trodden on our downspouts while mowing our grass, knocked the "Please Do Not Block Gate" sign off our back fence while shoving unbundled, unbagged yard waste into the dumpster (last fall while I hoed out the vegetable garden, listening incredulously through the fence), blocked our gate with unflattened, unrecycled cartons, flouted the watering restrictions all summer long, and are altogether unapproachable. At some point I would like to ask them please to stop throwing water away, first because overwatering is wrong and emptying the clippings directly into the dumpster illegal and immoral, and second because my leaf pile is almost gone (my compost pile is hot! glory be!) and I'll need browns soon.
But I did it. I still have to edge, really delicately along the property line.
As dusk fell we put the bikes and tools away and showered. Mm, shower. RDC's other critical task had been lunch, which we ate around 3:00,* late enough that all we wanted now was dessert. I suggested walking to Licks, and RDC wondered if that was nearer or farther than the gelato place in Cherry Creek North (nearer) but after showering decided the corner store would have all we needed. We scampered out, debating flavors. We got two pints, because we're grown-ups and can, but mostly because he is a heathen who prefers Swiss Almond Vanilla to Mint & [Oreo].
We watched "Road to Perdition," which considering it had Tom Hanks was quite good. He didn't overact (Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan). At the end of this sentence I am going to spoil the endings of both "Perdition" and "Ryan" to explain why it was good: his last words were not "Earn this." Safe now.
Besides ice cream we also bought a Sunday Post. So today, in marked contrast to yesterday, we got up at 10 instead of 7, it is cloudy instead of sunny, I actually read 100 pages of a book (I have ignored Book of Evidence all week because I wanted to read it in a big chunk) instead of browsing through travel guides, and we are slubbering around the living room with bathrobes and newspapers and lattes. Also we might go to the gym.
*Hey, that sentence could easily be misread as using "which" for a conjunction: "Task was lunch, but we didn't eat until three," instead of "task was lunch, which meal we ate at three."
I rode to work but had to get my chauffeur to bring me home. I still don't know how to shoe Shadowfax and its rear tire was flat. Again.
Saturday when RDC inserted the Tuffy strips, he unknowingly pinched the tube when he reset the rear tire; Sunday we were going to ride our bikes to the gym but Shadowfax came up lame. We had no spare tubes or patches, so we drove instead, and first to REI for supplies. Sunday night I finally had a lesson in bike maintenance, learning how to pop the bead of the tire out of the wheel, find the puncture in the tube, apply a patch, etc. Biggest obstacle: filthy hands.
Monday I rode to work, without patch kit or pump, and in the afternoon the tire was flat, the patch having skittered off its mark, which was on the inner, concave wall of the tube. Perhaps those patches adhere best where they don't get wrinkled. So I have a spandy new tube.
Now all I need is my own patch kit and pump and willingness to get road mire all over my hands.
(Why Denver has its city elections in May I have no idea.)
I didn't remember about voting until I was two blocks on my way to work. This is why driving is evil: if I had been on my bike, turning around and going to City Park Pavillion would have been no problem at all. But I drove because I am going to make a CostCo run at lunch.
The park I know so well on foot or by bike, the Martin Luther King statute, the Robert Burns, the other, metaphorical one, the Museum of Nature and Science, the zoo, the rose garden, the lilac shrubbery, the pavillion, the pond on the south side of the zoo that should be plumbed for new disease-bearing (or -curing) microbes, the bigger pond in which my friend's brother-in-law's father swam and contracted polio 50 years ago, just like FDR, the playground named for a little boy who drowned in that pond, the not exactly great lawn that's the best place to fly a kite...that park is a great black hole to me in a car.
I knew about the parking lot behind the pavillion. Weddings occur there, and concerts and other events: trucks must be able to bring in equipment and no one could expect a wedding party to trek across the goose poop-addled expanses of turf. How to get there, that was the problem. I turned west onto 15th, two blocks south of the park's border. I should have turned north and got on 17th, but much of City Park South is having new sewers dug in and some of the roads, including those with traffic lights that enable a left turn, are closed. I turned north on York, the park's west border. I remembered a road on that side, under a gate like l'Arc de Triomphe (somewhat smaller). But no, that road was closed. I knew 23rd, the northern border, would be no good: it's all zoo and sports fields and museum. (Only now does the access road along the south side of the zoo, that approaches the pavillion, accessible between zoo and museum, occur to me. The construction of a parking garage would have confused me anyway.) South on Colorado again, I turned right into the museum. I found another road looping through the park, gated off. Okay. Now west on 17th again. Almost at York, therefore after skittering around the full perimeter of the park, I turned into the park at the "Esplanade" (there is no water), circled Robert Burns, parked, illegally I'm sure, in the MLK circle, and scurried the rest of the way to the pavillion--still with no idea how to get to the parking lot.
There's a reason voter turnout is low. If I'd remembered, I could have walked over at 7:00 like a civilized person and not been late to work. But I wasn't tragically late and I took a sprig of lilac for my hair, so it worked out.
Cars are evil. I voted. There will be a run-off election in a month. Further reports as events warrant.
Today the new books came in and I brought an armful to the staff meeting to distribute. CoolBoss challenged who would find the first typo, because we always find something. The meeting began but I paid only half an ear as I thumbed through the book. I found a formatting error on page iii, for pity's sake: the footer under the Table of Contents is left- instead of center-aligned--mine. Bleah. I continued to read it through and immediately I turned the leaf of page 21 I gasped. The entire table swiveled to me. Mutely I pointed out to CoolBoss to my left. She gave the exact same gasp. "First sentence of page 22," I squeaked. Everyone turned to the page. There were no other gasps.
It's not an error of fact. It's not a misspelling or misgramming (hee!) or misformatting. It's just...wrong.
On the other hand the other two books that've come out in the past month are perfect. So far.
I have previously declared I don't like opera, but I said that based on two exposures, both Puccini. Last night I saw Don Giovanni and now it's "I don't like Puccini" or perhaps even "those two Puccinis." I hardly dreaded the prospect of an evening of Mozart, but I wasn't looking forward to it as RDC was. Mostly I was anticipating being able to wear my dress.
Right now I hear the Commandatore intoning "Don Giovanni," which scene is in "Amadeus," but it's overlaid with another "Amadeus" scene, with Mozart dictating his Requiem Mass to Salieri, singing "maledictum," which scans the same. Because I am a real eddicated opera-goer.
So I got to dress up! And really, isn't that the important thing? I even wore nail polish, though it's a bit of gilding the sow's ear to polish my short, broken nails in their ragged cuticles. It was only my skin color but shiny. I wore a tiny bit of eyeshadow, a tiny bit because once the first daubs went on correctly, any additional stroke might have either gone wrong or been whorish so I stopped. And the mascara was still on my eyelashes six hours later, a first.
My hair refused to be either curly or flatly curvily obedient. I pulled into a French twist and mourned aloud that now that it is nearly long enough for that style, I don't have a twist comb (and it's not long enough to use sticks in). I picked up a barrette RDC gave me two years ago, a slightly concave, oval, broad ring of silver, whose silver-topped wooden pin goes in one piercing, under the hair, and out the other piercing. RDC came in to look, loved the twist, and fastened the pin. And it held! It wouldn't've held for, say, dancing, but it held for sedate dining, strolling, and sitting. Silver and wood might have been Wrong with my ultrafake rhinestone and pearl and silver earrings, but did I care? I did not.
The real coup was my dress. Last spring, rootling through Ross, I found, OMFB, the most beautiful dress ever. At Ross. Yes, I know. Celidon. Silky satiny floor-length full skirt, a shimmery but not sparkly shell top. The shimmery layer attaches at the shoulders to some kind of underpinning fabric that connects the shoulders to the waist of the skirt. I am probably not explaining it adequately, but it means that the weight of the skirt (which is considerable) and of the dress as a whole is on the shoulders, not at the waist, that the bust is not fitted or exposed, and that waist is suggested but not defined or constrained. I wore the same silvery grey shoes I bought for the 2000 fall weddings, which were only passing serviceable with strategic bandaids and a dose of talcum powder. Floor-length skirt: the way to go. (I am aware I match the wall.)
We dined at Adega again. I would make such a good fabulously wealthy person, except that I might not be allowed to do my own gardening or wear shorts overalls. I love good service. Also I love good food. RDC had a fish whose name I forget, with crab and pea tendrils (pea tendrils?). I had goat cheese and asparagus tortelloni with salsify, which I learned is a root vegetable like a parsnip and also called oyster root for its briny taste. I considered whether it would be couth to tip the bowl to my mouth, not to miss a drop of broth.
Talcum powder: the reason I was able to walk from public conveyance to restaurant, to theatre, to conveyance again. Stupid shoes. On the way we met my COO and her kids. She'd recently given the oldest "Amadeus" for his birthday, hence their presence. I remarked to the youngest that we were supposed to have met three years ago when her mother brought her to the Tattered Cover for the midnight release of Goblet of Fire (no surprise we missed each other in the press) but maybe we would see each other this June.
The set was modernized in good ways. Instead of scenery, on the floor and backdrop were huge scrawls of all the names in Don Giovanni's little black book. The actual catalog was a Palm Pilot in Leporello's hand; people carried firearms instead of swords (though a musket and pistol are in the text); and the dresses...actually, the dress. Donna Anna wore black mourning; Zerlina wore red in a flamenco-ish style; but Donna Elvira's dress I lusted after.
(Yes. Opera is all about costuming, mine and others'.)
Stiff, nearly gun-metal gray but pretty anyway, four buttons in a square closing the bodice, wide neck, stand-up cloak collar, long to floor but, because it was cut like a coat, opening from buttons to hem revealing a sheath underneath. Stunning.
The program told me a couple of things to listen for: how themes in the overture, which by legend Mozart wrote at the last minute, are repeated and developed later on (which might mean the legend is not true or that he did, as reputed, have everything composed in his head but just not notated yet) and how, when Don Giovanni is seducing Zerlina, her music changes into his until, as she succumbs to him, they are singing the same notes. Also that he wrote the opera to suit the voices he knew would perform it.
The other day I used the word "spatch" for perhaps the first time in this site. I deplore my underuse of this invention. It's a spot or patch of territory you claim for your own. If it's not at your house, it could be just Yours anyway, like the bit against the slopey rock on East Beach across from my dorm Holcomb, or under the little sapling outside the first Denver apartment, or under the one particular linden tree on the plaza outside Dot Org's previous building, or the one bit of grass on the concave side of the parapet enclosing the patio at the new building. At Formigny, the reading spatch is in the backyard in the shade of the neighbor's tree.
Spatch. It makes your mouth happy. It makes your butt and your book happy to have a favorite place to read with a name to it.
This one ranks with her comment to me when I was in high school and newly disdainful about her preference for elevator music, predicated by a Muzak version of, say, "Let It Be" assaulting my ears and my asking her, respectfully I am so sure, why not listen to the original versions of songs. She said, "How do you know my music didn't come first?"
My mother called Saturday while we were in the garden. I didn't call her back during the weekend, so by Tuesday evening when she called again she was worried. I called her Wednesday morning over breakfast, apologized for not returning her call over the weekend, and explained that we had been at the opera yestreen (another underused word, though not my invention). She asked how that was and I commented about not liking opera before, maybe because before was Puccini but now was Mozart and she said,
"But you liked 'Phantom of the Opera.'"
That campaign I'm to be no more sarcastic to her than I can help? Severely strained.
Granny would have been 85 today.
We woke to six inches of snow. I thought the blizzard in March would have done away with the weakest branches, but undressed branches that withstood three feet of snow and my clobbering could not manage six inches of snow with their leaves on. We lost about a third of the cherry tree and a major branch of the larger plum.
But that wasn't the only reason I cried while plying the pruning saw.
High Country Gardens was to have shipped my plants the week of the 4th. I thought that meant Monday the 4th, so when they hadn't shown up by Thursday I was nervous. They arrived Friday, but so did a freezing rain; Saturday it snowed; Sunday, despite melting snow, clumping soil, and my impending absence, they had to go in. And so they did.
Vinca major for the easement, not enough to fill it in but a start, and I have to remulch it and make some sort of gravel border along the street. The plants right now are far enough away from anyone exiting a car--instead they're on the dogs peeing, sidewalk side--but the hope is they'll spread. A couple of salvia, a couple of penstemon, an agastache, and a catmint for the north side, not nearly enough to fill it in. I was modest buying plants, but there is also the neighbor's lamb's-ear sometime soon, and though it might be too hot (according to books, not to actual life) to divide last year's catmint, they are top-heavy and middle-thin and look like they might want to take over the world. Also a Spanish broom against the porch on one side and a decorative sage on the other. Now they just have to survive a week without watering and the season in soil I might have scarred by working while saturated: it's clay enough to have clumped.
The planting was interspersed with dashing downstairs to stem the tide, by towel and vacuum, of the flood in the northwest corner of the basement. RDC says this didn't start happening until the summer of 2001, and theorizes the foundation might have cracked (more) during the extremely dry years of 2000-2002. I didn't remember exactly when it started, but I know we didn't bother buying a rug to cover the tile in the front of the den until we had the television set up, which wasn't until late in the summer, and that the first we knew of the leakage was my wondering aloud why the rug was wet after a torrential rain (Denver's preferred form).
We shoveled all the snow away from that side of the house (in shorts and Tevas); we increased the length of the gutters on the ground to move the flood further from the house, and placed buckets under, ahem, leaks in the gutters. I don't know what we're going to do, but it's a serious problem.
One of my first tasks when we get back is to dig a drainage ditch. PVC pipes, gravel, grading, surveying. Oi. Or something.
Is "strike" feminine? It is now.
Because of the strike, it took us two hours through thick traffic to cover the 30 kilometers between the airport and La Défense. Happily RDC's work had arranged for transportation, so from Dulles we didn't worry about that leg.
One time years ago Haitch and I could not remember the names of the four "Cosby" daughters and the one we couldn't remember then is the same one I can't remember now, Tempest Bledsoe's character. Sonya, Denise, ?, Rudy. When we finally remembered, I decided that the next time I picked her up at the airport I would have one of those signs that chauffeurs carry, with that name. (I never did do that.) Anyway, this time we were met by a driver with such a sign. I felt like a movie star.
He was a really nice man, a good conversationalist, with quite serviceable English. I could tell only that his French wasn't native, but RDC guessed that Spanish was, and after that they chatted happily in a medium I couldn't follow. Which was good, because I had been awake for 20 hours and wanted to sleep, but Miguel was much too friendly for that. He had an Eyewitness (different publisher, same exact style) guide to the Louvre, in French, and I would have loved putting myself to sleep attempting to read that in a moving car, but it was not to be.
When I saw the map of where RDC's business meetings were going to be, I thought, by the angle of the Seine, that we were going to be near le Tour d'Eiffel but on the right bank. Nope. Downstream of le Tour, the river makes a hairpin curve and turns north again, and we were staying on the left side, in the very businessy district called La Défense. It looked much like any business district I've seen in the States, except not. Except better.
Immediately outside our hotel door grew un grand pouce. I didn't go find out what it was supposed to represent, because I already knew. If you squint you can nearly see the onion field at the top.
Because he had a business dinner that evening, RDC needed sleep; and though we both knew you Don't Sleep on first arriving, we both happily did, for five hours. We had planned no more than le Tour d'Eiffel that first day, but between 3:00, by which time we had woken and showered, and stopped at a café for lunch (croques monsieur--maybe messieur), getting back by 7:00 for dinner meant that we got, by foot since the mé wasn't going, only as far as halfway through the Bois de Boulogne. Which was still a very nice walk.
RDC scampered off. I found a faux little shop for croissants and jus d'orange for the next morning and happily went back to bed until 6 the next morning, though not so much to sleep. Either the nap or Something meant I did not adjust to the time difference for about three days.
She looks exactly the same, except 15 months old and a toddler instead of four months old and an infant. She has about eight teeth, and more hair, which is truly golden and not blonde, and her eyes are blue not green, but she looks exactly the same. She looks like someone who likes to toddle here and there and decapitate chives especially when someone exclaims "Pop!" She loves Nana, who is a giraffe, and she loves to turn the pages of books (usually all of them at once). She is remarkably (I think) adept with her fork and spoon, and adores yogurt. She dropped her spoon, I thought because of slippery hands, and I retrieved and handed it to her; she made steady eye contact and quite deliberately dropped it again. I barked with laughter and Nisou shushed me: I shouldn't encourage her. Nisou knows when Emlet has woken up in the morning because she will pull out the accordion bear that plays Brahms's "Lullaby" as it contracts. She tells long stories that unfortunately I could not understand, as she is still learning to string syllables into words: "Lo lo lo lo lo" and "Bababababa."
She looks exactly the same and totally different, with a year's worth of learning inside her.
I think I propositioned a cabbie. I meant to ask if he would take me to my hotel. (I asked because the taxis closer to Gare Montparnasse had been reserved and I didn't know what was going on with the strike). I think I asked him if he would take me in my hotel. Or something. Um, no. After we got that confusion as cleared up as it was going to be, he had to look up rue de l'Échelle on his map. I had the street number of the hotel, wrong, as it turned out. There was nothing at 11. It was 7. I probably crossed a numeral 7, all suave and continental, and then mistook my 7 for a continental numeral 1. Though how I doubled it I don't know. Anyway the hotel was only the block before, easily found.
RDC had left me a note and the key. I happily threw myself into the room, onto the bed, to nap before his return in about a half hour; and then into his arms when he got back. For supper we found a little restaurant in the rue Moliere and he had a good red wine and we had decent chocolate mousse.
I love Paris. Anyone can love the central, walky, best-preserved area of a city, and paint me a tourista but I love Paris. I love the architecture. It's mostly of a piece in this main, oldest, central part of Paris, but a good piece, 17th century, four and five stories, shops at ground level, living and office space above, shutters and window boxes, lovely. "I am here as a tourist." I am so shameless that I quote "A Room with a View" about tourism.
Friday we went to the Louvre, which was supposed to open at 9. Because of the strike it didn't open until 10:10, and then the ticket-printing machine we chose ne marche pas. We brought our half-printed tickets, whose timestamp though nothing else was legible, to the information booth. There helpful people helped us, in two steps, one of which lasted long enough that before the second step I asked, in flawless idiom and accent, ahem, "Combien temps?" Of course I have no idea what that actually means but I was understood, and a clerk told us "deux minutes." Two minutes later, indeed, we were on our way.
There was a special exhibit of da Vinci's notebooks and cartoons. I loved seeing his rough draft work. He was like, and I don't mean to be profane, Mrs. Barrable from Coot Club, whose own letters she would unconsciously interrupt with sketching. I confuse, because I suck, some of his notebooks with others of Michelangelo's that we saw upstairs. One of the men interrupted his doodling with the odd line of Petrarch. Since I couldn't even ask how much time it would take for our tickets to be fixed, my French was not at a level to translate much of the commentary about the work. But it was still remarkable to look at.
After that we did the Cliffs Notes to the Louvre: the Venus de Milo, the Victory of Samothrace, the Mona Lisa, and its two Vermeers, The Lace-maker and The Astrologist. The Wreck of the Hesperus I didn't track down, but my attachment to it comes solely from A History of the World in 10.5 Chapters, which I haven't read since 1991. And some stuff in between, Italian Renaissance paintings and a chamber devoted to Michelangelo's notebooks and an Egyptian tomb and some remnants of the crown jewels. At least England had three centuries of Empire after its Revolution to rebuild its collection of sparkly rocks for my viewing pleasure. France, not so much.
We found lunch in a cafe in the Place à Malraux. Nearby in le Jardin du Palais Royal, RDC indicated the square with a sweep of his hand, the black-and-white striped columns of different heights, and said, "This is where they grow their columns." He pointed to some circles set into the ground. "These have already been harvested."
He retreated to the room to nap and I would have joined him if I had harbored any hope of success. Instead I went ShopPING, because I was in Paris. A store near the café sold Tintin stuff, which is ridiculously marked up in the States, so I bought myself un petit Milou. (I found out when I got home and replaced Babe with Snowy on my monitor at work and brought Babe home, that Blake is afraid of Babe. And in return for acknowledging that the French pronunciation of Tintin is better, can we please all admit that Snowy is a better name than Milou?)
Last time, walking from la Place de la Concorde and to Musée Picasso, we detoured just a moment into a kitchen store. It was very close and my first place to try this time for my main task, a butter dish for my sister. (That's what she asked for.) The closest thing I found this time turned out to be a terrine dish, and a clerk recommended a shop just across the way.
The china shop I found myself in was one of the few businesses I encountered in which no one spoke English, and even with my stupid French we all got on fine. I spoke with three different clerks, besides greeting them: yes I had seen the back; please could you pack that for travel; thank you for writing out the sum (dix-neuf quarante-neuf wasn't so hard) and I don't want the receipt thank you. So I hope ma soeur likes son cadeau. I bought some books at the Louvre bookshops for some of the shorties in my life.
The other treat of this trip, besides going at all and seeing Emlet, was to see my old college friend KREL and her family. Her husband picked us up after work, which was a kindness I hardly expected, and we introduced ourselves and it was all pleasant and comfortable from the start. He brought us back to their lovely apartment in the 16th arrondisement and the next person I saw was not KREL but her older daughter, who threw herself at us, and then the younger, and then KREL herself, who has not changed one iota in the ten years since I last saw her. She must have a portrait up in the attic somewhere.
Her children are spectacularly adorable and charming and, which reassured me about Emlet, completely bilingual. There are some things they know how to say in one language but not another, but they chattered easily in both. I have worried that my absence of French will leave me unable to talk with Emlet after her "Lo lo lo" and "Ba ba ba" resolve into speech, but these two girls are in the same position, Usan mother and French father, and they speak both languages as well as any monolingual child of their ages might.
We had two wonderful dinners with KREL, at a brasserie on the Trocadero Friday with just the tall folks and en famille Saturday, which meant I got to sing ELL to sleep. Also it was RJH's birthday, so we called him in Connecticut, startling him rather.
In between, on Saturday, RDC and I wandered over the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint Louis.
We visited the Sainte Chapelle, and when Melissa tells you to go somewhere, you should go. It felt intimate even with a crowd, and then the school group left and it felt even smaller. We toured le Crypte Archéologique, more than two millennia of buildings and walls and roads and the edges of the island. We went through Notre Dame again, this time with time to go through the treasury with the Holy Hand Grenade and a human femur (whose, it did not say). I was, cue foreshadowing, coming down with a cold, and not interested in queuing in the rain for a climb to the top--despite having just read The Hunchback of Notre Dame--which is titled with Hugo's intended protagonist in French, just Notre Dame de Paris--which was my main reason for a second visit.
By the Pont St. Louis we crossed to l'Île Saint Louis, which is as touristy as Commercial Street in Provincetown if not quite so tacky. RDC startled me by wanting to shop by actually going into shops instead of just looking in their windows. We had crêpes in a little hole in the wall, and eventually ice cream at Berthillon's, just as everyone, and I do mean everyone, I know who has been to Paris, commanded us.
I am pretty sure I have never eaten an ice cream cone while walking along in the rain, but I wasn't going to miss the chance. That was some good skeam.
Sunday I was definitely sick. We scampered into the 7th arrondisement toward the Musée Rodin (which gets points for being one of the few sites with its own site), where we planned to meet KREL at 10:30. A walk like this is the sort that makes me resent Usan cities, but resenting anywhere for being insufficiently Parisien is about the stupidest possible attitiude. It was Sunday, there was little traffic, many places were closed, but a little boulangerie that was open sold the most tempting array of noshables I have ever seen. We both spotted a pastry and--okay, my French is really bad, so I'm proud of these little moments where a Frenchie and I understood each other--I asked, "Ces sont aux pommes?" where I mentally patted myself on the back for saying "aux" (and heard the "x" in my head) instead of "avec." The clerk said, "Non, poires." Pears are good too, so we bought those and called them breakfast and devoured them.
A reason I was anxious to go to the Rodin was the jardin aux roses. Is that grammatically correct? Whatever. Mid-May is now the perfect time to go to Paris, because of those roses. The house itself is lovely but the grounds are endless roses, heavily perfumed and smelling even stronger in the misty rain. I managed not to think of Petals on the Wind for some hours. We saw Le Penser et Les Burghers de Calais and the gates of the Inferno, which had the Thinker on top. I only just learned that Le Penser is Dante. We saw Balzac a few times and The Kiss, the Eternal Idol (which I prefer to the Kiss for sensuality), and Springtime.
We also saw KREL and her older daughter, who continued to bewitch me. She drew everything--really well--and I asked her for a drawing for my refrigerator.
I really liked The Hand of God because the hand was finished while the marble it loosely clasped remained unworked, The Danaide for her hair and back, and The Secret for the unknown within the hands. I was not so much taken with his drawings and was glad they were not his day job.
After that we separated, the Parisians to a baptism and we to a special exhibit of Magritte in the Tuilieres. This I would have liked better if I had not been ill. Often and often I do not get Magritte's point, and nearly as often I don't find the paintings aesthetically pleasing. But there were many that I did (La Magie Noire, La clé des champs--translated not as the Key of the Fields but as the Door to Freedom, which means I will never understand idiom) and RDC really enjoyed it, so that was fine. Magritte drew a lot of birds, or bird-like thingies, always a good thing. Les Grâces naturelles and its variations I particularly liked, birds growing out of leaves. (Searching for images, I found a Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy named Magritte. Though neither Labs nor dalmation/basset crosses nor black, Ridgebacks are gorgeous dogs.)
Saturday and Sunday had had sprinklings of rain and sun. Monday, in contrast, pissed with rain, and these fucking smokers have got to stop. Both of these conditions made leaving very easy. But flying, with dry air and changings of pressure, when my ears and sinuses were clogged, was less than no fun.
Home. Home home home home home by early evening.
Besides that I really should have scheduled a day between transcontinental travel and work, I was actually sick. So I was home at noon when the phone rang. My new best friend missed me so much she couldn't go to sleep without talking to me.
It was very endearing.
Both of us had some sort of relapse and I could face neither my bike nor contacts on Friday morning. I have to find my bus route's new, less frequent times. But I drove. I should have remembered to call Peaberry's for a big bag of grounds, but I didn't; instead I went to the post office with my presents.
Also I had to carry something home which wouldn't've been convenient on a bike.
We had three lay-offs last week. So today when I saw UberBoss quietly walking up to my cube, slowly, eyes down, my breath caught. It resumed a moment later when I realized that everyone else in my department was also converging on me. After we all laughed at me for that confusion, pour mon anniversaire, they gave me a card and a wee potted rose.
Much better than being laid off.
The Colfax bus makes for good anthropological research.
We were maybe two minutes late to meet Jared and Trish and I called Jared to tell him we were almost there. It was all very hip and now as, when RDC and I got to the top level of the Pavillions, there was Jared checking his messages.
Greetings were greeted and then Trish put a bag into my hands, wishing me a happy birthday. She gave me a penguin (and chocolate). Presents!
I recently learned that baby platypuses are called "puggles" and recently decided that baby penguins, being fuzzier than their parents and cuter, should be called puppies.
My penguin puppy is named Josephina because I am reading The Age of Napoleon and Josephina's is next door to the Market, where we ate.
Then we went to see "The Matrix Reloaded," about which too little cannot be said.
Remembering, I pounced on Trish: "Mo had a finger puppet of Beaker in her latest entry! I want one!"
Making me excessively happy, she told me they were at Starbucks.
We were in downtown Denver at the time, never more than two blocks from a Starbucks. I dragged her in, she pointed me in right direction, I snapped up the only Beaker in the bunch and removed the stripey stick of candy from his butt. Then I noticed there was someone already at the register. "Oh I'm sorry am I interrupting maybe just a little?" But I wasn't. I offered him the candy anyway, but he didn't want it; I gave it to Trish.
Despite its being my birthday weekend, I had to pay for Beaker. "Twenty-five?" inquired the non-customer I had non-interrupted. The cashier shook his head, "Now you're flirting."
The thing is though, since he was making friendly-like and obviously thought the mock guess of 25 was young for me, to the extent he thought he was flattering, he was actually insulting. But I am all about Owning My Age and he and the cashier, whose skate-boarding convo I had non-interrupted, were making friendly-like, and at least I don't look so decrepit as not to be worth flattering at all.
If that makes any sense.
Most of the conversation today concerned the house falling over into a swamp. My mother called to wish me a happy birthday, and I was content to listen for the ninetieth time about how buying a rose bush from disease-free stock is so worth the money and how long she's wanted a magnolia bush and exactly how they're going continually the amend their soil to keep their hydrangea blue and also how they have a store of a toxin that's apparently now illegal but which they use with impunity. My father called to wish me a happy birthday, and I told him about the swamp and heard about his cucumbers and tomatoes and in-laws (the last of which he is not growing nor perhaps even cultivating). My sister called to wish me a happy birthday and we debated whose fat is more attractive (she thinks she's fatter than me now, which I doubt, but her spongey bits have always been more appealingly arranged) and bemoaned the lack of decent television of a Sunday afternoon and swapped pet stories.
I recently learned that I have been falsely impugned. My immediate reaction was to wish (though not to plan) to clear my name. I will say nothing, however. Of course this is a rationalization for a pre-existing habit of non-action (read, for cowardice). Or not: I could be being sensible. I know the facts, and I really want that to be enough for me; it shouldn't matter what slander the slanderers believe.
It's not though. Privately, though aloud and to non-involved others, I mutter blackly. I'm working on that. I would work harder if the private muttering weren't funny or if it didn't help with the public silence.
Two 3.8-mile city rides.
I am taking my life in my hands to commute by bike, even over established, signposted bike routes. Denver's particular driving quirk is to run red lights--to keep going straight through the yellow, so that people waiting to turn left do so on the red, on the mutual red and even against the opposing's green. I know to watch for that.
I don't expect cars to come to full stops at stop signs, especially in residential areas like those the bike routes go through. I don't rely on blinkers. I am shocked--still--by how many people look left when turning right on red, for cars on the road they're turning into, but not right, where a cyclist might be waiting. And if the light turns green in that time, so that the straight-going traffic (including the bike that's been there longer than the right-turning car that didn't even see it as the driver approached the intersection) has the right of way, the driver will turn.
Making eye contact is critical.
This occurred to me, for the first time and in so many words, the other night as I demolished the brush pile into manageable fagots. We await the verdict of geotechnical and structural engineers on the fate of the foundation; we need to contract with a landscape engineer about the north side of the house because neither of us foresees the exact grading called for; and lots of the brickwork needs tuckpointing.
It doesn't matter.
I have always wanted a house. I have always wanted a house the way some people have always wanted a child. Blind to the responsbilities, ignorant of the challenges, unknowing of the maintenance. This house isn't the one I expected, but now it's mine. Mine, yet still its own, with its own individuality that I'm responsible for, to preserve and improve and pass into the future.
It's an imperfect analogy, of course, but fitting in another way. I never questioned whether my desire was right to act on. Lots of people want kids but don't weigh whether their parenting resources are sufficient. I wanted a house but didn't consider whether my mechanical, design, landscaping, gardening, and overall housekeeping skills were up to the task. I just blundered willfully into the job, trusting to love and devotion.
But so far we're doing okay. And I don't regret it for a second.
On the way I got grounds from Peaberry's Coffee, which has to be a more regular stop for me. I had no idea coffee grounds were as green as they are. I can get rid of the leftover bad mulch with enough grounds. And, I realized, there's a Starbucks kinda on the way, and a Diedrich's not too far out of the way. I would rather ask the Diedrich's: I can prop my bike outside and keep an eye on it while I picked up my stash. I need enough for, say, 25 square feet, 3 inches thick. Let's see how long it takes me to figure out the volume.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
6.25 cubic feet of coffee grounds.
Stuff I'll actually do:
Kinwork:
Lisa:
Stuff I keep putting off
Read
Exercise
Updated 29 June
This afternoon, grumpy and tired, I retired to the chair where I intended to spend the evening. Through the open window I heard a passerby leap at a plum tree with a rip.
At the next moment, he turned up the walk to the house, with a big Tupperware chest under his arm, a child roped into one of these ridiculous door-to-door solicitation programs that I hate: adults profit in money by teaching children who shouldn't be out on a schoolnight to harass residents, who donate out of pity; the children learn nothing useful and are exploited for pennies.
Before he got to the steps I had called, "I don't want to buy anything, thank you." He turned away, turned back, and asked if I was sure. At that provocation, I added, "And don't rip at trees."
I was just practicing. I figure I can get a lot meaner pretty quick.
He asked, pointing, "Are these yours?"
I didn't say that they're their own. Instead I said, "Whose they are doesn't matter. You shouldn't hurt them."
Who's teaching them that?
And it was the smaller plum, the one that doesn't overhang the sidewalk and requires a leap from a 10-year-old to reach. We were on the swing last night, eating our supper, watching people walk up to the park for the Sunday concert (that we forgot about again). A group of maybe six walked by, ducking the overhanging branch of the droopy one. "I don't know about your tree, man," one said to us, probably more politely than she would have spoken of it if she hadn't seen us.
I forget how low it hangs. I can walk under it without ducking my head. You just have to walk single-file and be shorter than, say, 5'10". Is that so much to ask? We keep saying we're going to hire a tree surgeon at least for the nectarine. I expect the others could stand a once-over too.
And ha, I prevented one dog from peeing in my garden. A human tugged a leashed dog away from the garden when she saw me on the swing. Ha. Score two for the mean old lady.
And I have to fence off the easement, illegal though that might be, until the vinca is stronger. The one that died was from its mother's womb untimely rip't by someone unloading an air-conditioner from the backseat of a car as RDC watched from inside the house while conducting an uninterruptable conference call. By someone, more specifically, who lives across the street, so I wonder why he didn't park on that side so his car door faced the right way. If I'd seen him I'd have yelled. Score three for the mean old lady.
Voting by bike: much more sensible than voting by car. Shadowfax and I entered the polling place together and were the only voters until we left, when I met a black-and-white dog named Harrison. One of the judges asked if I rode to work, and if so how far, and what a good distance, and how nice that it was uphill in the morning so downhill in the afternoon.
Cars are not bases for conversation.
This is so wild. A week ago yesterday it was suddenly 94, and I thought, well, that's that then.
It hasn't broken 80 since. It's cool and cloudy to the point of overcast in the morning. In fact, in the morning, it's overcast to the point I think I don't want to bike. But get this, now I have no choice. There's not the bus to fall back on any more, tra la, at least not from a block away. Now I have to walk a mile--if it's a mile, 10 long blocks anyway--to another bus. Anyway, there's no reason to walk and bus when I can bike. And I biked when it was 25 degrees and sunny, so almost 60 and cloudy really shouldn't be such a challenge.
Since before we moved here, the mayor's been Wellington Webb. You can't go wrong with a name like that.
"John Hickenlooper" just doesn't have the same resonance. It's Dutch and means something like "fence-leaper" according to him.
Welcome, Mr. Mayor.
I had my hair cut this afternoon. I am not cut out for the pretty or for the high-maintenance cut. I like my cutter and am glad to have found one to return to, and I am glad that whoever gave me the Big Cut in January knew style, but for the every day, I neither repeat it nor live with it. It was a little wilder even than this when I left the salon, and the rain didn't help the frizz settle.
Almost as soon as I got home, RDC had dinner on the table. One of the things I can't do with my hair down is eat. I skewered it with three fake tortoiseshell chopsticks and ate as it fell down my nape. After dinner I twisted it again but pinned it from another angle. There is now one pin in it and it's secure. Hallelujah, and just in time for summer (which might start by Monday). Even the ponytail touched my neck and didn't capture my fringe. This is close to a French twist and it's all captured. This is a style I can live with. And damn it, I still find it much more flattering back than down.
(Haitch, she got goosebumps when I told her.)
RDC has recently bought a bunch of tunes he hasn't had for years from the iTunes store. When I got home today, both times, he was listening to Bob Dylan. I've tried, people, but it hasn't worked yet. That is, it hasn't worked for me. Blake loves his music. Happily the entire flock agrees about Neil Young and Janis Joplin.
Blake sings along. He bobs and dances. There is no kind of a bad mood (and when he's pissy, he's very very pissy) that loud rock'n'roll doesn't fix.
One of the songs RDC downloaded is Neil Young's "Powderfinger." Considering how strongly I feel about The One Right Original Way, there is no justification for my preferring the Junkies' version of this song. Except that they're my favorite band, and except that Young's tone does not at all fit the subject matter. He could be singing about having a beer at the corner bar as he croons, "Just think of me as one/ who never figured/ to fade away so young/ with so much left undone." When Margo sings it, you know somebody's about to die.
Blake doesn't care. The version RDC got is live, and there is nothing Blake loves better than live music. He is just like the Humbug in how much he craves adulation, and all those cheers and whistles he knows are for him.
Just shopping.
I went into an accessories store because my hairclips are all either bent or broken. I was looking specifically for a French twist comb. I found a smaller hairclaw and a larger, a pair of curved hair sticks and a something or other that will work (as do the sticks) for a French twist. The only comb they sold had too many teeth and was clear plastic with rhinestones, and I am not going to prom any time soon.
A French twist is the only way I know to put up my hair that's not in a ponytail or with a claw; a ponytail requires me to skin the hair back too harshly and a claw looks sloppy and doesn't hold as securely as a twist. It's not a true French twist: it's too short still or too layered, the fold goes diagonally instead of vertically, and the ends of the hair peek out, but that's the principle.
Janelle does a lot of undercutting, or something, "for movement," and maybe the hair swings better but it doesn't braid yet, as long as it is. At least it's calmer now, a day and a half later. This is my dilemma. I love a French braid, but I'm letting her cut it for down instead of for a braid. Layers and undercutting are the only reasons I can think of for shoulder-length hair not braiding.
I also bought myself a summer-weight bathrobe with some birthday money, which, ha! puts me ahead in the superior bathrobe category. If it warms up--it might snow tomorrow--RDC's will be too heavy, all summer long. It's white and looks, I hope, not too much like a doctor's smocky coat. I am reminded of the Glamour Shots leather jacket and how much that looked like a bathrobe.
And I finally brought the stupid wine bottle thingies to Bombay Company. They were gifts (with the price tag still on) and they're not my type of thing at all, nor RDC's, who would decide, being the one who drinks wine. He said he saw in the Louvre, in the collection of royal household objects near the remnants of the Crown Jewels, something like these bottle necklaces, but I am fairly confident I would not use such things even if they came in gold and diamonds like the Bourbons' set. I can't bring up the Bombay Company, but that's no loss. I have store credit that maybe I could use nearer Yule, for a tree ornament.
What can I say, I think decorating trees is fun and decorating bottles is ridiculous. Chacun á son gout.
Last night I danced my beloved "I don't have to work tomorrow!" dance.
Today I am working in the sense of Getting Stuff Done, but not in the sense of For The Man. It's not 10 yet and I have started laundry and begun another batch of ginger-chocolate cookies (some for a hosueguest and some for an ill coworker) and have just sat down with a cup of tea that RDC made for me an hour again when I was knee-deep in cocoa and cinnamon.
The more I get done today, the less I have to do tomorrow, so the more time I can spend at the People's Fair. Which is kind of like the grand prize being a week in Cleveland, and the second being two weeks. Or however that Beckett line went. Was that Beckett? Whoever.
Dr. Bob graduated. The brazen debauchery was several people in a hotel room, a lot like high school, though unlike high school in that everyone (else) had a baby. Nearly: I gave CGK a backrub: she's got almost two months to go but is huge and uncomfortable. One baby stayed home with a grandparent so I still haven't met him, conveniently the one I am least personally interested in. I can't believe we were thinking of joining No Kidding: if you like your friends, surely you like your friends' children. Conversation flitted between DU gossip and children and teaching and reading--children being only the newest, not the only, topic of conversation.
And I just talked to my mother. She ran into my childhood friend's father, who reported that HPV had twin boys in late May, and also into Michael's grandmother, who said that that childhood friend just had a son. Last I knew about him, he and B were still dating, ten years after high school, so I wonder if she's the other parent.
Apparently my mother and HPV's dad didn't talk long--only long enough to establish that HPV's partner is female, big news for my mother and confirming my longheld guess, but not long enough for anything about the children, like their names or exact birthdays. But I'm glad to know as much as I do and must dispatch essential books immediately.
Also I talked to Nisou a bit this morning. Emlet has discovered how to scale the couch, and she went swimming for the first time last weekend and loved it. Thank the gods. I remember how much she enjoyed her bath at four months, how her body elongated and how she smiled and wriggled. My beautiful little girl.
And in most excellent news, my youngest child and a friend (whom I remember but didn't babysit) are roadtripping home from Arizona to Old Lyme and will stop here Monday night. It will be a tight fit, because we have another friend arriving tonight for several days, but they're young and a night on camp mattresses on the living room floor instead of the already-spoken-for futon won't kill them. I haven't seen her in five years and am most stoked.
I have been missing, I always do miss, the sort of broad community of friends and acquaintances I had in Connecticut--that I still have, though scattered to the four winds. When a friend says he and his family camped with the other families from daycare, when I see the photographs of Nisou's four godchildren--each from a different family--in frames, I feel that lack.
It existed for me only in latter years at UConn. I left Old Lyme when I called it escape. I never belonged to the circles I admired, of the intelligentsia library board members, the patricians of town, my babysitting's family broad reach of school and library and church involvement. Even at UConn I was an outlier, but I knew so many pivots I felt included.
Eventually last night or really this morning, we left the hotel room for the three-year-old to sleep, and RDC and Dr. Bob and SPM and, uh, Alias and I sat around the lobby and talked for another while. The talk was more DU gossip and fantasy baseball and Six Feet Under and someone's boss who was "an insane cunt--no offense" (because I'm an insane cunt? I let that go) but also someone's feeling every June when someone else, but not he, graduates. Of the four DU students, the non Dr. Bob three are ABD and have been for some time. It's been on my mind and I had brought it up to CGK as well: almost eight years here and for what? After eight years I call the fourth Alias because I don't know him well enough to give him an alias?
For a strong marriage and a great house and a garden from scratch and Blake, SPM pointed out, not letting me pity myself. Yeah. But his confession about June was the first personal statement I have heard anyone I'm not married to make, in person, in months.
I want to be quite clear here: I do not ache for or crave a child, I do not hear ticking, I experience my friends' children with affection and amusement but not desire. I do recognize that parenthood would likely hurl me into a community, but it's the community I want, not the child.
It's in my hands, to volunteer or join a bicycling group or open up more among coworkers and RDC's classmates.
It's always surprising to me how a task expands to fill the time available. I managed to be showered and and dressed by the time RDC's coworker arrived, with the house as clean as it ever gets. But barely.
We bussed downtown and had bison burgers at the Wynkoop, again filling all the space available. Except I ordered the pasta salad alternative to french fries and I am very proud. RDC has a theory that french fries are almost never good but that you always order them because they ought to be really good and you continually hope not to be disappointed. There is also the It Will Still Be There Tomorrow rationale of food avoidance that I haven't quite grasped yet.
I bailed soon after dinner and left them to their pub crawl. I bussed home and read Bleak House until Blake and I were thoroughly asleep. Meanwhile, RDC and Denton worked their way home from My Brother's Bar by way of tequila and a 3:00 breakfast at Pete's Kitchen. Speaking of filling the space available.
I guess we're fond of repeating photographs, same setting, disparate times. Or not: this is the first time in seven years we've done this one. Our usual repeat is a map hut in various levels of snowpack. Anyway, in June 1996 we spent our first anniversary camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. That's a really bad scan, isn't it? We looked for the right rock this time but failed.
Okay, I say that deliberately sounding like Mr. Emerson in "A Room with a View." Ooops.
I had not seen RKC for five years, since she was 17, and her friend Sarah for longer than that--probably since 1995 at CKC's high school graduation party. RKC is all tall now, I think the tallest of the three, I think even a smidge taller than I.
Sarah was never a victim of mine but she remembers getting piggyback rides, which I hardly doubt. The best game a babysitter can play is to be human furniture or a cat jungle gym. They both remember when I used to carry all three of my girls around at once, RKC being one of the carry-ees and Sarah being impressed when she witnessed it. When I was 18 and strong as hell, they were 9, 7, and 5 and I could stagger a few steps with them slung about my various limbs.
Since last time, RKC has graduated from high school, attended college, and most important devoted a year to AmeriCorps, which seems to have been one of those life-changing events that shape your whole future. I love being so proud of her.
It was also tremendously reassuring to have her here. They drove up from Tucson by way of Albuquerque, and RKC opined that "Colorado could not be more beautiful." That, coming from another Old Lyme native, who therefore knows natural beauty when she sees it, was wonderful to hear--especially since they only drove up the interstate, alongside not through the Sangre de Cristo and other lumpy bits.
She said she'd thought she'd got used to the desert enough to find it beautiful, but as soon as she saw the green of the Colorado mountains she realized what she'd been missing. I know I have to get over my geographical assumptions--considering how irritating I find it when people insist that Denver's in, not next to, the mountains--but if Colorado is green (to a Connecticut eye) compared to Arizona, then I think the Grand Canyon is as much of that state as I need to see. But then in Animal Dreams there are orchards and flowing water, so not all of it can be sere and ochre.
They had been in the car--she's keeping up the family tradition of Volvo station wagons, I was glad to see--all day and I suggested a stroll around City Park. This they also liked, the pond and the pavilion and the view from behind the Museum of Nature and Science. Stormclouds rolled through, though it was clear over the mountains, which could not but improve the view.
We had a really nice visit, though too short. And I learned that the middle one--whom I haven't seen for four years--plans to visit in August.
Fiona Shaw plays one of my favorite characters in "Persuasion," Mrs. Croft. I finally bothered to look her up and she plays Aunt Petunia Dursley as well.
It's called acting, I know. But it's the same startlement I felt when I realized that Daniel Day Lewis played such unlike characters in "My Left Foot" and "Room with a View" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," or that Jonathan Pryce, so endearingly geeky in "Brazil," was the foxy shill for Infiniti cars.
Why must there be such campy caricature in every single Jane Austen adaptation? in "Persuasion," Sir Elliot is portrayed as quite silly, rightly silly, exactly silly enough, but Elizabeth Elliot is over the top and not nearly as attractive as either Anne or even Mary, which doesn't suit the family dynamic. In "Pride and Prejudice," Caroline Bingley isn't nearly as attractive as she ought to be, and it's not just that she overspends on her wardrobe. And no one who married Mr. Hurst could possibly sneer at the Bennets.
Okay, that's two. I don't count "Mansfield Park"--of course Fanny Price is not palatable to the contemporary audience but she doesn't take nearly as well to "Oh and I happen to be the author in her youth" as Jo March does in the latest "Little Women." "Sense and Sensibility" is well cast. Gwyneth Paltrow doesn't look like Emma Woodhouse nor Toni Collette like Harriet Smith nor Euan Macgregor like Frank Churchill nor what's-her-name like Jane Fairfax (or she did, plus about ten years) but at least they're not campy. The only one I don't have is the Kate Beckinsale "Emma."
Satire, yes; foolishness, yes. Camp, no.
Now I'm done with "Persuasion" and I've cranked up "Sense and Sensibility," which I've worn a groove into. Man I love this movie.
Besides that Jane Austen fetishism is my usual state of being, one of my birthday gifts finally arrived. My mother-in-law gave me a gift certificate to Amazon and I indulged myself with The Making of Pride and Prejudice (and Out of Africa and Quincunx). I am all about paying attention to the man behind the curtain.
I thought that the girls would quite possibly be vegetarian so I was glad I had made Enchanted Broccoli Forest Green Green Noodle Soup. But it needed pesto, so Monday at lunch I bought basil (and some fruit for them to take with them because I was slightly in loco parentis (which is in fact how I justify calling them "girls")).
Only on the way home did I remember that in May the food processor died as it valiantly attempted to mix up dough for lasagne noodles. You'd think I'd've remembered, because half the soup--onions, zucchini, spinach--needed to be liquefied as well. The blender worked well for that (and for once prudence prevailed so I happened to be holding the top down when I switched it on), but it wouldn't work for pesto.
But then I remembered that people did make pesto before Cuisinart.
We have a hand-held thingie, something that fits in the palm with a six-bladed wheel. I sliced up the basil with that, then mashed up one (just one! though large) clove of garlic, enough pine nuts, enough cheese, a dash of salt, in the mortar and pestle. And then mixed it up in the basil. And it was so much better than usual. Maybe because I didn't overgarlick it, but I don't think so. I prefer to think it's because pesto prefers to be made the old-fashioned way.
I cooked. Again. Baking cookies doesn't count--that's dessert. I made the soup on Saturday, though it went uneaten until Wednesday. Tonight I made something from Almost Vegetarian, which I have to say, as a cookbook featuring allegedly healthful recipes, falls well short of its intention. Everything is packed full of dairy.
I made asparagus tips with a leek and scallions and parsley and orteggio (a circular, shallow dish of dime-sized pasta) and a dallop of yogurt (!) and some wine and muenster to melt into it at the end. Melting the muenster was the bad part; RDC was scornful of so primitive a method of adding cheese and thought it was going to be melted in wine first.
Sticky and too rich but I cooked it fine. Hey, I was proud.
I want to know--maybe not to learn, just to know--how to get a week's worth of food out of a set of ingredients. Two thirds of the leek and chives went into the compost--can you use leek leaves for stock? I still have a cup of leftover chopped onions from the soup that I didn't put in tonight's dish because it was already oniony enough.
My sister cracks me up. Yesterday she emailed me saying she couldn't believe she'd had no response to the spinach story. She did the phone equivalent of sending the story to my yahoo account (which I seldom check), which is calling my cell phone (which I almost never turn on). So I turned on my cell to check my messages.
"I'm not even home yet and she's already making me crazy. This morning the phone rang at eight o'clock and it was her and I couldn't understand her before staggering into the living room where I have better reception. I asked her what she had to call me at the crack of hell about, and she got all flustered and said, 'Well, now I've forgotten.' But then she remembered that her spinach crop is so bountiful this year that I can take as much of it as I want. So she's waking me up three days before I go home to tell me I can have spinach."
Reportedly it's been soggy in New England this June and jumped from cold and wet to hot and wet. I am so glad I plan to go home in September, when the weather (barring hurricanes) is more dependable. Our father's home this week too though. Our mother's throwing a Father's Day picnic for her husband this year, and I don't know how my sister plans to juggle seeing our actual father on Father's Day with our mother's expectations about seeing her husband. If I lived near both sets of parents and I saw my notstepmother on Mother's Day instead of my actual mother, the hurt would be vast and percussive--and justified. I wonder whether my mother can make the parallel.
CLH left a postscript in a second message: "If it's all right with you, when I tell her how irritating the spinach thing was I am also going to tell her how inappropriate of her it was to inquire about the state of the gate-leg table during the turmoil of your house falling over into a swamp. 'They ripped off the leaves and are using them as flotation devices in the swampy areas.'"
Me, I fume until I snap, because I find trying to communicate to her the source of my bad feeling and her role in it so frustrating. More frustrating than fuming and snapping? I'm not sure.
(And yes, my mother did so inquire. She called me on my birthday, which was nice of course, and I told her I wasn't in a particularly birthday mood because of the uncertain state of the house. I told her about taking everything out of the furnace room to so we could see the whole thing, and calcium sulfates, and type 5 concrete, and the crystalline structure, and the cracking of the floor, and the disintegration of the support column behind the furnace. She asked, "Now where is the gateleg table in all this?" RDC and I have considered living in Blake's cage or maybe the garage if the house goes. Silly us, not to consider the primacy of the table.)
My sister works fast. I called my mother's house to tell her about the shocking new development (that I cooked) and to be told that the only reason I don't take more readily to this innate female skill is that RDC forcibly keeps me out of the kitchen, and also to talk to my sister, now home for the weekend.
My mother asked about the house and I told her what I told her before, about fixing the drainage and supporting the porch beam and replacing the columns. This time I was able to tell her that RDC was, as we spoke, routing a plank to fit under the porch beams, a nice manly activity I expected she would appreciate, to keep the porch roof up, and she asked, very solicitously, if it was actually falling down. "No, but it would if we didn't fix it." She was all concern this time, unlike last, and I knew CLH had already spoken to her.
Our mother passed the phone to my sister, who (after leaving her earshot) filled me in on lunch with our father (new malapropisms: "cosmatose" for "comatose," as in drinking to the point of, though whether anyone actually had a cosmopolitan I doubt, and "shitake," which is the sort of wave created in the pool when his apparently overweight notstepdaughterinlaw jumps in) and so forth.
I asked CLH how she'd broached the table topic, since it was obvious she had. "Well, I told her you were a little offended [note: amused enough to tell CLH, since any slight mother-error becomes story fodder] that that was her question when you told her about the house. She said, 'Well, I was concerned about the table,' so I pointed out that you were telling her about the house and she was concerned about a piece of furniture."
I know dwelling is unhealthy. But laughing about it, even if we're not quite to laughing it off, has to be good for us, right?
James Spader will never be anyone but Steff. And I hate Steff. I'm not sure if "Sex, Lies and Videotape" would have stood a chance with someone other than him in it; and in the two minutes of "Less Than Zero" I watched I thought Steff was a good choice to play Rip; but for Steff to be in "Secretary" didn't work for me. At all. I wondered who told him a bad Christopher Walken imitation would be a good idea. Because it wasn't.
Wow.
When RDC wants to lure me into an evening of playing boat (i.e., not moving from the couch because of the sharks in the floor, a holdover from my sister's or my being being sent to our room not to move from our bed but the other freely sharing in the exile, thence not to stir from the bed, because of the sharks), he'll announce that there's nothing on but Jane Austen movies with Peter Gabriel soundtracks.
The fact that "The Last Temptation of Christ" is unwatchable has nothing to do with this. And I don't think he's seen "Birdy," but that doesn't matter because it's the book, not the movie, that's better worth knowing.
Peter Gabriel love aside, Long Walk Home approaches but does not touch its movie's brilliance. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is one of the best movies I've ever seen, with three of the most natural child actors I could ever imagine. It makes for particularly good watching so soon after reading Pigs in Heaven.
Hey! "To Kill a Mockingbird" has a C.M. rating! True to the saying, the rule is thus tested. It's euthanasia.
Moonshadow's time is 10:38. I started scribbling a little after 10. I bet one snort of cockatiel dander that, despite the actual differences in the times I saved-to-publish these four entries, this one will show the same time, 22:10 as the first three. Why?
By the time rain began and I got up to lower the north windows, at 3 o'clock, it had been thundering and lightninging for a longish time. I only closed the two on the right: if rain came in the two on the left it would fall on us in bed. Meanwhile we wanted the cool air, and it wasn't windy so the rain just dropped straight down.
The storm was far away, judging by the lapse between light and sound, but huge: the thunder was tremendously loud despite the distance, and each outburst was neither a simple clap nor even a roll but a seconds-long rumble. I am looking this up now, but my guess is that the higher the storm builds, the longer the path lightning travels from cloud to ground, thus the longer the thunder. But that doesn't make any sense, because the difference it takes lightning to go 20,000 versus 50,000 feet must be wee. But more distance would mean more gases to expand. So maybe not so nonsensical.
After the rain started, the sound and light show ceased or moved on, so I fell back asleep thinking it couldn't've rained very much. But the front garden is flattened and detritus marks the high-tide mark near overburdened storm drains.
I am so enjoying this summer.
It had not thundered all damn day but any public organization has to protect everyone from no chance at all, so the pool was closed for lap swim. A lifeguard was present nonetheless and she suggested one of the indoor pools.
Indoor pools in the summer? People are freaks, they really are.
I will figure this out.
I just used the Ohio Public Library's tree identifier finally to determine that the Other tree is a European mountain ash or rowan. I had no idea. Rowan sounds so sexy and romantic and this tree is orange: the bark has an orange tint and the fruit is orangey, in wee little clustered berries that, according to Ohio, birds eat. We call it the Other tree because we don't like it much. I thought, from my tree identification guidebook, that it was a sumac.
I have used the Ohio site before trying to establish a species of tree I love here, with such a scent. A couple were planted by a new housing development on my bike commute and I bet if I ever could find its architect or designer, they would know. In the meantime I'm going to go through the tree identifier name by name.
Okay, none of those. The closest I've found, the narrowleaf cottonwood, doesn't mention the tree's shoots. Like a quaking aspen or our cherry tree, whatever tree I'm after spreads with shoots; when I discovered that I realized that identifying it mattered less since I wouldn't plant it.
I'm sick! Sick! Besides that I say that anyway, because of a movie or "Bloom County" (The Onion recently ran an article about someone whose pop culture references stopped in 1988 but I go all the way to 1994), it's more fitting to say now because I'm reading This Perfect Day, in which nonassimilated members of the society are "sick." And I didn't think of this in previous readings, but that's a nod to Erewhon, in which criminality is sick but illness is criminal. Hence you say someone's "got the socks" (i.e. stolen a pair of socks) as a euphemism for having a cold. Hence Blake's "getting the flaps."
Anyway.
Where would I be without that word?
I'm sick! Sick! This morning it was pouring (again! I should have planted a tree this spring, but in the window of time when you do that, before it heats up, not that it's done that yet either praise be, we didn't know what the water situation was going to be. Ironic, innit?)--
I'm sick! Sick! This morning it was pouring so I drove because I am made of sugar and will melt, thank you Kymm. NPR or CPR was fundraising so I switched to KBCO and then to one of the "classic" rock stations. A song was just beginning. A song I knew really well. "Wow!" I thought. "I haven't heard 'I Will Follow' in years!" Because I hadn't. And still haven't, because the song was, in fact, "Two Hearts Beat As One." I haven't listened to U2 much since 1992, well after Bono's Christ/Elvis complex began to bother me, and I only just bought War digitally. And then I plugged in my iPod, that being its point, and listened to the album from the beginning. "Sunday Bloody Sunday," "Seconds," "New Year's Day," and then I was at work. At my desk, I skipped "Like a Song..." because I decided, with 20 years' remove, that the song sucked. Then "Drowning Man." Then I skipped "Refugee" because I didn't like it even then, and "Red Light" too. But "Surrender"! That was my anthem! My angsty teenage anthem, baby!
But that's not even the sickness, OMFB. No no no no no. Listening, I wondered if I could find setlists from the Unforgettable Fire tour on that newfangled thing they've got nowadays called "the web." I looked. I knew it wasn't tenth grade, because in tenth grade my first concert was Duran Duran, and then I broke my arm. It was eleventh grade, spring, and I bought a $15 ticket from a schoolmate for $20 and considered myself hard done by. Here I found two dates for Hartford Civic Center, 20 and 23 April. I considered, for half a second, which of the two I had attended. And then I remembered. It had to be the 23rd, the birthday of my high school crush.
Of course I also remember the phone number of my childhood best friend, even though I haven't dialed it since about 1980. That's just how my mind works. I remember in kindergarten when Miss Pancera (who got married the next summer, and I have never been able to remember her married name, even though I saw her occasionally throughout my entire elementary school tenure, because that is also how my mind works) asked my phone number, I gave HPV's, because that's the one I knew.
And maybe I'm not that sick. 23 April sticks out as a date not because it was the crush's birthday but because on 23 April 1985 I saw U2 but on 23 April 1984 I was having surgery on my broken arm. I for damn sure remembered that contrast. (Remembering that I noticed the coincidence of dates doesn't strike me as being as sick as remembering an obsolete birthday.)
But I am still fairly pathe. The exclamation "You're sick! Sick!" is what Milo yells at Opus after Opus ran up thousands of dollars at 1-900-DIAL-aMOM. I reread my Bloom County anthologies far too many times. And it's a pity that the past tense of "reread" is indistinguishable in print from the present tense. Because that is past tense, OMFB. Just not past enough.
By the way, the set list was
11 O'clock tick tock
I will follow
Two hearts beat as one
Seconds
MLK
The unforgettable fire
Wire
Sunday bloody sunday
The cry
The electric co.
A sort of homecoming
Bad
October
New Year's Day
Pride (In the name of love)
Knocking On Heaven's Door
Gloria
40
But can that be right? I remember Bono singing some lines from "Ruby Tuesday," a song I didn't know. I probably had to ask someone at school what that was, or I didn't ask because that would have been uncool but remembered and wrote down the lines. Maybe they didn't do the whole song.
If nothing else the Addams Family movies were well cast, and Wednesday's slow smile at camp has always struck me as one of the best and scariest smiles in moviedom.
I'm watching "Harold and Maude" for the 90th time and it's clearly been too long--maybe only once or twice since Haitch gave it to me for my birthday in 1997? 1998?
Because when Harold smiles after Candy runs screaming is indisputably the best movie smile, scary or not, ever.
Also, "They're my species." Also, "So I'll always know where it is." Also, "Go and love some more."
Sometime during college--it must have been in college because my father was living in the house again and he subscribed to cable with HBO--"Harold and Maude" came on a pay channel one later afternoon and I began to watch it (again). Eventually both of my parents joined me, and though I don't understand how anyone can begin watching a movie for the first time elsewhere than from the beginning, I was much more pleased that it captured their attention. The computer dates amused my father most and the staged deaths amused my mother not at all. But they were both captivated, and I was so grateful and relieved. I have always since used "Harold and Maude" as a gauge. If you prefer cats to dogs, we can maybe talk. If you don't like "Harold and Maude" you have no soul.
We just got it on DVD, which has two theatrical trailers as special features. The first one has a collage of shots with "If You Want to Sing Out"; the second gives the whole damn thing away. And neither features That Trailer Voice saying "In a world..."
One of the reasons the house is falling into a swamp is improper drainage. Today I took the first step in correcting that by receiving five cubic yards, 2.5 tons, of dirt, tipped into the street against the curb in front of the house.
Now then. The city pools close in the middle of August when the lifeguards go back to school but the pools do not open in the middle of May when they leave school. Why? It's a mystery. No, they open in mid-June--last Saturday to be precise. I swam Saturday, we went mountain-biking Sunday, and then Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the only post-work lap swim times, there were thunderstorms (or at least a tiny little smidge of rain three miles away that we had to be protected from) so swim was canceled.
So today I was all stoked for a noon swim--there is a noon lap swim every day, although the adults who want lapswim generally have jobs that prevent their taking advantage of it, and why do I live in the land o' no lakes again?--so after the dirt's 11:15 arrival I barrowed only three loads from the great big pile before biking over to the pool.
The great big piercing blue sky that Denver generally has all day clouded up fast as the dozens of littl'uns vacated the general swim. In ten minutes the overcast was complete. I swam .7K before we were whistled out, and for goodness sake, a thunderstorm in the middle of the day? That just doesn't happen here. I shucked my suit, regained my shorts and (white) tank top, Tevas and sandals, and biked home as fast as I could through pouring rain, gusty winds, and maybe some thunder and lightning.
My great big pile of dirt in the street wanted to swim away already. Denver might not get a lot of rain, but it really enjoys its downpours. I grabbed tarps from the lasagne mulch in back, from over the leaf pile, from under the brush pile. I dug a trench through the dirt for the lake that already had formed on the upstream side to drain. I hastily reattached all the long gutters that're supposed to divert the water from leaking into the basement--those I'd removed that morning so the wheelbarrow could get through.
I dashed into the house to swap sunglasses for contact lenses and sopping wet white--though muddy--tank top for something more practical and opaque. Just as I emerged, the rain, true to Denver form, dripped to a halt. It's rain, and I cannot resent it. But I maybe did give the sky the stink-eye a couple of times.
So my next barrow loads were of mud as I tried to buttress the pile from further erosion. My gloves were soaked from the lake and the stream and the ditch, so I shucked them. But when my shorts had got so filthy I could no longer wipe the mud onto them for a better purchase on shovel or wheelbarrow, I gave up.
I broke for dry clothes and a sandwich over a few minutes of "Sense and Sensibility." I have really worn a groove in it--it crashed twice and I restarted Moondshadow, taking that as my hint to get back to work. Twice more in the afternoon, thunderstorms passed through, though only with showers, and I took the second rain as a signal to stop for the day.
So here I am, in warm sunlight, on my porch swing, listening to Crosby Still & Nash and now the Waterboys, eating cherries, and not reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.
I am loving this summer.
I haven't mentioned it because I hadn't seen the evidence in the rock yet, but now I have so I will. Haitch and McCarthy are engaged, and the subject line refers not to any conversation or visit, I am happy to say, but to the design of the ring. The extremely sparkly stone--that's clarity, right?--is tension-mounted in titanium so there is no metal beneath or around it. Light can enter it from almost any point except two, at 9 and 3 o'clock where the band touches the…rim or whatever you call the transition from the round top to the pointed bottom.
We toasted them with the champagne KREL and her husband gave us in France (that I schlepped in my carryon wrapped in my nightgown, so I'm glad that went well) and fed them raspberries from the garden (yesterday's take made two layers in the bottom of the same style of bowl). Also I gave her her French KitKats. And she gave me my birthday presents: a chocolate and raspberry candy bar, a book of essays on northern New York (I love local books), and moose cookie cutters, big and wee.
I brought them into the kitchen to join them with my other moose cookie cutter. "Oh, I didn't know you already had one," said Haitch, perhaps disappointed.
"But now I have a whole moose family!" I exclaimed. All three have the giant palmate spreads of antlers that mark them as meeses, so it's quite authentic in the lisaverse that they're a bull, cow, and baby. When SEM discovered in college how squeamish I was about giving birth, he accessorized the worst possible baby for me: claws, tail fins, and velcro, and there might have been antlers.
We had dinner at Mizuna, which used to be Aubergine. I don't know why I was the designated driver on the way, except I had had only a sip of champagne while the others had finished the bottle, since I cannot parallel park, even by Braille, unless the space is big enough for a yacht.
Mmm, food. RDC had made me tea in the post-dirt pre-dinner hosing-off period, and I sucked down some Advil, so I was even awake for this meal. I had a goat cheese and morel and some green sprouty thing salad with my first fava beans; RDC had paté; Haitch had some kind of potato and corn pasta; McCarthy had macaroni and cheese, at Haitch's request, so I could try some.
Macaroni and cheese is one of my continued finickinesses. I didn't like noodles or cheese as a child, so after I was grown and loved both and lived with a good cook, I figured hey, pasta, cheese, what can go wrong? I don't know, but I still didn't like it, until last night. It maybe helped that this mac & muck, as my sister (whose favorite food it was) called it, was made with mascapone cheese and studded with lobster. Maybe.
Then RDC and I had prosciutto-wrapped scallops with a shiitake-potato-fava garnish and McCarthy had halibut and Haitch a vegetarian sampler, and we all finished with a flourless chocolate cake covered in crême fraiche. How do you spell that? Whatever.
The restaurant did crumb the table and refold your napkin if you left the table, but it did not provide the far more practical service of a valet with a handcart to roll you back to your car.
Besides that I'm a freak who wakes up early when she doesn't have to and that it's the shortest day of the year, that is.
A family of magpies in the cherry tree outside my bedroom window. Five baby magpies whining mag? mag? mag? mag? mag? etc. while their parents ate and tried to encourage the babies to eat instead of begging to be fed. The babies have short tails and are scruffy but already have their adult white bibs and black hoods.
Now, them I don't mind sharing the cherries with. But yesterday I staggered into the backyard to find a squirrel sitting up on its hind tentacles in the grass beside the raspberry canes, just scooping fruit into its fiendish little mouth. I shooed it off, but it just looked at me; I stomped and yelled scat so it scurried--slowly, but it's a squirrel--first to the vegetable garden, with me quite close to it, clapping my hands and saying "Shoo!" and "Scat!" and "Git!" (so much better with an i than an e in that context) until it finally hopped the fence. Blighter.
Which reminds me that Haitch said she had considered a squirrel and nut set of cookie cutters before the moose ones but then realized that wouldn't be such a welcome thing. No, probably not, except then I could bite a whole bunch of squirrel heads off, not in the messy geeky way either.
Which also reminds me that Haitch is about to read Geek Love. Good. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets…." What a great book.
Okay, now I'm getting up. Dirt and Order of the Phoenix and yet another deceptively sunny day that will cloud over at 11:57 a.m. await.
When I emerged from the pool I thought I had a most viscous water clog in my left ear. Maybe after twenty years of breathing to the left my right ear is trained enough to shed water, but when the left gets plugged, it stays plugged. The ride home was interesting. I dashed inside for a drop of isoprophyl alcohol to break the surface tension: no dice. Huh.
Then I admired RDC's handi- and footiwork: while I was gone he had dug a ditch along the property line and stomped grapes all over the fill I had barrowed into place on Friday and Saturday morning. Besides a barrowload for the raspberry patch, there was nothing for me to do until the fill settled down so the sections could take more--nothing…for me…to do…on the house. It was very strange. So Blake and I settled on the porch swing to read Cadmus and Harmony with my head tilted to the left.
RDC was still muddy so I ran his errands inside, like to refill his water bottle and fetch scissors to snip open the silicone he was patching a gutter with. Every time I got up I noticed I was more disoriented in a way people with hearing loss must somehow accommodate. So I gave in completely to nappitude, bringing a floor pillow and the picnic blanket to the swing for more comfortable left-sided reading. Or napping.
I heard Blake greet someone, "wheet wheet!" and I thought RDC was on the steps taking off his boots. But no, I heard him from farther away, "Do you need me to sign for that?" I sat up, not quite awake yet, off-kilter. "It's what you've been waiting for," he told me.
The mailman stood at the mailbox by the door with a box. I grinned and slid it from under his arm with a grin and my thanks. And there were the scissors, fresh from silicone duty. There was no more sleeping.
I did get up, though, when the sun reached more than half the swing. I read for a spell in Vito before realizing it would go better if I weren't wearing sunglasses. I was really out of it. When RDC came in, he suggested an ickier cause of my hearing loss. The next step, warm water and hydrogen peroxide, did indeed fix me. Gross.
Blake and I then joined RDC on the patio, where he was grilling asparagus and bison bratwurst (the point of that eludes me--why disguise bison? But it was in the fridge). I took a bowl and gathered raspberries to snack on and sat reading before dinner--after chasing RDC around the backyard and swatting him with my book, which he tossed onto and then retrieved from the garage roof.
We left Harry Potter on page 178 and Blake very disappointed--two nights out in a row, three for RDC--and hopped on a bus toward downtown.
I feel a little disloyal to Old Lyme but glad too, because, not before time, I really like my city. I love being able to use public transit to a hopping downtown with a Pride Fest and at least something going on every summer weekend. The Pride Fest might have meant the bus turned around several blocks before Auraria, but it was a lovely walk, through Larimer Square with its chalk-paintinged street and over Cherry Creek.
The last time I came here--I wrote this between sets in a little notebook CLH gave me, so "came here" instead of "went there"--also the first time, in December to see Peter Gabriel, the bus dropped us at the Auraria campus and we hoofed the short distance to the Pepsi Center. There is no traffic signal nor even a pedestrian crosswalk between that last stop of a major bus route and this major destination. So we jaywalked. This time, I didn't know where in the complex the attractively named Universal Lending Pavillions at the Pepsi Center Complex would be but I figured a large tent would give itself away. It did. Will-call was obvious too, and overall I liked the Pavillions immediately because it was like the Fleet Pavillions in Boston where I saw the Cowboy Junkies with CLH. And because this place is right on the South Platte, there is a breeze. That's not so unusual for Denver in the evening, but it is for New England, so it was pleasantly reminiscent of the coast.
When we arrove, RDC wanted a beer. Despite Denver's having the highest proportion of brew pubs per capita in the country, Coors is still just up the street. So he got the only premium option, Killian's Red, which he described as Coors with red food coloring, and I got a water. Noshing being my weakness, I looked around in dismay at the foods offered. My sister would have been happy, but I need chocolate not salt. Finally, tucked away in a corner, I found an ice cream stand. Adequately supplied, we sat down just as Robert Randolph and His Family Band took the stage.
I only just learned about this band and I'm not sure if RDC has known about them for long. If I may quote William from "Almost Famous," he is incendiary. He and his 12-string steel guitar smoked. He and his band played only five songs, but they all evolved through jams. I wasn't sure of the titles, but setlists are why I brought the little notebook:
Then Susan Tedeschi came out. I've known about her only since January and I don't know all her song titles either. These might be obvious lines from the choruses:
This is ridiculous--neither the News nor the Post reviewed the concert, so I can't track down songs. In sum, good show, good guitar, glad Robert Randolph played with her, glad RDC liked her, startled to find out that her speaking voice is high and squeaky, considering how throaty and deep her singing voice is.
Nope. I have nothing more to say. I'm tapped.
Partly this is true. Partly I have poisoned myself with hydrogenated fat today so am feeling headachy and ill and down-in-de-dumps, and by god I have got to stop quoting Bloom County. At least the first part, "headachy and ill," is from September, not that Rosamund Pilcher is such an improvement.
When I'm alone in the house, I'm less tidy than when I'm not alone. Partly it's courtesy for my housemate, partly it's that the presence of the housemate keeps my sluggishness and my entropy in check.
Usually when I come home, Blake is not my first stop. Usually when I arrive, I go into the bedroom to drop bag and shoes, into the bathroom to pee, and only then into RDC's study to kiss him and take Blake and then change my clothes and make his supper and get the mail and so forth. When RDC is away, Blake is my first stop for two reasons: he's right there, by the living room window where I rolled his cage in the morning, and he's been alone all day.
Yesterday, I did go outside after I got home but only to bring out the trash and gather raspberries: only out the back, using the spare key that lives convenient to that door. This morning, I looked for my keys. Usually I lose them by throwing them on my bag instead of clipping them to it, so they get lost in a pocket sometimes. Not so. I tried to retrace yesterday's path: did I drop them on Blake's cage stand' My bag lay near the coffee table: did I drop them there to mar its finish' Did I put them on the mantel, there to be lost among baby shower and wedding invitations and anniversary cards' The most likely place was the dining table, or from there to have fallen onto a dining chair. No. The bathroom counter' The nightstand by my bed' My skirt pocket' The kitchen counter'
They have to be somewhere in the house: I got into it last night. But today I'm using the spare car key and the spare house key, and if I lose those I'm screwed. I clipped them into their zippered pocket as soon as I exited the car this morning.
Said CoolBoss when I got to work: 'But you drove' Today's Bike-to-Work day!' And so it is, but today at lunch, since I didn't do it yesterday evening, I am going out to get gravel to fill the last of the ditch. Also, since RDC is away, I have been a lazy toadstool, see letting house drift into entropy, and driven. Monday I brought him to the airport, true. Yesterday I wanted to get home early enough to spend some time with Blake before my swim, but it was 55 and I didn't swim.
CoolBoss also asked if losing keys was a pattern for us--just a few weeks ago I zoomed out on my bike at 2:00 in the afternoon because RDC had locked himself out of the car in front of Whole Foods, to rescue him as he had rescued me from bad or at least less than ideal weather. No, that was the first time he ever in his life locked himself out of the car--the keys were on the passenger seat where he dropped them before messing with his phone headset or getting the shopping bags out of the backseat. ('You two belong in Boulder,' she opined. 'Canvas shopping bags, Whole Foods, biking to work.') I used to lock myself out of Fugly early on, but since she was an '80 Omni with pull-up locks, as long as I could find a wire coathanger I was okay.
I don't, or I haven't yet, locked myself out of my house. I do often lose my keys, but only inside the house. If I lose these spares I'm screwed. SPM has a housekey and I should maybe keep one at work, but the Cassidy key I'm using is the 'valet' key--it works the ignition but not the glovebox. It lives in the house for just such occasions, since I lose my keys more often than we mistrust what valets we use.
The reason to do housework on weeknights is so it's done for the weekend. I'm not proud of spending the week rereading Harry Potter and watching television, but so it went. By the weekend I was way too much in my head and mindless crap like that wasn't keeping me out of it. Now, Sunday evening, the house is clean (even the bathroom and the birdcage), the weedcrop is weedwhacked (except for the bachelor's button, which is too pretty to be a weed), the trees and gardens are watered, a quart of cherries are in the freezer, the day's raspberries are in a bowl near to hand, the laundry's done (though just piled on the bed with its flipped, notated mattress and clean line-dried linens), groceries are bought and away, the drainage ditch is full of gravel, and if 80 pounds of birdseed are still in Cassidy, well, the baby shower was really nice.
Which is how I prefer to be. I raced (relatively speaking) home, swapped work stuff for swim stuff, pedaled slowly to the pool, swam 1.7K, came home to dinner on the patio, picked a quart of cherries and a handful of raspberries, fed me and RDC the latter and pitted and froze the former, folded and put away laundry that I took from the dryer only this morning, and here I am.
At the pool swam a man in my lane, the slower of the two medium lanes. He more thrashed than swam and he could not keep to the right. Also he was too slow for the medium lanes. A length and a half after I noticed him, he ran into me several yards (meters, whatever) from the shallow end. He stood up. I faced oncoming swimmers and told him, quite kindly I thought, that he needed to wear goggles so that he could see to keep to the right. Although he did not physically speak like a stupid person, his content was stupid: he didn't know the word for goggles (he sounded like a native Usan though), he hadn't noticed you should keep to the right, his eyes hurt but he hadn't connected that to his lack of goggles. I gestured for him to move on, out of other swimmers' way; he either didn't see or didn't comprehend. I gave up and walked to the end and that he followed. He said he wasn't used to the pool's being roped off and I told him about general swim and lap swim. I referred him to Gart Bros. for goggles and pushed off, pleased with how frustrated I hadn't been at his numskullery.
Swimming, I tried to figure out his deal. He could have been just not as bright as average, on the left side of the bell curve, without being left enough to be mentally disabled. Had he just had a shock? A concussion? Could anyone be that blasé?
Some time later when I took a water break, I heard him in the next lane over saying to another swimmer, "I was too slow for that lane and they kicked me out." I had said nothing about his speed at all. And if he thought he was too slow for the slower medium lane, why would he move into the faster medium lane instead of into the slow ones? And I didn't ask him to leave the lane.
I somewhat wanted to say, at least to the other swimmer, that I didn't kick him out, that he could swim neither straight enough for lap nor fast enough for four of the six lanes. I didn't, because she probably had noticed and I have that much self-respect. I don't have so much that I could just gloss over it, thus this.
Blake is so happy that his daddy is home. Unfortunately RDC's day began with a 7:30 conference call, remotely accessing others' computers, meaning he was stuck at his desk. He preemptively covered Blake in the bathroom, because besides Blake protesting whenever he doesn't his own way, he also is compelled to respond and compete with the whiny baby mapgies infesting the neighborhood. RDC called me when he was free again. Instead of napping or moping or breaking his heart or whatever he usually does when covered up, Blake sang and chattered, showing what a sweet and wonderful buddy he is. He kept asking, "You're a good boy buddy?"
As soon as I joined them in the living room tonight, Blake wanted me. "Oho," said RDC. "He's done with me." But between work and swim and cherries, Blake hadn't seen me all day either. He is now making his beloved nails-on-a-chalkboard sound, grooming his beak as he gets sleepy on my shoulder. The very picture of a contented cockatiel.
When we first moved here, everything was migratory. We had about as much crap as any two average English grad students and the Best Value U-Haul and I packed extremely efficiently, thus with room for nonperishable foods. In our first months in Denver, we finished off a lot of migratory pasta. I don't know how we came to have a badger in the oven (I think it might have chewed through the wires one time when we were going to feed ABW and KRW baked chicken; instead we fed them delivered pizza), but it came along too.
And so it's gone, over these past eight years, finding migratory items, with decreasing frequency. I guess we don't have a lot of use for isoprophyl alcohol, because last weekend when I took it from the cupboard I recognized the old-style Stop & Shop price sticker on the top. That it was Stop & Shop brand to begin with probably clued me into its being migratory. I commented to RDC that this was probably the last of the migratory stuff.
Saturday I polished a silver barrette I seldom wore with my hair really long: too much hair to make a ponytail with the barrette and my occasional attempts to draw the front hair back into a barrette and leave the rest loose seldom lasted. I wore it to the baby shower, since it was cool enough to wear my hair down. This morning as I brushed my teeth I noticed the little jar still on the sink instead of put away down in the laundry room, with Stop & Shop sticker on its lid.
That's a lifetime supply of silver polish, unless I acquire actually silver silverware. Or maybe it would work on the floor lamp, whose hood is getting fingerprinted. Yes, knowing that I'll always have something migratory in the house is comforting to me.
Today I did one of the stupidest things I've done deliberately since I was grown. Or at least since Friday, when RDC gave Shadowfax egg-beater stirrups (at my request). And not counting the rollerblades. RDC took the car to DIA for a long day trip, back and forth to Tucson, and I already mentioned going to the Dead tomorrow [except I accidentally deleted that, so I didn't, but we are], and really I should've mailed it Saturday but we went to Grand Lake instead.
I had to send it today, so I pedaled (unclipped) to the package store--I love saying that--with a care package for my sister under my arm. I was fine, and thank heavens, because if I had spilled it would have been my sister's fault (in our parents' eyes) as much as my 1992 car accident was, since it was her care package I was sending.
(1992 car accident: driving back from the surprise birthday party she threw for her boyfriend in Boston, half mile from home, passing (on the left) the braking, left-signaling other driver, passing on the left despite the left turn signal, because he must be turning right onto the residential street rather than left into the restaurant because who would be going to the restaurant at midnight, three hours after it closed? No one except its cleaner. Both of the 'rents gave CLH shit for that, like my carelessness was her fault.)
Care package: a child's jigsaw puzzle of a duckling, because it was there and a nice quiet game she probably can't injure herself with, except I forgot about Curious George eating the puzzle piece until just this moment. Plus she hates birds. A book of crossword puzzles with a rainbow cover, and a package of "pencil pillows" coordinatedly colorful.* A bag of individually wrapped Wint-O-Green lifesavers, because what is a stocking without them?** A package of Newman dark chocolate peppermint cups. Animal Dreams and Poisonwood Bible and Why Girls Are Weird, the last of whose first non-entry scenes is Anna washing Dale's hair because he just hurt his hand. CDs of John Denver and Barry Manilow because they will make her laugh and PJ Harvey (thanks Trish) just in case. Um. A tin of Before the Kiss mints in a tin with Klimt's The Kiss on the lid. Did I mention I just bought Nisou a shower curtain with The Kiss on it? Well I did. Then I saw the mints and thought that would be a good follow-up but somehow wound up with two tins. My sister gets the spare. A candle holder that, frankly, has been in my Goodwill box (along with that travesty of a jacket I foisted on Jessie some time ago) for a long time. A store credit to Bombay Company for the princessly sum of not quite eleven bucks that I scored when I finally brought two wine bottle necklaces, for chrissakes, back to that Land of the Laminate. (Both the candle thingie and the necklaces were Christmas presents. I am the regifter.)
I have not been to an interesting store since before I got The Call alerting me to the Need of the Care Package, so what she got was what I had in the house or could score at Rite-Aid when I picked up prescriptions, plus Pamie's book.
I could have found good swag at the Tattered Cover if I hadn't been scurrying. Between the Tiny Wooden Hand and the hair-washing, Why Girls Are Weird might be just what my sister needs. It will be interesting to see if someone who's not Among the Initiated likes it.
* and ** My sister just sliced her hand open, hence the care package. Her right hand. Crossword puzzles and individually wrapped lifesavers might not have been such hot ideas.
Moving on. So I need to get hold of the second Addams Family movie. They lose their house and have to move out, and there's a scene where Thing, the hand, trots down the sidewalk on its fingers trailing a little red wagon filled with one-handed thingies. I want to get her that stuff. I want to know what Ned Flanders sells in the Leftorium and get her that too. And then there's the "M*A*S*H" where Charles is so proud of his painstaking work enabling someone to walk again, even if he slacked on the hand a bit, not knowing that the soldier is actually--sob!--a concert pianist. So Charles finds him left-handed piano sheet music--amazing what you can find in a mobile army surgical hospital in the short window of time a soldier would have convalesced in one. Not that my sister has a piano or remembers any more than I do of our lessons with Mrs. McNamara ("Swans under the Willows, "My Favorite Things," and "Three Blind Mice," me).
I can say this because she doesn't read this (she tried it and stopped, disappointed that it wasn't all of the calibre of "Breathing Stuffed Animals): I boxed everything up in the box that her last year's birthday present came in, the Super Bubbler. She was really disappointed in me that I didn't find this as amusing as she did. I'm a grown-up: I'm not going to use that in the house on my hardwood floors and upholstery! Or outside, all that soap film to harm plants with? Plus the concept of blowing bubbles with a motor instead of with your breath is faintly heretical, isn't it? Like using a leafblower instead of a rake, a motor instead of a sail. Plus it's loud.
But, CLH notes with satisfaction, I have used it at every outdoor gathering I've had since. Which is two, last summer: a cookout with Clove and Dexy, who I knew would enjoy it and did, and Haitch's graduation party, when little kids ran through the bubbles and emptied the bottle into the large stockpot I'd put out as a water dish for the dogs. Dogs with diarrhea from drinking soap: just what I want in my backyard and what their owners wanted to take home with them. This year for my birthday CLH sent me a box of stocking-stuffer type stuff that was all just super, and one of the things was a large bottle of bubble juice. Ha.
So she'll be amused by the box I used. Hey, it's the only one I had in the house of the right size. Damn it.
So Ebay has this beautiful handmade Tiny Wooden Hand for $35, and frankly if she hasn't read either Pamie's site or book, would it be funny? Otherwise I can buy a gross of plastic backscratchers for two bucks. I exaggerate, but she might not be getting a TWH. Also I need to find the titles of appropriate sheet music.
But the box won't even get there until Friday. Perhaps by then I shall have completed a second box. I have already contracted to drive to work on Wednesday, after a late night with the Dead, and at lunch I plan to find one of the Other Targets. I've seen one, probably a mirage, not too far away. Ours is closed for expansion until October, and the line in our house is that that was the only one on the whole planet.
I am taking suggestions for subsequent care packages, though the hook and the pirate keyboard are probably the pinnacle of possibilities.
By the way, she says Kitty really likes the splint. It makes for good scratching. There's a cat for you, always looking out for your best interests. "Oh, you're injured? That cast looks like a good scratching post." I am not one to talk: RDC had to go around like Napoleon last winter because Blake found his cast deeply, deeply enticing. It moulded RDC's hand and wrist into the buddy-scoop position! What could be better?
Why the hell am I still awake?
Five cubic yards of fill, 2.5 tons, in three steps, 20-21 June, 29 June, and this evening.
When RDC came home the 30th, after a full week away, he asked why I had not moved all the dirt. I had blocked out my frustration with the project in the intervening 36 hours and forgotten why, exactly, I had stopped. "I was tired?" I guessed. Wrongo. I remembered as soon as I started again. I fucking stopped because there was no more fucking room on the north side of the house. I did not order five cubic yards, no. I voted for three. Three, I grant you, might have been inadequate, since all but one wheelbarrow-load that landed in the raspberry patch is in fact on the north side. But five has taken some trampling, and some gentle grading of the slope on the north front, and quite a bit of fill against non-tarred bricks, where it cannot stay.
When we started this project, you could see two tiers of black, that is tarred, brick on that side of the house, where bad drainage had gradually eroded the soil. Or, I should say, not before we started but after I had removed all the stone previous owners have tried to improve drainage with. Certainly dirt should cover those two layers, but no higher. I worry about the grading, whether it's sufficient to keep rain, should any fall again, from the window wells.
I should also say I don't know how dirt solves the problem. I understand about grading, about sloping the dirt primarily toward the property line but also from back to front. But dirt, even clay dirt like this, still is water-permeable. Water still drains down through the soil. It just has to go through more soil before eventually finding our foundation with its probable crack. Yea. If it had been just RDC's brilliant plan I maybe would have objected, but since it was the structural engineer's I credited it.
There's been no rain to test anything since 20 June. We'll see.
This might not be the final step. We still might need to dig a ditch.
I don't understand why they call themselves the Dead. When the remnants first toured without Jerry Garcia, only the next summer, they called themselves the Other Ones, but it might not have been everyone. I once wrote "the other one" as the return address in a letter to my mother, so I understand why, Jerry-less, they were Other. Besides, there was the song. But now, just "the Dead"?
It reminds me of that scene in 1984 when Winston and Julia have been reading Goldstein's book and they say "We are the dead" and the Thought Police reply, "You are the dead."
Anyway. I changed into my paisley tank top and sweatskirt. (Both of these are miracle garments, the latter because it hasn't given out yet and the former because it's the sort of thing that fades after a few washings but I've had it for 11 or 12 years now and the colors are still strong and I wear it all summer long.) And into my Sneetchified Bear's Choice earrings, dime-sized dancing bears punched from silver, dangling below a couple of chunks of polished quartz, Sneetchified because one has a phosporescent star on its belly. I parted my hair diagonally and braided pigtails, which worked surprisingly well on a first attempt.
(Apparently a Dead show is like the opera, where sartorial matters are so vital.)
SPM came over and the three of us zoomed off to Red Rocks, there to meet Alias, whom I have decided to call Begonia. Alias is male, but despite its ending in -a, Begonia is appropriate for another reason than just the song "Scarlet Begonias." A parking lot attendant waved us into place, and what a place: they weren't placing cars immediately next to campers, so we had a car-spot in between to set up coolers and chairs for socializing with the camperfolk, whose vehicle shaded this idyll. We ate and drank and shoved the remaining beers into RDC's and SPM's CamelBaks to sustain us (well, them) in line, which we joined soon enough (Red Rocks is all unassigned seating).
Red Rocks. Hot and dusty, but the shade, once you're in some, by grace of either a camper or the sun's gradually inching behind the monoliths, counts. Plus the view doesn't suck. Swallows and swifts and bats and the city steamrollered flat on the plains below twinkling first in the heat by day and later by artifical light.
My escorts, or whatever you would call it, I guess I was theirs as the built-in designated driver, finished their beers and a bottle of Maker's Mark in line, and criminy, may I never get SPM mad at me. Well likkered up, he told the most hysterically scathing stories. But we're English grad students, or nearly, so occasionally a story would require the right phrase from Yeats' "Second Coming." It was very amusing. Also, since we found out too late that no water containers without a factory seal would be permitted, I got a little shower with the remnants of the drinking water. Damn hot. It was, after all, a lap swim night.
Also, how the scene has changed. I say this so authoritatively, having attended a total of six shows between 1993 and 1995, plus two Jerry concerts. But as we stood in line, we spoke of children, of how brilliant one is and how another just wants blocks and another is such pals with his dad, of houses and maintenance and real estate, of work (managerial, not sustenance) and so forth. I was reminded of when Ruth Anne borrowed Chris-in-the-Morning's motorcycle and fell in with some Hell's Angels-looking bikers, one of whom wore a patch over his eye, and how their conversation bikerishly accepted this 80-year-old woman into its midsts and evolved from "Easy Rider" to having to get home to a child's school recital and how relieved the patched one would be when the stye in his eye cleared up.
So, the show. I was worried about Joan Osbourne. In the summer of 1998, I went to Lilith Fair with Haitch and KMJ, Haitch for Sarah Mclachlan and Natalie Merchant and I for them but less so and primarily the Cowboy Junkies, who were also KMJ's reason. The Junkies' abysmal sound did not further my campaign to convert Haitch, I'm sorry to say. I am also sorry to say that during Joan Osbourne, during "What If God [were] Watching/One of (whichever it is) Us?" I was compelled to make a munchie run. I loathe that song, not only for grammatical reasons.
Begonia had seen them Monday as well, and said they sucked. "Baby Blue" is not an up song for third in the first set. They played Deal, Sugar Magnolia, and Box of Rain, the first one of RDC's absolute favorites besides "The Wheel" and the latter two mine or ours and Sugar Magnolia being one of the two songs RDC is required by marriage articles to dance with me during (the other is the Junkies' "Anniversary Song"). I am willing to believe bad renditions are worse than none. Traditionally their sucking one night should mean a much better show the next night. I wondered, and I wondered more when I saw setlists in front of everyone's microphone and more in front of Osbourne's, or perhaps they were lyrics.
They came out and took their places. I asked who was playing keyboards, and SPM suggested, "Linus?" I thought he was making a PigPen joke--Pigpen died, as do all their keyboardists, and now they're killing off the next Peanut--but he was making a Schroeder joke. Either way was okay. They began to play, and the crowd whooped as it recognized "Friend of the Devil." But then Bobby began to sing, and I buried my face in RDC's Phil Lesh & Friends t-shirt (only one of the four of us wore tie-dye, heretical). So, so, so wrong. Lyle Lovett can sing "Friend of the Devil." Bobby should not.
Throughout the show, Bobby sang less and Joan Osbourne sang more, and that was really good. Not as good as Susan Tedeschi (I would warrant), who could even play guitar and occupy herself thus instead of by twitching her skirt around, which was Osbourne's primary means of entertainment. But good, better than Bobby. Joan was Different But Okay where Bobby Sounded Wrong. I stopped calling Osbourne Donna, anyway. She has a much better voice than Donna Godchaux.
-Jam
-Friend of the Devil
-Mississippi Half-Step ~~>
-New Speedway Boogie (this is when Joan's voice began to assert itself more)
-Night of a Thousand Stars (a Phil Lesh & Friends song we heard last summer)
-Looks Like Rain (sung by Bobby, and a ridiculous choice showing the danger of setlists because there wasn't a damn cloud in the sky. Also Bobby was trying to look like Jerry, having grown a beard and mustache and even a little potbelly. Mostly he looked like Charlton Heston as Taylor in "Planet of the Apes." Scarily enough, they bear a strong mutual resemblance. This was RDC's "What If God Whatever" song and he vamoosed in search of drink.)
-Deep Elum Blues
-Good Morning Little Schoolgirl
-Stagger Lee
-Mr. Charlie
second set:
-Playing in the Van
-Shakedown Street
-Built to Last (another of RDC's unfavorites. He made a beer run.)
-Truckin'
-Reuben and Cherise, a Jerry Garcia Band song (sung by Joan)
-Take It Home by Midnight (?), sung by Mickey. No: Baba Jingo
-Drums. This is a perennial favorite of mine, and this was a great one. I'm not sure that Bill is as cutting edge as Mickey, but he was game. They had drums like the Kodo Drummers', and it was amazing.
-Space, very shortly, and I was glad I peed during the break instead of waiting for Space, as was my habit. Space~~>Happy Birthday to You (with no singing), because it was Joan's birthday. Some kids brought her out a cake and there were flowers.
-Comes a Time (another JGB sung by Joan)
-Uncle John's Band, which made me very happy
~~>Playing in the Band
-Lovelight
encore:
-Brokedown Palace, which made RDC very happy since it wasn't "U.S. Blues."
And then we went home. Home by 1, perversely awake before 6 with a second-hand smoke hangover. I am such a grown-up for being so tired.
I still do not have an emotional connection to this band. Six shows, two Jerry shows, one death, two Furthur Festivals, five years and then Phil Lesh & Friends (with Ratdog, bleah), another year and everybody, but no. I was happy for RDC to have a good show, it was fun to hang out with Begonia and SPM and RDC, but I didn't tear up, as I did when Peter Gabriel began "Here Comes the Flood" or shout with perfect glee, as when he started "Solsbury Hill." I am there for the music, not as a tagger-on wife or lone invasive chick, so I didn't feel like I didn't belong, anyway.
Friday we bought two objets d'art from the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, a photographic print for over the mantel and a covered bowl now on Charlie Walnuts the bookcase.
Saturday we went to Grand Lake and kind of brought Blake. He likes going for rides in the car and we wanted to bring him for a ride that didn't end at camp. He most certainly noticed his surroundings, though if he could comprehend any of the landscape I would not guess. We brought his towels to screen him from scary things like dogs and hot things like sun, but forgot about wind. We used a beach towel as a wind screen and so his crest calmed down, no longer blown to one side by the wind.
Sunday he was glad to stay at home though. As were we, except for my swim and ice-cream date.
Monday RDC spent a long day in Tucson and I--oh yes, the accidentally struck entry--finished the dirt, picked and pitted and froze cherries, and ate an exceptionally unhealthy dinner, even for me, comprising toast with elderberry jam and, instead of or, an apple sliced with the remains of the cheese, species forgotten, I had bought to go with the devoured Granny Smiths. Then the cheese was gone but the apple wasn't, so I added some slices of romano, because why not? And it was good. And a bowl of cherries. And then a bowl-bottom of chocolate chips, which were enough caffeine to keep me up until RDC got home after midnight reading Devil's Larder.
So I started Tuesday tired, which wasn't a good plan.
I recently said to..someone, I forget who, that RDC was required to do whatever it was by marriage articles. The person was surprised and I pointed out that I was kidding.
Mostly.
By marriage articles, which is a fiction in my head, RDC is required to:
- Fasten my necklace or bracelet and then kiss the back of my neck or my wrist
- Dance with me during "Sugar Magnolia" and "Anniversary Song"
- Accept that the car will always have a platypus in it
- Pluck the (so far, solitary) hair that sprouts from my (so far, not yet a) wattle.
I think that's all. So far. I can't think of what I'm required to do. I've become a Deadhead, mostly and by extension. I've learned to like lots of even those Woody Allen movies with lots of Woody Allen in them instead of just "Radio Days" (from which he is mostly absent), some Ernest Hemingway especially For Whom the Bell Tolls, and, heaven help me, I'm beginning to give on the Bob Dylan issue. I should ask him.
Well, it's been almost eleven years. Even if I can't name my obligations I must be fulfilling them.
Recently UberBoss marked his 15-year annniversary at Dot Org and wanted to take my department out to celebrate. A gracious idea, but hardly fitting for him to treat us. Luckily CoolBoss just earned an honorarium at a speaking engagement and that was enough--for the twelve of us, since we have interns this summer for the first time ('nother story, that).
So we went to Indigo, which used to be Papillon. When it was Papillon RDC and I went once, in 1999 maybe or 2000. We weren't impressed, and you really are supposed to be impressed. Is it the same chef? I forget. Anyway. I had a tarragon chicken salad sandwich with dried cherries and sprouts and maybe walnuts? which was fine, not spectacular. The really interesting thing was the appetizers we shared as a table: popcorn with wasabi peas, almonds? I think I'm transposing my nuts, doesn't that sound painful? and something else. Also--separately--calamari.
It was a yummy meal and a fun one. I sat across from Lou, who swapped travel stories with Intern #1 on my right.
Part of the nother story that is the interns was the question, "How are we going to tell them apart?" (not mine). I think, because he's often the funniest one, it might have been UberBoss who said, in honor of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Intern 1, Intern 2, Intern 3. They are, in fact, quite easy to differentiate. Which is another part of the intern story.
Lou is so cool. She left the States in 1984 with a thousand dollars and came back in 1987. "And you'd spent it all?" UberBoss asked, mock incredulously. Today's stories were how she got from China to Tibet to Nepal, there finally to Kathmandu, with neither language nor money nor passport, the latter two of which had just been stolen. In Kathmandu at least English was often provided.
So the point of the subject line is that RDC called in the midafternoon suggesting coquillages et pommes frites for dinner, at Le Central, one of our old favorites. I was dubious but thought that a swim might restore my appetite.
It didn't really, but that's why I had the second, third, and fourth stomachs installed.
Never eating again, that is, until breakfast Friday morning, over which I wrote the above.
Don't mind me, OMFB. This is merely the only way I'll be able to find the list again.
AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DE FL GA HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WY.
That was easy. That I can do without thinking. I can't do it in statehood order. I am pretty sure Connecticut wasn't third, but I often think it was since it is third smallest and Delaware is first and smaller. Statehood order, of the top of my head: DE, PA, the other 11 not including ME and VT (showing shocking disloyalty to New England), the general clean-up of the east and southeast-eastern midwest, KS in 1861 and WV sometime during the Civil War, CO in 1876 (the Bicentennial State, yo), and then the rest of them, ending with NM AZ AK and HI.
More to the point,
Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, Missouri, Arkansas,Michigan, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada, Nebraska, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii.
031223: What do diamonds have to do with Arkansas?
Tex came over to my cube asking what I guessed would be on Alabama's. I had no idea whatsoever, and it's easy for me to wax disparaging about the South. So I said whatever, couldn't be anything good. It's Helen Keller, and he was tickled that I had shown my true colors. But please. No one thinks, "Gosh, you know, Helen Keller wouldn't have been such a brave, determined voice for the blind and the deaf and the otherwise disabled, wouldn't have graduated from Radcliffe summa cum laude (or magna? I forget), wouldn't've traveled the country speaking out and meeting Great War veterans, if she had been from any other state than Alabama."
Connecticut's design is by far the best, of course. The rounded treetop fits the coin well, of course, but it's a tree! There is nothing better than a tree! Plus there's a stone wall, very appropriate, that balances the caption. All of the designs so far have been either about the Revolution, if they could manage it, or used icons of the state. Pennsylvania's is boring, but at least it is the Keystone State. Ditto Georgia--a peach? New Hampshire's is iconic, Virginia's is pretty if a bit of a stretch, since it wouldn't be Jamestown's bicentennial for another seven years after first minting, I know North Carolina and Ohio nearly came to blows about which would claim flight (holy shit, they're nitpicking on Capitol Hill about which state can claim it), Vermont's is pretty lame but at least people do associate syrup with the state in a way they don't associate Helen Keller with Alabama. Etc.
Anyway. I'm comfortable with having been mean about Alabama, but I love Helen Keller! I wasn't being mean about her! Really!
"Buddy" is an adjectival noun sometimes. There are buddy toenails, buddy clippers (for the toenails), buddy fluff (in drifts on the floor, on our shoulders, or stuck to his beak), buddy eyelashes, sweet buddy basil breath, buddy greens, buddy dishes, two buddy windowsills, the buddy bedtime, buddy poopers (an essential accessory, some bit of junk mail for the buddy poop), the buddy foot (lifted and waved in a request to be picked up), buddy yawns, the buddy box and the variety of buddy caves, buddy flaps, buddy sneezes, buddy chow, the buddy spray bottle (for showers), and of course the buddy beast himself.
Last night after I finally got home from work, the pool, and Le Central, Blake had a thorough head petting and then some buddy fun with a 5280 magazine. It might be almost as good as the Utne Reader for whatever the magazine equivalent of a fabric's "hand" is: a good snap in the beak from good substantial paper, and also, a lenient mommy expecting to vacuum the next day who doesn't prevent the confetti production.
I am lying on the couch (yes it's a gorgeous day out, your point?) reading and napping. Blake is on my naked left shoulder (most of me is in the navy satin pyjamas my MIL gave me for Christmas). He's mostly napping too, and I roused when I felt him stir. I reached for him and held him out over the pooper. He did his prepoop stretches, left wing and leg, right wing and leg, both wings up over the back, and pooped. I sleepily moved my right arm back toward my left shoulder, but before he was close enough to hop back, I stopped my arm and inspected my shoulder more closely.
I know this means I have enough fat to make this possible, but if so I never want to be thin: I have a perfect little buddy footprint in my shoulder. One, because he was napping, damn it. The other was tucked warmly into his belly feathers. A buddy footprint. Than which nothing is cuter. There's not much plantar surface on a buddy foot. But there's some, I know, because it's imprinted in my skin, and a little halfmoon where some weight must have rested on the cuff on his bent leg.
Should I have the vet remove his cuff? Not that anyone has ever harassed me for having a possibly stolen-from-the-wild bird but I like it for proof that no, he wasn't, he was born into prison thank you.
A little buddy footprint, there on my shoulder.
Or something. Tendonitis is much more likely than carpal tunnel syndrome, which is just so trendy anyway. I mention this only to give context about why anyone took my blood pressure Wednesday afternoon.
I had a smoke hangover, I drove because I was damn tired, I was going to go to Another Target at lunch but I went to the doctor instead [see medical care, not seeking of, because no transportation to and fro], and did I mention it was damn hot and I was damn tired?
Nevertheless, my blood pressure, at 1:15 p.m., was 88/54. Could the tech possibly have done that right? I've been falling over after standing up too fast for years now, but that's nearly dead, isn't it?
Then she took my pulse. I doubt its accuracy because she held her finger to my wrist for maybe 15 seconds but I think 10 really. Sixty. 60. Again, nearly dead.
As we stood in line, SPM told stories. He talked about the daughter of some friends, who is three with the vocabulary of a five-year-old, and how she will very clearly state what she wants. She has the entire Baby Genius series, and SPM listed them, "Baby Einstein, Baby Mozart, Baby Beethoven, Baby John Holmes."
I knew he was making a joke but I didn't know its nature.
This is even funnier, considering that last winter he and his wife mentioned the porn catalog I had left for them back in September when they watered our plants while we were in Grand Teton. I was flummoxed as to what they could possibly mean and realized, some hours later, that the only catalog I would possibly have had that I would have assumed to be of interest to them was The Common Reader. The raciest it gets is Anaïs Nin and Colette.
So Baby Porn Star was pretty funny.
The other thing I learned is the word "ganja." I am certain I had never heard it before, and I would love to know its etymology. Marijganja? I don't know.
Still not shopPING. I don't think going to Ross counts as shopPING unless you wind up with a ballgown for fifteen bucks.
I found a suit for which I need shoes. I have brown leather sandals for summer and black leather clogs for winter. The latter work--as far as I'm concerned--with my winter suits, olive green, houndstooth, eggplant, chocolate. The former do not work with summer suits. I also have an icey lavender-grey suit that I need shoes for. Shoes bore me so utterly. I can tell mine are wrong but I have no idea what might be right or where to find such Right things.
The suit is summer weight, skirt above the knee, jacket either short-sleeved or unsleeved, and the color--the color is shell pink. It is tragic, but that's a good color on my pasty skin, summer or winter.
I also found a knee-length "natural" linen skirt and a white linen shell with some eyelet. The shell is stunningly similiar to the black shell with white embroidery I bought in May. Same label. Do you call it eyelet? Perforated. Different pattern any.
The real score is A Perfect Skirt. Pale buff, sueded rayon, nice and substantial, ankle-length, and it fits perfectly slightly below the waist and at the hip and, though not a miracle worker, it makes my butt look okay, like an attractive if oversized thing rather than an object that moves at a different speed than the rest of my body and has a distinct gravitational field.
I told Haitch and my sister I hadn't clothes-shopped since Dot Org left downtown. This is not true: I bought a sweater in November and a sweater and skirt in the later winter and some other clothes in May. Somehow none of this counts: the sweater was a specific errand, the May excursion was for a specific thing too even if it yielded more than the long black skirt, and the winter stuff was online. It's not that it doesn't count as much as it does that I'm spoiled.
I had Blake on the porch while I watered tonight (I watered the south xeriscape for the second time this year), and back on the porch after that and tidying up inside. We read on the porch swing until dusk and after I opened the house to the cooling evening, we retreated here to the basement. He puttered about in his tray and his box, finally eating his dinner, chewing on the piping on my pyjamas, clawing his way up to my lapel for head petting.
When he jumped to the arm of the couch and peered onto the table beside, I knew what he was after. I lifted my big cup for him to drink from. Hey, I used to share with my dog, and birds don't have spit. He looked at it suspiciously and I knew why: ice cubes. He doesn't like ice any more than he likes snow, which he has seen only by the handful brought in from outside for his inspection (or just to frighten him). I poured some water into my empty juice glass, but even without ice on its surface the water was cold.
I could see him debating in his tiny brain which was worse, cold or thirst. Thirst won. He dipped the tip of his upper mandible--which has blood and nerves to its tip--into the cold, then worked it off with his tongue or let it drip into his lower jaw.
I'm keeping water in the juice glass to warm up, sans ice.
Jesus GOD Usans are single-minded.
I'm watching ABC World News. It's Bastille Day, maybe that's why ABC noticed the Tour de France at all. The newscaster said, "Lance Armstrong had a harrowing day in the Tour de France today. He had to swerve out of the road because his closest competitor crashed right in front of him!"
The competitor, who apparently has no name or country, might be out of the damn race with road rash at the least, but poor Lance! he had to swerve!
I love cycling, don't get me wrong. I know next to nothing about it other than that male cyclists shave their yummy, yummy, yummy, and did I mention lickable, legs. Is there something else to know?
Anyway. Years ago I pointed this out to CLH: "A plane crashed in India today with 400 aboard. Three Usans were killed." Three hundred ninety-seven other people don't matter at all, apparently. Some time later CLH found and sent me a cartoon illustrating just this concept, with a penguin newscaster showing some sort of catastrophe among polar bears saying, "Luckily, no penguins were killed."
She named her cat Kitty, which is unusually lacking in imagination for her, but of course Kitty has multiple nicknames such that the actual name is only for show (cf. Blake, Buddy).
I love my sister because she has got bored with calling Kitty "Lambchop" and has moved on to "Choppage of Lamb."
It was 94 today. Do I remember accurately from childhood that it was seldom in the 90s in Connecticut, that humidity not heat made summer hellish? Or did it often get that hot there? Anyway, 94 here is a reasonable temperature as long as you do sensible things like loll about in the shade of a large tree with a pitcher of ice water and a book or eighteen months of a new journal to read. It is not so good to drive in, though if your father's birthday is Friday and you have not yet motivated to acknowledge it by post that's a good reason to get in the damn car and go shopping.
It is now 8:30. It's still over 80, but in a sundress I had no idea still fit (though I doubt it suits me as well now as it did in 1989 when I bought it), sitting on the porch with Blake in his cage on the swing beside me, I am perfectly comfortable.
It is, in fact, a beautiful evening. The neighbor with the golden retriever and the basset hound (my new snow-measuring unit, you remember) strolled by and I greeted her (yes, I know her name in addition to her dogs'). A new father (well, new to human fatherhood, he's had Sam the lab since we moved) has gone by too. I congratulated him--we passed their house on the way back from the Arts Festival just as his mother-in-law arrived with flowers, is how I knew the baby had been born--and he invited me to drop by and meet the baby, but that's got to wait for seven weeks at least: new babies unnerve me and they're not cute enough to bother about. The kids in the rented house passed as well, with their shrunken golden retriever. I don't know their names, the kids' or the dog's. The dog looks like its legs were shot off in the war and its paws sewn onto several inches up, it's adorable. There was also a three-year-old on a trike, but I have my priorities.
Long summer twilights on the porch swing.
But if my other neighbors water their new sod again, well after the permitted period of daily-for-two-weeks-after-planting, I will have to spank them.
Later. Here returneth the golden retriever and the basset hound and their human, in their typical end-of-walk pattern: the retriever trotting out ahead, bounce bounce bounce, the hound trailing well behind, lope lope lope.
It's dark now. Actually it's not, but it's dark enough that Blake is scared. In we go.
Five hours ago when I got home Blake begged for Vito. He loves the reading chair, which is unfortunate since his favorite activity on said chair is foot-wanking, which is quite tiresome as well as ticklish. Also there was important television-watching for me to accomplish, hence the ABC News story above, and not to forget the "Friends" reruns I might watch even if RDC were home if the reruns were worth his whining and undisguised disgust. (But this week? is the pilot. After that I might be done. I hope.)
At 7:30 when I emerged from the basement hoping the earth's surface had cooled, I brought Blake outside. This he certainly preferred to the basement (he's chewed away almost half of his--formerly my--hatbox, so he doesn't have a Fortress of Solitude so much as a Half-Shell in which you might find the Boston Pops), but it still wasn't Parental Contact.
Closer to 9:00, it was darkening and so we came into the light, child. (Fact: I have never seen all of, or even most of, "Poltergeist.") Only then did I settle into Vito. I myself prefer Vito toward the end of Blake's day, when he's more into snuggling than wanking. And so, indeed, he just spent the last hour plus having his head pet and snuggling into my neck. Only when I disturbed him by moving my left arm to type instead of read did he realize, whoa, bedtime, and scrabble across to my right shoulder, the one closer to his cage. It is, after all, 10:19, and a cockatiel needs his beauty rest.
So does his mother, but first I had to say, blissful hour of gently stroking a cockatiel with my chin! No wonder my blood pressure is nearly negative: buddy-cuddling. I should rent him out to the hypertensive.
10:58. The sun set more than two hours ago. I should emphasize that I have listened to my swamp cooler on the outside, and it's no louder than a box fan, before I say I loathe the neighbors. If they--and not to be too outlandish here--say, opened a window once in a way, they wouldn't need a fucking air conditioner, let alone one that rattles on the 2x4s propping it up. But they finally turned it off.
(It only ran for an hour that I'm aware of. But damn, that thing is ten times louder than the sun.)
I was going to say "rabbit pellets" but I've read Watership Down too many times for that to have any other connotation but one that's a little stronger than I actually feel.
Athena mentioned the other day that she has Go Lean Kashi for breakfast, so--since this would probably give me the same fitness results, you know, even though I'm not also exercising quite so much--I decided to look it up. How different could it be, I wondered, than the kashi I've been eating since I joined the gym in January and looked for a cereal with less sugar than Cranberry Crunch?
It has more calories per smaller serving size and more sodium. It also has lots more protein and fiber. That I knew by reading the panel. Today I poured some into a bowl and discovered it also has rabbit chow in it. Those half-inch cylinders of solidified bran. Yeah.
I halved it with regular kashi, and it's not that bad. It doesn't look much worse than the ribbed lozenges of RDC's cereal that I love to watch Blake dismember. (I say I've seen a lion eat a gazelle with more surgical precision than he shows eating a wedge of orange. When he's gnawed a hole through a little pillow of cereal such that the ribbing really looks like, well, ribs, I get to think that again.)
Verdict: tastes better than rabbit chow.
I haven't seen either for a long time. I remember watching "Return of the Jedi" with SSP, so in 1990 or 1991, and already the 1983 Rancor looked as cheesy as that version of "Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde" when Jeckyll falls behind a sofa and Hyde rises.
Anyway, last night ranting about the neighbors' air-conditioner I couldn't remember the Emperor's line about the hatred being strong in Luke and that being a reason he would join the Dark Side. Then one of my own lines occurred to me "Hate the [Someone]" and I knew it was a photo caption but I couldn't remember from what.
Tonight, again at 9:00 sharp, they (grr) turned on the hell machine. With my windows open, I can take advantage of their watering, because their sprinklers act as evaporative coolers and the chilled air zips into my house, thankyouverymuch. Again, the "Hate the [Who?!]" line occurred to me, this time with its context. That's what I need: 24 hours and the same circumstances to remember something.
(A million years ago, driving to a movie probably at Trinity with ABW and KRW and RDC, somehow none of us could remember a particular Yes song for a particular reason. We were just passing the Mansfield Depot on Route 44 at this point in our conversation. Time passed. Something like weeks or months later, passing that exact same point with the exact same people (probably going to our next movie), the answer--the lyric, the meaning, the memory, whatever--surfaced and I blurted it.)
"Hate the waiter!" came up as a "Say 'cheese!'" substitute when my sister and I were in a photo booth. Division 16? that former firehouse and now former restaurant on Boylston, near Mass Ave, near the Cheri, and stop me before I reminisce further, had a photo booth. I may never have been in one of those coin-fed, four-photographs-to-a-strip booths. We had just had miserable service, either at Division or wherever we had fled from. So just as the warning light flashed I cried "Hate the waiter!" and we growled and made fangs at the camera.
Hold on a sec. Excuse me, Blake (he is tucked on my lap).
Got it. First picture: I'm trying not to laugh, so my face is about to burst, she's cracking up, hand demurely over her mouth; second, we both look scared; the third is Hate the Waiter. I think I allowed her the first picture of the four for herself. When was this picture taken? My hair is long enough to pull back but she hasn't started growing hers yet. I'm behind her and can't tell what I'm wearing or even my earrings, which might not be helpful anyway considering how long I wear my clothes. Hmm. Acne inflaming my forehead: 1991-92 school year. Grad school, feh. No pressure.
Please for next time remember not to open old photograph albums when RDC is away. At the least I was reminded that today, today, is NAV's eighth birthday, and I don't have the Vs' email address! And also reminded that I need some sort of wallet-size photo pages for an album for all those pictures of newborns I get. (Can I tell any of them apart? Could I even if everyone didn't use the same pink and blue rainbow hospital background? I could not). I found a 5x7 of my father and his sister my namesake and wedding pictures that I haven't put into an album yet even though the marriages have long since dissolved and really, there must be a drug for this. Or a disabled parking permit: hello, I'm crippled by nostalgia.
Enough. To bed to bed to bed. To sleep, perchance to dream. Maybe instead of "Shakespeare in Love," my usual RDC-is-away movie to watch in bed I'll watch "Richard III." Since, just for closure's sake, I don't have any of the Star Wars movies.
But that reminds me, the Boulder Shakespeare dealie is putting on Cymbeline this summer. Don't let me get superstitious about days on which that play is staged.
Yesterday morning I filled the birdfeeder and -bath. Yesterday afternoon I glanced out the window and saw that the feeder was still nearly full. Then I saw that the anti-squirrel part was down.
This feeder has been great in the months I've had it. An inner tube holds seeds, and an outer tube on a spring has strategically placed fig leaves. If a squirrel gets on the feeder, its weight is enough to pull the outer tube down, covering the holes; when the squirrel leaves the spring draws that tube up again. I haven't often seen a squirrel on it--they learn fast--but the few times have been great: once they negotiate the thin hook from the branch and the thinner loop of wire from feeder to hook, there they are on a closed feeder! Whee! They scrabble around with the seeds not half an inch under their tentacles but still ungettable-attable!
Welcome to my small world, in which that passes for entertainment.
I could not figure out in a quick inspection what had gone awry. Before dissecting the birdfeeder I am going to have to scrub it. I don't mind filling it and then washing my hands, but prolonged manipulation through its filthiness is more than my fastidiousness can take. I stood the feeder on the patio to Deal With Later and proceeded with my evening (which went City of Ember and then Oscar and Lucinda on the bus and then "Pirates of the Caribbean" and then Peter Carey on the bus again and then City of Ember until I finished it just before midnight).
This morning I glanced out the window to a herd of sparrows and finches on the nectarine branch, on the windowsills, forlorning looking to that empty bit of air below the hook. I had already thought what a commotion there must have been yesterday as they perched on the feeder only then to realize they had no access. They are not parrots, these birds. They are like the aliens in "Toy Story," as I've said. Not overly bright but admirably single-minded.
What the hell. I fetched the old feeder from the garage, filled and hung it.
Ahoy there, "Pirates of the Caribbean"! I mostly thought you were great and could ignore your illogicalnesses! After all, I make up words like "illogicalness," so I'll overlook that two men could not walk along the seabed carrying a boat upsidedown over their heads for an air supply. But especially in the late eighteenth century, no one would say "hung by the neck until dead." Hanged, damn it!
The old feeder must be exactly what the squirrel engineers who must have plotted the new feeder's demise had in mind. I can just imagine the committee meetings over the last several months, the deliberately accelerated evolution of an opposable thumb, the forging of a small pair of snips for the spring.
Yesterday Shiny Happy New Coworker and I stood by the printer waiting for our jobs. She said, "You have the best clothes."
I was flabbergasted, oh yes I was. Not so much that I couldn't thank her, but pretty much. I was wearing something new, at least.
When do two garments become a suit? This is a skirt and a shell (note: I hate the word "top" for "shirt") that together cannot be a suit because the upper half is not buttoned, is neither jacket nor vest, is sleeveless. Of course I do not want it to be an "outfit" but the two pieces are clearly not "coordinates" (oo, more concepts to loathe!).
Tuesday I told CoolBoss about my Sunday shopping spree. Wednesday I wore the new pink--well, I'll call it a suit--and told her this was one of my new things. She said oh! with some relief, because when I told her "pink," she thought--she groped for a term--I supplied "'Legally Blonde' pink"?--and yes, that's what she thought. Okay, pale pink is bad enough, concept-wise, but aesthetically it's a good choice for my pasty skin. Barbie pink is beyond the pale (oh, I slay me).
Then when a few minutes later I reported this compliment to her, let's just say that, after six years (despite this period's leaving her with the impression I might wear Barbie pink), she was familiar enough with my wardrobe to understand that while this was a very nice compliment, it was a little odd.
Of course, Shiny Happy New Coworker has only been around since spring. Let her experience my winter wardrobe--black with a side of grey--and repeat that comment.
Still, it was nice.
When I told the story to my sister last night, I was a little more dramatic (moi?). "She must be on crack," I said, and my sister, ever so much less diplomatic than CoolBoss, agreed.
But I had another story to tell my sister! When I scurried out for the bus last night, my hair escaped my leather barrette (which, hooray! I can wear again--my braid had got too long to fold into it). I stood there, on Denver's most notorious street, twisting my hair up. I heard a noise behind me and turned to see a cyclist stopped on the sidewalk. Standing in front of the bench, I was blocking the way. I apologized and stepped aside. "Oh no honey I was enjoying it! I just want to stay here till the show's over." By this time I had switched on my Ignore function and hoped fervently for the bus and calculated the distance between me and the nearest open door. He moved on, not before saying, "If your boyfriend don't know you sexy with your hair up, he crazy."
So here we have figurative and actual crackheads with the compliments.
In "Shakespeare in Love," Geoffrey Rush as Philip Henslowe always wants to know when in Romeo and Juliet the pirate king will appear.
He starred as le Marquis de Sade in "Quills," which also featured Kate Winslett.
Kate Winslett starred in "Titanic." In this movie, which had a sinking boat, she yelled "Jack!" a lot.
Yesterday at the library I picked up the copy of City of Ember that I had had the library find for me. I mourn my absence from the central branch and its stacks of stacks and decided to Browse and find a book the old-fashioned way. Oscar and Lucinda occurred to me, and lo, it was there, in an edition old enough, hooray, not to have a movie cover. I read City until it was time to catch a bus (to go see "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl") and then on the bus started Oscar, which I had brought because it was small enough to fit into my bag.
Oscar and Lucinda was made into a movie, some or all of which I watched without knowing about the book. Whatever parts of it I didn't watch I didn't because I hate Ralph Fiennes, both his acting and his face. Whatever parts I did watch, I did because of Cate Blanchett, whom I adore.
Joseph Fiennes as Shakespeare omits the pirate king entirely from Romeo and Juliet. In "Shakespeare in Love," he does not sleep with Elizabeth Regina; in "Elizabeth," with Cate Blanchett in the title role, he does.
So Geoffrey Rush had to make an entirely new movie in which he could play a pirate king! So he could slit more throats, as he did in "Elizabeth"!
This movie's heroine, though not much this side of daft, at least didn't yell "Jack" too much, though there was a scene where she could not save her Will (see, Shakespeare again) from the collapsed hold of a ship, just like in "Titanic."
And so is proven the interconnectedness of all things. The end.
My mother-in-law's friend, the one whose cancer inspired me to cut my hair, came last night to the end of her struggle. She was 47.
No rain had fallen for the four weeks between 90 minutes after we took delivery of five cubic yards of fill and two days ago. Friday evening the thunderheads delivered their goods here instead of east of here, and we had a deluge.
Temporary no-parking signs close off one bit of our street for construction. We watched two float past on the torrent, spinning, lifted clear despite their manhole cover-sized bases.
The catmint lay under the brunt, flattening their ears back in distaste. My potted cherry tomato plant got drowned--I didn't realize how poorly I had provided for its drainage. The pears are noticeably bigger today; the last of the overripe cherries were beaten from their pips, and I had a nightmare about getting lost in the weeds of the backyard.
And the basement stayed dry as a bone.
Home. Bounce Shadowfax down to basement. Throw shoes and gloves and helmet into crate on landing. Peel clothing out of pannier and throw pannier on crate. Rescue Blake. Strip off bike clothing. Turn on swamp coooler. Shower. Make buddy chow. Collapse into Vito.
Damn it's hot.
Blake preened on my knee for a little but of course went for my foot when I stretched my leg out. I wondered briefly why he prefers my left foot to my right, but it's probably because I keep the right leg folded much more often. I wouldn't let him make with the friendly-like with my foot but threw him back onto his cage, where he is now whining. He is my child and it would be incest but mostly he tickles.
Trish said someone hit her site looking for a particular phrase she'd heard me utter. I searched myself and yep, there she is at the top of the list. I also read actual cockatiel sites, most of which said "It's normal, they have no shame, don't encourage it and don't punish it and yes, they do probably consider your face and your hands or feet to be separate entities." One cockatiel-advice site featured--let me guess, a conservative fundamentalist dumpy inorgasmic female--asking how to get her cockatiel to stop "because that's just NASTY."
I really hate people sometimes.
"Florp" as a title was supposed to be all about my adventures in Vito whence I am not moving for the rest of the evening. It shall not be a euphemism for cockatiel self-abuse--oh, the irony--because said activity doesn't require one.
It's still hot. I still haven't moved. I should probably read Oscar and Lucinda instead of blathering though.
Shyeah. 5280 and Westword, approximately, both said this place had the best burgers in Denver (apparently never having been to the Cherry Cricket). We went, nearly going to a new? or at least previously unobserved, Frenchie bistro or maybe Tamayo. Ted's patio faced east, so we stuck to the original plan. We were seated and handed menus and thereafter left to fend for ourselves. Eventually a waiter showed up and desultorily took our orders after reluctantly omitting his routine about bison's nutritional information. We live in Denver, we're aware.
Parenthetically, in Grand Teton last September way up in Cascade Canyon as we stopped to eat our lunch (which was not bison), somehow a passing hiker asked if we happened to know where he could buy bison meat. He was in Grand Teton and Grand Teton is in Wyoming: the only meat they don't sell there is human. I ducked my head, not to be sarcastic at him; RDC told him he could probably find it at any grocery store in Jackson or certainly the higher-end ones. The man asked how he, RDC, could be sure, since, tragically, we had neglected to conduct a thorough survey of foodstuffs available in the area. Because this is the west, I said. "I live in the west," he returned. He was wearing a Berkeley t-shirt. Geographically, he was right; culturally, he was way off. I ducked my head again until he went away.
So anyway. My lemonade was good. When an expeditor brought our food, RDC asked for another beer and I had to ask for my burger to be fixed: I had asked for cheddar, not just mushrooms. I had ordered it rare and expected a fresh burger, because you can't melt cheese on a hunk of meat without cooking it more. My cheesified burger arrived by expeditor again; RDC's beer never did and I offered him some lemonade; the waiter never checked to see if the temperature was okay (it wasn't: I am used to restaurants not taking "rare" seriously enough but gray is not seriously at all). The fries were dry.
The burgers, overcooked or not, were excellent. Reportedly they also have the best milkshake in town--which isn't much of a challenge or even a statement, here, malheureusement--but I could not fit one in.
We had a drink afterward in the Samba room, RDC some rum and mint and sugar cane thing and me lemon-spiked water. (I feel bad asking for water: charge me for it, but give me a sugarless, caffeineless, alcoholless drink.) On our way back to 16th Street, I tried to prop up the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory's bear. He's very large, the St. Bernard of bears, and he has a leash around his middle (certainly not "waist") since Denver disapproves of bears roaming its downtown. But it has a severe c-curve to its spine, like the only pool regular who uses a snorkel because of how much he'd have to bend his body to breathe directly, and I always try to prop him up. Through the window I spotted globs of raspberry and chocolate and I darted in to buy one. They were about to close and offered me both, since they wouldn't be good tomorrow. I accepted one, with many thanks, without lucre exchanging hands. (I should remember to go there every night at 8:59, possibly wearing disguises like Count Olaf so they don't clue in.)
A 2.1, torso-stretching swim, and only one glob of chocolate instead of two! And no milkshake! So I'm thin now.
The ripping out of the street continues, today accessorized by the breaking off of major branches from our plum and the silver maple across the street. RDC yelled at the driver, who ignored him, and so found the foreman and yelled at him. There will be no more branches broken off.
Later in the morning, RDC glanced out the window and saw three people standing on the sidewalk, looking and pointing at the house. He went out to the porch and said hello in a much different tone. It was the Fosters, the former owners of the house I found two years ago.
They talked about the house for a while. The Fosters were sorry to see the state of the evergreen, which does look quite pathe without its two spires. It was their Christmas tree one year, and they transplanted it. Pity about the three feet of snow. They seemed to like the garden, but I theorize they were being polite. Very little of the south half is currently in flower, and the north half is only started. Plus there's the north side of the house, currently raw unlandscaped fill.
They declined RDC's invitation to come inside, possibly not wanting to see the house with 20 years of change (and a good thing, because Blake's cage was extremely foul and smelly. I scrubbed it this evening.)
When I talked to Mr. Foster before, he said that they came to Colorado occasionally. And here they were. Not, this time, only for their vacation. In 2001, a librarian noticed my address, told me she was my house's family's former babysitter, and sent the owners--the Fosters--the note I enclosed in a card to her.
She died.
Is there any good reason I had never been to the Cache la Poudre before Saturday? I cannot think of a single one. RDC has fished there almost since we moved here and always said it was gorgeous, but somehow I never accompanied him. The day before we adopted Blake, two months after we arrived here, we explored the South Platte in Cheesman Canyon a little; I have gone with him several times to the Lower Williams Fork (of the Colorado). I have seen, several times, the particular, quite low spot of the Continental Divide with the ankle-deep Colorado on the west side and the Poudre on the east, within Rocky Mountain National Park. But I had not seen the Poudre as anything more than that wee streamlet until Saturday.
From my perspective, coming upstream, it seems like the road joins the river where the latter emerges from the foothills, and they climb together up Poudre Canyon for quite a distance. The river, playful, follows broad, shallow, slow curves, bounces in whitewater, and jumps small falls. The road, much tamer, still gives wonderful views and sneaks through a tunnel in unreinforced living rock. Two thousand feet up, at Big South, a sharp bend, the river is let alone--the road climbs on to Cameron Pass--and a trail leads from Big South to the river's genesis in the Park, twelve miles away.
We hiked a distance--not the twelve miles, nor even the seven to where a washed-out bridge would have turned us around anyway--up the Big South trail until we found a good fishing and reading spot. RDC caught (and released) trout after cutthroat trout and I sat on a rock in the middle of the river, my feet in the water and my nose in Oscar and Lucinda, except when I emulated Dante and found the perfect view over my head.
It was a good day.
This morning on NPR I heard a segment about Ashton...I've already forgotten his surname...who is The Voice for movie previews. This reminded me of a few things. Last week when I entered the theatre for "Pirates of the Caribbean," I did so just before the previews began, late enough that I couldn't sit in my spot. My spot is in the middle of the first row of stadium seating so I can put my feet on the railing in front of me. Ahead of the railing is floor space for wheelchairs and a few seats for companions of the chairy. I sat at the end (the left end, sorry, Haitch) of the second row, with a seat, not a railing, for my feet, but no railing is less important than farther back. Next to me was a little boy, maybe five, short and light enough that his legs weren't enough weight to keep the seat down. He sat folded in his seat, knees over the edge, and his father told him to sit up. I smiled, remembering how much more comfortable furniture used to be when it was bigger, and grinned at him. He told me he was too short and the seat didn't work. I said that sitting that way might come in handy if the movie was scary, and he wasn't short, he was five. I also told him I missed being that short. "You do?" he was flummoxed. "Why?" I told him that I miss riding on the back of my mother's bike.
(And I do. I was so sad when, as a new school year started, my mother told me I was too big to go to preschool in our accustomed manner. Now there are those follow-along half-bikes so that kids too big for the tow-behinds (none of those either!) but too small for solo can still come along. Not 30 years ago.)
He told me his father's bike had been stolen, and his car seat. I commiserated and hoped they could get better ones, and so we were friends by the time the previews started. I had wondered whether sitting next to a little kid was going to make me crazy, but he shut up as soon as the previews started.
During the previews it was a she-grown-up behind me who complained about each subsequent trailer, about their quantity. Wouldn't the ticket-taker tell you exactly when the feature itself started, if you asked? I'm sure you could avoid trailers if you really wanted. During the movie itself, a couple of times the kid leaned to me to tell me something, but when I put a finger to my lips and with the other hand pointed at the screen, he subsided. So there's a well-behaved movie kid for you. I meant to ask him afterward about one time he wanted to tell me something--actually I wanted to compliment the father on a well-behaved kid, but the father started reprimanding the kid immediately the lights came up for offenses I couldn't imagine and didn't stay to hear. I wanted to ask the kid about one of the times he sought my ear: it was when Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom defy the laws of physics to use an upturned boat as an air bubble, and I like to think that the kid and I had the same thought there: "Just like in 'Toy Story II!'"
Way back when we saw "The Pianist" at Chez Artiste, we saw a trailer for "Russian Ark." I've kept an eye out for it since and Friday I noticed it had arrived. We arrived hours beforehand because, of course, this time I was with Mr. Exaggerates the Time It Takes to Get Anywhere in Town. Wee example: we left the house just before 7. We stopped at Wild Oats for illegal concessions and I paused between the bulk foods aisle (chocolate-covered almonds and chocolate-covered ginger) and the check-out saying we should get a card for Sooby, whose daughter arrived Thursday. "We don't have time," said RDC. It was 7:05. Wild Oats is about 1500 South Colorado, Chez Artiste is 4100 South Colorado. I selected a card, we paid for our food, we drove down, we bought drinks, we sat down. It was 7:20. The movie started at seven forty-five. In addition to smuggled goodies, I had Oscar and Lucinda. RDC had his Palm. So we read. After 7:30, three young women sat directly behind us, though the auditorium was not nearly crowded enough to warrant that. Though they were (clearly, from their conversation) about to start college, they had not lost their high school ways: the vituperative attacks, the round-about self-aggrandizement through vicarious flattery, the inability to gauge their volume (okay, like I have that skill either) when they dropped their voices to comment on how much RDC and I must hate each other, not to talk before a movie.
Mrs. Miniver was right: "It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye to catch."
I expected, as I had with the five-year-old, disturbances from the peanut gallery during the movie. They were absolutely quiet. In fact I made more noise during it than they did, because as soon as the lights dimmed, the movie began, so I couldn't open my slick plastic bag during previews as is my wont but had to during the credits. There were no trailers. How very, very odd.
"Russian Ark" was great. Technically spectacular, because of the cast and the costuming and the orchestration and the dancing and the 96-minute single shot. Also bizarre, because possibly deep within the recesses of my brain more Russian remains than the words for tea, but, please and thank you, and goodbye. ("Yes" and "no" I knew before making my attempt.) I want to see it again, because I doubt I will ever get such another guided tour of the Hermitage in real life.
A friend's father-in-law would support an amendment to criminalize flag-burning. My friend's counter-argument is that on Fourth of July he--the father-in-law, but presumably also the friend--wipes his mouth on flag napkins, and how can burning be so much worse than that?
If you burn the flag, I damn well hope you're doing so to exercise your First Amendment rights. If you use a flag napkin, you're probably only showing ignorance through patriotism, like those who display a flag any which way, flouting the code.
Last night I delivered RDC's old bike to an underfed, deserving intern (both adjectives do apply, but it was to an underfed moose and a deserving porcupine that Harold gave the remainder of his purple pies) and scampered for some groceries. When I left, just after 8, I saw the most amazing sunset. Actually I didn't see the sun, behind thousands of feet of storm clouds, at all. It gilded the translucent edges of two prominent towers and its light streamed between them, their two broad shadows striped the sky all the way to the eastern horizon, light, dark, light, dark, light. The eastern horizon was here marked by the Cherry Creek Mall, and it was still fabulously beautiful. It didn't hurt that, away to the west, in the mass from which the towers grew, lightning streaked.
The flat still makes me nervous, that there is nothing to contain me should I leak outside my own edges. But being able to see miles of sky, horizon to horizon, and an entire bowl of sunset rather than a wedge, makes up for a lot.
I searched for that book I mentioned the other day. I had "Jane Eyre" and "girl closet tray read" and lo, I found it: It All Began With Jane Eyre: Or, the Secret Life of Franny Dillman, by Sheila Greenwald. If the book itself doesn't have that tone (I'll find out when it makes its way to me through the library), its title sure does. Deliberately, I'm sure.
Finding it made me grin. So did my first episode of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" last night, which I thanked Eliza for. So did my first swim, rather than only immersion, though in only fake, rather than real, water, in over a week, just a leisurely mile but enough.
So did this:
I love its little punk-ass haircut. Which I have just (the next day, watching Blake, perched on my shin, preen in a sleepy kind of way, and fluff his plumage in a sleepy kind of way) realized is vaguely cockatielian, which is so a word.
And its jauntily angled nose.
And its little blind stare.
Also, it tasted good. It grew, I plucked it, it modeled for the camera, I devoured it with salt. Such is the life of a tomato.
Well, Blake's more than a friend, but that's the phrase. He likes the cave, the space under the arm of the couch, between its side and the wall. Back there, he's easy to clean up after. Today, sitting on the couch, I set up his box at the open end of the cave as a Buddy Containment Device. He can't wander all over the floor if he's penned in by his box, or so went my reasoning. I'm not as bright as a cockatiel, though: the first time he got bored, he nudged the box aside and trotted out on the wall side, my clever little thing; the second time, I braced the box with my tall glass of water, and he nudged the box forward and emerged on the couch side; the third time, he gathered his strength and did a standing jump from floor to box top, six inches up, scampered across its top, and hopped off the opposite end. At least all of these ways were noisy enough that I could hear him and recontain him otherwise.
Thank goodness I was cooking dinner: an obvious and also honest excuse to cut short my conversation with Babushka. It is tomato season and she damn well knows it, so she opened the door and said "Yoohoo, honey!" (she's forgotten my name again) and came right in. I had been moving between porch swing and kitchen and not locked the door: a mistake. I picked six tomatoes today, including Mr. Nose; I gave her three. I didn't give her any cherries this year but selfishly kept them all myself. I can't begrudge her a decent homegrown tomato or three.
The project itself doesn't have an easily googleable site, but "CBS Sunday Morning's" story about all that can be produced from one tree made me happy.
In other tree news, I drove partway up Mt. Evans today, aiming for the West Chicago Lake trail. I didn't like the look of its dirt road so instead strolled around Echo Lake and found another rock in another creek to sit on while reading another book. Under more trees, I should say.
When we were kids, we were sent to the back of the station wagon to sleep during the second feature of a drive-in. My sister sneaked awake once and saw "Audrey Rose," the lurid plot of which she detailed to me and which became the basis of many later games. Maybe because of it, this is how CLH and I decided we should have a code word so that when one tried to haunt the other, she could give the name to prove the haunting was genuine and not someone else's trickery. That code word is probably the one secret I will take to my grave.
I never saw "Audrey Rose." Until now. I recorded it a couple of days ago but only just talked to my sister. I didn't know if watching this movie, like riding an upside-down roller-coaster, was something I needed to do with her. But I at least have her permission.
Because of the subject matter and the age of the child, it's hard not to see "The Exorcist" all through this. Because of the lead actress and the age of the child, it's hard not to see "The Goodbye Girl" too, and that's one bizarre pairing of movies. Anthony Hopkins is the lead actor, so it's hard to dismiss it as trash outright. Yet, at least, 30 minutes in.
[Later.] Definitely more "Exorcist" than "Goodbye Girl," no surprise there. Gee, I wonder how those big windows high over Park Avenue will come into play.
[More than halfway through.] Oh cool, Higgie-baby is in this. I know John Hillerman only as Higgins, and--who was just saying this? maybe Kymm, though she understands acting and I can't get past my typecasting--he and David Ogden Stiers sound so wrong to me in their native Usan voices. I probably would have the same issue if ever I heard James Marsters as someone other than Spike.
Conversation with Egg and an intern (the newly biked one) this morning. Egg had just seen "The Philadelphia Story" for the first time. Much enthusing on both our parts plus reenactment for the ignorant intern was necessary. [Logically, it should be "were," but that sounds wrong. Have I been corrupted?] Through Jimmy Stewart, we got to "Airport '77" and other cheesy crap to watch in the '70s, so "The Donny and Marie Show" was but a short leap--unlike the conversation, which was a long gossipy reminiscence on a Monday morning. The intern (who is Mormon) said that besides polygyny, the Osmonds were the worst thing for the LDS' reputation. Here I refrained from commenting that harassing people on their doorsteps probably doesn't help either but instead observed that I didn't remember any Mormonism in the show particularly. My first exposure to the religion was in the Great Brain books. "I remember those!" exclaimed Egg. Of course she does: we're only a year apart, whereas most of our childhood television was lost on the intern, a decade younger.
So I explained the books to the intern (much as Egg and I had, in tandem, quite a while earlier, explained "The Philadelphia Story"), how in the little town of Adenville, Utah, the preponderance of Mormons necessitated each boy (Sweyn, Tom the Brain, and John the narrator) to be able to beat up those Mormons in his own age group. And the Brain's swindling and crime-solving. Egg exclaimed at how much I remember, and the intern has--big surprise--also noticed it. She said something about "how much you remember, when I'm ready to go on to the next thing."
I cracked right the hell up. That is such a perfect description of me. I laughed and laughed and laughed and teared up with laughter and laughed in that unstoppable, face-aching way, and she was laughing too and insisting she hadn't meant it like that. I knew that she didn't mean it maliciously, but the subconsciously rendered, absolutely perfect description of what it's like to be around me, reduced me to hysterics.
Then the intern asked me how I can keep all of that in my head, that he would go insane with so much going on. I told him I don't know the capital of Angola, which more important to daily life [whereupon I shut up, continuing in my head, "than the Fitzgerald boys' middle name (which is Dennis)," but I didn't want to prove his point too much, did I?]
A Formigny screen or storm window hangs from two tabs at the top and then, once the frame is fully into place, is secured by a hook on the screen to an eye in the sill. Mostly: they are old, and some of the hooks and eyes are missing, stripped out, whatever. This morning as I sat at the dining table and Blake ate his breakfast on the kitchen windowsill, I sneezed. This startled Blake and I heard him flap once and then utter the cockatiel equivalent of a human "hmph" of frustration. I was already up and after him: his flap had delivered him three inches left and four up onto the screen, from which he hung by claws and beak, with tail splayed out. Remind me to check that the hook and eye are quite, quite secure.
In the future, people will not wear clothes but instead stick Post-Its all over themselves.
What a fantabulous day. Get this: it was perfectly sunny all day, but not blazing hot even in the sun.
We walked to the farmer's market for tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches, plums, butter-and-sugar corn, and two pounds of basil. Our own tomatoes and cucumbers will be ready soon but not our nectarines or plums. (If you guessed a rodent with tentacles and a tail, yep.)
Then I inaugurated the new food processor: basil + piñon + romano cheese + elephant garlic (milder) + olive oil + salt = a couple of ice cube trays lined with plastic wrap filled with pesto, now in the freezer ready to stave off the bleakness of winter basillessness.
New food processor! New food processor! New food processor! Cuisinart, quite strong motor, two work bowls, three blades. The last one died in May as it struggled with perhaps too much pasta dough. I discovered in the meantime that pesto tastes much better when made with a mortar and pestle, but basil in bulk is available now and pesto in bulk is nothing I want to prepare without electricity. Plus the mortar holds less than a pint. So.
After that--which process spared me yet another opportunity to learn to change my bike tires, hooray!--we set up the new tent, which is snazzy although less exciting than the new food processor, not needing repetition, because it will entail camping. It has a moonroof! It has a vestible without really a vestibule (you keep your muddy boots between the fly and the tent but don't have to turn a pretzel to exit the damn thing. Also you can unzip the doors--two, one for each occupant, hooray!--with one hand: they're curved instead of cornered. There's an attic (a little shelf made of screening) for glasses; luckily there're also a few pockets along the sides, since the attic obscures the moonroof. The fly can roll down in seconds if the weather turns (completely covering the moonroof). It sets up about as easily as the...whatever the people's name was...tents in The Hero and the Crown.
Then I weeded! in the middle of the afternoon! in the sun! without dying of sunstroke! I clipped out all the old raspberry canes because, who knew, a second crop is coming in. There is one little baby pumpkin coming along, so I removed the other blossoms. (Last year, the mystery plant that turned into a pumpkin was huge before it was orange. This year, it's wee but already yellowy-orange. I didn't mark which squash I planted where, so because of the color I wonder if this is the Casper variety I planted.) I snipped the cherry sproutlets, ripped out whatever it is that has dandelion leaves but also pokey little irritants, not quite thorns but bad enough, ripped out some maybe-mums that do way too well on way too little care to be anything but weeds and that were crowding the rosemary anyway.
Then I emptied the garage. Kind of. Its perimeter is lined with this and that, but its perimeter is what the masons need access to. Some stuff I brought inside, and I am sick of moving stuff from here to there, and other stuff I piled in the middle, which the mason said was fine. I got to throw out some crap, always a plus.
I was soaked in sweat by the end, because of work not because of sun.
Today is Blake's hatchday! To celebrate we are going to glue an eggtooth on his beak and pluck out his tail so he fits when we fold him back up into an egg.
I don’t do this often. Bear with me, OMFB. The first thing I remember was being held against my will in some bizarre religious culty thing (RDC is reading Jon Krakauer’s new book Under the Banner of Heaven, about a murder in a Mormon context). In my small bedchamber, a persistent swain pressed his suit in the most unwelcome self-assured courtship since Mr. Collins’s of Elizabeth Bennet. (After her volunteer vacation in Togo three years ago, Egg received the most hysterical postcard from an utter stranger who must have got her name and address from another Togolese, with a cut-out three-quarter photograph glued on, trying to woo her, saying something about how even though he didn’t meet her he experienced the beautiful scent wafting in her wake. She is in western African this week for work and I enthused with her just before she left that maybe she could meet him this time.) The next day, as I knew it in the dream, I had escaped, and I had a newborn (it was Blake's hatchday Monday). There was no coitus, no pregnancy, no birth, but I knew it was mine. I wanted to be rid of it before it needed to eat because I was afraid if I nursed it, I would bond with it. Here are the ways it was like Blake: it moseyed about (and, unlike Blake, nearly fell down the cellar stairs), it was kind of toilet trained (one mosey was to poop somewhere that wasn't-on-me), and it kind of talked (like Blake, but more like the cat in Half Magic). It could do all this despite being merely a day old, and I liked it and told it how brilliant it was. It was a girl and I thought I might name it Emily but then I would reprimand myself that the sunflower was Emily (I had a sunflower yesterday). I wound up in a house belonging to a woman who looked like Chloris Leachman (we watched “Interiors” last night and apparently Geraldine Page reminds me of Chloris Leachman). I finally nursed it when it needed to be fed. While it fed, I realized, “Hey, I'm on the pill! That must be bad for the baby.” Following rapidly on the heels of that brilliance was “Yeah! I'm on the pill! I can't have a baby.” Whereupon I woke up.
With, interestingly, neither horror nor relief nor longing but disorientation and then amusement.
A while ago I bought a pen with a light in the tip so you can write in the nearly dark. I have never used it in my paper journal because, as my sister says, if it's not violet, it's not recognizably my handwriting. I woke, I pulled my journal from my backpack (which lives by my bed) and the pen from the drawer, and wrote four pages.
One and a third geological ages ago, either my boyfriend's grandmother or his friend's wife had a butter-keeper: the lid has a bowl that fits upside-down into cup, you have some water in the cup, you put butter in the bowl, and lo, room-temperature butter that's slightly cleaner than leaving it on the counter all the time. I've been wanting one since and remembered to put it on a gift list my mother asked for before last Yule. She found one for my birthday and sent it in the box from the store, with her usual inability to pack such that the lid, chattering against the bowl on its journey, arrived in three pieces (shh).
Meanwhile, when I went to France in May my assignment for my sister was a butter dish on a pedestal. (I have no idea what she meant.) I bought her one, not what she had in mind but she liked it, and it arrived entire because both the shopkeeper and I know how to ship.
Meanwhile, my mother had been harping that the one piece she needed to complete the yellow Florentine pattern Depression glass set she and Granny had been trying to complete for years--for my lifetime, I am sure--was the butter dish lid. She had the base but needed the domed lid. I timidly ventured into eBay a-looking. In the 1.75 years since I broke my favorite ornament, it has never come up for bid, though I could have bought dozens of the Kurt Adler Polonaise Boot with Presents. So I added a search for this thing. It came up once before and my maximum bid didn't even meet the seller's reserve price, which I thought was ridiculous, since the final bid was ten times the starting price. Another came up a few weeks ago and zounds, I won it.
I dislike auctions in general: they are too close to gambling. But I got the thing for my mother, although, as my sister pointed out when I bitched about the first auction, what's the point, because it will live in a cupboard so crowded that nothing on display can be seen, and she doesn't appreciate nice gestures anyway, and it came from a gas station to begin with. I had the seller (who frayed my nerves by never responding to my emails telling him I had sent payment, that I would like to know when he received payment and shipped the item) ship it to her, and he did, and I told her a package would arrive that was her Christmas present and she could open it either now or on the proper day.
She opened it yesterday. She left me voicemail sounding not particularly enthused, which is unfortunate considering how much she worried this particular bone.
So now we all have a goddamn butter dish and can get off each other's backs.
I will be so glad when the street construction is done. We've had pounding that shook Formigny, so sturdy a little brick house that even the Wolf couldn't blow it down, and I figured it was a good thing the masons would start their work after that was done. The other morning the Trojan Rabbit rumbled along the street before we even got up, a wheeled behemoth or maybe a conveyor-belted one, not that I got up to see. Remember how in "Jurassic Park," they know the Tyrannosaurus Rex is coming because the Jello wiggles? Or perhaps a more highfalutin example is the opening scene in "Richard III" when Henry VI is supping at his war table and notices the wine is a-tremble moments before Richard's tank comes through the wall. Anyway, that's been our house.
The most beautiful noise in the whole wide world is that of a washing machine deciding, after stopping midcycle and not starting again despite being rebalanced and having its drum jiggled and eventually having its clothes removed and wrung out and dumped into a plastic bag-lined hamper ready to go to a laundromat and its lid closed and its dial turned and pulled again (just in case), to run.
I added this to the list of stuff I don't get:
Wearing gear from a team you don't belong to (relatively mild, really), or from a school neither you nor anyone you know attend or care about (less mild), or with the initials of the New York Police Department or the Fire Department of New York just like that worn by those who actually have committed themselves to those departments (not mild at all, that one).
For a few reasons we decided to leave a day later. One of the several benefits was making the drive in daylight: the climb to Bailey, over Kenosha Pass into South Park, a break for lunch in Jefferson or Fair Play, at a diner cum general store cum post office. Resolved: to stop thinking of Colorado as Denver plus a stretch of interstate to the regular ski mountains or another stretch of smaller roads to Rocky Mountain National Park. Also: to take better advantage of knowing how much more to Colorado there is.
I had seen South Park a few times before, the remarkable flats leading back to the plains and the long drop down, Mt. Elbert looming in the distance. This time we didn't turn toward Salida (an exit from the mountains) but west toward Monarch. I might have done better with blinders on: Monarch Pass was scary. But in that case I would have missed the snow.
Prosaic as I am, when I look around to these small towns, the homesteads without the towns, I wonder about their fresh produce. Weekly or monthly mail I can figure. If only monthly, though, do they get tomatoes and spinach and asparagus only monthly as well?
After four hours of painted horses, parched, sage-covered hills, creeks a-jump and a-burble, foothills and mountains, we reached Crested Butte. On almost every postcard I wrote that this was the most beautiful bit of Colorado I had ever seen, and that was true because I hadn't seen Telluride yet.
One of the things I miss here is forests, both their presence and their views. I've always preferred deciduous to coniferous trees in general, but somehow I knew the problem with Colorado forest wasn't just that they're mostly evergreen. Here in southwestern Colorado, the forests appealed to me much more, and I immediately saw why. More moisture means more deciduous, more aspen and cottonwood (including my favorite, redolent narrow-leaf black willow), but also more Colorado blue spruce instead of the drier eastern slopes' Ponderosa and lodgepole pine: the green of the forest is more blue than yellow. It was soothing to the eye (like poppies).
Crested Butte is in two parts: Crested Butte, full of Victorian, mining-era buildings, with shoppes (pronounced "shoppies," natch) and galleries and restaurants, and Mt. Crested Butte, nothing but ski condos and hotels, three miles north and directly under the eponymous mountain.
Geographically, I'm not sure what the difference is between a butte and a mountain or a butte and a mesa, but I know a mountain and a mesa aren't the same. Crested Butte is relatively independent, descending to the valley floor on all sides instead of being one peak of many (butte not mountain), and it's not flat on top (butte not mesa) even where it's not crested (like a cockatiel or a dinosaur, take your pick).
I don't know how a ten-mile round trip could possibly include 12 miles uphill one way, but it did. North of Crested Butte, north of Mt. Crested Butte, north of Gothic (a ghost town revived for the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory), we headed for Copper Creek trailhead. We did not park at the base, no no no, because apparently the jeep track passes for a road that RDC wanted to take Cassidy up.
(Monarch Pass went on for a long way, was vaguely snowy, had narrow, sharp curves and no guard rails, but it was paved smoothly. This wasn't even gravel, like Guanella Pass, nor washed-out blacktop like the state forest road to Uncas Lake. This was nothing that a vehicle should be taken up, four-wheel-drive or otherwise. We went up and Cassidy did fine. Like Olivia Steinbeck in East of Eden with airplanes, this is something I continue not to believe in even after experiencing it.)
Gorgeous. This is how everywhere should be, with surface water and lots of trees and, get this, about a dozen people along our entire several hours on the trail (I know I'm part of the problem, but part of my problem-causing is that I like it deserted). Sallows and blue spruce and cottonwoods on the north-facing slopes and sage and bear grass on the south-facing and Indian paintbrush and campanula and did I mention the creek and the lake?
The last mile up lasted about twelve times as long as I wanted. I plodded. Steep is one thing. I don't know what the grade was: "plenty" about sums it up. RDC wasn't quite up to speed and listed somewhat, and unfortunately strained his knee. I was determined to get to the top, and so was RDC, and so we did.
Why we had packed only one sandwich apiece instead of all of them, I don't know. But I am damn glad I had my own 64-ounce Camelbak bladder.
From the map, we thought we were close to the Canyon; from the guidebooks, I, at least, had different expectations about what the reservoirs would be like. First, we weren't close but two hours and 90 miles away. Second, I was delusional to hope that Blue Mesa reservoir would be any different from any other water dammed in high arid land. Water, imprisoned into an unnatural form, low along its shoreline, below hills so dry the scrub sage is less than spotty, looks not dammed but damned to me.
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison was much better. What other major canyons in the United States haven't I seen? Glenwood Canyon and the Grand Canyon; the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone; now this. I haven't seen Yosemite, and there must be others.
When we arrove, it was cloudless and hot. While we were there, clouds formed and rolled in. Light rain began to fall, and then more. At the downstream end of the south rim, we stopped for a torrential thunderstorm. To the west, where the canyon plateau fell away into a 60-mile view, we now could not see even to the next bend in the river, but during a brief lull we saw that lightning had sparked a fire on the north rim. The rain closed in again, pounding the car, and when it finally ceased the smoke from that one had lessened, but not gone out--a fire could simmer in the sap of a juniper or piñon through a worse deluge than that--and a second fire, a little farther east, had started. A ranger, who had waited out the storm along with many civilians, said around a wad of tobacco in his jaw that they'd have to hike in to ensure they were out. I would not have felt as assured without the chaw.
The Canyon was only recently upgraded from monument to park, and even if it had had marked trails down, there was no way, capital No, capital Way. We took pictures from the rim, at Dragon Point of Painted Wall, where because of the small fires it looked somewhat like the dragons were breathing the smoke in the air, as well as that on the wall.
We never do this: just hang out by the pool all day on vacation. We did this day, such a novelty.
I can't recommend the Sheraton in Mt. Crested Butte. A king mattress fits across two twin box springs, but the hotel doesn't spring for king-sized pillows or king-sized fitted sheets or even fitted sheets at all or indeed sheets that aren't pilly. We didn't sleep well during our stay: the least movement untucked the minimal tuckage, just for starters.
There was a pool, smallish and not particularly cleanish, with a fine view of the butte, without shade. But that's me: it's a pool, and I would have preferred to laze the day away by a creek or a pond. But even fake water is better than no water. I explored the beautiful old Victorian village in the morning, checking out books from their library (in super old building that was a school until nine years ago) and shopping a bit, and then joined RDC by and in the pool. I stood in five feet of water, arms and chin on a towel on the deck, and read Second Summer of the Sisterhood.
There are worse ways to spend a day.
We fled the short-sheeted Sheraton for a lovely bed and breakfast in Ouray. The China Clipper's nautical theme was incongruous in the middle of the mountains, and felt more like a small hotel than a B&B, but the bed was high (there was a little wooden stepstool on what was therefore clearly RDC's side), the atmosphere non-corporate, and the view of the canyon wall from the porch an excellent way to rest your eyes over the top of your book. Our room was the Southern Cross (#8 in the virtual tour), and I noticed that in the Sheraton, we usually had CNN on, while at the China Clipper, the television remained blind and mute: corporate v. non-corporate.
But damn, that was a long drive, and we had a leisurely start to the day, so all we did was wander about the town and, get this, shop. Can you call it shopping when you don't buy anything? Or is it shopping if you go in instead of just looking through windows and have not ruled out the possibility of buying? Crested Butte, Ouray, Silverton, and Telluride all were born mining towns in the late 19th century and the architecture shows it. Now, with the mining nearly not happening, they survive on tourism. This time, I'm sorry to say, we fit more into the sightseeing demographic than the active one, but the sightseeing was fine and the shops were mostly shops, not shoppes, and the galleries good.
(Only Ouray's main street, part of U.S. 550, is paved. There are no traffic lights. There is no McDonald's or Wal-Mart in San Juan County. There is Billy Goat Gruff's Biergarten, though.)
On the way to Ouray, we did not stop at Ridgway State Park, whose photographs lie. This our guidebook had proclaimed "the crowning jewel" of Colorado state parks, which bodes poorly for all the rest of them and for the state. It looked just as much like a reservoir as any other and its roped-off swim area, visible from the state route, was the size of Cherry Creek reservoir's, such that even if you ventured in (which I never have, preferring my swim water separate from my sewage water and please don't ask where my drinking water comes from), you could not swim any distance, or away from paddling peeing children, or in water deep enough not to be murky from disturbing the bottom, or out of the roped area without being run down by a foul motor boat or "personal water craft."
We had our best meals yet, service and food combined. In Crested Butte, the Wooden Nickel's service was surly (though the prime rib was good); the Gourmet Noodle's and Bacchinale's marinaras abysmal (RDC dove into the kitchen when we got home to make real sauce) though cheerfully served; and the Idle Spur was depressingly empty though the elk chops were tasty. Our first meal in Ouray, by contrast, was lunch at Le Papillon Bakery, which served po'boys! I regretted not sampling its desserts. At Buen Tiempo for dinner, I had a seafood mixed grill with a wonderful fruit salad. I had never eaten anything called "mixed grill" before (I would have said "mixed seafood grill") and all I could think of was The Corrections--I think the transposed adjectives indicate that "mixed grill" is really its own dish. RDC had something way hotter than I can manage--the one forkful I ventured made me regret my wussy palate. The next night's dinner happened at the Coachlight, a hokey enough name that I could not help thinking of the late Chop House in Flanders, Connecticut, an unfair slight to this not nearly as pathetic place.
The first stop on the Million Dollar Highway was Box Canyon Falls. Whole trees jammed one spillway; whole hillsides had been softened by floods. Then up and over the Million Dollar Highway to Silverton, where I bought a rock.
I always get a rock for Haitch, or usually. This time it had entirely slipped my mind through Copper Creek and Black Canyon because I suck. Then, as we crunched through Silverton (which, like Ouray, has one paved road, or none because it was being resurfaced at the time), we saw a rock stand.
Ages ago in Denver we saw what would have been the perfect photograph if it had been possible to capture the image without its subject's notice. A shorty, nowhere near 10, had a lemonade stand on his corner lot. Apparently business wasn't brisk, because his expression rivaled Puddleglum's for pessimism.
These kids were too young to be discouraged. I think. If the older was even five, I'll eat my hat. They were dazzlingly towheaded and fairly shone out of the empty lot where they had set up shop. It looked an unlikely spot as we drove by, but I hadn't noticed the traintracks like a spine in the road. RDC said, "You should get Haitch a rock." Oh yeah.
So we investigated the rail station (the Saybrook train station looked only slightly less decrepit last time I looked) and looked at some old rail cars (including one ambulance car still running on a 1918 Cadillac automobile engine) and then looked through town. We looked into the town hall (which has a great dome I would have photographed if there hadn't been a jumbo potted tree directly under the rotunda) and the one-time prison and now museum. Repeating our strange new habit of poking around town, we did that, which is basically the historic walking tour. This jaunt also included its Carnegie library, which was just fine, especially its nonfiction room in the basement.
Upstairs, I spotted a book I showed to RDC to rival the legendary Tact for Dummies: Virgin Planet, a seeming combination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland and...that short story that's a twist on the saying "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" (the blind doctors want to remove from his face the one or two bulging, soft tumors that they are sure are causing his dementia). The back cover matter of Planet proclaimed an astronaut's crash landing somewhere that had been man-less for 300 years. Apparently this man faced the same difficulties Taylor does on the Planet of the Apes. Lord. (Of course now I regret not borrowing it, but please, it's bad enough I interrupt Goldbug Variations with Second Summer of the Sisterhood. I don't need to encourage myself.)
So anyway. I made sure to walk by the two young entrepeneurs. They had wee little chairs by a wooden crate. The older pawed through the bills and change they'd collected in a coffee mug, probably not yet having mastered arithmetic (or maybe he or they had: they were businessmen). So I asked the younger, "Where do your rocks come from?"
"The mine." Duh. They were clearly not from the empty lot behind him.
"How much are your rocks?"
He began to pick up rocks from the array on the crate. "This one...is two dollars," putting it down and randomly picking up another hunk of granite, "and this one...is two dollars and fifty cents,"...pausing as in Godot's "Endgame" before picking up, with difficulty, the largest of the rocks about the size of my fist, "and this one...is five dollars..."
I had already picked out the one I wanted, a yellow quartz, so I touched it and asked how much that one was.
"A quarter."
I managed to stifle my laughter until I was around the corner and in the car again. That was the funniest thing of the whole trip.
The funnest part of the whole trip was next. Back up and more down to Ouray, north of Ouray to a not-quite-town called Orvis. We were looking for Orvis Hot Springs. Our aim was County Road 3 off State Route 550. Believe me when I say these were driveway-level turn-offs. We saw a sign that said "Orvis Springs" and thought that was it.
It was not. The sign actually said "Orvis Springs Inc. Custom Meat Processing." We thought, for heaven's sake, all we want to do is soak. Where do they get their meat anyway? And we drove up a long driveway that probably also counted as a county road and passed a shed outside of which stood a frame with a grate set into the ground below. I recognized it not because it looked like anything I've seen in (pictures of) slaughterhouses but because it was a larger version of the game room in the kitchens of Chenonceau. I know you hang small game for a day or two to facilitate dressing, but these were elk- (or human-) size hooks. We had turned to hightail it the hell out of there as a man approached us on a tractor (which we could outrun, as long as his other brother Daryl didn't show up wielding a chainsaw, because believe me, the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" jokes kept coming). The man, with the weary smile of one who has had to deal with this once too often, directed us back out to the state road and to the next turn-off.
It's easy to miss Orvis Hot Springs because it's in a little dell and its privacy fences are cloaked in green. It needs the privacy fences because, praise be, the entire outdoor area is clothing-optional.
We spent the next three hours in a 40' long, four- to five-foot-deep, pebble-bottomed, 99- to 102-degree pond, surrounded by mountains, sage, hollyhocks, sunflowers, cottonwoods, and willow, occasionally being rained on, moving now closer and now farther from a plume that fed in unadulterated, hot, mineral (but not sulphury) water, and we did this unimpeded by the known carcinogen that is a bathing suit.
And the next day we went home.
From Ouray we detoured to Telluride. The way led among mountains in more dire need of an orthodontist than any I have seen before, between working ranches and resort ranches and ghost ranches, through quaking aspen and gambel oak, up the San Miguel river, and into another mostly preserved, mostly Victorian town (with some architecture that wouldn't be out of place in Aspen, and some even in Anonymous Suburb, U.S.A.)
From Cascade Canyon last year I remember glacier-fed creeks tumbling down hillsides, and one of those is the prominent feature of Telluride, visible from anywhere in town at the end of the canyon. A private residence improbably perches halfway up Bridal Veil Falls. From partway up the ski slope by gondola, you can see the young craggy mountains (whose names I forget), lapsed volcanoes like Little Cone, and other unimaginatively name hills like Bald Mountain that cradle the town.
Passing signs for it, I had no idea how anyone could fit an airport into the narrow canyon; from the ski slope I looked down on its single, short runway on a conveniently placed plateau that must make for gnarly approaches and departures.
The town is so crunchy! Boulder is not, actually, crunchy anymore. The Ramseys lived there: QED. In Crested Butte and in Telluride, wild mushroom festivals were going on. Telluride has a movie festival, a bluegrass festival, and Widespread Panic just played. How Spreadheads afforded Telluride, even camping, I do not know. But when we come into our money, we're moving there.
Coming down just the sixty miles thence to Montrose--well, I wished the whole state looked like Telluride. Montrose is flat and arid, eh. From Montrose to Delta didn't turn my head either, and just east of Delta, Colorado looks as much like the barren former seabed of Utah as anything else that I never want to see again. (I just don't do deserts or near-deserts well. I can live with that.) We were in the Gunnison Gorge area, but you'd never know there was a river within a million miles.
But then, oh, but then, we started to climb again. Colorado's geography changes so rapidly, so dramatically, and so much over the state, that I am ashamed it took me eight years to learn this for myself. After Hotchkiss, the altitude enough to trap the clouds, the land blossomed. Cherries and apples and peaches, vegetable crops, livestock: beautiful country. We passed through a coal-mining town that brimmed with stories. I regret to report that even Paonia Reservoir, high enough to be surrounded by forest, still looks like a reservoir. Mostly, the climb to and the drop from McClure Pass was staggeringly beautiful. There is a campground along the North Fork of the Gunnison which looks both fishable and swimmable and went on the list.
East from Montrose, lightning beckoned us up and chased us down the peaks. We had rain, lovely rain, sporadically throughout the drive. (We had rain nearly every day. I loved all of it.) We cut the trip short because, what with RDC's knee and antibiotics, hiking and camping weren't happening--next time, we camp either in Poudre Canyon or along McClure Pass. These several days were a gorgeous introduction to an area I want to see more of, and see more deeply, and find places to swim in. I will never ice climb, but Ouray in the winter must be even more spectacular; I am not a gazillionaire, but Telluride in snow (without diesel fumes) probably blinds one with beauty. Not a bad last sight.
There are more pictures in the gallery.
Denver Events, as Reconstructed: we got home, I brought my first load inside, I left the car unlocked and the doors open while I inspected the pear tree (denuded) and the tomatoes (booming) and the raspberries (not quite ripe yet) and the garage (tuckpointed but not acid-washed). I returned to the car for more stuff, emptied the car into the living room, and breathed. I showered and shampooed and shaved, and wrapped myself in my bathrobe, and, amidst piles of dirty laundry, sleeping bags, Nalgeen bottles, fishing tackle, etc., wondered aloud, "Where's my wallet?" which had the effect of convincing both of us I had left it in Montrose, either in the store or in the peer or on the car.
Montrose Events, as Reconstructed: I left RDC to fuel Cassidy and went into the shop to case it for peers, snacks, and drinks. Exploration of its nether corners yielded no peer of either persuasion, so I asked a clerk, who said they were outside round the corner. I tried the female one, whose door I could not budge, and returned to the car, somewhat shamed of leaving RDC to both pump and squeegee. We both went back to the store and out again. He and I serially used the same facility, with him guarding me while I violated gender protocol. We bought Gator-Ade and Dove Dark Chocolate and retreated to the car, whence we did not emerge until nearly Glenwood Springs, where we made use of a McDonald's, and not again until Denver.
Did I drop my wallet on the initial pass-through of the store? on the roof of the car when I offered to squeegee? in the peer? RDC thought I left it in the peer, because he would have remembered seeing it in my mouth (where I hold it, lacking pockets, not to put it down) and he did not.
When my keys run away, I generally panic and give them a day to their own devices. I use the spare house and car keys and then, finally, make one more assay into my bag where, invariably thus far, they have hidden in some recess. My wallet has never run away before, but anonymous keys are a lot less scary to lose than a wallet. I would have to drive all over the state to reaccumulate all my library barcodes, for one thing. Someone else could enter the Botanic Gardens in my name and maybe spit in the lily pond! My first step was to google "Montrose Conoco" and RDC's to place holds on the credit and debit accounts.
To clear my head, I continued to unpack. Sorting laundry. Hanging up parkas. Searching the car, like the undercarriage of the passenger seat where, it turns out, Rarities, B-Sides, and Slow, Sad Waltzes emerged several months after I replaced it (so I gave it to JGW, thereby converting yet another person to the Cowboy Junkies). Picking tomatoes. Showering. We were both in the kitchen when I lifted my Camelbak bladder from the counter to rinse it, exposing the wallet beneath, which did not skitter away quite fast enough. I pounced.
Stress kills my appetite anyway, and what fortuitous timing: there's nothing in the house to eat but cherry tomatoes.
I love this. CoolBoss's son asked her what the double-fingered, two-handed quote gesture means. She said it indicates quotation marks but that the gesture usually indicates irony, so he asked what irony is. He is eight, and she floundered a bit before saying something about "unusual development." Her son asked, "So it's like a caterpillar?"
So far he trumps both Troy Dyer (could the name be any more symbolic, O ruined existentialist city?) and Brian Krakow.
Ethan Hawke as Troy in "Reality Bites" says, "It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning."
Brian Krakow in "My So-Called Life" defines "ironic" as "Um, when you realize the, like, component of weirdness in a situation."
I like better that it's a caterpillar.
Good grief, this is as stupid as wanting to make a stuffed animal tiger and selling it with the label Hobbes. Or stupider. I just got "The Two Towers"--I am that much a sucker for marketing and consumption--which came with a booklet selling the obvious crap, like elven brooches and Arwen's pendant and a truly unspeakable vomitation of porcelain and pewter and also RDC's Christmas present. All of that is offensive to my aesthetic taste, because the "jewelry" is costume, not of elvish or dwarfish quality and the vomitation is...unspeakable and the chess set is tacky and so forth.
I don't mind the idea of a Hobbes: Just as "Calvin and Hobbes" burst into syndication, HEBD gave SEM an enormous bear, about the size of a St. Bernard, whom he dubbed Hobbes. I mind a mass marketing of, rather than an individual relationship with, Hobbes. Similarly, I don't mind the copyright violation that Bill Watterson did mind when folks made t-shirts reprinting the strip where Calvin and Hobbes dance in their sunglasses. I don't even mind non-Watterson Calvin and Hobbes interpretations that respect their spirit, like their playing with Max where the Wild Things are. I have always despised those violations featuring, fr'instance, Calvin and Snoopy and Opus, bleary-eyed and weaving, captioned "I get by with a little help from my friends" or Calvin, drunkenly pointing and saying "What about that one?" and Hobbes nearly puking, captioned "Friends Don't Let Friends Beer-Goggle." (To be honest I haven't seen these since college.)
So. Selling a mock-up of the One Ring violates the entire principle of The Lord of the Rings and, I daresay, "The Lord of the Rings" too. One ring. One. Also, it's bad! It's evil! It's wrong! And it gets fucking destroyed!* It doesn't exist!
* What, you didn't know that?
The icing on the cake is that it's in mere 10K gold.
Yesterday a brief, intense rainstorm burst out just around 4, so if I hadn't been flexing I'd've been caught. It had cleared enough by 4:30 that I got wet only by my tires hurling puddles up at me. Because I take my bike into its native environment so often its big chunky treads are necessary.
Then last night it was cool in a pleasant kind of way and we were going to have supper outside. I went downstairs to do laundry and watch "Sex and the City" (so RDC wouldn't have to) and when I came up again, half an hour later, it was cold! Cold cold cold! I closed windows for to keep the heat in, not out. Wild.
Later in the evening rain began again, loud because I still haven't spread mulch on the groundcloth on the north side of the house (which laziness was, at first, a good thing, because walking on mulch would have pissed off the masons, but which is now because I haven't gone to Home Despot to buy edging--I have to dig 30' of edging in so the mulch doesn't wash into Their yard). It rained and rained and rained, and now it's 10 in the morning and still merely 56 degrees, and though the weather will of course warm up again, it is fall.
Also it's been overcast enough for the past two weeks that we haven't seen Mars.
RDC remarked tonight about something I had entirely forgotten: when we discussed getting our wedding rings engraved, his suggestion was "Quid pro quo."
It turns out that the tree I've spotted along my bike root and admired for its height, tulip or trumpet shape, tough-ass leaves, and graceful droop is, in fact, American elm. This boggles me: I thought they were extinct.
Lyme Street used to run through a tunnel of elms, but they all died by, I expect, the '50s. Now it's overlaid with utility lines, much less attractive. And hotter.
ÜberBoss is certain any healthy, thriving elm I have seen must be sprayed early and often. I prefer to believe people don't use fungicides, at least not as many households as have these trees, nor the city on the several trees on public property, so was ready to believe they were another species, despite what I deduced from various identification guides. But sprayed or not, they're elms.
Then I looked closely at the tree in the alley because I was ripping out the not-ivy climbing creeper that's grown into it. It's an elm. An American elm, not a Siberian or Chinese. It's diseased, with beetles at least, and the fungus will follow in the beetle-weakened vascular system.
This comes up because I want to plant an elm in the front yard, but not if it needs any kind of -cide to survive.
We had a parting dinner out at Tamayo, on the deck overlooking Auraria and the mountains and the sunset, and talked about what I might do when I get back. I'm just noting that.
Today I had lunch with Karen and Mr. Karen, who were in town on their day to a wedding in Vail. Among the meal's other amusements was Mr. Karen's trying to think of a song on Peter Gabriel's So called "Chicken Run," so mangled had my comment on the animators become.
Then RDC picked me up and brought me to the airport.
Friday night at midnight Saturday morning my sister picked me up. I threw my bags into her back seat and got into the front, accepting from her hand a plate of still-warm oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (milk in a travel mug awaited me also). "How much for the whole weekend?" she asked. This took me a minute to process, making me as difficult to joke or communicate at all with as our mother.
I know my role as aunt, so as soon as we got into CLH's apartment I called for my niece. Kitty is, of course, adorable and purrfect and my sister has her picture up everywhere and I told CLH about the psychologist in Maus. When CLH first adopted her, she said she had intended a grey cat but Kitty's purr won her over. Maybe because she expected the sleek prettiness of a grey cat, she said--at the time--that Kitty's coat looked like a bad dye job. She looks like a tortoiseshell to me, and the purr really is something, and of course she is the prettiest kitty ever.
Over the weekend, the weather was flawlessly, perfectly gorgeous--as it would be the whole week until the last day--and we went to see Thomas Gainsborough at the MFA and to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (I had never been) and she showed me all the community gardens in the Fens behind MFA. Also we went on the Swan Boats, me for the first time. The Gainsborough was not so much what I like, a bunch of portraits. CLH prefers people to landscapes, or did for Gainsborough anyway, which makes sense since that was his fame. What I remember is that one of the pieces is the cover of the Penguin edition of Sense and Sensibility.
I learned at least two things about my sister: that "Sense and Sensibility" is also one of her favorite movies and that blue sky through green leaves is also one of her favorite colors. I am so glad to know we have such vital things in common.
We talked about Margaret Dashwood and reinvented the course of the Volga and I told her about Emma Thompson's and Ang Lee's two commentaries. We talked about Margaret Atwood too and why CLH didn't crack Oryx and Crake and how we both didn't like Blind Assassin. We wandered up Newbury Street and along Charles Street and I asked how her friend's restaurant Vesuvius is going and she knew what I meant because we were passing it but its name is Torch and she cracked up. Well, it had something to do with fire (isn't Vesuvius the restaurant in "The Sopranos"?) We ate lunch at the Gardner and somewhere on Boylston near Dartmouth and dinner at the Top of the Hub and a picnic from Whole Foods on the Esplanade.
Also we looked at the photographs she had from our aunt who died a year ago. She had already culled her favorites and I selected some for me. (I want a scanner. Now.) I have photographs of my father in the Army, and how he got in needing glasses that thick I don't know. I have photographs of my paternal grandparents traveling to see my father off to Korea, with Bump-bump not wanting have his photograph taken and slouching in work pants, shirt, and cap, and my grandmother properly suited, befitting the honor of the occasion. Among the photographs is one of me as a 14-year-old boy, which is my favorite.
We called our mother from lunch on Boylston. It was her and BDL's anniversary, which the Good Daughter remembered. They weren't home, so we nattered into their answering machine, so I got to score as many GD points as CLH did. Heh.
We called our father from the Esplanade two days later. RSH told CLH something so ridiculous she spluttered with incredulous laughter, and this is how her relationship with our parents is so much better than mine. If Dad had told me the same thing, on my own, I would have said, "Oh really?" and fumbled for better follow-up questions. Whereas when our father told CLH that as one of his duties as quartermaster of his branch of the VFW, he was going to call Bingo once a month, she could laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. He has retired and lives in Florida, yet he distinguishes himself as somehow other than a Florida retiree. And he will continue to do so even though he is Mr. Bingo. That's funny. He cannot enunciate for shit, such that when a friend would telephone the house and Dad would answer, the friend would almost invariably ask, once we got on the phone, "Did I wake up your father?" and ask timidly, because he's scary-sounding too. Yet he has to call letters and numbers clearly enough that a bunch of Florida retirees can understand him. That's funny too. So CLH laughed. I wouldn't've laughed, for fear of hurting his feelings. It makes me a fairly boring conversationalist. CLH, on the other hand, knew she could tease him without hurting his feelings, so did.
One night we went to the Top of the Hub to eat. I had been to the top of the Pru (and the Hancock) several times, but I had never eaten there. I have to have a clothing tangent here--it becomes pertinent (to me) later on. When I dressed Saturday morning in a short natural linen unwaisted skirt, I discovered my sleeveless button-down L.L. Bean shirt was stained. CLH lent me a fitted short-sleeved ribbed t-shirt. Fitted, as in would betray my belly if I forewent sucking it in and would inescapably betray the fact of my bosom. I wore it, having recently realized (or decided) that baggy is only acceptable over skinny, because baggy over bulge makes you look fatter where fitted over not actually fat yet but not skinny either just makes me look like me. CLH said that I looked like an After photograph in "What Not to Wear." That made me happy. For dinner, I wore my own long ivory sueded Nearly Perfect Skirt (only nearly because there's a seam down the center) and another loan from my sister of a fitted three-quarter sleeved (which I pushed above the elbow because I am only human), ribbed, slightly shiny, scoop-necked shirt. When I emerged, she said, "I don't think I've ever seen you look sexier." Whoo! "It reminds me of a day I was home from college, in the early summer, and I saw you out the kitchen window walking to the clothesline in this white bathing suit. It must have been the year everything changed about you, because I exclaimed something or other and BJWL looked out at you and back and me and said 'yep.'" I told her, laughing, that I remember that white bathing suit; on the day she remembers I would have been 16 or 17 (I was a late bloomer). I tried to find it again for years and I only just recently ditched white as my tank bathing suit color in deference to it. Its primary attraction for me was that it had side panels of dense mesh so I tanned on my sides too, though less.
There were plans for Walden Pond or a whalewatch, and the weather was so beautiful it might have been criminal to stay in the city and not be near water, but it was a really good time with my sister. Also I got to pay for meals with her--but I still carried everything. We decided that I am a camel in a china shop. One of my mother's more frequent exclamations is that I am a bull in a china shop. Since historically CLH has paid and I have carried, I have been the camel for years. Thus, camel in a china shop. My family role. I'll see if ACOA has such a listing.
Tuesday I dropped CLH off at her new job downtown, before sunrise even, and was on my way. At 8:30 in Old Lyme, I looked for breakfast but it didn't happen. Hallmark's offers it only on weekends, and a couple of other places weren't open yet. I miss the Lymelight. But I got to the beach before 9.
I walked out to Griswold Point, or what's left of it. There are curves of sea grass where land used to be. What land remains was covered in cormorants and sea gulls and plovers and terns and there no dogs can get at them, but there's less habitat overall. It was stunning and gorgeous and perfect in every way, breezy and sunny and warm in the sun and cool in the breeze and when I got back to the town beach I dove in. Lordy. I have not been at the beach in September for some years. The day after BJWL's wedding, I invited folks to the beach and TJZ came and ABW came with baby NKW, but it was cloudy and chilly. This was perfect.
People swim in artificial water for exercise and to cool off. Does anyone go into fake water to enjoy being in the water? I don't see how, the dosed water feels so wrong against skin. This was something else. This was perfect. I swam with no fear of jellyfish or jetskis, I floated in salt, I bounced in the strange formations called "waves" that Old Lyme only gets in September (and presumably over the winter, but even I swim only May through September).
When I started shivering I got out and lay in the sun until I decided dehydration and hunger weren't helping me to warm up. By this time the new café across from Phoebe was open, so I had a tomato and cheese bagel and a liter of water and shivered at a patio table in the sun as I read the paper. When I ordered, hugging my arms to myself and turtling my head into my shoulders, the proprietor asked, I think incredulously, if I was cold. It was a gorgeous day in the 70s by now--how could anyone be cold? "I just got out of the water," I told her. The wet hair might have been a give-away, but maybe not: there are showers. I went into Phoebe, listening to the grandfather clock strike the hour, looking through the children's collection, glancing at the new adult fiction, before heading to my main goal, the old reading room. I nodded to Phoebe, still smiling her Mona Lisa smile over the fireplace, and breathed. Eh: it's air-conditioned now, so no real air even in the summer. The geneaology room smells right, at least: no air conditioning can combat books that old.
Then I hied me to Uncas. The road is passable! One of Connecticut's means to balance its budget is to "return certain parks to a natural state," i.e., a reduction in services. There were never any services in Nehantic State Forest anyway, praise be, except to pave, in the most slapdash way, the road. It's now dirt and the smoothest drive I have ever had there. I spent four hours there, sunning and swimming and reading and looking at the sky through the leaves* and being almost entirely alone. Once two men arrived, which made me a little skeevey, but the older just told the younger about fishing here and then they left; another time when I was in the water a man showed up with a baby in a front-pack and a dog on a leash and soon left. Later a family came paddling by in a canoe. No smokers, no screaming kids, no one else in the long term. Peace. Water and sun and utter quiet. Not silence, because of the wind in the trees and the birds, but quiet, with just the wind in the trees and the birds: perfect.
My mother got out of work at 3 so I headed for the house. I remember this as an unstressful half hour, anyway. ABW showed up with her two boys, my mother went off to an optometrist appointment, and ABW and I gave the boys a choice: the beach, with waves and better castle-building sand, or a lake with warmer water and a playground and not very good sand. They opted for lake, so we went to Haynes Park at Roger's Lake, and thank goodness it was after Labor Day or my willy-nilly parking in town lots at beach and lake couldn't've happened. My mother and I would occasionally swim in Roger's Lake, but up in Town Woods, when she didn't want to drive all the way to Uncas, but I haven't been in the shallow, tepid water at Haynes Park since Hurricane Gloria, when after three days of yard clean-up and no electricity I biked over with a bar of Ivory. We attempted to build castles (too coarse a grain), to volley a ball in lacrosse-y baskets, and to seesaw. A 150-pound woman can teeter but not totter when at the opposite end are a 7- and a 4-year old. They scrunched waaaay back and I sat waaaay forward, ahead of the handle and nearly at the fulcrum, and that worked somewhat better. But not much. And then someone dumped a bucket of water on me, so then it was war! After a staggeringly healthy dinner at Hallmark's (fries and a mocha shake for me), they dropped me off at the house and ABW set off with a cargo of exuberantly yelling boys.
I spent the evening with my mother and BDL and that seems to have been fine too. Tedious as usual, but no tenser than usual. It was only after I reminded my mother of my plans for the rest of the week that the stress level ratcheted up, or that's how I remember it now. I had told her that I was traveling to see other people, Charenton and RPR and TJZ, who had guests or a trip to Vermont or baptisms that precluded their coming to UncasCon, but she didn't pay attention or believe or whatever. Now, this makes sense: hurt that I chose to spend so little of my time with her, she acted hurtly, and I got mad for feeling however guilty I felt, and maybe guilty for not feeling guiltier, and the vicious cycle continues.
My mother had Wednesday day off and so I had asked her for Wednesday and (not through) Saturday. This was agreeable, and we spent several hours of Wednesday together. I woke at 7:00 to find the car in the driveway but the house empty, including the cellar, where by this time I did not want to find her collapsed. Nor at the clothesline nor in the camper but finally around the front of the house weeding. She did not garden at all when I was growing up, and it's nice that she is now. One of the awkwardnesses in conversation is that she is so focused on her chemical-induced successes and proud of the open spaces created by murdering perfectly healthy century-old hardwood trees. I cannot encourage chemicals or slaughter, nor do I criticize (to her face, behind her back being so very much more admirable), so I am left with "Ah" and "This is a very large tomato" and similar inanities.
Over breakfast my mother (asked to see and) looked at some of my photographs of the house and garden and of southwest Colorado last month and of Emlet in May. She declined help in the creation of pancakes but glanced at me where I sat at the dining table assembling an iPhoto album to demand that I smile, Lisa! Because when someone isn't smiling, for whatever reason, decreeing that she do so is kind and effective. She showed me Granny's photograph albums and allowed me to select a few--so now I have family photographs from both sides! She had already let CLH go through them and I lusted after one on CLH's wall, of Granny in her 20s perched laughing and leggy on the hood of a car. This is why I need a scanner, so all of us can have all of them.
Then we went to the beach and walked farther than BJWL had ever been, past the sundial even. I showed her where Griswold Point used to be and remarked on the cormorants, which I don't remember seeing before. She said they have always been around. Maybe they have and I used to think they were loons, because I knew loons swim low in the water. But loons are farther north and fresh water. I wasn't much of a birder before I moved to Colorado--but wait (it occurs to me now, almost two weeks later): if, as she herself said, she had never been past the sundial into the bird sanctuary, how would she know whether cormorants had always been there? It was another spectacular, crisp, sunny, breezy, exactly warm enough day.
But not one that couldn't be improved by criticism. I picked up some litter, a shotgun casing and other bits of plastic, as I had the day before both here and at Uncas. She actually asked why I was doing that. "Because it doesn't belong here?" I responded, surprised why? at the question. She tsk'd about how dirty it must be--she was picking up seashells from the same beach--and forbad it on her property and didn't know why I should do it. "It's everyone's responsibility," I said, evenly: I am much less likely to make like a blowfish--puffy and spiky--at her concerning unmotherlydaughterly things, especially things as impersonal as litter, and particularly when I am perfectly confident that I am doing right.
I left at 4. RPR had called to change her day, and when I called Charenton to change their day, JUMB said that was swell--though she wouldn't say swell--and if I arrived in time could I accompany her in her car to the garage and drive her home. Of course.
I stopped just north of Norwich to gas up, and this is when the vacation took a u-turn. I think I mean that in the U-Haul sense, not in the shape sense. I pushed the button in the door panel that released the fueling door, a feature new to me, and I thought the button should have popped back up but then figured maybe it wouldn't until I clicked the gas cap closed--CLH had told me you have to turn it past where it feels shut. I gassed up, I turned the gas cap and clicked it closed, I closed the fuel door (mistake number two). When I got back into the cabin, the button had not popped back up. I tried to manipulate it up, but, ham-fingered as I am, managed only to dislodge it entirely from its mount. There was now a gaping hole in the door panel. Huh.
I drove to Charenton, JUMB and I drove to Tony's and dropped off her car and asked the mechanic to look at mine. He tried the ignition key a couple of ways as a work-around, but no dice. If I would leave the car there, he could try to fix it, but he had a full day tomorrow so he couldn't promise it would be done then. Huh.
I drove us back to Charenton, at which point the fuel gauge read 3/4. Norwich to Charenton to garage to Charenton: one quarter of a tank. Yoikes. I didn't remember how much gas I had leaving Boston, but clearly until the door was fixed I couldn't leave Storrs, not even to drive three towns north to see RPR, nor drive anywhere but Boston. I calculated: I would drive to the garage in the morning and walk to campus--three or four miles?--and walk back at the end of the day. JUMB suggested that LEB might be able to pick me up from the garage, and I called and of course she was willing to do this. So I tried to put i broke my sister's car out of my mind for the time being and enjoy my evening at Charenton.
We had shad and conversation and JUMB's bread and APB's stories and conversation and tarte aux poires and pictures of Emlet's visit in August and of the play ZBD had written and directed (full of princesses and dragons, of course), starring SPG, and conversation. My heart went pitter-pat: I had gorgeous weather and good swimming but no Emlet, no Nisou, no SPG, and now maybe no RPR and MPR, TJZD and RED and Soulmate, or UncasCon. I proudly showed my pictures of Bump-bump and Granny and got to explain how Bump-bump got his name (he bumped foreheads with CLH, whom he adored, and she named him), and APB brought out some of theirs going back four generations, and we hot-tubbed under a full moon and a blazing Mars. And I woke up even before the rooster, an efficient sort who crowed while it was still pitch dark.
In the morning JUMB presented me with Charenton's own "Pretty Virgin" maple syrup and dosed me with coffee and sent me on my way. I had to tell the mechanic I didn't know what year the car was, or what its plate number was--though it was probably the only one with Massachusetts plates--and he had to tell me he didn't know if he would be able to work on it that day. If I had arrived as a stranger instead of under the wing of a regular customer, I would have had no hope, I think. Leaving the car was hard: not that I could fix it myself, but this put it totally out of my hands. LEB picked me up and off we went to campus, where, I realized, I would spend more consecutive hours than I had since 1994.
The new office spaces completely threw me. There are holes through floors--deliberate ones--for air and light. And televisions in the old library (office space since before me). I greeted my former cronies and got the schedule for the only undergraduate I know, the middle child of the woman whose illness inspired me to donate my hair, because I had promised to look her up, but I was in no mood to chat with anyone, let alone a 19-year-old woman whom I haven't seen since before her mother died. Then I found publicly available computers, one with a nearby plug for my phone, now sad and voiceless. I emailed everyone I knew was coming to UncasCon, canceling because of uncertain transportation and expecting my sister to be mad that I broke her car, and stressed at RDC by phone. He suggested not stressing, and finding a VW dealership nearby who might have more experience or at least knowledge of how to bypass the broken switch, and also not stressing. The closest VW place was in Glastonbury, for pity's sake, in the opposite direction from Boston, and claimed to be available no sooner than two weeks out and in that case only for cars purchased there. The serviceman did tell me how a mechanic could get to the gas door through the trunk, anyway. That made me hopeful I could fuel the fucker.
I am a little too good at stressing and a little not good at anything else. And behind me the televisions displayed memorials, because it was Thursday, September 11th, and so I got to feel even guiltier for being so self-involved on such a day.
Emailing was time-consuming. The web interface for penguindust takes so damn long and has no spam filters and sifting through 450 headers looking for the 15 I wanted was more than I wanted to deal with. I didn't think to, say, ask anyone I emailed for a phone number, but then, I wasn't going to have access again to retrieve replies anyway. I canceled immediately instead of later because I was...overly stressing? or just being efficient and taking responsibility for the situation? Whatever. Possibly mistake number three, but probably I should stop enumerating them.
I had left the car to be serviced, I had let everyone know who needed to know, and I needed to get away from the televisions and out into the sun. I had been told, but forgot, that English is no longer in JHA (which is going to be demolished, along with HRM, long the two ugliest buildings on campus, hooray for instance of Change is Good!). I climbed to the third floor and immediately sensed Change. Aha, it now houses Linguistics. No wonder the doors are boring and undecorated. (I was traumatized by a Linguistics professor. I know now that the subject matter is interesting, but he did his best to disguise that fact). So I scampered to the new building, which houses English, Statistics, and Geography, which subjects all complement each other quite logically. Enough of all the foreign languages and Journalism being in the same building as English! What sense did that make?)
I found the office, I tracked down the bulletin board listing the professors, their office hours and room numbers and class times. Happily, RJH had office hours right then. I scampered downstairs and found his door ajar. I rapped, he called, "Come in!" and, OMFB, we were both ecstatic at the sight of each other. Though we're both lousy correspondents, as he said, "It feels like we were friends in another lifetime," because time and distance drop away when we're together. How I do adore him.
Ironic, innit, that nothing has changed in 12 years, that I still invade his office to compel him to entertain and shepherd me through various emotional crises. This time, again, he was talking me down from the same sort of nauseous panic: if Change Is Bad, well, then, good, because that hasn't changed. And, of course and always, he makes me laugh. I suggested he record it so his office would sound right.
I had to tell RJH this one: The courtyard in the Gardner is amazing. All bluey-lavender and white flowers, a mosaic patio, statuary, a fountain; it's just beautiful. CLH and I stood and gazed for a long time, and we looked at it from every window as we passed through the rooms. French windows (RDC said, "In France they probably just call them 'windows'" but Nisou tells me they are portes-fenêtres, door-windows) overlook the courtyard from almost every room, and as we looked out from the Dutch or the Italian room, CLH said, "Quote something from 'Room with a View.'" So I did, exactly in context because that's how much of a freak I am: "Come away from the window, Lucy, you will be seen!"
*Two days later at Uncas, of course this one repeated itself frequently: "My father says the only perfect view is of the sky over our heads." (It might be "real," not "perfect.")
RJH responded that his favorite line is "Excuse me, my dear, but it seems to me, you're in a bit of a muddle." This he left in the carel in the library where I worked for him, in Latin for me to English out, one very long time ago. And mine is "But I've got to go to Greece! The ticket's bought and everything!" And the wonderful thing about RJH is that he knows exactly why that's my favorite: that reasoning is why I entered the grad program.
We talked and laughed and he wrote a quiz and I read and he went to class and I walked up to the top of Cemetery Hill to kill some time before RCD got out of her class. I hadn't been up there since…probably RDC's and my farewell lap around campus, if then, but likely years before.
After I left RJH's office for the last time, in the later afternoon, I was after food, my first since a slight breakfast, and news of the car, and books. I stopped in LEB's office for the third or fourth time, but the garage still hadn't called. While LEB and I gossiped, the garage did call. The car was fixed. I should have pulled the levery button up instead of down (mistake number one), but it was fixed, a simple matter of popping the door panel off and resetting the thing. It was all okay. The relief was abrupt and physical and I didn't even try not to tremble.
LEB offered to drive me to the garage right then, but I felt grovel-y enough with the two shuttlings that I could not have her disrupt her day more. I called JUMB ("all okay") and RPR ("tonight is a go"). I bought a couple of Clif Bars and apple juice, because apple juice is what I drink when I'm miserable. Possessed of cell coverage, I called RDC and then my sister.
I had avoided that last step out of trepidation. But CLH was not at all mad. Well, she was, at Volkswagen, because the button had broken before, and her dealership--just like the one in Glastonbury, though without the excuse that it didn't come from there--also said "two weeks," until she--contrary to me in similar situations, evidently--got in someone's face and reminded him that one of the car's selling points was the dealership's service. Even though I pressed instead of pulled the lever, she didn't think it was my fault.
In front of the Benton Museum, under trees, near a trickling fountain, I slowly ate and drank and talked to my sister. She outright commanded me to use the car as she had intended me to do and to stop beating myself up.
So. I canceled to be responsible, I didn't try to uncancel because I thought that would be presumptuous. I went back and forth on this. A lot. Which I will spare you, gentle reader.
I got to RPR's house and talked to the barking dogs. I met the new puppy and admired how he seems to be extending the older dog's vivacity. She showed me all that they've done to the house and I admired the lovely painting job I did on the staircase last summer (I think I only primed it). We talked about the impending Little Stranger (hooray!) and I admired its little kidney-beanness with a thread of spine in the ultrasound. It is a remarkable thing, an ultrasound. Also I patted her not-yet belly and later rubbed her back until she went to sleep. It is interesting to me how different women take to pregnancy. I admire or sympathize or just observe quite happily from the sidelines. If the dogs are any indication, she is going to have the most well-behaved child ever. She picked up two treats, and the dogs ran out to their kennel and sat down to await their treats. At bed-time, she picked up two treats, and the puppy ran for his crate and the older for his pillow and they both sat down to await their treats and immediately lay down to sleep. It was a little freaky, but being owned by a whiny, overly indulged cockatiel, I can only wish and delude myself.
I was completely oblivious to MPR's arrival late that night, but again I woke absurdly early, a bodily manifestation of stress. I got to witness one of their Who's on First routines before we all left for work or errands or breakfast with RJH in Willi (me). I tore myself away from that gabfest well in time to get to Old Lyme before my mother's noon lunch period. She was unavailable, so I took myself back to the beach for another flawless afternoon. I made almost no progress with Goldbug Variations because it was much more important to watch the waves. The wind was strong enough that I avoided swimming for fear of freezing to death after I got out, but then I saw an older man splash in. If he could do it, I could, and so I did. It was, of course, wonderful and bracing and restorative, and when I got out I froze and put on my fleece and lay in the sun.
The first call I had made on Thursday was to TJZD, because she lives way the hell west, opposite to Boston. If I might have risked a return to Old Lyme, no way would I venture to Fairfield County. CLH specifically commanded me to go visit her, and I did. Perhaps I would have reinstated UncasCon if also specifically instructed? Anyway. The drive down was fine except just east of New Haven, where construction jammed traffic. I had water, patience, loud music, and an automatic transmission, so I was fine.
I saw pictures of Soulmate as a little boy where he looks exactly like RED. When I complimented Soulmate on RED's charming adventuresomeness and winning grin, he said it was mostly to TJZD's credit. But I had seen photographs and even a chalk painting, and he had a lot to do with this baby. The five of us, the three adults and the baby and the dog, walked to the playground of a nearby school, where we accidentally crashed the back-to-school picnic, and then another grouping, TJZD and I and her 13-year-old neighbor and her best friend, went to a carnival at her school, with cheap rides and rip-off games and a white elephant sale. We sent the girls off to ride nauseating rides and laughed at ourselves when we realized we would rather spend our time at the tag sale.
True to all church white elephant sales, the scariest things in the world lurked in wait. The most disturbing was a foot-high statuette of a child who looked like a Precious Moments reject and had entirely black, glass eyes, like Charles Wallace's on Camazotz (except black, not blue), like spice-eaters of Dune (more appropriate than Camazotz, because it was the whole eye), like Quint's description of a shark's eyes, "black, lifeless, like a doll's eyes." When we returned later to show it to the girls, someone had actually faced the hideous thing to the wall of the tent, which we should have thought to do. Yeah. So instead of riding rides (but I have never liked rides with spinning within spinning, even before I became such a grown-up), we mocked tchotchkes. We're old.
Not so old that I couldn't talk books with the girls. The neighbor had a bearded dragon, so we could talk about Holes; and she was about to start Walk Two Moons, which I praised possibly more highly than Holes; and the younger's mother was pregnant with her when the mothers met at the older's baby shower, so I told them about Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; and one talked about a principal's unfairness and plus they were best friends, so I recommended Bad Girls.
In the morning I drove through pissing, peeing, or at least slobbering rain back to Old Lyme.
When I got back to the house at 9:41, my mother and her husband were just getting into the car to leave. If I had bothered to communicate with her since Wednesday afternoon I would have learned that Granny's sister-in-law's funeral was Saturday morning. As it was, they were about to head off and my mother asked if I would get in the car right then and go with them.
"I have nothing even vaguely appropriate to wear," I said, my clothing for the week being my beloved grey sweatskirt (currently), short natural linen skirt, long ivory skirt, and overalls.
"She won't care, but just put some feet on, we'll be late." I also hadn't showered since Friday afternoon, wasn't wearing underwear of any sort, and hadn't washed my hair since Thursday morning. Possibly, to honor my great-aunt's memory, attending her funeral even as I was would have been better than not attending. More probably, I should have called my mother to let her know my movements: she continued to expect me home every night despite the itinerary I had given her as recently as Wednesday. Also, I can change in a moving car as well as the next person and so could have swapped comfy for nice if not funereal, but my mother's husband would not have had a heart attack if I had put on a bra in front of him--in the back seat and without exposing myself would count as in front of him.
Being able to blame my nonattendance on superficial reasons of wardrobe or on my rudeness or on my callousness is better for my mother to do than to know the ulterior, ultimate reason: even if I had been close to this great-aunt, even if I had been clean and dressed, even if going wouldn't mean sacrificing last minutes at the beach, in no case would I have voluntarily entered that car to be engulfed in the clouds of my mother's Miasma (I don't know her scent, but that's a fitting name).
Whew. I let myself into the house and closed off my nose and eyes as I got a glass of water and the phone.
Outside, I called AAC. Having canceled UncasCon, and with its being rained out anyway, I did the same as I did at UConn on Thursday, see more people longer than I otherwise could have. She was only too pleased to have a reason not to do her painting project and I cleaned up and was on my way. Possibly I project onto my three girls the head-shakingness I felt when my mother installed the second bathroom in her house years after my sister and I left: the house they grew up in was small for three kids, while this new one is roomy but inhabited by only 40% as many people as lived in the previous. And it is lovely and spacious and lofty and gorgeous and meant to look like a barn, with salvaged 100-year-old beams throughout and lots of open space, and a nautical mood to the decor. A set of drawers in the kitchen is shallow but wide and deep, for table linens and silverware, and AAC was pleased it recalled to my mind a map chest. She was also proud that I knew the purpose of the faucet over the stove (though without a drain as well, is a pot-filler so necessary? I guess it saves 50% of water-lugging).
AAC was an excellent baby-sitting mother by asking if I had pictures of the house, since RKC had said it was so charming. She spotted the album entitled "Blake" and looked at him, and she laughed at the one called "Nieces and Nephews," since none of those people is a blood relative, and she laughed further when she saw I had pictures of my sister's cat among them.
And of course, I got the latest dish on my girls.
My mother said they'd be home before 2:00, so I made sure to be back by then. I considered a detour to Uncas, but I had already canceled on everyone and my insanity does not extend to swimming in cold rain. Warm rain, maybe. So instead I went to the beach, where it was not raining. Really it was a good trip beachwise, because for years I have been home only in the summer when jellyfish make Long Island Sound not so nice for swimming. I returned to the house and was repacking my bags on the deck in between raindrops when they returned.
I apologized for not calling. Her expectations for my tenure in Old Lyme were delusional, and I had told her my schedule, but since I knew she had these expectaions and wouldn't register anything to the contrary, I should have kept her informed--silly me, telling her a thing only once and acting accordingly instead of calling to counter repetitious "but I thought you were staying here"s. She told me about her various family and I told her about mine, and her criticisms of me continued, and I continued to neither lash back (yet) nor learn how to deflect it.
Wearing a tank top, I was shaking out a canvas bag over the deck railing and my mother said nothing about particles of beach sand destroying her loam, which was good, but she did say, disdainfully, "You certainly do have your father's shoulders." If I were male she would not find so much fault with however true that observation is. And would she have me be craven-shouldered? Into this bag I put clothes for Sunday and toothbrush and syrup Charenton had given me and jam my mother'd given me. Clothes out and backpack crammed in, it would be my carryon. "Oh, so that's how you pack clothes, is it?"
I wish she would just outright say: "I don't like the way you pack your clothes" or "You look like a slob all wrinkledy like that" (this the woman who thought utter slovenliness suitable for a funeral) or "I just don't like you so I'm going to pick you apart bit by bit but I still don't understand why you don't spend more time with me." But then, I also cannot, or do not, say, "Ma, your constant criticism pisses me right the fuck off and hurts me to boot."
Except that I did. Wednesday at the beach, she asked, "Why aren't you wearing your hair in that nice style I saw back in January?"
I seethed. I said, "It's the same exact fucking cut it was in January. It's in a ponytail because we're at the beach." Then I tried a diversionary tactic and continued, "Actually my haircutter wants to take it two inches shorter, but I've refused so far."
"Is that why you jumped down my throat?" Woohoo, she actually called me on my tone and cussing! However, I don't think I'm unreasonable to infer that she thereby tried to blame my alleged defensiveness on my haircutter rather than on herself.
"No, it's not. If you can't hear the criticism inherent in your question, you're deafer than I think. Try to rephrase it."
She fumbled but couldn't do it. I explained to her that her saying my hair isn't in "that nice style" works out to mean she thinks it's in a not-nice style and it is not a pleasant or positive or necessary comment. She denied this. Whatever.
Friday night I mentioned this exchange to TJZD as an example of my mother's usual criticism and my, for once, instead of only seething at her, trying to explain my problem with her statement right then, instead of later in a letter when she'd call it "dwelling" instead of "a response carefully thought out and not in the heat of the moment." TJZD said her mother would say the exact same thing and think it a compliment, because after all she's saying something nice about you--though eight months ago and in contrast to now. We laughed.
So on Saturday after the clothes-packing crack I told my mother about telling that to TJZD and that how her mother would think it was a compliment. "Well, it is a compliment," BJWL interrupted.
"Of how I looked eight months ago," I pointed out again. "It's negative now." CLH got the logic immediately as well.
The other day I heard someone correct a child who said, "[Whoever's] mother brang us." She corrected, "She brought you." In the first sentence of the paragraph, is it clear enough that "whoever" is an indefinite pronoun, that I don't remember a name which is not pertinent to my point? My mother said something about funerals being a chance to see family. (She didn't mean that the reunion element superseded the mourning and consolation elements.) I agreed, commenting that on several occasions when I have seen someone's pleasant, even rather smiley, photograph of a large family group and asked the occasion, they'll say, "It was someone's funeral, but that was the last time we were all together." She followed my sentence with this question: "Oh, They forgot whose funeral it was?" She is mind-numbingly difficult to communicate with. I told her, in dulcet tones of annoyance, that the subject of the funeral was immaterial to my point, which was in fact to agree with her, that funerals are occasions when everyone is together so let's take a photograph of all the cousins. If people actually wore somber colors to funerals I might not mistake such photographs for ordinary family gatherings anyway, which is another thing.
Why is it, when my mantra otherwise in life is "Change is bad," that I so fervently hope it can be brought about in my mother?
Then I wasn't staying in Old Lyme long enough this day to suit her either. I might have stayed longer, but there was a game at Fenway and so I would have to get to Boston early enough to find a neighborhood parking space. "But CLH has a parking space behind her building," she protested, since I am an habitual liar. I didn't say "not anymore" because that would be telling her my sister's business and defending myself from false accusation, which I endeavor not to (want to) do. My other option was to arrive after the game, but I was tired. Weary from beating myself up over apparently nothing, from regretting that I had canceled UncasCon and wouldn't see HEBD and ZBD, and from sleeping poorly and eating worse. I was weary, and I was ready to go home.
I had Jessie's number and considered calling her and trying to get in touch with Molly to put together an impromptu BostonCon, but, driving, I realized that I was too tired even to drive, let alone go out and be merry and not talk about my mother all at the same time. For slumming and slandering, I wanted only my sister.
CLH and I ate potato skins plus I dug through all the various candy she keeps in a silver wine bucket looking for the chocolate stuff. Tragically, a lot of the chocolates had picked up the flavor of the powerful Wint-O-Green Lifesavers. (Note to self: exclude Wint-o-Green from future stockings in favor of chocolates.)
Also tragically (after the chocolates), Kitty's new name is Benedict Kitty. CLH and I were watching the Lana Turner "Postman Always Rings Twice" and I was rubbing her scalp when Kitty deigned to join us and lay down along my leg, not CLH's. In the morning, when I picked her up to say goodbye and made kissy noises, she gave me little kitty kisses back even long enough for photographic proof. Then CLH tried the same thing but Kitty would have none of it. It must be that cats are evil, as everyone knows, because otherwise, since CLH is the good daughter and I the bad, Kitty would like CLH better.
The Chicago leg was only normal, but when I emerged I saw a flight to Denver at the next gate in 15 minutes, rather than in the next concourse in 90 minutes, as I had scheduled. I scored an exit window on the earlier and called RDC to tell him and finally finished Goldbug Variations, damn. We arrived in Denver almost 30 minutes earlier than expected, so RDC hadn't left the house yet. I trained from B to A concourse, because you have to, and walked from A to the terminal, because I had time.
RDC and I arrived at the arrivals area at just about the same time, and I carefully held in my belly to give the full effect of the Perfect Skirt and the Okay, Okay, I Admit That I Have Breasts Shirt as he drove up. I expected to do the hug-kiss thing once I got in the front seat, but no, he got out and came around to the back. This was not because he was bowled over by the sight of me but so that I could get the full effect of him.
He grew a Van Dyke in the ten days of my absence.
After RDC picked me up, we went out for lunch. That was enough for him for the day but later I heated up some pasta with marinara. Of course Blake needed to share so I rinsed off a piece for him, a bit of pasta the length and diameter of the outer two joints of my thumb, which he ate all of. The residue of sauce had enough garlic in it to give Blake severe garlic breath--a first for him and an experience we don't want to repeat, since he spends so much of his time on our shoulders--for more than a day.
RDC grew the van dyke for a joke, and yep, I was startled. It wasn't quite long enough not to be scratchy when I first experienced it, and I opined that if he didn't hate it, it might be amusing to let it go for another week, past scratchiness. I think he was really looking forward to my coming home not just because I'd be coming home but also so he could finally thoroughly shave. It was scratchy on the inside, as well as on the outside, and he removed it little more than a day later. I was relieved, yes indeedy.
Today I wore pants. Yes, it's true. Back in July I went on a second shopping expedition that I didn't mention, it being less than a week after the shopping spree that I did kind of mention. I went to the Colorado Mills, which is an entire "mall" of "outlets." I ventured into the Geoffrey Beene store because three years ago my sister gave me a shirt from there, dark lavender polished cotton, that I absolutely adore. One of the things on my mental list of staples was a pair of khakis to replace the frayed, seven-year-old ones from the Gap. I tried a pair of actually fashionable rather than conservatively traditional pants. They have no waist band, which is a fine thing in my head. They are flat-fronted, which should make Haitch happy. They fit, not quite snugly, but certainly more fittedly than I usually allow. They are also, OMFB, size 8, which makes Geoffrey Beene my favorite source of sizing inflation.
Today I finally wore them (with the GB shirt). Egg looked at me and exclaimed that I looked nice today. I said, "I'm wearing pants!" kind of proudly, the way I claimed that I grew a lot overnight and she realized that yes, this certainly was a momentous occasion. Also I figured out the first element of the "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" drinking game: you have to drink every time Carson says "pant" for "pants."
Also Egg is leaving. At the end of September. I am bereft.
I have accompanied RDC before on his semiannual expeditions for clothes but not this time and perhaps not again until I find an equivalent store for me, where the stock is stylish and high quality, where there are clothing and shoes, where a salesperson will assist you and a tailor fit you, yet you still have all your arms and legs when you leave.
Instead I sat across the street, on a patio under a tree, drinking coffee and petting dogs and reading Dostoyevsky. I did check on him once after my initial errand, a new bra. I found him with two saleswomen and a table covered with a new jacket, trousers, shirts. I really liked the jacket and said so, then left to him to what would have been, for me, wolves except that he is good at dealing with pushy salespeople and that, at that store, helping you is actually their job instead of an imposition.
I did have a salesperson fit me before I looked for the stupid harness. I felt like I couldn't breathe in the band size she assigned me, and speak not to me of demi-cup or push-up bras, which should be called push-out. I found another of the sort I like, in the size I say I am rather than that she thought I was (I say bigger band, smaller cup size). Dunno what happened to the previous one, probably nailed up over a bar somewhere.
Neither of us expected to be thrilled by John Singer Sargent, me because he did a lot of portraits and RDC because he's too close to an Impressionist. We did go, finally on the last day, and while we weren't thrilled, a couple of paintings stood out: the play of light on water in Venice canals, the intensity of sun reflecting down an icy, stony, wet mountainside into your eyes, the corner of a building rendered rapidly but with much detail in watercolor.
We spent most of the afternoon downtown, wandering and eating and reading, an ideal last day of summer. We glanced at Oktoberfest in Larimer Square: the featured beer was Coors. Bah. We read and browsed at the Tattered Cover. I came away with Embers, which someone back east mentioned; and The Parrot's Theorem, which I think is going to do with mathematics what Sophie's World did for philosophy, and of course I picked it up because of the title. I started it over a late lunch at the Wynkoop (even though I had Crime and Punishment in my bag) and interrupted RDC's reading Al Franken by exclaiming that a parrot can't eat two pounds of Brie in one go and also about the maths. It's translated from French into British English, and I appreciate that it thereby keeps a foreign flavor and it's why I just said "maths" instead of "math." Or maybe I'm rebelling against Carson.
I put a coat of paint on the new beams of the porch as soon as I got home. Just as I finished cleaning that, RDC had dinner ready (dorado, which is the new, Spanish name for the dolphin fish since its English name had obvious problems and its Pacific name, mahi-mahi, never caught on, with sun-dried tomatoes and wine and pine nuts, and yellow squash, and brown rice), and after I cleaned up that and cleaned up myself, I was done. A hint that I haven't been getting enough exercise: cramps really hurt.
Blake and I retreated to the living room with Westword, Ms., Harper's, and Crime and Punishment. The first three were fine but in the novel people were speechifying about whether commission of crimes is ever justified and I wasn't paying enough attention. So I resorted to television. I had recorded, heaven help me, some unreality shows, "Trading Spaces" and "Queer Eye" and a new one, "Clean Sweep." They are why TiVo was invented, but I hope even if I had 'flu (why is it given an initial apostrophe, for the in-, but not a final one, for the -enza?) I wouldn't watch these start to finish. I do like make-overs, but to see those all I need is the last five* minutes, muted. This is true for "What Not to Wear" as well. The process in Queer Eye, unlike that in the others, is still vaguely amusing, and it is the only one on which I can see a drinking game based: you drink every time Carson says "pant" instead of "pants." Didn't I already say this?
* Edited two days later: I first wrote "last final" because of final and five peskily sounding alike, also because I clearly have been tainted by Spirit Airlines announcing its "last and final boarding call."
Panic in the dining room roused me from sleep. A dream delayed my waking and disorientation delayed my actually getting up, and apparently I was still half asleep when I extricated myself from the covers: the first foot on the floor skidded forward from underneath me, the other leg was still in the bed, and down I went, all my weight on the folded joint of my hip, making me gladder I'm not older or weaker. Calling to Blake all the while, I found my feet and made them go, found the dining room switch and light flared out, found the covers of the cage and yanked them off. Supporting myself on the back of a dining chair, I was on the hinge side of the cage door when I opened it, and so when Blake fled the phantasms in his cage, he flew away from me and landed heaving on the hard floor. I limped to pick him up and tried to cuddle him, but he wouldn't make himself so vulnerable as to close his eyes and present his head for petting. We sat, waiting for his breathing to slow, his pulse to calm, his posture to relax, his plumage to fluff enough that I could not see his eyes from behind, waiting for me to see if I still worked. I crooned to him and gradually his crest lowered. I was quite ready to go back to bed, but he did his various Cockatiel Evasive Maneuvers to avoid stepping off my hand onto his perch.
More cuddling, more crooning, more maneuvering, until I was merciless. He stood on his perch, leaning down to look at whatever monster had arisen from the floor, in a scared little stance that made me feel crueler, and I turned down the light for him to settle down for a minute before I recovered him and returned to bed. I don't know how long he stays awake after one of his nightfrights, but I was awake for a long time.
This morning I was surprised to find myself almost not sore, and not bruised at all. But it's a reminder to keep up my bone mass density.
Someone in an online forum I skim linked to a smut story. Sometimes the spoken flavor of its written words works, sometimes not. Sometimes a grammatical error--not a stylistic nuance--flares out and trips the narrative flow, as here: Someone has told the narrator he reminded her of a basenji. "What she was referring to I guess was my ears, which basenjis, according to the little picture in the dictionary, have big ones and so do I."
That's what I call a which splice. There are comma splices, someone joins two independent clauses with a comma and calls them a sentence. The previous sentence is an example of a comma splice. The which splice is a similar animal, in which the speaker conscripts the "which" as a conjunction. The clause following the "which" may or may not be independent grammatically, but it is usually dependent in thought, as in the Basenji example.
I have not yet come across the which splice in a standard publication. In speech, yes; and then in personal email, where in my experience writing follows speech patterns more than it does in longhand; and now in writing not traditionally published but paid for and on the web.
I don't claim to be a genius of logical syntax and pristine grammar myself. I just found, and I thought had admitted here but I guess not, an email, a posting to an online discussion group, in which I said, "The words now in my head is 'poser' and 'cheat.'" (I was talking about Barbara Ehrenreich, not another journaler, sorry no gossip here.) I think I wrote the sentence with one predicate nominative, decided it needed another, added the other and the -s to "word," but didn't think to change the verb. That's stupid and clumsy.
I do that often--just yesterday I found an instance where I tried to substitute a real verb for a form of "to be." I didn't strike everything I should have, and so I posted "...they were occurred while I read...." That's bad editing compounded by no proofreading, but I create clumsinesses like that too. Also I recently came across something more distressing: I wrote "in their." And I catch myself--I hope always--two or three keystrokes after impaling the possessive its with an apostrophe. But I shouldn't do the impaling to begin with. Anyway, I the pot am aware that the kettle and I are both cast iron.
Except that I am a well-seasoned piece of cookware, I know the benefits of a good oiling, and I don't want rust spots to form or, having formed, to stay. I don't call corrosion character.
Now, having disclaimed, the pot balances on a soapbox to declaim. Using "literally" as an intensifier instead of a modifier hurts, because English loses a necessary modifier to gain yet another intensifier. That's my coworker's particular peeve, but she uses which splices and pronounces the t in "often." A correspondent just bitched about corporate jargon like "thinking outside the box," but also wrote "your welcome" in the same email. I cannot remove the post from my own eye, but I can distinguish it from a mote. I got into a spat some time ago about the relative badness of "I wish I would have done this other thing" but couldn't come up with any examples or--this is my actual point, that I suck as I writer--properly articulate why it's a problem beyond saying "It sounds bad."
Over the past few days I've come across a few examples where that confusion of tense makes for unclear writing, makes syntactically unclear the order of actions when the significance of that order is the thought being communicated. Finally I understood the nature of the problem.
"I wish I would have done this, because if I would have done it, I could have done that as well."
All of the actions in that sentence occurred at the same time. Whereas with correct tense (or is it voice?), their order is clear: "I wish I had done this, because if I had, I could have done that as well." It's not just a wordier way to phrase the same tense, as "I am doing this" and "I do this" are. It's a different meaning.
So. I can be technically correct, if I try. More often I am blowsy and run on. More important, even when I am technically correct and, rarely, concise, I do not communicate a thought well. Effectively, evocatively, meaningfully, lastingly well. But I can damn well edit somebody else.
This morning I brought Blake for his annual well-check, the first time I have accompanied him in at least three years. In 2002 and '01, he had his check while boarding, and maybe in 2000 as well. He's healthy and I know it, but he is not a plant.
I usually bring him in his entire cage, which is tall enough that from the highest perch he can see out the car window. This time I decided on the much more convenient (for me) travel cage, about the size of a cat carrier. Stupid me: he could not see out the window, did not like that one single tiny bit, and let me know it the entire way. Sorry, buddy.
His veterinarian, whom I maybe haven't spoken to in that long, commented again on what a great personality he has. He asked if the bird is as outgoing and friendly all the time as he--Blake--was being with with him, who is, as an avian vet, very much a parrot person. Pretty much. When he encounters non-bird people, mutual nervousness compounds into a hopeless relationship--my sister, Nebra, Lou, and CoolBoss--but when he meets anyone who shows the vaguest interest or even calmness around him, he's Mr. Sociable.
The weekend after I cut my hair the shower wouldn't drain and we had to have a plumber come in. On a Sunday morning. After the plumber had snaked the last of my two-foot hairs from the drain (the picture of the tail that I donated disgusted my sister enough that I didn't bother to take a picture of that clump), Blake insisted on meeting him. Two years ago when a police officer was in the house taking a statement after we had been burgled, Blake wanted to meet him too. Hi, please take us seriously, and if you could just ignore this yelling thing that rules the roost.
His plumage is in great shape, his eyes and ears and nares and vent are clear, he chucked enthusiastically and bowed to his doctor, he weighs 93 grams ("medium to medium-plus, which is fine"), and the vet observed without further comment that he is eight, so I guess I don't have to worry about his age yet.
I tried to be good. First I went to the Bookies, the unfortunately named but independent children's book store. They had ordered a scant nine and those nine were, surprise surprise, gone, so I contented myself with books for shorties instead. What does an almost-seven-year-old read, or have read to her, after having had The Silmarillion read to her, by her choice, after hearing first The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings? Then I resorted to Barnes & Noble and bought what I was after. I had a coffee and read some there; I looked for a non-bar with outdoor seating along Pearl Street and decided I would shiver anyway; so, yes I'm a terrible person, I went to the mall and ate in the California Pizza Kitchen. Which I pronounce at least half the time as "California Pizza Chicken" because I am a latter-day Spooner.
Also I bought a pair of shoes, of girl shoes. I realized that the shoes I want for the new pants are Dansko clogs, of course, but they cost more than I was in a mood to spend. I bought a much cheaper pair of shoes in the meantime, at no savings at all because I will get the clogs as well, some time this fall.
I talked to my mother today for the first time since I left Connecticut two weeks ago. She asked what we were doing this weekend so I told her how I had intended to paint the porch swing but discovered, while scraping it, that it's painted in oil, which I've never used before at all and we don't own any of, so that put the kibosh on that project and I cleaned out the fridge instead, and RDC put the swamp cooler to bed for the winter. She asked what a swamp cooler was and I briefed her. I asked her in turn what she'd been up to, and she told me about a painting project and about planting a slew of bulbs, and about attending her aunt's funeral. All of these things I already knew about, but listened to again anyway, because that's how it goes.
She asked, after her description of the services, "Did I tell you that Aunt G died?"
"Mom, I was there the day of her funeral, remember?"
"Well...," she thought back. At the start of the call, after the usual weather opening--rainy and humid and warm there, cool and brightly sunny and perfect here--she asked, "You brought the good weather back with you?" Now she said, "I do remember that you were here for the best weather of the year..." so I prompted, "I got home just as you were leaving and you wanted me to come with you?" This she did not remember.
Does she really not remember? She remembers that Aunt G died and that she went to her funeral, but does she really not remember my [lack of] involvement? Or is this her memory-block, applied because she would prefer not to recall my lack of involvement? Honest question here: does she truly not remember, in which case no wonder she considers my lingering responses "dwelling," or is she being coy?
RDC suggests she probably honestly doesn't remember, "because how many times has she asked you, and have you told her, what a swamp cooler is?" Yep.
She also asked how the garden's doing, so I told her that we're so overrun with yellow squash that I was thinking to make bread from it. Yellow squash bread should follow, according to the grocer's baker, a pumpkin rather than a zucchini recipe because its texture is more like the former; however, the pumpkin bread recipe says to cook the squash first, too much effort, so I just foisted it off on Babushka instead (except I said "our poor elderly neighbor who's always glad of our extra produce," since I didn't expect her to remember Babushka's name). She said that she had lots of zucchini bread recipes and would I like her to me them? I said, "No, thank you, because, as I just said, it needs a pumpkin not a zucchini recipe and that I gave it away anyway."
You would think that knowing she doesn't remember things not only two weeks past but just two sentences past would make it easier for me to cope with her, would enable me to adjust my expectations of her actions and responses. Apparently, however, I continue to be unwilling to cut her any slack. As, in fact, she cannot cut me any, disappointed in my appearance, skills, and choices as she is. But probably she just forgets who I am, so that the presence in her life of someone whom she misunderstands and disapproves of so thoroughly continually surprises her by her [mine, that is] failure to conform.
Later: And the fact that my mother cannot expend the effort to remember such a rare occurrence as a visit home is, damn it, reasonable cause for resentment.
This is, of course, the real reason I don't use the webcam that often. How many pictures of a yawning cockatiel does anyone need? At least 12. Note the turns, trying to find the side of my leg from which the tip of his tail will not touch the chair. Note (row one, second picture) the scratching-the-head-induced yawn. Note that the more open the beak (the later into the yawn), the greater the distance between feet and head as the head tries to capture the yawn.
More than 12: in this particular yawnfest, I snapped the cam 30 times. My response time and that of the cam are poor, so I didn't capture all thirty yawns. But I got to watch them, OMFB, so yours is the poorer existence.
Did you start yawning at the sight? Or at least by reading the word "yawn*" so many times? I am extremely susceptible to catching yawns, even cross-species, even in print. That would make me the sucker, not y'all.
A satisfying day, though not without its frustrating elements. I woke well before dawn, which I am sure has something to do with my not having had a lick of exercise since Wednesday, and since before that if you don't count, as I shouldn't, bike-commuting. The Parrot's Theorem was waaay out in the dining room in my backpack and I don't do well reading stuff I want to think about when the point of my reading is to go back to sleep. I lay restive and grumpy for a while before remembering I had Nobody's Fool on my bedtable.
It's there because RDC got it for his latest audio and I'm listening to it too and I always like to have the book with me as well if I can. I've mentioned before that repeated readings will turn up faults, and I noticed another one: sometimes Sully has a watch, sometimes he has not. Does it matter? Nope. Luckily RDC doesn't mind the voices. Sully sounds gruffer than I imagine him, but gruff probably works for a 60-year-old smoker. It's Mrs. Peoples's voice that grates, because she's made to sound like an old biddy. But he likes the book, which means that we can stay married. Hey, another thing to add to the marriage articles: Thou shalt like Nobody's Fool and "Sense and Sensibility."
Speaking of which, I just reread Persuasion because sometimes you just have to. It struck me (for the first time?) that this is the only Austen book in which you don't know the protagonist's dowry straight off. Fanny Price has nothing of course; the Bennet and Dashwood girls each have one thousand pounds, which is piddling; Georgianna Darcy and Emma Woodhouse each have thirty thousand pounds, which I expect would be the upper limit for the untitled gentry; part of the excess of Sense and Sensibility is that Miss Grey has fifty thousand, which is also the fantastic amount Elizabeth Bennet teases that Col. Fitzwilliam should require unless his older brother fell ill; I don't remember how much Catherine has. But how much has Anne Elliot, daughter of a baronet? Austen doesn't say until the last chapter, when we learn that of course her spendthrift father can give her but a fraction of the ten thousand which is her due. It was interesting to me that this important fact was left so late, but Austen's point is that Anne and Captain Wentworth are past all that thanks to Wentworth's success. His booty earns him an annual income of only a thousand pounds, which doesn't seem so grand, but that's Elinor Dashwood's wealth, so it's probably adequate.
Persuasion is so very satisfying. I love the changed 23rd chapter because it gives some sense of Mrs. Croft's delighted hope, in which her fluttering makes her satisfyingly reminiscent of Mrs. Gardiner's not so subtle voiced wonderings.
But it was Nobody's Fool I read this morning.
So I read and maybe dozed fitfully and didn't get up, if you don't count RDC's alarm going off at 7:00 and my sister calling at 8:15, until almost 9:30, when I finished the book (again). So I figured I had wasted the day. But I had not.
This is what I got done: two garbage bags of clothes, mostly RDC's, and one of shoes, also mostly RDC's, one flatbed scanner, one 5-disc CD player, three other electronic pieces whose identity I forget, one Brother Electronic typewriter (from 1986, a high school graduation present from my father), one box assorted household goods (a drill, various books, some pots and pans), and one pair extra-torture ski boots, are now in their new charitable homes. The clothes we thought fit to wear are about two-thirds what came out of RDC's wardrobe; the rest became rags or trash. He weeded! Even a Jerry Garcia design tie, which I think now maybe should have gone into a box of souvenir clothes.
When I added his retired tie-dyes to this box, I weeded out some of mine: I kept concert shirts for Joshua Tree and Unforgettable Fire (I am not made of stone), but I ditched my UConn Co-op staff shirt and one from the UConn Women's Center and another from the Ivoryton Playhouse. The latter two, being half polyester, I never ever wore, and the first I wore only at work. Breaking the crippling cycle of nostalgia, that's me.
First stop, get rid of all that. Second stop, Belcaro Paint, ejected from the Belcaro neighborhood by the invasion of Home Despot. I selected some paint strips for the water closet, the back landing, and my study. I actually bought paint for the water closet. Third, a supermarket where I further divested myself of Bag Lady status by turning in my bag of bags, and accepted the 9% fee to get rid of almost $30 in coins. Now only parking-meter silver is in the car ashtray and only foreign coins and tokens in the change basket on the dresser. Wheeee! And while at the regular supermarket, I bought (with the coin cash) exciting things like bleach that we don't get at the elitist food store.
Then I checked out a store called, apparently incorrectly, Scrap 'n' Stamp, which had only scrapbooking stuff but satisfied my curiosity. Besides, I am going to do something Different for my Yule card this year. Then Home Despot, where I remembered some things but not others, and Wild Oats, where I scored vegetable pulp and a picnic that I brought to Cranmer (Sundial Park). I did not score roasted salted bulk peanuts, also not available at Whole Foods, which probably means not available anywhere in town, which means I have to use their peanut grinder, which turns out product inferior in both texture and saltiness to that which I made on my own.
However, my picnic was delightful. Wild Oats commissary usually doesn't hold a candle to Whole Foods, which makes more of its ready-made stuff on-site, but it had a New Thing that was wicked good, Veggie Tortellini. Zucchini, green beans, spinach, and cheese tortellini, in a hot-diggety-dog garlicky pesto. I read Ms. (the best of the selection at Wild Oats, and it really could spin less like a top than it does) and ate and watched a chocolate Lab catch a Frisbee tossed repeatedly for it by someone not entirely one with the Pet Concept: she held a towel to pick up and throw the drippingly slobbery disk, which diminished her range considerably.
I stopped at the coffee shop to pick up grounds, as I had arranged in the morning, and a Brambleberry Tazo because the having been awake for 10 hours already was taking its toll. Blake and I read Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them on the porch swing until yellowjackets harassed him (have parrots died of bee stings? Do parrots, free or cagedly captive, get stung? I should have asked the vet), whereupon we adjourned to the couch, and later downstairs to facilitate napping. Also because Franken was pissing me off with puerile hyperbole.
In the late afternoon I re-emerged to lay another lasagne mulch: vegetable pulp (I acquired at least three gallons grocery shopping last night, plus today's) and sunflower seed husks and coffee grounds and pine needles on top. Inside, I scored wallpaper with the wheely-bob tool. Blake was on my shoulder at his insistence, which I used as an excuse not to proceed with the wallpaper solvent but instead to call myself done for the day.
There are two instances of wallpaper in the house: in the furnace room and in the water closet. The [a] kitchen sink is original to the house, so I don't know why the waste pipe from the sink is external to the furnace room wall (the dishwasher drains to the sink so shouldn't have required new plumbing?). Probably because the basement wasn't finished when the house was built. Anyway, someone drywalled around the pipe, so we have a rectangular tube angling along and down the wall. Later, the earth cooled, and someone decided that a nice strip of wallpaper border with birdhouses on it would dress up the pipe attractively. Three and a half years ago, I saw that and resolved to remove it immediately. Today I did: it peeled right off. Maybe I shouldn't've peeled it, but I peel sunburned skin prematurely. That bleeds, and my hypothesis is that since the wall doesn't bleed, peeling wallpaper off it can't be nearly as harmful as premature sunburn peelage, which hasn't killed me yet. Though it has scarred me, and peeling this strip left some backing on the drywall. I will practice in there with the solvent and to prepare for the water closet.
Which is, as I've said, truly a water closet. One of the Before pictures I took this evening (too late, since a section had already come loose plus it was dark out) is of my foot on the wall opposite to the toilet (I took it while seated on the closed commode.) That's how big the room is: the length of a toilet plus a leg by slightly more than the width of a toilet, and its ceiling is lower than elsewhere in the basement. Hence water closet. Tomorrow I dissolve and scrape and dissolve paste and scrape and wash and rinse and wash and rinse and wait. After the wait, I patch whatever I have to patch, and sand.
Then paint.
Somewhere, I need to find a sign to hang on the door announcing a W.C. I would look for such a thing now but the day's major frustration is that the airport is acting up, denying me internet access. So I think I'll go cozy up with some peanut butter toast, Pantalaimon, Blake, and Al Franken, and call it a night.
I'm watching a program on the History Channel, "Russia: Land of the Tsars," and among the academics lending any historical credibility is Larry Langer, University of Connecticut. I was in the laundry room when he spoke for the first time, and I recognized him, incredulously, by voice rather than face or name. I had him for Russia to 1905 (big surprise) as a...sophomore? Yes, sophomore fall, a year before I should have taken an upper division class. I took two that semester, and I am grateful I was allowed to: they inspired me to become a college student rather than the super-high-school student I had been as a freshling.
Russian history was my first love, before English (history) I think. Or alongside. My favorite high school history teachers both emphasized Russia in world history classes (to prepare us as good citizens to fight the Cold War). We read Nicholas and Alexandra and Dr. Zhivago and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Those I loved, and Fathers and Sons with Professor Langer; however, in Russian Lit, not with Langer, Eugene Onegin and Dead Souls both bored me to tears.
The History Channel values entertainment more than history. The title still of the show is supposed to read "Russia: Land of the Tsars," but thanks to mindless substitution of Cyrillic letters for Phonetic ones that they vaguely resemble, the word "Russia" isn't. The backward-R letter is "yah," the not-U letter is "ee." Yah-ee-ssia. It's akin to the insertion of punctuation for dubious aesthetic effect.
Distressing Blake mightily, I spent the morning in the water closet removing stripey wallpaper. The nozzle of the bottle of solvent didn't work, so I squirted the gel onto the wide scraper and slathered it on the walls that way. The wallpaper came off easily, but most of the backing did not. Blake nearly had laryngitis from shrieking and whining (anyone want a cockatiel cheap?) when I broke at noon.
More coffee grounds. Home Depot again, for another bottle of solvent whose nozzle I tested, and heating register covers, but not ceramics glue. Bloodbath and Beyond for brackets and a curtain. When RDC and I recently examined the back landing, he picked up a curtain rod I freed from the sunroom almost two years ago and wondered why we had never thrown it out. Aha, it turns out that I kept it on purpose, not because it could be ignored behind the vacuum cleaner, because it would come in handy today: I hung a heavy curtain between the den and the laundry room. The doorway used to have--a door. I wouldn't have a door again, but the back of the basement doesn't need to be heated. This curtain might make the room cozier, blocking drafts and holding in the warmth from the space heater.
I had lunch from Einstein Bros. bagels with a book that I brought with me. There are several new nonfiction books that look really interesting, including one on the Bounty whose author is doing a reading Wednesday, but I didn't indulge. For now. Instead I indulged in dogs, an unusual terrier mix with a curly tail and unterrier snout, and more time with more pettable English mastiff named Greta. Her human and I talked for quite a while--he's lived in Hong Kong and traveled all over Asia and nearly bought a cattle ranch in Ecuador and made for a pleasant hour of stranger-chat.
While we sat chatting, lots of other passersby wanted to meet Greta. She obviously loved all the children she met. One little girl commented, "It looks like Fluffy!" Which she did, in shape of head, besides that she had only the one head and a brindle coat. Greta's human asked who Fluffy was, and I told him Fluffy was a Cerebus in the first Harry Potter book.
The girl's father contradicted, "That dog's name wasn't Fluffy."
The girl and I protested that yes, the three-headed dog was named Fluffy.
Now, it turned out (eventually), that the man was thinking of Hagrid's regular dog, Fang, who is a mastiff, and Greta did look more like Fang than Fluffy, being a one-headed mastiff not a three-headed CGI. I can't fault the girl for thinking of Fluffy first, since it has more page and screen presence than Fang. I can fault the father for insisting that the three-headed dog's name wasn't Fluffy.
After they left, I told Greta's human about a recent zoo trip. I was watching a resident, not captive, gopher, because it was little and cute and right at my feet, instead of over a moat, like the ruminant in front of whose enclosure I stood. A series of passersby asked what I was watching. "A gopher," I would say. The majority, spotting the animal, would reply, "Oh, a chipmunk!" In the Crested Butte newspaper I read a column by a park ranger who's been stationed all over the Rockies, on the frustration of not being believed when she answered certain questions ("How big do deer need to be before they're elk?"). Ah, the tribulations of being a know-it-all. It might have been a ground squirrel at the zoo, though the lines of spots among its solid stripes really do indicate gopherhood.
Anyway, I got home and attacked the water-closet for another three hours. The two drywall walls were relatively well-behaved, though (nooo!) the toilet has to come out to do the wall behind it properly. The exterior wall is plastered brick or cement block, and wallpaper does not come tidily off plaster. I'm not done scraping yet, but nearly.
When we first moved into the house, we saw many traces of the previous tenant. She told us that the one thing she never got around to doing was painting. As far as the main walls of the house were concerned, this was true. But she decorated quite a bit. The chute cover in the coal cellar is the most obvious example. On field of blue bordered in green, painted in red, are painted a flower, her nickname, and the word "Boogie," which might be her son's nickname. The saloon doors into the sunroom were the same primary red, as is the edge of the hardwood floor in the back landing, as is the frame of the window in the water closet. Stripping the wallpaper revealed another instance of tagging. Just to be clear, the W.C. had been painted white, then someone streaked it (as if cleaning off a brush) with a mix of the blue and green of the chute cover, and saw fit to tag it with her name in white. The coal cellar, home of off-season window parts, painting supplies, and beer carboys, is easily ignored. But I have got to get that toilet up so I can paint the room properly, because there is no way I'm putting up with that name over my shoulder every time I need that facility.
Lordy. If Kucinich, Sharpton, or Lieberman, but especially Kucinich, becomes the Democratic candidate, whatever advantage television gave to handsome Kennedy obviously will no longer be a factor. Can't a representative either own his baldness or get a better hairpiece? No, now I feel bad: a department of peace? If a Department of Homeland Security is possible, certainly one of peace is.
Wesley Clark, the most attractive of the bunch, just said, "There's not enough forces there." So he's out. I require my president to match his verbs to his predicative nominatives. He said Bush decimated the EPA, but honey, he destroyed more than 10% of it. He's not really out.
Al Sharpton was never in, but he's out even more. "I disagree with he and Governor Dean and Senator Kerry." "Their children has gone to war." Plus he's just a showman, as much as Schwarzenegger.
Lieberman was a lousy running mate for Gore because neither of them ever spoke in other than a monotone. At least as veep Gore didn't speak often, and Lieberman wouldn't've had to. Connecticut or not, I can't get behind Lieberman.
Gephart--well, I'd have to rewind to hear whatever his first grammatical mistake was. His second speech was fine. He should dye his eyebrows darker. He's too much inside the beltway
Kerry's not Kennedy. Does he know that? Oh, he cracked a joke! He gets points for that.
Edwards's accent is too strong. Also: "Every one of us are against George Bush." Someone, I think Clark, said, "Each of us want to be president."
Carol Moseley Braun speaks well and isn't freaky looking. But seriously speaking, the first black Usan president will not be a woman, and the first woman president will not be black.
Which leaves me with Dean. Of course.
I went to a Dean Meetup last Wednesday. I brought 6.5 years of professional Dot Org knowledge to bear when, as the organizers gave addresses of representatives whose support of Dean we were to solicit, I spoke up to give, and advocate using, the proper etiquette in both address and salutation.
Later. Fuck. Dean, solid Yankee that he is, just said "idear." Three times.
Has it ever occurred to me before to compare the convenience store visit by Veronica Sawyer in "Heathers" to that by whatsername in "Reality Bites"? Definitely dancing to "My Sharona" is superior to the flirtation in the former.
I thought Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, overall, was Blake's absolute favorite. It turns out he's never heard Nevermind before. Poor little guy, I don't know how I'll break it to him about Kurt Cobain.
My sister called me yesterday to tell me to watch City Confidential on A&E: an episode entitled "New London, Connecticut." It's a true crime show, her kind of thing not mine, but when she called me seven minutes in, there had just been snippets of Old Lyme. So now I'm watching.
It sets New London in its social place among the suburbs around it with a lifelong New London resident saying how those in surrounding towns look down in New London and a woman who married into an Old Lyme family saying that she will probably never be accepted by lifelongers as an Old Lymer. To the first, I say New London is a city, not a town, so yes, townfolk are afraid of it; to the second, I hope a native of anywhere is proud to be a native of that place. I recognized which scenes were from Old Lyme--mostly from along Lyme Street, easy-peasy, even if that café wasn't open in 1994 when the crime took place. Finally the narrator acknowledges that not everyone in the surrounding towns has a yacht the size of an aircraft carrier. Thank you.
Wow, listening to these people I understand why I have an accent in Colorado. I never thought so, though I accepted people's saying so. I expected to hear a Midwest twang here, but I seldom do, probably because so few people are native to Denver. Someone just said "vister" instead of "vista." Ack.
I swear the narrator is stoned. There is no other reason for him to slur and use slang.
Recently I participated in a Usual Suspects interview project. I was asked five good questions, but I gave only one a good answer.
You talk about Blake with such enthusiasm and affection that I can't help but anthropomorphise him. Help me out. If the feathered gentleman were a person, what sort of person would he be? How would he look? What would be his career and interests? Would he be a person you'd like to know, or the neighbour from hell?
This is my favorite question, so I left it to last. Perhaps it will cheer me enough that I can flesh out the two scary last questions that I skimped on. All they needed was a little prestidigitation. Blake is so much a parrot and I have adopted so many of his mannerisms it's easier to think of me as one of them, instead of him as one of us.
RDC recently remarked, “We shouldn't anthropomorphize animals so much. They hate that.”
What would he look like? He would have muttonchop whiskers like a Dickensian villain (because when he preens, he angles the feathers that usually lie sleek under his beak out away from his face, exposing his lower mandible). He would wear breeches--we call the thick fluff (for egg-incubating) around and behind his thighs his bloomers, but bloomers are for females and breeches for males. In 1850, would an old-fashioned Dickensian villain still wear breeches? I'll say yes. Also a swallow-tail coat, no matter the time of day, with epaulets. He might have eczema or another condition that would have him constant attending to his skin (instead of feathers). Scrofulous. Less ickily, he would be a fop, obsessed with his eccentric wardrobe. He would have dandruff. He would have a Tintin-esque quiff. He would walk around with his hands clasped behind his back, except I can picture him using a walking stick (the kind with a sword in it). Possibly because I'm overdoing the Dickensian villain thing, I see a monocle too. Prominent eyes, certainly. Unlike Bill Sykes or Mr. Gradgrind, though, he would have excellent teeth, straight and white and strong, and he would smell good.
He would be an explorer, particularly a spelunker. I'm not sure he'd be successful, because (like any pigeon you see on the sidewalk) he finds purposefully moving in a straight line quite a challenge. But he would explore the great dangerous unknown, and most especially honeycombed caves. He would need a faithful assistant, like a Sancho Ponzo or Pinky, to wait to rescue him, because he might have narcolepsy. He would never go anywhere very cold, because he would be deeply afraid of snow. And perhaps honeycombed caves wouldn't be a good idea, because he would be afraid both of total darkness and of flashlights and candles. But cliff-dwellings, canyons, and overhangs, he would know all about. He certainly would be in charge of all expeditions, because he likes to manage things, and he has very particular ideas about who is allowed to touch what. Oven mitts might not part of the paraphernalia, but knives would be, and those are his to wield.
If caving didn't pay the bills, he would also sing. I can't picture him singing in subways--cavelike though they are--but I can't imagine that he would have a good enough voice, or write good enough songs, to make a regular living. He would sing, though, somehow. Especially in his caves. Perhaps he could be an acoustical engineer for a cave chorale. That he would form and be the soloist for. Perhaps also he could consult for the Ministry of Silly Walks. Or he might be an interior designer, again unsuccessfully, because the clientele who believe everything should be lemon yellow or sea green or artistically draped with dishtowels or socks would be few. Or a book critic, a very literal deconstructionist.
If he were old enough, he would have served in the war as a spotter.
What kind of person would he be? Self-important. Annoying but irresistible, so enjoying company that even though he would be pesky and demanding, people would be drawn to him. Like Sir John Middleton in Sense and Sensibility, except he wouldn't shoot birds for sport. He'd be an optimstic curmudgeon, verging on the neighbor from hell--not wanting kids to play on his grass or dogs to pee in his garden and playing loud music (but only during decent daylight hours)--but you'd want to know him because he would have frequent parties full of chattering company and tasty food and goofy games and musical entertainment. He would be able to play most musical instruments at least rudimentarily, though his specialty would be brass and his favorite the French horn.
He might look villainous, but he actually wouldn't be. He would solicit your admiration ("Do admire my freesias!") but he would be generous with his in turn. Also, he would call everyone "chap."
You'd even want his company when you were sick, because he would know the value of a companionable silence and a quiet shared nap. Plus his sneezes would always be louder and wetter than yours, proportionally, so you wouldn't feel as sick.
I cannot touch my toes. I can barely sit up straight with my legs straight. I cannot lean very far over one straight and one bent leg. It has been two days since I shocked my hamstrings, and they are making their displeasure known. Stairs hurt. Putting my feet up on my usual under-desk footstool (a copy box) hurts. Ow.
RJH said last night that when he asked his students what they read for pleasure, he heard only crickets and church bells. This reminded me about how little I read actually during school. I did my school reading, but what did I read for pleasure? Slaughterhouse Five freshling year. I know a hallmate my sophomore year lent me Aura and The Awakening and that's when Stephen King's Eyes of the Dragon came out too. I know I read Tolkien and Less Than Zero and The Big U. over winter break freshling year. I know I reread the favorites that I brought with me--Ayn Rand, Watership Down, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, the usual. Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes, of course. In grad school I read and reread for pleasure to the exclusion of my actual work. But aside from the occasional, post-midterm indulgence from the Paperback Trader's "Not for Browsing" shelf, what books did I discover on my own during school?
When I kissed RDC goodbye this morning I told him I left him a present outside the house. He clearly could not think what this might be. He asked, "Front or back?" I told him it was outside any window he wanted to look out of. "It snowed?" I nodded. "It was 80 yesterday." I nodded again, even though it was only 75, sunny, powerfully windy with Chinooks, and dry enough for three fires, two visible from the city.
Yet I rode anyway, OMFB. It was 29 when I got up at 6:30 and 27 when I left an hour later. I wore shorts and a thin sweatshirt and my new gloves and I was fine. Later, at my desk in tights and a skirt (the worst suffering of the morning being the donning of tights over just-showered skin), my thighs itched and tingled as the blood warmed them.
Two 3.8-mile city rides.
House:
Errands:
Reading:
Kinwork
Lisa:
Someone asked me if I thought a joke was okay. I thought maybe one demographic would feel oppressed, which the querier was ready to shrug off. "Someone's got to be oppressed," I offered and cracked up.
He didn't get it.
On any road trip my sister and I take, there might be Elvis Costello, Patsy Cline, or the Cowboy Junkies. The one constant is Godspell.
After a year and a half of hanging out mostly upstairs or in the den, this weekend I reclaimed my study. There had been the occasional thwomping onto the futon to watch "My So-Called Life"* or read a book, or the rare occupation of my desk by present-wrapping or coloring book coloring, but I haven't regularly hung out in my study since I got a laptop. It is now dark at 5:00, and somehow I find myself here, writing and reading and listening to music.
The room still needs to be painted. Would painting it a color less objectionable than the current bastard cousin of blue be stupid since replacing the swirly green carpet is not yet a project I'm up for?
I haven't given up on the water closet yet. RDC is convinced the walls cannot be salvaged but must be papered, and I hate wallpaper on some principle I can't articulate. Damn it, I am going to scrub and patch the two do-able walls--one of which didn't have paper to start with. And scrub over the toilet and prime just to cover the tagging. And generally debate the fate of the under-window wall.
Blake's happy to have another study to play in. He spends his days in RDC's office, either in or on his cage, or in a cave on a shelf in a bookcase, or on the chair seat between his legs. On my desk, I keep stuff he can gnaw on, like snippets of cardboards or blowcards, and he loves throw pens off the desk, and then there's my desk organizer thingie, with shells and stones and his old tail feathers and a little Snowy. Snowy's on a keychain and, with his front right paw lifted in his jaunty stride, does not stand well, so he leans on a piece of seaglass. Blake clambered up on my pencilbox and tugged on the bone in Snowy's mouth. Besides being in one molded piece, Snowy isn't one to give up a bone, so he tumbled down on a startled Blake. When Blake figures out that his feathers are up there, plus my little pewter knight, Snowy won't be guard dog enough to keep him down.
* I firmly believe that movies should be in quotation marks and books in italics, to distinguish between, e.g., "A Room with a View" and A Room with a View, and have treated television series like movies. But television shows have episode titles, like magazines (italicized) with articles (in quotation marks). Writing The West Wing's "War Games" but then "My So-Called Life" is inconsistent. It's a problem.
I was wondering, as I do around every Veterans' Day, how many World War veterans are left. From the first, twenty-seven British ones, few if any Australian or New Zealandish, a handful of Canadian, while Usan numbers are harder to find. There are more from the second, but I found out last night there is one fewer than before.
In fifth grade we had to interview a veteran. I interviewed my across-the-street neighbor. I don't remember anything about the interview except its very end: why I remember it at all. I must have asked the assigned questions, or maybe I had to make up some, which I'm sure were not overly insightful. I know he served in the Pacific and retired an officer. What I remember is Mr. H asking, "Don't you want to know if I got any medals?" He had received a Purple Heart at least and maybe a Bronze Star.
The Hs were good neighbors. They built their house when I was about three, a ranch with a paddock for their teenage daughter's taupe and pinto horses. Their driveway touched the road at two places, both within sight of my house (my boundary), plus it was paved, so it was a wonderful place to learn to ride my bike. Trick-or-treating, young enough to be with my mother, I turned from their front door and saw, I swan, a witch on a broomstick fly across the moon.* Also, they gave nickels in addition to candy.
They had a Christmas party once and I got to try something my father would never let me do: a guest left a smoldering cigarette on the kitchen counter and I touched its pretty orange glowing tip. Now I knew why my father wouldn't let me do that.
They had a toy poodle (for her) and a Weimaraner (for him). Long before William Wegman, I startled more than one Weimaraner human by knowing their dog's breed.
Later, when their daughter married (my cousin, as it happens) and had three children and divorced, the Hs had the children all the time. So they built a pool, to which they welcomed the neighbor children--me and my sister and two boys much younger. First we could come only with our mother, and after a year or two of not drowning, since we were older teenagers, just on our own, and eventually I was allowed to go by myself, wonderful in those pre-car days when the biked miles to the beach took forever in the heat and I was flat-out forbidden to go to the lake alone. Once when my mother and I went over, they were having a cookout so we turned around, but they invited her to join their party and found a lobster for her. I might have had a bite.
In return for this bounty, we gave them jam and cookies for Christmas.
When I flew to a college program when I was 17, we got up waaay before sunrise to drive to the airport, and there was Mr. H getting his paper. Four years later when I left the house at 5:30 every morning to go to work, there he was getting the paper. Getting up early after 40 years in the Army was a habit he never broke. Several days ago my mother noticed that the Hartford Courant remained in its tube after sunrise. Then last weekend she saw a moving truck. The next morning she brought the paper to the door, knocked and poked her head in and announced herself, and Mrs. H called her in.
Mr. H died very quickly, without much pain, with scarcely enough time to be diagnosed before he died. The moving truck was not to bring in a hospital bed, for Mrs. H with her repeatedly broken hips, but to move in the eldest of the grandchildren, her husband, and two young children, because they are going to live with Mrs. H now.
The last time I spoke with my mother before this was to learn that my great-uncle died. It was his wife's funeral that I declined to attend in September. My remaining great-aunt had told my mother she didn't want to be the last of the three siblings and their spouses--but she is the youngest and a woman. Her demographic sealed that fate, but in ten months, in two spates six weeks apart, she lost her husband and her sister (my granny), and then her sister-in-law and her brother.
I feel bad that I can remember enough to eulogize Mr. H when I could not my grandmother's siblings. I remember talking to my great-aunt-in-law after Granny's funeral and admiring her bravery and her certainty. I remember my great-uncle could not tell my sister and me apart (I'm not sure if he ever could). I barely remember my great-uncle-in-law at all, just a smiling face at the other great-people's annual Christmas party. My great-aunt looks very much like Granny, minus eight years, though my mother tells me she's aged a great deal in the past year, and who wouldn't.
I remember.
* A couple of days later I realized that the full moon does not rise early enough to be up when a little kid would go trick-or-treating. But it could have been a waxing moon.
My first taste of lobster (which I liked, because hey, butter!) was either a bite at the Hs' cookout or the tip my father got once from a fishmonger. I just don't remember which happened earlier. My father worked for the power company, and during an outage, after a lightning strike or a car crash or whatever, my father's crew restored power to a fish market. In gratitude for their fast work that let him keep his stock, or in acknowledgment that linemen--they were all men--on call get up at three o'clock in the morning and work without sleep for days after a hurricane, he gave every man however many lobsters.
It's good stuff, lobster. I can distinguish it from chicken even. I've withdrawn from the drawn butter camp, because what the hell, why cover delicate flesh in butter? Why not drown your bread in it instead?
I did that once during "Wizard of Oz." I bought my own stick of butter so I could use as much of it as I wanted--breaking up a pack of butter cubes after squeezing the Charmin, pirate of the grocery aisles as I was--and popped popcorn for the big yearly broadcast. I dipped each kernel in a bowlful of melted butter. Damn good, that was.
Lordy, I love iTunes. I just bought Dream of the Blue Turtles, which I've owned on a tape dating to 1985 or whenever Sting released it, and ...Nothing Like the Sun, which I've had on a crappy dub since 1987. I gave Soul Cages one listen, decided it depressed me (what a surprise: I bought it in 1991), and, I believe, never listened to it again. Ten Summoner's Tales is fine. Last night I listened to Dream, and oh my it's so '80s. But now I'm listening to Nothing: "Lazarus Heart," "They Dance Alone," "Fragile," "Sister Moon," a cover of "Little Wing." Sigh.
Plus I just bought Reckoning, soon after getting Murmur. I have missed them so much. Also I listened to snippets from Green, so vital a part of the 1989 soundtrack, yet unlike with all the other pivotal albums released or new to me that year--Passion, Sensual World, the Indigo Girls' first and also Melissa Etheridge's, Elvis Costello's Spike, my introductions to the Waterboys by way of Fisherman's Blues and This Is the Sea and to Joni Mitchell by way of Hissing Summer Lawns and Wild Things Run Fast--I can do without Green. This surprised me.
What decade is it?
A friend just lent me Beth Orton's Central Reservation. It is, if possible, even more barbituate blues than the Cowboy Junkies. And I like it! It dates, of course, from the previous millennium.
This weekend I watched "What Dreams May Come," which I had wanted to see when first released. It was cinematically beautiful, but considering how his task had been described, Robin Williams didn't put forth much effort in effecting it. Williams's inability to function in his painty heaven was unfortunately reminiscent of "Hook," and I only know Annabella Sciorra from "The Sopranos," so her becoming unhinged was just typecasting.
That also dates from the previous millennium.
But the next Netflix flick is "Lost in La Mancha," which ought to be super and is this year's, so mleah.
I do things like write "rights" for "writes" that scare the piss out of me. Occasionally I do things that reassure my sense of myself. Today as I approached Colorado Boulevard, I spotted a slouchy young man slouching toward a perfect cone (not pile) of leaves on a tarp on the verge. Judging from his appearance, I suspected he was going to scruff through the leaves. As much as I pitied whoever's work he was going to undo, I was a little envious too. He noticed my glance and probably my judging as he aimed right for the tarp, bent, and picked it up by its corners. By this time I was abreast of him. "Oh," I cried, "I thought you were going to stomple through them!"
"Aw, wouldn't that be fun!" with a regretful smile and hoisting the tarp to his back. "But then I'd have to rake them all up again."
Of course he was slouchy, dressed in layers against the changing temperature and for his labor. I'm glad that, given my previous expression, my tone was right for him to understand that stompling leaves is fun.
And I invented "stomple," just kind of accidentally. Stomp, which came from my thinking he was scruffy, and trample, which is how you destroy a pile of leaves.
Stomple!
When I started at Hateful, my first assigned task was one of dubious taste (as were most of the very few I ever had): to write letters to everyone whom they hadn't hired for that position. Looking at the cover letters and résumés, because I hardly scrupled not to, to avert my eyes from all but name and address, I could only think "Well no wonder they hired me." It didn't say much for me in comparison to be be so clearly superior in verbal dexterity and even vocation.
We have some strong candidates and we have some interesting ones and we have some other ones. That's probably already saying too much.
Tragically, the webcam does not work with the new system. Otherwise I would show--would have shown last night, when it was fresh out of the chair and not slept on or twice helmeted--my haircut. It is...short. I can just, just, scrape it into a stubby pigtail. I showed RDC a picture of me from October 1991, a bit more than year into the growing (which officially started August 1990), and my hair was longer then than now. It cups my chin.
I don't think I'm the type to change hairstyles this often (twice in one year).
RDC said I looked like Amélie. CoolBoss and Intern, who knew why I was scarpering 20' early yesterday, liked it; and even Tex noticed.
He noticed and then he asked as if confirming, "And you colored it too?" Um, no. Dye is make-up. When I did the big chop in January, another coworker was convinced I had colored it, and I think she didn't believe me when I denied it. Tex I could show: I pulled it into its usual not-down-ness, and he saw how the color changed depending on whether it was loose or back.
The usual not-down-ness is out for the duration of this cut. I kind of like the swing at my jaw, but I don't like the blinder effect. It's not short hair over the ears but it is over the ear. It does tuck behind the ears, at least.
I am embracing the down.
Sometime during college someone had an installation in the art school called Black Plastic: a human-sized maze of it, inside of which was utterly dark, dank, close, and clingy, because pollution is bad. Looking into my back yard now, I am reminded of that, except in blue.
A blue plastic tarp covers the woodpile, so the wood will be dry on those wet days when we most want a fire. A tarp covers the vegetable garden so that it does not serve as a catshitter of massive proportions all winter long. A folded one covers the lasagne mulch so that bindweed cannot grow up through it, although maybe I can take that off now for the winter. Another is under the remaining pile of needles and sunflower seed husks that have not found their way into lasagne mulches yet.
The most prominent tarp is that covering the brand-new leaf pile. Yesterday I very carefully groomed the front gardens and easement. The vinca is thriving, sending out shoots and sprouting all around. I'm very pleased. I took out the groundcloth so it could spread and battled bindweed thereafter; I'm hoping that after a few seasons of my assiduous plucking, the vinca will dominate on its own. It's tangled enough that getting the leaves out without ripping out shoots that haven't rooted yet was a quite delicate task. I can't wait to plant the other easement, because under that plum tree bare dirt plumes up from the rake's tines. I worked with rake and hands in the north front garden, trying to get leaves without mulch and not hurting the plants; I was less gentle in the better established south front garden and to the catmint I showed no mercy. Raking the north side of the house was easy, since it's covered in landscaping cloth. The south side was extremely rewarding, with two trees protected from the wind dropping all their leaves into a thick carpet whose absence made such stark contrast that I knew I was done. I did just a bit in the back yard, the south fence and the raspberries: the cherry tree hasn't dropped its leaves yet and I'm all about not duplicating effort. All of this made quite a pile, artfully crafted to touch neither the fence nor the garage and rot them by contact. I soaked it, shrinking it by a quarter at least, but it's still about four feet high.
I need to get yet more coffee grounds and vegetable pulp to wed the leaves with, to create the child, dirt.
RDC and SPM saw Phil Lesh & Friends at the Fillmore last night. This morning, with the remnants of his voice, RDC told of how they were tighter than the Dead ever were. "Because Bobby wasn't there," I said. I don't like Phil Lesh's own songs much: they're just basic rock and roll and not very interesting to me. But his covers of Garcia/Hunter and Weir/Barlow songs are fantastic. Phil can't sing and neither could Bobby but at least Phil knows enough to rely on other vocalists.
I'm extremely fond of SPM, and yesterday evening I discovered--for the first time?--something that made me fonder: love of '80s music, in addition to, not exclusive of, Deadheadism. We played 30-second iTunes snippets of Level 42 and Howard Jones and a-Ha and Toto and Asia and did not quite drive RDC screaming from the room, but nearly.
But then it all came crumbling down. As they got ready to leave, RDC pulled his--my!--leather jacket from the closet. "But what will I wear?" I asked. "Not this!" he replied merrily. "But it'll get all smoky!" I whined. SPM erkled: his jacket, lined in sheepskin, would also pick up a lot of smoke. He put it on: a corduroy jean jacket. I remarked that looking like Ponyboy Curtis should be some consolation (N.B.: except for the jacket, he doesn't, being tall, stocky, short-haired, and 20 years older), and just to stay out of old churches. But SPM didn't know who Ponyboy Curtis is at all! And when I said The Outsiders, he only knew the movie, not the book.
I wanted the leather jacket because I was going to a Howard Dean birthday party (i.e. fundraiser). My whine that it would get smoky at the concert but presumably not at the party held no water: when I got home I stripped in the living room and dashed into the shower and I am so glad I didn't wear contacts because lordy do people still smoke. The party happened in a Capitol Hill apartment, a great space with a porch facing west, oak woodwork that had never been painted over, a fireplace with shelves on one side and an inglenook on the other, and I was the only woman and nearly the only straight person. That was kind of interesting.
One man admitted to knowing little about Dean but asked questions about his background and stances and I told him my focus: not that his policies are secondary, but Dean wants to return the process to the people instead of corporate interests and that is his primary appeal for me.
He's shorter than Bush fils, though. Historically, the taller candidate has won. Gore is taller, and Gore won, but Bush proved that the rule of tall as well as the rule of law can be toppled. So maybe Dean has a chance.
Zounds. I just changed the leading in the style sheet, from 120% of line height to 150%, and that seems to have fixed the display problem--that minor one by which text wouldn't display.
Yesterday I cheated on Blake. I went to Hobby Lobby for lunch (and found oh! just the most unnecessary purse-shaped memo pad for my sister's stocking) and detoured into the parrot store. I would have bought the seed mix they picked up after Colorado Seed and Pet went under, but clerks were in front of all the bulk bins with large boxes so I just flirted with the birds.
A military macaw said "Hi!" as soon as I walked in, so I said "Hello!" back. I offered to pet its head, but it only wanted to step up. I don't step up a) big birds b) that I don't know c) onto work clothes, so we were at an impasse. I introduced myself to a double-yellow-headed Amazon named Daisy who wanted, despite being in a cage, to have its head pet. Very very much. It climbed up to the top corner, held onto the two walls with its two feet, and ducked its head to the side to grasp another bar with its beak, and exposed its neck. And I pet another bird's head! I did. I'm very bad. Amazons are not as soft as cockatiels. However, they dislike having their toes (so much bigger than a cockatiel's and that much more tempting!) touched nearly as much as my cockatiel does. Also, perching in a corner like that exposes the belly, and I for one cannot resist tickling a parrot's belly when I have access to it. It is easier to get to the hairs between the pads of a dog's hind paw and tickle those, but I'm a tickler.
I did look at buddy toys while I was there. I think we stopped making him toys out of balsa wood colored with food dye because he got bored with them. All he's wanted for ages is magazine blowcards and a peacock feather and of course his box anyway.
Today is a First Saturday. Usually the only dates I make note of are the Fourth Mondays: every fourth Monday since I was 19, I have got my period. There have been a couple of intermissions, but I've been on the pill pretty much straight for 16 years. Until today.
Today, I did not take a breakfast treat upon arising. (When I first went on it, there was a snack food called the Stella Dora Breakfast Treat, hence the moniker.) Today, I declare hormonal freedom. Too bad I have no mountaintop from which to proclaim it; a website is anticlimactic. Happily, that's the only thing about today that is.
...get down tonight.
Finally! We might not get much, but we're getting some, and there was much rejoicing.
This morning as I toweled my hair (which is, strangely, nearly sufficient to dry it), I cocked my head because surely that couldn't be what it sounded like...? I peeked out the window. The goofy neighbor was indeed raking his leaves through two inches of snow. They are really unclear on the concept, these people.
"I was shopping in Norwich--and you know there's nowhere to shop in Norwich--and I had all four of you girls with me, except you were little, 7, 6, 5, and 4, and I had Granny with me, and she was about 80. Then the car broke down--don't ask me how I had all of us in one car--and I called BDL, but his car had broken down too. Isn't that weird?" my mother asked.
"No, it doesn't sound weird. It sounds like you're worried about your responsibilities. You were more responsible for CLH and me when we were little than you have to be now, as you would have had to be for the German Shepherds, and you had to be more responsible for Granny when she was old than when she was 60. But you can't be responsible if the environment is bad and if the mechanics of your life are breaking down."
Meanwhile, I had an anxiety dream that I didn't tell her. Lots of people have naked anxiety dreams: vulnerability, embarrassment. Although I am clad, usually I have registered for a regular college courseload but somehow forgotten to attend one or more classes all semester long. If there's anything I can do to fix it, I cannot get to the right place in the right time to do so: there are ten minutes, and I keep getting distracted and I can't move fast enough. All of that is fairly obvious.
Last night I combined all the threads of my anxieties. I had attended some of my classes but I'd forgotten I'd registered for a couple. The usual "Can I withdraw? Will the professor show mercy, since I didn't perform badly but just forgot to go? Can I walk faster without someone asking me for directions?" antics ensued, this time in the altogether.
Later I realized that I'd been attending English and history and whatever other class--Women's Studies or poli sci--but had forgotten to attend anthropology and French. That's pretty easy to parse too.
In the summer of 1990, I happened to be in my mother's line of sight when I happened to have one of my dizzy spells, which happen sometimes when I get up too fast. It was a particularly bad one: I didn't just lose my vision for a moment and clutch at a nearby wall for balance, as usual, but actually spasmed for several seconds as my body tried to hold itself erect without my brain's help, and then fell abruptly, with no visible attempt to break that fall, as I lost equilibrium.
I cannot imagine how frightening that must have been for a mother to see.
She freaked and refused my word that really, this was nothing, just tremendously low blood pressure not getting juice to my brain when I get up quickly after a period of inactivity. She insisted that I consult her doctor. I had no medical insurance at that point and insisted in turn that if she wanted me to go she could pay for it. Isn't that a beautiful example of mother-daughter relations? It was so typical too.
I went, and it was the single most thorough examination I have ever had. Not that he did bloodwork or anything--he flipped my eyelid back briefly and dismissed my mother's concerns of anemia--but I felt like he was there, listening, assessing, more than any doctor I have had since. And oh, that's right, the summer of 1990 was the first I spent under my mother's roof without benefit of four-footed meat. The other thing she didn't believe me about but accepted grudgingly when I repeated the doctor's assurance on, was that chicken and fish and dairy would supply all my protein needs. Her initial fears were that I was pregnant or that not eating meat had rendered me rickety.* The doctor agreed with me, though he put it in medical terms, about the low blood pressure thing.
* That was a mathematical "or," which contains the ugly "and/or," so that sentence is grammatically correct. I hope.
Anyway. It's kind of a cool feeling, my faintiness. Although I've been clutching walls for years now, not every time I stand up but several times a week, I was never able to duplicate the way-cool sensation of that summer afternoon--until this morning.
I threw myself out of bed, grabbed my water glass, and headed for the bathroom. Three steps away from the bed, I started shaking or spasming. I made enough noise hitting the wall, dropping the plastic cup, and eventually thumping to the floor that RDC noticed from under his pillows. In a moment, when my blood caught up with my brain, I could respond.
This makes rescuing Blake from his nightmares interesting. I hurl myself out of bed towards him, fifteen feet away, as quickly as I can, hitting the lightswitch on the way; but sometimes I compound his fright with the noise of my full weight dropping to the floor amidst the covers I'm pulling off to show him that there are no dragons. Eventually I'm going to have to modify that response or I'll break my hip.
"Ben-Hur" is a featured movie in "The Celluloid Closet" and no surprise. I just found out Gore Vidal wrote part of the screenplay. I just looked that up because I'm reading Ben-Hur courtesy Project Gutenberg, and there's no homosexuality written into the movie, OMFB. It's all there in the book. When Judah and "the Messala" have their falling out: "Messala offered him his hand; the Jew walked on through the gateway. When he was gone, the Roman was silent awhile; then he, too, passed through, saying to himself, with a toss of the head, 'Be it so. Eros is dead, Mars reigns!'" (chapter II)
Gentle men are not all homosexual, but this is certainly part of a body of evidence: "The thoughtful reader of these pages has ere this discerned enough to know that the young Jew in disposition was gentle even to womanliness--a result that seldom fails the habit of loving and being loved" (chapter VI).
It was 20 degrees and I rode my bike to work. Shady spots of road had still had ice and snow on them. Once, stopping at a stop sign, I fell, and my bike skittered over the ice away from me and would likely have been hit if a car had been on the perpendicular street. I'm here to tell you that I love my bike helmet, and without my helmet I might have a nasty goose egg, or even a cracked egg, on my head. Then, as I biked one way and a 11-year-oldish boy walked the other and I passed him, he yelled at my back (I'm pretty sure at me, since there was no one else on the street), "Bitch!" I was wearing a helmet and sunglasses and a face mask, so even if I had a mean expression, he couldn't've seen it. I know I've seen him before, walking probably to school, but I'm certain I've never been unkind to him. I know I ought to conclude that he is just a pubescent boy experimenting with malice and power plays, but I can't quite whole-heartedly do that because part of me is still 11 myself.
Reading The Times (of London)'s style guide, I learned a few things. Some points are merely differences between British and U.S. English (The Times says "English" and "American," as if this side of the pond speaks a different language altogether), some are basic definitions and solecisms (aggravate, affect and effect, "animals and birds"), and some are things I would screw up--unless those are ones I don't immediately recognize as British usages and so am just Usan about? Also apparently I have changed the spelling of "British" to "Britsh," not quite "kitsch." Hmm.
ad nauseam
I have probably spelled it "ad nauseum." So much for naming that whale Ablative.
allege
Avoid the suggestion that the writer is making the allegation, so specify its source. Do not use alleged as a synonym of ostensible, apparent or reputed.
anticipate
Not to be used for expect. It means to deal with, or use, in advance of, or before, the due time. To anticipate marriage is different from expecting to marry.
Apennines, Italy
(not Appenines)
bail out
(As in to bail someone out of trouble; also bail water from a boat); but bale out of an aircraft by parachute, to escape. NB, bailout (one word, as noun).
Usan Merriam-Webster says you bail out of a plane and bale only hay and such.
bated/baited
Note the important difference - bated breath; baited hook.
I looked up how else "bate" can be used other than with "breath." A falcon can bate its wings, i.e., beat them impatiently. Also cockatiels, since I love applying falconry jargon to parrots.
Beduin is plural. The singular is Bedu
Oh.
beg the question
Do not confuse with "ask the question". To beg a question is to evade it.
Aha! I was recently talking with Haitch about examples of "begging the question." This is a different meaning of the phrase than I am used to.
bight
A curve in a coastline or river; bite involves teeth.
I wouldn't've confused them because I didn't know the word "bight." Now I do and will look for occasion to use it.
birthday
People and animals have birthdays; everything else has anniversaries.
Now now. The Times rails against solecisms like "birds and animals" but says that "animals have birthdays"? Including those animals, like insects, most fish, amphibians, most reptiles, birds, and three mammals, that hatch from eggs rather than are born?
blame
Take care with this word; blame is attached to causes, not effects. So say "Bad weather is blamed for my bronchitis," not "My bronchitis is blamed on bad weather."
Is this British? I might say "I blamed the weather for my bronchitis." I'm probably wrong.
bluffers
Be very cautious. The Bluffer's Guide/Guides are trademarks, rigorously protected by their publishers. So generic phrases such as "a bluffer's guide to ..." must be avoided
The British equivalent of Dummies books? Does "bluffer" mean the Usan "bluffer" in British English, to bluff your way through whatever situation with help of this guide? Or does it mean "duffer" or "stupid person"?
Bush, George W.
Do not use Jr. President Bush at first mention, then Mr Bush or the President. Refer to his father as the first President Bush or George Bush Sr.
I understand why not to use "Jr.," since they have different middle names. I don't understand why "Sr." is okay.
cagoule
But kaftan
I looked up cagoule: a knee-length waterproof garment, like a parka but long. I have no idea what they're getting at here.
Ceylon
Now Sri Lanka. The people are Sri Lankan, the majority group are the Sinhalese.
I wouldn't call Sri Lanka Ceylon, but I would have no idea what to call the people.
clothing
Say menswear, women's wear, children's wear, sportswear.
Why?
comparatively, relatively
Avoid using as synonyms of fairly or middling.
consensus
The word is a cliché that should be avoided wherever possible.
is it ever okay? Doesn't it have one right meaning?
coruscating (not corruscating)
Sparkling or scintillating, not abrasive or corrosive.
I didn't know it meant anything at all.
crisis
Always try to find an alternative for this greatly overworked word. Its use should be confined to a process reaching a turning point. A crisis does not deepen, grow, mount or worsen, and is never a continuous state such as a "housing crisis". Economics are never "in crisis"; "crisis situations" are never to appear in The Times.
deny
Does not mean the same as rebut (which means argue to the contrary, producing evidence), or refute (which means to win such an argument).
diagnose
Take great care: illnesses are diagnosed, patients are not.
England, English
Beware of these when the meaning is Britain, British.
Right. Such as "British English."
fuchsia
I bet I get this wrong all the time
jubilee
This is from a Hebrew word, who knew? "A year of emancipation and restoration provided by ancient Hebrew law to be kept every 50 years by the emancipation of Hebrew slaves, restoration of alienated lands to their former owners, and omission of all cultivation of the land."
Last Post
Like Reveille, is sounded, not played.
last, past
Last should not be used as a synonym of latest; "the last few days" means the final few days; "the past few days" means the most recent few days.
Logical, but I had never thought of it. A Britishism?
major
Do not use as a lazy alternative for big, chief, important or main.
majority of
Do not use as alternative for most of.
massive
Avoid as a synonym of big.
may / might
Do not confuse; use might in sentences referring to past possibilities that did not happen, e.g., "If that had happened ten days ago, my whole life might have been different". A clear distinction is evident in the following example: "He might have been captured by the Iraqis--but he wasn't," compared with "He may have been captured by the Iraqis--it is possible but we don't know."
minimal
Do not use as a synonym of small; it means smallest, or the least possible in size, duration, etc.
motocross
There is no r in the middle syllable, even in Usan. News to me.
nerve-racking, not -wracking.
Ooops
recrudescence
Do not confuse with resurgence or revival. It means worsening, in the sense of reopening wounds or recurring diseases.
reportedly
Avoid this slack word, which suggests that the writer is unsure of the source of the material.
responsible
People bear responsibility, things do not. Storms are not responsible for damage; they cause it. Avoid the phrase "the IRA claimed responsibility for the bombing"; say instead "the IRA admitted causing the bombing."
Because the IRA are not people, but storms?
rigmarole
Not rigamarole.
Oh.
shambles
Take care not to overwork this strong word, which means a slaughterhouse and, by extension, a scene of carnage.
Cool.
slay
A Biblical word, not to be used in headlines for kill or murder.
I can't say, "Oh, I slay me" anymore? Very sad now.
vagaries
Aimless wanderings or eccentric ideas, not vicissitudes or changes (as in weather).
wrack
Means seaweed or wreckage and must not be used as a synonym of torture; thus, racked by doubts etc.
Here endeth the lesson.
Tex just bought some sort of toilet-locking device because his youngest child, unlike the older two at her age, has shown interest in this watery danger. You have to close the lid in addition to the seat for the lock to activate.
I told him that was excellent practice, for his son to learn to lower the seat (and lid) and for his middle daughter to learn to lower the lid. I think closing the lid is a fine compromise for both genders when the male has not been well-trained. I have to remember to thank my mother-in-law again for raising RDC in a house with herself, his sister, his grandmother, and female roommates and their daughters. My previous men were either one of two brothers or only children, and, I expect, would not be reflexive seat-lowerers.
Occasionally RDC has taken ski vacations with his best friend, who has got mock-angry with him for lowering the seat even when no females are around. It is automatic for him to put down the seat, and I am grateful. Only a few times in all our years together have I sat on a cold commode in the dark. Unfortunately, two of those times have been in the past week. Is he slipping? I sure am. The first time, he said, he had in his half-asleep-itude forgot that step because he was moving the bathmat off the heat register. Okay. This morning, he is still asleep so I haven't asked yet. I'm just glad the toilet got scrubbed yesterday. Am I actually going to have to practice my own suggestion of compromise, and remember myself to lower the lid? Hmph.
I just had an argument with my little tiny youngster of a coworker (he's 26). He was asserting that Cat Stevens wrote "Cat's in the Cradle." It was a perfectly amicable knock-down-drag-out fight, of course, but I was right and he wasn't so you can bet I didn't let it go. He said this song was on the same album as "Where Do the Children Play?" Possibly I am more intimately familiar with Caution Horses than Tea for the Tillerman, but it's a near thing. (The Junkies devotion exists despite their lack of any song with my name in it; "Sad Lisa" is on Tea). I don't know So or Sensual World as well as I know Tea, for pity's sake. Shyeah. Plus I live with a man who grew up on Harry Chapin. Intern and I quick-draw googled on our two machines, vying for supremacy. I found lots of cites that an early MP3 had been mislabeled, hence the proliferation of this lie. I also found, on Cat Stevens's own site, mention of an album I had never heard of called Cats Cradle, which I think might be the cause of--not responsible for-- this heinous lie.
This all came up because he didn't know about "Harold and Maude" either. I have told him that by the time I see "Red Dawn" (which he references more than you would think), he has to see "Harold and Maude."
Among my other pop-cultural touchstones of which he knows nothing: Bloom County, "Northern Exposure" (well, he'd heard of it), "M*A*S*H" and "Say Anything." Egg and I tried to explain--well, re-enact--"Philadelphia Story" for him. McTeague, the Great Brain, etc. Also he asked if David Sedaris wrote Confederacy of Dunces, which twisted my brain, but then he explained why (favorites of a sibling's). Meanwhile he has kindly informed me that P. Diddy and Puff Daddy are in fact the same person. I am so glad we hired him. The office with neither Egg nor Intern would be extremely lonely.
I thought I took most of the impact on my left hip and I also noticed I struck my helmet but today it's my left upper arm that's sore. Tex has a nasty habit of smacking me friendlily on the arm--the left arm, since that's the side he usually has access to--and a couple of times today I had to ward him off.
There is nothing like having a cockatiel tucked and dozing on my shoulder, watching his eyes close from the bottom up, resisting the urge to nose into his breast and snort in an extremely nap-disruptive kind of way.
I'm just watching the end of "Dead Irish Writers," a particularly good episode of "The West Wing," and marking time for the next six minutes.
Dude.
(You know, I don't say "dude" that much, my slang having petrified before that. I might be being sarcastically hyperbolic.)
I have never ever even merely wandered by, let alone read or even be familiar with, two of the three nominees for the legacy Diarist Awards. Emily has been writing since the dawn of time; her own formative years and the medium's have kept pace with each other. So there's no question of who I would vote for, but I am so far out of the loop.
And fine with that, but--one of three? Dude.
Netflix is making it waaay to easy for me to indulge my less savory movie tastes. iTunes facilitates the '80s music; Netflix the movies (my mentioning "Heathers" a while ago? yeah).
So I've seen this movie once or twice. The first time I saw it was with Bill--not Billy from the roof, malheureusement. I hadn't read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas yet--I wouldn't meet Hobbit for another two weeks. The last time I saw it was with a woman I made slight temporary friends with when Judy Blume came to the Tattered Cover to sign Summer Sisters.
Somewhere in there I realized that Judd Nelson's character slept in a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas tee-shirt. Of course rewatching movies is valuable: it's only this time that I realized Billy carries Fear and Loathing in his pocket.
It's not December, but it is after Thanksgiving, and therefore it begins. If I didn't have to ship anything, I would be ecstatic.
I mailed Emlet's package air, being ten days too late to trust surface. And a good thing, because when I talked to Nisou on Thanksgiving, she said the books I sent--in late September or early October--had just arrived. Those two were Frederick and an alphabet book of artistics masterworks. For Yule I gave Emlet books (Dandelion and A Baby Sister for Frances among them) and a puzzle and Not for Kids Only and some clothes and a bald eagle and a bison (American animals).
Envelopes are addressed and cards printed. Now comes the long period of procrastination in which not enough will be written.
I know what I want to give to this person and that person, so all there is to do is obtain and ship these things. I found the most beautiful book for ZBD. CLH and I are doing only stockings for each other this year, though I have a couple of other ideas. I need goofy stuff for our cousin, who is coming for Chick Weekend in December (she writes it "chic weekend," which I'm not sure is a joke or a misspelling).
Either Blake's nutrition has gone out the window--a distinct possibility, since he's a carbohound like his mother and even his favorite vegetable (or most favored element of his twice-daily chow) is corn--or he's having a minor moult. A few contour feathers, a racing stripe on the windowsill, and, tonight's prize, his longest crest feather. He grows four, so he doesn't look scalped when he's shedding, as Percy, who grew only two, did. (Percy's crest feathers were brighter yellow and maybe longer, but Blake's crest is altogether fuller.)
Do you think he would tolerate a used basset hound?
Jed Bartlett just asked a retiring English teacher if, when she taught Beowulf, she taught it in the original Middle English or in translation.
"The West Wing" is not "Northern Exposure." It's not even "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." But it is "West Wing." Or at least it was. Once the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff perpetuated the myth that the eagle's head on the Great Seal of the United States turns from the olive branch to the arrows in time of war. Once there was a representative who had taken the seat of his deceased wife. I don't mind when it changes the name of a newspaper (it got Denver's wrong), and I certainly don't mind when it spins Dot Org with an anachronism--that it mentions Dot Org at all is cool enough for me. "West Wing" certainly shouldn't get government information wrong, but Beowulf is common knowledge, damn it.
It saddens me to say that I have found yet another flaw in "The Last Seduction." First I rewatched "Every Girl Should Be Married," its polar opposite. Then "Last Seduction." Spoiler: At the end, when Mike's lawyer says he believes him but there's not a scrap of physical evidence to back up his version of events, all Mike can think of is the name on the apartment building's doorbell. A while ago I had wondered about the fake Trish letter. He wouldn't've shown it to Bridget, because he doesn't want her to know about Trish, but maybe it doesn't exist anymore--and a good graphologist would be able to distinguish between Bridget's imitation and Trish's genuine hand--because he destroyed it upon receipt. Then there's Trish [her]self: and avoiding a capital murder charge is sufficient reason to expose your accidental marriage to a man, isn't it? Anyway, the bit of physical evidence I thought of yesterday he might still have had in his wallet, the note on which Bridget wrote their fake names together, backward.
But it's still a brilliant movie.
I am aware that no one thinks anyone else's pet or child is as engaging as the owner thinks. Especially when someone says that their pet is the sweetest, funnest little guy ever, but then doesn't let the pet socialize because she's petrified he might get squashed in the crowd and she doesn't particularly want him shitting on anyone either.
With that said, Blake is such a joy.
The setup: I was sitting downstairs on the couch, feet on the ottoman, with Blake's crates--wooden four-sided boxes RDC knocked together in 1993 to hold stereo components now serving as occasional tables--alongside, short end to short end, between ottoman and chair. On one crate was an oatmeal box serving as a buddy cave, on the other, the buddy tray (vegetable chow, spinach, apple slices, seedballs) and my water glass (from which he also drinks).
Blake was in his box, preening or singing or just hanging out, when something--not a phone call or a sneeze or the heat snapping on--startled him and he ran out of his box, onto the crate, toward the next crate, which didn't abut the first in perfect alignment. He didn't see that, and so fell, wheeling a bit just like Wile E. Coyote before dropping (fourteen inches) to the floor.
I howled. Presently he pranced into view, bobbed his head, and clucked at me. I apologized, picked him up, and kissed his belly. I love my buddy.
Nisou's sister had a baby girl today. She is named her for her maternal grandmother. Everyone is well.
Where the fuck was this Albert Gore in 2000? In his endorsement announcement, he spoke with vigor, nearly passionately. His hair was disheveled. This Gore could have won more decisively than 2000's Gore.
There is a basset hound mix in Greeley whose human just died. She's mixed with Australian shepherd, which is not such a good dog option. There's a basset hound, full blood and older so maybe safer, 280 miles away in Wyoming.
But today Blake had a yawnfest. Dogs yawn. I've seen it. However, no dog yawning has ever been as cute as Blake yawning. Dogs don't tuck under your chin. Dogs don't sing in their boxes. Dogs don't bow while you brush your teeth.
Dogs go for walks. Dogs are big enough to hug. Dogs--particurly Labrador retrievers and basset hounds--have floppy ears instead of icky reptilian holes in their heads (though charmingly covered by orange feathers). Dogs have oversized paws instead of ugly scaly feet, and when you trim their toenails, they don't shriek and kick to the point you fear they'll dislocate their hips. Dogs snore. Dogs aren't afraid of pigeons.
Are dogs as fascinating to watch? Do dogs make rattling-of-sabers sounds as they preen and rearrange their tail feathers? No? Damn.
I never thought I'd be 35 and dogless. Sigh.
CLH and I were talking about Shadow. She really was not the best behaved of all possible dogs, but she was still the best dog. No dog has ever been 26, I know. She would have liked a basset hound.
Happy birthday, my Shadow puppy.
Blake is singing in his box. My mother once had a dog who could kind of say "Lauuurrrrra," which was not its name; Blake can say both his own names.
And the goose is getting fat.
The 15th is late to get a tree, and this year for the first time we didn't slaughter, tote home, erect, and decorate it all the same day.
Monday I did get the lights on, and arrayed all the ornaments on the couch partly so I could admire them but mostly because I always pack the tree skirt at the bottom of the box. For cushioning, but also because it enables the arraying and admiring. Also I finished wrapping all my sister's stuff.
Tuesday we decorated. I contemplated the ornaments and was sure we didn't have enough. RDC gave me one of my presents early. I love this one. It's on the heavy side, it shades from blue through indigo to violet, and it's traced with silver in a, to me, Tolkieny kind of way. Also I made peanut butter cookies for my father. If they crumble on their way to Florida, I figure they'll still eat well.
I am physically incapable of buying ornaments for others without buying one for myself. Also it's got a perky bill.
A neighbor made this for me when I was about 11. Cardinals always nest at Yuletide. Speaking of, we had our trees trimmed, which was painful for me too, and I had the trimmers leave the bird-feeder branch on the nectarine, but the pine tree is gone and so are the birds. My poor chickadees!
Granny must have taken a Yule crafts class in 1978. This barn that she painted, my Little Drummer Boy little sled, and the plaster ornaments that look like cookie-cutter cookies all say "dew 1978" on their sides. She gave me all those that year, others to CLH, and a thingie saying "Noel" or "Yule" for the front door to my mother.
Others she kept and I inherited. I like this one, besides because she made it, because it looks like an extra from "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." And I like the other one too.
CLH gave me a hedgehog some years ago. I hope all my packages, which I didn't mail until Wednesday, get to Vermont and Albany and waythehell upstate New York and Boston and two places in Connecticut and two places in Florida by Wednesday.
This was in a batch of Granny's ornaments. I used to have a few of these clip-on animules and it seems to be happy there.
I bought this last year or year before. For myself. While ornament-shopping for others. I am not made of stone.
RDC asked me please not to break this one. Damn straight, it took 20 months for its replacement to show up on eBay. I would have got medieval on anyone who outbid me, but luckily I seem to be alone in my dreadful taste so won it handily. I don't care that it's stupid, I love it.
We had enough ornaments. Kinda. It is not slathered, but it's not sparse either. It's a balsam fir so smells delicious, but its branches are so dense and tend toward the vertical so much that some ornaments could not find a home. I was going to try to make diagonal stripes with the wired ribbon but I figured vertical was sufficient.
And so, for the first time, we have a tree by the window. It is gorgeous and tall (I had to hack some off the top to jam the star on) and I suggested to RDC that we could continue to get bigger trees in future years if only we lay them on their sides. We could work up to a 24-foot tree laid diagonally in the living room. Or even bigger, if we moved the dining table and used that room too.
I'll be back, I'm sure. For almost a year now I've written frequently, if not at length, if only a sentence about a book I've read or modest exercise I've shuffled through. There are a couple of things I don't want to talk about here until I've hashed them out elsewhere; hashing will take effort and time and I don't want to jinx myself. They're good things, or should be.
Apparently all I needed was to give that permission to myself. Hence, a couple of stories.
Tuesday Intern and I were waiting for the bus together for 15 minutes longer than we should have because we missed the bus we were aiming for by about 45 seconds. In the chat, he divulged that the best present his parents could give him would be a bunch of toilet paper, because buying it seems so petty and is a terrible reminder that he's not living at home anymore. A lightbulb went off in my head.
Friday I drove and suggested to Intern that I give him a ride home punctuated with a stop at my house to give him his present (which I had announced the existence of before, because I'm hideous with surprises). He was hesitant, but he wanted to meet Blake too (who wouldn't?) and I am sure he recalled a dumpster into which he could deposit whatever I had in mind if it wasn't to his taste. So first there was the mandatory admiring of my tree, which I again refuse to be modest about--actually first was my mourning as we pulled up under the shorn outside trees--and second was the Meeting of Blake, who had got so offended when I came home and spent a minute in the living room with my guest instead of fetching him right off that after dutifully climbing onto Intern's finger he immediately hopped back to me for his proper measure of snuggling, and third was scampering down to the basement and my saying "Merry Christmas" and handing a 36-pack of Costco toilet paper into his arms while he laughed. Also he met RDC, who was much more sociable than Blake. Then I drove him home.
So that was a success.
I say this hoping my father and notstepmother haven't found this site. If you have, don't read this until after Thursday. (I keep thinking Christmas is Wednesday.)
My sister's gift to our father (and notstepmother) is a photograph album, more his photobiography. She received family photographs from Aunt Namesake and included those. (I would have found that difficult, greedy and grasping as I am, but CLH said, realistically though scarily, that she would get them back eventually. We both swallowed hard.)
There is a photograph of the Ascendancy great-grandmother who married our decidedly-not-Ascendancy, plain Irish, immigrant great-grandfather and was disinherited for his sake. (Similarly, our maternal great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Rockefeller was disinherited for marrying our great-great-grandfather (whose daughter I hazily remember: she died when I was five). We are peasants from way back and on both sides.) A photograph of our great-grandfather holding our infant maternal grandmother; his face is just not one that gets made any more. Photographs of her girlhood; of her beloved big brother, our great-uncle, whose story I want to tell here but for which I want a scanner; of our father and his siblings as children (all wearing glasses before their fourth birthdays; I'm grateful again to have my maternal line's myopia rather than their compound of problems, and mystified again how my sister at nearly 40 (!) can still have perfect sight).
A picture I'm jealous of, since I could never be in it: my father's cousin, sister-in-law, brother, father, and wife holding his first daughter. I, the second daughter, was born after his father died.
A large section of pictures of CLH and me:
* With puppy Sagi. My mother has a series of snapshots of us mauling the poor thing; in one, I in no more than a diaper am holding the dog, and in the next, my hand is raised to hit CLH who is now holding the dog. This latter is the one in the album, of course.
* With grown and aged Shadow in her beanbag in front of our father's chair, in which I sit with CLH on my lap. Over the chair is a photograph portrait of Dad's father.
* At my high school graduation and her college graduation and my wedding, all with him, and the last time he saw us together, at his brother's in 2001.
* The two of us in Boston and Old Lyme and Aspen over the years.
Also pictures of CLH on her own and of me on my own and with RDC, including this one of us going to the opera. Last weekend our materal cousin was looking through the album, I hope out of interest and not just courtesy, and when she turned to this page said "Great dress!" I replied, "That dress? Fifteen bucks at T.J. Maxx!" and my sister exclaimed "Good story, Jwaas!"
Because most of my stories, like the one I've just told here, are overly long and filled with tedious unnecessary detail and have no particular point. Whereas that one merely communicated the glee of that dress at that price. My sister is my biggest fan. Whereas I was proud of myself for fibbing about the name of the store, since the actual one, while operating on the same principle, isn't nationally recognizable.
I picked up Blake's tray (a foot by less than a foot, with a half-inch lip; it started its life as part of my dorm fridge) the other day and asked RDC what were those desiccated hairy things? He had bought broccoli sprouts to put on sandwiches. We always share foods with Blake--the sandwich bread, some lettuce or spinach, a wisp of cheese--and that's how RDC discovered what extremely yummy things sprouts are. Except they mummify even faster than spinach wilts.
They snap in the beak, they shred well, they stick to the wall when you whip your head back and forth to clean it (like a wet dog shaking), so even if they weren't tasty, their physical attributes would make them a favorite. My little buddy.
The last page of my father's album features his grandchildren: Kitty sunning herself in my sister's ivy-covered window, and Blake preening his tail. Of course.
RDC just digitized our wedding video, eight years old, already deteriorating, and not of high quality to start with. His uncle took it and gave us a copy, I'm pretty sure. I didn't know he was taking it until I spotted him during our first dance, which was unsurprisingly dreadful. I asked RDC, when he told me he'd digitized it, if the dance was as cringeworthy as I remember. He said that the most embarrassing moment was when I wouldn't let him feed me cake.
We didn't have an argument about something that happened 8.5 years ago, but we had stiff words: he said it was embarrassing that I wouldn't let him feed me, that I held his hand away from my face with both of mine, that I didn't trust him just to put a little frosting on my lips to kiss off. Hmm. Whereas what I remembered was not knowing about this "little bit of frosting" ahead of time and fearing that he would smear me. "You didn't trust me," he translated. I didn't argue that, but why would he think I wanted frosting on my mouth?
So I started the video, jumping up to remove cookies from the oven every few minutes, and finished the cookies sometime during the wholly unorganized because unplanned receiving line. I figured I had already found the most embarrassing moment: my mother's shrill voice commanding everyone to "look over here," over and over and over again.
Then I brought my computer downstairs to finish watching it with him. The dance was terrible, but either RDC's uncle didn't catch my first, displeased reaction to spotting the videocamera or he tactfully edited it out (which might be why we have only a copy). There is only my saying, "Arrest that man!" and RDC at my ear--he was whispering that any protest would be undignified because, in fact, also taped. He was correct, though I was right--I didn't want video--and I shushed.
The toasts were okay, EJB's short and sweet and my sister's welcoming us to Colorado and praising RDC for putting up with "that laugh." That footage does include the worst moment of the tape, RDC's aunt approaching the lens to urge her husband closer, thereby giving a really dreadful close-up.
Then the cake-cutting, and yes I was watching to make sure I was right, always a nice way to treat wedding relics. RDC fed me first, bringing his hand to my mouth, and I took a bite. Then, with audible encouragement from at least two identifiable voices, he approached his hand to my face again, frosting forward. So ha, I did have cause to fear the oh-so-tacky smearing, and that's when I leaned back and pushed his hand away before, for form's sake though with basilisk eyes, I stopped outwardly resisting. He put a little frosting on my lips and kissed it off. When I fed him, I held the piece of cake still so he could control his bite rather than have to work around my moving it toward him.
Then we kissed and made up, both on the video and in person.
Not the most embarrassing but the stupidest moment is the bouquet toss. The only things I had forgotten to bring with me were not on my list: garters. RDC's grandmother gave me one that might have fit around my lower arm when I was eight. Also, my uncle gave me the garter he caught at my parents' wedding--what he was doing going for the garter when he was already married I couldn't say--and I would have worn that as my Something Old if I had remembered it--but not thrown it, a keepsake meant for CLH. Without a garter, we had a co-ed bouquet toss. That might have been funner if we could have coordinated a throw better. We released the bouquet so late that it landed nearly at our feet, while everyone bunched up to catch it stood at least 10 feet away. CLH and SPG were equally determined to get it, so they tussled amusingly.
I think I have mentioned before that I completely bollocksed the old-new-borrowed-blue poesy. My dress was new, LEB lent me a pearl choker, I forgot the old garter, and RDC's aunt had lent me diamond-and-sapphire earrings but I preferred faux-pearl-and-rhinestone pendants that went with my dress better, dangling for its neckline and pearly for its fabric. I had my sapphire engagement ring of course, but CLH wore that during the ceremony.
We seem to be muddling along all right despite that inauspicious beginning.
Plainsong made me laugh out loud once as two people unused to anyone other than each other try to make conversation with someone new.
RDC and I were talking about "Return of the King." He said he had expected the matter of the ring to be resolved at the end of the first movie. I asked him if he knew there were going to be two other movies--living with me, he ought to have--and he said yes; I asked what he thought the other two movies were going to be about, then? He said, "Some other ring?" and I laughed and laughed and laughed.
A while later he asked if I recognized that "some other ring" was a Baldrick answer. I hadn't. I laughed again.
I have been refreshing his memory, since he hasn't read the books and saw "Fellowship" two years ago in the cinema and "Two Towers" whenever it came out on DVD (I still don't have the extended version). He was confusing Saruman and Sauron, so to remind him of who is who, I recalled the battle between the two wizards, Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee, smiting each around in the white tower, "and remember how you said that since it was filmed in the southern hemisphere, Gandalf should spin the other way?" He remembered that. Other characters are Agent Smith, the Aerosmith chick, the Alice Cooper guy, and Sallah.
We were looking at animals for a baby and an almost-baby we'll see tomorrow. I swooned over a lemur and an elephant and an ostrich. RDC frowned when he saw more of the ostrich than its generic head. "I thought it was a vulture," he said, "It's ecologically sound for when the other stuffed animals die."
When I put my grandmother's clip-on koala to the tree, I remembered mine, mouldering among other keepsakes. Today I added another koala and two raccoons. (I figure they're arboreal and like being in Yule trees even though they don't sparkle.) I noticed my koala's off hind leg was about to fall off. RDC suggested, "We can have it for dinner."
I am married to Ebenezer Scrooge.
I decided to make like Linus van Pelt (or Emily Blair) and read the Christmas stories as given severally and contradictorily in the gospels. Fifteen of the first 16 verses of Matthew are begats, the generation of Jesus Christ, ending with "And Jacob begat Joseoph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ."
Why is Joseph counted in the genealogy of Jesus, no matter how good a stepfather he was?
I have been sneaking snorts of buddy fluff. Often when he's preening and facing away, I can get my nose into his breast for a sniff or two before he notices and beaks me. He's in a forgiving mood today, I guess: he was on my shoulder and I had my nose in his shoulder joint and my lips against his breast for a couple of minutes and he just let me. I really doubt basset hounds smell as good.
If I got up at midnight to see, it would be very bad luck to spot him genuflecting. It would also scare the piss out me, because cockatiels don't have knees.
I first typoed "kneeds." Ha! Cockatiels have plenty of those.
I am watching the Loony Tunes' Golden Collection, since my mother-in-law, perspicacious as she is, did not fail to notice the want want want note under that item in my Amazon wishlist. Bugs Bunny is arguing with an umpire: "I was safe!" " Yer out!" "Safe!" "Out!" until finally Bugs says "Out!" so the umpire contradicts "Safe!"
This reminds me that I lost an argument ("Is not!" "Is too!") to NCS once by falling for the exact same trick. I hang my head.
When my sister was home, she looked at the cards on the mantel. My mother's husband got a Christmas card from his boss, with a gift certificate to a local restaurant and a note: "Your awesome." BDL is a high school janitor, which makes his boss a high school principal. My sister clearly is not always the Good Daughter, because she was disgusted by this. My mother said she had noticed as well but not said anything because BDL was so pleased by present and compliment.
Having bad grammar and spelling doesn't make you a bad human being. It just means you shouldn't be in education.
We got a card from a family whose mother, who has a B.A. in elementary education, is homeschooling her young brood. The return address, on a preprinted label, read The Brood's.
The other day I glanced at a stack of address labels in the Dot Org mailroom. Dot Org works closely enough with government entitites to warrant printed address labels to capital cities, to offices near capitols, yet Dot Org, someone at Dot Org, cannot distinguish between "capital" and "capitol"? And I, happening by to photocopy something, was the first to notice the error in a stack of labels half gone?
My mother's husband gave her a cellular phone for Christmas. Being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, she is. That's not what I'm proud of.
What I'm proud of is this: a while ago BDL was given a hand-me-down, surely obsolete computer from his school. Its price was right, even if nothing else is. Today she told me that BDL finally set it up on a table in the...work room? My sister's former bedroom has, besides the computer, quite a snazzy sewing machine in it, both machines thus far unused. The room of misfit technology, then. She told me it was just on a table so far, not aerogonomically [sic] correct or anything, and I asked, "So you know that the monitor faces front, right?" and she laughed! She even continued, "Yes, it's all set up, with the keyboard in front of the monitor, hee hee, and everything."
She asked about presents. I told her that, as RDC retreated to the couch after the Great UnMasking with a stack of new books clasped to his bosom, I asked him, "But what will you read tomorrow?" and she understood the implication of far more than a day's new material.
Really, I should have got her remarried off years ago. We'd have an entirely different relationship.
I skimmed People or a similar rag in the grocery line the other day. It said that Brooke Shields has a daughter named Rowan Francis. Eh? I figured People had made an error, so I just looked it up. According to Extra, that's the girl's name. Francis, not Frances.
Looking it up, I see that although Frances was "standardized" as the spelling for females, females have always been named Francis too. Well. Okay then.
A woman I used to work with had a sign hanging in her cube:
"When it comes
To Francis, sir,
It's 'i' as in 'him'
And 'e' as in 'her.'"
Just before midnight, we paused our game of Taboo,* switched the set from DVD (either "Dead Again" or "Henry V": Clove was in a Kenneth/Emma mood) to Dorian Gray's Rocking New Year's Eve, and tried to pour sparkling cider for the non-champagne contingent. The cider needed a bottle opener, and RDC dashed upstairs to get it. I paused the ball drop at 11:59:02 to allow time for the dash and pour.
Besides that the ball had dropped two hours before, how much of an insult to time was it to Tivo the time-delayed drop?
* Taboo really isn't much of a game if you have any command of synonyms or culture. I couldn't say "Dutch" but I could say "Don Quixote tilted at ---" and go on to the next word.
Conversation over lunch led to RDC saying, "I always said I was going to be an inventor when I was a kid."
"What did you say you were going to be when you were an adult?"
"The kind of person who beats his wise-acre wife."
I was reading a site about basset hound rescue and care and came across something about anal sacs, which sometimes become impacted and need to be emptied (you hold the tail up and squeeze and whatever it is, which the site admitted was "smelly," comes out.
That took the bloom off the rose somewhat.
But Clove said this happens to their dog too and they have the vet take care of it. That sounds reasonable to me. The next impediment was one of the site's dog-readiness questions: Is the decision to adopt a basset hound a unanimous one?
It's really not. RDC wants an eventual German Shepherd because he knows to what degree their obedience and discipline can be honed. I say, and he knows, that we haven't the space, inside or out, for a Shepherd. That's why I downgraded from Labrador Retriever, myself. At basset hound, I want a used one, older, to ease myself into a parent relationship with a dog, and he suggests that a puppy is more trainable and will have grown up with a cockatiel and won't have emotional trauma.
The dog's been shelved for now (in the public dog library). Alas.
This morning, with Blake on my shoulder, I scraped and spackled more of the watercloset. There's more I won't do until I have convenient hot water again, and some of the walls need joint compound, spackle's tougher cousin, but I could do some. I spackled and then I trimmed some 90-degree angles where a previous painter had let a long bead of paint dry, and I scraped the scar of a one-time phone line (?) off the ceiling. Spackling is boring (Blake just preened), but the scraping made noises that he had to imitate.
A basset hound would not be able to help like that.
It is nearly long enough to put up again after November's choppage. I mean, I can put it up, but it's nearly long enough to stay up even if I, say, move. So here it is, up, and when I looked at myself in the mirror I wondered if I could deal with hair actually as short as this looks, because I liked this effect. I don't mean to look like Norman Bates, either, I was just hiding my chin.
But I can't hide my eyebags.
The setting: the Children's Museum of Denver. The players: JJM and JPM, who will need aliases, and me.
The first scene: a room with a road carpet (? a rug printed with roads to zoom cars along) over here, Duplo blocks over there, and a lot of wooden blocks in the corner. JJM said JPM would like the cars and Duplo and I said, "Goody, blocks for me." I did two things with the blocks: one, putting them all away in their cubbies, like with like, because I am all into organizing--magnetic poetry and proverbs, stuffed animals--which JJM knew from at least Thanksgiving, when my playing with JPM's toys consisted mostly of nesting the five-sided cubes--and two, building low towers for JPM and other kids to knock over. I would cry "Yea!" and applaud at each topple (and quietly feel slightly proud at detaching myself from my creations). One little boy wanted to demolish a tower, but his grown-up, thinking that would be rude to me, called to him not to knock the towers over. How should I have told the man that it was okay, that that's why I built them? I even built them wide and low with the thinnest blocks on top, for minimal toe-smashage.
Mostly I was stowing away the blocks, though.
Our next stop was a 30' wall covered with giant fridge poetry-style magnets of letters, numerals, and words, thoroughly jumbled. I approached the board to assemble JPM's name, and JJM observed to her son, "Uh-oh, this one could take Lisa days." (I hadn't even told her about the measurer's comment yet.)
I howled with laughter, partly because it was true but mostly because, damn, on first seeing it, I didn't think to order and sort the characters, but as soon as she said it, I felt the need.
Later, I mentioned dismantling the tree and dealing with the cards, putting photographs in albums etc. JJM said, "You keep photographs of other people's children?" Or something like that. Not contemptuously, but mystified. And yes, yes I do. This struck me as so obvious I didn't know how to explain it. I used as an example a card we both received: "If you saw Begonia, Ms. Begonia, and Baby Begonia at a party and happened to take a good snapshot of them, you might put it in an album, right?" She allowed as how that was so. What's the difference?
I freely admit I am a freakishly, unnecessarily over(-)tidier of blocks and magnets and books and DVDs and lists. I cannot see in any wise whatsoever how keeping pictures of my friends' children, as well as those of my friends, is freaky in the slightest.
I have two paintings of Granny's that I need to reframe. When my mother first offered them to me I should have noticed how cheesy the frames were, how integral they were not to the paintings and how easily the canvases lifted out.
The two have been sitting on the curb of my study since my mother sent them (with a jar of elderberry jelly on top), next to an 8x10 photograph of my mother and her husband that she also sent, maybe as a Christmas present. The red poppies will wind up in the sunroom, and the slender jug on the blue and olive background in the landing, when you look left on first entering the house.
Torpor:
1 : APATHY, DULLNESS
2 : a state of mental and motor inactivity with partial or total insensibility : extreme sluggishness or stagnation of function
Turpitude:
: inherent baseness : DEPRAVITY
The latter word I learned from Bloom County.
The other day I wondered if I was projecting my inability to function after 10 p.m. on a friend. I was not: she too shuts down and longs for her bed.
Torpitude: the craven propensity to take too many naps or need to go to bed earlier than normal people. My first new word since "stomple."
I finally raked up the cherry leaves, though I have to do the whole lot again. Also I thoroughly cleared out the former gravel bed on the south side of the garage for a new vegetable bed. It was so warm that Blake came out and helped me.
I really liked the narrator of The Human Stain, no one I had ever heard of named Arliss Howard (also Debra Winger). I am not so much enjoying the narration of American Pastoral--and why would Audible have two different narrators when both books are "by" Nathan Zuckerman? Especially since Nathan Zuckerman exists in The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
The reason I don't like this narrator is--well, one of them--why do people pronounce the g in words like "sing" and "thing" as much as they do the k in "sink" and think"? The velar nasal, ŋ, is a sound on its own, not a diagraph. It's [ng], not [ng-g]. Hmm. (The phoneme is represented in IPA as an n with a long, slightly hooked right leg, but both ŋ and ŋ might not display correctly.)
Today season 4 of "The West Wing" started on Bravo. I didn't like the character Bruno before, I think because of his personality. I haven't seen "West Wing" since I started listening to American Pastoral, but as soon as I heard his voice I knew. Ron Silver. Now I'm going to project Bruno's character onto everyone in American Pastoral, and the book doesn't need another strike against it.
This morning for whatever reason--I did have one--I asked Intern if he knew about Flowers in the Attic.
He replied, quite seriously, "Is that by the same guy who wrote Where the Sidewalk Ends?"
---
Minutes later I was able to tuck what remained of my brain back between my ears and sit up. The Giving Tree. My Sweet Audrina. Lafcadio. Petals in the Wind. The Missing Piece. If There Be Thorns. Falling Up. Seeds of Yesterday. Where the Sidewalk Ends. Garden of Shadows. The Light in the Attic. Shel Silverstein wrote 'em all.
<--Before and After -->
And the chip. In early third grade I fell off the jungle gym and broke my front two teeth. It must have been third grade, because Center School didn't have that jungle gym before then. Maybe second grade, because I did already have my adult teeth, possibly as late as fourth. Mrs. Newman, my beloved speech therapist, came and sat with me in the nurse's office until my mother arrived. The front two teeth were capped--I've alluded to this twice before--and what mystifies my mother and me is that no dentist since has ever detected any trace of said capping, despite my vivid memories of the fall, the blood, the "wust" taste, and the tape-recording, despite my mother's memories of being called, racing to the school, and having me capped.
Anyway, eventually I managed to chip off a corner of the right front tooth again. For ages I considered it Character. Didn't Sally J. Freedman's teacher have a deliberately chipped tooth? I was thinking it was the father's secretary in Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing but Peter was befuddled by, not envious of, her beauty routine. It's been a while since I considered it Character. I have been able to justify it, in my own head, as repair, not make-up. And today I had it done.
(The title is from Geek Love.)
Dot Org has a director, my ÜrBoss, and an executive committee (like a board of directors), whose membership, including its officers, rotates. So while the latter is completely refreshed every few years, ÜrBoss has been with Dot Org since its inception more than a quarter of a century ago. Occasionally the committee meets in Denver, and occasionally occasionally there is a function. Tonight, we dedicated the building; and when I found out that a magnum of champagne wouldn't be smashed on the cornerstone, I had no expectations.
Though I am no fan of urban sprawl and have only grumpily dealt with the move out to the hinterlands, this evening I clapped as loudly as anyone, and maybe longer, when the president announced that the building will be named for ÜrBoss, after his retirement, which sad loss we all hope won't be for years and years and years.
I talked to Haitch, who reminded me that I love Blake even when he's a footboy. We had a shower together--Blake and I, not Haitch and I--and the post-shower preening distracted him. I watched him fuss in a spatch of sun on a corner of the dining table, shaking off clouds of dust, and talked to CLH, who might come to Denver again.
I told her CoolBoss's latest two lines: Friday when I, dressed in a suit and wearing makeup for the executive committee's presence, bared my teeth at her, she said, "They look really good, except you've got lipstick on them." Later, talking about the next Big Top, which will be held in Salt Lake City this summer, she said, "Lisa, you have to go--you're the only one who won't mind no drinking." CLH has met CoolBoss a couple of times and likes her; now she likes her more.
Before the phone calls I smeared joint compound on the water closet walls so tomorrow I can sand them. Unlike scrubbing, smearing isn't so loud that I can't listen to American Pastoral. So that got done.
Then I walked out to feed some friends' cats. It was a lovely walk, and I sat on their couch with a glass of water and Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself prepared to cuddle some lonely kitties. They were having none of that, but two in turn (I swear the third is invisible) drank from my glass--after they had eaten their disgusting cat food. At the end I did get some Charley-love. Maybe by tomorrow they'll appreciate me more.
I stopped into the Park Hill Co-operative Bookstore and came away with some treats: Because of Winn-Dixie, which I've read but did want to own; What's Bred in the Bone, which had been my goal at the library (my next stop); a Newbery Honor that I haven't read, Dragon Wings by Laurence Yep; and a great Twinkie treat, A Royal Pain by Ellen Conford.
The library yielded two Douglas Couplands (Hey Nostradamus and All Families Are Psychotic) and A Great and Terrible Beauty, which I think Melissa recommended. Or not: I find no mention of it in The Usual Suspects. Well, I heard about it somewhere.
And now after a satisfying though dogless walk I am home with Blake, reading cheesy YA fiction and watching "The Sea of Grass," one of the few Hepburn & Tracy movies I haven't seen and supposedly one of the best.
I love them all, some in spite of themselves, some more than others.
Adam's Rib
I don't love this as much as it might deserve. I have a hard time not resenting Spencer Tracy sometimes, and I can only wish their relationship was as equitable in real live as on screen.
The African Queen
My earliest favorite. Adventure and romance and victory against the bad guys!
Alice Adams
I haven't read the Booth Tarkington book and I understand the movie's happy ending is not at all that of the book, just as Magnificent Ambersons got butchered. Screen filler.
A Bill of Divorcement
"You mean, there's insanity in the family?"
Break of Hearts
I just recently tried to watch this, but the print was so terrible I couldn't bear it.
Bringing Up Baby
Cary Grant, so what could go wrong?
Christopher Strong
The eventual fate of either of the heroines in The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly?
The Corn Is Green
A Delicate Balance
Despite Paul Scofield, I didn't like this. Maybe it was just too painful, maybe it didn't translate well from stage to screen.
Desk Set
Prescient and charming and she's not under Tracy's thumb.
Dragon Seed
Wow. Despite the same problems of Caucasians playing Asians that plague a contemporary viewer's experience of this and the cinematization of another Pearl S. Buck novel, quite a powerful movie. And because I hadn't read it first, I didn't find it as fraught with inadequacies as the mangling of my beloved Good Earth.
The Glass Menagerie
Grace Quigley
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
The Technicolor glares, and I can't quite separate it from knowing she never could bear to see it.
Holiday
I love it. They're both like Dinah Lord all the way through instead of only at the end.
The Iron Petticoat
Keeper of the Flame
This one's Plot Twist was obvious a mile away. I am a later generation of movie-viewer.
Laura Lansing Slept Here
The Lion in Winter
Although it's impossible to say for certain, certainly among my very favorites.
The Little Minister
It's waiting for me on TiVo right now. I think it's the sort of thing I should proof during.
Little Women
She's a great Jo.
Long Day's Journey Into Night
I haven't seen it in many years, since before the love really blossomed.
Love Affair
Love Among the Ruins
The Madwoman of Chaillot
The Man Upstairs
Mary of Scotland
Katharine Hepburn playing Mary Stuart Valois Darnley Hepburn. What could be better?
Morning Glory
Is it in this or in "Stage Door" that she speaks of carrying calla lilies on her wedding day? That was one of the captions in my wedding album.
Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry
Olly, Olly, Oxen Free
On Golden Pond
I haven't seen this since its cinematic release, I think. It might have started the Kate love. I'm not sure I connected this woman with Rosie Sayer though.
One Christmas
Pat and Mike
My least favorite Tracy pairing. It's not just that it's about sports, or even mostly. It's just cheesy.
The Philadelphia Story
I can't give this anything but love, baby.
Quality Street
One of those that I have watched out of sheer determinedness to see all of them.
The Rainmaker
I tried to watch this once. I'll try again.
Rooster Cogburn
The Sea of Grass
This was good for a while.
Song of Love
Just as "Casablanca" freaked me out because it paired Charlie Allnut with someone other than Rosie, Victor Laszlo with Rosie was weird. But it was good.
Spitfire
I didn't pay much attention to this, which I just saw last week, because Kate's Pennsyltucky accent was so atrociously bad.
Stage Door
I confuse this with "Morning Glory." One of the several I saw at the Wadsworth the summer of 1992 with ABW and RDC, when the only one I remember is "Bill of Divorcement."
State of the Union
A great movie
Suddenly, Last Summer
Elizabeth Taylor can act. Between this and the O'Neill, I figure Kate had enough Freud.
Summertime
Sylvia Scarlett
Cary Grant, so what could go wrong? They could wind up not together, that's what.
This Can't Be Love
The Trojan Women
True Love
Undercurrent
This could have been so much better, with such a concept and cast. Ah well.
Without Love
Better than I expected.
Woman of the Year
I suppose when the movie came out Tracy's character was more sympathetic. No more.
A Woman Rebels
Much better than I expected, though that iceberg thing, or the production code, meant I rewound a couple of times, not having picked up cues its original audience would have parsed correctly and been shocked by.
Another before and after, thought this is a before and middling instead of middling and after.
The paint wants a second coat on the walls and trim, though I think that of the ceiling is okay, and the window wants scraping. It's a lot pinker than I planned, though I still like it, but it clashes with the adobe-hued floor. A rug would be nice, if I could find one to reduce instead of emphasize the clashing.
Another coat on the walls and trim, the window scraped, floor moulding, a new lightswitch and light fixture, a curtain and rug, and, of course, a new toilet, and then it will be done.
Oh, and a door. The door will be flat white, like the ceiling, unless I can find some eggshell white. (The arch between living and dining rooms is flat white, and I should get some eggshell white to do that, plus this door.) It's on sawhorses in the furnace room waiting for its next coat. And a sign for the outside of the door, a W.C. sign.
Three months for a room smaller than a closet (and it's not done yet). I am smokin'.
P.S. Tex said the wallpaper and curtain looked like they were out of "Leave It to Beaver."--21 January.
P.P.S. This morning I took my box of 96 Crayola crayons into the watercloset. The closest match to Benjamin Moore's 2005-50 "Pink Eraser"--which looked so attractive and reasonable on the swatch--is lavender (bottom row, eighth from the right). The W.C. is darker than Crayola's lavender, but that crayon matches the tone and hue if not the saturation. --22 January.
Of all the movies and books I've mentioned to Intern in the past seven months, such as Egg and I acting out "Philadelphia Story" for him and all three of us reminiscing about "Breakfast Club," the one I thought he really needed to see was, of course, "Harold and Maude." He saw it, and he liked it. The only one he's recommended is "Red Dawn."
It's not a fair trade, which both of us knew going in it wouldn't be; still somehow I expected it to be more intelligent than, say, dirt. Alas, it's stupider than "War Games" and lacks that movie's charm. Intern described it being as fundamentally '80s as "Weird Science" and "Some Kind of Wonderful," but I just painted my bathroom pink, for pete's sake. (Maybe that makes me a pinko?) I knew it wouldn't be my type of movie but I didn't expect to be bored. Well, maybe the time and my age are wrong: I was devastated by the equally bad, and made for TV, "The Day After," which I saw in 1983 at age 15. (I realized it was bad when I rewatched it many years later. "Threads," though, I bet is still effective.)
I suspected this movie when I learned that the operation to capture Saddam Hussein was called "Red Dawn." And yes: the possible locations were called Wolverine.
Today's acquisitions: one (1) new toilet, Eljer "Savoy" model, which name cracks me up--and the other model was "Patriot," which also cracked me up, one (1) toilet seat, one (1) wax seal, one (1) extra wax seal, and one (1) package of four (4) toilet shims; two (2) eight-foot lengths of pre-made molding for the watercloset; four (4) bulbs for the lamp in the den, 40 and 60 watts; several (x) painty appliances; and two (2) crown molding ledges that we hung, with frustration at the stupid mounting system but no snapping or swearing, in the dining room.
I asked Haitch once if the dining table was too big for the dining room. She hedged that it was the right size for a dining table. It seats six without its leaves, and there is no space in the room for a handy bar or sideboard. One corner has a six-foot corn plant, another presently has a fern (exiled from the sunroom for the interminable building of the breakfast nook), the third a door, and the fourth has the buddy cage on the buddy stand on the buddy rug.
So now we have two ledges. They don't hold anything really useful, like glasses and decanters, but they could as occasion demanded. Right now they hold pretties: a platter we were given for Yule, a plate RDC brought me from Ireland, the champagne glasses we had at our wedding, the bread plate I made at Color Me Mine, another plate friends brought us from Italy, and a copper plate with a Pacific Northwest-style orca hammered into it.
We weren't in the mood to deal with the toilet, which means we have to deal with it one of the next four evenings or have a houseguest with just the one.
I know that the narrator's nasal whine did American Pastoral no favors, but that doesn't stop me from editorializing myself when I'm reading aloud to RDC.
Last year when I read him Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, I muttered when the farm was referred to as "Mr. Fitzgibbon's" rather than as "the Fitzgibbons'." I also snorted when Justin told Mrs. Frisby to slide down a post like a fireman's pole, because of course she'd know exactly what that is.
Last night we finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This time my annotations were obvious: when Aslan paces up from the Fords of Beruna to the Hill of the Stone Table, I said "Gethsemane" a lot (the first time, RDC said, "Gesundheit" so I kicked him). When Lucy and Susan joined him, I said "Mary and Martha" instead of their names. During the Easter Sunday romp, among the joyous leaping and bounding and laughing, I added, "And Susan stuck her hand in his side." Naturally I had to make Susan the doubting Thomas, since she's the lipstick-wearing baddie who doesn't make it past Revelations.
We are doing the kitchen. Packing its contents, removing the tile, getting rid of the dead downstairs fridge, bringing the working fridge down, setting up some small appliances downstairs in a temporary kitchen so also doing something about the utility sink so that it turns off without nine billion psi of wrist-wrenching pressure, removing the cabinetry, removing the countertops, repairing the walls, removing and hiding the dishwasher, disposing of the range and sink and insinkerator, buying and installing a hood, (paying someone for) installing new cabinetry and countertops, installing a range and sink and insinkerator, reinstalling the dishwasher, repairing the window, painting the walls, tiling between the countertops and cabinet bottoms, and possibly buying a new upstairs fridge. And doing something about the lighting.
We have a plan and the beginnings of a timeline; we have chosen cabinetry and countertops and hardware and wall color but not tile; and we have four months before it gets too hot to work inside.
Yesterday we chipped off the first three tiles just to see how it would go. Today I chipped off several more before dinner. While I cleaned up after dinner, Blake continued helping. I will remove tiles starting on the north wall with tools, and Blake will continue working on the south wall with his beak, and we will meet in the middle. I think "middle" will be "one tile east of Blake's starting point," but I appreciate his effort.
I started packing the kitchen, just a little. The china, into a sturdy plastic crate with lots of poppy stuff; the cookie and cake stuff like the spritzer and cutters in the box the sander came in; and bundling stuff like milkshake glasses and my grandmother's sugar bowl and creamer into one cupboard for when I get more boxes and packing stuff.
RDC applied a last bit of joint compound in the stairwell; when it dries I can sand it all and finally prime and paint that.
We got a quote on the cabinetry installation and, with that, now know the basic major expenses. "Minor" expenses are the hardware for the cabinetry and the tiles for the backsplashes and any under-cabinet lighting.
I still haven't replaced the watercloset door or razored the window and the trim still needs another coat plus I got some color on the white ceiling, but nevertheless I feel like after a pause of many months--since the gardens went dormant for the season--we are finally making progress on the house again.
I sanded the front landing in a respirator and safety glasses, swept the walls once, hosed myself off (my eyelashes were white), puttered about for a while while more dust settled, swept the walls again without the respirator or glasses, hosed myself off (my nosehairs were white), read, then damp-mopped the surfaces, then scrubbed them with TSP-substitute.
Tomorrow morning, the first coat of primer.
Also, in my brilliance, I painted the outside of the watercloset door in semi-gloss and the inside in flat (not even eggshell) white. When I do the trim in the landing I'll gloss the door. Define it, you know. I did razor the window clean. And we replaced the toilet, seating the new one much more thoroughly so it doesn't wobble. I hope I never have to replace another toilet. The wax seal between toilet and waste pipe gets extremely nasty over time. The first layers come off on the scraper like fresh earwax, pliable and not overly gross, but the inner ones are like the big chunks of dried earwax that that mouthbreather in third grade always had, that he could make a Bernie Botts' Every Flavor Bean out of.
But it's done for this time, as of Tuesday night, and the current project is not repellent at all, and I am showered and shampooed and cuddled in fleece and making dinner and probably will finish She Is Me tonight.
Yii. I have Sinéad O'Connor in my head because I am so aware of the difference in my outlook today. I have these hiccups of blee that I love, that I remember being my usual state of being, that haven't been for a long time.
So yesterday my psychiatrist and I (that would be one of the things I've been not 'fessing about, and the difference in my mood is why I'm 'fessing now) talked about why I'm not as comfortable socially as I once was. I have become, shockingly, an introvert, in fact if not by nature.
I told her three incidents from the class I took at Metro.
The first I told when it happened: that I mistook a classmate I had already thought looked like Sabrina for Sabrina. I think I wanted to tell her (Shrink) that I did see a potential friend there but already didn't know how to court the prefriend when that incident nixed (in my mind if not in fact) any chance of that happening.
The second happened the first day of class and set the tone for the remainder. The professor gave a spiel about how far feminism still has to go and had some clippings from recent papers to illustrate her point. One was Mr. Someone saying that sometimes it really is okay to hit your wife. Most of the class seemed to know who the speaker was, and his apparent celebrity meant that people would look up to and emulate him. I had no idea who the name was, so I raised my hand and asked, "Who is Shannon Sharpe?" He is a Denver Bronco football player, and my not knowing that, and probably quite obviously not caring about knowing it, that began (many of) my classmates' dislike of me. Shrink and I have spoken about cognitive distortions, such as my limited ability to react appropriately because I'm so busy being insecrure and overinterpreting (speaking of Cathleen Schine, "so literal-minded and fanciful at the same time… a black hole, sucking up the world around me to metaphorize it out of all recognizability") and however much that is true (very), I damn well didn't mistake or exaggerate the hostility of particularly three of them.
Once feeling brassy and superior, as we walked into the classroom, I asked one of the three whose murmurings whenever I raised my hand were the loudest, what that button on her backpack meant (MET with a slash through it--something about how the nickname for Metropolitan State College of Denver should not be Met). From my usual front right seat, I easily saw her in the opposite corner telling her companions why she spoke to me at all, and if she'd known it was me addressing her from behind as we entered the room single-file, she would have--here she jabbed backward with her elbow. Not just dislike: hostility. Whatever. For good or ill, I felt superior to them and their dislike of me amused rather than distressed me. Whereas, another time that semester in my commute home, I was so distraught when a random other bus passenger told me off, in quite foul language, when I asked him please not to stand on my foot, that at my transfer point I called Haitch asking her to come get me rather than spend another instant on public conveyance.
The third incident--well, it's just a good story when I was already talking about the class, so I didn't resist it, even though it has nothing to do with How I React When People Like or Dislike me--happened one Monday evening after I had spent the weekend in Aspen with CLH, who had flown in for a friend's wedding, and not done the assigned reading. In class, the first several people the professor called on to comment on the reading could not answer--no one else had done the reading either--so she systematically called on everyone, about the readings page by page. Because she naïvely used alphabetical order, it was easy to gauge what reading she would ask about by the time she reached H, so I nonchalantly skimmed it so that I could answer. An easy trick that continued not to enamour my classmates of me.
Shrink observed that all of these stories are about How Others Perceive Me. Yeah, pretty much. I like to be perceived well, and probably haven't enough inner resources to keep my esteem high when I don't get feedback. Maybe.
Speaking of feedback.
Last Saturday morning, I woke from an amusing if startling lascivious dream. I dreamt that RDC had loaned me out to JGW, and it was extremely erotic if not lewd, and amusing because JGW, while a great fellow, is no one I have ever found compellingly attractive. But RDC had been gone for over a week and JGW was due in a week so that explained that. Later that day, JGW called to report when his flight was due, and he asked me if I had a bed all warmed up for him and whether I had one of my hugs ready for him. As I told Nisou when we talked later, it sounded especially flirtatious to me.
Yesterday JGW arrived, and I returned from being shrunken in a contemplative mood that quickly dissipated into merriment. The three of us went to the Cherry Cricket for the best burger in Denver--well, three of them--and conversation. Flirting, I remarked that I cut my hair and mocked offense that he hadn't noticed. He said, "Well, your hair was never your most outstanding feature," and though I knew--I knew--he wasn't insulting my hair, he saw he'd have to explain himself. He said, "I'm probably going to embarrass myself here..." and continued to exonerate himself by speaking of the total package (I had anticipated my laugh or smile or eyes) and saying the hair was just what topped it off. I evened out the embarrassment by confessing the lascivious dream.
What am I getting at here (besides wanting to commemorate and publicize an extravagant compliment)? That if someone I did not trust as much as I do JGW had said something that sounded that much like an insult, no amount of follow-through explanation on their part, no matter how much I intellectually knew they meant something positive, could assuage my hurt. I don't mean only flirtatious comments either.
I mean that it's much easier for me to deal with people when I already have some foundation with them. Last month in Boston we played Pictionary and I was teamed with my sister's friend. My sister and cousin trounced us, but Friend and I got some brilliant ones ourselves (she guessed my "drench," which is extremely difficult to draw). I felt an immediate connection with Friend not because of anything in her personality but because of our tie through my sister.
I suppose that's universal, that it's easier to form a tie with someone when the initial boundary has been breached already, but I'm confronting the fact that I didn't use to mind that boundary, the fact of it, its presence. I used to be able, or to want, to bridge it. Now I don't bother, don't bother to make the effort.
I miss not having the social circle here that I had in school, but it's not moving that deprived me of it (though knowing no one here except RDC's schoolmates whom I was anxious not to alienate didn't help). It's the confidence I lost during My Bad Year, when I leaned way too much on way too many people, lacking discretion and restraint and even what slight tact I had cobbled together up to then.
Since then, I have been so anxious not to commit the same offenses that in the limited new social environments I find myself in, I am on my Best Behavior, and that's not fun, either for me or the society. Having to Watch myself all the time makes me anxious that I will Fail, and it's been easier to avoid the failing by not making the effort.
Which is pretty much the theme of my life. My epitaph will be "Change Is Bad" and "Crippled by Nostalgia," and a reason I am crippled by nostalgia is that Back Then, all this Having Friends nonsense was easy.
Shrink gave me a list of irrational thoughts that someone invented or compiled, and while I don't know what credence to lend the list (since I know nothing of its author), I do know I indulge in about 80% of the thought patterns listed.
I was kinda thinking, "Oh great, another thing to beat myself up about. Ain't I better off not knowing I am failing in these additional several ways?"
Cognitive distortions indeed.
I'm so anxious about people that recently at work when I, for a rarity, had to spend the day on the phone, I was getting sweaty and nervous at the prospect of each perfectly reasonable, professionally founded, call.
I know that Change Is Bad is a major reason I haven't attempted to find a more challenging, probably better paying, higher status job--although, as I told JGW this morning, I work less than 40 hours a week and get four weeks of vacation a year and have zero stress (semiannual evaluations and occasional phone calls aside) and that's worth the lower pay and status. The lack of challenge is probably no good for my mind or esteem, of course.
Do I have a thesis here? Probably not.
Anyway. I tapped a few notes this morning, when I was feeling bouncy and like my old Tigger self; now it's after eight and I ache from scrubbing the walls and being vibrated by the sander (that sounds not just painful but possibly maimful, doesn't it?) and I should see if I have a thesis yet.
Nah.
While at the Cricket JGW told his favorite lisa-goes-skiing story: RDC, he, and I at Ski Sundown. JGW remembered that I had been skiing fine for several runs but then choked on an easy green (and in Connecticut, the greens are really easy) and skied through a group beginner-skier lesson, and got yelled at by the instructor for my troubles while JGW and RDC both tried to excuse me and I shamefully apologized. RDC told EJB's favorite lisa-goes-skiing story: at Keystone, EJB was giving me a lesson on a blue run. I fell. I did not stop. Once at Whiteface in New York I fell and could not stop myself--and a perfect stranger dashed down in front of me as a brake. Thank you, whoever you were. I had yard-saled and, if he hadn't stopped me, would have had to trek back upslope to retrieve ski and ski and pole and pole. This time, at Keystone, my skies stayed on my feet, and I saw EJB grab my poles, so I continued falling with impunity. Basically I sledded down the slope, several hundred feet, on my front. As I now told JGW, I was getting down the slope and my feet didn't hurt, so skiing-wise I counted myself ahead of the game. Sledding's always more fun than skiing.
I referred to the Sundown incident as JGW's favorite lisa-story and he said no, it was his favorite lisa-skiing story but that his favorite lisa-story overall had to be the naked hottubbing at the wedding. I think it amused EJB and JGW so much because they had previously though RDC was marrying a prude, since I don't drink. Sometime during the afternoon, when most people were out front playing volleyball or croquet, I walked about with a bag disposing of plates and cups. Around back, I found APB and EJB talking about how possibly to enclose the deck, EJB in the hottub observing the Charenton stricture against bathing suits. That stricture was fine when it was just the two of them, but he was extremely startled when I skinned down and joined him. Last night in the Cricket, I told JGW I didn't remember him around the tub, and he said, "Believe me, I walked by" (presumably after EJB left and several other women joined me).
After the Cherry Cricket we met SPM and Begonia. Begonia's been going to this bar forever and the owner stood us a round of drinks and then a round of the same shots Begonia had had before we arrived. Five shots. Five people at the table. One of those people being me.
Moments later, RDC called my sister to tell her that I had had my first shot--an Alabama slammer, or something, Southern Comfort and something that tasted like Pez or presweetened Kool-Aid. Soon after that I left, having had enough smoke for the evening and leaving the men to reminisce about the Grateful Dead, to pass out from my imbibing, as RDC said.
De-smoked, I settled in to "Mary of Scotland" and TUS-chat. Between amiable, familiar friends in person and a common airing of grievances on the board, I did feel quite chatty, and some of my favorite Suspects were there. I chatted! I never chat.
So anyway, this morning I woke up nearly giddy. I am not still: that would make me manic. But I am happy, and happy to be so.
I am not, as we know, a football watcher. Today, however, I am not doing a damn thing more. If only there were still chamberpots. So here I am. Laptop, Douglas Coupland, and Superbowl TiVoing. When I started to watch "CBS Sunday Morning" and saw it would have a story on Superbowl ads, I tuned live tv to CBS and, what the hell, hit record. There's still Douglas Coupland and "Mary of Scotland" and "The Little Minister" until it's time to fast-forward in search of ads.
When CBS came on, someone was singing a tribute to the Columbia, which tribute was fitting though the performance a trifle twee. I don't know how Josh Groban could look familiar to me, but he did. He looks like Adrien Brody.
When did "The Star-Spangled Banner" become an easy-listening melody? Where is the shame in singing it as written? For all that Roseanne Barr's baseball version was foul and mean-spirited and out of tune, at least it followed the notes.
And what you learn from television! From "CBS Sunday Morning" again, Princess Leia is Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher's daughter? And Elizabeth Taylor was her stepmother for however long that marriage lasted? And she was married to Paul Simon for an instant in 1983? If Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor are friends now (and they are), does that mean Carrie Fisher and Edie Brickell are buds too?
Well, 2004 wasn't like 1984 either: no Mac ad at all. Oh, and New England won, which should make my father happy. And my sister too, I guess.
I was late leaving the house and rushing. I didn't rush enough to catch my bus; I walked the full four miles. Then we had a new person start and what with one thing and another I had a busy day. It wasn't until I was within a block of the house that I wondered about Blake. I could remember giving him fresh food and water and wheeling his cage in front of the living room window so he could look out, but...
I forgot either to put the stick in his door (which means that if he hops hard onto the dishes that latch into the door, he can bounce the door open) or to close the door at all. This I saw through the window as I raced up the steps, because his cage was empty (or full of everything but bird). I opened the door carefully not to squish him, then proceeded through the house at a trot, calling for him. The toilet had no cockatiel in it. I glanced into the bedroom: there he was.
He had spent the day on my fleece sock by the bed. He didn't seem particularly hungry or thirsty and in fact just wanted to return to his sock. His tail was filthy because he had squatted horizontally on a sock instead of standing vertically on a perch and occasionally taken refuge under the dusty bed (for a nearer ceiling than the actual one), so the most traumatic thing part of the experience was my taking an old, dampened toothbrush to his precious tail.
Good thing I don't have a dog.
I am going to sleep, watch two "West Wings," do something about my emailbox, sleep, paint the landing ceiling and trim, sleep, call RPR's baby shower, sleep, buy something for another baby shower and go to that in person, sleep, empty the cupboards around the stove (three of four done), and sleep, and that will be Saturday. Sunday I hope to snowshoe, finally, and cap the day at Hot Sulphur Springs. Also I am going read Everything Is Illuminated.
Coordinating the kitchen work is going to make my eyes bug out of my ears. After I empty those particular cabinets, they need to come off the wall, which will damage the plaster. An, I hope, multi-talented electrician will inspect the kitchen and attic (which means emptying RDC's closet, removing the rod, and setting up the ladder) next week and give a price to install the hood. At that point, the hood begins to make its way to the house, either within a week from the distributor or in a couple of months from the manufacturer; and as soon as the hood is a certainty, we can order the cabinets, which will also take six to eight weeks to arrive. In the interim, we repair the plaster.
I found two methods to repair plaster. One talks about plasterboard so I think actually means drywall. (Perhaps I can use that method to repair the hole in my study ceiling.) The other relies on luck: "Cut around the hole, making sure not to damage more plaster." It doesn't give any tips about how not to damage the plaster.
And I thought tiling the backsplash would happen at our own pace, after we had Other People install the cabinets and countertops and replaced the range, but it has to happen before the range goes in. That means we have to decide about tiles before the counter goes in, before we get a feel for how the counter will look in the room.
I toted a 12-inch square piece of Blue Pearl granite about the store and RDC saw that the cobalt blue sink did not match. So the sink will be stainless steel. Also we upgraded from a drop-in to an undermounted sink. The Great Indoors gave us a much more manageable three-inch square sample to take home. It goes really well with the pale blue on the back landing that I plan to apply to the kitchen.
After emptying the cabinets, my next step is to look at tile, bringing the granite chip and the Behr* Ocean Air paint card and the, sadly, mere catalog photograph of the cabinets along. It's actually a fun prospect.
But I begin to see why redoing a kitchen will always burgeon beyond the four- to six-week plan people think about.
* Yeah, Behr. I decided to paint the landing while standing in Home Depot, hence violating the vow we took never to buy Behr again. Besides, the front landing will be in Behr as well, the same sage as most of the upstairs.
** I'm not going to link the color because it displays online as green, whereas on the chip and the wall it's blue.
RDC wants to get me a phone that takes pictures, which would enable even more pictures than the iSight, so there'd be a lot more of these. That might get excessive. Here we have me on the chair, Blake tucked on my chest, the edge of a book tucked between back and arm of chair, and the arm of the chair (I want to emphasize that that's not my arm).
When I woke up this morning I was really disoriented and almost dizzy from bizarre dreams twisting together "What Dreams May Come" and "Angels in America." I called CLH so she could talk me into the present. I slept late, which is one reason my dreams were strange (either I'm more awake at the end of a long sleep, so I remember them more, or--my preference--my mind is using up the dregs of its material), and between that and the long sister-chat, I ditched the idea of painting the landing ceiling. It will wait.
I did go for a walk in the Preserve for the first time in maybe two years. I had avoided it because I remembered, I guess wrongly, from the last time I went, signs announcing new houses in the middle of a hairpin loop that had housed raptors and coyotes and waterfowl and kingfishers in wetlands: the big They were going to fill in the ponds. But either I misremember or the signs were for two mansions that have gone up on the built-in side of the canal, and which are palatially gargantuan but not on wetlands.
In the horse field--the particular horse field with the Przewalski (is it possible for a civilian, even a wealthy one, to have a Przewalski? that's what it looks like) and the donkey and the regular horse--I saw a rough-legged hawk, and at the apex of the hairpin, I overshot my planned turn-around point because I saw I think a Swainson's hawk. Also I might have spotted a peregrine falcon.
There were, however, no dogs. I was walking along in shorts, tank top, an unbuttoned denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and hiking shoes over about four inches of well-trampled snow. But this is Denver: the sun was out and I drove with the window down and was perfectly warm. (Let us not speak of my subcutaneous fat.) The occasional people I passed wore fleece and sweaters and even hats and long pants and were clearly freaks who thought it was too cold to bring their dogs out.
I walked and listened to Underworld and missed Haitch.
Then I visited my favorite library branch. Its architecture is perfect, for one thing, with a separate children's room and lots of window seats and nonfiction on another floor so you can research in quiet, but in addition to its browsable stacks, its main draw is the reader's adviser, a smiling woman named JoAnne who reminds me of my publishing professor.
I picked up Michele Roberts's The Looking Glass, which CLH recommended; The Beans of Egypt, Maine, very popular when I worked at Phoebe; J.M. Coetzee's new Elizabeth Costello; and a couple of volumes of Jane Austen because I have, ahem, never read Lady Susan.
Then I was late for the baby shower. I zipped down to Babies Are Misspelled and Grammatically Incorrect Depot, selected a present by triangulating the factors of registry request, price range, and proximity of item to check-out counter (and it sells wrapping paper too!), and promptly got lost in the Land of AllTheSame. Climbing Tree deliver me from Highlands Ranch and its beige McMansions. I thought that by continuing south of BAMaGI Depot I would find the highway, but apparently I crossed it without noticing as I looked for the Depot--I am used to approaching it from the east and using a Krispy Kreme for a landmark (I have previously visited that hellish pod place in Haitch's company, hence the doughnut stop). In Highlands Ranch, University and Colorado Boulevards intersect instead of running parallel. I ended up approaching the house by following the directions backward, but I got there only 20' past the start time.
I got to meet three newlings: Clove's...Pynchon (too young to be other than iguana-y), Margaret's...Buckbeak (six months old and very sociable), and Begonia's Scarlett (with the little palm tree pigtail most little girls have). I was grateful for Spenser, who has never failed to delight and amuse me even as rarely as I see her, because during Jack and Diane's unwrapping we kvetched (quietly, in the back) about the paraphenalia. Of her blanket, she said, "Needs neither instruction nor assembly." She asked what my "Prince Lionheart Diaper Depot" was about, and I explained my triangulation. Then she looked askance at me when I knew what a Boppie is. But she spoke of Trundlebundlers so we were both suspect.
But my favorite conversation happened with a woman whom I had previously seen only through Haitch. She came to Haitch's graduation party at my house last summer, and recognized me immediately today, but nevertheless had me mixed up with someone else. She came in right after Dexy and Clove with Pynchon and first saw me greeting the baby so after saying hello sequed to, "And how is your little one?"
I paused. This was an ambiguous and probably misguided beginning. "He's fine, thank you...."
She now had a gender, so could ask, "How old is he now?"
I grinned--this was fun. "He was eight in August."
"Where is he today?"
"At home. In his cage."
She laughed, clearly thinking I was being sarcastic. Someone with more guile than I could have kept it going longer, and if I had met Dexy's eye I couldn't have strung it to this point.
"I'm sorry," I explained, "I am quite seriously literal. I do have a little boy whom I love and adore, but Blake is a parrot, not a human."
We laughed and it was fine.
Doing the post mortem with Haitch over the phone later, I told her about an interview of Mohammed Ali I saw. He likes to show a disappearing handkerchief trick to people, but he doesn't like to deceive anyone so always follows up by demonstrating the fake thumb that is the trick's secret. I felt a little like that, delighting in the person's courteous small-talky mistake but not wanting to take advantage of her.
Also Haitch misses our walk.
Yeah.
No snowshoeing and no hot sulphur springs: the windchill in Grand Lake is going to be -20, and the gusts will approach gale strength. So instead I will paint and demolish some cabinets and hope that next weekend is warmer and sunnier. Four days of snow between now and then, as forecast, would make for great snowshoeing next weekend.
Probably because I saw JoAnne who reminds me of my publishing professor--oh, and also because yesterday Haitch's professor made the same mistake about Blake that mine did*--last night I dreamed of the latter. CLH, who organized my wonderful 30th birthday party, led (my class? a group of dream-strangers?) us onto a school bus that brought us to a wonderful, Charenton-like house. Charenton-like because of the fruit growing everywhere, but Green Knowe-like in architecture, with a little bit of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle thrown in for magic, and Phoebe for nostalgia. Everyone suddenly knew how to cook and created a feast with the produce of the gardens that everyone else had gathered, and we all pitched in with our various talents like the Country Bunny's 21 children. The occasion was a Great Expectations-style wedding: seemingly unplanned but perfect and sweet and filled with love. I don't know from what mental recess I pulled a groom for my professor--I think he was an amalgam of my favorite Phoebe patrons.
Now that's a dream.
* When we bought the house, I sent change-of-address cards to everyone announcing that Lisa, RDC, and Blake had moved. My professor, with whom I was in mere year-end card contact, wrote congratulating me on the house but mostly on the offspring she assumed Blake represented. I responded, thanking her and confirming that while yes, Blake ruled the roost, he was our pet and not our child.
I'm sorry, Haitch, but this is allegedly my "journal," so you'll have to cope.
I usually read myself to sleep. This means that I read, fall asleep, refuse to admit I've fallen asleep for the first few times RDC asks if I'm asleep, and finally mark my place, drop the book on my bedtable, and switch off the light. Often I refuse to admit I'm asleep because the marking and moving and switching might wake me up. Last night I woke from a dream in which I had finished my chapter, moved the post-it that is my bookmark, dropped the book (sometimes I lean it on the bed slat, against the table), and turned off the light. Like Calvin, waking from a dream in which he had already got up, eaten breakfast, and run for the bus, I grumbled that my dreams had become way too literal.
This morning I was grateful to my alarm clock (which hey! means I slept all the way to 6:30!) because it woke me from Yet Another high school dream. Can't I be done with these people yet? Taking French. Being the butt of this one's joke and that one's faux sympathy and the others' perfect blind eyes.
Last entry I mentioned a lamp my mother gave me, for high school graduation, as part of my expected dorm furnishings. Eighteen years, OMFB! Make it stop!
Gael Cooper linked to an Ask the White House session in whose transcript the contraction "they're" is written as "their."
That's at least one person whose spelling was left behind.
Oh goodness. No child left behind. I had never thought of the apocalyptic novels and that phrase before. If it wasn't deliberate, it's at the least a happy accident for them.
It just started while I sat in the living room and ate my breakfast over the morning surf (doesn't that sound like I watched the sun rise over the ocean?). Who knows how long it'll last, but it's falling thickly, not just flurrying. Please, snow, snow! I want to plant a tree this spring.
If there is anything happier than a cockatiel with a shoelace, especially when he has not had a shoelace for several weeks, I have yet to see it.
There is also the tile-gnawing cockatiel. Now that we want to encourage kitchen demolition, he can chew on all the grout he wants. But he still expects to be reprimanded for it, so he'll point his eye at you, beak bared (this would be "fangs bared" if he had any; the facial expression is the same), ready to defy you.
Oh, and the "No, I'd prefer to stay where I am, thank you" cockatiel. If he is on your finger and you would like him to step off onto someone's shoulder, or onto the top of his cage, or onto his windowsill, or down anywhere when he does not want to go, he is quite expert at simply refusing to step off while leaning back the better to keep his grip as you rotate your finger forward to tip him off.
I got a late start and thought I would get nothing done before lunch. How wrong I was.
Carrying the hamper down to the laundry room, I was disoriented by the dropcloth bunched at the bottom of the stairs that disguised where the floor began. I stepped out, expecting floor, instead of down to the final step. Ow. Extreme ow. On three points, I crawled upstairs, toward the phone, in sight of Blake, in sunlight. By the time I lay supine on the living room carpet, my subverbal moaning had evolved into sobbing. I steeled myself to unclench my hands from my ankle and examine it. It was the right shape. I could move it in any direction. I didn't need Willoughby to ascertain if there were any breaks. In fact the initial burst of pain subsided quickly, and it soon could bear weight.
So I wrapped it up tight and put another coat of paint (embarrassingly, "December Lace") on the front landing ceiling, up both ladders to be careful of the edging. There.
Then I had a lunch date with a friend of a friend. KMJ left Denver in 1998 and I last saw her in 2000, but we keep in touch and when her friend Paul recently moved to Denver, she gave him our email address. Someone raised her eyebrow at this--a date with a man I'd never met before without RDC, who was out of town--but at least called it an adventure instead of quite a rendez-vous. Paul was charming, a good conversationalist, funny. After bison burgers at the Wynkoop, where he taunted me about his Canadians burning down the president's house during the war of 1812, which I dismissed as their being colonialists following Mother England's orders, we wandered around the Tattered Cover, where I bought books entirely forgetting to use the gift card I was recently given (The Good Earth in a trade paperback) and discovered that one of Paul's favorite books is José Saramago's Blindness. I'm a fan.
As soon as I got home, I broke Blake's little buddy heart by immediately leaving again to see "Girl with a Pearl Earring" Chez Artiste. It was okay. It attempted to keep the spirit of the book, but it failed to convey the chemistry unspokenly explicit in the book. What else did I expect? I do hope Colin Firth doesn't become the new John Corbett, so beloved as Chris in the Morning that he's cast as Perfect Man even if he doesn't fit the role ("Sex and the City," "Serendipity," "My Big Fat Greek Wedding").
The ankle didn't break my heart. It hurt, but it would heal. What broke my heart was my pretty pretty iBook Moonshadow, which wouldn't start when I got home. And my Macintosh consultant was away.
Sunday I started painting the walls and trim. I know you're supposed to do trim first and then walls, but I wanted results. Flat off-white on the ceiling and even semi-gloss blinding white on the trim don't make for contrast against primer. Eggshell moss green does.
Plus I chipped off more tiles and packed up more kitchen.
Egg and I cite to each other uses of "literally" as an intensifier rather than a modifier. I recently emailed her:
Arkansas is considering a user fee on ATMs, like a nickel a use. This is problematic of course because how to collect it? When you take $20 out of the bank, does the machine dispense $19.95? Anyway, Tex said, "This is literally nickel-and-diming people." Happily, he didn't continue "...to death."
Also, ÜrBoss described a situation between Dot Org and another party but (diplomatically) didn't name other party. We discussed the occurrence in staff meeting, and Ernier (hey, we have a new Egg! his name is Ernie. He is Not You, but he seems fine) said,
"If ÜrBoss wouldn't have named the party, I would have known it was X because [such-and-such made it obvious]."
He had a valid point to make (though content is never what I discuss myself, only style), but I was too distracted by his confusing mood with tense. I have been trying to find examples of this for ages. He should have said, "If ÜBoss hadn't named the party, I would have known it was X...."
His usage strips English of its fading conditional or subjunctive (I never can keep them straight), don't you think? Saying "if ÜrBoss wouldn't have named..." wouldn't have been correct even if his meaning had been this:
"If ÜrBoss wouldn't have named the party [meaning, in the past-tense meeting he did not do so], I would have [because it needed to be named]."
I think there could be a correct meaning for that construction to express, but damned if I can think of one.
23 February, from another site: [Someone has not done something.] "I wished that he would have done thus-and-so." I don't even know what tense the second predicate is. The first is perfect (or past perfect?), because it's a completed action? Bah.
I don't have the words to describe what I mean because I know the language natively rather than having been taught it and have an ear rather than a learning of grammar. RDC has or had a really useful Spanish text called something like English Grammar for Students of Spanish, meaning to explain all the stuff you know because you speak it but do not understand well enough to implement in another language (especially one, like Spanish, that has so many more tenses than English). I should look up the names of the tense or mood I mean.
Perhaps because I am not as in love with The Sun Also Rises as RDC, I delight in any occasion to say, "Isn't it pretty to think so," because overuse of this phrase makes it less special. Kind of like in For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose most famous line I tried to read without 60 years of cliché robbing it of its power: "The earth moved."
RDC's favorite line from The Sun Also Rises, at least when he's talking to me, is "The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs." We strolled through Cooks' Mart yesterday and I picked up a stuffed animal, a dog with a halo or crown sewn firmly to its little doggy skull, and released it, horrified. (Banzai's hat is attached to her head with one stitch, which doesn't bother me quite so much.) I asked RDC if he saw the stuffed dog I'd just looked at. His face lit up with opportunity to use his line.
"Don't say it," I unkindly cut him off.
Meanwhile, right behind him, another browser said to her friend, "You always say that!" which cracked me up.
I remarked on the maimed dog, I went on to say, because in Whole Foods the other day I saw an affront to all deities and decency: an aromatherapy bear which is supposed to be microwaved whereupon it will be warm and scenty for two hours.
Later that day we passed the Build-a-Bear workshop, luckily along the opposite corridor. The vivisection shop is next to a couple of children's clothing stores and Neiman-Marcus so I usually can easily avert my eyes.
Who comes up with these concepts, anyway?
House:
Garden
Errands
Kinwork and Lisaism
Reading:
I don't know yet what I lost or what can be recovered. The worst thing is digital photographs. Most people probably could resend whatever pictures they've sent, but I hate to ask, having lost them through my own stupidity. The other thing is the additions and corrections to my address book that happened during year-end card-swapping.
Merp.
So. Saturday we took everything out of the kitchen (and the house) except the fridge, and moved the dead fridge out from the basement; Sunday we hurled money at Home Depot and CostCo; Monday we moved the working fridge from kitchen to basement, and sealed the kitchen off from the rest of the house, mostly. It has three doorways: one, to the sunroom (where the dishwasher pines for me), which is the house's spleen? gall bladder? the one that's nice to have but you can do without? is sealed, but needs to be breached once. because the bills are in there. Two, the dining room doorway, is entirely taped and sealed: no construction dust in the finished parts of the house. Three, to the back landing, is taped on the top and one side. It is strange to have to go to the kitchen from the dining room by way of the basement and two flights of stairs, front and back, but we will survive.
Our "kitchen" is now the back of the basement. The back of the basement has been a workshop for some time: it has a long countertop over four cupboards and an open area with a sawbench and a toolbench and my bike, narrow shelves in one corner, cut to fit around plumbing, a fridge in another corner, a watercloset, and tub-and-sink room.
I laid some planks over the tub, making space for a dishdrain and paperplates. I've been pretty good (it's Day 4) about scraping dishes into the trash and washing them immediately after I use them, but we're not going to use a lot of dishes: mostly Blake's, since paper ones don't hang in his cage right. The microwave's at the shelved end of the long counter, the coffee grinder and the toaster. I might dig out the popcorn popper too. We had used the shelves as yet another pantry, for warehouse-size purchases of Pellegrino and craisins and soy milk, but now they're primary storage. The workshoppy element means that we might have sawdust in our food, but that's good bulky fiber.
The cabinets are due March 25, and today They said they would like to install them the week after they arrive. That means all the wiring and plumbing and plastering and painting has to happen between now and March 18, when RDC's nephew, mother, and her husband arrive for several days. The water plumbing is, supposedly, not a huge hairy deal, and the gas plumbing can wait, if it has to, until after the cabinets are in place, since the range, not a cabinet, will be in front of the gas. The plastering is scariest to me partly because we've never done it before and mostly because, since it doesn't involve forces that could burn or blow up the house, I'm going to be doing it.
After the cabinets, They have to measure for the countertops, and I have no idea how long the wait will be between template and installation.
Sometime in between all this we will coarse-sand the floor, install a ventilation hood and range, repair the ceiling, rip out and replace the window frame, install track lighting on the ceiling (yet not remove the glarey recessed floods, a design duplicativeness that I am not One with) and build a new windowsill (extra wide for cockatiel pleasure). After the cabinets and counters are in place (and the new sink undermounted, as we are nothing if not slaves to trends), They will be gone, and we'll fine-sand and otherwise finish the floor. And then ruin it by rolling in a new fridge.
Last night RDC suggested that since we will be at this point On a Roll, we should commence with the bathroom. Ha!
This happened three weeks ago, the day before my iBook blew a gasket. I was reversing out of a parking spot at work when I noticed a couple of crows on the nearly flat roof on the building next door. Because of its shallow angle, the roof had kept the night's snow; because of the lip on the roof, it had kept much of its melted snow as well. The crows were bathing in snowmelt, and being as goofy as any other bathing bird.
I probably thought of it now because today RDC sent me a picture of a freshly showered buddy doing his drowned dragon impression. I should have showered him a few days ago: he's been smelling especially good. Intern asked what he smells like. Dusty, I said, but not like a dusty room--like a dusty cockatiel. Soft and sweet and...dusty. The dustier the better, but the dustier the more Blake wants a shower. You can distinguish, or we can, between his "I'm bored because you're in the shower and not paying attention to me" yell and his "I'm attracting your attention to the fact I want a shower" yell.
These crows probably didn't get as silly as Blake. I didn't see them turn nearly upside down with their heads between their feet and their tails in the air, but that's probably hard to do on a flat surface like a roof instead of on a finger perch. But they were very silly. They slid the short slope, flapped heavily back up, and slid down again; they fluffed their feathers out, making themselves look much bigger but not for the reason a cat might--to intimidate with size--but to get water deep into their plumage; they hunkered into the slush and probably would have appreciated a rubber ducky.
RDC was on his way to Amsterdam--one reason I succumbed to the convenience of driving--so I couldn't call and tell him about it. Instead I called Tex and made him look out his window, whereupon the crows immediately flew off, one to the lamppost right in front of the building. I told him to look to his left and the tracks on the roof. "Those are theirs?" he asked. He wasn't as delighted with the spectacle as I was, since he didn't witness it and isn't a bird person, but he understood why it was interesting and funny and enjoyed my pleasure in it. So today I made him (and Intern) look at the picture RDC sent me of the freshly showered buddy.
Yesterday we went to a first birthday party that, when we arrived, was a usual first birthday party--more adults than kids, including two fathers and their children without the mothers, which unfortunately is still worthy of note, because I travel in an enlightened crowd. Then the ratio flipped, and that was funner.
This was only the second time I have seen Gethen, and I am a huge fan. A pile of the cone-shaped birthday hats lay by the birthday cake, and I offered her one. She was uncertain. I modeled one, with difficulty since they and their elastic were child-sized, and said "how about it?" Her look was one of superb disdain, and I howled with glee (probably confirming her opinion of me as a poorly haberdashed loon).
Blake is eating carrot.
Every batch of buddy chow includes one bag of Bird's Eye Mixed Vegetables (corn, peas, string beans, carrots). He regularly hurls from his dish the stupid beans--although he likes fresh beans from the garden. The carrots, being smaller, he usually eats around without hurling. I know he likes carrots, occasionally raw ones because of their gnawability, absolutely carrot tops when they are available (for the same reason he likes peacock feathers), but I've never seen him eat a piece so meditatively and thoroughly. He usually gets his beta carotene from yam.
I don't suppose I saw a lot of photographs of other black Labs during my dogs' lives, before the web. Photographs of Labs in books are of show dogs who don't wear collars so much that they don't have impressions in the fur around their necks, of posed show dogs, full face or perfect profile, very few snapshots. Of course I easily can distinguish Belle from Sagi from Shadow, not only because of my age and other time clues in the photographs but also because they were so different in body--puppy vs. lean adult vs. chunky all her life and eventually old enough to bearded.
No Lab I've seen on the web has looked like my dogs. I tell personality from movement, and even without that, only in still photographs, no smily, portly Lab bears more than general resemblance to my beloved Shadow. I suppose the fact that she was too chubby to sit straight and instead would sit on one leg (which must have exacerbated her hip problems) is a major clue in any photograph. I miss my dog.
Either I have been better trained to distinguish among dogs than among cockatiels, or cockatiels all look alike (at least all normal gray males). Lots of the photographs I see of other people's cockatiels look a lot like Blake. So seeing my little buddy eat carrot made me wonder if he had been swapped.
Nah. They don't all look alike. This one's ear patches are smaller than Blake's. This bird was supposed to be a cock but it turns out to be a hen. Her yellow is about as bright as it should be but the arrangement of her feathers makes her obviously not Blake, and I link to the photograph instead of the whole page because another photograph on the page is of a bappie with a...ruptured air sac. Simon is 20 and looks a lot like Blake, and though Bo on the same page doesn't look like a hen, she doesn't have enough yellow on her head (especially behind her ear patches) to look like Blake. Blue looks like Blake, but who would allow a parrot to perch on a fan that could cut its toes? though Izzie, on the same page, has more black in his beak. Now, Ivan looks like Blake, including the goofy smile. Oh, I can't continue to go through those pages--so many have such tragic stories of human stupidity, boiling water and Teflon fumes and open doors and careless treading. And several Google searches for permutations of normal gray cockatiel male turn up "lost" advertisements which is enough for me today.
It bears repeating that no matter their color, all cockatiels--all the healthy ones, I suppose, anyway--smell really good, which dogs don't; and naturally Blake smells the best. This I affirm being intimately acquainted only with Percy otherwise. When we adopted Blake one of the first things I did was sniff him, and the scent almost made me cry. It had been less than a month since Percy died, and I painfully missed that smell.
Lastly, you can tell I'm a sicko because I think these little dudes are cute.
Yea! I can braid my hair again! Janelle cut my hair last week, taking off a half-inch but strategizing for growing it out. It was dreadfully shaggy, not having been cut since November and that cut being--immediately I left the salon--extremely cute and hugging my chin but nothing I could style on my own. It's been a year of various lengths from chin to collar bone and now I am certain I want at least collar bone. Previously she had cut it to be loose, for "movement," and this meant that although none was higher than my chin (the minimum for braiding) some bits were shorter than other bits and so short locks would stick out of any plait. Now, despite the recent loss of that half-inch, it is beginning to be all of a length.
It's not an attractive braid by any means, and cannot be braided off my scalp but ends at the nape in an elastic and another inch or two of leftovers, but I have missed plaiting my hair. I am too old for pigtails, and I don't like the center part that two pigtails give me and never mastered the part on a bias and diagonal pigtails thing anyway; so other than the small braid within loose hair, I have been unbraided for a year now, and I have missed it, the process, the result, the motion, the sensation.
I miss Granny too, but I do not require of myself to mourn forever. She's the one who taught me to braid to begin with, and I am glad to return to a braided life.
Even if I've said this, it bears repeating that when I say "we," I generally mean the opposite of the royal we. I mean that RDC did it. That doesn't mean I don't do anything, though.
We rewired the kitchen to distribute the amperage more safely and sensibly, added a junction box in the attic to be wired eventually to another circuit in the breaker box, drywalled over holes we'd cut for the wiring and supports for the hood, patched the ceiling, decided to forego the track lighting for now because it was complicated enough to be affecting the timeline; swapped out the kitchen storm for the screen, emptied RDC's closet for attic access and rehung everything, primed both sides of the shelves--tricky because they're all slatted and prone to beading, not to mention requiring scraping and razoring of all the previous beading--and one side of the doors, swept out the kitchen (once), tidied up my study and the laundry room and the garage and the furnace room, did a lot of laundry, scrubbed the buddy cage, knocked together a couple of shelves to use my study closet space more effectively, read 90 pages of The Stone Raft (the dog showed up! its name hasn't been decided yet, either Faithful or Pilot), and listened to several hours of War and Peace. I did the things after the semi-colon. And we both went to Mezcal, a new restaurant! a good one! with atmosphere, and not nearly as low-rent as most of the stuff on our stretch of Colfax (such as the adult bookstore and arcade across the street)! that I like! that was hopping! and walked by a new, Climbing Tree be praised, bookstore; and we saw that a yoga studio is slated to open next to Witz coffee shop; and we watched "Holes."
Also I took two "West Side Story" breaks, half yesterday and half today, because Blake cannot help in the kitchen or with primer and was feeling quite neglected. The instant I sat back on my heels to gauge books on the bookshelf, he scrabbled from my shoulder to under my chin, clearly requesting snuggling and attention. This evening after his supper and some playing in his box, he returned to the under-chin spot and tucked immediately.
RDC's new headphones are amazing. I tried them once, and the sound quality was great, plus I heard no external noise at all. I saw RDC's mouth moving but heard not a damn thing besides Susan Tedeschi so assumed he was gaslighting me. He waved a bandana in front of Blake, who of course yelled, and then I believed. I could not use my iPod while scrubbing the cage so instead played "West Side Story," loudly, over the washing machine between me and the den and the jigsaw in the kitchen. RDC came downstairs after one tool or another while I jigged from here to there doing this and that. "What are you dancing to?" he asked, loudly over Robert Randolph or Moe or Umphrey's McGee or whatever he was listening to--all he could see was me prancing without aid of headphones. "The dance at the gym!" I replied, probably meaninglessly to him who, sadly, is not a "West Side Story" fan.
Last Thursday we went to Barbie and Sabrina's booksigning at the Tattered Cover. Besides being a really pleasant evening altogether--tapas beforehand at the Fourth Story and dessert afterward at Mel's, seeing Butterfly and Danger Kitty and Margaret and Spenser and of course Barbie and Sabrina, finally using a gift card for War and Peace and The Brothers K--it afforded a few minutes between tapas and signing to peruse the 85%-off table in the rear of the event space.
One title made me seize the book and hoot. I might have perused it more but I was actually speaking to people (and have I mentioned how much better I am feeling these days? Verging on confident even). What I gleaned was this: Lyme Disease and the S.S. Elbrus: Collaboration Between the Nazis and Communists in Chemical and Biological Warfare.
What an absolute wackjob Rachel Verdon, its author, is. First, the theory at all. Second, even aside from the mediocre design, the lack of copyediting on its very first page convinced me that Elderberry Books is a vanity press (and so it is). Third, one of her first premises, that Lyme Disease was allegedly new in the '70s, is nothing anyone believes. Fourth, even I could see through some of her rhetorical devices (paraphrase: Such and such happened in November 1963 and so was clearly part of the JFK assassination), and anyone could see through her paranoia (robber barons and the military-industrial complex targeted Glastonbury, Connecticut, unsurprisingly her hometown; also unsurprisingly she has had Lyme Disease). According to her, many neurological illnesses, such as Lyme Arthritis and multiple sclerosis, are the result of Mengele's experiments and shipped into the United States at the following ports: Portland, OR; New Orleans; New York; and Boston.
Elderberry claims "Rachel Verdon has been much in demand on national airwaves to discuss her blockbuster new book: Lyme Disease and the S.S. Elbrus. Read it for yourself and see what's got the nation's media in a lather." I'll get right on that.
Last night I put away the year's correspondence. In the next few years all my rubber-banded bundles will expand into a third box, but not if I keep losing letters. One entire bundle is missing. I confess that once I threw out some people's stuff, years ago when I lived in small apartments and wanted to postpone expanding into two boxes and only people whose stuff I did not cherish and would never reread. But I would never throw out NBM's correspondence, so where is it? I figure I accidentally bundled her with someone else, which leads me to the daunting task of going through each bundle looking for incongruous handwriting.
I think the first piece I have from her is a construction paper heart, a Valentine from when she baked several huge (dinner plate-sized) chocolate chip cookies for her son and his friends junior year, followed by the occasional thank you and 15 years of Christmas cards. Damn.
One part of the project went well. I finally made a shelf (all hail Liquid Nails) so I can put the boxes across the depth of my closet instead of along the width, and I weeded out a lot of old job-search stuff and organized my writing and layout samples. That sounds like more than it is. My samples are the two magazines in which I have articles and a dozen or so books from Dot Org in which my name appears (in the acknowledgments, for designing graphics and doing layout). It's not much but it's all I have. And now it's tidier.
Okay. Most important, Blake will probably be okay. But for a while he wasn't, and he is my little trooper buddy.
Saturday the 20th we worked on the house in the morning and in the evening picked up RDC's nephew, mother, and her husband from the airport. We drew pictures, went to the zoo, tried to figure out Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, stayed at Keystone for a few days (where we snow-tubed, skied, took a private ski lesson (me) and a group snowboard lesson (RDC2)), and toured a (non-cyanide) gold mine and panned for gold on the way home Wednesday 24th.
When I brought Blake to camp I told the vet we'd pick him up either Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning. Nevertheless when RDC2 and I arrived Wednesday at 4:30 to fetch him, they hadn't trimmed his talons and wings yet. The vet techs did so while we waited, and, therefore, did it fast and, evidently, carelessly.
I noticed immediately that Blake stood on only one foot in his cage in the car, but we've occasionally nicked the quick ourselves and he has favored the affected foot for a few minutes and then been fine.
This time he was clearly not fine. He limped, putting barely any weight on his right foot. Especially after being three days at camp, he wanted to do all his usual buddy things, like walking the plank (the foot of the bed), prancing on the couch, and bowing, but he couldn't. He could not grasp with that foot, meaning he could stand on flat surfaces but not perch. Not bearing any weight on it meant that pooping was difficult and could not be done with proper ritual: he could not stretch his whole left side but only the left wing because he could not stand on his right foot, nor his right side but only that wing because he couldn't flex his leg back. Wednesday night, for the first time ever, we slept with him in our bed, on RDC's chest, because standing worked better than perching.
Thursday morning we arrived at the vet well before 8. Blake's doctor saw him after only a short wait and palpated the entire leg, from hip joint through the drumstick and each toe. He felt no bone damage and hypothesized soft tissue injury. He lent us an aquarium for a confined flat surface, recommended a tightly rolled towel as a soft quasi-perch with a greater circumference, and said if Blake hadn't improved by Saturday we should bring him back for x-ray. How anyone restrains a parrot for x-ray is beyond me, and happily it hasn't yet been necessary.
By Saturday, Blake could walk almost normally, and just before I called his doctor he lifted his bad leg over his wing to scratch his head. His appetite never wavered, which was his vet's other question. Today, he repelled up a towel on its hook, slower than usual and with a few false grips but all by himself; also he can bear his whole weight on that leg so as to scratch with his left foot, and to stretch the left side, and he can almost flex the right leg fully backward in the usual manner. He even roosted on only the bad leg, which must be a relief to his overworked left, though only for a few minutes. Tonight we might let him sleep in his cage like a bird instead of in an aquarium like a spotted gecko.
The biggest indicator that he feels better is that he has stopped being so clingy. He wants to trot and prance and go on expotitions, and he has done some singing in his box.
My best and dearest little gecko boy.
My ski instructor said, about halfway through, that I was doing well. He didn't mean ski-wise necessarily but instruction-wise. He said, "By this time, most women are either yelling at me or crying." What men might be doing, I don't know. I should have called him on that, but I was too busy being glad to be better than I usually am at taking criticism.
RDC2's snowboarding lesson didn't go as well and he bailed. He wants to try skiing next time because snowboarding was so hard. His uncle and I and probably his instructors told him that skiing is harder to pick up than skiing, and all of us told him that part of his difficulty came from his dehydration, and that no, Sprite does not replenish your fluids well enough. He flat out refuses to drink water, and he would not drink the lesson's offered Gator-Aid because an instructor half-diluted it with water not to overwhelm his system.
My skiing day started out cloudy, so did I think of sunscreen? I did not. Did it stay cloudy? It did not. So besides becoming tubercular from sanding, I also had leprosy of the face. Hence the atypical apastiness in the photograph.
The mine tour--the Phoenix mine near Idaho Springs--was really interesting. I learned new words, like winze, a steeply inclined passageway connecting a mine working place with a lower one, and that the surfaces of a mine tunnel are called the back, ribs, and belly. This mine, when it is operational, gets three ounces of gold per ton of not-gold, whereas the strip-mines up by Yellowstone that use, or want to use, cyanide to separate the gold get sixteenths of an ounce per ton.
We panned for gold--the miner said that that a few times a year someone actually picks up a nugget--and I picked up some pretty rocks.
Friday night we paid Intern in cash and Tommy's Thai to have RDC2 for the evening while the four of us went to Adega. Sweet heaven, that was a fine and tasty meal. Well paced, well served, and most of all well cooked. Succulent, subtle, and fucking delicious. JHT didn't connect our having mentioned it when he saw its mention in the inflight magazine article, so he was pleased that we had already planned it.
Earlier in the week I couldn't lift RDC2's 85 pounds to my hip to dance with him as my mother danced with me--I needed him to stand on something so the lift was only horizontal not vertical. Sheesh. When I arrived at Intern's house, they were watching "Princess Bride" and he wanted to stay, somewhat to watch the end, only a few minutes away, but mostly because he was tired. His sleepiness gave my pride a reason to squat to lift him from the couch and carry him the block to the car, where I reassured him we had the movie at home.
JHT had lit on the fact that Intern is Mormon, and so asked, "Shouldn't they have been watching 'Princess Brides'?" We began--sorry, Intern--mercilessly to riff on that: Kramer vs. Kramers, Twelve Monkey Brides, Brides of Frankenstein, and my personal favorite (because it was the best as well as being my own), Seven Brides for One Brother.
Last night looking back on the floor over which we'd just taped resin (rosin?) paper, RDC said it was neater than he wraps my presents. My presents have that pesky third dimension.
After confirming the need or desire for it Friday on my way home from work, this morning I brought RDC2's leftover groceries to the nearby elementary school: an unopened gallon of cow milk, drinkable sugar-laced yogurt, and sugar-laden puddings, the latter two in ridiculous packaging. Tomorrow I will bring the juices, in unrecyclable boxes and bags, because everything at once was too much to manage on my bike.
In addition to the dairy stuff, I brought my clarinet. I have not touched it since eleventh grade, so I won't miss it--what I miss is any dedication to homemade music. The secretary expressed her thanks for the instrument, which the school needs badly. I hope they do enjoy it.
Ever since I can remember, I have dreamed about my period the night before it arrived. Especially when I was off the pill, this was a handy consideration my subconscious showed me.
Last night? No period dream, just a nightmarish, "Brazil" style melding of Black Hearts in Battersea and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Today at work? Thanks for nothing, brain! Better luck next time.
These days I am drinking out of Nalgeen sippy water bottles, since the hope is they get dirty more slowly than glasses. Blake recognizes it as a water vessel, and he is accustomed to asking me for a drink if I have forgotten his water dish. He pranced up to it and bowed, so I removed the top--a sipper in the screw-on cap with a half-dome meant to keep the sipper clean--and poured water into the half-dome from the bottle.
He eyed it and me and it and me again. This was Different and Strange. Finally he gave it a try, and ended up drinking quite a bit, drop by drop (and I drank the rest). And then he helped me pick out pencils to color on birthday cards. He really is the sweetest cutest boy.
Except that it was an hour too short, the weekend was relaxing and productive and quiet.
How old I sound. There's an old "Peanuts" strip--from the ‘50s, I would say, because--if memory serves--Snoopy still looks like he does here in the first two rather than the in later strips--in which someone is trying to get Snoopy to play fetch and Charlie Brown says that because he is older now, he's more interested in quiet pastimes, like 20 Questions. At the mention of that game, Snoopy's head snaps around.
Anyway. I tried to talk myself out of going to Margaret Atwood but I had promised CGK that I would go and fetch a lower number than she herself could get arriving later (coddling a parent, I confess). When I got there I found Spenser (really, why did I alias her so? I haven't the foggiest) and gave her the number to give to CGK, planning to leave, but true to form Spenser cracked me up so I had to stay. We came up with a new band, Alexander Pope and the Beats. Because "The Rape of the Lock" really could be a rock and roll song, couldn't it? Then I suggested "Absalom and Achitophel," because yes I confuse together everything I had in Restoration and 18th Century Lit.
I did not wish to have a book signed so hadn't even brought my Oryx and Crake. I had in my bag only What's Bred in the Bone, which cracked me up. Not even Canadian women, only Canadian men for me.
When Atwood arrived, I was pleased to see she seemed friendlier. On her last tour--did I see her for Blind Assassin?--she was out and out mean. Perhaps by now she's stopped being resentful of being asked about writing science fiction. She allows as how Oryx and Crake is "speculative, like 1984," not science fiction. Even though it's all based on science and she made nothing up. Oh, sure you didn't, honey, because there actually are green-skinned, blue-genitaled, purring, ruminant modified human beings. You didn't make that up. Pat pat pat.
Spenser asked a good question, I thought. She said Steven Spielberg has said that if he'd made "Schindler's List" first, he wouldn't've made all the dinosaur movies (I hope that wouldn't mean "Jaws" and Indy'd be struck too). Does O&C's Cassandra complex (I paraphrase) make another Robber Bride or Cat's Eye seem to mean less? Atwood said no.
I scarpered immediately afterward, grocery-shopped, and made like a hermit for the rest of the weekend. I meant to return Blake's aquarium to the vet Saturday, but the range hood doesn't come until Tuesday and the vet can wait such that I don't have to make two trips to McMansionville.
I watched the final four episodes of "24" while painting fiddly slatted pantry shelves and doors. I scrubbed the entire kitchen, carefully not to drip on the new cabinets. I primed the east, short wall of the kitchen (it has no cupboards touching it) and the bit of wall around the door on the south side (also no cupboards). Not the ceiling, because eek, the cupboards--also because I found a bit of bubbled paint I had to scrape off and patch with wallboard compound--and not the rest of the walls, because eek, the cupboards, and of the trim, only that associated with bits I did (four doors and some floor moulding).
I uncovered, raked, weeded, hoed, and otherwise pummeled the original vegetable bed and planted beans, carrots, and spinach along marked lines (to distinguish between baby plants and weeds, I hope). I raked and weeded the south bed and planted some flax seeds. Should I cut down the sage? I suppose so. I noticed that the raspberries are still spreading, which made me happy; and that of course so is the cherry tree, which did not. I spent some little time laboriously pulling out and snipping baby cherry trees. Sorry, tree. Blake is so happy to be back outside in the fresh air and sun. He's still no help with the actual gardening.
Another of my hausfrauisms was to fill the liquid soap dispenser with the last from the big gallon jug. I filled the jug with warm water and used that diluted soap to scrub the patio furniture. I should have done that under the cherry tree, to water it, instead of on what's left of the grassesque, which doesn't need any moisture for weeds to thrive. Oh well. I like "grassesque." It reads like maybe I planted blue fescue. But I didn't.
I caught up with where I'm supposed to be for the TUS Ulysses seminar. I can't claim to catch more than a smattering of Joyce's cultural references but I do like piecing the action together on the minimal interior-dialogue cues. And I loved the Hamlet debate. This week's reading (episode? chapter? 10) is longer than previous weeks' readings, and I think begins to be even screwier.
Speaking of screwier, what was I just reading that made me think of Turn of the Screw? I try not to think of The Turn of the Screw at all. It must have been one of David Gifford's annotations and come from a source earlier than James. Shakespeare again, probably. Also, twice now in The Annotated Ulysses has been mention of the poem or song "If a body meet a body comin' through the rye." Yes, I like Ulysses, even though it breaks my brain.
Last night I was reading in Vito the Reading Chair with Blake playing in his box at my feet (on the recliner). Ulysses tires me, I admit, and a couple of times I nodded off, snapping awake when my head fell over. At some point Blake took himself out of his box and sat on my knee, waiting for me to notice him. I picked him up and put him on my intercostal clavicle for headpetting, but I continued occasionally to doze off, waking now not because my head fell over but because Blake would, quite understandably, snap at my hand when it dropped on him. Poor buddy.
The one grocery I forgot was butter, despite having obtained a dozen thirsty sesame bagels. This was a tragedy. I scampered out to the nearby 7-11 and thought of recent conversations about how to eat cheaply and healthily. At Whole Foods on Friday I overheard what was surely a visiting parent comment to his Denver resident child that he couldn't believe the selection. I repeated that compliment to the produce guy, who is always pleasant and eager to slice samples. Mr. Produce said the parent was probably from some one-grocery-store town on the plains. Maybe, but you could live in the middle of Denver, lack easy mobility and funds, and come across no more fresh produce in a week than an occasional overripe banana at the local 7-11. It didn't have butter either, and cream cheese is just Wrong, so I tried the grimy little grocery a couple of blocks away. I checked the butter's expiry, but if I die I'll know it's because of scary butter. Or excess of perfectly good butter, of course.
Speaking of scary butter, while RDC2 was here I chased him around the house with a scary banana, one that had gone quite brown and soft while we were away. I mentioned that to my mother under the category of Amusing Anecdotes with Nephew and she didn't understand the point. RDC2 is 10, and a scary banana is icky...does this need explanation?
This weekend I also slept a lot. When RDC is gone I sleep with all my animals on his side of the bed, all of them minus either Hamlet or Pantalaimon, who sleeps on my side with me. When we went to the zoo RDC found me an okapi in the gift shop. I say "Wapiti wapiti" like someone trying to start a stubborn, early model car--and I can never say "wapiti" just once--and RDC and I both say "O Kapi My Kapi," like Walt Whitman (well, like Robin Williams). Unfortunately, the stress in "okapi" falls on the first syllable. Sigh. Also this is a standing okapi, and how do you put a standing animal to sleep? I don't know. Also it cannot fit comfortably with the main five, so it will have to live downstairs with Tigger and Opus and Madeline and Josephine the penguin puppy. And it's not an it. Her name is Ophelia.
(Besides my animals, I also sleep with Moonshadow. This weekend I fell asleep to "Pride and Prejudice" Friday, "Sense and Sensibility" Saturday, and "Persuasion" Sunday. This is why I'm not allowed to have a television in my bedroom.)
Oo, and I reorganized the nonfiction. It's not all the nonfiction: most of it is critical or literary theory and in RDC's study, and about two shelf-feet's worth is in the living room bookcase, and the reference books on camping and birding and cooking are in the living room and sunroom. (One day I will get book cataloging software and be very happily geeky.) The nonfiction I reorganized is mostly mine: history, literature, anthropology, cultural studies, feminism.
I ought to organize by proper LOC numbers. Or not. I have a biography of Rachel Carson next to Silent Spring; and Boswell's Life of Johnson next to Boswell's Dictionary; but I have several memoirs and biographies without a counterpart. Jon Krakauer is still in fiction by author, but Touching the Void is not. Does The Tao of Pooh belong with the Tao de Ching or withWinnie Ille Pu, or does the latter with the Latin grammars and dictionaries and not with The Pooh Perplex?
Partly I am a librarian because I like information management. Mostly because I like books. Some because I like reading to kids. Plus there's a large wedge of fiddly organizing that I geek out on.
I rearranged the den so I could put up the sawhorses and paint with movies on in the background. Right now the dropcloth covers most of the floor and some shelves are scattered about, and I'm sitting on the floor with my laptop on one. Because I am hard at work, clearly. Blake has been enjoying this New and Different Set-up because he can go on expotition to the rocking chair and gnaw on its dangling cushion-ties but still see me.
The shelf is about two inches high and near my laptop is a paper cup with two inches of cranberry juice in it. Blake just now trotted over and reached up with his beak to the rim of the cup, ready thereby to pull himself up to the shelf. As if he can't easily hop two inches, but I guess he needed Up at that one spot and no other. I rescued the cup in time and offered him his water dish (currently his food is on furniture higher than mine: what does that say?), but he wasn't interested. So I offered him the cup.
Blake is the pet, and I am the human. I know this. I just don't practice it.
When Blake was injured, he was an incredible Velcro boy. RDC has been away this week and Blake has continued to be such a Velcro boy that earlier this evening he flew (fluttered) from the top of his cage (which I had rolled to the kitchen doorway so he could see me) all the way to me, except "all the way to me" was too far for his stubby wings, and he nearly landed in a roller pan full of Behr Ocean Air eggshell-finish latex paint (but I caught him). Right now he is tucked on my shoulder and I am not going to bed but watching actual live television because I cannot bear to get up and disturb him. Also, earlier he had a yawning fit.
I reserve the right to change my mind, especially if he ever does land in the paint or succeeds in diving into the toaster because he wants his chunk of bagel now, but right now I am content for my dog to be only hypothetical.
The summer after sophomore year of college, I lived with Nisou in an MIT fraternity house. The point was that we could get better jobs in Boston than in Storrs or Old Lyme. Nisou went to a job fair and scored a regular, full-time, temporary job in one of the umpteen local colleges' registrar--a perfect fit, given her school-year job. I did not do this but did the same thing I've been doing all my life: coasting. I earned my keep, kind of: my rent for the two months was $400, and we were allowed to eat out of the pantry, so I subsisted on freezer-burnt minute steaks, bananas, and 35-cent hearth buns from Au Bon Pain. I had a series of job, ranging from door-to-door canvassing for MassPIRG to telesoliciting for the Massachusetts State Republican Party. (That kind of cracks me up, me, that not the jobs but the companies ranged widely.) Mostly I worked in dead-end, extremely temporary jobs. For example, I got fired from a drugstore because my count was more than $2 off my tape.
(If I recall, it was $53.17 off. The manager figured out and reconciled the 3.17 or whatever the spare change was; the more serious was, of course, the fifty. The manager didn't even think I had stolen it but that I had mistakenly given too much change to someone (two 20s and a 10? I certainly could have done so, but with two different denominations?); I have always believed I gave someone too many lottery tickets.)
I worked in retail--I loved my job at the hat store, which was only Sunday afternoons but which I kept through the entire period. I was a receptionist in a SuperCuts sort of hair salon. I worked in food service, as a waitress at a supper club on Comm Ave and as an expeditor at hotspot on Newbury. If I had had any doubts about me in college, that summer erased them.
Tangents as usual. My point is that I did not work hard at finding a job. Story of my life. I sent all my paychecks home, and I did manage to pay my share of my junior year, but only because of my scholarships and my father did that bill get paid. It was my first summer without a beach, in a city--you'd think I'd've kept that in mind seven years later--and working evenings left my days to be spent in air-conditioned libraries and bookstores. In the children's and juveniles' sections, because again, coasting.
All of this is my justification--and what an admirable one!--for how many Sweet Valley High books I can recollect. I found a site of plot summaries.
Thirty-six.
Realistically, this represents about four afternoons tucked into an out-of-the-way corner with my chin on my knees. Maybe six.
Thirty-six.
Next I'm going to see how many Sweet Dreams Teen Romances, with which I wasted many a 12th grade lunch period, seem familiar. You know, aside from all of them, since they were all the same plot.
RDC has a bruise on one arm, acquired somehow while traveling. After we got up this morning he examined a mark I put on his shoulder. "It's almost symmetrical."
I hadn't been thinking of it at the time, but I decided its placement was a little higher the way owls' ears are placed, not quite symmetrically, so they can triangulate the sounds of their prey better. I said, "Symmetry is very important."
RDC said, "It's fearful."
I replied, "No, that's symme-try."
We had to name our pet after someone. Maybe I should have held out for Tennyson.
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Before the family arrove, I bought new towels and actual washcloths, since we had previously had exactly two. Now we're using the new ones, and it's quite a treat to use unshredded, still hemmed towels. I bought periwinkle blue because RDC likes blue and I like periwinkle, and I didn't think we'd have a buddy problem because yellow and green have been his favorite colors before. But this morning we discovered a new fixation for him, the periwinkle blue washcloths. Wonderful.
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We went to Witz, the newish coffeeshop, for breakfast, orange juice and swanky coffee and a blueberry scone (me) and a ham and cheese burrito (him). I finished What's Bred in the Bone and RDC reread part of Foucault's The Order of Things because he just saw Las Menenas at the Prado last week (and the first chapter of Order is about the Velazquez. Someone was playing the grand piano and I am so glad to have a nearby coffee shop. I hope it and Mezcal signal new and better things for the neighborhood.
Just before we left, an old, bent man entered. He carefully stowed his stick in a corner, arranged his jacket over an armchair, dropped a library book in the seat (Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie), and went to the counter to order. Carefully, he carried a plate with a pastry to his table. I fetched his cup full of coffee on its saucer and placed it by him. He thanked me kindly.
Why do I always feel bad about doing that? I am sure he appreciated the gesture and didn't consider me interfering. I think because I really don't want to be stooped and wanting a cane myself.
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To get to Witz, we walked through two and more inches of spring snow! Hooray! The garden is going to go boom. It's a good wet slooshy snow, and around the bases of trees are stains, not from dog pee, but from all the dirt that has accumulated on the trees since the last significant precipitation--months ago--and now rinsed off.
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I went to the gym! Goodness me.
We've been receiving The Denver Post on Sundays for weeks now. I have no idea why. A few weeks ago when we went to the zoo I gave an almighty leap at the jump-measuring place because I hoped I could improve on a previous performance. Your standing long jump is supposed to be at least your height, and I am taller than four feet. This time I did manage five feet plus a little, but--I am a 35 and decaying fast--I leaked a little. I whispered this to my mother-in-law to make her laugh, and she did; so did JHT, who overheard, except he laughed louder, not having to empathize. Later that afternoon, when I got back from renting my skis, DMB gave me something she'd torn from the paper, a research solicitation for women with incontinence. I laughed like a drain.
Today I read some of the paper, but if a paper is going to arrive on our doorstep, couldn't it be The New York Times? The front page had stories about DU hockey and a war widow while stories about the Japanese hostages, the September 11th commission, and protests in Taiwan were buried elsewhere in the front section. DU and the widow belonged in the "Denver and the West" section, which I enjoy. It's just not a paper with a national or international perspective.
Mostly the weekly wodge of newsprint means that Blake gets fresh flooring more often than previously.
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RDC primed the ceiling and I put another coat of white on the closet shelves, which are a pain in my ass. I am halfway through War and Peace, anyway, which I wouldn't be if the shelves were less annoying.
Counters on Wednesday!
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I weeded, since the weeds as well as my darling plants are thriving in the moist soil. I expect the vegetable seeds have been drowned, but potatoes are sprouting in the compost. I don't have a good idea of how potatoes grow. I mean, I understand how a plant grows from a potato, but how a plant develops other tubers in the course of a season I don't know. Do they spread a lot? How do you know where a potato might lurk? Would they work in my south garden? I have been tempted to grow potatoes ever since Nisou responded to my surprise that her family grew them with praise of the bite-sized baked potato.
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The clevernesses in The Well of Lost Plots are often too clever for my best enjoyment. I do, of course, appreciate that Lenny is allowed to spend his free time in the park set aside for the overabundance left over from Watership Down.
Whereas the clevernesses in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses are far more clever than I will ever be equal to. Is there anything Joyce didn't know? How much everyone hates Leopold Bloom, and why, is grating. The Irish history lesson was nothing new: I am my father's daughter, and there are some exaggerations I took in on his knee. Or at his other heel, his left one being occupied by a dog, on our long ramblings in the woods.
Yesterday I remembered that this is one of the periodic large-item pick-up weeks. The city makes a run on one day in each of these weeks, and the quantity of stuff in the alley decided me that I hadn't missed the day. So last night I put out most of the old cabinets. They'd been in the garage for some time, except the few taken away in an earlier LIP week, and then I moved them to future second vegetable bed when the new cabinets were delivered to the garage.
On that spot, they were meant to act as weed suppressants, but the bindweed didn't get the memo. When the Grinch saw that Christmas arrived without presents, it came without tags, it came without boxes or bags, he realized that Christmas didn't come from a store and maybe meant just a little bit more. Me, I observe that bindweed grows without sun, without air, without water, and I realize this does not make it warm and fuzzy like Christmas but evil and bad and wrong. Like I didn't already know.
Still hoping, I pulled all the weeds and lay the drawers and doors (which I won't dispose of until we build the new bed) over the spot. Since bindweed clearly scoffs at the weight of full cabinets, that of mere parts will not deter it at all. But they'll block some light, at least. Another marker of bindweed's evilness is that despite it seeming like a plant that would photosynthesize, it grows just as green in dark oppression of a cabinet's weight as it does in unfettered grass.
Anyway, the good change there is that the old cabinets are gone.
Inside, another good change is that RDC finished painting the ceiling, just in time for today's good change, the installation of the countertops (and therefore the sink and its fixtures).
Another good change is the yearly miracle. The yellow storksbill is beginning to flower, and the large mats of thyme are about to burst into a mass of tiny bluey-lavender blossoms, and the vinca, which is spreading just as aggressively as I hoped, is the flowering kind. Only one plant, from the first planting last May, is so audacious as to flower, but eventually the easement will be a riot of lavender blooms in deep green foliage. (Yes, most of my garden is lavender and blue. I do have some yellow and white for contrast and emphasis. A change from that color scheme would not be good.) It's doing so well I will transplant some to the other easement, where it won't have the advantage of mulch and rototilling but won't have to compete with bindweed.
Since last Hallowe'en, our neighbor has had a prop in her yard: a glaring, gaping head, two hands, and two sets of toes, as if coming out of the earth. She decorated for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and St. Patrick's Day, with the dead guy still in the grass. Finally, last weekend the dead guy left the yard. It was Easter. Coincidence? I think not.
While I was talking to RPR today on the phone, I was washing dishes in the downstairs bathroom sink. ("You still don't have a kitchen?"--we haven't spoken since her shower in early February.) Blake, as usual, sang as the water ran. RPR said that when she first heard him--whose song is not singy but squeaky--she thought I was being particularly diligent with a dish, getting it squeaky clean.
More importantly, eight pounds twelve ounces! She is something like 5'2" with small bones. Ow. But the baby is the most beautiful ever, of course, with a full head of black hair, steel gray eyes, and exactly a miniature RPR; plus she demonstrated how brilliant she is by immediately nursing like a pro.
Okay, this was the freakiest fucking dream ever. My usual anxiety theme, but instead of its suddenly being the end of the semester and my realizing I forgot to attend some number of my courses, something totally...not. The emotion this dream evoked was so powerful that despite waking twice, the waking became part of the dream, intense relief, but followed by yet another tragedy. I have had high school and college anxiety dreams, about social and academic problems, I have dreamed about my family's deaths, about torture and pain and loneliness and the screaming heebie-jeebies (whose origin I just looked up: coined in 1923 in a comic strip, benign).
I have a pen with a light in the tip so I can write in the otherwise dark. I often write my dreams, because writing helps me remember them and remembering them helps me figure out what my brain is working on. Plus they're fun. Sometimes. Sometimes they're fun because I laugh at myself: still mulling over that?
This was horrifying. The betrayal was deep, it was all my fault, people would shun me in all possible ways, I had hurt people I loved. I woke up sweating and shivering.
And what was the dream? I had, again, omitted to follow through on an obligation, and the repercussions would ripple everywhere to everyone. What I had done was to forget that I was supposed to perform in a duologue production of "Guys and Dolls" (which I don't know and have never seen in any wise). My stratagem of not writitng it down at the time, or when I got up, or at all during the day until now, has served its purpose: I now remember almost nothing about it except the strength and the anguish of my remorse.
What the fuck was that about, I'd like to know.
I finally began a kitchen photo album, added several photographs to Blake's album, and a few to the garden from this year. The kitchen thus far has only tediously detailed before pictures. I intend not to post any afters (or durings) until it is after, but there's a peek* at the cabinets in the Blake album.
* This was "peak" until 12 May 2004. I blame this on CoolBoss, who composed a headline--"A Peak Ahead"--not about mountains but about forecasting. I hang my head.
My poor mother. She says that she and two women from her church are awaiting children to be born, all within April sometime. The other two are having maternal grandchildren but my mother can play along with only her cousin's grandchild and her daughter's friend's child.
Sorry, Mom. Helping you keep up with the Joneses would be among the last reasons I'd spore. Not, to give her credit, that she adopted that Tone this time, but I do kind of feel for her. With two heterosexual, undiseased daughters, she never expected not to have any.
I stopped working for the UConn registrar ten years ago. I never took a chemistry class in college (or high school). Nevertheless, as I read a selection of actually published examples of Bulwer-Lytton quality prose, I pegged one item as from UConn at the first alphanumeric:
"127Q-128Q. General Chemistry
Either semester. Four credits. Three class periods and one 3-hour laboratory period. (Students who have passed CHEM 137 or 153 may take CHEM 128.) (Students who have passed CHEM 122 will receive only 2 credits for CHEM 127 but 4 credits will be used for calculating QPR scores. A student who has a very high standing in CHEM 122 may be permitted, with the consent of the instructor, to take CHEM 128 without 127.) CHEM 127 is not open for credit to students who have passed CHEM 129 or 137 or 153; and CHEM 128 is not open to students who have passed CHEM 130 or 138 or 154."
(The CSUs employ UConn numbering for interchangeable courses.)
Alphabetizing thousands of registration scan-tron sheets over six years and staffing nine bouts of Add-Drop shoved certain course numbers deep into my brain, especially since every Bachelor of Science candidate had to take this pair of classes.
This morning I finally figured something out and declared, "I'm brilliant!" but of course being brilliant is of little solace unless I can crow about it to someone so I made Intern come over and look at what I had done. He listened quite kindly, following about two inches of my ell* of explanation, and when I wound up, he did my happy dance with me and then asked, "So do you have any snacks?"
I cracked up. He's seriously been talking to my sister: "I'll listen to your story if you give me a backrub while you tell it." I haven't laughed at myself so hard since--well, probably since I saw my sister in December, but certainly workwise--Egg said that thing.
* When I wrote that I just pulled a measurement word out of the air, but an ell! Because I, ell jay aitch, do tend to overexplain and at length, don't I.
Gossip. I love the gossip. I have my guilty-pleasure trainwreck journals, and I am not above dissecting them with friends. I love dishing about people actually in my life as well. There are, however, lines--perhaps arbitrary to an outsider but logical to me--that I keep to one side of. I hope.
I know two pieces of (offline) information right now and I am determined not to pass them on. When I'm brilliant and solve a problem, I want to crow, but there's nothing helpful here. One is only a tidbit that could be taken as part of Someone's larger drama if I passed it on to the Other Person who made me a confidante. The other is a matter of public record and has been published, and is much worse.
The element that disturbs me most--indicative of my own self-involvement, given the nature of the information--is how I received it. I maintain a web page for a group. Someone whom I barely remember after a proximal acquaintance 20 years gone, who maintains a page for a related group, told me. She has presumed before on the similarity of our pages' intents, asking me to intrude on the privacy of someone in my group for information about that person's relative in her group. The fuck, I wondered. The chiseler could ask my groupmember on her own if she though the information so vital to possess. And on what basis did the chiseler assume intimacy between me and my groupmember, and worse, between herself and me?
I didn't reply to the previous request and I won't reply to this. I could wish for greater involvement with my group, but I'm not going to buy it at the expense of others' public humiliation and private pain and of my own dignity and sense of decency.
I have 10 years of said dignity and decency to stand on, though that base wobbles on the 25 years of indiscretion preceding it. The element disturbs me because the chiseler and I occupied similar roles in our groups during their heyday. I do not want to occupy--and I don't--or to be seen to occupy, that position anymore. Nor that of an obsequious chiseler.
I should really get over high school. As if that weren't obvious (where "that" antecedes both what I need to get over, and, just as obviously, the setting for the above groups' formation, where the role I refer to is not that of class gossip).
RDC and I went to My Brother's Bar last night and I was a chatterbox. I told him what Shrink said, that she would like to see me self-confident again, "as you were in college," and I amended, "...yet acting in age-appropriate ways."
Age- and context-appropriate and, as I said above, with a little more discretion.
But not entirely repressed. We went to Brother's so I could try on new Tevas at REI afterward. The only thing wrong with my current, 10-year-old pair is that the Velcro has lost its grip, but can they be restrapped? I don't know. I tried on Merrills and Tevas and Chacos and, in each pair, skipped across the area to the shoe-testing bit of fake rock.
I am feeling better because one, I didn't particularly notice if anyone thought I was too old and fat to skip, and two, fuck 'em if they did. Also I am more sensible than I was in college, because I wouldn't've skipped if skipping would have been in the way of a more crowded store's activity.
I was looking for hiking sandals but most of the shoes I found had river soles. "I can't find my sole," I told RDC, after much looking. Then I realized. "I had to leave it on the dock!" A homophone pun doesn't work if the person hasn't read the right book. That particular scene in that particular book just wrenches my heart of my chest, and I thought, oh shit, so much for that good mood. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
As we left, we passed through a display of canoes and kayaks, one of which we'd like to have eventually (with a lake to use it on). RDC suggested Blake could perch on a strut and come along. Blake probably would hate it, and besides, the least wind would land him in the drink. RDC didn't drop it right then but considered whether Blake might be able to do this or that, and eventually I had to hit him in the head with a shovel but not before my mind was full of terrible imaginings.
Not too long ago, either of these things, remembering the leavetaking at the dock or picturing another way Blake could die, would have crashed me. I do think a means of societal control is to keep people complaisant and distracted, and it's not a struggle for me to remain angry and concerned yet, so right now I appreciate that these two incidents merely ended my giddy mood instead of blackening it.
It is appropriate that I have an epiphany while reading Ulysses. This morning I realized proof of God--not my amorphous Gaia ideal but the typical occidental monotheistic dealie who pre-empts evolution.
Evolution cannot have created human breasts: they are too ugly, cumbersome, inefficient, and purposeless to have come into being by any method as gracefully ruthless as that. Other mammals can engorge only when they need to feed their young, but breasts are an evil perpetrated on humanity by a vengeful, perverse, sadistic, heterosexual male god.
/rant
There are plenty of breasts that are proportionate and shapely and a pleasure to their bearers. Mine are not.
When RDC2 was here, at least twice he didn't want to leave someplace because he was too tired to move. I wouldn't've brought a child to McCormick's at all, but it was a Sunday and I don't know a lot of babysitters, so along he came. He resisted for a while our suggestions to put his head on the table and sleep but succumbed before his meal arrived. When it was time to go, he resisted being woken and wanted to stay, perhaps using his grilled cheese as a pillow.
Friday when we gussied up and left him at Intern's for the evening, he claimed to be too tired to move when I picked him up at midnight--although he was awake and watching "Princess Bride"--so I obligingly carried him like a child half his age to the car.
Right now I am not getting up, even though if I did I could read Gilligan's Wake in bed, because I have a sleepy cockatiel on my ankle who huffs whenever I move. Shit, he just tucked as I saved this. Now I can't ever get up.
Both my mother-in-law and I have created monsters.
What a charming restaurant. We ate in its potagér, surrounded by nothing yet in bloom for a kitchen garden but beautiful and scented anyway, with Siberian forget-me-not and lilac and I think a Penstemon strictus (it looked just like mine) that I groomed. Two of us had a nettle and spinach soup (primarily spinach, which was good) and then yellowtail tuna with hazelnuts and Jerusalem artichoke and also fennel, which was quite daring of me, and RDC had the special, a Hawai'ian fish whose name escapes me, with plenty of morrels.
I stole a morrel from RDC's plate. "You have no morals," our acquaintance observed. (I could call him either Vancouver, where he's from, or Toronto, where he met KMJ who recommended us to him when he moved here, or Wynkoop, where we first met. None of those works. How subtly to ask someone's middle name?)
For dessert RDC had crème brulée and I had a slice of flourless chocolate cake--quite predictable choices for each of us. Our third had a rhubard something with basil ice cream. I've seen basil ice cream around but never ventured so far until now, when I asked for a spoonful. The basil just explodes on your tongue, it's amazing, but I didn't like the aftertaste.
I have no idea what brought this up yesterday, but as RDC and I were eating sandwiches at Heidi's Brooklyn Deli before funding another Home Despot timeshare, a couple of our acquaintances at UConn came up.
Oh no. Now I remembered, so I'm going to do that thing that my sister hates.
Like all good campuses, UConn's had its characters. A street person wandering by in Denver reminded me of whatever his name was who panhandled at the Willi Food Co-op. He reminded me of Paul, a fixture at any food function, who would often pay to eat in the cafeteria at Shippee--a women-only dorm--who walked as if on Thorazine, always wore a parka no matter the weather, and was off-putting in several ways. Although not as many ways as Physics Phil, who was as much of a lech as Paul was but for men instead of women (UConn had equal opporunity sociopaths), and whose untrimmed beard he groomed only with his overgrown nails.
Physics Phil reminded me of ROTC Rob, of whom RDC didn't know at all until Rob hooked up with our neighbor a few doors down from our first apartment, the tenement. When we first moved into the tenement, my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend were living in that other apartment--and when they left it, these acquaintances--the ones who sparked this entry, I'm circling around--moved in.
RDC, being not as much of a gossip as I am, was unclear on all the drama attendant on this couple. But when they came up, neither of us could remember if they got married because they were pregnant or if the pregnancy just happened really fast. I suppose I should be proud of myself that I cannot remember such a meaningless detail ten years old and so far outside my own life. It's either that or my brain is decaying.
Anyway, I looked them both up. The things you find on the web. Like me. Hi lurkers!
Can I just say, because I haven't told a story in so long, that the man, whom I'll call Faun because The Marble Faun was the one Hawthorne text he hadn't read, had Liked me when he first arrived at UConn? In his first days at UConn, he took a temporary job for my office’s beginning-of-semester cattle call, and that’s how we met and when he vaguely crushed (as he told me later). It was my senior year and I was newly single, but a much different single than my naïve freshling self--instead of looking for men to crush on, I was oblivious to those who liked me. My attention, it’s true, was elsewhere, and my singlehood didn’t last long.
Our casual acquaintance happened in the humanities building, where he and I were English students, graduate and undergraduate. Two years later I was a graduate student myself, single again, and friendlier with Faun. He was interesting and attractive but intimidating and not among that year’s noncommittal yet fraught with baggage dating victims. Late in the fall he hooked up with another English department acquaintance of mine, and the usual amount of time later she told me she was pregnant with intent to keep.
It didn’t take much imagination for me to consider what the implications my own dating Faun might have been. I was fond of him, because he was brilliant and weird and opined that the ties of an ex-friend of mine ran the gamut from A to B, which I cracked up at and failed to recognize as Dorothy Parker. But if I had, might I have wound up pregnant instead? Or as well. Yii. A lesson, not that I needed one, that casual hook-ups were not my way.
A month after that child was born, a new school year was beginning. The first time I met a new graduate student, she had lovebites all over her neck and shoulders and I was impressed at her wearing a boat-necked shirt without embarrassment. The biter had been Faun. Two years to the due-date after his daughter was born, he had another with this woman. What RDC and I couldn’t remember is how many months before the son was born they got married.
Anyway, what I found on the web suggests that he is still interesting and brilliant and that they are still married though each now to someone else. Tex called me scary, and I’ll cop to scary for remembering and being curious about people whom I have not seen or communicated with for a decade, but I don’t consider googling for three minutes and skimming publicly posted, personal pages scary stalking. Just mildly stalky curiosity.
ROTC Rob, though, he was a scary stalker. He, like Paul, would eat in Shippee caf because it was a single-sex dorm, although since he lived in a large dorm and therefore had a meal plan, at least he didn’t have to pay extra for commissary chow. After the first incident--leering, immature flirting, deep breathing, inappropriate remarks, cornering a hallmate in the elevator, whichever it was--that brought him to our attention, my next-door friend Michelle told me she knew him as Grocery Boy, because he worked in the supermarket she shopped in and would utter cheesy come-ons to her as he stocked tuna cans even when her mother was right there. My roommate took Tae Kwon Do and during stretching exercises was randomly partnered with someone who caressed her feet in a non-stretchy, non-Tae Kwon Do manner, didn’t stop when she told him off, and showed no remorse when she asked to be repartnered; he turned out to be ROTC Rob. He leered--focused, menacing scoping with pouting and tongue--at every (white) woman in my hall, all ten of us, before first semester was out, and I’m sure the entire dorm knew about him and avoided him.
After my ex-boyfriend and his girlfriend, after Faun and the mother of his son, the next tenant of the nearby tenement was a woman I didn’t know. She looked fairly skanky but even so, when I noticed ROTC Rob there regularly--that apartment was two buildings from mine and between it and campus--I was surprised anyone would find him that worthwhile.
Worthwhile enough to reminisce about but not to google.
Oo, MIT has a nest of maybe red-tailed hawks, and the clearest web-cam I have ever seen trained on it. Right now a parent is standing over the two? chicks, watching and guarding and also preening its extremely fluffy belly. I am a bird sicko, wanting to cuddle with a raptor. I know this.
This is how the CD my sister and I made for our mother turned out:
Fiddler on the Roof, Prologue, Tradition
Because whenever we do something because we've always done it, we sing the chorus.
10, 000 Maniacs, My Sister Rose
More a sister song than a mother song, but a family song.
Aimee Mann and Michael Penn, Two Of Us
More a couple song than a family song, but pretty
Beatles, Julia
About John Lennon's mother
Cat Stevens, Where do the Children Play?
Well, where do they play?
Cowboy Junkies, Musical Key
"My mother's hands were always cool and soft..."
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Teach Your Children
"Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you."
Innocence Mission, Medjugorje
"You're everywhere
Everywhere"
About the Virgin Mary, so religious though not her religious. Also pretty.
Shirley Horn, Summertime
My mother told me she sang this to me when I was a baby. I can't quite imagine it, but it makes me happy to think of her singing "And your ma is so good-looking, baby/ She's a-looking good now."
Joni Mitchell, Love,
With a Biblical source even: "As a child I spoke as a child/ I thought and I understood as a child/ But when I became a woman/ I put away childish things."
Kate Bush, reaching out
"See how the flower leans instinctively/ Toward the light./ See how the heart reaches out instinctively/ For no reason but to touch." Also pretty
Kate Bush, this womans work
"I stand outside this woman's work,/ This woman's world./ Ooh, it's hard on the man,/ Now his part is over./ Now starts the craft of the father."
Louis Armstrong, What A Wonderful World
"I hear babies cry, I watch them grow/ They'll learn much more than I'll never know/ And I think to myself what a wonderful world"
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Our House
"I'll light the fire, while you place the flowers/ In the vase that you bought today."
Michelle Shocked, When I Grow Up
"Uh huh, that's what I said a hundred and twenty babies/ We'll raise ‘em on tiger's milk and green bananas..." I love this song. It's so silly and loving.
Shriekback, Cradle Song
A lullaby: "May the fire be your friend and the sea rock you gently,/
May the moon light your way till the wind sets you free."
Godspell, By My Side
Our favorite song from our favorite musical.
Sting, The Lazarus Heart
About his mother: "Every day another miracle/ Only death will tear us apart"
They Might Be Giants, Birdhouse in Your Soul
Another delightful love song: "Say I'm the only bee in your bonnet/ Make a little birdhouse in your soul."
Fiddler on the Roof, Sunrise, Sunset
I should have had just songs from musicals, though I can't think of an appropriate one from "Sound of Music." This is about parents watching their children grow up seemingly in a day.
The Waterboys, The Stolen Child
She used to be Irish, and Yeats is beautiful. "Come away, human child to the water and the wild/ With a faery, hand in hand/ For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
I am going to have to restrain myself mightily. My sister probably is moving in with our mother and BDL. The stories, they will flood in, and I have not enough thumbs for the dike. Already we have discovered that she--an LPN--had never heard of Tourette's Syndrome ("that sounds serious") and that a wooden toilet seat must be left up "to let the wood breathe."
Yesterday I strategically suggested a trip to CostCo after work, achieving the dual purposes of more contact lenses for me and not having to bike home in 35-degree rain in no more than a t-shirt. (Today I took the bus, and possibly will bike home.)
When we got home there was snow too, dime-sized flakes that melted at contact with any surface. I filled the birdfeeder for the second time that day, a dispensation I wouldn't have made except for the unseasonable cold in nesting season. (I hope my robins are okay--robins are nesting in one of my plum trees!) We watched sparrows and finches shelter on the windowsills and utility lines under the eaves. RDC wanted to offer them the house, which I think would be fine. We need a sparrow to eat the moths that have suddenly erupted. Last year was a peak in the miller moth population and this year enough are left over that sparrows, so excited in their pursuit of fluttering yumminess, do not think to dodge traffic.
This morning I watched a soaking wet squirrel on my neighbor's windowsill groom itself. It's so unfair that they can be so cute. It washed its face like a cat or a rabbit, it pulled its tail through its claws to comb it and applied the water it wrang out to its hind feet, the muddiness of which I never would have thought would bother a squirrel.
Also at the bus stop I met a four-month-old golden retriever puppy named Mason.
It is entirely possibly I am way the fuck too easily amused. I am proud, though, to have proof that if I had a video camera, movies of Blake are not all I would film. I do have a love-hate relationship with the little fuckers, but this morning I was glad to see this one.
I showed one picture to ÜberBoss and he giggled (he has a great giggle). Actually I emailed it to him and I heard him laugh from my cube, when one of the worst things about the new building is that I am farther away from him than across the hall and therefore hear his giggle less. Haitch, stop reading now. Anyway, he told me that in his first Denver apartment, he kept seeing wet dead squirrels in the alley until finally he asked his landlord (who lived on the other floor of the house). The landlord shamefacedly admitted to having tired of bringing the squirrels he'd captured in Havahart (non-lethal) traps to City Park so now was drowning them, trap and all, in his bathtub.
The worst part of that story to me is why the fuck do these people bring their squirrels to City Park? I live too near City Park to think that's a good idea. The best part is, of course, the irony of drowning Havaharted squirrels.
Haitch and McCarthy were in town today for McCarthy's defense. She called the house to get my work number, which I had been too foolish to provide earlier, and she and RDC talked, and then she called me at work to set up a meeting time and place. I asked if she and McCarthy would have time to see the kitchen before they leave tonight (without me--I am not going to her unshower in Oklahoma tomorrow, which makes us sad). She cracked up, because that's exactly what RDC asked. She said, "It's not important that I see RDC or Blake but I have to see that hood."
I picked her up at noon and we spent the afternoon shopping after toasting Dr. McCarthy. Lord, I miss shopping with Haitch. The camera did not come out to document our hideous finds, as it has before, but our negligently omitting to document them did not mean they were less hideous. We did not find her wedding shoes, but we did debate various possibilities of Things On The Head, like veils and tiaras and earrings and necklaces and hair.
Her hair! is longer than mine. That is so odd. She accompanied me for my mourning-donation chop, and I have seen her only once since, last May right after she and McCarthy and their square of sidewalk all got together. It is only just longer, but in three months when I see her next hers'll be way longer (especially after my pre-wedding cut).
A bunch of us had dinner at Mezcal afterward. I asked the server to take a picture of the seven of us, which she did, the seven of us in the lower left, the giant chihuahua painting in the upper right, and two quarters of the poorly framed shot wasted. And that chihuahua is scary.
The red-tailed hawk bappies are thriving and huge at MIT, but the robins in my plum tree are not. I have not seen the parents in days. I did find one half of a robin's egg in the yard, but I can't tell if it hatched normally or was cracked by a crow or a foul evil cat or by a fall. Without the parents, even if a chick did hatch, it's dead now. Hooray. So I'm watching the hawks again.
I grow the most brilliant children. My youngest just graduated with a 4.0 and stopped at the Formigny B&B with her roadtrip companion on their meandering way east. I disappointed her companion with how few embarrassing babysitting stories I had, but I lived up to the warning she received from my children's mother at graduation this weekend that I remember every book I've ever read and will talk your ear off and never wear shoes (straight out of the car, she pointed at my feet and observed, "No shoes!"). The entire family is going to Ireland ("Do you need to bring a babysitter?") and my oldest is starting a global jaunt from there. My middle and oldest just went to the March for Women's Lives in D.C. In another family of victims, one sister got a job in her field, no mean feat, and the other is a high school chemistry teacher--hooray, because there can't be too many female ones. (Our high school had no female science or math teachers. Actually a majority of the teachers were male, and I wonder if that's because our teacher salaries were higher than average.)
RKC is looking forward to reading for pleasure again. Because she just took two semesters of Portuguese I told her about José Saramago ("Read those of his books with dogs"); because we were sitting in the living room I pulled The Golden Compass from the shelf and shoved His Dark Materials down her throat; because we both like Lemony Snickett I told her Sunny's best word from Slippery Slope, "Buscheney," meaning someone without regard for others; and because she said she wanted to read The Giver I actually gave her my copy. I told her that while it's great for kids, as an adult she might be disappointed by the holes in its structure. "And not good Holes either." She's also looking forward to Life of Pi and The DaVinci Code.
For graduation I gave her Sandra Boynton's version of Oh, the Places You'll Go!, Yay, You! because while Dr. Seuss is of course superior, everyone gives everyone that. Also a little card version of The Book of Questions to entertain herself and her friend in the car, "If You Were a Cereal, Which One Would You Be?" And, because I am a child of the '80s and my sister's suggestion of a Mother's Day present reminded me I could do this, two mix CDs, RKC & A's Roadtrip 2004 and RKC Graduation. Making the mix CDs occurred to me yesterday at work, and the first song I thought of belonged in both mixes, Cat Stevens's "On the Road to Find Out," which is good because, reading the song lists, RKC said, "Oh, I love Cat Stevens!" (and then, "Who is Kate Bush?").
Yeah, I made a mix tape for someone 13 years my junior. I was going to say, "I am sure I shall be monstrous glad of Miss Marianne's company, whether Miss Dashwood will go or not, only the more the merrier say I, and I thought it would be more comfortable for them to be together; because if they got tired of me, they might talk to one another, and laugh at my odd ways behind my back. But one or the other, if not both of them, I must have," but I didn't, because that book thing, you know.
(That book thing didn't stop my quoting to my new reading-friend-at-work (we sit mostly silently, but together, reading books we have propped on our meals), yesterday, after I coaxed her out of lunchroom onto the patio and into a stiff breeze, by way of apology, "She is abominably rude to keep Charlotte out of doors in all this wind. Why does she not come in?" She is a reading companion, so she understood, so mleah.)
Today as we strolled through the park I saw two boys, about nine, hurl a stout branch into the pond amongst a stampede of ducklings. The newlings fled, churning their little drumsticks and chirruping, and I don't think any was hit, but the hurler was certainly aiming for them and not just throwing an object to make a splash. "That's terrific," I said to them--they had so little shame that they did this despite being our being so close they could hear a regular speaking volume, and they turned to my voice. "That's just what I like to do around babies, to throw sticks at them. You should be very proud."
Hellions. Apparently I am out to correct stupid behavior, one event after another.
For my birthday I got a hooked-up stove! It arrived Saturday and just getting it into the kitchen was an adventure. There were two delivery men, a short wiry one and a tall skinny one, and the skinny one really could not manage his share. Also the kitchen counter protudes into the doorway, which we knew, but so much so that the range had to go up and over it, which was a surprise. Skinny nearly dropped it, but RDC supported it. There it hulked, the gorilla in the room, for only two days. The universal fitting kit wasn't universal, but RDC was able to find the connection bits he needed at a specialty plumbing shop. So Monday afternoon he and SPM got it into place, with gas and electricity, and Monday night he made his grandfather's favorite dish of sausage and peppers.
(What you're not supposed to notice, but which I will not scruple to remark upon to all and sundry, is now it becomes obvious that the left wall cabinet was installed too far to the left. While the hood and stove are flush to their cabinets and counters, the hood is not centered over the range. What stands out is that between left cabinet and shelf are four inches and on the right, two and a half. It is a more important error than the notch in the tile...sshhhh.)
Is it common for permanent, established, on-the-grid residences to use propane instead of natural gas? My mother assumed it was the former, while the latter strikes me as obvious. Even rural areas of Connecticut are on the gas grid, so it shouldn't've been so mysterious to her.
I also received a fresh batch of pictures of Emlet, who continues to be delightfully beautiful (but apparently in for quite a shock when Siblet arrives next month), and a phone call from KREL in Paris, and a gardening hat from my mother (which I asked for, floppy and with a wide crown, and which she embellished with a lavender ribbon, and which would be perfect except it doesn't absorb sweat), and a check that will become books from my father, and from my sister a book of historic photographs of Old Lyme that would have been much better with a few more useful captions and a few less foolish ones about the lack of computers in 1930.
My mother-in-law, DMB, is moving house. Her husband has an African Gray parrot who lets no one but the husband touch him. Taz's cage is enormous and apparently they don't have a travel cage for him, so this morning, DMB used a perch to step him up and bring him out to the car. His flight feathers haven't been trimmed in a long time, and Taz usually doesn't go outside farther than the screened-in porch (this is Florida), so I guess he thought, Hey, freedom! and he flew. Not very far, just across the street (eek!) and over the pond (double eek!) whereupon he got tired and landed (unspeakable eek).
Parrots can't swim.
But this one could flap long enough for neighbors to emerge at DMB's screaming (she can't swim (!!!) and is afraid of water, especially since these artificial lakes in Florida can contain alligators and water moccasins) including the neighbor's guest, who flung off his clothes, dove into the pond, swam out to the bird, and swam back holding him over his head.
Back on shore, Taz announced to his rescuer, "Good job!"
Later, DMB shook her finger at Taz and said, "Just you wait until I tell your daddy what you did!" and Taz whispered, "Uh-oh."
I don't know whether Taz has ever said "good job" before. I know he knew "uh-oh." I love that he can remember and utter contextually correct phrases.
---
Blake does not like being got up in the morning. The usual thing is for us to remove his covers, open his door, and say good morning. Occasionally he's ready to come out and will sashay a little out from his sleepy spot to be stepped up. Most often he stays in his sleepy spot having a little morning groom and stretch. While he does this, we get his breakfast--fresh seed and pellet mix, fresh water, heated up buddy chow.
This morning I was downstairs watching the news (an easy habit to have fallen back into with the kitchen in the basement for three months) with my cereal. RDC uncovered Blake, gave him his breakfast, and then came down the back stairs to make coffee. When he went back up with his coffee, he called to me asking if I had the buddy. I leapt up the front stairs and found Blake pacing the landing.
He is probably physically capable of hopping down each step, though the full flight at once might be more exertion than he is used to; but he has never done and might think he can't. (It took him a long time to realize he could hop up and down between the den floor and my study floor.) He is used to yelling when something is Wrong, like being Alone, as here. He usually yells before fluttering down from his cage. He usually yells before coming to the front door to look out at us, if we have been in the front garden too long, or pacing the back landing if we've been in the yard. Maybe this morning the stealth jump was deliberately sneaking because he knows we don't like him wandering and grazing unsupervised. But I prefer to think he was lonely and getting as close to us as he could.
One of the news blurbs was on the national geography bee held yesterday. The final question was "Peshawar, a city in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, has had strategic importance for centuries because of its location near what historic pass?"
I'm quite sure I would have known that even if I hadn't just read The Kite Runner, because the country's been in this little skirmish over there...? So I suppose it was random and earlier questions were harder. What grieved me is that the CNN morning newscaster thought her co-newscaster was ohsointelligent for knowing it was Khyber Pass. She decided to ask him, after he said he sucked at U.S. geography, which five of the state capitals were in cities that begin with A.
This is Dot Org basics and therefore easy: Atlanta, GA (he worked for CNN and didn't get that!); Augusta, ME; Annapolis, MD; Albany, NY; and Austin, TX. After a commercial break a viewer and maybe their own graphics team had noticed that the map in their reveal placed Atlanta in Alabama. But no one seemed to mind that their flag would have had only 48 stars, that the map excluded Alaska and Hawai'i. That's a common thing we have to deal with in our 50-state maps, that the outlying states don't like being shoved into the Gulf of Mexico or wherever is convenient, and maybe it's bad that they're not to scale either.
The new software trainer at Dot Org is a big improvement. He devised a map-generating tool that I guess is handy for people who don't know what state is where. I still think my method is easier and results in better maps, but I have demonstrated it to enough people, even here, who confuse Mississippi and Alabama or New Hampshire and Vermont--though not quite North Dakota and South Dakota--that his text-based rather than my map-based tool is the better choice for them.
I read somewhere sometime about an experiment that concluded that cats really are physically capable of seeing color but that it's an extraneous skill that they have to be trained to. I don't know whether that's true, but I remember the analogy in the report: that humans can learn to knit with their feet, but what's the point?
Today I came into work wearing a violet knit dress and Intern, who is severely color blind, asked what color it was, guessing blue. I compared my skirt to two different books, one navy, one purple, and he guessed that the purple was the darkest when really it was the brightest (to me). I told him about the cat thing, suggesting that when someone razzes him about being color blind he can tell them they're knitting with their feet.
From an information page about peregrines nesting on their builidng:
"People have been fascinated by Peregrine Falcons for thousands of years. Nearly decimated by pesticides, recovery programs such as the one in Rochester, NY, are helping to increase their numbers. Enter the world of Peregrine Falcons and learn more about these magnificent birds of prey."
"To destroy" already has so many synonyms that it doesn't need another when that other's meaning is so handy and specific. Whom do I sue?
Also I added this to the list of things I don't get: Referring to potential residences as "homes." A home is a concept and cannot be bought; a house or apartment or condominium or yurt is a physical entity and can be.
We did not tile. Instead we were as Murkan as Murkan can be and shopped on a Saturday: drawer organizers for the wide drawer, a new garbage can for the kitchen (stainless steel of course, and oval instead of round, very hip), new yard and camp chairs, a wedding present, mason jars for coffee, a cage for the sponge that suctions to the side of the sink, a spool for paper towel (the one disadvantage of undercabinet lighting is that it precludes undercabinet paper towel), and two sets of new sheets.
I read Ulysses during a brief rainstorm; raked up months of sunflower husks to start a new lasagne mulch; satisfied my whitehead-popping, sunburn-peeling itch by grooming the neighbor's easement of bindweed (when you pull a tendril out from under groundcloth and wind up with a handful? I love that); unpacked more kitchen and organized it; and watched "Big Fish."
It was a good day.
RDC and I had dinner with Trish and Jared last night, or two separate dinners because of an incompetent host. There was monkey vivisection and smacktalk and gossipy speculation. And forgetting that Trish cooks and to let her know I received her birthday card and the usual dose of lisa-suckage.
It began to sprinkle on my way home. I should not apply stain if rain is forecast during the next 24 hours, and I don't like to pressure-clean if I'm going to freeze in the blowback. So that was my excuse. I transplanted the jasmine that the neighbor gave us, we ate spinach from the garden, and I read Watership Down. Also I put away two-day-old laundry (only occasionally do I get it away the day I do it). Blake was a beast with two back toes, falling in lust first with the washcloth (I bought new, periwinkle blue washcloths when the fam came in March, but did not bring Blake to vet colors) and then with laundry. He spent a lot of time in his cage, pacing and whining, because he would not play nicely in his box or with a peacock feather or be pet (and to turn pages with one hand and pet with the other constitutes a perfect evening for me) or listen to music with his daddy. I will use the old washcloths if I have to but the new ones are still cushy. Hmph.
My neighbor gave me a jasmine because he is kind and generous. The jasmine is hardy only to 20 degree Fahrenheit, which means it should come inside over the winter, yet it wants to climb, which means it should live outside where it can climb. Also it is very tall, and my pots are either pretty for inside or big for outside. Well, I have until fall to get it a pot of adequate size and prettiness, but I am not an indoor plant person. And since it was a gift from someone I like, its probable death will be guilt-inducing. Hooray.
One thousand five hundred ladybugs supposedly were in that bag. I shook them into the lower branches of the cherry tree and left the net bag and the raffia in a crook for them to finish escaping from. The leaves do look better--maybe because the hosing rinsed off some goo as well as less grippy aphids, since I don't see scads of ladybugs around. What eats ladybugs? Any meat-eating bird, I figure. We have flickers and robins and starlings in abundance.*
Tomorrow is supposed to be hot and I will pressure-clean if it's not cloudy.
* I have not seen "Rocky Horror Picture Show" in years. When will I be able to say "in abundance" and not hear Frank N. Furter in my head?
Months ago we bought tickets to see David Grisman at the Botanic Gardens. Yesterday the Junkies finally posted more tour dates. There is one show in Colorado. Both Grisman and my Cowboy Junkies are on Friday August 27th.
RDC, prince that he is, said we could probably sell the Grisman tickets--Grisman is more him and Junkies more me, though he like them too--but we bought the Grisman tickets first and we've never seen him but we've seen the Junkies a slew of times, me eight and him six. He was sweet to offer.
But still, fuckity.
We might have left earlier and made the evening reception, but I needed my head shrunken first, so we set out a little after six. I had not been over Independence Pass since 1998 or so. It's still gorgeous and hairy and windy and loopy and absent guardrails. The Arkansas River looks tempting and there might be stretches where bodily contact with the water, rather than wading overalls and boots, or boats only, is permitted.
In Shrink's waiting room I wrote in my paper journal: I didn't think about this until I chose my next book. I only thought that I had already started it, a few pages at least, and that it's a reasonable vacation book. But I first read Tracey Chevalier in October 2001, the last time we went to Aspen, the weekend we started bombing Afghanistan. Now I am going back to Aspen with my last unread Chevalier, The Virgin Blue, and we are still at war, and Afghanistan is still in rubble.
I still love Aspen. I know our habits there are unsustainable--but I love it. Sunday on the way home, RDC suggested stopping in Vail for a late lunch, and maybe Beaver Creek for coffee, for a trifecta of towns we're only kidding ourselves about. I don't know Beaver Creek at all, but I don't know if I'll ever get over my feeling that Vail got rolled out like so much Play-Do and baked like polymer clay. Or puffy paint, while Aspen feels like a town where people live. And where they can't afford to live, and where they don't actually live, but which is a damn sight prettier than Vail would be even if it didn't have I-70 slap through the middle of it.
Anyway. As soon as we were down out of the Pass, I could smell the black willow cottonwood trees I so love. It makes me want to run alongside a fence. (I am not really allowed to make Sound and Fury jokes.) That's the predominant smell. Also aspen, also ponderosa pine. But mostly this specific species of cottonwood.
Three blocks away from our hotel (the Hotel Aspen), we ate a late dinner at the Hotel Jerome bar. In addition to the Texans whose volume and hairspray and assumptions about go-cups gave them away, and the upper crust so crusty and inbred that the men actually have evolved to grow less body hair on their chests where their knotted sweater arms hang and their faces betray what Toulouse-Lautrec's body did, there were the Aspen crew that I knew, the privileged poor who ski by day, wait tables by night, and manage to prolong their early 20s lifestyle into their 30s.
Besides black willow cottonwoods and people who ski without health insurance, I love Aspen for the stars. Okay, I could get them anywhere outside of a city, but they just add to Aspen's loveliness. And we had a 270-degree view from our patio.
Another plus to our hotel was its proximity to the Main Street Bakery & Café. Not that anything public is too far to walk, but only two blocks is a fine thing. On our entering, CoolBoss waved, and we joined eight or so Dot Orgeristas for breakfast. I am not so good with work folk outside of a work setting, because in my head at least I am demure at work, not laughing The Laugh or swearing or telling raucous jokes or telling stories nine tangents long or at least doing these things only to well-broken-in coworkers and no more than two or three at once. RDC is much better at that, so breakfast was not merely stupid small- or work-talk.
Most people were getting a late start as well because of the reception the night before. We could have done something outdoorsy if we had finished our breakfasts before noon, but no. My sister had told me that one of her friends--happily, RDC's and my mutual favorite from her 18 months here--now owned a jewelry store, named This. I looked This up in the phone book, where it wasn't; I called her and she told me its name under the former owners had been This but its friend-name, well, she couldn't remember That. So I strolled into a jewelry store and said I was looking for one that had used to be called This but its new owners, Friend and Wife, had changed its name? This was Aspen, so of course those jewelers knew the new name. We went into New Name, where Friend wasn't. He was at his fly-fishing store--he had been a guide when we first met him. And there he was, glad to see us, inquiring after my sister, admiring our sleuthing.
Oh, and my earlier epiphany. I had this one, recently, while reading Ulysses, but upon stopping into the bakery where an earlier one bloomed (I slay me), though this time for lemonade, I had to mention it.
We were visiting my sister for the first time upon moving to Colorado. We went into the bakery, where CLH and RDC each ordered a chocolate chip cookie and I a brownie sundae--which they didn't offer on the menu, but I asked if they would just shove a brownie (which they had) into the bottom of a bowl of ice cream (they offered both paper bowls and ice cream) and charge me whatever à la carte and I would just call it a sundae. Soon enough my sister and husband had finished their cookies and wanted some of my sundae, which I did not want to share. They had had theirs, and this was mine. CLH insisted, explaining, "We're grown-ups now. If we want more, we can have it."
My epiphany was not that as an adult I could have more, but that I could share without resentment. I had aspired to this as an articulated concept since I read Ursula LeGuin's Eye of the Heron, but this was the first time I knew I was practicing it.
After a late breakfast and due at the gondola by 4, we didn't do much in town besides find my sister's friend and poke about in a cookery store. Then we strolled along the Roaring Fork trail for a while, sucking in deep breaths of aspen and black willow cottonwood and everything else on offer in a high-altitude riparian environment. Then we repaired to the hotel to dress.
I have got to get new dress shoes. It doesn't help that I am not fond of shoes. One pair of grey satin pumps would go with every single one of my best dresses, since every one of them (four) is an ice tone. I found the current pair almost four years ago and they are, besides stained, fucking uncomfortable, bearable only with doses of talcum powder and bandaids on my heels, which latter I forgot. We walked less than half a mile? to the gondola and at the top I asked at the lodge for a band-aid. A band-aid, because at that point only my left heel was cut through. By the end of the night, my right heel was sliced through too.
Anyway! The top of Ajax Mountain is no sucky place to get married. Snow-capped mountains ring the top. They were not as capped as in 1995, when friends of CLH got married up there; the photographs she brought to my wedding were the first I saw of Aspen. But they were white and shiny and lovely. The ceremony was funny and perfect; and the bride lovely of course.
I love that almost every wedding dress I have ever seen is exactly right for its bride. This wedding and EJB's are the two loveliest I have seen (except my own). They had in common gorgeous settings (this one far more spectacular), personally perfect services (EJB's had far better grammar), gracious service (this one had better food as well), but also they had nothing in common other than us and another pair of attendees--one woman works with TMB and is the cousin of this groom. And how each dress suited each bride, but that's something every wedding has in common.
The bride tugged me and others behind a pair of microphones to be back-up singers during "Mustang Sally." The next day when we ran into Ernie and his wife Seahorse, who had not stayed that long, for breakfast, I said I didn't have the moves to be a back-up singer.
"All you need is a tight black dress," Ernie suggested.
"I have one of those," I said. "It wasn't tight when I bought it [1990], but it's tight now."
"I have that dress!" Seahorse said. "Damn drycleaners."
RDC did say that throughout the wedding he noticed that I was much more comfortable talking with strangers than I have been in recent years. I am not sure that's true. On the gondola going up, we chatted with another couple, and the three of them were out-Colorado-ing each other so I shut up. It might be state pride, which is fine and which, oceanless as Colorado is, I could participate in, but it sounds like boasting. But otherwise I was chatty. Mostly with my coworkers and their spouses, but also with spare people. And during a tussle with another guest, which might be too hairy a story to post, though I don't think fast on my feet, my refusal to confront or to escalate or to speak disdainfully didn't leave me anxious and shaky. Instead I shook it off. And that is certainly better.
A side note: another road trip, another celebrity death. One major figure we haven't been away for is John Kennedy Jr. And slightly less major, Johnny Cash. The actor deaths in threes we tend to be home for too. But to date, Elvis Presley, Jerry Garcia, Princess Diana, Mother Theresa, Frank Sinatra, Charles Schultz, and Ronald Reagan.
The tussle concerned a child, which led me to think about its taking a village to raise a child. Someone--not the tussler--suggested that if I can't name the kid, it's not my village. I respect someone's thinking that I was out of line, though of course I don't share it; I do not respect the name division.
One time at a neighborhood ice cream shop, I saw a toddler playing on the bike rack as if it were a jungle gym. He was close to the curb and ignoring the street inches away. I walked over with my cone, keeping on eye on the kid before a parent came out of the store and thanked me. I couldn't name that kid; was its safety not my concern? A few years ago a man watched his grown male friend lure a little girl into a public lavatory; the man knew the friend was going to rape and kill the girl but did nothing to prevent the friend's actions or to alert anyone who would safeguard the child. He could not name the child, but he damn well shirked his responsibility to her.
At the Vietnam Memorial, a very little boy crouched at my feet and picked up a photograph someone had left below the names. I crouched myself to address him eye to eye. I asked, "Is that yours?" and he looked around in consternation. His father had been several feet away and now came to scoop him up and take the photograph from his hand. "He doesn't understand," the father apologized to me. "No, of course not," I replied. And that was that. I shouldn't have said "No, of course not," though. That didn't express what I thought, which is that the the boy was being a little boy, which is a fine thing to be, but having picked up and examined this curiosity, he shouldn't be allowed to keep it.
That's my ongoing problem in unrehearsed speech in unexpected situations, that I don't think quickly enough to respond cogently and evenly.
On Sunday after breakfast with Ernie and Seahorse, we drove down the Roaring Fork valley, drier and wider and drier yet, into Glenwood Canyon, from which we climbed (not a climb but a steep hike) to Hanging Lake.
Pretty.
I banged my knee on the way down. I have not had a scraped knee in some time and was feeling way too much like a grown-up. Now I have scabs on both knees and am feeling more like myself.
I am getting the house in shape for my sister and a small party we might have on Saturday. I had planned to take two days off, but now we have administrative leave Friday: when the federal government closes, the other office closes. I do not know if the other office had the same days off we had in March of 2003 when they didn't have our blizzard, but we do have this Friday off. I am not sure why anyone is in shock: Reagan was 93 and surely his death comes as no surprise.
CLH doesn't arrive until midnight but I took the two days of vacation anyway: five-day weekend, shweet. This morning RDC and I hiked in Red Rocks, lovely in green still. We saw a sharp-shinned hawk and a rufous-sided towhee and heard lots of meadowlarks.
I still have to weedwhack and scrub and make the bed and so forth.
If she wants to watch the funeral on Friday I am going to go to the zoo by myself. Princess Diana's funeral happened to be the day of our mother's second wedding and as I pried my sister away from the television I teased her that it was inconsiderate of her, Mom, to schedule it so. (She did understand that I was teasing.)
This afternoon as I weedwhacked and mowed, I felt the occasional drop of rain. Certainly there were piles of clouds over the mountains and in the foothills this morning, and by afternoon they had released themselves onto the plain. I was showering off when RDC came in to tell me the tornado sirens were going off.
Into the downstairs bathroom went Blake in his cage, his travel cage should we need it, his styptic powder, a tupperware of food, and my backpack of my current book, journal, Moonshadow, Dandelion, my camera, a different shirt and better bra. Also Booboo, wrapped in my blue hoodie, and light hiking shoes.
We watched the storm from our front steps and on the television, which is how this entry came to be written. Local stations split their screens between the storm and the arrival in Washington of Reagan's body. What I am struck by is how closely Blake seems to be watching television.
He watched the six horses pull the caisson from the White House to the Capitol, a half hour slow march. Every time I glanced at him from making CLH's bed or dusting, he would be in the same spot, his head cocked the same way. Eventually I made his dinner and came to sit with him while he ate, and he ate with one eye on the screen (not that he could ever keep both eyes on the screen). He's still watching the honor guard carry the casket from the street up into the rotunda.
Oh! It's not that he's watching flags flapping as much as he's listening to the music. Besides rock n' roll, Blake loves a march. A military band has been playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" adagio for ages now.
We hung out with an Aspen friend, we explored trendy Potter Highlands, we wandered through the Botanic Gardens, we ate Cricket burgers, we shopped, we hung out under a tree in the park with books, we ate at Adega, we had a cook-out with her friends and ours, we hung out around the outdoor fire, we explored a street fair, we had more burgers and milkshakes too, and we had dinner with a couple of RDC's coworkers.
It was a good enough time that I have forgotten all our bons mots, which were plenteous.
Still with its Disney moments, probably nearly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read it (which is fine), better than the previous two, with one major problem: the fourth member of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs was never explained, nor the shape of the Expecto Patronum spell. Also, Alfonso Cuarón has watched a lot of Monty Python and Hitchcock and hasn't forgotten his "Wizard of Oz."
Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint still can't act their ways out of paper bags, though Emma Watson is coming along nicely. Michael Gambon is a much more vigorous and less cariacaturey Dumbledore. Despite the improvement in director, this is solely a plot movie.
And fun.
From my semester of astronomy in high school, I remember only that it was hard (that and the viewings in our own observatory). It involved math, which wasn't my thing. I had expected to be thrilled by physics, to talk about Newton and Galileo, and was similarly disappointed by math-heavy formulas calculating acceleration--three feet per second per second? mass multiplied by what equals what?
But I still like stars and planets, and I still like Copernicus and Einstein--their discoveries, their processes, their clean deductive minds.
For some years now I have asserted that the full moon is never in the sky at the same time as the sun. I do not remember where I picked up that factoid, and I figured it was about time I researched its accuracy. This is not completely satisfactory. It does confirm that the full moon cannot be high in the sky immediately or soon after sunset, which is the gist of my assertion, but does it mean that half the moon and half the sun both can be visible at their opposite points of horizon? Most places are not so flat that you can see a full 360-degree plane.
Anyway, that search led me here, where I learned again that Venus rotates opposite to its revolution. Now I'm trying to think how that would affect weather and evolution on Earth. Oo, a science fiction "plot."
(Someone told me once that science fiction, apparently unlike all other fiction, is based on an idea. He didn't elaborate at the time, but I filled in the blanks: What if a planet had insufficient water? Dune. What if Germany and Japan had won WWII? The Man in the High Castle. I remember that morsel because even at the time I thought it was bullshit but didn't know how to assert it. What if a girl had muddy drawers? The Sound and the Fury. What if a woman's first impressions of a haughty man were wrong? Pride and Prejudice. What if Frank Cornish's secrets were finally revealed? The Lyre of Orpheus. (Perhaps because at the time I had not read these, I could not assert this?) An idea is different than a premise, but I can't think of a science fiction "idea" that's not actually a "premise," just as in straight fiction.)
How would everything had evolved differently if Earth rotated and revolved in different directions? How much does the direction of our revolution affect us? If rotation were reversed, ocean currents and winds would be different to the point of opposite, but if rotation were the same and revolution turned face, what effects on a planetary level would there be? Any, before Earth's course disrupted the solar currents?
CLH's loves RDC's comment "You shouldn't anthropomorphize animals--they hate that" because she anthropomorphizes more than anyone she knows. I say that because probably everyone anthropomorphizes more than anyone else they know because only everyone is in their own head. That was confusing to write--and to read too I suspect.
Anyway, CLH was talking about how Kitty's facial expressions change, the tilt of ears, how the eyebrow and cheek whiskers are held, the angle of the head. That's all well and good, but can cats (and dogs) shift their facial fur hair by individual hair? Blake can change individual feathers on his face, it seems like. He can't moue his beak as a regular pet can its mouth, but he can move each bit of filoplume independently. His crest is his major indicator, but he can tweak his plumage with great precision and delicacy.
Also his feathers are long enough to get mussed, unlike cat and dog fur. (It's obvious my experience is with short-haired pets.) An eyebrow feather can hang over his eye like a fringe. His crest can be shoved to one side like--this is my invention--my father's comb-over in a stiff breeze.
And I know dogs and cats speak with their whole bodies, with their posture, when they need to, but a bird emotes with its whole body all the time, not just when it's awake and alert. If a dog is awoken, it'll open an eye and roll it around, and if it's startled maybe it'll jump up (my dog was not among the world's most active, obviously). But a bird--a cockatiel, anyway--will always use its whole body: the puffy, downy chick pose of dozing, with the feathers puffed up, the neck pulled in, the beak almost hidden by feathers; the guard-bird who has just seen a seagull on television and is sleek and slender; the scaredy-bird who has just seen The Exercise Ball or the Falcon at the Meta-Birdfeeder and looks like Alice when she's drunk the potion.
Okay, I have to go to work, but Blake is on my lap in the dining room, listening to his newly-returned daddy snoring in the bedroom, cuddling under my typing arm among folds of terrycloth bathrobe, poised for his after-breakfast nap, and I cannot bear to get up. I have to, and the beakless chick swee'b (I called Percy Swee' Pea, and Swee' B doesn't have the same ring but the swee must continue) will turn into the growling lion of Uwokemeupistan. Obviously, I prefer the former.
I see a shrink biweekly. Hi, my name's Lisa, I'm overindulged. Anyway, I started seeing her in October. Since March, she has made roughly every other appointment and canceled the others, or not canceled them, such that I show up at her office only to be told she's out. She has some sort of onging medical thing, or so I gather, because the first time was "a medical emergency," and when I said next time that I hoped it was okay, she said "It is being taken care of."
Every other appointment. She's made fourof my nine appointments since March.
Also, in late May she asked if I was getting anything out of therapy, because she's not sure. So now I'm second-guessing everything I said to her until then and since because I am clearly doing something wrong.
My sister took an instant, unmet dislike to her, one because you don't blow off your patients like that, and two because she should have known that to say something like that to be would make me nervous and insecure about the thing that's supposed to help me get over my nervous anxiety.
Also, her name is Dr. Hu.
I am not going to sack her--maybe because I am not so devoted to shrinkage that missing these appointments fucks me up, which would make both my sister and Shrink right. But I am glad of the Lexapro and I want to keep it.
RDC has said I seem more comfortable around people lately. My self-loathing has decreased, though I still eat garbage and don't exercise. I'm not beating myself up about stuff as much, and while I now have the impression that I did something wrong earlier this week, I can't remember what it was. That's a good thing, that I am not turning it over and over in my head and crippling myself with guilt.
I know I'm way too acclimated to Colorado but it was damn humid today. Sweat actually trickled down my face instead of evaporating. It was sticky and not an effective means of cooling. And I felt buggy as I worked in the yard, which I hardly ever do. Sixty percent! I weep for me.
I weeded the vegetable garden, groomed the south fence of bindweed, added perhaps two gallons of vegetable pulp to what probably cannot be a lasagne mulch since I'm adding its layers gradually, and gathered a small bowlful of raspberries (slightly more than yesterday).
Last night Blake was in the living room with RDC as I dismantled his cage: he wasn't in it, he didn't want to be in it, but he didn't like the fact I was messing with his turf. (He could hear my activity.) While his house was in the dishwasher, he could forget his territorialism, but when I began to assemble it again he recommenced whining. As soon as I got the basics assembled I put his box on the roof, and he hopped from my shoulder to thither and pranced into it and huffed at me while I arranged his perches and toys.
Today he's been sweet all day. I am sure that if everyone had a cockatiel to entertain, oral hygiene would be a major hobby. Flossing, brushing, and gargling are just so much more fun when there's a buddy on your shoulder bowing and bobbing.
Now I am downstairs with Blake on my shoulder. He has just had a yawning fit and is now on my sternum, just under my chin, where I can pet him with with little lip nibbles.
I understand he is a rarity among parrots to be so affectionate, but I really can't imagine life without a buddy.
I don't know what gets into me. I meant only to watch some news over breakfast, snugglified because it's still cold. Instead I watched most of a sentimental woe-is-me movie from 1952, Invitation, with Dorothy McGuire (whom I didn't recognize as the mother from "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"; if I had I wouldn't have lasted any time at all) and Van Johnson, whom I know only as Spike from my beloved "State of the Union."
Also I downloaded part 8 of War and Peace. Which means I am only 75% done. It might not be as bad as I think it is if I only listened to it more than occasionally. It's why I should cook, so I can listen to it in the house. The match that I wanted to happen could happen now, and I know Napoleon falls, so maybe I could stop listening! There would be much rejoicing.
But the scene with the black-eyed little girl in Quention's section of Sound and the Fury is straight out of War and Peace. Countess Rostov isn't nearly as bad as Caroline Compson, but she tends that way.
Kal said she was feeling lucky and that she would push her way to the front, but when we arrove at the Tattered Cover around 6, there was no hope and the line was insane. We were herded as through a sheepfold around the perimeter and up the stairs and around some more (I picked up a title something like Grammar for the Completely Unclued) and we grabbed some floor two rooms away from the hall. In this way, going to a David Sedaris reading was a lot like listening to him on NPR or through an audio book, a broadcast, disembodied voice. It was also a lot not like either of those, because occasionally those people in his presence laughed when the rest of us did not. At a gesture? an expression? We will never know.
Waiting, we entertained ourselves with the quizzes at the end of each chapter of the grammar book. The first chapter was on capitalization, and the book claimed that the one properly capitalized sentence of the mutliple-guess four included the words "Dominican republic," not Dominican Republic. Have I been spelling this wrong all my life?
Sometime in elementary school (I hope no later than fourth grade), we were assigned a project in the school library that the librarian, not the teacher, reviewed. (I can't remember the teacher, hence not the grade, but the librarian was the perfectly friendly but intimidating-looking one whose half-glasses sat on her really tremendous bust.) I remember that Mrs. Bust was surprised I finished whatever it was, probably a reference and geography project, so rapidly and then said, "And you capitalized everything right too." That's why I like to think it was no later in elementary school than fourth grade. Capitalization is simple and follows rules, unlike spelling, which is a sense much more than it is a subject. I got a little glow, of course.
The CIA World Factbook has an entry for the Dominican Republic, in which it mentions "The Dominican economy," following a normal pattern, and gives the conventional form as "Dominican Republic." Britannica's entry capitalizes both in its title, mentions the Dominican peso, and capitalizes both in a sentence: "The Dominican Republic was originally part of the Spanish colony of Hispaniola."
Well, this book also claimed that apostrophes properly do occur in "the 1970's" and in "the 70's," as in temperature; it didn't mention how stupid "the '70's" looks although that's correct according to their pattern nor how Class of "86" is hypercorrection nor what to do when you need quotation marks within quotation marks such that perhaps quotation marks within italics would set off the phrase under consideration more clearly than nested quotation marks.
So mocking that was fun.
David Sedaris was also fun. He read two essays from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, about cleaning apartments in New York City and about seeing "The End of the Affair" in Paris with Hugh. Then he read from his diary, which was better for me because new. He told us about finding, in Budapest, an obscene monkey masturbating with a penis as large as its banana. Because it was just as nasty as it could be, he said, he gave it to his brother, Paul, who of course loved it. A visiting sister found it so repulsive Paul hid it in her luggage, in her decaffeinated espresso. She didn't discover it the next morning, however, since she drank caffeine before traveling on to her in-laws' place. Her father-in-law has beginning Alzheimer's but still can do simple tasks, like make coffee. Also he's a retired Baptist minister. Sedaris also told us his ruminations after reading an article his sister (the same sister; I like to think that Lisa is his favorite) sent him on people who want to be amputees. He used a term for it, o-something-philiac, but that is not a Google search I want to do. [28 June 2004: I can always count on PLT to delve into something prurient: the word was "apotemnophile." Teehee, I said "prurient," for dubious humor of which see below.] Sedaris said that unlike transsexuals, who are born into the wrong body, these people are born into the right body...just too much of it.
See, I'm not David Sedaris.
Afterward, Kal helped me find books and animules. For SFR, I got A Snowy Day and When the Elephant Walks; for SLG, Pat the Bunny, Hop on Pop, and Is Your Mama a Llama? and a pink pig with enormous trotters. (SLG is Emlet's new sister, and Hop on Pop might be better for Emlet since she can speak, and so ma filleule doesn't feel left out, also A House for a Hermit Crab.) A birthday card for Intern, an arrival card for SLG, yet an anniversary card for my husband slipped my mind.
Then we were starving, but it was 9 so Denver was closed (the Market on Larimer and Max BurgerWorks on Lawrence). Before we ordered at Sam's (a faux diner), Intern and one of his brothers came in; they said hi but sat elsewhere. Kal and I decided on breakfast for dinner and I ordered pancakes and bacon. My order came with two eggs, which I hadn't noticed, rather than poison myself, I told the server to give them fried to the skinny guy in the last booth. Intern came over to chat some more and said "dope!" * when I told him eggs were on their way, but when my three fucking enormous pancakes and four slabs of bacon arrived, the cook hadn't made the eggs because the server didn't think I was serious. Maybe she thought I was just making fun of the skinny guy--Intern is really staggering nonexistent from front to back. So when Kal's toast came on a separate plate, we sent that down the end.
* "Dope," like "bomb" as a good thing, is slang that not only passed me by but also that I never heard personally in the flesh. Then Intern came along and I smile like a geriatric when he describes something as dope.
Meanwhile, I was tucking away my pancakes and Kal her huevos rancheros. She reminded me as I picked up a piece of bacon that when we arrived, I had said not to order any pork. I turned guilty to the pig, then picked it up and shoved it head first into the bag so it couldn't see. Then neither of us could remember the name of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's table manners-teaching pig, though of course I realized I had offended this pig the same way the messy eater's mother had (although I hadn't fed the pig anything). So afterward we had to stop at Barnes & Noble to look up the pig's name. I wondered if B&N might be closed (since it was after 10, ooo) and was glad that (thank you again Kymm) I had them in my house if need be.
Need wasn't--that pig's name is Lester. SLG's pig doesn't yet have a name, but he, or the Tattered Cover bag he peeked out of, attracted the notice of another couple in the diner. She asked if we had just seen David Sedaris and we chatted about him. I promise that, for once in my life, I did not drag the conversation out. It was not I who brought up politics. The man--easily in his 40s, note the lack of apostrophe since nothing is dropped, damn it--said had just registered to vote for the first time. My face did that thing that it does that I don't regret not controlling this time, and he said, observing this, that he didn't believe in it. This was clearly our exit and we scarpered.
I asked Kal what she did the day she turned 18. Register to vote, of course. Now, I didn't register the day I turned 18 because in 1986 my birthday was on a Sunday (it was the day of Hands Across America, which I still think was stupid to stop in New York City instead of continuing to Boston so I could have had a hope of participating), but it didn't take long. I also didn't give blood the day I turned 17 because Old Lyme had drives only every 56 days, but whenever I did go no one there knew me nor would take my blood because lacking a driver's license I couldn't prove my age, damn it.
So that was a fun night.
Number nine, number nine, number nine...
We each gave the other a card with a dog on it: he a bulldog wearing a flowered bonnet and I a basset hound with its ears held up like a rabbit's. Also mine came in a silvery envelope, stainless steel to match the kitchen, I said. He gave me Eats, Shoots & Leaves and I gave him a last-minute impulse buy (because this is the first time we've done anything more than cards, I think) from when I bought the basset ears: a deck of George W. Bush cards. These will go with his Friendly Dictator Trading Cards which pack was a text in a class once.
His card read, and I quote,
Then we went to Bistro Vendrôme, whose patio even looks vaguely Parisian, since it's in a pedestrian courtyard with a garden. It's surrounded by three-story Old West buildings instead of five-story baroque ones, but that was close enough for us. I had chocolate-hazelnut crepes for dessert. Yum.
Wednesday Tex wasn't in the office for staff meeting, and I was glad because CoolBoss used my HumanDictionary function when she needed "prurience" defined. I asked for someone to pitch out the worst of the reality television shows, and then I said that these shows appealed to the public's prurient interests, and prurience was the noun for base and usually gratuitously sexual interest. The example was "Lawmakers in furor over prurient turmoil" and she rightly questioned turmoil being prurient.*
This discussion might have made squeamish Tex squirm, so I was glad he wasn't there. Except that naturally on Friday when he asked me what had happened in staff meeting, I was compelled to needle him so said, "I had to define 'prurience' and I'm really glad you weren't there." He said, "What?" and I flipped his dictionary open, pointed out the word, and left the room just as his phone rang.
* I don't know if there is a technical term for misassignment of adjectives. Recently CoolBoss asked me why a divorce couldn't be called "amiable," and I more felt than could articulate why. Because people and dogs are amiable but relationships and concepts are amicable, like divorces and treaties. You might say "an amicable gathering" but you'd say "a gathering of amiable people" or "an amiable gathering" where "gathering" was a grouping word rather than a description of the ties among the people.
Later in the day Tex asked what constituted a divine period. Was I on a crystal clear, snow-covered mountain top, communing with the sun or something? We got that cleared up by my clarifying that I had had to define 'prurience,' not that I had had a divine period, for pete's sake.
But this allowed me to tell a recent amusing story. When CLH was here, we had lunch with an Aspen friend who now lives in Denver. As the three of us chatted, I announced, "I think I'm getting my period." I left them at the table to go a-questing for supplies. We were at trendy 32nd and Lowell, which means that clothing, books, gee-gaws, and antiques were available to me, but tampons there were none. I drove to Walgreen's, picked up a box of 40, and scampered to the counter. Except that someone evidently had shop-lifted one out of the box, whose end was therefore loose, which instability I didn't notice until 39 tampons suddenly skittered underfoot--under my own feet and those of at least four people, including a man and children, around me. I debated for a tenth of a second whether to gather them, decided fuck no, returned for another box, and beat a hasty retreat with a box of 20, that having been the last 40 (or 39).
CLH and her friend were amused, of course, and CLH told us an incident from when she worked at Souper Salad, fishing in her apron pocket for a pen to take an order and poising a tampon over her order form to write with because she hadn't looked at what she'd retrieved.
Tex told me in turn about a coworker's being pulled aside by apparently a new employee of the TSA who had not been properly briefed and whose cultural background rendered him a lot less likely than, say, Tex, to know certain things. The TSAer, searching her purse, extracted a tampon and, waving it, demanded to know what this was. I can picture Coworker's efforts to restrain herself from saying, "You want me to show you how that works?" and instead calmly to inform him that it was a feminine hygiene product.
Anyway, I'm glad we got that cleared up.
In Erewhon, Samuel Butler describes a culture where illness is illegal but criminality is a sickness. Therefore to gloss over someone's slight indisposition without getting them in trouble, you'd say "he's got the socks," i.e., stolen an insignificant item. We use this for Blake when he's got the flaps.
What I mean is that I Don't Get Sick, Especially in the Summer. I know very well I did get sick over July Fourth two years ago, but I like to pretend that that didn't happen. Thursday night I thought I bit my lower lip because I am clumsy, but I am probably catching RDC's cold: when my immune system is compromised, I get cankers. A canker just inside my lower lip swells it enough that I bite the lip. Yea! So now I might be getting RDC's cold.
Which means that this is the fourth weekend in a row we're not tiling the kitchen; RDC doesn't feel steady enough to operate the saw and heaven knows what butchery I'd commit even if I were 100%.
Last Saturday, RDC slept until late after the Dead show in the rain at Red Rocks after returning from Vancouver at 2:00 a.m. Friday; the weekend before that CLH was here; the weekend before that we went to Aspen; the weekend before that it was too cold to get sprayed by the wetsaw. This is just never going to get done.
And then we're not going to paint until the tiling is done, and even after the tiling, there's moulding to be made for the floor and scrim to be removed from the cabinets before the painting can be tackled. This is, I repeat, never going to get done.
So I am just going to flobber (my favorite neologism, inspired by flobberworms in Prisoner of Azkaban) about today, headachey and muscle-weary.
This is so cool.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a honeybee colony in a silver maple across the street. Silver maples grow really fast, so new neighborhoods in Denver were once planted thickly with them, but because of their growth rate they have weak wood and are prone to breakage and holes. So we have lots of natural nests for starlings and squirrels and bees. This hole is about seven feet up, and I was concerned what might happen if the city discovered it. (The property-owners probably wouldn't: they might as well live in suburbia for all they use their front yard but enter through the back near the garage instead.)
The colony explained where the scores of bees who love my front garden live. My catmint especially but everything else as well regularly hums with bees.
Just a little while ago I glanced out the screened front door and saw them swarming. The noise was terrific. First I worried for the original nest: did this swarm represent some few survivors? But the original nest seemed fine, still with traffic. Less traffic than I have observed before, but I don't pretend I had been keeping a close enough eye to gauge the difference.
I wrote to an acquaintance who has just begun to keep bees and then commenced to google. It seems likely that, with all this rain and consequent spike in nectar production, the hive is doing well enough that 40% to 60% of the bees, including the queen (who can fly?) or perhaps a virgin queen, have left to seek new quarters. For now, they are clustered high in my European ash tree, along a stretch of branch, forming a living cylinder about the size of a three-liter bottle. Over the next few days, scouts will search for a new home, and then they'll all move.
My concern is that they'll find a way into the attic. I would love for them to continue to live nearby but I do not want them in the house, in the attic, in the structure anywhere. And I am not about to become a backyard beekeeper, which seems like a full-time occupation, and which furthermore would probably lead to my divorce. RDC is not so much a fan of bees--spiders are his job and bees mine.
But honeybees are nice. They aren't mean, like yellowjackets, and they make honey, and there'd be a lot less to eat around the world without them. Plus, while they swarm, they have no brood or honey to defend and are much less likely to sting (I just read that).These are European bees, bigger than the native American ones that aren't big enough to fly far enough to pollinate fields as big as Usans plant (a factoid I think I learned from Sue Hubbell's A Country Year: Living the Questions).
Anyone want a swarm of bees? At this point all you'd have to do is somehow erect an extension ladder without disturbing them--the cluster isn't near the bole--and clip their branch into a container. Simple.
It feels like it's about to rain. What will that do to them?
I expect the sequels and prequels to Rebecca suck as much as those to Jane Austen's novels, but I am intrigued. Why did Maxim marry Rebecca to begin with? How could he have been so misled? And I just watched a cheesy Cary Grant movie, "In Name Only," similarly with an interloper; and I wonder why his character married his first wife. It's based on a book probably even more cheesy, Memory of Love by Besse Breuer, and maybe that has more background. Or not, because that title sounds like teen Harlequin shlock.
Danvers is a fright, isn't she?
The fridge finally arrived. With it, four sets of roller indentations and one dent in the newly refinished kitchen floor.
Hooray.
Blake is dozing on my shoulder. He shakes and a minor dust cloud rises, filling my nostrils with sweet buddy dust. He grooms the tendrils around my ear, because really my hair is a mess. He tucks, and then wakes up again to puff or chew his beak.
And I'm supposedly to get up and go to bed?
The biggest disadvantage to parrot companionship is not the uncontrollable shitting. It's not being allowed to sleep together.
I just found this. It's exactly a year old and I never published it.
It occurred to me that my list of shit I don't get is much longer than my list of stuff that pleases me. This struck me on Friday and on and off over the weekend I was able to think of three things:
That wasn't the original third one. The first third one inspired me to start this entry. Then I forgot it, because I'm such a deeply troubled, bitter soul.
Three things, people.
Later...
This should come as no surprise. The much-discussed and long-awaited buddycam is ready to go. We can support only two connections, so it's not a public cam, but his doting parents can watch Blake from afar now.
The subject is going through a minor moult right now. I thought it was the equivalent of shedding because it's hot again since most of the dropped feathers were contour feathers with a lot of insulating fluff on them, but this morning he dropped what is nearly a flight feather, a quite stiff body feather from the small of his back, nearly part of the tail.
Yesterday in the zoo a peacock displayed for me--I doubt it was for me, of course, but when he turned and saw me he rattled his quills and flared--and strutted about for several minutes with his tail so erect he actually formed his own Mary-in-a-bathtub look. He turned in circles and I looked to see how the series of tail feathers go. It must be exhausting to do, especially when you have to run after other cocks with your tail still spread to chase them away from your peahen, your two peachicks, and your humans with their KFC lunch that they are sharing with you, and your other bemused human crouching with a stupid grin on her face as she longs to cuddle a peababy. They looked like goslings except with peafowl feet.
I am paying too much attention to my buddy, who has now removed a racing stripe feather, to follow the petty warmongering outside, but two squirrels just had a screaming racing match and now the victor is sitting on a nectarine branch, looking through the dining room window, swearing at me and flicking his tail. What did I do?
Maybe Blake's shedding is the result of last night's shower. He is getting himself all pretty for his webcam fame.
So fucking hot.
I drove from work to the Esquire to see "Fahrenheit 9/11" with a coworker, and in ten minutes and four miles, in my air-conditioned car, over my entire back my slip of a dress was entirely sweated onto my skin.
I just saw this movie and I'm going to talk about my dress. Okay? Okay.
I bought this dress in 1995. I wore it, with my Interview Suit linen pumps, to work (temping at MetraHealth), and went out to lunch with some coworkers, and on the street in Hartford, a man approached me and said he would have to arrest me. I said, "Excuse me?" sure I had misheard him. He clarified, "You look so fine, it has to be a crime!" and he laughed with his friend and I turned away with my coworkers and I am so oblivious and unfoxy that I had never heard that line before and so did not recognize it for what it was that I responded with even just the "excuse me."
It doesn't hang on me so well anymore. I liked my sheaths a lot more when they fell straight from bust to hem without my ass or hips in the way. But today it looked better again, because instead of my clunky Dansko sandals I wore a pair of slingbacks I bought over the weekend to go with the dress I bought for Haitch's wedding. They are much sexier.
Not really "instead of." I had both pairs with me and switched on and off during the day. The week before the Big Top is a bad time to break in pretty, impractical shoes.
The movie pissed me off--both the content, what I knew to be true and what I perceived to be allegation, and the presentation, see allegation. Then when I got home, it was so fucking hot that about the last thing I wanted to do was leave--leave the cool interior, leave my long-suffering buddy--to do anything, especially anything social. Swimming sounded good, but I had a dinner promise with a pre-friend whom I like well enough not to want to blow off for his sake and do not know well enough to blow off for being grumpy in the heat.
As soon as we got to Sabor Latino and the driving was over and cooled air embraced me, I felt better. We dished about the movie some and about Canadian politics--about which my mind is about as blank a canvas as the Northwest Territory, Territories? (my point)--and shared arepas and plantains and empiñadas and then I had ceviche. He had something with beans and cheese, even though it was 99 bloodsucking degrees out. Give me lime juice or give me death.
The food was excellent, and I am going back when I can be better company.
A Coöperista (UConn's bookstore is a co-operative) dubbed the grad school me Sybil because he never knew what kind of mood I'd be in from one shift to the next. I don't mind the amplitude of my moods but their frequency--is that the distance between any two peaks or troughs? that's what I mean--can scare me. And their unpredictability. I was in a black mood yesterday, self-flagellating and dooming myself to one thing and another. If it hadn't been the week before the Big Top I'd've set Babe up and had a Talk to the Pig day; also except for that I brought Babe home and I now have only a palm-sized Snowy, finger-puppet Beaker, and a knock-off Beanie Baby named Dan'l Bloone at work. The excellent thing was that I knew exactly the source of the mood: it had a cause, and while if I had a solution I wouldn't have the problem any more, at least my mood was explicable.
I had my hair cut after work and told Janelle about Trey's second dog and Haitch's third fitting. My hair touches my collar bones when I pull it straight down; she took about an inch off. It's much tidier.
And then I sealed grout until Kal came over. We had Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream, a faux Oreo without high fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated fat (absence of the latter means the goo lends itself admirably to quintuple-stuff constructions), blueberries, strawberries, "A Room with a View," and "Sense and Sensibility." I haven't seen "Room" for years, and probably even my first, cinematic viewing was not as clear as this DVD. We lusted after Lucy's hair and Freddy and Freddy some more and admired Emma Thompson and wondered how Kate Winslet could be so good here and so bad in "Titanic" and I lent her The Making of Pride and Prejudice and The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries and I am making a friend! She even has a parrot in the family so I don't have to break her in Blake-wise. And she lives within six blocks, so while she of course walked over, when we were done, after 11, I drove her home.
So I'm happy again. And happy because my happiness again has an attributable cause.
P.S. A perk is that yesterday a Dot Orgerista of whom I'm quite fond said that I look different lately, thinner or fitter. I hugged her gratefully.
At the family reunion, I made my best connection with my cousin Susan, really my mother's first cousin. We were simply immediately friends, which was terrific. The last time I know I saw her was at her younger sister's wedding when I was 10ish or younger. Her husband had been stationed in West Berlin and she spoke of one place being so many "kay" away from another place and even though I had had the metric system in fifth grade, I had no idea what she was talking about.
I noticed the goddess pendant she wore, quite similar to my favorite earrings, and when quite soon we recognized each other for what we are, the black sheep of the family, she listed as her first black sheep trait that she's a witch. I touched her pendant, indicating that I had already guessed and unintentionally reminding her to drop the necklace behind her collar. I wouldn't've thought to hide it because, as she herself said, lots of people just admire the goddess shape for its aesthetic value without realizing what it might represent. Later in the day she explained us to her sister. "We're both witches," and I said no, saying that I'm not but do sympathize with Wicca more than with the predominant religions of my culture, especially my mother's newfound fundamental evangelicalism.
What I wanted to say is that we're kindred spirits, but I didn't because I was restraining that book thing in front of the non-kindred spirit, and refraining from claiming kinship in front of a non-kindred spirit, and also sparing my kindred spirit from an Anne of Green Gables references, because the best thing besides her being a kindred spirit is that her husband is from, and they now live on, Prince Edward Island. I am promised that when (when!) I visit, we can do all the cheesy stuff.
One thing CLH discovered when she moved home is that our mother keeps dryer lint. She asked why; BJWL wouldn't tell her. She asked me if I could think why and all I could think of was firestarters we learned about in Girl Scouts, made of dryer lint and kept by the dozen in single-serving sizes in egg cartons. Just now my sister came up from the cellar brandishing an 18-egg carton partially filled with dryer lint, which would lend credibility to my hypothesis. BJWL continued not to 'fess up. She turned back to the sink when CLH mentioned flammable cotton in a flammable carton, and not answering the firestarter idea, she countered my sister's repeated query with "Just to make you ask questions." The egg carton means my suggestion is probably right, but her refusal to answer at first meant she was a little embarrassed, and her refusal to verify my hypothesis now might mean she just doesn't want to be found out.
This is cute, not vexing, because I don't live with her.
Minutes later I asked her where I would find a colander. Before she indicated a cabinet, she asked, "Why do you need a colander?"
"Just to make you ask questions," I entirely predictably answered, with a grin, and she grinned back! because she understood I was making a funny, and also because by the time I uttered the word "questions" I was tipping blueberries into the colander so her question was answered anyway.
A conversational exchange. Yea!
Sunday morning it rained mistily while the Happy Couple were at God, so I enjoyed the rain, while it lasted, au naturel. When CLH emerged, we went to the lake, but not very long. She read while I swam, and when I emerged, I realized I was hungry. And so was she. So we hied ourselves to Essex and ate deli sandwiches on the dock at the foot of Main Street. Conveniently, the Connecticut River Museum is right there, so I didn't have to dig that up with non-internet research. We wandered through an amusingly sucky little craft fair, browsed in and out of shops looking for fudge and a birthday gift and finding neither, and continued questing into Saybrook for fudge. (CLH needed fudge, while cookies usually satisfy me.) Summertime in shoreline towns, and we could not find fudge (naturally we required a little independent shop). Bereft, we returned to her lair for "Cold Mountain" and "Six Feet Under."
Monday the three of us went to lunch at the former Anne's Bistro and current Sherlock's 221. Sherlock is reportedly the new owner's surname, but since it is on Hall's Road and Old Lyme doesn't have a Baker Street, using Sherlock Holmes's house number doesn't make a lot of sense. Is the owner trying to tie in to the relative proximity of Gillette Castle, unrealistically hoping that most people know the detective was William Gillette's most famous and lucrative role?
I had a jolt of Age when our server came to the table. I honestly could not have guessed if she was 16 or 20 or 22. CLH guessed from her first visit that she was inexperienced, and I guess she was, because she didn't know how to pronounce some of the words. Describing the special, she said "proscriutto" at least twice and maybe thrice, and at every mispronunciation CLH would kick me under the table. When she was well away we laughed, and had to explain the humor to our mother. I wanted to ask if proscriutto came from the proscrotum of the animal, but I didn't. BJWL said that we have larger vocabularies than most people, which if true is pathetic, and that this was unkind. I said I expected people to know the jargon of their own field, such as servers knowing how to pronounce prosciutto and--here CLH kicked me again.
I continued, though more carefully. At the compound before the reunion, my mother had told me, when we spotted him approaching, that her and BDL's friend whom I had been partnered with at the Happy Couple's nuptials had had prostrate cancer and would appreciate my greeting him. As if he would remember me, as if I would ignore a friend of theirs wandering by to pass the time of day, and after we had been reintroduced I restrained from asking him if his illness had just flattened him for its duration. She said "prostrate" more than once and "prostate" not once. So now at lunch, I asked, "Remember that you told me that Groomsman had had cancer?" and she said again, "Yes, he had prostrate cancer." (I might be imagining her pleasure in emphasizing a detail I had seemingly neglected.) So CLH and I defined those two words.
When my father had knee replacement surgery and later physical therapy to strengthen his legs again, he referred to the muscles of his thighs as quadripeds. That's funny!
One might ask why I corrected my mother but not my father. Correcting might be unkind, but so might letting someone persist with a malapropism. Especially in her field: I didn't say anything about "biannual" plants or nor did CLH about "shy-take" mushrooms.
After lunch we popped into the Chocolate Shell, whose fudge supply is rendered unavailable on Sundays. Monday's excuse was that their supplier had had a kitchen fire. But one block remained, and CLH had that. We each had one of their peppermint patties, which are tremendous, and then we went to the lake, where CLH and I swam and BJWL hung out. Our mother wanted to be home when her husband got home from work. Apparently she times her every day for this occasion. It feels a lot more saccharine or surrendered than it does lovey. Whatever.
CLH and I met one of the German Shepherds and her husband and motored to Middletown for dinner. It's funny that it always seemed so far away, but it's 20 miles or less. I had more ceviche.
The family reunion was one thing because in such a gathering, it's expected that everyone talk to everyone else and that not everyone know everyone else. Dinner with the Shepherd and Angel was different: it was only the four of us, and a lot of subjects seemed prickly. I know the Shepherds had resented that CLH and I went to college and had expected us to be intellectual, so books were out. I own instead of rent, so nothing about my house. They're trying to get pregnant, so I wouldn't mention my favorite littluns unless they, by broaching the subject on their own, indicated it wouldn't pain them to hear of others' offspring. Politics and our parents are Right Out. Without my sister, I wouldn't've known what kind of small talk or big talk to make.
Tuesday BJWL and I went to the Connecticut River Museum. That wasn't overly thrilling on its own but you can opt for a boat tour of the river, and this we took. The three floors of the museum were dedicated to Fenwick, bordered by River and Sound and most famous for Katharine Hepburn's long residence there; a discussion of the shipping and boat-building that helped the estuary towns flourish; and a series of photographs of Essex long ago and currently. The boat tour was wonderful. I had never been on a boat on the river, never seen the beautiful (and sometimes merely ostentatious) houses and estates on its banks, never gazed at my town from this angle.
Thirty years ago there were no ospreys in Connecticut at all; now there are at least 75 ospreys nests along this seven-mile stretch. This is thanks to Roger Tory Peterson stealing eggs from some less polluted southern shore. Eagles are more common in winter, and we didn't see any but did see many ospreys (hunting adults and begging nestlings), egrets, herons, cormorants, a school of agitated shad (I think that's what the guide said) and a deer. I learned that the Connecticut River is so shallow at its delta that it did not lend itself to industry, and that's why it's not befouled as the Quinnipiac in New Haven and the Thames in New London are. I learned that Selden Island is the largest in Connecticut at 610 acres and that stone quarried from its hill formed New York City sidewalks. I saw Brockway Landing, which during the years of quarrying serviced that business; and Joshua Rock, a sheer cliffy edifice from atop which Joshua, son of Uncas, watched his people fish in the river and the sun set opposite (I had never known for what Joshuatown Road was named). The boat turned around just south of Gillette Castle. It was a beautiful trip.
Selden Island
Joshua Rock
Gillette Castle on the hill
Abominable people whom I hate have built two houses on my ledge, an ugly one at the base near my house, and an okay one on the ledge proper. Fuckers. It does make me wonder if I would rather a contemporary with a longer view rather than the original Federal house right on the bank that has been mine for many years. Either way, the one I don't like has to go.
After a bite at Hallmark, I brought my mother home and returned to the lake for the late afternoon and early evening. Floating there, watching a sliver of a waxing moon rise, listening to birds and the wind in the leaves, feeling the water's cool embrace, that's what I went home for.
Uncas is what I returned for a full day of on Wednesday as well, but I was barely out of the parking lot when I heard way too many voices. At the picnic table, a man was constructing sandwiches, and the shouts and shrieks were many and louder. I asked, "Camp Claire?" and he said yes. He told me he had 42 kids. Then he offered me a sandwich. This I declined with a smile as I beat my retreat. The beach cannot accommodate 42 bathers, and I also question even a relatively affordable camp sending only one adult, who is making sandwiches, to supervise that many children in the water. But I had options. There is a little pull-off with a path I had never explored, but which I knew must lead to a wee gap in the laurels along the banks: I'd seen people there from canoe and rafts and from longer swims. So I went there. It was just about big enough to fit my (sister's) chair and my gallon jug of water.
I stepped off a foot-high bank into a foot of water with a clear bottom. The gap gets enough use that the leaf litter flooring the rest of the lake is cleared away. I probably wouldn't be afraid of it, but it's slimy and I'm happier without it. I haven't been on the lake in a canoe for many years, and I usually swim blind, so quietly and not really breast-stroking out in sunglasses let me see more detail than I have for ever and ever. I could see both the boat ramp at the south end and the other little beach at the north end. After I swapped glasses for goggles I started swimming.
When I swim with goggles I often open my eyes only when facing down, to ensure I'm still going straight. Sometimes goggles leak, and that quick glance down means less pool water in my eyes. Also, if I can't see other swimmers I don't compare myself to or compete with them. This is not such a good strategy in the lake. I am perfectly comfortable swimming anywhere within it, as long as I keep several yards from shore and possible snapping turtles, but I don't want to look into its greeny-brown depths, especially when I'm alone. When I'm alone, sometimes I cannot shake thoughts of the Unc Ness Monster. And I hate harboring any fear of my lake, especially of monsters I made up 30 years ago. This time I tried to open my eyes only to the side to mark my place, but sometimes I messed up and looked down.
I swam nearly all the way to the boat launch, but if there was a gap in the lilypads I didn't find it. If lilypads are significantly less gross than the seaweedy stuff that grows in untended parts of the much shallower and warmer Roger's Lake, they're still gross. And then I turned and swam, well away from the main beach, to the north little beach, and back to the gap. The lake is maybe three quarters of a mile long and this is the first time I have swum it end to end.
I swam and read All the King's Men and ate bananas and Luna bars (the Old Lyme A&P doesn't stock Clif bars?) and in the middle of the afternoon I heard singing behind me: the Camp Claire children walking back to camp (two miles of forest road and at least a mile along Neck Road, a long and dangerous way and worse for that many inadequately shepherded children. I swam out in glasses again to scope the main beach, which did look empty, and as I stood in the shallow water about to clamber up, I spotted a small snake noodling through the roots under the bank. I stooped to examine it: dark brown with a series of paler brown triangles down its spine. Copperhead? Whatever: snake, and extra impetus to return to the main beach.
BJWL and I visited the Florence Griswold House on Thursday, house and gallery. I hadn't been in the house since high school but I think middle school, and the gallery is new. I passed it when I walked to my mother's office after being locked out of the house last January, but this was the first time I had been in it. The exhibit was Childe Hassam in Connecticut, though two of the three generous rooms held paintings by other Tonalists and Impressionists in Connecticut's past and present.
We took a tour of the house and looked at the paintings in the new gallery. BJWL might have wanted to stay longer, but she acquiesced willingly enough when I said that was all I wanted to see, that she could visit any time but I needed more lake. So lakeward we went. She sat in the shade and read the paper, and I swam and read my book, and she gave me shit for picking up litter (including a pull-tab from a can that must have lain there 20 years) and I ignored that, and we ate raspberries and blueberries and Fig Newtons. We also saw another snake of the same species (the same snake, so little and half a mile away?) on the path. It was a lovely afternoon.
Me in Uncas Lake.
In the evening I picked up CLH from work and we returned to the lake. When we arrove, there were two women and a bounding labradog whom I got to watch as I blew up the raft. When I finished the body, CLH picked up the still flaccid pillow and asked if I would like for her to do that part. But I did that part too, because camels having very large lungs. Then I became a camel tugboat and pulled her around the water. Staying all the way in was just fine with me, because it was cool enough that being partly in and partly out would be cold. Also stringing the two parts of my suit on my arm was warmer than wearing it: a suit holds cold water against your body. So that was a good last lake jaunt, with only my sister, at sunset, unhampered by stupid clothing.
Hallmark had a line 15 people long so I drove past toward the beach. In September I did more beach than lake for first time in ages, but that was September, warm water, cool wind, and no summer people or jellyfish. This time, we had to get past the parking guard. It was 8:15 and our presence in my Massachusetts rental car hardly deprived a resident of a spot, so the guard kindly let us ("We grew up here!") in. We looked for toenail shells (if they have a proper name I don't want to know it) and seaglass and when CLH suddenly straightened and hastened, I knew her object. When she turned to me with a length of brown kelp in her hand, I agreeably mimicked fear.
I was afraid of seaweed as a child. We have a picture of us on Hampton? Beach in New Hampshire, summer of 1977, me in a Snoopy bathing suit, pretending to eat some kelp as if it were bacon. That was the trip during which I conquered the Great Seaweed Fear. But lakegrass is still icky: where it is, so could snapping turtles be.
And then Hallmark's line was shorter! I felt virtuous because I got only a large serving of fries to my sister's cheese fries. But I also had my third milkshake of the week.
And that was that for Old Lyme bit.
During the Saturday-to-Friday stretch I spent in my mother's house, I went to Uncas daily. That's the important thing. I also gathered raspberries and freed catbirds from the netting around the raspberries. I discovered that, even though she has neither computer nor mouse, my mother has a mouse pad, because she placed it under my iBook's power cord so it wouldn't set my bed on fire. I ate a lot of Hallmark, whose new owners received the previous owner's ice-cream recipes but who now use inferior chocolate chips, though they still make good fries. I ate dinner with my mother and her husband only once. I brushed and pet and snuggled with Kitty, who slept with me a couple of times thereby living up to another of her names, Benedict Kitty. I alphabetized my sister's CDs and cleaned her keyboard and monitor. I didn't snap at my mother. It was a success.
It was leaving Old Lyme that made me want to go home, 36 hours before my flight. Driving on I-91 near Hartford does not especially endear the state to me, and I wasn't sure how the visit would go, and so forth. Maybe I had just been gone long enough.
Visiting RPR was fine and good and fun, of course. Someone told me a while ago about how if you stick your tongue out at a baby, it'll stick its out at you, in a reflex. SFR was the first baby I remembered to try that on. She's three months old and a perfect age for this game: if a little old for the reflex bit, not too young to chortle and smile and obviously watch and interact with us. Babies are way time-consuming, aren't they? We talked and played with the baby and bathed and fed and changed and dressed her, and that's about what we got done while I was there. I got to coo over her closetful of adorable dresses, and I read her A Snowy Day and On the Day You Were Born and When the Elephants Walk and Guess How Much I Love You, and I cooked! yes, I cooked bacon for BLTs.
At the birthday party I got to meet three other hatchlings I hadn't yet seen, plus two others I hadn't seen since before they were mobile. Despite quantities of blocks all over the floor, the oldest of this set of cousins wanted yet more blocks that she spotted in a clear container whose screw-top she couldn't manage. She did not believe my assertion that this was only a large rattle. She is 2.5 and about the size of a four-year-old. I met RDC's best man's first baby when he was two months old (cute but boring) during the Connecticut detour of our New York City trip, and now he is nearly two (cute still and no longer boring). He had a baby brother in May, who is RDC's new godson. I hadn't met the birthday girl yet or the huge 2.5-year-old's huge six-month-old younger brother. And I got to play with them all.
Soon after RPR left another, family birthday party, farther from Boston, where she would be later than my travel allowed, I left too. I hadn't previously arranged to visit Charenton, and I didn't call ahead of time because if I left Nisou's parents voicemail both of us would be disappointed, and besides, voicemail might only mean they were in the garden and not really not at home. And they were home, hooray! I saw (and copied) photographs of their visit to France for Siblet's birth, and saw photographs of their days in Tuscany (jaw-droppingly opulently beautiful), and heard about their 40th anniversary party, and had only an hour with them, but an hour we were all glad to have, before I had to leave for Logan.
Once again I flirted with expense, fueling the car at Natick, 20 miles from Boston, risking Thrifty's perceiving the fraction gone. And that was after disaster flirted with me: as a minivan and I merged side by side in two lanes, leaving 84 for the Pike, the minivan was unable to pick a lane. It continued to fail to do so after I beeped twice, and even after I pounded the horn it continued to drift left, wanting to push me into the concrete wall that served instead of a shoulder. I braked, let the fucker pass on my right rather than sideswipe me, and as soon as we were both on the Pike I passed her slow ass on the left, maturely bestowing upon the driver a dirty look as I did so. As Ellen DeGeneres says, "That'll show 'em."
I returned the car and shuttled to Logan and was through security and at the gate a full hour before boarding began. I hate that that extra time is required, both by airlines and by prudence. I would have liked to linger at Charenton. But now RDC suggested France for Thanksgiving, with a five-month-old Siblet and an Emlet that much closer to three. I long for that.
This list will grow, as had the list of stuff I don't get.
Over breakfast I said something about powerwashing the fence, but soon enough RDC suggested Golden Gate Canyon State Park. So that's what we did. As soon as we got up to Fraser Meadow, the skies opened. Instead of glugging water and chawing a Clif bar or two, we immediately turned around to get back under trees.
We saw a grouse of some sort who scampered along the path ahead of us for yards and yards before finally veering into the grass and up into an aspen. We also saw a garter snake and another garter snake and then a skittering across the trail, which RDC thought was another snake. It was a rabbit, not much more than a kitten. I tried to point out some differences between a snake and a bunny to RDC, but he pretended that he already could distinguish between them.
Also he called the garter snakes something I didn't initially listen to. He repeated, "Some people call them grass snakes, some people call them garter snakes."
"I call them a sling snake," I responded to his cadence. He for once agreed that that was funny.
3.6-mile hike.
All day long. Many more than a thousand meters. More than a thousand kilometers even. To Chicago. To Syracuse. And beyond Syracuse.
When we got there, we were crazed for food and found the (the) pizza place. If we had braved the shrieking baby we heard in the hotel restaurant, we would have found it attached to Haitch's sister and the rest of her family and her and McCarthy.
But the pizza was good.
There were most excellent speeches from both sides, and then McCarthy's father called me out of the crow. Yoikes. I said something lame like hi and begged off until the morrow, by which time I would have finished writing the thing.
I got to meet Haitch's grandmother, her handsome, entrancingly voiced, well-named cousin, and millions of McCarthy's friends-and-relations. McCarthy Mater and I had bonded over brunch when we established that of course I know the family who keep the B&B in Old Lyme where the McCarthy parents occasionally weekend, and now I mingled up to her where she stood with a friend.
"Friend, let me introduce you to Lisa," Mater said.
"Oh, are you the mother of the bride?" Friend asked.
Even with my crest fallen as far as that bon mot dropped it, I like to think I do not quite look like I could be the mother of a 31-year-old. I mocked sobbing and gnashing my teeth on Mater's shoulder. Friend was embarrassed, pleading that she had meant to say "sister," not "mother" (which is good, because Friend had met Haitch's mother at the engagement party in October).
It was a fun night. Remind me to get a copy of Richard's toast. It is an excess of "Sense and Sensibility" in my head that makes me think his line was "Let not to the marriage of Brahmin and Okie admit impediment" but it was pretty good.
We had our last walk as Dr. Haitch and Ms. ljH. (Later in the day, I congratulated Mrs. McCarthy, and she thanked Mrs. RDC. Ha! Our next walk will still be as Dr. Haitch and Ms. ljH.) I had to abandon her with big rollers in her hair to go pretty myself up, but I took up the reins as Bride Wrangler as soon as I could.
I shoved RDC out the door to hand out the programs I'd folded during rehearsal (with the now non-shrieking two-month-old baby on my shoulder: who says I can't multi-task?) and scurried back upstairs with chocolate and downstairs to look for the black velvet bag with the make-up brushes in the blue Blazer that Sister had driven back to the hair salon and upstairs to appreciate Haitch in pajama bottoms and veil and downstairs to curl my lashes and that was all nerve-racking and tremendous fun--once the brushes were found. And the hair, unrolled and coiffed, was perfect, very Haitch and sleek and flattering.
The bridal staging area in the chapel was in the opposite corner from the casas de pepe, and the casas were downstairs to boot. The chaplain offered us his individual casa, upstairs but still in the front. Instead of herding Haitch across the vestibule and up the left aisle, I brilliantly led her up the right aisle and across the transept. The first time not many people were seated, and I held up my hands to shield her. The second time, most people had come in, but I spotted a framed poster propped against the wall in the chaplain's office and made use of it as camouflage, quite effective and of course amusing as well, for us and the assembly.
I am pleased to say that my emergency kit came in handy: safety pins were called for to secure the flowergirls' sashes. I should have had water and good chocolate instead of having to resort to M&Ms from the vending machine, but I'm pretty sure I'm forgiven. Everything else--the alcohol swabs, earring backs, mints--was unnecessary, because we were just that suave.
Haitch's nieces, 5, almost 4, and not quite 2, were staggeringly adorable as flowergirls. Despite being released half a nave apart each, by the time they reached the first pew they were bunched together. The older two sat down sweetly, but the youngest couldn't decide whether she wanted to spend the ceremony with her father and fussing younger brother in the vestibule or with her grandmother in the front pew or by her mother on the presbytery steps flanking the bride.
I did leave the poster in the staging area. Sorry, Father. And I lost a fleece of Haitch's. But I did coerce people into signing the guestbook and posing for photographs at the reception. My toast seemed to go over well.
And Haitch and McCarthy are married! They had a lovely ceremony in a pretty chapel, dancing flowergirls (though not with me, sadly), good food, no noticeable mishaps, many guests ready to dance and toast, maple syrup in maple leaf-shaped bottles as favors, and Frater doing an impression of McCarthy's childhood charade of a run-over frog drying in the sun.
McCarthy and Haitch
Haitch and me. One day I will remember to put sunscreen on my nose so contrasting color doesn't emphasize its size even more.
RDC and me
Typically, I savaged a centerpiece and shoved flowers in my hair. (RDC asked if I was drunk.) I wore the one that isn't a rose traveling home, though tucked into my french twist and not so much Daisy-head Mayzie.
Another brunch, and then a late lunch in Syracuse (Haitch: have you found L'adour on Water Street? very frainch), and then trying to sneak onto an earlier flight.
At the ticket counter we encountered other wedding guests. The clerk greeted the five-year-old boy enthusiastically and asked how many were traveling. They responded, "Three," and I said, "Four!" because of the bear peeking out of the boy's backpack. But the clerk said he could fly for free. I asked the boy what his bear's name was. "Teddy," he said, as if that were painfully obvious. Maybe it ought to be, but none of my bears was ever named Teddy.
We had a whistler and a screaming baby on the Chicago-ward flight, and the same two happy-makers on the Denver flight with the baby right behind us kicking our seats for 1000 miles. There was also a 19-month-old boy in our very row, who was charming and merry and looked over the seat at the grizzler with interest but not mimicry. The grizzler was seriously in love with his own voice, and would wind down for a few minutes before remembering his purpose. Climbing Tree be thanked for earplugs, without which I will never fly again.
Home.
I sent this to my notification list:
This is not a notification but a plea for assistance. I have acquired a kayak and it needs a name. I do want a name before it hits the water, and that gives me 24 hours.
I could not think of Ged's boat's name, if it has one, and thumbed through Earthsea looking for it, but if I can't think of it straight off then I don't deserve to use it. Besides, islands will not feature largely in my paddling. My second instinct was Dicey, for Cynthia Voigt's Tillerman series and for my chances with a vessel, which I score as dicey at best. I considered Journeys in My Favorite Books, but Ratty's boat doesn't have a name and no one goes boating in Jane Austen and the punt in Watership Down doesn't have a name either. Except that I could call it Watership, and that would be literal and tribute both.
It is bright orange (and I will offer it a libation of orange juice over the stern when it first hits the water) so another idea is Ear of the Cockatiel. Except the orange feathers are ear coverts, not ears, and Ear Covert of the Cockatiel doesn't flow.
Possibly Viola, for "Shakespeare in Love," for stories must end in tears and a journey but I'm not wishing for tears here.
There are no boats in Possession and though Harold drew one with his purple crayon it didn't have a name.
Oo! Since I mean to stay on the surface, Watership Up!
Selectively transcribed from paper journal:
We set up the tent without snapping. Mostly. So it's a good tent. We spent fifty bucks on a screen house and now can cook and eat and maybe read without rain or insects. The screenhouse feels so luxurious, it's almost shocking. It's like the Weasleys' tent at the World Quidditch Cup. There are horses right behind us, a gorgeous walnut mare with a foal, a brown and white pinto with a black and white foal, two horses so large I am surprised their lower legs aren't hairy, and a black and white paint.
We downloaded Pat Barker's Another World. It is very different from the WWI trilogy, a contemporary family story with disagreeable relations, but both the grandfather and the house the grandson and his family live in date from WWI.
We have camp chairs with footrests, so we can sit elsewhere and more comfortably than at the picnic table. The campground has, lo, hot running water in its washrooms and toilets that don't feel like they haven't been cleaned all season. And showers.
I have a pile of books (Confessions of Nat Turner, Left Hand of Darkness, Unlocking the Air, History of the Siege of Lisbon, House of Splendid Isolation, Straight Man, The Brothers K., and Absalom, Absalom! Also From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler for RDC. Plus nearly half of The Odyssey to listen to.
I do not know if these are lodgepole or Ponderosa pine. Probably lodgepole, because they don't smell strongly of vanilla. But they smell pretty good.
Yesterday as we drove to CostCo for a supply run (including the screenhouse), I discovered that the pen in the car had exploded. So I had to remember "hotdogs" and "windshield wiper fluid" without adding them to the paper list. Then as we walked through the Target parking lot for yet more supplies (groceries), I heard a parrot shriek. It was about 80 and someone had left a conure, perched on the steering wheel so it could see out, in her car, with the windows cracked. My hackles flared. I strode straight to customer service (CLH would do a great impression of the walk) and had someone announce that the driver of a white Jeep of this plate number should return to her car to attend to her pet. Another customer asked, "Someone left a dog out there?" "Conure," I replied, then expanded at the blank look, "parrot." RDC meanwhile was in the grocery area with our list, and he said he saw someone run out at the announcement. Good, we thought. Ten minutes later we left and saw that the Jeep was still there. I shaded the window with my hand and looked in. The conure now was in its travel cage on the backseat so it could not see out and therefore, yelling to greet passersby, attract attention. Since we didn't have a pen in the car we couldn't leave a note on the windshield: "You suck."
We had to scurry to REI for a valve for the stove. While we looked at bits, I spotted one box that claimed its stove was "Duel Fuel." I cracked up and cried "En garde!" at RDC, lunging at him with a pound container of propane.
On my way back from doing dishes, I stopped to pet some heads. Are there different words for mares and stallions in ponyspeak versus horsespeak? I'm not sure if the piebald is a pony. Her withers reach my breast and the palomino's my shoulder. They needed their jaws rubbed (because all pets secretly like to be pet in a cockatielian manner) and their necks and sides rubbed and--well, I thought they needed this last though they might have disagreed--their snouts gently berubbed.
They are so friendly, even the dams with foals, despite having other horses to assuage their loneliness and despite probably being mauled by anyone who's ever read Misty of Chincoteague as well as lots who haven't.
Why isn't there a collective word for magpies as for crows and ravens? Murders of crows, councils of ravens. Oh, there is! A tiding of magpies! What a great word.
PLT stopped à l'Hôtel Formigny last night. He skimmed our bookshelves. "Ah, here's the Gregory Maguire section," he said. "Did you like Lost?"
"Not so much. It pretty much lost me. Wicked was wonderful, and I liked Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister okay, but not Lost so much. His newest, Mirror, Mirror, is better than those two."
"I thought Wicked was good," contributed RDC.
"You haven't read Wicked," I contradicted.
"Yes I have."
We went back and forth a bit. I knew he hadn't read it; and he said he had, when it was new, in hardcover, in Florida once after he had given it to his mother; and I asked if he had read it why I had heard about it from Beth and then from PLT and not from him and why we've never talked about it; and he insisted he had, that he had given it to his mother who declared it had ruined "The Wizard of Oz" for her. Light dawned, on me at least. "You mean Was."
"That was it. Was."
"So you haven't read Wicked."
"No."
"So who is right?"
"You are, dear."
This was very satisfying, because I seldom am. And with an audience, better yet.
PLT hadn't heard about Was, and I haven't read it, and it wasn't under R in the main library so I figured it was in Florida or upstairs in the living room among the unread fiction. "I've read it," RDC protested its inclusion among the supposedly unread. But he did not fill the bookcase, and the top shelf is a continually refreshed two feet of my unread. Except that Mason and Dixon, which RDC has also read, is likely to stay there a while.
PLT's seven-year-old daughter is reading a Judy Blume-ish book, in that it has Issues, which surprised me--not her reading level but that that would be of interest. In second grade I read Dr. Dolittle and Little House and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle; I didn't read Are You There, God? or even Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing until...fourth grade.
Anyway, I hadn't seen PLT in almost four years, since TJZ's wedding. After dinner the three of us sat in the living room with our laptops (Blake approved of PLT and sat preening on his knee and snowed dander all over his black jeans) and played Boggle and looked at pictures of the sprouts. It was a fine evening.
Oh for heaven's sake. I have been wondering about the name of a book I remember about a boy who wanders nameless, subsisting as a migrant worker, until a sheep rancher takes him in. It's Ester Wier's The Loner and it was a Newbery Honor book in 1964, hardly obscure. After submitting it to Loganberry I did a better google search than previously: the first result of "book boy migrant homeless shepherd named David -Goliath -Saul- Copperfield" was a William Penn University bibliography of children's books about homelessness and running away.
Loganberry book detectives solved three other books for me:
I think you might be mixing two books here. I'm not sure about the Irish Setter book, but the German Shepherd guide book may be Follow My Leader by James Garfield. The boy was blinded as a youngster playing with fireworks.
Curry, Jane Louise. The mysterious shrinking house [original title: Mindy's mysterious miniature] illus by Charles Robinson. Scholastic, 1970. dolls; dollhouses, doll houses, miniature of the main house - juvenile mystery.
Jane Louise Curry wrote one of my favorite younger children's books, The Bassumtyte Treasure. Reading her more recent, mediocre A Stolen Life didn't affect my love for Bassumtyte, but unless I can purge my misgivings about Mindy's Mysterious Miniature (as it was probably titled when I read it), my beloved Thomas Bassumtyte might need a visit to reassure me.
York, Carol Beach. The witch lady mystery. illus by Ethel Gold. Scholastic, 1976. When Oliver rakes the leaves in Mrs Prichard's yard, will he find out if she is really a witch?
30 August: more solutions.
Keo Felker Lazarus, The Gismo/The Gismo From Outer Space, 1970. It might be this one: "The Gismo that Jerry and Ron have found is no ordinary gadget. It's part of an alien spaceship's radio and what's more, they must return it. But how?"
Lazarus, Keo Felker, The Gismo (from Outer Space). Chicago: Follett 1970. Pretty sure this is it - "The gismo that Jerry and Ron have found is no ordinary gadget. It's part of an alien spaceship's radio...and what's more, they must return it. But how? How do you keep a date with a man from outer space?" Original title is The Gismo, retitled The Gismo from Outer Space by Scholastic, and also printed in the Weekly Reader series. The spelling - gismo instead of gizmo - is what catches most people.
Elfrida Vipont, The Elephant and the Bad Baby, 1969. "One day, an elephant offers a bad baby a ride through the town, and so begins an adventure and a chase. But when the elephant realizes that the bad baby has forgotten his manners, the chase ends with a bump and tea for everyone." I had forgotten all about this book till you described it and am going to look for a copy for myself now!
"...and they went rumpeta, rumpeta, rumpeta all down the road."
Ezra Jack Keats, Pssst! Doggie, 1973. I know the date's a little later than you were looking for, but this seems to be a likely book. It is described as "almost a wordless book." The library catalog description is "A dog and cat dance their way through several countries."
Keats, Ezra Jack , Pssst! Doggie-- 1973. If the dog and cat dress up and dance their way through various countries, this is your book.
Now damn it, these people seem to be able to search the LOC summary in the front matter. I've used the catalog but to no avail thus far.
I wonder how many other dregs of memory might resolve into actual books.
Fall arrived with a whomp today. It peed with rain almost all day, sometimes pissing like a racehorse and sometimes dribbling like an old man with prostate difficulties, not the best weather for an outdoor concert. But there is no bad weather, only bad clothing. Tell that to me when I'm camping.
I drove--PLT bikes to work every day, and where he lives is not without rain and fog, though he's spared snow--and scampered to Target at lunch where I acquired two of those lawn-seat things, in which the weight of your body on the ground cushion braces the back support. They were quite comfy on the grass, especially since the concert area at the Botanic Gardens slopes considerable-like. We filled our backpacks with fleece and Gore-Tex and cheese and wine (and juice and cookies, because I am 5) and walked the mile or so thither.
The David Grisman quintet! Their site is too annoying to navigate, but the music too good for that to matter. Enrique Corea played a meticulous but expressive guitar. When they played "Grateful Dawg," he didn't twinkle as Jerry Garcia did, but he sounded a lot cleaner than Jerry ever did, without ever sounding clinical. There was an upright bass, possibly my favorite instrument; and a flutist who played both a regular and a bass flute. A bass flute? I had never heard of such a thing. But it was beautiful. A fourth musician played everything, fiddle and mandolin and both expected and found percussion (by which I mean bongos and a cardboard coffee cup, including the little corrugated waistcoat hot cups wear). And David Grisman on mandolin.
I had previously known Grisman only for his work with Jerry Garcia, Not for Kids Only and Shady Grove and the pizza tapes, but I liked his Dawg music very much. Their songs had overlays of swing, bluegrass, salsa, and whatever else they cared to improvise. At recent local bluegrass festival, a 14-year-old boy won a mandolin pick-off and was given a valuable instrument as a prize. The quintet had him on stage for a jam during "Grateful Dawg" and he was as composed as could be and riffed with them all, and played lead to Grisman's rhythm.
The rain had ceased by late afternoon and didn't start again until most of the way through the show. David began by greeting the audience, "It sure is nice to be out among all you...plants tonight." This struck my funny bone and I cackled the lisalaugh. If it was this pleasant during drizzle, with the nearly full moon occasionally peeking from among clouds, it's got to be wonderful on the more usual beautiful evenings. We'll go back.
Also I might be at the end of an era. After we bought the Grisman tickets, the Cowboy Junkies announced a date at the Fox Theater in Boulder last night. Their latest album, One Soul Now, despite the title's nod to The Grapes of Wrath, does not appeal to me. That's three ungood albums in a row, and this one, however ironically they mean its religious overtones, is too preachy in its lyrics, undistinguished in its sound, and as for Margo's voice...eh. Nor are we going to Keystone to see them tonight.
Once upon a time at the Bloom Boarding House, an earthquake shook up two people on a porchswing. Grandpa Bloom said, "Ethel[?], I think the country's shifting to the right again." The ground might rumble as I leap from the Junkies' bandwagon to Aimee Mann's. Aha, no: they're in armchairs and the line is, "Brace yourself, Bess." | Rumble | "The country's moving to the right again."
Tangentially, the beautiful thing about Jessie is that when I said, "Well, maybe it wasn't that bad, but Lord, it wasn't good," she knew I was quoting Opus. I will blame today's explanation of my musical shift by way of Bloom County on her recently introducing us to Rosebud; however, I cannot blame on anyone but myself the urge to respond to the perennial question "Can I help?" with "Hose me down!" I'm lisa, and my cultural referents are 20 years old.
Another indication that fall is here: Blake was so dreadfully riled up by his seasonal hormones yesterday that the only punishment we could think of worse than our leaving him alone in the house was to bring him with us out into the dark 50-degree damp. He seems a little better today, but he's not just in a foul (fowl?) mood: today on the floor by his cage were two perfect feathers. Usually he loses tail feathers when he's very bad, since RDC's plucking a broken feather often humbles him, but otherwise he hangs on to his plumage. I have more of Percy's tail feathers, despite his living only 2.5 years and my gifting them away, than I have of Blake's at 9 years. And this is one of the two center, longest tail feathers. The second is a sexy crest feather, also the longest, but he has such a full crest that he doesn't look bald or badly barbered.
I made--I mixed; the hardest step comes after setting by refrigeration--my favorite cookies. Blake wanted to help. He doesn't usually show any interest in what is happening on the counter if it doesn't involve a toaster, but I think he was intrigued by the back and forth motions, of shaking the sifter and shredding ginger on the grater. He paced the windowsill and commented distractedly. Perhaps he would rather have listened to rock and roll instead of The Odyssey.I doubt Australia grows peppers as hot as America does, and wild American parrots have been known to munch on cayenne peppers just for fun.
Lately we have been using the old comforter as a tv blanket instead of my cozy fleeze blanket: Blake does not fixate on the comforter, and it's bigger if not as warm, and best of all it is quilted with nylon threads that have popped over the past decade and therefore need to be groomed.
This morning I met a puppy named Nellie. Eleven weeks old, big paws, agitating stern, sweet face, needle teeth in my bike gloves, woolly coat, chocolate Labradog. This evening I watch my feathered, crested, monocular, hammer-tongued, zygodactyl, sweetly dusty smelling buddy, pretzeling himself to do his tail, tangling himself in my hair to preen my tendrils, slowly relaxing his crest, fluffing his plumage, tranforming from sleek prancing falcon into puffy sleepy beak-chewing squab. I love Blake. And I don't think it messes with his head too much that I call him my puppybird.
My library turns up books I had forgotten or never knew we owned. We own Les Liaisons Dangereuses, French title, English text, Penguin volume. I haven't read it and it doesn't strike me as RDC's usual. But there it is. I have combed the shelves a few times for titles for the upstairs stretch of unread fiction, and one of those books was Mary Gordon's The Rest of Life, which is on the Feminista list, though whether the title novella or three-novella volume as a whole I don't know. Last night I opened it for the first time.
The title page is inscribed: "For Lisa. Mary Gordon."
I have no memory whatsoever of attending a booksigning for Mary Gordon. Her face on the back cover doesn't look familiar (which means nothing). I always peel off the bar codes, so whether I bought this book, published in 1993, from the UConn Co-op or the Tattered Cover I couldn't say. But probably the UConn Co-op. At the Co-op I remember Gretel Ehrlich, Ken Kesey, Louis de Brunhoff's son, Bobbie Ann Mason, Douglas Adams, Anne Lauterbach, and Allen Ginsberg. Mary Gordon I do not remember.
I try to tell myself that remembering every event ever isn't necessary. My father just visited Connecticut and one of my sister's plans with him was to go to Block Island, just as he and I did in 1987. He had no memory of that visit. That's another story, but that's the kind of thing I remember. That I want to remember. That I ought to remember. Booksignings, I don't require. But still.
Throughout college my journal was a series of 120-page Joredco notebooks that eventually they stopped making, driving me to merely serviceable or occasional really cool spiralbound books. The last sheet or two of more than one notebook listed Reasons I'm Glad I'm Alive, events that I maybe didn't have time to chart in detail but didn't want to forget, or the date and the event so I could find its detail easily rather than pore through pages of not-as-happy-making filler. It's occurred to me recently that those pages could stand review (recently because I am almost finished with my current paper volume and it'll be time to dig the box out and either quickly cram it in or torment myself by skimming previous volumes). I wonder how many of those events I would remember.
A struggle for me has been how much to cling to my previous tastes and preferences out of loyalty to my former selves or devotion to the idea that I don't have former selves but am an integrated being. If I have forgotten a gathering in SEM's room sophomore year, does that mean it didn't mean anything? It's another thing for me to feel guilty about, that I am trying to learn not to feel guilty about.
Just in case I haven't said it enough yet, Blake is moulting. He leaves little bits of nail clippings and shoelace aglets and plumage in his wake. My navy blue-clad sternum looks like the shoulder of my sixth-grade teacher whose dandruff was legendary. Right now he is chewing on a blowcard when he can't reach around it to my keyboard, but last night he snacked on my Norton Anthology of English Literature, which I had out for John Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel," which has fuck-all to do with Absalom, Absalom!
The plan for today was to take the kayaks to Chatfield. We did that, detouring to the Apple store in the mall on the way because neither of us remembered the one directly on the way and remembering only when we arrived that someone who packed the car had forgotten our PFDs. (For once, the responsible someone wasn't me.) Violating state law there would have lasted about two seconds and, I'll have to check, cost us our kayaks. The boat rental area, which must offer them along with canoes and foul jetskis, was closed.
So we retreated, walked through the (our) park and up 17th Street to À La Tomate (which has been open more than eight months though not that we noticed until today) and had yummy sandwiches over newspapers, and came home.
Then I did tidying up stuff. The kitchen is winding down--we have only to paint the window sash, touch up the east wall/ceilng crease, rehang the blind, remount cabinet and pantry doors, replace scrim, and invent thresholds to cover border between newly finished floor and not--and I am so delighted that I accidentally on purpose prematurely put away supplies, which led to a larger project. I disposed of--in or near the dumpsters for the opportunistic or determined--crap that we'll never use, that was in the coal cellar or garage from before we owned the house and that we should have got rid of ages ago, and things that I wish could be recycled but which I haven't found a taker for. From the garage, four bags of Scott's lawn repair, scraps of real wood and lengths of particle board, many little seedling pots, odds and ends of kitchen tile. I stacked empty paint cans in the far corner for hazardous pick-up, sorted through odds and ends in the cabinet, stacked this and that better, used space more efficiently, and swept the floor. That leaves, after I bring the cardboard to recycling this week, only one thing in the car-space in the middle of the garage--one unstackable thing. But one thing is easier (for two people) and tidier to move in case of hail or blizzard. There.
Then I tackled the coal cellar. Useable segments are now not in the garage but the coal cellar with the remaining whole tiles; all the particle board and ugly shelving strips are gone; the painting supplies are in a box big enough for them so they don't spill out; gloves are clipped into pairs; brewing stuff is contained and off the floor; all the sanding stuff is together and all the plumbing; and sometime I am going to get RDC down there to tell me exactly which component boxes we still need to keep.
This winter, or Before My Mother Visits, I mean to refinish the much missed gateleg table. I would prefer to horrify her with a new cherry finish than with scars in the current mahogany (? so dark as to be nearly black) one. That needs to happen in the furnace room, which means that several of its denizens need to reside in the coal cellar for the duration, like the standing fans and the wet/dry vac and the coolers. And now there is room for them.
No kayaking. But I got to nest, or to clean my nest, and that's fun too.
...not water but hair. Yesterday afternoon at work when I began to notice my hair--shoulder length and not thick--I knew I was in for a bad spell. When I got home I made myself tea and prepared to nap over Inkheart until JJM picked me up. I didn't sleep but did feel more rested, and was able to break Blake's heart by getting dressed again in street clothes (he whined when I shucked my robe, and the hours I spent last night inhaling him counted for nothing, I guess.
I am better. If I had gone to DU, particularly lovely old Mary Reed building, and to a short story reading, in one of my pits of despair, I would have waxed all self-flagellatory about Wasting My Life. Being properly drugged means that I just don't mind wasting my life! Or something. The stories were good, or serviceable, but I was glad to get home. Despite the late hour, Blake needed some snuggling before he would go to bed, so it's a good thing I prefer Inkheart to Thief Lord.
This morning my hair weighs several tons. Let us not consider that my crippled head is probably due to this week's inactivity. I almost always take advantage of RDC's absence to drive to work and this week has been no exception. I excuse it with errands, like looking for kitchen rugs during Monday lunch and acquiring pounds of buddy seed during Tuesday lunch (at the African Grey I met a pied cockatiel who sounded more like Percy than any other bird I can remember, right down to the tone of his wolf whistle) and Wednesday, well, just going to the dry-cleaner after work.
However much exercise might have staved it off if I had exercised, I am somewhat sick: I have a canker sore inside my lower lip, and those never flare up except when I am sick or stressed. So I am hanging out at home, writing letters and ruining Blake's pleasure in my company by cleaning his jowls--I just removed desiccated corn molded exactly into the shape of his lower mandible.
I wrote a note to Haitch's in-laws, thanking them for wedding photographs they sent. This reminded me to write to the person who hosts the B&B in Old Lyme the in-laws enjoy, and also to her daughter; also to KREL, whom I dreamed of last night; and also to a friend whose pregnancy has turned tragic.
I think I need more tea.
It occurred to me to take before and after pictures of the house today. This is just to remind that I intended to do that. A before picture of the microwave would be too gross, and an after picture would tragically fail to include the microwave cart currently out of stock at the closest Target unless I did something insane like go to the two other nearby Targets.* A before picture of the dining table as an example of the mess would probably suffice, but an after picture would similarly fail to include new white tapers for the candelabra and therefore be inadequate.
Also, do you see what I am doing? I am not cleaning. I am typing.
I have houseguests on Monday, one Ukrainian whom I've never met and the other whom I've seen once at a wedding in the past nine years and who is more RDC's friend than mine and also someone else's ex-husband. I don't know anything about the Ukraine. At least previously if not currently extremely fertile soil. Kiev. Chernobyl. Odessa. The Endless Steppe. The Dnieper and the Dniester, because of Russian History to 1905. The Crimean War, because of a biography (for children) of Florence Nightingale. I'm not sure if it's Little or White Russia, though I know Belarus, which I cannot spell off the top of my head--no, I can, but not so confidently as not to check--is the other. Everything Is Illuminated.
I'm still typing. Meanwhile, Blake has been preening on my lap. He has finished dropping feathers and is now growing them in. I'm wearing RDC's navy terrycloth robe instead of my periwinkle fleece one, and I don't know how I can still be surprised at what he can produce, but there are strips of feather casings as long as my little fingernail. He's only little.
Oo, a list. Then I'll stop typing and do the list.
What I did instead of clean:
* 30 September 2004: Most of the cleaning strike-outs date from last night; since the potential houseguests got stuck in Flagstaff I stayed slothful for longer. I did attempt the other two Targets but one was illusory and the other was also out of stock.
I don't want to make a gaffe in Gstaad where the merest gaffe might trigger an avalanche but what will they pinch on me...I hope?
I sleep raw and have done since high school at least. I was nervous, living with a roommate for the first time, that I would be compelled to wear the nightshirt I had brought along as camouflage. Occasionally I'll wear a nightgown, when we have guests or I am one. A nightgown, and not pajamas, because anything that interferes with the thrashing of my legs is evil and wrong.
Last night I shucked my pyjamas to the floor and climbed into bed. Rarely I have to get up to pee, not often; to my knowledge I have never sleepwalked.
This morning I woke up from a series of uncomfortable dreams (wanting to take a nap instead of vote, Cordelia from "Buffy" trying to steal my boyfriend, the Cowboy Junkies saying "no comment" when asked whom they would vote for in the U.S. election [they're Canadian]) that, happily for my overall impression of them, was interrupted by the alarm clock when everyone was laughing (I think in an end-of-the-Bradys or of-Scooby-Doo "you crazy kids" kind of way) and staggered out to turn off the shrieking thing. Midway across the floor I noticed...I was wearing underwear.
A while ago, out of desperation brought on by shredding elastic, I bought a pack of underwear from CostCo. These are terrible garments, supposedly bikini but really fitting near the hip such that at every move I am reminded of too much fabric or elastic over my hip bone. Which is wrong. I assigned them for use only under bike shorts. This is what I was wearing this morning.
Part of the nap-instead-of-vote thing was that I had a hotel room facing a sidewalk and kept lowering the shade but someone not in the room nor on the sidewalk but existing only as a reflection in the window kept raising the shades or opened the louvres on the blinds, so I couldn't lie down and sleep except with an audience (both the passersby and the haint, a priest), and I couldn't get to my polling precinct without some rest. I wonder if it was because of that dream that I got up, opened a drawer, removed a pair of underdrawers, didn't notice or care that this was the most uncomfortable style I own, donned them, and went back to bed and to sleep.
RDC woke at 2:00 this morning, which isn't even wake-up time in Sydney but some kind of middle ground. He made himself peppermint tea and buttered toast, and Blake, who often sleeps through my morning routine because he knows it doesn't concern him, squoke at the sound of the toaster plunger.
RDC has pictures from the Sydney aquarium of a platypus swimming. He saw a wild eclectus in a park log-rolling on an empty soda can. The Aussies have kangaroos and emus on their money. But apparently aboriginal Australians remain even more marginalized than Americans. So I don't need to move there yet.
He said he was bringing me home a present and if it broke I would have lots of little presents. It survived the trip: a hollowed etched emu egg. The shell is maybe four times thicker than a chicken egg and three times bigger than a goose egg. The unetched surface is blue and pebbled; the etched oval is paler blue and delicately worked and depicts (not an emu but) a crested parrot. The perfect circle at the fat end of the otherwise intact shell means that there is one fewer emu in the world, but apparently they are raised for meat and this is not a wild egg. I hope.
RDC didn't see any wild buddies, which is good because if he had I would be wildly jealous instead of only slightly envious. But he had budgerigars and cockatoos on his hotel balcony and he swam in the ocean and that's bad enough.
This weekend is devoted to backrubs and jetlag recovery and fall cleaning. It is sunny for the first time in days, too. Maybe two whole days. And Uncle Tex gave Blake a new oatmeal box, and Minne gave him an oatmeal canister, so he has the door of the first to widen and the tube-ness of the second to explore (with just the last half inch of his tail peeking out) so it's clearly a viciously busy time.
I went to the zoo sometime over the summer to see the baby okapi. It wasn't in the pen with the others and a keeper nearby said maybe it was too hot. It's a rainforest animal and Denver's strong sun could easily be too much for such a thick-coated critter. Today we took a walk through the park toward the zoo, hoping for an okapi this time. The zoo was packed with people but not, unfortunately, with a baby okapi. Did the zoo give it away? Was the sun, again, too strong? I want to see it before it grows up. Also, there were only three giraffes, whose indoor shelter is also public so they cannot hide. Only one of the two calves born last year was there (I think).
Afterward we lounged at the pool for a while. I played in the leisure pool and read The Rest of Life and RDC might have napped in a jetlaggy kind of way. In the evening I had a really nice conversation with my dad. While we talked I was in the front garden weeding; SPM walked up just as we were discussing the debates. SPM offered his opinion as he passed and my dad laughed. I mention this because the contrast between him and my mother struck me: my mother seems not to pay attention to what I say when I am on the phone with her, let alone be able to register stray comments from passersby. I could be saying something like "Don't poop on me, you bananahead," and instead of understanding that I am immediately commanding her grandbird she would ask (and has asked) me whether I am addressing her. (I did not mention this to my father.) Instead I told him the story of Taz's (an African Grey) rescue:
For reasons surpassing understanding, Taz's wing feathers had gone unclipped to the point he was flighted, and he doesn't have a travel cage. So when DMB needed to bring Taz somewhere, she stepped him, who allowed no one but JHT to touch him--up on a perch and brought him outside, whereupon he took off. But he's a captive bird and his wind gave out when he was a ways out over the pond, and down he went. DMB, who is afraid of water and cannot swim, stood on the edge of the pond and screamed as Taz flapped desperately to keep himself afloat. The noise brought out a neighbor and the neighbor's guest, and the guest threw himself into the pond--which might have alligators and snapping turtles in it--and swam out and got the bird, swimming back three-limbed and carrying Taz in one hand. When they got back to shore, Taz looked at his rescuer and said, "Good job!" The rescuer was Austrian and needed that translated. And then, when DMB shook her finger at Taz and said, "Just wait until I tell your daddy what you did!" Taz said, "Uh-oh."
My dad liked that.
Without a chaperone I am a lazy sot with the diet of a spoiled 7-year-old (did Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle treat a picky eater? I remember a mother calling other mothers and learning the bizarre and restricted diets of other children, but she never dealt with finickyism...did she?*). I have been tracking my poundage and fat percentage since June, with no cumulative change. Because I haven't tried, because I eat peanut butter toast and cookies and chocolate candy, because I don't exercise enough, because I am not active enough, and because my diet (and I mean "what I eat" and not Atkins or Grapefruit etc.) sucks.
So let's see what we can change.
This morning I had my teeth counted (Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing) and shined ("Firefly"--I don't think "Firefly" had dentistry but they did say "shiny" instead of "cool."). Dr. Dentist said I must have to dim my teeth for oncoming traffic, and I said yes, I am on call on Dec. 24 in case Rudolph is sick. He laughed at that, and said, "That was funny!" as if in surprise. Hmph.
Later he palpated my face, one hand in my mouth, one hand under my jaw-- checking for cancer of the chin, I guess, but reminding me that I should schedule my annual gynecological examination. This I did not tell him.
And then the cleaning! I started what is supposed to be fall but is really quadrennial cleaning. My study could wait until this winter, when supposedly I am going to paint it, but it was fun and easy so yesterday I started there. From the floor of my study to that of the den I removed the gateleg table, the futon, the floor pillows, the little bookcase, the camp mattresses, the little chest of drawers, the old Apple printer, the not-as-old photo printer, the surge protector, the two cassette tape cases that live under the futon, and the box of travel memorabilia I am never going to make into albums.
I stripped the walls of posters and photographs, dusted the ceilings and walls, emptied the two bookcases and the shelves, tipped the cases over to dust and vacuum behind them, removed the shelves to clean them, reshelved dusted books, and reorganized photographs in frames and collages. I threw out dry pens and little bits of this and that and remembered that I have an address book (a gift from PGN when I went off to college, with its address in SMS's bright pink handwriting already entered) wherein to store slips of addresses.
The purging of tapes was ruthless. ITunes has enabled me to get rid of many 20-year-old tapes that I hadn't listened to in 10 but somehow was keeping for archival or nostalgic purposes--such the Flock of Seagulls' "I Ran," which is perhaps the most embarrassing of my recent purchases. I still need Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance." ITunes should offer a wishlist as Amazon does. Now I have one 50-cassette box, way less than full.
When I put away my haul from the used book store crawl last Sunday, I discovered two copies of The Stranger, which I previously might have kept on purpose because one is RDC's Vintage edition and therefore nicer than the Signet pulp I had in high school, but that Signet matches the Signet Fall I had in college. This time I tossed it into the give-away pile. This time I discovered One Hundred Years of Solitude twice on my favorites shelf, once in a good trade paperback on the main shelf and again in pulp on the shelf constrained by the brackets to hold only pulp and no bigger books. Plus it's in the main stacks (ha!) again in pulp under G. Though not for a fourth time under M. So I tossed the worse of the two pulps.
Also, and this is huge, I actually noted the poster sizes of Starry Night and Jack in the Pulpit No. IV so that I can buy frames for them. Oo, and I should get the size of Picasso's Columbe avec Fleurs, which hangs in the den, as well. Especially since its bottom hem is all pinked from when I had the couch against that wall while painting the doors and someone amused himself by gnawing the poster.
We are having Dot Com guests in two weeks and until they are gone, Blake is not allowed on the topmost shelf, which has been his for some time. My writing books, on the second shelf, do not soldier along at the edge of the shelf but an inch back, safe from the bolt of Tash falling from above (do I have that right?). On the top shelf are art supplies in boxes, which he chews on, and a basket I was given, which I gave to him, also for chewing, and a peacock feather. But, as of last night, no poop, no chewed scraps of box and basket and feather.
Tuesday I start the den--the main library, from Kundera to Z; nonfiction; the television shrine with its shelves of CDs, VHS cassettes, DVDs, and practical books (the other nonfiction). If I got that book cataloging software, it would just feed my obsessive tendencies. I would arrange the books according to LOC (grudgingly, I admit it makes more sense than Dewey), more than they are already.
* In the Slow-Eater-Tiny-Bite-Taker cure, Wetherill Crankminor won't stop eating and Pergola Wingsproggle horrifies her mother by sometimes chewing her food only 71 or 93 times instead of 100, but it is in the Bad Table Manners cure that we hear of Percy, Pamela, and Potter Penzil eating peanut butter and poppy seeds (only at night), weenies and bananas, and junk food. Dear Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.
Two 3.6-mile city rides.
I was going to swim this afternoon, really I was, but RDC called me at 3:42 to tell me that he had just nearly shut Blake's head in the closet door and was going to the vet. I stayed at work until 5:15, because working was better than biking or being home alone.
Immediately after the accident, Blake was hyperventilating, shaking his head, and huffing. Pain could have made him hyperventilate; he always shakes his head when he doesn't like something (being told no, the taste of icky food, loud unexpected noises); and he huffs when he's scared. His eyelids drooped on the ride down, until partway there, when he started chattering to things and acting more like himself.
I was about halfway home on my bike when RDC called me again. Dr. Vet looked into Blake's ears and eyes and saw no signs of trauma or bleeding. He said birds have tough skulls, for flying into things by accident (and maybe for rapping on things: sometimes Blake attacks a window with his beak as if he hoped the glass might be another big-horned ram). Blake perched on the previously terrifying scale-perch all by himself instead of having to be shut into the scale-basket like a hamster. He is 92 grams, which is a great weight for him (last year his 93 grams was "medium to medium-plus, which is fine," and I would rather he be "great" than fine, but can a gram make that much difference?).
I assembled a microwave cart while Blake chewed on interesting parts of a wheelie suitcase and put Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 4 in a frame while Blake chewed on the faux poster insert. We all three had pasta for dinner and Blake ate two whole pieces of rotini. And now I'm watching "ER" and typing and petting buddy head.
I didn't swim, but Blake seems fine.That's all I need.
How do I deal with the giddy? Where is the balance between giddy and sullen?
Yesterday I was feeling at the top of my game. I had my hair cut Wednesday and it looks faboo, I have to say. That evening RDC wanted to go to Mezcal and I said fine, for two reasons: you want to go and I want to show off my great hair. Thursday I wore the Boob Shirt and the Perfect Skirt to work, along with the new hair, and, giddily, I greeted CoolBoss by saying "Please to admire my gorgeous haircut" (obligingly, she replied, "It's fabulous"). At my performance evaluation last week, I repeated my fear that NCSL is not getting its money's worth out of me, and Coolboss said that if that were true, I would have known it by now, that I know her well enough not to doubt she'd've previously addressed it. We also discussed my lack of proofreading such that projects have too much back and forth, plus a new project that I might get responsibility for if I can get proper training. So yesterday I tracked in Schedule+ the various tasks that occupied my time, and glory be, I didn't slack all day, with my booklist or a Project Gutenberg novel or the Suspects.
When I submitted a presentation for her review, I had made a second copy for Ernie. Only in the course of reviewing it for some issues he still needed to resolve for its completion did I notice a few proofreading errors. I printed it again and replaced the old version in her inbox, without eye contact or conversation because she was talking with two people in her office (in an open-door way). Still looking at Ernie's numbers, I noticed an oversight on my part more significant than crossing a t. I corrected it, printed again, swapped it again. This time I caught her eye and we grinned at each other in complete understanding of what was happening. Giddy.
CoolBoss and I always get an error message when we eject and remove her USB memory stick, whose proper name I don't know, even though we don't just pull it from its port but choose "eject" from its software. Ernie was trying to save a presentation to the stick on his machine yesterday and couldn't, getting an error message about installing hardware, that made no sense. When I returned to my cube with the stick to copy it from my system, Big Bird was there trying to duplicate my IE errors.
I had previously left voicemail for him, the one guy in IT I like--Big Bird because he is tall and because I regularly call Ernie by his name and vice versa, despite utter lack of physical or personal resemblance, despite Ernie being in my department and Big Bird not, only because their names are similar--because Explorer is doing two odd things: View Source is not opening Notepad to display the html, and returning to any database-driven page always needs the page refreshed, even if you submitted something through the page and are immediately returning. Big Bird thought the latter might be a security thing that IT has recently installed to prevent user errors, except that I told him it happens at Amazon.com too, even though I would never use Amazon at work. Giddy.
While I had him there, I asked about the memory stick. Big Bird told me that our security is set very high because ya ya ya and systems have to be individually set and permissions allowed for them to work. So Dot Org would rather we use floppies, which no one uses anymore, or CDs, which are a waste of resources, instead of a reusable, more portable, more universal, overall more sensible medium? He alleged that not this but security is the reason, but since this is a "side" effect of the interdict, the interdict should be reviewed. One does not counter IT at Dot Org, but there I was. Giddy.
He didn't know what was causing either of the two IE problems and told me I always have interesting questions. I do like that I have real questions and not "what is the keyboard combination to save" or irritating things like lisa-chip issues, where something misbehaves until a witness arrives and, under lisa-chip mandates, then behaves correctly. But I was sitting on my desk, legs crossed and hands clasped over a knee, in my own mind not behaving flirtatiously and to any mind not speaking flirtatiously or on flirtatious topics, but I don't know whether I was a) fun coworker having silly conversation about whatever is causing these issues or b) mutton dressed as lamb behaving unprofessionally. Giddily, I didn't care.
Big Bird devised another way to webbify PowerPoint presentations, saying it was superior to PowerPoint's default way. In some ways it might be, but his way omits notes. During his tutorial Wednesday when I observed this omission, he said that it was an advantage because you don't want your audience to see your notes. I acknowledged that sometimes that's true ("Say something witty here. Be sure not to take Mr. X's sure-to-be-stupid questions") but that sometimes notes are useful because they give more information than a slide, e.g. data that support a chart, and what would be his solution if we wanted notes? That was a good point, he said, and so the flash device and IE thing the next day continued my pattern of asking interesting questions he cannot answer.
Pride goeth before a fall.
In the next minutes, RDC called me, nauseated and panicky, about Blake. I noticed two things: one, the abrupt change in my mood, including stress sweat, quicker respiration and pulse, lips between my teeth; two, that despite this utterly reasonable catalyst, I continued functioning, working and being productive, and how much that was in contrast to my all-systems shutdowns in response to similarly stressful stimuli up to about a year ago.
Tangentially, RDC asked a couple of times how could he live with himself had he done that thing I can't type. Welcome to my world, I didn't unkindly say. I didn't cause Percy's death as obviously as this would have been, but I was responsible, and I didn't notice his illness until it was too late. So his world would have been much worse. But it is not, because Blake is probably just fine. We are Observing him for 48 hours, but last night he played in his box and wanted to help brush beaks and devoured pasta and otherwise had a healthy appetite, so I am going with Fine.
So last night my mood was even: fine, content, not giddy, not overly anxious about Blake. Ernie assigned me a couple of tasks to do "by Friday morning" and it occurred to me after I left that I had my usual shrinkydink on Friday morning. So I emailed another assistant asking her to follow up, but after RDC and Blake got home and I calmed the rest of the way down, I realized I already had done at least 75% of the work so I emailed her again taking her off the hook.
This morning, giddy again. By the alarm clock I woke from an unusual (for me), and very hot (not unusual) dream. In my bathrobe, on the couch, with the throw wrapped around my feet, I wrote it out, gradually falling back asleep until RDC's alarm rang at 7 and again at 7:10, when I finally got up. I made tea (which I mention because it's a rarity and therefore might have influenced my mood) and was on time for Shrink. I talked her ear off. I finished the sentence I had begun writing in the waiting room, then with the prop of my journal was compelled to tell her about the dream (even though the bit that interested me didn't have the anxiety element that is usual), and everything above. (I had the tea in my water bottle bracket and didn't begin drinking it until I got to the clinic, so I really can't blame the giddiness on the tea.)
I talked, giddily, about my difficulty striking a balance between giddy and sullen. There is a range between utterly self-absorbed and so determined not to be self-absorbed that I paralyze myself into silence.* Both are means self-absorption. Sometimes I am happy or comfortable enough in my own skin that I am not conscious of this range but merely am. Sometimes. What I want to do is be confident enough that my periods of awareness ("I'm aware...of my own tongue!" **) are shorter and rarer, and deservedly not self-aware. Deserving not to be because I actually am not rude or self-absorbed or utterly boring.
* This is another instance of my beloved Evolution of Jane:
"'You're so literal-minded and fanciful at the same time.'
"I was, wasn't I? A black hole, sucking up the world around me to metaphorize it out of all recognizability."
At either end of the range, I suck up the world around me to metaphorize it into lisaisms and lisaness.
** Linus, to Lucy. Moments later, Lucy gets all mad because now she, too, is aware of her tongue.
I told Shrink a story from grad school. At an end-of-fall-semester party, someone commented, "You drink so much water! That must be great for your skin." I do drink a lot of water, both a large volume of fluid and in contrast to more common beverages, and also conspicuous at a party where most people are drinking alcohol. I did not infer an insult, and I do not think the person implied one, but I was so self-absorbed in my own misery, in small part comprising my relatively-for-me bad skin that year, that I focused on only the skin bit. I said something like, "and god knows my skin needs it." Daniella's face clearly showed that she thought I was responding to a perceived insult and that she had not intended one and that I was a loon for reacting so. I saw all this in her face but whether I could have redeemed myself or tried to, I don't remember.
At the beginning of that school year, after an organized fête, I had gone out for a drink with Daniella and another Medieval Studies student. We didn't know each other well, but we were 20something women in grad school together, so intimacies came thrice as fast as they might have otherwise. I remember the third saying that although she was in her 20s, she had never had a relationship, and I was surprised (but not shocked) that she disclosed "but I'm not, you know, a virgin: I've done the barfly bit...." So following this lead I said I had recently ended a major relationship and my ex was in the grad program and yoikes, how awkward and stressful. I know I told Daniella and Third that; I am sure I also reeled through my woe-is-I shtick and griped about how quickly he'd hooked up again.
Some time later I was asking a friend of the ex, Tor, why the ex and I couldn't get along. Tor had been my friend as well, but only through the ex, and, I gradually realized, now made nice with me only for tactical gossip reasons. I had asked outright, so Tor said (among other things) that it hadn't gone over well with Ex that I told "everyone" about the situation: for example, when Ex himself befriended Daniella, connecting him with me she exclaimed, "Oh, you're the one." (I was indiscreet that year, I know that now; I knew it pretty soon afterward, on the upswing from my nadir.)
But this is about Daniella, generalizing (metaphorizing, thank you Cathleen Schine) from my relationship with her to my relationship with the world at large. Later yet than this, an actual friend and I were talking about how the department perceived me, given my lunacy and misery and indiscretion. He said that he could think of only one person who disliked me besides than the obvious, and that was Daniella. Besides that I believed him without difficulty, later later yet than that, when RDC and Daniella chatted and he mentioned he was dating me, though she was verbally polite about it, it was evident to RDC she doubted his taste. I earned her dislike fair and square.
If it wasn't HEB then I don't remember who told me--I obviously must have been an undergrad--that people generally liked me because I met them expecting to be liked, or at the least not worrying whether I would be liked. At the time, that was true, though I had never articulated it. My self-absorption meant I met people openly, unworried about their approval or acceptance and without agenda. It also meant that I treated them without tact or sympathy, but, as I've mentioned before, in college I interacted with a large enough pool of potential that I could find and befriend people for whom I worked.
Now it's after lunch. I interrupted myself three paragraphs back to have yogurt and fruit with Kal, and since then I have written just the three paragraphs, finishing the thread I began before. I was reluctant to interrupt myself, and I'm not sure if it's good that chatting with Kal grounded me or bad that I cannot recreate, reclaim, the morning's giddiness and loquacity. Instead of giddy, I'm just happy. Besides, I've probably said all this before.
Instead I'll repeat what I told her. Wednesday as RDC and I walked to Mezcal, we passed a woman with a dog. I hope this woman lives in my neighborhood because I totally want to be her new best friend. (Now, see, should I have said that to Kal? Are we already good enough friends that that wouldn't hurt her feelings, that she knows I mean that both lightly and sincerely?) The dog was Lab-esque, but smaller, with white speckles and one white sock. Of course I had to meet it, and she was happy enough for that to happen. I asked the dog's name, and she said Milo.
"Really?" I asked, delighted. "After The Phantom Tollbooth?"
"No," she said, "Milo was the name of my invisible friend when I was little. And I looked it up, and it means security."
It's a great name! with a great reason behind it! and the fact that she would tell a perfect stranger about her invisible friend means that either she is a loon or really cool, either of which works for me.
Earlier we met a Welsh Corgi named Bat. "Bat?" I asked--had I heard right? "Does he have such big ears?" They didn't look so very prominent to me.
"When he has fur is clipped, his ears stand out much more," the man explained.
I told him there is another Corgi in the neighborhood, named Opie. That dog was his too, so I must have met his wife, he put together. Like I asked her name (<--that explains everything about me, right there).
Hm, I didn't remember about the Corgis with Kal. Her family name their pets for Andy Griffith characters, so I should. Also I should find some Andy Griffith on Nickolodeon sometime, because its theme song is one of the most common things cockatiels whistle.
And ha, I began with Mezcal and ended with Mezcal, so I did kind of wrap up. Mleah.
As I was hanging out laundry, RDC came to the back door with Nisou on the phone. She is coming home! for two months! with Emlet and Siblet! and I am going to join her, tra la. Unfortunately, not toward the end when both SPG and SEM will also be in Connecticut, nor earlier than that, when PLT and his family will be; but I take what I can get. Emlet told me about her favorite book with Max, M-a-x spells Max, and about her pony ride--at first she was scared and then she wasn't; and I heard about Siblet's progress.
Then I had lunch with Lucy, Koroshiya, and Jared in Cherry Creek. Frequently and overly self-aware and chi-chi Cherry Creek is notable because at first I snarked at a woman walking by with three Highland terriers in Harley harnesses--harnesses instead of leashes because dustmops are so hard to control--but then she clipped those harnesses to the sidecar of her retro motorcycle and drove off and I wanted to marry her even though she didn't wear a helmet or restrain her shoulder-length hair while riding. Of both snark and facetious lust I spoke at a normal volume, so I should have expected that the woman at the next table would say of the dogs' tack that they have leather helmets as well and so clearly knew my victim. Hi, I'm subtle.
I have no idea what happened on the rest of Saturday, but Sunday RDC made us pancakes for breakfast and we hung the pantry doors and then I attacked the backyard while he cleaned his office. I combed the grassesque and weeded and mowed it, added the clippings to the compost (and admired the mouse tunnel from the asparagus-strewn top surely leading to the warm interior), added the last of last year's leaves to the other compost, ruthlessly watered both composts (and didn't drown any mice this time that I noticed). Also I took the big pots of dead annuals off the porch columns.
We tried a new fastish "Tuscan" grill for dinner, and took a long walk through the park and the autumn color, and, let me repeat, hung the pantry doors. It makes a huge difference in the doneness of the kitchen, white paneled doors instead of shelves of boxes of food.
And then, oh gods, dinner on Monday. We got to be tasters for an upcoming executive dinner at Adega. The sommelier matched wines with each different dish--two different dishes for each course, and six courses. I decided to try wine, and I don't know if I should be congratulated for trying something new or cautioned that I am an alcoholic waiting to happen. We had champagne before an amuse-bouche of puréed leek tartlet with tomato jam; different white wines with our soups (amaranth with pomegranate-stuffed acorn squash and spaghetti squash with almond); again with the entrées we selected (tangerine-drenched pheasant breast and foie-gras braised fluke); and reds with the ones the sommelier gave us (prosciutto-wrapped gurnard and albacore tuna); and reds again with our plats, monkfish and crown of rabbit.
Sorry about the rabbit, Haitch. It was my last rabbit, presented in a rack just like lamb (leading RDC to call it rack-o-rabbit, or wacko-wabbit, and many Thumper, Watership Down, and Bugs Bunny jokes.
And then two ports with our desserts, a half-baked chocolate-port cake with blackberry ice cream and bittersweet chocolate crumble with hazelnut brittle.
I liked the white wines and the port. The reds, RDC decreed, were more complicated and more of an acquired taste. I'm not surprised I liked the port: it was very sweet.
Also I got to wear my blue velvet beaded dress and my new silvery grey satin slingbacks. That was fun.
A cold rain fell over night, and this was going to be the first time I would call Kal for a ride. I reset my clock for an hour later, except I didn't set the alarm but the time. So when I got up, the clock read that I was half an hour late to work already. I panicked and asked RDC if I could drive, and wow was I late, and he didn't need the car and his own clock gave the correct time and I wasn't late.
But it was raining, so I wore contacts, and I showered at home in a much nicer shower than the work one, and I wore a new suit I scored at Sweatshops R Us; and I had a cold slice of pepperoni and mushroom pizza for lunch; and I spent the day manipulating Census Bureau data in Excel, figuring out the best way to present information graphically. Except at the end of the day, when I downloaded Main Street and The Way of All Flesh from Project Gutenberg to fill in the gaps. I finally read more than 10 pages at a time of Gertrude and Claudius, which I am loving, and RDC made stuffed chicken breast and perfectly steamed, garlicky snowpeas for dinner, with apple crisp and cinnamon ice cream for afters. I am watching the debate, which is giving me indigestion, but I have my iBook and Blake is napping on my knee.
Life is pretty good.
I attacked the house. Some parts of it didn't need that excruciatingly thorough a drubbing because I delivered that severe a treatment in my first efforts after we dismissed the housecleaners. They didn't do the corners or behind the furniture, but they kept the main areas more clean on a more regular basis than I have yet. Whatever.
I weeded my closet, clothes and shoes; I removed all the shoes and suctioned out gritty, dusty accumulations beneath and on them; I dusted, swept, vacuumed and mopped the upstairs; I polished the stainless steel in the kitchen; and my scrubbing the bathroom included emptying and cleaning and weeding the medicine cabinets. But I didn't launder and iron the curtains or empty the dead moths from the ceiling light in the living room. And as soon as a guest showed up I noticed a dancing shadow on the kitchen wall cast by a defunct cobweb in one of the recessed lights.
I'd met the Canuck before and he is delightful and enthusiastic and a good conversationalist; I hadn't met the other but he was sweet too and managed to contain British bewilderment at the size of our fridge and the steaks to polite interest. The Brit was from Norwich, which I eventually connected with Coot Club, and he showed me in the frontispiece map where he lives and sails. At one point Blake jumped to the floor to prance into the kitchen, where we were congregated, and I swooped him up safe from our feet and the giant Squash-You-Flat, who I think is one of the BFG's compatriots? The Canuck then asked if wasn't Roald Dahl also the author of Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, which isn't offered even used at Amazon. AmazonUK lists it with author Mordecai Richler, but the Canuck barely remembered it and it has no reviews. That was funny. And then the Canuck made the mistake of saying that the first and last lines of Watership Down were the same, which they are not (though primroses appear in both); plus he called RDC a gourmand instead of a gourmet; and it was all in fun that I produced the texts to settle these points. Both the Canuck and the Brit scoffed at poor Noah Webster. Hmph.
It was a fun night.
Kaland I went to a corn maze today. Thank heavens the maze was printed, though an inch square, on our tickets, because otherwise I'd be in there yet. The Botanic Gardens called it the most challenging yet, and it was at least devious. I wanted to get to the tip of Chapungu's beak, because that seemed like the heart of the five acres. We went through the words, which were good to orient ourselves by and led to my insisting on recognizing an E as an E when I ought to. C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair. A bridge at the base of the spine of the R in "Denver" led not to the eagle's left wing but to a loop without an outlet--the printed maze was small enough, and the actual maze lacking enough in traps and monsters, that we didn't plan ahead. When I thought we were in the southeast corner but then I saw the bridge again, I swore, because I'm a class act in front of your children, and because the foothills were behind, not in front of me, but it was, aha, a second bridge. This one carried you deviously over, instead of to, the path to get out, so we twisted and turned some more, and I made bad puns about dead Ns, and I might have crawled through the desert gasping for nutrients in the last few yards but--as with a national park--being so close to the trail head meant there were stacks of people, so I didn't.
The maze is open until 8, and it would be fun in the dark, I guess. Maybe. A flashlight doesn't reveal a whole letter at once, or shed enough light to show the foothills (and thus the compass points). When I got home I saw an email indicating that Denver No Kidding was supposed to have gone at 12:30. The group's expanded, and they're not all or even mostly kid-haters, I think, but I'm glad to have gone as I did, with Kal. If I'd gone with RDC he would've wanted a GPS and a slide rule, and if I'd gone with No Kidding, would I have had to listen to complaints about how the place swarmed with littluns, as if this were or should be an adult-only affair? Or been part of an indecisive mob with a lower common denominator than Kal and mine? Because ours was fairly high, and all the kids I encountered only enthusiastic (and decisive).
Haitch, come back: I know where to have your birthday party!
I bought a pumpkin that I hope will orange up in the next couple of weeks, and we discussed Hallowe'en costumes. She was recently Between a Rock and a Hard Place and I am considering being Macaroni this year, if I can find a cap to stick a feather into. After the strain of nearly having to cannibalize the nearest Girl Scout in the rigors of the maze, we required dessert. Of course. I had a milk shake, a proper milkshake of a proper size (meaning, with the extra (and there was extra) served in the silver mixing cup alongside), hooray, and spent the evening reading Vernon God Little in Vito the reading chair.
Blake weighted my shoulder and preened: I'd showered him in the morning so he was a marvel of not dust but filoplume, and without dust his feathers lay sleek and almost shimmering, but he was so busy preening that I wasn't allowed to snort him.
The reason for the frenetic housecleaning was not just fall or the two dinner guests on Saturday but RDC's conference this week, and his having his group work at (sadly, not on: they failed to remodel the bathroom or build the nook) the house today and tomorrow.
In the evening we all went to Mezcal, and I have to recommend being the only female in a table of 12. I was hardly fawned over, as if Satine dropping among a bunch of men smelling of teen spirit "Moulin Rouge", but it was fun. I continued my conversations with the Brit and the Canuck and had new ones with the Aussie, the Fiancé, and the Southie, who wasn't a Southie but if there's a name for Northies I don't know it. I can distinguish Rhode Island from Worcester from Southie, but Southie from that of the northern suburbs I cannot.
Please let it only be that I am out of shape. Lately I have been getting headaches and I'm tired--now to the point that I sleep too much--and I am fairly sick of it. I attended a fairly dull tutorial today and noticed only a quarter of the way through that I was falling asleep. I must not do this. From somewhere or other I remembered that rubbing your earlobes is supposed to invigorate you. I put both amethysts in one ear and commenced work on the other, expecting to fall asleep over even this. I can understand Tina's fascination with the earlobe: it's so soft. Nobody's Fool, and in Enchanted Broccoli Forest, the author recommends the bread has been kneading enough when it's the consistency of an earlobe. Maybe she'd be a good baker.
Kal brought me whither she is house-sitting. Two dogs, two cats plus her own, a fish, and a green-wing macaw named Picasso.
Without Picasso's beloved human around, she deigned to accept affection from Kal and even some attention from me. I even got to do some wing-pit petting, so very soft and warm. Blake doesn't like his wingpits touched, and of course altogether is too small to stroke with the full hand, so this was a treat for me. Mostly I had a lap full of dog, which was great. And I still got to watch and listen to the parrot: dancing to various blues songs (mostly wobbling her neck like Tim Blake Nelson in "O Brother Where Art Thou"), or doing her Stevie Wonder imitation, ripping up blowcards (the parrot favorite, and an eye-popping illustration of the size difference between Blake's and Picasso's beaks), asking for cracker (anything that goes in the mouth is "cracker"), holding a strand of spaghetti in one reptilian claw and eating the whole thing without dropping it (about eight strands), and, whenever we were out of the room, calling for her human beloved (Kal's uncle) in a heart-rending, irresistible voice. You know how humans are genetically programmed to consider babies' cries unbearable? She figured out that sound.
The lapful of dog and everything else was lovely but I had to get home and snuggle my little buddy before bed.
Wheee! I'm a geek.
Yesterday we had a brown bag lunch to discuss state elections and ballot measures. Encee, who led the discussion, started with a trivia quiz. I didn't know the obviously Dot Org minutiae like in which state is someone retiring after 64 years in legislative service (Georgia), or in which state a leader was indicted (Wisconsin). When he asked which state's state flower was the peony and state tree the tulip (poplar), no one knew; and when he offered that it's a midwestern state that begins with I and the room answered with one voice, "Iowa," we were all wrong (it's Indiana). But when he asked which state's state pie is the apple and state horse the Morgan, I immediately and singly called out "Vermont!" And I was right.
Afterward Encee and I happened to meet in the stairwell and he asked how I had known that. "Children's books," I answered promptly. "Marguerite Henry wrote lots of books about horses, Misty of Chincoteague, about that colony of wild horses off the coast of Virginia," and at this point I heard someone begin to descend the staircase above us, "and she won the Newbery for King of the Wind, about one of the first Arabians, who came to England under George II." Now the person descending was abreast of me and was UrBoss. I grinned that he heard me geeking out but was the more prompted to wrap up. "And she wrote Justin Morgan Had a Horse, about the man who developed the Morgan in the early 19th century? late 18th? in Vermont."
Encee asked what sort of horse this was, particularly. UrBoss said that hearing Vermont had surprised him because it's a horse he associates with the South, and I said that as far as I know it's on the smaller side, in a compact, sturdy, strong way, a good work horse, not as much a riding horse as the Tennessee Walker or American Saddle horse, which I associate with the (antebellum) South. And that Morgans were often used for police horses.* Encee laughed and said "Children's books, eh?" and UrBoss smiled, appreciatively and amusedly, in my direction. This inspired me to add that Almanzo Wilder, who would grow up to marry Laura Ingalls (a name Encee recognized, unlike Chincoteague or Newbery), had Morgans on his boyhood farm in upstate New York.
* I don't know if that's true in general, but in Henry's Album of Horses, or in the last chapter of Justin Morgan, was a story of a Morgan who helped a police officer guide people away from a fire. In Denver the police horses are donated and are Morgan, thoroughbred, or even quarterhorse.
This is the kind of encounter that has to be okay. I long for it to be okay. I know to watch that I don't go into to much detail, because the map of South America that Phantom had on her flank isn't pertinent to Justin Morgan, but mentioning Henry's two best-known titles and naming the Newbery to give her legitimacy before a one sentence description of the book that answered Encee's question, please let that be okay. And he asked about the kind of horse, and UrBoss joined us, so it was a conversation instead of a monologue, right? Please?
Because two weeks ago? When I was all giddy? and in the midst of gidst I had what I thought was a loquacious, not particularly guided, but wheee! giddy and geeky session with my shrink demonstrating the loft of my mood? She thought I was upset with her.
Such that last Friday, when I for the first time forgot my appointment, she thought maybe I was subconsciously avoiding her/therapy. What do I do with that? I haven't been getting up on time and forgetting was a stupid effect from that stupid lack of discipline, no more. When she called me at 8:20 as I sat placidly at the dining table drinking coffee waiting for Kal to pick me up, did my "Omigod it's Friday I am so sorry" sound fake?
Shrink today offered me a couple of things I said or did two weeks ago to make her ask: on our way into the office, she stopped in the hallway to talk to a colleague. I interjected that if I didn't stop as well it was because I don't expect her to treat me like a social peer, introducing me to her cohort, and if I walked along, it was because I didn't belong in their conversation. She finished, saying I said something like "I'll see you in there" or "I'll leave you here" or something that (even now, three hours after she mentioned it today) I don't remember. And I see that as fitting with not expecting to tag along, and also not expecting her not to make an important communication with her colleague just because it's my hour. She had seen it as exactly that last, though, as a "well when you deign to give me your time I'll be waiting." Then during the session when I mentioned my haircut, apparently I said something about how she wouldn't understand, which I meant in an I-always-come-to-the-clinic-on-my-bike-wearing-a-ponytail kind of way but which she took as a you-don't-understand-good-hair or worse kind of way.
So what the hell. When I'm at the top of my game is when I make everyone else feel worst, and only by suppressing myself, on purpose or, after months of purpose, by fucking depression, can I refrain from random insults. Except not even then.
She did admit that it was her mistake not to address what she saw as a problem two weeks ago instead of waiting for our next session, which (by my forgetfulness) was two instead of one week later and meant that I can't remember these incidents--meeting the colleague in the hall, my exact wording about my hair.
And I had so enjoyed the gidst.
And my geeking out with too much information about children's books has to be better than the previous occasions in which I've answered merely, "I read."
This, actually, was pretty funny. In Renaissance history we were talking about the wool trade and the professor was eliciting from us wool's advantages as a fiber in damp climates for poor people. He had practically already told us when I remembered, "Oh! Wool keeps you warm even when it's wet!" He asked, in a how-did-you-know-that way, "Do you knit?" and I said, "No, I read." And everyone laughed. I don't remember where I picked that up, but it was neither in the class's texts nor in an academic book.
Another time, in a class on comedy--reading the Rumpole story about the brothel--I answered a posed question what the old boys' network was and how it was named. The professor, having his answer, continued, but there was murmuring behind me about how I, the prep, would know that. Or something; the only reason I remember this is that it happened only two years after the incident above and I wanted to retort, "No, because I read," but knew better. By 1990, I wasn't compelled to respond to classmates' jeers or misunderstandings.
I am still compelled, though I hope I am better about judging when to yield to respond to jeers and misunderstandings.
Gidst: the midst of giddiness. Possibly the main point, or gist, of giddiness, except not, because I have a hard enough time remembering that "gist" has a soft g.
I should redo all my pages in Movable Type so they're easier to update. I haven't even added "blee" to my coinages page.
Blee: bliss + glee
Two 3.6-mile city rides, the homeward one quite chilly and windy. A wonderful fall day.
Today's brown-bag was sixth season premiere of "The West Wing." I was stupid enough not to program the season pass into TiVo and was bereft when I realized, Wednesday evening at 9, that the show airs at 8 and I had just missed it. Besides having trivia contests about the state tree of Indiana, policy wonks are also likely to be "West Wing" aficionados. So today a bunch of us watched a merciful co-worker's tape.
I am not liking the looks of this season.
Last weekend Trish invited me to a movie, by cell phone; Wednesday I turned on my phone to get someone's number and noticed the message; also I learned that No Kidding was assembling to see "Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water," a documentary about people who speak Klingon (who did not thus describe humans; a silicon-based life-form elsewhere in "Star Trek" did). Trish was up for that. I was thinking that No Kidding could possibly be a good way for Trish as well as myself to meet Denver folks. It was my one experience (five years ago, I think) that NK people were freaks, but that was, of course, before I saw this movie. We girded ourselves with water and Timtams and entered.
The father who spoke only Klingon to his baby hoping that the child would be a native speaker? And what, as a native speaker know more words than the creator of the language has authorized? A native speaker of a language that has a grand total of 2500 words, though none for sandwich, a language that belongs to a bellicose, and let's not forget fictional and alien, culture? The kid speaks English fine for a sevenish-year-old, so whatever.
The real danger to himself and others is the fellow who, without obvious physical cause (so I assumed emotional), sounds like Elmer Fudd, describes his ex-girlfriend as a bloody Romulan despite being treated like a queen ("I brought her to all my Klingon conventions"), and, most tragically, considers proficiency in Klingon as undeniable proof of belonging to a(ny) group.
The unscripted dialog ripped hysterical and incredulous snorts and guffaws from Trish and me (and the rest of the audience), but the movie itself also was laughably bad. Was the film technique that gave Michael Dorn's epidermis the quality of looking worm-ridden deliberate? Was there a purpose to the "transitions" that I would call "filler" of water running over probable shower curtains? Did the director premeditate my newborn fear of lampshades, the movie's only, and Dr.-Who-level, prop?
Could there have been some alien intelligence behind it? The director was present--the movie was part of the Denver International Film Festival--and he was alien, being French.
Precor Elliptical: 45', 5600 strides, just under 125 spm. A few bicep curls on the half-dome wiggly thing, whatever that's called, and not nearly one half of the way around the 1/12 mile track by lunging (I stopped as soon as I felt a hamstring).
In the morning I began The Shipping News but I was feeling waaay too depressed for it--the writing is bizarre without being inventive, the characters might have been better off drowned as kittens, and it reminds me of someone I miss, plus I wonder if my opinion can be separate from hers (probably not) and how pathetic that makes me (very, or call it loyal)--so I started Confederacy of Dunces instead. I read it in the whirlpool today, a little, and only a little because someone whom I first took as only annoying was TALKING AT THE OTHER WOMAN IN THE WHIRLPOOL EVEN THOUGH THE WHIRLPOOL WAS WHIRLING AND THERE'S A FAKE WATERFALL TOO AND THE ENTIRE SPACE IS, SURPRISE! TILED AND ECHOEY.
Then I took a shower, and when I came out the same woman was TALKING AT AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT VICTIM IN THE LOCKER ROOM, PLUS AT THREE OTHER WOMEN INCLUDING MYSELF WHO WERE INESCAPABLY IN EARSHOT AS WERE THE ANTIPODES. I observed without surprise that the litter of possessions--toiletries, snacks, clothing--strewn along the length of the counter and unattended when I had arrived over an hour before belonged to this woman, WHO WAS NOW NOSHING HER DRIED FRUIT AND APPLYING HER MASCARA WHILE NOT YET HAVING CLOTHED HERSELF SO SHE WAS SITTING NAKED ON A CHAIR WITHOUT BENEFIT OF A TOWEL LAYER.
I very deliberately didn't catch anyone's eye, because it's possible I have an unreasonably low tolerance for annoying people and because, whether or not that's true, it is certainly true that soliciting agreement about my annoyance with someone else would externalize and strengthen that negativity.
WHEN THAT SECOND VICTIM LEFT, FIRST GRADUALLY AND THEN SUDDENLY The Sun Also Rises, SHE THEN CONTINUED HER MONOLOGUE TO A THIRD WOMAN. HER TOPIC WAS MENOPAUSE AND HER EXACT TIMING AND SYMPTOMS AND SHE INQUIRED OF HER VICTIMS, WHOM SHE OUT-MENOPAUSED AT EVERY TURN, WHETHER THEY HAD CONSIDERED SUPPLEMENTAL ESTROGEN BECAUSE HER DOCTOR TOLD HER IT WAS NECESSARY ONLY IF YOU NOTICED YOU WERE BECOMING, NOT JUST KOOKY AS YOU'VE PROBABLY BEEN ALL YOUR LIFE, BUT NON-FUNCTIONALLY KOOKY.
Whether being told by a perfect stranger that yes, you're kooky in an above-average way that even limits other people's functionality counts as "noticing," she didn't mention, so I didn't tell her. She was a fuck of a lot less appealing than Owen Meany, anyway.
After keeping my trap shut, I ate a salad for lunch. Further signs of the apocalypse as events warrant.
The Red Sox won the World Series.
I hate "The West Wing." (Okay, no, I probably don't, though Aaron Sorkin wouldn't've done what the new writers did. But still. I hate "The West Wing.")
A shadow ate the moon last night.
Now all I need is a comet to know the end times are nigh.
Several weeks ago the small but valiant Lymeline in Old Lyme called the high school girls' soccer team the "lady" Wildcats. I had, months before when the site was new and the editor debating whether to continue her effort, written to say oh yes please do, how can I help, because I need my hometown news.
So I wrote again:
I still love LymeLine and I appreciate the job you do. But please, no "lady" Wildcats unless there are "gentleman" Wildcats as well.
I'm pretty sure it was this article, which the editor has since modified. She asked if she could publish my letter, and I said I hadn't intended it as a public letter to the editor but to go ahead if she thought it would spark useful debate.
The girls' soccer coach and my ninth-grade history teacher responded:
The girls of the seventies and eighties enjoyed this title, and proudly became, over the years, a very good program in their own right.
If the UConn Lady Huskies, the national champions for three years straight, can deal with this endearment, I think then we can too.
Editor’s Note: The writer is the Athletic Director of Regional School District 18, which comprises the towns of Lyme and Old Lyme.
The Usual Suspects have toughened me up, and I earned a 95 on his mid-term examination, back when I could recite all the Roman emperors in chronological order. This hasn't been posted yet:
The need in 1975 to market and distinguish the new girls' team from the existing boys-only team no longer exists: girls' sport programs are well-established and funded on a par with boys' teams. To the extent, if any, that girls' teams may not be respected as much as boys' teams, to discriminate between Wildcats by gender only perpetuates the notion that one gender is other or lesser. When "Wildcats and Gentleman Wildcats" sounds no sillier than "Wildcats and Lady Wildcats," then might equity have been reached.
In all content at www.uconnhuskies.com, a commercial site for UConn athletics, the UConn teams are called the women's or men's sport (unless only one sex participates: baseball is just baseball and softball just softball). In this article, while the Huskies are called simply Huskies, the Tennesse team is called the Lady Vols. For one institution to do a wrong thing does not justify another's doing that same wrong thing; but [Coach] did commit that fallacy, so by his logic, should not LOLHS shun the designation of UConn's chief rival?
Following another institution's lead is no excuse not to think for oneself. I don't assert that the girls' teams be "Wildcats" because the UConn women are "Huskies"; I do so because that is fair and equal.
I don't recall that the girls' teams were called Lady Wildcats during my tenure at LOLHS (class of 1986). When I first alerted the editor (not the "lady" editor) of this site to my concern, she responded that she had used "Lady" only to distinguish one article (about a girls' game) from the previous (about a boys' game), but not because it is the actual team name. Between that admission and my (possibly not all-inclusive) memory, I doubt that "Lady Wildcats" is even the LOLHS girls' teams' official designation. It seems not, from this site. The Wildcat Booster Club's page is blank, but the LOLHS handbook says that the Club "is an organization of adult members established to support the school athletic programs and to help recognize excellence in Lyme-Old High School varsity athletic competition." Though it is called "the Wildcat Booster Club," not "the Wildcat and Lady Wildcat Booster Club," I am sure its mission is to forward both boys' and girls' teams.
All of the above paragraph suggests to me that the "lady" Wildcat headline which I challenged in Lymeline.com is not LOLHS policy but was a formatting choice on Lymeline's editor's part. If I am wrong and "Lady WIldcat" is and continues to be LOLHS's policy, then I hope students might consider the implications and petition to change their team's name.
Our plane arrived in Logan about half an hour late, so even though we hadn't checked bags and didn't have to wait for the shuttle and the shuttle dropped us right at our car, we landed on the Mass Pike at 5:00 on a Friday. Traffic was treacly all the way to Sturbridge, and then we hadn't thought to ask if there was a basketball game so we got snarled again on the way into Storrs and didn't arrive at Charenton until after 7:30.
Of course, the destination was well worth the frustrating journey. After a brief hello, RDC continued on to his own new godson, leaving me at Charenton for a blissful interlude.
Emlet learned how to blow bubbles over the weekend; also she sat with her legs crossed for the first time. I stacked firewood and helped to wire Pépé's cabin. ZBD and I collected eggs. A six-year-old cousin read a story to Emlet and her nine-year-old brother sailed us around the seven seas by way of the rowboat in the pasture. I read Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes and Go Dog, Go! and Frog and Toad Are Friends to the two-year-olds and listened with the seven-year-old to a chapter from the latest Redwall book. I herded hens, calling "chook chook chook," to which two did not respond when granddog Zelo was on the property; we debated whether "chook chook" might mean "I have the axe now git to the block." The two youngest babies stared at each other, Siblet at four months having just figured out how to sit up and the eleven-month-old cousin how to wave. There were ginger-chocolate cookies that I made in Denver (flat and extra crispy) and the other batch that I made there (domed and chewy); I figure the second batch came out better because ZBD helped me sift the flour (through a mill, because that is what we found) and Emlet helped to roll dough through sugar. I did a lot of dishes; we never had fewer than six at a meal and once twelve--throughout the weekend were Nisou, her parents, both siblings, one sibling-in-law, all five grandbabies, another family friend, HEBD and ZBD, and TJZD and RED. And me.
Someone's illness led us to discuss (not à table) how "stool" got its medical meaning (the "close-stool") and reading aloud selections from the OED led to much laughter: one of the sources mentioned "the stool of repentance" and another is a verse about "sitting between two stools." Merriam-Webster offers "the stool of election promises to balance the budget and reduce taxes, and the stool of the hideous cost of new weapons." Also Pépé didn't want us to forget about apostools and epistools either, and he and Mémé had just listened to an NPR bit about junk English and asked us to define what "capstone experience" might mean academically, and so I asked about the capstool experience. Later a stool pigeon came up and that was just too much.
We played in--well, near--the brook except for RED who slipped, dousing his feet in chill water. He took it like a champ, of course. We played poohsticks, some of us not quite grasping the up- to downstream element but having terrific fun throwing anyway. We played in the hottub, Emlet jumping to Nisou or me but thinking that ZBD was not big enough to catch her. She thought she was a fine size for pony riding, though, and I was even better because then both could ride me. This was I was game for until my hoove-knees gave out; they lasted longer on NBM's more thickly carpeted floors--visiting her and another part of SEM's family is the only time we left the property for three days.
Emlet and I constructed wheeled towers of Duplo blocks, which ran me over ("Not on me! On you!" in the sweetest French-accented, fluent English you ever have heard); ZBD and I constructed Minas Tirith in Lincoln Logs. We chased me around and around, and when I turned to chase Emlet instead, she corrected me: "No, you chase me!" We colored in coloring books, meticulously recapping a pen after each use, and generally coloring only in or near a small detail of the bigger picture. We admired Siblet in her elfin hat, seven-year-old ZBD's first sewing-machine project. I french-braided waist-length, very thick, but very fine, and glistening with spun gold, hair, so I told the stories of Rumpelstiltskin and Rapunzel. In addition to populating Minas Tirith, the animals I brought from the zoo (a tapir, sloth, mandrill, okapi, and jaguar; in plastic) served most excellently as chew-toys, especially the tapir. Nanabush sometimes had companionship in the stuffed wolf, who was either Jonathan the Husky (some Charenton folk are manic UConn basketball fans) or the Big Bad Wolf (under Emlet's care), and Emlet chastised me for hugging Nanabush hello because he is her "own personal animal."
Emlet's every expression is charming, but her clownface is something else, especially paired with my sister's and ZBD's. A couple of weeks ago I asked my mother if her Monday was free and, if it was, when my sister told her to get in the car, to get in and be driven like a good passenger. I had considered whether to tell my mother I was going home at all, and when I first told CLH only, she suggested my spending Sunday night in Old Lyme--which pressure to be from Charenton untimely ripped is why I debated. I put my hoof-knee down and kept to my suggestion of their coming to me and mine instead. And so we surprised our mother. Who was quite good and didn't say anything about my hair or my lack of grandchildren or curry in the chicken (although she was surprised by the baby épinards in the salad) or otherwise overly critical. However, she could not keep the vowels right in the children's names. CLH said she finally has got Kitty's sex straight, so that's something at least. Emlet's other godgrandmother also i'd the e in her third syllable but needed only one repetition to get it right; my own mother's mauling of Siblet's name into something you might name a sow and continuing to do so after more than six corrections made my teeth itch. When she did this, CLH and I would catch one another's eye and roll them--a difficult simultaneous manuever--and my mother, noticing this, would remark to Nisou each time that we thought it was "funny" when she mispronounced the name. Finally I told her it's not that we find the mispronounciation funny but that we need to sympathize with each other about her inability or refusal to learn Siblet's actual name.
But mostly my mother did fine. Although I am not always uncomfortable with strangers, I know which parent I favor when I tend that way. I wonder if she noticed how comfortable I am in the one house, inviting my guests to sit or drink, making salad, reminding Emlet to go pee, compared to her house where I always feel on eggshells and fear to make myself a sandwich lest I ruin her menu planning.
RDC returned from his aunt & uncle and other uncle and an early Thanksgiving with our other family (SFR is the prettiest baby ever) and baptism and meeting DWJ's betrothed. We had one last dinner together; RDC sympathized with and shared my inability to leave; he came up to kiss Emlet goodnight ("Goodnight, Tonton Richard!") while I was reading my last revolting rhyme to her; and then we did leave.
I had the most wonderful time.
Monday my throat had a few razors in it; by Tuesday morning it hurt. Smooching little kids will do that, except that quickly? So I might have passed it to them, especially since RDC had the same thing. Spreading Dr. Seuss and pestilence wherever we go, that's us.
In Logan I bought some books from Borders because I knew I would continue ignoring Iris Murdoch and James Baldwin, as I had all weekend, this time because my brain was falling out rather than being otherwise occupied. I bought pop history.
On the third-empty plane, I hoped I might be spared rowmates. Nope. They cruelly prolonged my hope by being the last passengers to board (which I noticed for certain because of how long I stood in the aisle while they filed in, watching the attendants arm the doors). I did offer to swap my aisle for their window seat, but they declined.
In a four-hour flight, the two of them got up a total of five goddamn times, two for her and three for him, which--hey!--I wouldn't have noticed or minded at all if they had just sat aisleward from me to start with. And neither would speak to me or touch my arm (I wore headphones) while they wanted out or in. They would just stare, each of the ten times I moved for them. I hated them.
A substitute for my own dog in the fifth picture. One day I hope to find myself such a beautiful dog as in the third picture. A normal gray hen for Kerry.
I spent Wednesday watching "The Lord of the Rings" and organizing photographs. I didn't read a drop but all my photographs are now sorted out. It was just the kind of activity I could do breathing through my mouth, and since my sinuses plugged both nose and brain that suited me fine.
We had a very small and very lovely Thanksgiving chez our friends, four adults and one baby boy and one Little Stranger and two actual cats and the one phantom. One of the two actual cats is actually a dog, because he is so friendly, unless he is a shawl, because he wears himself around your neck.
Charley is also the head of the family, because he sat on a chair peering over the end of the table while the humans sat on either side.
We had an amazing meal: poached pears with prosciutto, crab-stuffed tomatoes, butternut squash soup, pork loin with oven-roasted potatoes, green beans, apple pie with cheese (because we forgot cinnamon ice cream) and ginger chocolate cake.
Yeah, I've got this ginger-chocolate thing going on, haven't I? Before she knew what desserts I'd brought, JJM remembered that a cookie I served at Clove's shower was very popular, and very tasty, but she didn't remember what it was. I was glad she remembered it favorably because RDC had confessed while I baked that he is not as wild about this cookie as I (and everyone I bake it for) is. But I only cook desserts, and the other day I pulled Moosewood Desserts off the shelf and it fell open, I swear, like Dr. Dolittle going to Spidermonkey Island because that's how the atlas opened to Tommy's pin, to ginger chocolate cake. With mango sauce.
Also I made an apple pie, because it is Thanksgiving. Actually RDC made the crust, because while peeling and slicing and flavoring apples is not precision work, making pastry is. It was fun, cooking all day with each of us listening to our books.
Both were good, and RDC admitted that he liked the cake, so mleah.
I was sitting in the living room surrounded by my project with Blake on his windowsill. He began shrieking and freaking, which alerted me to the noise of a murder of crows outside. I went to the window and looked out: In a tree across the street I saw three crows and a dangling...pigeon, which resolved into not only a pigeon but also its fate. RDC is not sure if the pigeon is dead yet in the left shot. I think it is, because at least a minute but probably more time has elapsed since impact, enough for the crows to crowd in, and raptors kill with their feet. Possibly it would have fed in the tree if it could have mantled enough, and not just by overbalancing with one wing, to protect its meal from greedy crows; possibly the entire pigeon was too heavy conveniently to carry away. It flew off with the remainder of its prize after tearing out and gulping down what looked like most of the breast meat and gizzards.
I wish I had seen the stoop and the kill, because raptors are the amazing animals, but through binoculars from my porch I got to watch the sharp-shinned hawk feed on pigeon sashimi. I think it was female, because it was on the larger side of the 12"-14" range for its species. (About the species, at least, I am certain.) And RDC used his birthday present, not from the porch but with lots of zoom.
The photographic evidence. These took a great chunk of True History of the Kelly Gang (not all its 14 hours), all of "I, Claudius" (13 episodes) and all of a six-episode "Mansfield Park" that had to recommend it only that it wasn't the "updated" 1999 version (Edmund Bertram is not hot, let alone in a 1983 bodice-ripper way), and seven hours of I Am Charlotte Simmons. I'm a little slow.
Emlet's was a bought stocking. Sewing her name into place took eleventy-nine years because I had to reach further and further into the toe for each letter. I beaded her name in red seed beads, sewed on the letters, covered the joins of beaded loops with pompoms where necessary, added the red velvet cuff atop the made one, and strung and sewed the bead and jingle trim to the cuff.
Siblet's stocking went a little easier. Emlet's was the last of the made stockings in the store, so I had to cut and stitch Siblet's from fabric, but I could do that after I sewed the name down. My embroidery hoop to hold the fabric taut and its not yet being a tube made that much easier. I figured out, possibly by the final E in Emlet, how to close loops of wire, hence no pompoms in the latter two stockings, but I was still clumsy shaping the letters, hence the squarish O in Siblet.
When I bought the red stocking fabric, a day or two after the first supply run, I didn't find green velvet so I used red furry stuff instead. I had already sewn it, completely butchering the join of leg to cuff necessitating the four-pompom camouflage (seen between cuff and leg), when yet a third supply run netted me SFR's green velvet.
I could find only red and silver jingle bells, not the green jingles I had envisioned. I might have used green or red seed beads instead of silver for the trim of the silver-jingled ones, but after completing each name I hated those beads. The straight, unshaped trim didn't drive me nearly as much to distraction.
SFR's stocking is a little bigger than the other two because I felt really bad about Siblet's, which I sewed from fabric, being accidentally smaller than sister Emlet's prefab one--I patterned Siblet's on Emlet's but then took too much hem. But SFR's being significantly wider and longer shouldn't register on the unfairness scale, since she is in a different family. It's the (slighter) difference between Emlet's and Siblet's that worries me. RDC says that it's okay because Siblet is smaller than Emlet: but that is older-sibling rationale right there, OMFB. She won't always be smaller, only younger.
My favorite is Emlet's, even though it's the messiest. I like the red bead on green better than the green on red, and I like the contrast of leg and cuff. I am not sure I'm done with Siblet's, though the rule of this sort of thing is To Know When To Leave It the Hell Alone Already: it wants, or I want, more green. Hmm. Maybe I could redo the trim with green seed beads instead of silver? SFR's cuff is too long, maybe to the point of out of proportion, and still needs a loop to hang it by.
Overall, though, I'm quite pleased.
Another illustration of how my mother is ready to think the worse and not the better of me.
With some backstory: one summer in the early '90s my mother accepted my suggestion to go to the White Elephant Sale. Wishing to avoid the clusterfuck of little bluehaired old ladies much more skilled at rummaging through others' castoffs than parallel parking, I parked farther from the Congregational Church than my mother would have wished. She complained of the distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile, despite my having offered to drop her closer, and she complained that I walked too fast. "It’s not a race," she chided me. I wasn't racing but walking, and told her she could opt to keep pace with me as well as I slow for her. She tried to make me guilty for not adopting her head down, eyes on toes gait, or for having a healthy stride, or uncomfortable for not pairing up. This was hardly incentive for me to stay by her side, and I continued at my own pace.
While she didn't, I am glad to say, increase her volume to keep me within range, she did resume the haranguing when she got to the churchyard where we waited. She said something about how "everyone" must think me very rude to walk away from my mother. I didn't contradict the obvious weak bit in that, that passersby and driversby were unlikely to have noticed or judged our relationship, and that unlike her I didn't care if people looked at me funny.
Whereupon one of the little bluehaired ladies turned and said for herself and her companion, "We're looking at you funny." Now, she might have meant "Stop arguing/ with your mother /in public," but she was laughing as she said it, because she had said it while making a silly face: she was looking at me funny. I laughed at her, and smiled at my mother, saying, "My point."
Meaning, that this woman had just bolstered my point in this discussion, which is that no one was judging or dismissing me for failing to escort my 50-year-old mother along the sidewalk by her arm, or even for quibbling with her.
But my mother, anxious to see the worst in me and not engaging the interloping, ready to be chatty old woman, said, "You always think everything’s a competition. No one’s taking points." Just as she saw my walking my usual pace as trying to compete with her instead of just...walking.
Physically, of course, it wouldn't've been hard for me to match her pace. Emotionally, I had nothing but criticism to gain by accompanying her. And, I confess, I was thoroughly enjoying, at long last, my own automobile; and I wanted her to experience a morsel of my years of frustration at reprimanded for being "late" when I arrived at a meeting place at her dictated time rather than reading her mind and showing up five or three minutes early, as she had, and thus wasting her whole day. My car: my control. I didn't care if she couldn't or wouldn't keep up with me, or if she felt manipulated. I could have gone to the sale on my bike and spared us both the togetherness and the spat. Oops.
So anyway.
As I said, the Charenton cookies turned out better than the Denver ones. That is, most of them did, but I burned the first tray. HEBD crunched into one and opined, "That’s the best-tasting charcoal briquet I've ever had."
Later I told her, "One way I know I’m better is that your saying that didn't hurt my feelings."
We were bringing dessert to the lunch table at the time, so my mother heard the "One way I know I’m better..." sentence without any background or context. She criticized, "Listen to you, Lisa! You're 'better'?!"
At the time, it didn't occur to still naïve moi that she assumed that her younger daughter of course was comparing herself to others, at all and then daring to do so favorably, so I said simply--or arrogantly, depending on your point of view--"Yes, better. Once it would have struck me to the quick."
HEBD said, "I know exactly what you mean."
And why HEBD knows is that she listens to what I say sympathetically instead of critically...something I can do with almost everyone but my mother. I do recognize my own hypocrisy. Some of it. Sometimes.
---
Earlier I called my mother to tell her about the sharp-shinned hawk and the progress on the stockings. Blake was "helping." I had given him a couple of inches of wire-edged ribbon to pick apart, which was fun for a while; and he had his shoelace; and early in the beading process I made him his own little bead string to nibble so he wouldn't want mine; each of these things, because they were his own, quickly became unfun. His latest desire was the big plastic heads of straight pins, and then, possibly because they're shiny but possibly because he's just not that bright, the pointy ends. So on the phone with her I asked my mother how she had managed to sew with a little kid scampering around, although I granted that even I probably hadn't wanted to gnaw on straight pins. This she granted, and then she said something that really pleased me, because it showed that she remembered something:
"You just wanted to play with the cowboy and the horse."
I laughed and laughed. I had recalled the same thing when threading my own sewing machine. Her old Singer take-up and maybe tension levers moved both up and down and back and forth, and the upper one was a simple eyed doohickey while the lower was longer and had both an eye and a slot. To toddler me, these were cowboy and horse, galloping along, and even the thread became reins. My own sewing machine (surprisingly, I do own one, though this stocking adventure was its first time out of the box in many many years) has only a horse, not a cowboy.
She doesn't remember my first word or step from years ago or my goddaughter's name from minutes ago. But she remembers the horse and cowboy. That's something.
*Dot Org is an occasional exception, in addition to UConn and Old Lyme, to my rule about not wearing things with words on them. A couple of years ago a sponsored event resulted in blue canvas bags with our logo on one side and the sponsor on the other. I attacked the sponsor's side with acetone and a blue permanent marker.
I am listening, which is worse than reading, to I Am Charlotte Simmons, and I just heard a detailed scene of freshling deflowering. One should not infer from "detailed" anything like "prolonged and sweet and fun and living up to expectations" (not that the defloweree had any). I jerked out the headphones in disgust, at greedy predators with no thought for their naïvely consensual prey, at Tom Wolfe for writing a character untrue to herself when his needs required, and at myself for having ever said unkind things about the partner with whom I shared a mutual first. However badly matched we were personality-wise, sexually we were just fine. When I consider how many hideous first experiences I have heard about, I am the more grateful that we spared each other haste and heedlessness.
I hope you're well and happy, NCS.
And ha! Thanks, Haitch, for the link: Tom Wolfe earns a Bad Sex in Lit award
Packages shipped: seven--SFR, RED, ZLT and CTL, HAO, RSH, DMB, Charenton. Packages to ship: two (CLH and RSH). My father's second can go out tomorrow, some way faster than ground, with the peanut butter cookies I baked this evening. I have to finish CLH's stocking and Catalog of Tackiness and should be able to ship hers Tuesday or maybe Wednesday. I wrote 15 cards but have to ask my father for new addresses for his sister and sister-in-law. I have 75, or 62 if I skimp, to go; this shouldn't be a problem if the ink cartridges hold out. This week I get to bake oodles of cookies, go to Blossoms of Light at the Botanic Gardens, have bothersome hair ripped from my skin, and get a haircut.
...ovaries. It's been over a year now and I think I have settled down. The first half was 26 27 30 25 26 22 24 but the second half has been 30 28 26 26 26 27 28 and that's better: not so much more often than 28 days to piss me off and not so much less often to stress me out. I have noticed I have a mood thing, though, at about three weeks, touchy and paranoid and so forth. Having recognized it only means that now I'll watch for it, and however much hormones might not cause, my expectation will fill in.
How very very pretty. A lot better than the lame Wild Lights at the Zoo, which I went to once, thankfully without paying for the unprivilege. At the Botanic Gardens, the color, size, and frequency of the bulb complements the plant in question, both its overall shape and that of the foliage, if any.
I had more to say, but it's been two months and I just discovered this is a draft and if I don't have a ticket stub in my scrapbook I still have to commemorate the evening somehow.
Well, yesterday we broke in the spirit not by watching the South Park short "The Spirit of Christmas" but by having a party. We didn't watch the short until this morning, but I think the spirit found its way to our house anyway.
I had wondered how to entertain the hatchlings. (Like the selectively particular matron I am, I put the dozen ornaments I dragonly love the best on the tree-shaped ornament stand I dragonly bought for dragonly display the year we didn't have a tree, so that there on the mantel they would be safe from hatchling exploration. As we trimmed the tree this year, one ornament already went off to the Great Big Christmas Tree in the Sky, and I didn't want it joined.) I printed several sheets of a hunt ("on the tree, can you find an elephant with a howdah? a spotted reindeer with wings? a merry-go-round? etc.") and brought my picture books upstairs and--big effort--offered up my crayons for sacrifice, along with a pack of construction paper, which last stayed downstairs in the kid-friendly basement. From my crafts box, left over from a Hallowe'en costume or two, I pulled red and white pipe cleaners. (I think the red ones gave shape to my Cat in the Hat bow tie, but I can't remember what the white ones were for. Maybe for when I wanted to be the misfit Spotted Elephant, to shape the trunk?)
Although Booboo didn't make the same fuss Mrs. Bates does, I stowed him safely in the fruit cellar called my closet. No child happened to play in the bedroom and there discover the less destructible Hamlet, Morse, Monty, and Pantalaimon, but in my study they did discover Dan'l Bloone the knock-off Beanie Baby blue bear, Ophelia the okapi, Babe the gallant pig, and the salamander from the Prado, as they were welcome to.
(Dan'l Bloone has not previously occurred in the census of my animals because it has lived at work all its years. A coworker gave it to me, a give-away from a Big Top the year that someone named Blue from Kentucky was involved with Dot Org. I brought it home specifically as a hatchling party favor.)
Almost-four-year-old Gethen is my new best friend (since Hallowe'en). She and I made candy-cane jewelry with pipe cleaners and colored pictures and played bumper balls (with the exercise balls) and one of us got a booboo on her toe and required two kisses and a band-aid to make it better. She wanted to be barefoot like Miss Lisa. I'm a bad influence.
Ms. Begonia has Scarlett call adults Miss or Mister Firstname, which I think is an excellent compromise between the possibly stand-offish Title Surname and the possibly overly egalitarian First Name Only. And Miss is just fine, easier to say than Mizz.
This morning on the porch (whither I had gone to shoo off some pigeons that are trying to nest atop a column) I discovered scary lump of…something. I am really hopeful that it is the Silly Putty that someone discovered and that I last saw with Scarlett. Does it discolor as it freezes? Because otherwise there is Silly Putty somewhere in the house.
A few coworkers came, including ÜberBoss who had never come to the house before. He liked it, which made me happy. He admired the upstairs décor and the downstairs plentitude of space and the kitchen work, and he admired Blake and had him on his shoulder. By the time Minne arrove, there was enough of a crowd that Blake was imprisoned, but he wasn't yet so frustrated not to be friendly. He bowed and chucked to her, and she asked how she should respond. I suggested bowing and chucking, and she did that for a few volleys. Another coworker's almost-two-year-old daughter really wanted Blake, and while her mother sensibly kept her fingers out of the cage, the proximity of children and the crowd in general respectively frightened and frustrated Blake, whose mood didn't improve for quite a while after the attendees thinned and aged enough for him to have the liberty of the top of his cage.
I invited Kal's aunt and uncle, since I have been to their house for dinner but never met them: Kal was house- and pet-sitting, so I had met Picasso the green-wing macaw (red otherwise, and so perfectly Christmas-colored) and the dogs and cats but not them. Also, parrot people should flock together. We hit it off, as Kal expected.
RDC fishes with Gethen's father, but I have seen the parents only at party intervals since they moved a distance away. They hosted us for a lovely Thanksgiving in the mountains, lo these eight years ago, but Gethen's mother and I don't know each other very well. So in the basement as Kal and I played with Gethen, her mother asked if she and I were sisters. We looked at each other and grinned. She was willing, because she never has had a sister, and I allowed as how I'd have to vet the situation with CLH but it would probably be okay. Gethen's mater meant physical resemblance, more than inner sanctum communion. I don't see it, but maybe because I am used to looking like only CLH. Certainly how we followed each other's cues playing with Gethen could have increased whatever resemblance exists.
Gethen asked if this was my house, and what my name was (I might not be her best friend, even is she is mine, but her father said she'd been looking forward to going to Lisa's house all week). And when she ran to me for huggies and I swooped her up, a stranger asked if this was my little girl.
Yes, a stranger. I invited some neighbors to come, including the man across the street whose ex-girlfriend I knew better than him. They both saw the garden evolve from its inception, and while he and I had not been on more than hi and isn't the garden beautiful, thank you so much, basis until last night, the girlfriend, while she lasted, and I chatted a bit more. Anyway, I invited him, saying it was an open house for neighbors and regretting that I know only the people on my own block. Farther afield I know dogs' names but not so much people. He took my mild chatty statement further, inviting some other neighbors to meet him here, which friend-of-a-friend-ing I have never participated in but worked really well, I am happy to say.
RDC came down into playland to say that people we had never met were in the house, and I went up to say hi, and the woman, Scarf, and I hit it off immediately. Meanwhile Scarf's husband Drums and RDC did so over Thomas Pynchon, Java programming, and the North Mississippi All-Stars. Scarf invited another neighbor, and all was good.
Lou invited us to her own party in the evening, and while I like her a lot and am clearly swinging more toward outgoing again (see below), when the neighbors left to continue their evening at a nearby jam I used Lou's party as an excuse not to accompany them but didn't go. I had been on all day and had had enough.
I asked Dot Org's COO if I might ask her daughter to the Lemony Snickett movie, since she is the only child I know (of) who has read them. I met her only once, on the way to Don Giovanni, but I know she is outgoing and friendly, and the COO and I are palsy about Harry Potter and Lemony Snickett, so I figured it would be okay. And it is. We three have a date for a girls' night this week, and if it is not Tuesday then I will celebrate Solstice with Scarf and some other neighbors.
The earlier part of the evening was Blossoms of Light, which I bailed on; but RDC and I went to Drums and Scarf's house for glögg (I drank one full glass of mulled wine, minus the bit I dribbled on my sweater because I'm a lush) and chili and Solstice. RDC brought mix CDs for Drums and the across-the-street neighbor, whom I guess I'll call Howard, and I brought star-shaped cream-cheese cookie-cutter cookies (wrapped in star tissue paper). Most of the attendees were neighbors, which was really good. Scarf knocked on every door in the neighborhood this summer and fall, ensuring that everyone was registered and planning to vote, which is how she met a lot of them.
Scarf is intensely cool (worked in Antarctica, has been to every continent but Africa, travels with her dog), intensely committed (it's awfully brave in my book to knock on people's doors, though clearly I am more sympathetic about it if you do so for political rather than religious reasons), and overall intense. After she sketched what the Solstice ritual would be, I smiled to the woman standing next to me. "Scarf has the biggest heart I have ever met," said she, and after only two meetings I agree it is quite sizeable.
I didn't stay very long, just an hour and a half. Bless Scarf for not pressing me to stay but--after ensuring I had participated in the rites--just thanking me for coming. I stayed long enough to light a candle (for Emlet) and to write a wish (for my sister) for the coming year and tie it to their tree.
The downstairs fridge has Gethen's drawing of a dragonfly and two flowers. Haitch gave me hot chocolate to remind me of her all winter long. Scarf welcomed me to her Solstice celebration. I sent Kal home to Mitten Country with cookies and a card signed "love actually" (for the movie we intended to watch together but which I didn't have at the time), to which she responded, briefly because at work, "ditto." My mantel is plastered with cards from everyone--my uncle admiring my pluck and spirit, PSA's son in a spectacular Japanese costume, SFR surrounded by the paraphernalia of a first Christmas. My cup runneth over.
It is nonetheless somewhat short of full. Tonight my longest best beloveds are collected at Charenton for Nisou's birthday. Having a Christmas birthday makes you feel shortchanged as a child, but as an adult can be a blessing because your best present is seeing everyone come home. The house is full of children, cacophony, and revelry, but one after another HEBD, Nisou, PLT, and SEM closeted themselves in a pantry so they could hear me on the phone.
I spoke only briefly with each, HEBD telling me what everyone is doing--SPG stirring fondue, a nine-year-old the oldest and only boy of at least eight children, the Zs surely hatching a drama or two--and Nisou accepting my birthday wishes and love and PLT pondering gulping tempting foods and my god-husband SEM threatening a February visit and being the last to agree to distribute all my love and nose-lickings and strangulations of love to the rest and especially our goddaughter.
I am just a tad homesick and jealous. It should be just envy, but it's jealousy too, because I am selfish.
Today we went to the Denver Art Museum to see Tiwanaku, an exhibit of ancestors of the Inca; Japanese Prints: 150th Anniversary of United States-Japan Relations; Heaven and Home: Chinese Art of the Han Dynasty from the Sze Hong Collection; and "No Boundaries," 13 works "leading us to the intersection of fine art and fiber art."
I miss downtown, I miss noontime access to the museum, and I even miss the ménage aux roues that is the Colfax bus. We had a lovely time, even finding points of commonality among the two-dimensional art we liked--I liked a depressing still life and he liked a Georgia O'Keeffe, and then we came home and had tea and read in the direct sun of later (and slightly longer) afternoon.
So I had a lovely day, and I am surrounded by love: my tree, with ornaments from my sister and grandmother; my husband, napping on the couch with Blake; my bear, whom I fetched for the last few pages of Sophie's Choice because Blake was otherwise occupied; and I had a nice conversation with my mother this morning. But I still miss the rest of my family.
Yes, a nice conversation with my mother. Overnight I had a bad dream about her, she and her husband building an ostentatious house without windows (ooo! symbolism!) and she getting furious with me because I was so foolish as to walk home (across the road) from HPV's house (in real life, our parents' houses are joined by a now-overgrown path through the woods between) in the dark without an escort.
In daylight, I talked with my mother. RDC says 80% of our discourse is my explaining things to her. She wanted to know if I made my cards. I told her yes, I colored them each with crayons so carefully that they looked like they were printed, and she understood I was making a joke! She wanted to know where I got the stock (Office Depot) and if that was like a Staples. She appreciated points of the Catalog o' Tackiness I made for CLH but didn't get the toilet seat illustrated with fishing lures (of course she didn't get it: the reason for its inclusion is its utter absurdity) or the story behind the crystal objet de snot that I called the Ice Princess. My sister, of course, understood why this thing would have to be preserved from the Cassadine family and probably explained it to our mother at the time, but today was four whole days later so she'd already forgotten. From a gardening catalog I included a photograph of a cement (therefore white) tomato and gave the plot summary of Bunnicula before querying why anyone would want a cast of a giant tomato at all, let alone a white instead of red one.
She didn't remember Kal's name but did remember that I had a new friend only half a year older than my youngest babysitting victim, and was happy to hear about Scarf and socializing with neighbors, and when I confessed to homesickness, she seemed purely to sympathize without taint of blame, since it's my fault, or my victimization at my husband's nefarious hands, that I am so far away.
Awake, if not asleep, I get along with my mother better now than I ever have. And that makes me happy. More spillage.
Blake has been one-footed for most of the day. He was mad when we went to the museum but has happily napped or sung in his box since we've been home.
I have no idea what he's looking up at. I checked for spiders and saw none. Possibly he is looking up at the ceiling fixture to bring on a sneeze, but I don't know if cockatiels have that light reflex at all, and he didn't sneeze, and the reading lamp is brighter anyway. Possibly he is just a cockatiel.
yawning and napping on my leg
After we returned from the museum on Thursday I made gingerbread. I knew enough to make the top and bottom the same size and I really tried to make the walls the same height but unsuccessfully, so I joined some of the walls to the roof with marshmallows. Also it didn't occur to me to leave a brim, so my gingerbread drum was a slice of column. Drums don't have brims, but I've never met a drum that bore any resemblance to what I created. It was, as I anticipated it, a reason for me to play with frosting, and as such I should have gone prospecting for decorations earlier and farther afield than Christmas Eve at the corner store, and however much a drum is decorated isn't the top usually empty, for drumming? Not mine. It didn't occur to me until after I had glued (with confectioner's sugar and water) a few M&Ms to the top that I shouldn't have. And the 7-11 didn't have regular marshmallows (as I knew from an excursion that was supposed to have resulted in s'mores, since we had an outdoor fire, instead of ice cream) but only wee ones for cocoa, so I crammed about three onto the ends of unmatched candy canes (the only two I had) and used more glue.
It was a sight. A damn funny one, I thought, and I expected it would still eat well, but its present-ness was in its humor value. Except that its recipient is two, when a drum is a drum and candy is candy; and his parents are polite; and it did eat well. Well, now I know what I did wrong. Experience won't give me taste but perhaps it imbued me with construction guidelines. RDC said it looked like Stonehenge with a roof.
When I talked to Charenton, Mémé thanked me for the measuring spoons (making cookies there last month, I had use of a tablespoon and a half-teaspoon measure, and I am not so skilled a cook that I easily got by without the regular assortment) and the earrings. Also during that visit, she complimented my tanzanite (periwinkle blue) studs and I told her how they had come to be, with RDC finding them when one of the amethyst studs was (temporarily) lost. She told me then of having lost a hummingbird earring, and I asked if it was a flat gold hummingbird touching a flat gold dime-sized disk at three points of beak, wing, and tail, because her daughter had given me such a pair many years ago and I had also lost one of mine. Gold's not my thing and I was thinking to give her the other. But she said no, these were three-dimensional birds. Today I told her that when I shopped for stocking materials and came across the wee hummingbirds, I decided to make her a new pair. (I already had periwinkle seed beads; it's a favorite color of both of ours). "You made them?" she asked, now appreciating the gift more. I was glad she liked them and also a little stoked she hadn't immediately seen they were hand-made.
The stockings went over well, I am happy to report: Siblet did not have a stocking yet and the ones they were going to use were flimsy and unpersonalized. Nisou liked the beading, colors, and fabric. Whew. The fish puzzle is beautiful and the circus animal ornaments perfect. I liked them because they looked handmade and because one of them is a giraffe, like Nanabush. The books--The First Starry Night and In the Garden with Van Gogh--Mémé and I duplicated. Ha! We have the same excellent taste. So they might go on to one of Nisou's French god-children. (She has four altogether: everyone wants her in their family.)
I am wearing a t-shirt from the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, even though I am not much of a t-shirt wearer anymore: Nisou gave it to me, and it has Eric Carle's catepillar and Leo Lionni's mice and Maurice Sendak's wild things on it. Also an M whose picture-book source I do not recognize.
My mother's husband liked his share of a llama, except from now I think I am going to give six months of education to a child in someone's name instead of livestock. Except maybe a goat. I really want to give someone a goat. My notstepmother loved her turtle cookie-cutter and ornaments and chocolate-covered blueberries and I hope she likes having read Falling Angels as much as she likes anticipating reading it. My father is looking forward to True History of the Kelly Gang and probably has already played a round of gold in his new shirt on his new tees. And my mother seems to like her slate-teal fleece sweater. So that's all good.
When my sister and I talked the other day, she asked if I had listened to the message she left at my cell number. "I lost my phone," I told her. In it, she had told me about Kitty's out-of-body experiences with her new catnip toy and other escapades from their early Christmas. The one escapade that bears repeating is An Improvement on our mother's part. I made my sister a construction paper house to contain a token contribution toward a down payment on an actual house, and when she lifted the roof and withdrew the currency, our mother asked, "Oo, how much did she give you?" CLH just didn't answer, so that was fine, but the Improvement is that the next day, our mother apologized, uttering the actual words "I'm sorry, I was wrong" for what my sister reckons was the second or possibly third time in her own life. CLH supposes that BJWL's husband gave her a ration of shit, CLH's phrase, for the crass question. CLH tried to communicate appreciation for our mother's accepting her own responsiblity without possible implication that appreciation meant such inquiries are permissible. When CLH and I unwrapped stockings this morning over the phone, she said something that cracked me right the hell up: "why is there a phone in here?" "I found my phone," I told RDC. CLH and I appreciated our own and the other's stupidity: mine for shipping my own phone two thousand miles away and hers for not making the connection between unpacking such a device last weekend and my announcing two days ago I had lost one.
My notstepmother gave me a cookie-dough scooper, sort of like a melon baller but with a half-circle scraper thingie to knock the dough out. That will help me make more uniform cookies. My sister gave me a silicon sheet for over a cookie sheet. This season I converted myself to parchment paper: I could prepare all the batter at once, instead of having to wait for a cookie sheet to cool to use it again and not waiting and melting the dough before baking it, and then slide a prepared paper onto a cooled sheet as a rack opened. Genius, I say. Also the cookies were popular at the party, which made me happy. My mother gave me elderberry jelly, which makes me terrifically happy. You can never buy it anywhere and I have got to make sure she records all her secret berry patches more permanently than only on her mental treasure map. Also she dug out yet another of Granny's photograph albums, this one full of treasures. I really want one of Gram Lawrence on a moped (these exist from a mother-daughter jaunt to Cape Cod, I think), and one of my father tilting a beer bottle into the mouth of his diapered younger daughter so that when people say "you've really never drunk a beer?" I can show them that okay, yes I have done, but not for decades.
RDC made me a stand for the emu egg he brought me from Australia. On its face is etched a cockatoo-like bird, and before he flew home from Sydney he said I would either get the present he intended or many itsy-bitsy ones. The one unshattered present he intended rested on its side on a pallet of bubble wrap for months until yesterday. He bought a gnarled root of manzanita wood from the wood-working store, ground all the dirt out of it, carved out a more egg-shaped curve than the natural one that inspired its use, and sliced off the bottom into a flat surface. It is lovely, and now lives atop the bookcase.
I didn't make him anything. I beaded his name onto his stocking, which he already knew, and fed the brilliant suggestion of a cookbook holder to my mother for my sister to steal. It was brilliant because I knew he would like it but was unlikely to know such a thing exists. Otherwise I gave him books: five. It is the first year he has received more books than I. Except that one book, and another from his mother, are really presents for me, along with cookware: Roasting: A Simple Art and The Breadbaker's Apprentice.
Oh, that's why I've had Kate Bush's "Houdini" in my head: the cadence of the entry title. "With a kiss/ I'd pass the key/ And feel your tongue/ Teasing and receiving."
Today I took a bus from closer to the house and then walked a different 1.5 mile to work. This might not be always as pleasant a walk as the other route's--although today it was snowing and therefore beautiful--but it's a good idea to get the part I cannot control done sooner, and done with a more reliable bus than the previous, slightly more direct one I had used. A mile and a half is a fine walk, but having to split it around a bus that might or might not come vexed me, and not to walk from one stop to the next because the bus would skip me while between them wasted my time.
I walked through newer developments that attempt to mimic the front porch neighborhood and fail: The houses have garages on the alleys instead of bulging out of the facade, belying their true significance, but just as these icky bulging garage houses' residents enter from their garages and hardly use their front doors at all, so too with these houses. They don't have mailboxes at their houses but use one central deposity per block, located at the head of the alley so you can get your mail from your car as you drive home. I saw people walking their dogs in the alleys, not on the sidewalks in front. Even graveled front yards, which no one can enjoy aesthetically, are tightly fenced in. Bah.
Closer to Colfax I passed through a much more modest neighborhood of houses that would not be out of place in eastern Connecticut if their lots were slightly bigger. My neighborhood is older and crumblier and last month a man was sleeping on our porch, but this one I walked through today felt a lot less friendly. Even some of the side-streets (running north and south) didn't have sidewalks.
Being my sister's sister, I wanted to take the shortest route when the legal route seemed unnecessarily long. Almost at work, I could have curved around a bend of road or cut through a school's playgrounds. Naturally I cut through the playground, but I won't again: by the time I was near enough to see that the chainlink fence was locked, I would have had to do the dreaded backtracking to return to the legal route. I scaled the eight-foot fence easily enough, since I could use the mid-way rail as a foothold, but I do not have the upper-arm strenth to push myself away from a fence on the descent and didn't relish dropping along it and snagging my favorite flesh. I could get no purchase in Dansko clogs. So I shook them off, toed down the fence the old-fashioned way, and regained my shoes without having to put my sock feet in the snow. (Yes, socks: it was snowing.) The opposite side of the yard was easier: shorter fence.
It is a private school and therefore trespassing more than going through a public school's field might have been. So I'll be legal from now on. And I imagine I don't look like a tall child anymore but like a freak. Le sigh.
One Sunday in December, opening the curtains in the living room, I saw a man curled up on the porch, against the house, kind of under the swing. If I had been alone I would called the police, but as it was RDC went outside and woke him. Does that make me a wimp? or prudent? While RDC and he spoke, I put some Clif bars and fruit in a bag, and gave it to RDC as he came in and out to give the man bus fare (so the man said). He had been let out of the joint, his phrase again, at midnight the night before and had been walking home until he got too tired. (RDC wondered to me later why our porch, and I suggested that it was the first on the block not to have its light on, let alone additional festive ones.) He wore only a light jacket and asked if we could spare him one, and it struck me later we could have replaced our own even if we didn't have any unused ones around. Sorry, man.
I'm thinking I should keep a spare pair of gloves in my pockets and get a leash for my own. I can't give away my mittens but it is on the days I particularly don't want to give up my own gloves that the gloveless's red fingers seem coldest. CLH did give me a new pair of violet chenille gloves in my stocking, so I could carry the lavender pair.
Or just donate them. This weekend I finally made a trip to Goodwill, with books and a set of mixing bowls and another of glasses and clothing and toys and Dan'l Bloone.
I've been playing geography games recently, and I have a bone to pick with a few countries of the world. Brunei is clearly an Arab-sounding name and the country therefore does not belong in southeast Asia. Similarly, Suriname belongs in Africa, not South America. Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, and Malawi: did one person name all of you? What's the deal with Mauritius and Mauritania being not, say, the male and female halves of an archipelago, but a large chunk of land and a tiny island on opposite sides of a continent? But the worst offenders are the Guineas. Guyana and French Guiana are not Guineas but sound too much like Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equitorial Guinea, and Papua New Guinea to escape my wrath. Does "Guinea" mean "equatorial"?--should I paint Ecuador with the same brush? Why does the island of New Guinea not hold all of Papua New Guinea?
The Lonely Planet's thumbnail history of Papua New Guinea says, "The first European contact in 1526-27 was by the Portuguese explorer Jorge de Meneses, who named the island Ilhas dos Papuas (Island of the Fuzzy Hairs). The Spaniard Inigo Ortiz de Retes later called it New Guinea because he thought the people similar to those of Guinea in Africa."
Hmm, Lonely Planet has a few useful thumbnail histories. Suriname was named for its major river, and the Dutch got it in trade with England for New Amsterdam. There's a trade it might have learned to regret.
How important is knowing about the three technological improvements in medieval European agriculture that improved the yield of feed from seed from something miserable like 2:1 to something that allowed for not only survival but growth, like 15:1 if I recollect at all,* compared to knowing about how the world currently is? Of course Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana were sugar colonies; of course the England, the Netherlands, and France enslaved East Indians, Africans, and Indonesians on their plantations. Well, it's important to know both. So my next time-sink will be at least these thumbnails and maybe more.
* These were the horse collar (previous harnesses tended to impede an animal's respiration), three-field rotation, and better plows. I'm not sure about that third one: though a heavier plow was necessary for soil in northern Europe (wetter and heavier than that within the Roman Empire's boundary where a light plow was adequate), I think I learned something more specific than "heavier."
Almost to the gym, RDC realized he had forgotten my gym bag. (When I take the bus in the morning, he brings my bag.) He made as if to turn north to home, but there and back would have been 40' at least. Also, my iPod battery was nearly dead.
Instead I went happily to the library, the Virginia Village branch that was my first Denver library. I borrowed Secret of the Andes, a new book by John Leonard, stories by Carson McCullers, and The Castle, because I never finished listening to it.
Back at the gym, I soaked in the whirlpool for 20 minutes reading Ann Nolan Clark.
Pretty much the ideal workout in my opinion.
STL and PLT and I were talking about movies, and PLT said that anyone who can name their 25 favorite movies is either supremely organized or a huge nerd. I replied, "Or both."
African Queen
Almost Famous
Becket
Brazil
Breakfast Club
Bringing Up Baby
City of Lost Children
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Fisher King
Harold and Maude
Henry V
Holiday
Jaws
Kafka
Lion in Winter
Lord of the Rings
A Man for All Seasons
Paper Moon
Persuasion
The Philadelphia Story
A Room with a View
Pulp Fiction
Sense and Sensibility
Shakespeare in Love
State of the Union
Wings of Desire
I couldn't recall them in alphabetical order. Alphabetizing them makes me nerdier, I should hope. Making this list made me realize my Viewing pages are terribly out of date.
Twenty-five is too specific a number: there are 26. "Breakfast Club" is, of course, because I am Crippled by Nostalgia. I've only seen "Becket" and "Kafka" once each, but having seen the former as a prequel to "Lion in Winter" and having a perverse attraction to Jeremy Irons and a not-so-perverse attraction to surreal movies like "Kafka," "Brazil," and "Cities of Lost Children," they stand. "Lord of the Rings" might not last. "Dead Man" should be in there and maybe "Pirates of the Caribbean," and since I clearly adore Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet both, maybe "Finding Neverland" as well.
It is so unfair that something as sweet-smelling and mostly cuddly as he is should be fronted with a beak, and that the more tired and cuddle-worthy he looks, the more likely he is to want not to be disturbed. That little beak, part way open in a threat, when all you want to do is scoop him to apologize for your imminent departure for the millet factory, even though he's so adorable you'd rather leave him on your lap and write a pointless paragraph in your online journal rather than disturb him by actually getting up and going to the millet factory...
He's fluffed out to about the size of a partridge, and he has no neck.
In other cute news, this morning two squirrels chased each other up and down the nectarine tree and leapt from it to my neighbor's roof and scurried across to jump into his tree and the second paused at the roof's edge, switching its tail with irritation while waiting for the branch to bounce predictably enough that it could gauge its leap. Evil little things.
Christ, that last paragraph, which I typed so I could watch Blake some more, only gave him time to tuck. Now I'll never get up.
But then as I came through the front door, the song on the radio (left on for Blake) was "Solsbury Hill." So things are looking up.
---
I told Shrink a while ago that I will write an incident in my journal but not my feelings about it. She suggested that this is another way I deny my emotions. I thought of that after copying this bit out. I'm listening to Mao II, which is why the title is "what I didn't need to hear" rather than "what I didn't need to read."
I've been considering her suggestion and I think she's wrong (but of course, I'm not sure! because I'm me). Writing for myself, describing an incident, I don't need to say what I felt about it because I will know. I don't keep a journal to remember how I felt but to remember what happened. This might be denial-ish but it's more that I am unlikely to forget how happy I was the morning after TJZD's wedding to lie in the windowseat with DEDBG and watch the sun come up and play with her hair, but I am likely to forget about the lying and the watching and the playing, and therefore the pleasure, if I didn't record them. If I just wrote, "had great weekend with the heavies" I would probably not remember the specific incidents and therefore not be able to recall the emotions. It is also unlikely I will forget how mortified or distressed I was by the Who Died? or Pot Roast incident even if I don't write them down.
The Pot Roast Incident no longer distresses me but it's the first one that I will admit to that occurred to me. The admission bit is important. I know why these passages matter to me, but I don't need publicly to admit the reasons. What's important is that I record the passages. If, years from now, rereading this, I cannot recall those reasons, that will mean the journal has served its purpose.
I feel like the father in The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, and why don't I possess that book so I can check that quote? Something like, "...and I have to talk to them too?" demanded querolously by a father who'd rather believe his disappointing children don't exist. Shrink says I have a hard time naming my emotions, maybe also talking about them. Whatever.
I mentioned here some time ago someone's observation that the smallest thing can send me tumbling or soaring. I think I'm more susceptible to a tiny stimulus having a disproportionate effect when I'm low, and I have been since Wednesday. I've been listening to "Mary Jane" when I usually skip from "Head Over Feet" straight to "Ironic," and putting Aimee Mann's "Wise Up" on repeat. It's not good.
If I hadn't brought Babe home I would have had a Talk to the Pig day. Instead I had a Talk to the Dog day, with Snowy on my...I don't know what to call it, a file drawer and a half on wheels with a cushioned top, combining a visitor chair and storage space in Cube Land...thing rolled into my doorway. I wasn't all that dire: Intern came over to chat and that was fine, and I had projects I could immerse myself in so I didn't have to contemplate the inner contours of my own skull. But it still pissed me off when Tex came over, sat on the hassock, and starting talking about one of these projects, and I noticed he had either, bad enough, not noticed Snowy, or worse, flicked him to the floor. "Don't knock Snowy around!" Except that my doorway was partially blocked, I didn't expect anyone to understand that I was having a Talk to the Dog day, but don't fuck with my animals.
I worked straight through, sometimes with two earbuds instead of one or none, how shocking, and left a little early. Home, I started putting away clothes. The first thing that made me grin was a button on the floor.
Wednesday I got it into my head to wear a suit, but the slate jacket had lost a button. I looked through my closet, wore another suit, and took advantage of having the car to scamper to a fabric store over lunch, where I bought less funky replacement buttons. And now here it is just at the foot of the bed.
The second thing was a slender envelope from Ofoto. My girls recently posted photographs from the family trip to Ireland that launched the eldest around the world (subject line from an email I received 27 December: "I'm fine" from Laos, not Thailand), and one was of the three of them, not just this two or another two, not with their parents (whom I love, of course, but who were not my victims). The last I have is at least five years old and taken in their backyard; now I have one of them that is recent and all done growed up and in front of a waterfall in Ireland.
Now I'm fine.
It makes me nervous that I am so malleable. There. I named an emotion.
Johnny Carson died today, yet we were not only in Denver but firmly at home doing much domestic stuff. Possibly I have conquered my celebrity road trip curse, starting with Elvis Presley, including Diana Spencer, conspicuously omitting John F. Kennedy Jr., and most recently featuring Ronald Reagan.
I just read an article in a ski magazine reporting that primary businesses in Heavenly Valley, California, are tourism, gaming, and then I shut the thing because I am clearly way too easy to annoy.
Gaming is Monopoly, Pictionary, Scrabble, chess, Dungeons and Dragons, paintball, or dominoes. Gambling is any of those games played for stakes, money or otherwise. If you play chess as a game, checkmate is the end of it. If you or your opponent has to pay the winner a nickel, it's a wager as well as a game. If you put your money into a slot machine, or anything that similarly operates with no input from you, it's only a gamble and not a game at all.
Anything that relies wholly on luck is not a game. I can barely accept blackjack, and craps I'm generously iffy about only because you do at least hold the dice in your own hands. Participating in a sport could be called "gaming" but it's probably running or swimming or playing football; betting on an event that you're not involved in is gambling; betting anyone other than your single opponent on an event that you participate in is cheating.
"Gaming." Renaming it doesn't remove the stigma. Not being stupid with your money, or greedy about others' stupidity, might do that.
Okay, I got over my exasperation with the one woman kicking herself in the head with a cowboy boot theme of most of the stories in Cowboys Are My Weakness because now I have heard and met Pam Houston, heard her read from Sight Hound, which I'm reading despite its plot focus being canine mortality, and met her at a friend of a daughter of a friend of a friend's house. Or something. Kal belongs to a book group that her aunt has been part of since its inception, and the daughter of one of its members knows Pam Houston, having met her at a Tattered Cover workshop almost a decade ago.
After the reading at the bookstore, about which I kept forgetting to email Scarf, who is starting a neighborhood bookclub with Cowboys, a mass of people descended on the book group member's daughter's/friend of Pam Houston's house for a cocktail reception. Which factored into why I omitted to tell Scarf about it: I was going to be in two new situations myself, Kal's book group and the thrice-removed friend's house, and Scarf deserves a lot more credit for keeping her head afloat than my considering only that it was deep enough water on my own. And I even wasn't on my own.
Pam--can I call her Pam, having been introduced to her? Houston sounds so cold--read bits from Sight Hound, which has 12 voices, nine human, two canine, and one feline. It was on the strength of the feline chapter that I decided to read the novel, and I hope I hear it as I read in Pam's voice, because it was damn funny. Yes, the cat, and not the first dog (she read another, more canine-sounding, dog's part after I had the book in my own paw). The dog is a charming character, but he didn't sound very canine, whereas the cat's thorough cattiness cracked me up.
Pam said she spends a lot of time thinking about what her dogs might be thinking about, which pleases me. I said to Kal's aunt that the one voice the book is missing is the parrot's. There is no parrot, which is a common fault in literature. The aunt, who will also need an alias, and her husband, and more the husband, are owned by a greenwing macaw. (This made Kal very easy to break in, as far as the eccentricities of my own household go.) I spend a lot of time thinking about what Blake might be thinking about myself, and I wonder if I could tell a story from his point of view. I read a translation of a dog barking, approximately, "Oh wow, I'm a dog! Look at me, I'm still a dog! Yea, a dog! I'm a dog I'm a dog yippee." It must have been a golden retriever speaking.
Blake is extremely sweet and self-centered and likes things to be Just So, like Junket, and I severely doubt that any attempt I made to get into his head could be amusing to anyone but me, and to me only if I could stop nattering enough to let him be heard.
Speaking of Blake, as of course I was, we were reading and having our heads pet and preening when he dropped an ordinary gray contour feather, probably from his shoulder by the look of it. We watched it fall and he resumed preening. Then when he scratched his head, a crest feather fell out, not one of the tall ones but one of the wide ones that give it body, asymmetrically vaned with discrete barbs. That one he seemed to want, maybe because I pounced on it, maybe because it's funner to run your beak up and down an inch-long rachis with some spine (metaphorically speaking) to it than a round contour feather almost without structure. The rule is that once it's out of his body, it's not his anymore--this counts for poop too, and yes, we elect to interpret his not wanting to have his tail or feet touched or be otherwise disturbed as poop-possessiveness--so now I own it. Just a few minutes later a center tail feather nearly detached, and I gave it the slightest of tugs to disengage it. Blake is nine and I have never given his feathers away and I think I have fewer perfect tail feathers from him than I have from Percy, whose (much prettier) tail feathers I would often give away and who lived only to 2.5. Mine.
I have one answer to my perpetual question, which is: What foods, if any could be so abominable, go with neither chocolate nor garlic?
Today Kal and I were sipping Starbucks' three hundred and ninety calorie (she has forbidden me to tell her the count) per 6 oz. serving of drinking chocolate and she said it compared well enough to her father's Christmas morning traditional hot chocolate, which this year was followed by grapefruit, which is not a good pairing.
I don't like grapefruit anyway--I think I've had a bite here and there of particularly mild ones that didn't pucker my throat--but she does. And even though she does, she agrees it's not a good pairing, and wouldn't pair with garlic either.
42. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Of course, now I'm thoroughly tuckered. We talked about Don DeLillo and metanarratives over burgers at Good Friends, with me grumpy and petulant until I was fed.
Now we are home and in fleece and one of us has a buddy chewing his beak on one shoulder. We are watching "ER" instead of "Judgment of Nuremberg," which is apropos but only happens to be the current Netflix selection because I expect to fall asleep at any moment.
I bought a 5280 whose cover proclaimed 101 things you've got to do in Denver. Six of the first 10 are not in Denver: getting traffic-jammed along I-70, seeing Blues Traveler at Red Rocks (officially part of the Denver Parks System, like Winter Park ski mountain), singing "America the Beautiful" atop Pikes Peak, attending a show at Chautauqua Auditorium (in Boulder), visiting a dude ranch, and riding the Georgetown rail loop. I still haven't been to Pikes Peak.
I've done a lot of the suggestions, but not all. I haven't seen Cleo Parker Robinson Dance or eaten at the Fort. I wouldn't kayak Confluence Park (if I could) unless by personality transplant my cuticles weren't ripped up and I could seal off the seven holes in my head and boil myself in disinfectant immediately afterward and ick. I have intended to find Mork and Mindy's house since before I moved here.
We are having our traditional Sunday night television gape-a-thon and something in "CBS Sunday Morning" reminded me of an omission from this list. RDC mocked my mocking so much of the list being from the Denver metro area instead of strictly obeying its own headline, but if I must accept crossing Trail Ridge Road as something to do in Denver, then the magazine should accept that it omitted something major. This week's penultimate story was narrated by Bill Geist, whom I usually fast-forward through: visiting Nederland's Dead Guy and participating in Dead Guy Days. That's an omission.
Quelle trip down Memory Lane I have started. After I finally sorted and stored my various crafts stuff in lots of little boxes, I hauled out my file crate, like a milk crate but collapsible and twice as long and with rails for hanging folders. I think in the summer of 1991, when I bought these supplies, I was Turning over a New Leaf and Being Disciplined and Organized as part of my Embracing Life as an Ascetic. I was going to be an ascetic because it went well with involuntary celibacy; as it turned out, I was a hedonist. Though a celibate one. Anyway, these files. "Articles," not further categorized. Rock and roll got its own folder, though. Clothing (my taste hasn't changed much in nearly 15 years, but I doubt the black velvet v-neck dress from J. Crew is still available, or that I would look any good in it). Veronica. Artwork. Fugly. Resumes and recommendations. School records. Financial aid.
I threw out maintenance records for Fugly and the warranty on long-gone Veronica (though I did keep, for nostalgia, the checks recording her purchase). I found artwork from MCB and Reese that can easily go in the copy boxes of correspondence (never to be weeded). I found my own artwork, which can go into a copybox of my own stuff, and a bunch of stuff for my scrapbook. I didn't start keeping all of my stuff until fifth semester, and even then, did I keep coursework from Stats 110V? I did not. If I should ever want to reread my notes from History 261 (Great Britain to 1603), I can. And my bluebooks. That's as far as I got Sunday: then we went to the gym.
Tonight we (a different we) are going to Freak Train, and the really fun folders are done: I'm not going to weed much, if anything, from my schoolwork folders. I combined a few things into a history of lisa folder, like the insurance report from when I witnessed a bike v. car collision in 1993 and how I bought Shoreline Pizza a new sign after knocking down their old one in 1992* and my acceptance into the National Honor Society in 1985 and notification of academic probation in 1987. Then comes more recombining into boxes, the new history folder and artwork into the journal box and the feeling tidy. I have three formerly white but aged and dingy copy boxes full of journals and letters in my study closet, and I have a scrapbook that includes not only invitations to parties and weddings and programs from plays but also ticket stubs from movies and flights, and as long as all of this stuff is in its place, just keeping it doesn't make me untidy. The boxes, two at the time, made an excellent stand for two more boxes on their sides that held hair accessories and hosiery and jewelry in our pre-furniture apartment days.
My first computer, a Macintosh SE, I named Veronica. I was collecting friends in threes at the time, and I decided Elvis Costello's "Veronica" from Spike and Veronica Sawyer from "Heathers" and my computer would be a good threesome. When I bought it from a satellite store of the Co-op, they didn't allow check purchases for over what sum I forget. They sold furniture and computers so this was pretty stupid, and of course I didn't have a credit card, plus there was a $400 per day limit from an ATM. I should go to the ATM five days in a row and keep $1600 in cash in my room before a final $200 withdrawl and purchase? I finally talked the clerk into allowing me to pay by check. That was November. When I went home for Thanksgiving, I found a letter from my bank announcing insufficient funds. I was mortified: I had promised the clerk I had the money and the check would be good, and it wasn't. I sped to the bank, got a cashier's check, and sped the 50 miles to Storrs, getting to the store just before closing, slobbering apologies all over the clerk, who appreciated and accepted my groveling. More accurately, I had had the check deposited: my boyfriend was going to the ATM and I asked him to deposit my father's check. He did, but to my savings account like a goon. So there was the bounced check fee and the cashier's check and the scurrying to the store and the groveling and all was well.
Before I borrowed a thousand dollars from my father for Veronica, I asked him if he would let me pay him back. He wasn't good at letting my sister or me pay him back for outright loans, and there was no question that his assistance with my college tuition was a gift. But this time he let me. Also he let me pay him back when I borrowed another $500 only a couple of months later to fix Fugly's wispy brakes.
The day I bought Veronica, I lugged her home, in her big box, about a half a mile. She wasn't a particularly heavy computer for the time, but the box was awkward and its handles broke and blistered my skin. I was nearly home when SLH yelled from his window, "Polly, what are you doing?" and ran out and berated me for not asking for help and toted it the rest of the way (the length of his dorm and the lawn between it and mine). For the first time, last year's Yule card came back from his one-time location, "Addressee unknown." I know he's Crippled by Nostalgia as well: he bought an old--1930sish--UConn yearbook at an antiques sale and loved how its owner had kept track of her classmates over the years and we examined the declining handwriting together and imagined how the book had left her former possession during an estate sale. Dear SLH, I do miss you.
In 1993, living with RDC and inheriting his first PowerBook, I gave Veronica to CLH for Christmas. She, in turn, gave it to friends with whom she crashed for six months. Dear old Veronica, you were great but I don't miss you.
* Fugly never really recovered from this. She did become tri-tone, getting a new fender in a glarish red that clashed as much as anything else would with her otherwise maroon and beige shell. My parents individually blamed CLH for the accident, since it was her fault for inviting me to Boston for her boyfriend's birthday party and not mine for assuming the truck in front of me was turning right onto a street when I saw its brakelights and and passing on the left except hitting it on the way by and skidding into the sign of the restaurant that the driver cleaned at midnight every night and joining the statistic that most accidents happen within 25 miles (or a half a one) of home. But her timing or choke was off for her next, and last, six months. Dear old Fugly, you were a deathtrap--almost no horn, no emergency brake, dicey steering--but you were freedom and I loved you yet I don't miss you either.
See that? I miss one person and not two machines. That's reasonable, isn't it? Maybe I'm not crippled.
And also, that's my father in a nutshell, financially if not emotionally available. Financially because he could be, to a point, instead of emotionally, which for many years he could not be. He ends most phone calls with "I love you" now, and I am glad to exchange that last sentence with him.
I told Shrink some stories my grandmother told me about her daughter and ex-son-in-law, stories I really wish I didn't know. In this conversation, or maybe to open it, she asked me if my father had ever touched my sister and me or given us a pet. I was horrified by her suggestion--her suspicion?--and exclaimed no, of course not. But she wasn't alleging what I, given her language and my generation, assumed. She was asking about simple physical affection, and it occurred to me some time later that she in turn assumed that my forceful denial meant I was angry about the lack of affection and open to hear what more and worse she had to tell me that day. Another time I remember the generational difference in language is when she and Frisky were cuddling on the couch, he kneading her and she combing him, and her telling me that they were making love. I was pubescent at the time and knew but one meaning for that phrase, not knowing the one from hers: from "It's a Wonderful Life," Mrs. Hatch calls down, "What's George Bailey doing here?" and Mary responds, "He's making violent love to me, mother." And Jane Austen uses that very phrase in Emma, within a carriage one snowy Christmas Eve.
Sunday RDC asked me where his scuba license is. I am not so useful a backup brain as that. Then he asked where that tan corduroy toiletry kit was, and I said probably in either of the two boxes of his miscellany in the furnace room. Copy boxes, of course, labeled RDC. He found the box and found the kit but not the license, which was, shockingly because he hasn't dived in almost 10 years, available in an online database. That he found later. Digging through the box was as amusing as going through my files. I suggested tossing an empty box that once held highlighting markers. That he could manage. There was a piece of plastic that might have served to mount a phone on a wall that he could throw out, and a 1993 map of Mt. Snow that he could not, because it's a souvenir. Most amusing to me (still; I've seen it before) is the group photograph of his 400-person senior class. The hair-or, the hair-or. That box contains, in addition to perfectly reasonable mementos, whatever detritus was on his desk in the Storrs tenement the weekend before we left that he just swept in there.
Last night I went through the most amusing folder, pictures and headlines, some dating to high school, back when I, the extrovert, the exhibitionist, tried to give people a precis of my personality and interests by way of my dorm room door. Some I kept, such as the advertisement cut from Time, probably, of Snoopy holding hands with Charlie Brown and Sally, captioned "Happiness is having a Big Brother or Big Sister." Hmm. Even though Sally wasn't a big sister, I'm not surprised Big Brothers and Sisters of America didn't want to use Lucy to promote siblinghood. I had a collage of aesthetically appealing women, images culled from my weakness for Mademoiselle and wherever else. Other clippings betray my crush on Winona Ryder--Veronica really was a fitting name for my computer--and headlines my gullible fondness for peurile double entendre. I kept the odd comic strip and one copy of the time I was famous in the Daily Campus. But most I am going to send to my sister, because this shit is priceless, at least to her and me.
My high school subscription to Rolling Stone served me well, but I am sure I didn't put the full-page ad for the re-release of "The Wall" on my wall at any time other than freshling year (before I had seen it, but it was Cool) or maybe sophomore, since my boyfriend's favorite band was Pink Floyd, so why the hell did I keep it? Did I think I would have some future need for it? Hieronymos Bosch's Hell has not been my Outward Expression of Private Pain since maybe 11th grade. Clearly, I put all this stuff in a folder and forgot about it long before the web made all such things accessible all the time.
I found a Doonesbury Sunday strip where Trudeau tried to get postmodern: Roger Rabbit opening a door in the background and Mike & Zonk, seeing him, deciding to call it a day. But I didn't find my two favorites, both Sundays in a Walden classroom, with the same professor bemoaning the lack of intellectual curiosity in his classes. In one ends up ranting that black is white, up is down, while students frenetically taking notes say "This class is getting really interesting" and "Yeah, I never knew half of this stuff." In the other, he offers the radar detector as a device legally sold despite its stated purpose being to help a driver flout the law; a student suggests that maybe it's civil disobedience; and the professor nearly falls to his knees: "I have a student! A student lives! Where are you from, lad? Don't be frightened"; while the student thinks, "Am I in trouble here?" They're probably somewhere, on-line if nowhere else.
I was going to shove all this in an envelope for my sister immediately, but I think it needs to be part of a bigger, turning-40 memory extravaganza. Except that all the physical mementos I have are of my life, not hers.
I have felt remorse for Blake's flightlessness but never guilt for the safety I am sure it has brought him. The price of freedom, but really the cost of imprisonment. I had seen still but never moving images of a cockatiel in flight.
Blake will never look like that, and that's my fault. Hatched in captivity, he was never going to be free and wild, but I contributed to the demand for captive, though non-domesticated, birds. If he were genetically domesticated, it might not be so bad. Maybe that's another reason I call him puppy.
I do wonder how badly his psychology, in parallel with his clipped if not crippled physiology, is warped. Certainly no wild cockatiel is a Widespread Panic or Rolling Stones fan.
But I can't figure out where that bird keeps its toes while aloft.
In order of arrival, though hardly in order of import:
Going to the beach, going to the beach, going to the beach. Possibly frolicking with dolphins. Going to the beach, going to the beach, going to the beach.
Gonna be an aunt again, an aunt again, an aunt again. I dibbsed the honor of making the sproutling's stocking before it was even a glimmer. Now it's a sea monkey!
I have just learned that someone is a good kisser. And that the dinner he made for the other kisser that contained a pint of heavy cream. I didn't ask about dessert. But kissing is important! And the news was delivered with a grin.
This came in a couple of days later, but it fits with the happyhappy theme: SEM is crashing at Formigny in a few weeks.
I know that Blake would have made a fine wild bird, father, and prematurely a snake's breakfast, but I'm pretty sure he likes me. Surely he wouldn't be so interested with the imperfections in my skin--freckles and goosebumps--and tongue them and try to nibble them off if he weren't concerned with my well-being and appearance.
I don't often talk about my job. Work, yes: Dot Org, the occasional coworker, commuting, rathering to be downtown. Job, no.
(Except, aha! At Freak Train Monday night one of the performances was the Mouse Man from the 16th Street. He was just as unfunny on-stage as on-street with the disadvantage of not being able to walk away from him. He's someone I don't miss from downtown, along with the anti-choice Abe Lincoln dude.)
Today as soon as I arrived I got a call that, admittedly, would not have come to me if any of the research staff I support had been in. How many states require a supermajority to pass their budgets? Though I didn't know the answer off the top of my head (I so want to be Bunny Watson and know all sorts of things off the top of my head), I knew exactly where to find the information, in less than a minute, while the person waited on the line. Most of my afternoon I spent compiling 50-state per capita and percent of income rankings of property tax revenues.
Most of the researchy stuff I do depends on my MS Office proficiency rather than my genius for analysis, but that proficiency shouldn't--and doesn't--limit me to the support track. I wonder.
Goodness me, I'm being social.
Friday Kal and I went to TCLD to hear Jared Diamond speak about, more interesting than read from, his book Collapse, which I'm in the middle of.
Saturday morning my mother pulled her "My daughter is an abused neglected spouse" thing because I am not currently in Barcelona and though I do distinguish between Europe and south Florida I countered with Key Largo. Instead of enthusing about beach and sun and water and dolphins, she asked if I was going to see my father while in Florida, whereupon I went to the gym and worked out my frustration.
Then Kal came over to watch the 1972 BBC version of "Emma," which we had expected to be indifferently produced, but not indifferently acted, and we lasted about four minutes--disappointed in Mr. Woodhouse and Emma, and then disgusted in Mr. Knightley, whom I don't expect to be Jeremy Northam all the time, but gack. "You might not see one in a hundred, with gentleman so plainly written as in Mr. Knightley," could not be stretched to apply to this actor.
Instead we went to the zoo as soon as we finished our grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. It was a gorgeous day anyway, heretical to spend in the basement watching television, unforgivable if bad television. At the zoo, we cooed and awwed over the five-month-old lion cubs scampering and frolicking and leaping on their parents and aunts; and finally saw the okapi calf, now nearly as big as its parents and therefore pretty but not cute; and also saw the November-born giraffe named Dash; and marveled over the seven-month-old baby gorilla.
The docent said the baby was then straying farther from his mother--four or five feet--than he had ever see him go. When I first saw the baby, this summer, he looked like a human newborn, with bigger eyes and stronger fingers--his mother's preferred mode of transport is on her right hind leg. Now he looks more gorilla-y in build.
In the evening Trish and Jared and I went to the Rocky Mountain Diner and to "Sideways," which was great. Trish bemoaned my musical ignorance but helped by giving me Beth Orton covering "Wild World," and neither of them tried to take my Junior Mints from me, so it was fun.
Sunday I didn't leave the house but read all day, not Collapse but Pride and Prejudice because I am a sick pup. But Blake and I enjoyed ourselves.
Then Monday was the first meeting of Scarf's newly formed book group, for women in South City Park. We--she, five other female neighbors, Kal, and I--discussed Cowboys Are My Weakness and ate chili. It was really good. I don't expect to find voracious readers everywhere, like in my very neighborhood, but maybe I should. Not all were voracious, but they were readers, and that's enough for me.
Social, wheee!
As soon as I got in the house I grabbed the phone. "Who're you calling?" RDC asked idly.
"Kal."
"Didn't you just get out of her car?"
We called each other simultaneously to say "Jordan Catelano." We couldn't remember his name for the last half-mile, and that is just wrong. I was trying to make a parallel between Ricky and whatever the new chick's name was in the last episodes of "My So-Called Life" and the high school boy and his best friend in "Queer as Folk."
Not only as RDC never been a girl, he doesn't remember what it's like to live with one either. The same thing happened years ago when Haitch and I couldn't remember the third daughter's name on "The Cosby Show." Which I still couldn't and had to look up (Vanessa). It's okay that I forgot that, because I barely watched that show; it was very wrong of Kal and me to forget Jordan Catelano, because she was the exact right age to watch the show when it was on and although I wasn't and didn't I have certainly demonstrated my MCSL love.
Anyway, I had just come home from an Haitch outing and RDC said hi and then something about that Huxtable daughter Vanessa. You would have to know how much RDC doesn't talk about television and how gullible I am, in addition to merely appreciating coincidence, to know how those sentences coming out of his mouth bowled me over. But of course Haitch had called in the minutes between her arriving home and mine.
I don't know if she remembered it on her own or had looked it up. I looked up all of my references: Ricky of course, but I looked up Vasquez. He was one of the few characters not referred to by both names. Delia Fisher. Not knowing "Queer as Folk" names is okay. Justin and Daphne.
As parallels go, I prefer the calling despite having just left someone's side to the Ricky:Delia::Justin:Daphne one. But they both work.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard a song on KBCO that I had to look up when I got home: Nick Drake, "One of These Things First."
I had heard of him sketchily before, confusing him with Nick Cage--of whom I was also fond, for years, without cause other than his appearing in my beloved "Wings of Desire"--learning that my less but still beloved "Life in a Northern Town" was dedicated to him, and, I think, hearing Lucy recommend him.
Then I looked him up on iTunes. Kind of Cat Stevens-y, kind of Leonard Cohen-y: simple melodies, gentle lyrics, minimal instruments, mournful. I figured that KBCO had played that song not because he was however influential but because it appeared on the soundtrack to "Garden State" (I repegged that movie to the top of my Netflix queue).
Yesterday I listened to a lot of Cat Stevens, including "If You Want to Sing Out," which had not been available on iTunes previously and which I had had only on my worn-out Footsteps in the Dark cassette or sung by Ruth Gordon in "Harold and Maude." Today I listened to Nick Cage, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Drake.
He's been dead for 30 years but since he's new to me he counts as new music, to which I listen all too little of. If my newest successes have been Nick Drake and Beth Orton, who should I listen to next?
Okay. I know I live in the past in many ways, most recently evidentally, musically, and iTunes has enabled my WayBackitude more than might be good for me. I have an '80s nostalgia playlist that begins with "My Sharona" (1979, but who's counting) and ends with "Justify My Love."
I happily paid $0.99 for "Boys of Summer" and howled with glee when iTunes produced "I Ran" and, later, glommed onto Flock of Seagulls' "Space Age Love Song" in the background at the bar in the very beginning of "Monster" and remembered that as my preferred song from that album. And I will happily pay the same $0.99 if iTunes ever offers Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" or Icicle Works' "Whisper to a Scream." Those are nostalgic songs.
A lot of '80s music I never stopped listening to at all. Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, and the Waterboys figure prominently, of course, and I discovered Cat Stevens in 1986 as well. Some stuff I'm getting now, though, I wonder about. Do I buy it only to restore my catalog, my painstakingly recorded, radio to low-end cassette, full of background noises like my dog suddendly snorfling or my mother yelling, catalog of AOR and New Wave songs? Those cassettes I recorded over at college, and if Oliver's Army was ever legible above the generations of illegality, I missed it. Or would I have kept listening to certain of this music if cassette were a more durable medium, or if I had spent money on CDs rather than on student loans? No question I had to have "Voices Carry," especially since Aimee Mann has justified my love, speaking of, more recently. ITunes has recently provided me with Songs to Learn and Sing, and I am pretty sure that I still love each one, and that that is okay.
But I am a little worried that if I bought English Beat or the Cult, I would actually listen to them regularly and not on a nostalgia loop. Would that be okay, or would that just be pathe?
I was traveling through a trough Cowboy Junkies, Mariner's Song yesterday and once again succumbed to the one little thing phenomenon. Selecting yams, I saw one with a belly button.
I guess archeologists or art historians agree that Venus of Willendorf's navel occurred naturally in the stone and possibly inspired the artist to carve the surrounding woman.
The purpose of my quest was sacrificial victims for sweet potato crack. Whole Foods had garnet and jewel yams but not sweet potatoes, and the produce clerk had already told me when I inquired if sweet potatoes were in stock that they're the same thing. When I saw the naveled one and giggled, he was right there, ready to take it away as if spoiled. I reassured him I was giggling because it was Woman of Willendorf, not because the store had poor vegetables.
Luckily he knew about the sculpture, so I didn't come off quite as insane as I would have otherwise. But the yam and his ready understanding made me smile. Also he suggested I could sell it on eBay. I wish I had had my camera with me, or was handy enough with a knife to make a Yam of Willendorf. Its navel was big enough fit my pinkie-tip too.
Not that marriage is required for procreation or family, but I do like to call the godfather to my goddaughter my god-husband. I call my sister and mother Emlet's godaunt and godgrandmother, so it follows. SEM is in town for a conference this week and spent last night with me. I had lots of shawnster hugs, which are the best ever. (JGW says that my hugs are the best ever, but he's never had a shawnster hug, and certainly a hug is improved with sentiment so maybe even he did he wouldn't appreciate it as much.)
He noticed the kitchen all by himself but I had to point out that I cut my hair all off. For the first time I was conscious of its shoulder-lengthedness, because his preference is for either extreme. But he likes me anyway. Also the kitchen. Also what I cooked for him. Also Blake. So he was a good houseguest.
I told him about finding SLH and we giggled over our delight in googling the absent (and irritation about those so discourteous as to be ungoogleable) and shared pet stories and work and relationships and plans and it was a mighty fine chat.
Just before he arrove, I was listening to Three Junes and got to the bit where a devastating wit dubs a supercilious snob "The Cuntess" which had made me shout with laughter. Unfortunately SEM and I don't have someone we can call that, and I don't want him to have a vicious ex just so we can, except I kind of do. I thought to tell him that title when absence of cookery skills inevitably was mentioned. I didn't continue to him the train of my thought, which was bits in books that make me laugh, namely how Sodapop made green pancakes. Green. I always loved Ponyboy for how that single repeated word made them so much funnier.
Um, wrapping this up, SEM has green eyes. The end.
My newest time-suck is the baby name voyager. Why are names called "baby names," as if in mainstream culture adults are renamed?
The previous entry had me searching for Sodapop, which I didn't expect to find and didn't, and Ponyboy, which I had higher but unrequited hopes for. Darryl peaked in the '60s, but Dallas has been on the rise as the Outsiders generation has begun to reproduce. Oh, poo, the television show also must have credit. It has to have been "Princess Bride" that made "Westley" spike in the '80s and '90s, just as Buffy has inspired Willow and Xander but, sadly, not Giles.
McKinley, Theodore, Howard, Woodrow, Wilson, Calvin, Warren, Harding, Hoover, Franklin, Delano, Dwight, Kennedy, and Lyndon peaked or at least delayed their declines while their namesakes were president, while Herbert and Richard dropped after those terms. James, Ronald, and George aren't doing well but Carter, Reagan, and Walker are surging. William is declining, despite McKinley and an upsurge around Taft, most sharply before 1990, but that defense of #42 is belied by the drop of Clinton from the '80s to now; and although Jefferson is doing better, the third president, not the 42nd, gets that credit.
My teenaged self's idea for a boy's name came from the same source as must be responsible for the surge in Dane after The Thorn Birds. Also Justine and Meghan. Ayla appears from nowhere after Clan of the Cave Bear, as did Tabitha and Darren, and less so, Samantha, after "Bewitched." Glinda spiked briefly after "Wizard of Oz" and Dorothy somewhat as the book's first readers grew up. Holden didn't appear until the 1990s. Are Asher's sudden appearance and Jonas's simultaneous but proportionally smaller upswing due to The Giver?
Quentin ranks higher than the unattractive Quinton but Fiver is nowhere to be found. If I were so insane as to have five children, I'd name the fifth Fiver. Or maybe Hrairoo. At least no one's named a girl Quentin: that's asking for trouble.
The ascendancies of Dustin, Angelina, Jude, Kobe, Clint, Denzel, Salma, Elvis, and Presley I attribute to celebrity namesakes. Maybe Piper and Tatum too. Hm: while Orpha has (rightfully, to my ear) disappeared, Oprah has not yet appeared.
I have been trying to find the lowest ranked of these top 1000 names. The closest I have found yet is Doloris, ranking 988 in the 1930s; but because it was slightly more popular in the 1920s it doesn't look like such a maverick (which word is, inexplicably to me, now given as a name). The tracking begins at 1900, and maybe in the 19th century this following name was more popular, but its disappearance after an initial ranking of 973 makes me think Mossie never had a chance.
Three days sunning (shading), swimming, and sexing on Florida Bay, where the water means that the Crayola seagreen crayon isn't a lie. Long Island Sound just isn't that color. Stiff northeasterly winds clouded the water, so no snorkeling, and clouded the sky, but not much, and brought up the surf, just slightly. I sat, more or less bundled, under palm and hammock trees, and read, and listened to the waves and the wind in the leaves, and gazed at the water, and swam, and watched manatees, and went parasailing, and had a lovely time.
The place was teeming with French. One family was French Canadian and spoke English but one couple would have been entirely lost if much of the staff hadn't been Haitian. RDC came back from a stroll on the dock and said something that made me jump up and run to the dock. Only on my return did I think to ask the couple, "Excusez-moi, parlez-vous l'anglais? Il y a [should have been "ont"] les vaches de la mer, là. Quatre ou cinq." They thanked me, "Vous êtes trés gentile."
I don't know how to say "manatee" in French [le lamantin], and I don't know how "cows of the sea" translated since the fauna is only American. Whether the Frenchies thought manatee or dolphin or seal, they knew I meant something worth looking at, and went to look. The four or five seacows were feeding on the various seaweed, breathing, bobbing up to look at us, blowing out through their whiskers. They are peculiar creatures.
We saw ospreys and pelicans and herons and egrets and terns and gulls and a bald eagle. Another thing I liked about being on the bay side is the very low, uninhabited, rocky but treed, bits of land across the bay. I am not used to ocean to the horizon but to seeing the tailings of Long Island across the beach from me, and though I like limitless ocean just fine on Cape Cod or San Francisco or Ft. Lauderdale, having a bounded horizon makes me feel safer.
RDC was disappointed that, from parasailing's vantage point, we didn't see anything big in the bay like dolphins or turtles, and I would have liked to see either of them but of sharks I am happier ignorant.
We left Wednesday and spent the evening with RDC's family, and then I caught an early morning flight home. It was possibly not relaxing to get up at 5:15, but I managed. Up, pee, brush teeth, dress, kiss kiss, leave. Drive. Drive more. The rental car place was easy to find and the return painless. The painful bit was waiting at the gate without falling asleep, but I paid $34 for an upgrade to Economy Plus, which got me a golden ticket for early boarding, a seat in the second row for early deplaning, and leg room. A blanket, Wuthering Heights, eyemask, earplugs, water bottle. That and a few rollings of eyes with my one, only one, hooray! seatmate about the two unruly children and their nearly equally immature adults in the row ahead of me got me to Denver.
In Denver, I had my house and my bird. No sea. I like RDC's family, but, other than my mother-in-law, in small doses. DMB gathered family and friends and I was glad to see almost everyone, but one's own family inanities, however vexing, are at least familiar. I don't need to be a psychic to surmise that a man is likelier to name a son after his dead brother than after himself; and it's best that I don't spend more time around, than I have patience for, mindless prattle; and I cannot imagine what lightning bolt would be necessary for me to tolerate, let alone enjoy, one particular person's company. But I always like talking with Roz, and admiring Kay's rigott' cake and her knitting and gifts for a cousin's new granddaughter; and I'm glad I kept my piehole shut about the psychic because I like that person and spouse just fine, and hearing how much another cousin is enjoying her single freedom, and learning what this one and that are doing in school and his steamrollered sculptures and her history of propaganda class.
RDC2 and I might have had a pillow fight with a bear (him) and a dinosaur (me). The bear's head might have become a quarter detached from its body. I fetched RDC's travel sewing kit from his suitcase and stitched it securely, thinking of Stuart's bear Wolf and Anne's nameless? occasionally headless bear (The Cat Ate My Gymsuit and Look Through My Window) and keeping to myself, again, how even if our thwackers were inappropriate, it was for RDC2 to decide how much unhappiness the reparable injury to the bear deserved. RDC2, upset not by the bear but by drama, held the bear's paw during its operation, and I showed-and-told about how to thread a needle, that you call the hole in a needle the eye, how to knot a double thread by wrapping it around a finger and rolling it off, why to place the knot internally, how to space stitches, and how to make a lock-knot, and also I omitted to show-and-tell about what I think of drama.
I said that this bear could be pope, since it had had a tracheotomy. RDC's Catholic grandmother, who as a former seamstress was watching my surgery closely and possibly pleased that I can do a basic sewing task even though I can't cook, laughed, thank goodness. When I asked if I could help cook or whether instead the Irish should stay out of the kitchen, RDC's aunt told about my garlic bread. So I got to tell Kay about my absence of portion perspective, about how the aunt had given me a loaf of bread, butter, and some garlic, and set me to make garlic bread. I know how much butter goes on a piece of bread, but how much garlic I do not. I used it all, however much it was. A lot. Everybody ate it, and I believe genuinely liked it, but that was some excessively garlicky garlic bread.
Later I was sent to fetch RDC2's early birthday present, and I did, but I did not carry it in my hand. I had it tucked into my waistband and lurched across the porch, not sure if I was a robot or George Bush with a lump in his back at a presidential debate (or both). Tactless again for a Republican aunt and uncle, but everyone else thought it was funny. Basically, anything that prolongs an expectant nearly-birthday boy's anticipation is comedy gold in my book.
My mother-in-law and I plotted our trouble-making swath when she visits me during one of RDC's trips. Massages definitely, and I will let her talk me into spa treatments during which we will gossip girlishly, and lots of window-shopping and frustrating sales clerks by the clothes we try on without intention to purchase. The trick will be finding overlapping indulgence foods. We will persevere.
If there is any beauty in an 8 a.m. flight, it is that it arrives in Denver at 10:30.
When I got to the vet to pick up Blake from camp, I met a dog that might be cuter than my friend's basset/dalmatian cross. I thought it was a puppy because of the texture of his fur, but, his humans say, they crop his fur--sensibly, in Denver's heat--and everyone thinks at first glance that this 13-year-old dog is a puppy partly because of the soft undercoat and partly because of his build. Closer up, his incipient cataracts also gave him away. He was a basset/newfie cross--I hope fathered by an overambitious hound--and the cuteness could not be measured on an ordinary scale. Howie, my friend's dog, has the long basset ears, which might trump the downy fur, but I would have to have both dogs for prolonged and careful scientific comparison in order to decide.
I love basset crosses. Basset plus Rottweiler, or blue heeler, or labrador, or dalmatian. Is it the clodhopper paws in clumsy but constant first position? The ridiculous build alone is enough to trigger my cooing adoration; the hoofs make it inevitable.
Wednesday night I spent petting my dog-in-law, a sweet-tempered if untrained boxer. A boxer's coat is soft, but never fluffy, all over, instead of just the top-of-the-labrador-snout. Kissing her wrinkled face and caressing her ears was, additionally, excellent camouflage when I was cornered by my least favorite in-law. Petting a dog lowers your blood pressure when you're cornered and gives you something else to think about other than flight or tart retorts and almost excuses your refusal to make eye contact.
Anyway, petting Rollie the basset/newf occupied me until I heard Blake shriek as he left camp. I thanked the human for his time and scurried to the desk: I love dogs but I need my buddy, and my buddy was shrieking fit to split your eardrums and heart. Had he bonded to other birds again? Did he fear having another pedicure? But as soon as he saw me he stopped shrieking and started chucking and chattering, and he talked to me all the way home. My puppy-bird.
One thing I remember from reading The Maltese Falcon sophomore year is that it has only two scenes that aren't in the present or that aren't from Sam Spade's point of view. Or something. Those scenes don't exist in the film. And it's a good one.
Something about The Outsiders occurred to me last week and I reread most of it before we left. I saw the movie only once (before today), with Haitch, and, seeing it for the first time as an adult instead of at 13 when it came out, I thought it sucked. Like "Maltese Falcon," it is nearly faithful to its book; unlike that cinematization, it doesn't work. Pointless scenes like trying to trap the rabbit are added, and pointful bits about the characters that aren't in the linear time period, like Sodapop's love for Sandy or even that Two-Bit is a junior at 18.5, are missing.
You learn a lot about Sodapop and Ponyboy through the latter's telling Cherry about the quarterhorse. In the movie, that's completely absent, but Two-Bit wears a Mickey Mouse shirt, and they watch a bit of Disney cartoon on television. That's just not enough.
I am pleased to report that I like me a lot right now.
Last night the neighborhood book club that Scarf founded met for the second time over Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Of course discussion dissolved from David Sedaris into regular chat, and at the end Scarf said that she thinks she's like a radiator and has to be wept sometimes. I didn't get that until she explained that hot water radiators sometimes need their valves loosened to release water pressure. Or something.
So the next thing out of my mouth was "Yonder in the bushes."
I am torn between hoping no one heard me--or, if they heard me, assuming this ejaculation belonged to another conversation they hadn't heard--and wanting to explain to the world the wonder of Look Through My Window, in which four little kids take the cap off the radiator so they can sail boats and, when others discover the dripping water and demand the return of the cap, the youngest says the cap is "yonder in the bushes" (which is child-ese for "I forgot where I put it"). And Emily and her mother, having dealt with the flood (and found the cap under Anne's pillow), collapse into laughter and gasp out "yonder in the bushes."
Yonder is a great word anyway. There's a sketch that RDC told me about in which the comedian tells of lying in bed at night "afraid of monsters over yonder--Yonder was my teddy bear--."
Are there any little kids these days who actually use the word yonder? Let's bring it back.
Today the fascinating topic of a new butterdish came up. RDC contends the present plastic one is from Caldor, and while I am sure it's migratory, I think it's from Lechter's. That was a mall-type kitchen store, and RDC asked if this was in the collection-of-stores-under-one-roof in Willi. No, and to remind him of the store, I recalled a visit: "Remember, once when we were there, we ran into that woman you knew from whatever apartment complex who stabbed her boyfriend in the leg?" Also: I knew her from a women's studies course, also her name came to me in a moment, also in the store with her was a subsequent man about twice her age.
He looked at me, processing astonishment and recognition, and I looked at him until he also admitted, "Okay, that was scarily impressive."
I amended, "Pointlessly and scarily impressive."
This entry is just to remind me that when Belinda's birthday comes up, I want a new user title.
Of course, the other, earlier option originated with Trish at "Ugly Bags of Mostly Water": Afraid of Lampshades.
I broke in the new KitchenAid mixer by making my beloved chocolate ginger cookies. While the dough chilled, Kal and I walk to the Botanic Gardens and looked at orchids, whose aesthetic appeal I can now appreciate though not anyone's drive to cultivate them. We walked around the gardens, walked home fetching "Anne of Green Gables" on the way, ate leftover broccoli-tomato tart for lunch and watched the movie, made cookies and watched the movie. She and RDC and I had Japanese for dinner and then we (minus RDC) watched the second half, and somehow by the end of it I had a few Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Women, and Hans Christian Andersen around me.
It was a lovely day, and no one was in the gardens because of the four whole inches of snow.
Friday morning, Blake lusted after a dish towel and bit RDC, and RDC snapped his wrist to unlatch the closed beak from his flesh, thereby launching Blake into the refrigerator door. Blake held his beak open in that way he does when he's scared and that I think I remember from the few times he's been hurt, and we palpitated his keel bone and gauged his feet's grip on a finger, and he could spread his wings and bow his head for his neck to be scratched, so I left.
After I left, Blake sang into the hand and chattered for a while but then to RDC seemed lethargic, so he brought him to the vet. No blood in the eye or ear: no head trauma. Nothing broken. Yet he wasn't himself, not talking to the other birds in earshot at the hospital, but the vet said that was a reasonable reaction to the scare and pain and possible minor soft-tissue injury.
The vet, not his usual doctor but an avian-certified one in the same practice whom they both liked, suggested that his accompanying us everywhere (in the house), as we like because of our profound attachment and love for the buddy, is not always in the bird's best interest if it means we take him for granted (allowing him free rein on the floor, allowing him free reign over our lives), especially during his semi-annual hormonal surges.
A friend told RDC later that his shake was an instinctual reaction to pain. RDC knew very well, so I didn't make him feel worse by suggesting, that you simply must not react instinctually in certain situations. A hollow-boned creature 0.002% of your size, however powerful his beak, need not be flung, any more than a teething baby need be flung if she nips the breast.
Injury he might have sustained, if any, might be worse than otherwise because the buddy is closing that size gap:
Blake currently weighs one hundred and one grams.
That's up from 93 grams this fall and 94 grams fall before last. In his first year, before he was full grown, he was in the 80s. His silhouette is a 4 (I am not sure of the scale: I expect 3 is normal and 1 is starving). So Blake is on a diet, and we must exercise him more.
More meaning at all; right now he walks around a lot and exercises our patience and that's about it. He hates to bicycle (revolving index fingers into an endless step-up loop), but bicycling there will be, and more important than muscular drumsticks is muscular wings, of course. So we must flap him.
This happened yesterday. Today for breakfast I gave Blake only pellets instead of mixed pellets and seeds. He didn't notice at first, eating some raw baby spinach and a piece of whole-grain cereal and some corn from his buddy chow while on the kitchen windowsill. A bit later as I sat at the dining table typing this and eating my cereal, Blake left the top of his cage (with spinach, cereal, and chow) for the pellet dish in the cage door (which is propped open with a porch attachment). He began looking for seeds, shoveling with his beak and rifling back and forth, like Keehar ripping into the rotten log looking for insects, except he found neither insects nor seeds. He climbed back to the top of the cage and ate a piece of corn. I wonder which of us will break first.
Right now he is on my lap and preening. He doesn't need the excessive scoopage he did yesterday, and he is his usual chipper self. I am really hoping he wants a shower today, because he smells funny: other people's hands, or latex gloves, or his plumage absorbs odors rapidly. He smells kind of doggy, not his usual yummy dusty popcorniness.
Also, adminstering .03 cc of anti-inflammatory to a cockatiel whose grandparent was a squid and other great-grandparent was a soap bubble is not easy. Aha, and it is the anti-inflammatory that smells like rank doggy ass.
I am such a coddled little Denver sunverite. This 40-degree, cloudy morning, I decided I would clean the house, which it needs only slightly less than the garden needs attention. After breakfast the sky cleared and I headed out into 50 degree sun.
I mopped the winter's filth from the porch swing, the capitals (they're really not), and the doors, then removed the screens from the security door and washed them and my are they more see-through now.
I weeded (grassed, mostly, for which I'm grateful) the bishop's weed on the north side of the house. I guess I should put a border along that property line. The next project was to hoe out the north easement to be ready for vinca, arriving the second week of April, but however non-strenuous the project is, it is also tedious and results in unprotected topsoil (which I could cover with a tarp, but that didn't work with my excuse-making). Vinca, I decided, is tough enough that the still mostly grass and not more tenacious weeds wouldn't pose a big problem for it. In the meantime I transplanted some new shoots from the south easement.
When I had finished with the north side (where I cannot be seen from the porch) and the temperature rose to 60, Blake had accompanied me somewhat, mostly chattering. But occasionally shrieking (two black standard poodles, a golden retriever), so I put him inside, leaving the cage door open so he could prance on the top or in his box. Soon I heard him yell and looked in at him: he was not on his cage, on his own windowsill, nor even on the lower sill, but on the sash of the actual pane, which is of course too narrow for him to perch on, and I took this to mean he wanted out again.
I was done with the front, and willing to break from my unHeraclean labors before tackling the back (amending the vegetable beds, separating the lovely black moist loam resulting from lasagne mulch from the sunflower seed husks that didn't break down as readily), and so Blake occupied one capital and I another, with water and Lonesome Rangers, Homeless Minds, and in less than 15 minutes the sky had clouded over again.
I could have, say, put another layer on: a short gardening skirt and a sleeveless tee is not an outfit I should feel entitled to wear on the last day of winter without chilliness. But if I were goosebumped, so would Blake be. So in we came to await more sun, which, three hours later, isn't going to happen. It is supposedly 60 degrees outside and in, but I don't believe it. Blake and I are on the couch waiting for snow, I swear.
We read, and had a nap (which I felt entitled to, having not slept well), and read, and someone's head got pet, and I am still freezing cold just because I am looking through the window at a cloudy sky, despite socks and a hoodie and yoga pants and the perfectly reasonable temperature on thermometers inside and out.
A couple of times Friday evening I saw Blake begin to lift his left leg to scratch his head, then stop. He does that sometimes anyway, but now of course I wondered if it was from pain or injury. Today he lifts each leg over its respective wing readily, and I am sure he is fine. Which is good, because I didn't relish the prospect of dosing him all by myself. The medicine is supposed to fall on the back of his tongue, the more easily to drip down his throat. Ha, I say.
I was thinking I could pour some on the freckles on my shoulders and chest, which he often runs his tongue across, feeling for any imperfections that his concern for my aesthetic would require that he then try to nibble off. Or perhaps I could wait for a yawning fit, when his mouth opens nearly as widely as my own.
Yesterday we weighed a reluctant buddy on the food scale: 102 grams. Today he's had chow and a piece of cereal and spinach and sprouts and I gave him a piece of white chicken meat to shred, and yesterday I bought him a grannysmith apple of his very own to have by slices.
Way back when it was sunny and I wasn't freezing, I was thinking about going for a bike ride. Now, of course, I think that if I go outside I will shatter like an icicle. I am supposed to flap Blake, though, who is right now perched on one foot atop my ankle, eyes closed from the bottom up, crest relaxed. I can't disturb him now.
Hence why we are both fat.
Hoo boy, yes indeedy, yesterday I opened my closet to dress after my strenuous day buying new china, shopping for groceries, eating sushi, and preparing "the guest room," and before I donned regular clothes I tried out my little black dress.
The first time I emerged in this dress, in 1990, my boyfriend fell off his chair. The night I finally kissed CXJ (my motto: or die trying), I wore this dress (and other men that night were interested; that man was a brick wall of latent heterosexuality). It is a fabulous, simple (hence LBD status), linen frock. I can zip it, and there the story ends. To zip it, I hauled my bosom northward, displaying excess cleavage. No one wants to possess (or see) armpit breast. I didn't try to sit in it, and it no longer skims over my ass but my ass juts. Very attractive. Plus my belly didn't use to touch it (because I didn't use to have one).
Exercise and rather less chocolate. Onward.
Overnight it began to rain, and now what's falling is a mix of rain and snow: was I cold because humidity was on the rise? Could I ever manage New England damp heat and moist cold again? Why, if humidity makes heat feel hotter, does it also make cold feel colder, and what is the middle point of humidity and temperature when the former doesn't exacerbate the latter? (Whee! This shows the relation in warmer temperatures, and this site claims that the midpoint is 53F.)
Lovely, lovely spring snow, with higher water content than winter snow. Big flakes, though, and the ground is far too warm for any accumulation. But I've been awake for about three years now and the precipitation has been steady for several hours: a good drink for the trees, I hope.
Blake is far too wise to expend effort on flapping when perching on a hand that suddenly drops from over the head to below the waist, so I have introduced a wobble to the descending hand. A wobble is the one physical correction with which one is allowed to discipline a parrot: a wobble distracts the bird from its naughtiness by forcing it to focus instead on its balance. A wobble forces a flap, and a flap is the beginning of flapping, but I don't want Blake to think being flapped is a punishment just because being wobbled is a correction. I don't expect him to enjoy it much, and there are other things he submits to without reacting to them as a punishment, like having his sticky beak wiped before he feaks corn niblets onto a sleeve, or having his talons clipped, or being wrapped in a paper towel after a shower and before the blow-drying. His corrections are minor, like wobbling or a sharp noise (a clap to startle him out of nibbling something he shouldn't), or major, like time-outs either in the cage or in the cage covered up in the bathroom in the dark.
Flapped he must be, whether or not he enjoys it. Currently, after flappage and half a segment of orange and shoelace destruction, he is on my foot (I am stretched out on the recliner) and while I cannot (or choose not to) force him to cease the foot-worship, I can, by wiggling my foot, wobble him enough that he cannot indulge in the incestuous behavior he would prefer foot-worship to lead to.
I should just hire a surrogate: "Look, you're no relation to my bird, so if you just would sit in this chair for a quarter hour--want to call your family? read the paper? eat a sandwich?--and let my parrot court and seduce your feet, singing to them and, uh, rubbing them with his cloaca, I'll give you a sawbuck."
But bestiality is illegal.
He is also wise enough readily to distinguish between what he may nibble on and what he may not and to prefer the latter. I commonly will leave a blowcard sticking out of the pages of my book, or a Post-It clinging to its cover, so that Blake can shred allowable paper. Invariably, however, he prefers the book's actual pages, which unlike its dustjacket cannot be removed. This evening, for instance, we are in the chair with the tome Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and while it would be more comfortable for me to place the book in my lap, I am holding it in one hand because Blake clamored for it (rather than the temptingly crisp and substantial blowcard or the snappable catalog paper) when it was so readily accessible, and now that he has left my feet he is on my forearm, ready to snooze, and I would rather strain my wrist holding the book in an unnatural position than disturb his, he should pardon the term, catnap.
Between the flapping and the foot-serenading, he perched on my knee while I did bicycle crunches: more balancing for him. Perhaps there are human-parrot core-strength exercise classes, with a lot of focus on balance. That class I took at 24-Hour Fitness, wobbling on half a sphere while doing squats etc., was eleventy times harder than doing squats etc. on a stable surface. Surely flapping can be integrated into such exertions.
And now he is on my right shoulder, chewing his beak, tickling under my ear with his crest. I cannot quite conceive how I ever equated the sound of beak-grooming with that of nails on a chalkboard. Quite evidently, now my conversion to the cockatielside is compleat. Sic. Doesn't Darth Vader's crisp final t make the obsolete spelling seem appropriate?
-- Being the combination of math genius and detail-oriented cook that I am, I doubled a recipe calling for 1.5 cups plus 1 tablespoon of flour to 2 cups plus two tablespoons. The dough has to set in the fridge for a while, and when I removed it after two hours I realized it wasn't as stiff as it ought to be, but I attributed that to inadequate chilling. When I removed the first two trays--32 cookies--from the oven, they were flat as nilla wafers. Flat flat flat, flatter than the islands of chocolate chips. I gave up in disgust and went to bed pouting. Overnight I realized what I had done, so in the morning I was about to put another cup of flour to the remainder of the dough when I brilliantly realized that I was no longer dealing with the full measure of ingredients. So I added 3/4 cup of flour, and the rest of the cookies turned out very well. Not perfectly, because I should have added only 2/3 cup. They tasted right and had the right texture, but they were a little paler than they should have been.
-- I added any flour to a dough that was, if not as stiff as it should have been, still pretty stiff after a night in the fridge, with my new KitchenAid mixer. In nickel pearl, because how well it goes with the granite, tile, paint, and stainless steel is a vital component in my lurf of this thing. Its only fault is that the blade aligns so closely with the bowl that it snaps chocolate chips into even chippier pieces. So far I have made cookies, the same recipe, twice. I have bananas waiting to become banana bread, and RDC is going to make bread, and it is so pretty I want it on the counter all the time.
-- But we don't have enough counter space for that. If we ever build a breakfast nook, though, it might have to be out all the time. Or I might have to buy a different one, cobalt blue, for the breakfast nook. Then I'll buy a lavender one for the bedroom and three green ones for the dining and living rooms and RDC's office.
-- At the first meeting of Scarf's new bookclub, talking about influential books, I opined how messed up my generation was by V.C. Andrews. Kal, being several years younger, had never even heard of her (it, the writing corporation). I just lent her my 25-year-old copy of Flowers in the Attic, spine broken about halfway through (at the Christmas party, nowhere smutty), on the other side of yellow with age, held together with rubber bands. She asked! I am lisa, bringer of corruption.
-- Also recently in conversation, Ellen Tibbets, The Champion of Merrimack County (compare and contrast this obscure OOP book with The Mouse and the Motorcycle, even though the titular champion is a bicyclist), The Outsiders, and Look Through My Window.
-- Yesterday marked my eighth anniversary at NCSL.
I don't know where I draw the line between my sister inserting herself as middler (not quite a meddler, but nearly) and performing the critical task of being the parental newsfeed. I expect that only my perspective, not her actions, changes the function.
CLH recently told me that our mother's continuing resentment of RDC stems from her belief that RDC denies me children. I have told the mater that I made my own decision, and that I'm glad I met a man who agreed with me; but since that statement doesn't mesh with her own feeling, she cannot accept, let alone countenance, it.
RDC and I have been together for almost 13 years and I have not yet begun to tick, nor ever quavered, for which I'm grateful. But then, about this I didn't expect to quaver: although I second-guess many decisions and avoid making several more, this issue is one I'm certain about. I do dread ticking, which I anticipate might happen in my 40s. Anecdotally, I've heard that women question their decision most during the hormonal rush into menopause, and that the women who've ridden that crest through are relieved not to have succumbed. So I'll batten the hatches in a few years, and I have informed RDC that he must hold my hand. Meanwhile, if I see an adult walking with a stroller and a leash and am ever more interested in what I see in the stroller than at the end of the leash, I might be in trouble.
If I had stayed with NCS and married him, I might have three kids but also a miserable marriage or a divorce by now. I don't recall whether SSP and I discussed children, but we were only 20ish when we dated and who thinks about children that young? When I was with PLT, I had decided on one child, but PLT said he didn't want a singleton. I agree with what CLH and reportedly BJWL believe, that if I had married someone else I might have decided another way--hopefully before having married him. But, as I told Kal the other day venting all of this, I married RDC, and I am glad to have found someone who shared my lack of biological imperative, and instead of having kids and probably stress and a stagnant partnership, I..."have this great life," Kal finished.
And I do. I have a husband and other family and friends and neighbors and coworkers and community; I have a house and a garden; I have books and walks and music and my bike and access to a pool; I am healthy and not decrepit; I have Blake; I have, besides my own reflexive self-flagellation, a fine life. I don't have a dog, and that might be RDC's fault because he's the one who first wanted a bird, and I don't have a lake, which also might be RDC's fault because he's why I moved to Denver.
But the fact that I don't have a child is not RDC's fault, and I am beyond sick of my mother assuming she knows better.
So the question is, do I tell my mother again for her to ignore me again so I beat myself up again for having failed to get through to her again, for failing to stop futilely wishing, again, for a mother I simply don't have? Or do I just simmer and resent and ensure that the Happy Couple's visit in three months is absolutely dire? Does she know that a primary reason I decided against reproducing is that I wanted to protect a child from generational repetition? That's not something I need to tell her, partly because it might hurt her feelings and partly because she would take it to mean that, for whatever the reason, I am depriving myself.
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In other news, I am so glad that Lady Chatterley's lover's last name is Mellors. At first I thought it was his given name, and wondered what was in the water when D.H. Lawrence and Elizabeth von Arnim were writing. The name Mellersh occurs as a given name only in Enchanted April and no where else that Google can find.
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In yet other news, the new snack sensation is an apple and some M&Ms. Perhaps I could try to shove M&Ms into the fruit's flesh, as one does with cloves and a ham. Probably I will just continue to take a bite of apple with a few M&Ms.
Nisou shrieked when I said I was going to Amsterdam, but she, more sensible than I, has a much more realistic view of the practical distance and expense of LeMans to Amsterdam with two little ones. I didn't expect her to come, of course: that's why I hadn't mentioned it. But I told her I would wave as I passed overhead. Though I expect the flight is routed over the British Isles rather than over France.
Siblet has begun to cruise, and she is suddently much happier. Nisou attributes the winter's crying to frustration at wanting but not quite being able to travel yet. Emlet has made up cousins for herself every day since returning from Connecticut where she has actual and adoptive cousins. She sang me her favorite song of the past few months, "M. Carnival." Last weekend they blew eggs and made brioche and hot cross buns from the eggs, and painted the eggs, and hunted them in the garden. Also Emlet told me how I should come and help her play with her new duck magnet. Okay.
Otherwise Nisou and I talked gardening. Lasagne mulch, and how much we wish we had bought ourselves rotating compost bins rather than ones that need pitchforking, and Nisou's plans for the weedbed, as she calls it, at the foot of her garden, and trellises for raspberries. And where I am going to put strawberries.
I am considering whether to reread The Fall before I go to Amsterdam. I expect not, because it's not particularly about Amsterdam, only that the layout of canals is the closest geography to Dante's nine-circled hell. I have to check where the Swallows landed when they didn't mean to go to sea. Not Amsterdam, I am sure.
I remember a surprising lot about the Camus considering I read it 17 years ago. That's what happens when I love a book and read it closely and write what my curmudgeonly professor called "an exemplary essay" about it.
RDC recently got Ian McEwan's new Saturday from Audible.com. While I'm at it maybe I should reread Amsterdam. Except that I have struck euthanasia from my possible to-do list on the grounds that, while I can do it there and no where else, doing it is likely to dampen my enjoyment of the rest of the trip.
Otherwise I'm reading tour books.
I haven't told all my stories. My recent mention of The Fall reminded me of what I could tell about English 109. I am still glad I am more attractive than particular people for particular reasons and freely admit that particular, and I am certain, universal, human foible, of comparison and self-congratulation. Blake continues to charm me. PLT just sent me recent photographs of several sprouts, and TJZD just produced a new, almost ten-pound one. Those are stories I could tell.
But, as I told RDC yesterday, as we discussed pen vs. keyboard, though I can write faster with a keyboard than with a pen, the latter allows for contemplation whereas the former demands constant attention (the screen) and input (the keyboard).
It was sophomore spring that SLH and I belatedly took English 109 together, reading The Fall and Endgame and The Maltese Falcon and, spew, Harold Pinter's Homecoming. But I think freshling spring saw one of my favorite SLH memories. That semester, we had biology together (inspiring my nickname Polly), on the opposite corner of campus from our dorms. One warm day we biked back to lunch, on one bike, me on the seat and he on the pedals of an over-worked 10-speed. I think he hopped curbs on that thing, long before anyone, even ordinary people, made bikes jump. We scattered people and sheep in our path and left a wake of pissed off people with run-over toes. I remember clutching his love-handles, legs splayed out to keep out of his way, clutching the saddle with my crotch alone, bouncing over curbs and boulders, shrieking and laughing and shrieking with laughter and wondering when we were going to die.
Eighteen years later that exuberant glee and fear is fresh in my heart. Dearest SLH, I'm so glad you're back.
That's my only story right now.
Except not! I just glanced down to my backpack, wondering what therein might inspire a story. I glancingly remembered that a storyteller did that, found an object about his person and began a story from it. Instantly--and I'm glad not longer--I recalled that I was thinking of Dr. Dolittle, who when his family wanted a new story would look at whatever was in his pockets or his little black bag.
And that's another story. This evening RDC made us hot chocolate, with chocolate he brought back from Barcelona. This is not Swiss Miss Swill: this is liquid chocolate. It forms a skin readily, so you drink it with a spoon at the ready for stirring. Sometime recently I told RDC about Gub-gub's story, about the food sprites who had wonderful innovations for dining, like the speaking tubes into which you say whatever you cannot say at table; and the serving of fruit from one end of the table to the other as with tennis balls, with rackets; and the pincushions for fish-bones. What I didn't remember until tonight is yet another of their inventions: wee clotheslines on which to hang the skin of your cocoa so it doesn't gloop over the side of your cup.
Except I doubt Hugh Lofting said "gloop."
The only other story I can think of currently is the one that Blake is declaiming in his box. He's singing about the events of his day and his love for feet.
Is this a great place or what? Good thing I put the screens up last weekend.
The poor trees. That's one helpful thing for now about the blizzard two years ago: the weakest branches are already gone. Still, when I woke up, I threw on fleece and thwapped as much as I could reach with the paint roller's handle, which extends to maybe 10 feet. Now it's 10:37 and I've shoveled twice, us and the two houses to one side, among whom exists an unspoken shoveling agreement, and the two octogenarians' houses at the business end of the street.
Which reminded me, now his immediate next-door neighbor has moved, who will mow Mel's grass? I guess me, which is fine: I don't get to use my reel mower much.
First, the head-petting, for relaxation and comfort. He moves his head around under my fingers if he's in a forgiving mood; otherwise he expects me to know where he wants to be pet next and beaks me for any infraction. This was a head-petting he was glad to get because I had been doing terrible things like jiggling my feet to keep him off them or putting him back on his cage if he wouldn't give up his suit. The petting goes well: the skull and jaw massage, the ruffling of the neck feathers backward, the tugging on the crest feathers. The last I adopted from the masseur, when I decided I might happily pay someone just to pull my skull from my neck for a while. I guess I decided that it would feel good on Blake too.
Then he preens, possibly to get everything I disturbed back into place, possibly because feathers need a lot of maintenance, possibly just to startle me when I look up at the webcam window and he has no head.
And then the nap and my holding my head carefully not to disturb him and the breast feathers tickling my neck. This is my favorite part.
A personal rule about punctuation: A singular possessive word ending in s gets an 's even if the next word begins with s, even if the possessor is Biblical: Jesus's socks.
Otherwise, I would have punctuated this entry differently:
I have questions too. When the possessor is a book and therefore italicized, does the 's take italics as well? Yes, for visual consistency or no, because those last two characters are not part of the title? I say no, so that the apostrophe-s are not mistaken. Or, if the word is in quotation marks and also possessive, which takes precedent? If I wanted to refer to "Davies" or the punctuation thereof, should I write "Davies's" or "Davies"'s? I should rewrite the sentence.
I recently have been participating in the Geography Olympics and regularly scoring 100% unless one or more of the ten countries have been one of those pesky Pacific Islands. Tuvala, Fiji, Vanuatu--where are you again?
Ages ago I sought out blank maps of the contitents to see what I could name where. I found some, where I forget, and printed them. The entire existence of Slovenia had heretofore eluded me, and of the string Zambia, Zamibia, Namibia, and Nambia, I wouldn't've been able to say which two were countries (although, like Pooh with left and right, if properly started I could proceed; and Gambia I remember because a Senegalese friend described it as a dagger through the heart of his country). More recently, a Suspect mentioned a game challenging one to place the 50 states on a map, which is, even in the iteration with only one state visible at a time so you can't use Kansas to place the other rectangles, boringly easy, even for me who rereads some books solely to feel superior to them.
Happily, that site also has similar games for the rest of the world, though happily not countries' provinces because I might know where Cornwall, New South Wales, and Provence are but little more. So I used those maps, which do leave guessed countries in place because without Democratic Republic of Congro situated, I would never know where the Central African Republic goes.
Anyway. I worked my way up through the levels, starting at the thumb-sucking level for Africa but not needing any practice in South America. I have a lock on the former Soviet republics for the first time since 1988, though not their capitals as I had then. I skipped the mean level ("Drag each country name onto the map--no outlines given") after a few tries because if the apex of the arrow isn't exactly where it's expected, you're wrong, and became fluent in the next level, "Drag and rotate each country onto the map--you must rotate the country to the proper orientation." I ceased playing when my scores were consistently high.
Last night, preparing for his trip, RDC asked me if there were other countries in South Africa. Even before I got to the point I could place Lesotho at its proper longitude and latitude, I knew it was within South Africa, but I might have thought Swaziland was also an island instead of nestling between it and Mozambique. But I was surprised that the notion of South Africa surrounding another country came as a surprise to him. I always remembered it just because it is a globally unique configuration. No it's not: Italy contains Vatican City and San Marino.
Another reason I stopped playing is that I'm still no better at knowing capitals. Those countries with two capitals, like Bolivia, or three, like South Africa--I mock them. But I can't find any games to teach me those, and previously I learned by pairing in incessant writing the country and capital. That's also how I learned French and Latin and Russian and Old English vocabulary, and I wonder to this day how much sank it by staring at the pairs as I wrote and how much by the muscle memory of writing. It did work then (well, not for Russian), but now a game would be funner.
Aha! A hangman game of countries and capitals, but you have to click on the letters instead of type them: primitive.
Um. Today I called a company about the shipping time on an order I'd placed: I wanted to know if it considered Colorado to be in the midwest or the west. I grant that my knowledge of physical geography is pointlessly not backed up with knoweldge about countries' histories and interrelationships, but the woman I spoke to asked, "Is Colorado near Ohio?" I don't think she was from India because her voice was distinctly natively Usan, not blandly non-British. If I have too pointlessly little, she has too pointlessly none.
I usually say I'm not competitive (except about Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit). However. Today I went back to the map game site because I guessed Liberia for Sierra Leone at the Geography Olympics. I know as much about what countries are bounded by which others as I currently need. But the map games have a new level now, with countries needing not only to be rotated to be correctly placed on a map but resized too, no names given. I do not need to identify countries by their shape, absent name or relative size, I tell myself firmly.
It was chilly this morning, chilly being relative and in this case 40 degrees, so I asked Kal for a ride. A good thing I did, too, because in the later afternoon, before my usual leaving time and toward Kal's, hail began to patter down. Little hail, smaller than M&Ms, and soft. But lots.
RDC wanted to go observe the end of R-months until fall with oysters, so we did that at Jax Fish House. I thought, eating one, that it was a little off; I also thought, with it in my mouth, that if it was going to kill me it already had. Then we had fried calamari, and this is not just fried squid. It is light and perfect and strips of body and curls of tentacles and has two exquisitely complementary sauces, a baked (?) lime and a sweetly hot chili.
Meanwhile, hail streamed down.
On the way home we stopped in Marczyk's for dessert and hail plummeted down, and we ate chocolate ganache squares in front of MASH and Northern Exposure while hail formed drifts outside and cloud-to-cloud lightning caused barely audible lightning.
It seems television, as well as music, stopped for me in the early 1990s. Or '80s. A friend once said she wanted some Joel in her perfect man mix of Chris and Ed. Not me: just Chris and Ed. The pickings are slimmer in MASH, but there's one easy answer: Sherman Potter.
When Shadow was young, she would not explore the staircase. Eventually, she tried it out, getting herself upstairs, but for a while we had to carry her down. Staring down those 13 narrow wooden steps, her urge to please could not overcome her fear of that flight, what with her big paws and puppy clumsiness. Finally, she did it, with me by her side should she slip.
We now possess a rooftop evaporative cooler, hooray. Sometime soon we will remove the window unit, and RDC's office will have more light (though not air: I have to build a screen for that window) and the side of the house won't have a burl poking out.
The plumber suggested a mineral block to suppress mold and so forth. I'm not the one afraid of heights, so clearly I am the one to climb up to the roof and set the block into the drip tray. I've been wanting to climb around on the roof for a while anyway, but I have never quite understood how you get from ladder to roof. The plumber said over the top, which I hadn't thought of before, and so today, I went over the top. (Please excuse the WWI metaphor.) It's easy to lift a leg from the third-highest (highest permissible) rung over the gutter to the not-very-slanty roof and, another suggestion from the plumber, to fall forward.
I did that, scrabbled up, removed one side panel (the downhill one, which is Wrong because you lift the panel down which means your weight goes down and the drop is down too), placed the block, and scrabbled backward toward the ladder.
I felt a lot like my three-month-old dog.
Stepping on the topmost rung is no good: it's not just that the safety label says not to, it's that weight on that rung could tilt the ladder and I had no reward like an intercostal clavicle to make it worthwhile. If you fall forward to get on the roof, do you fall backward to get on the ladder? Yii. I turned left, my right, stronger, dominant side to the roof, left hand on the left stile, right foot gripping the sole of my right boot, whole soul hoping that boot had all the gription it ought, left foot out yii out yeepers out to the second rung. After that I was fine.
I tried to give blood today. The screening nurse who poked my finger to test my blood for hemoglobin or some measure by which 49 was excellent also took my pulse. Then she took it again because, she said, the first time was 48. So was the second time. If it didn't increase to 50 beats per minute by the time I reclined in the chair, I couldn't donate. I strolled around the room until a chair was available, but the lamprey nurse said she had to take a resting pulse and, three minutes later when she measured it, it was still 48. I returned a couple of hours later when the screener again counted it at 48.
I am the undead.
Wednesday I choreographed carefully. I had a doctor's appointment at 3:00, a haircut at 4:30, and Haitch was at a conference in Colorado Springs. After Janelle released me from her expert hands, I rushed home to feed Blake and then leave him, squeaking sadly, behind. He wanted to see his Auntie Haitch too.
I ate with John Leonard at the bar while Haitch finished up with her colleagues, and then we crashed on her hotel bed to discuss stick insects, maternity clothing, and child-bearing hips. She has a belly because she is going to provide me with another sprout come August, and she has the prettiest five-month curve I have ever seen.
As far as Haitch visits go, it wasn't very long, but also it happened at all instead of not, so that was good. It had rained on the way down and I had to leave at 9 to get up in time for last-minute fussing, and it rained and also snowed on the way back. But I got to see my pregnant Haitch.
When I am in Europe, I expect tobacco (and in Amsterdam, marijuana) smoke and, less so than previously but still, a certain amount of body odor. Getting there was something else. I landed in Detroit and had just enough time before my flight to track down some TCBY. I ate that on the gangway, and moving along the gangway took that much time even though I was in the back of the plane and shouldn't've had zillions of people ahead of me. I was in my seat, earplugs in, suitcase stowed, book to hand, and an attendant announced they were about to close the doors when a last passenger dashed onto the plane. As he side-stepped along the aisle, I decided he must be my window-seat-mate. He looked like Tommy Chong, whose character on "That '70s Show" cracks me up, so that was fine. Looking like Tommy Chong leads, as I should have realized before his closing the distance between us made evident, to smelling like Tommy Chong too. The man reeked of tobacco in a way I am accustomed to the unwashed homeless reeking. I didn't sit back down but fled to the service area to ask to be reseated. While one attendant looked, another attendant arrived me and asked what I was doing. I told him, and he knew immediately: "Oh, you were in 43B?" So it's not just that I am a wilting flower but that passenger was an Airborne Toxic Event.
I am pretty sure that sitting next to Mr. Bhopal 1984 would have been worse than sitting immediately behind the cryingest toddler ever, the sort who would, having wound down, realized he had wound down and so wind back up again. My earplugs are not as effective as I could wish. Neither was the melatonin. I know I slept some, because I had a crazy dream involving Jessie and flying kites, but not much. I recited, like Proginoskes and the stars, countries and capitals. Once I didn't even finish South America before I was asleep.
I don't remember arriving in France in 2003 because I was the closest to being asleep on my feet I think I have ever been. Arriving in London in 2001, we shuffled through more than an hour of queuing for customs. My first impression of the Netherlands was thus positive, because after landing at 7:15 a.m. I strolled through customs, tra la, without a line. That was good, because my next absolute encounter, with the train-ticket machine (the use of which I had practiced online, since it is the one thing in the Netherlands not available in English), was less wonderful. I could not use my MC debit card as a credit card, and it didn't work for the man behind me (who was Dutch, as I should have guessed from his ginormous stature, and English-speaking, as was almost everyone we encountered). So I bought my ticket from a human, and asked another human which track ("spoor," which interests me as a cognate, since the spoor of an animal is its track with an implication of poop) I should take. I found Spoor Een, but I just kinda got on the train without checking its direction. I had been on the train for several minutes and the buildings were getter smaller and sheep began to appear. Huh. I was, in fact, headed to Utrecht. Aha. I disembarked at the next stop and found the one Dutch person who does not speak English: I asked the ticket-clerk if she spoke English and she said, "A little." I bought a ticket to go to Amsterdam and asked which spoor. She showed me her outstretched hand, and I wasn't sure if she was telling me the minutes I had to wait or the track number. But the biggest help to get me to Amsterdam was just getting on a train that pointed the other way.
It would have been hard even for me to mistake Centraal Station for anything else. I asked another helpful information clerk how to find the Damrak and scampered thither, wheelie bumping over cobblestones. I got to the hotel by 9:15, swapped some stuff in my bags (ditching comfy socks, eyemask, and iPod, and fetching camera and sunglasses), left RDC a message, and scarpered in the direction of the Anne Frank Huis. I had an idea, from the scales on maps, that the city is about the size of my left thigh, but that idea hadn't sunk in quite enough. It doesn't have to be a 45-minute walk from the Dam to the Secret Annex, but I overshot considerable-like and then backtracked.
The first stop in my wandering would have been Nieuwkierk, but it was closed against Queen Beatrix's arrival later that afternoon. Cool: royalty.
An acquaintance of mine told me that her father thought the diary was not entirely genuine. Not that it was faked, as Holocaust-deniers allege, but that the writing is not that of a 13-year-old girl. I wonder if he had seen her handwriting. I saw it. I also saw her wee bedroom, Peter's alcove, the bookcase'd staircase, and what I hope is still the same chestnut tree flowering in the garden. I listened to the diary as an adult rather than rereading it obsessively as a child, so I didn't have the houseplans memorized. Of course: the annex did not face the canal but the garden. Several tall, narrow houses--ten or so on a side?--form a square. Their fronts face streets or canals and their backs share an enclosed space. I don't know if each has its own sliver of garden or if they all share it in common, but that's where the chestnut grew. I thought of Francie and the Tree of Heaven as well.
After more wandering and lunch in a cafe whose tables teetered on a cobblestoned bridge, I retreated to the hotel. It was 1:00, and aside from RDC's arrival around 3:00 I was unaware of that part of the planet outside my duvet for the next five hours.
In the evening, we wandered and finally found the Leidesplein. Preparations for Koninginnedag--lots of stalls and outdoor concerts--threw RDC off his bearings and it took a while to find the exact street he wanted. We ran it to earth finally and had a filling if not scrumptious Tibetan dinner. We began to walk through the Dam just as the orchestra set up outside Nieuwkierk finished its piece and the royal family processed into place. We did not see them in the flesh, but we did arrive just in time to watch on massive screens. The elite in the secure area rose from their seats at her arrival; hoi polloi in the square raised their drinks.
And the morning and the evening were the first day.
30 April is Koninginnedag, Queen's Day. The current queen's, Beatrix, birthday is not 30 April but on some seasonally less appealing date, so she observes her mother's day. And so does everyone else. I have never seen so much green in Boston on St. Patrick's Day as I saw orange on this day. The streets and canals pulsed with people and boats wearing inflatable orange crowns, moose antlers, arrows through the head, Gilligan caps, clown wigs, leis, grass skirts, nail polish, hose, rugby shirts, streamers, bunting, and balloons. The orange has to come from the same family color as makes Ireland see red, and it's a hideous color anyway, and overall there was so much orange that I saw blue after-images for hours. Weeks later, the correct metaphor occurred to me: the entire country looks like Home Depot. Next time I am going to wear a smock and carry a five-gallon bucket.
A benefit to everyone getting drunk in the street on orange beer (I exagerrate: only Usans color their beer) was that the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh were comparatively empty. Neither had a line. Much of the Rijks collection is in storage while the building is renovated, but I saw Rembrandt's The Night Watch and Vermeer's Woman Reading a Letter and View of Houses in Delft and especially The Kitchen Maid (The Love Letter is not in the selected display), and I marveled over the dollhouses. Despite its being only a partial display, I think I'm done: I don't often care for people or buildings in my paintings, Vermeer being an exception, and so whatever I am supposed to admire about Rembrandt I usually don't. The dollhouses (really, miniature actual houses and vanity pieces for housewives, not toys for children) were exquisite (plus I have that small=cute thing) but, yeah, people and buildings do not make for interesting art on the whole.
The Van Gogh is small and perfect. I still love Starry Night (which I've seen at the MoMA) and Wheatfields with Cypress, which I must have seen au Musée d'Orsay, but here I saw The Potato Eaters (people, but people with a purpose) and Wheatfield with Crows and Wheatfield with Thunderclouds and a Sunflowers and his bedroom at Arles and Trees and Undergrowth. I took a picture of an outdoor concert on the Museumplein from a window in the Van Gogh.
Koninginnedag was like St. Patrick's Day in Boston combined with the day after the World Series last year, minus the burning of couches (UConn after a basketball team won an NCAA tournament) or overturning of cars (Denver after the football team the Superbowl). Drunken buffoonery but no drunken brawlery. It was just a lot of fun energy.
In the evening we ate in a Japanese restaurant, seated at a table with four Usan men who were in Amsterdam for the weekend, for the party, before going to London to see Eric Clapton. They were...interesting, and fun, and the six of us were already obviously the Yanks in the joint long before the loudest said that Michael Jackson's comeback song was going to be a cover of Elton John's "Don't Let Your Son Go Down on Me," shocking me into an outburst of I-can't-believe-you-just-said-that braying.
Sunday we went to Keukenhof, 70 acres of tulips, daffodils, lilies, hyacinths, and 150-year-old beech trees. It was staggeringly beautiful and staggeringly crowded and blisteringly hot, way more than the "vingt trois" the Frenchie behind me in line for postcards and please more water claimed. It wasn't just that I had packed for Farenheit 50s and cloudy and that the press of people redefined clusterfuck ("kloosterfook") and that it was humid too. It was just fucking hot.
And goddamn loud. In the entrance was a giant, electric hurdy-gurdy that was blaring, as the entry crowd absorbed us and spat us into the interior, "Summer Lovin'." Muzaked "Grease" was just not the right background noise, but, as RDC said, what else would tourists take photographs of if not this? On our way out, "Bohemian Rhapsody." When we were out of earshot of it, we were stalked by two different musterings of Canadian bagpipery. Bagpipes are ordinarily just fine by me--men in skirts: what can go wrong?--but they were only slightly less inappropriate than the gypsy van hurdy-gurdy. A measure of my grumptitude was that the sight of men in skirts did not make me happy: they wore kneesocks and made me feel hotter. I looked up animal group words for an appropriate one for bagpipers, and a mustering is a collection of storks. I don't know what Canadian bagpipers were doing in the Netherlands, but "mustering" is an appropriate term for them there.
It was hot and loud and crowded and I was parched and hungry, so four of my five senses had ruffled brows and wanted to run screaming. But my eyes, my eyes were happy. Fucking hot, goddamn loud, and absolutely stunningly beautiful.
We were possibly going to go to Den Haag after this for (I alleged) more than just my slavering over Girl with a Pearl Earring but by four o'clock we were completely done in. Eventually we ate reistafel in Kanijl and De Tijger: a whopping bowl of rice and a dozen smaller servings of meat, vegetables, and seafood, that add up to a bulimic nightmare.
Monday was, thank heavens, cool again, and misty to the point of rain. We visited the Stedelijk CS. It too is being renovated so the temporary location has one work per year from 1875 to 2005. In this museum I felt guiltless for just walking past a piece if it didn't immediately appeal to me. RDC liked it better, as we both expected.
Then we took a canal boat tour, which was required on our visas. I kid. It was touristy as hell but I liked it.
Tuesday I left for home and RDC for South Africa, which (well, Cape Town to start) he reports is breathtaking. I spent two days traveling for four days in the Netherlands: South Africa is two days each way. Next time.
Threescore pictures and six, including the above, are here.
When we got back from the vet and Blake had had snacks (including toast), he begged for the reading chair in the living room. Instead I offered him my lap in RDC's office, and he is now tucked.
I missed my little buddy.
I am not old yet, I know, but I am definitely changing. I always thought I would look more like my mother as I aged, but right now I look a lot more like my father. In every single photograph of me in the Netherlands, I wonder if my mother was in the room when I was conceived. She was, because I have Granny's eyes, but otherwise I'm Dad. Partly it's that fat makes my face look more round, more like Dad's, than the rectangle that is my mental image of myself and that my mother carries.
I have my grandmother's eyes, and the texture of my skin is changing.
I still like my profile best.
I turn 37 in less than three weeks. I still look best with a dog. Edited: this is not my dog. It is someone else's dog in someone else's house. The big clue to its not being my house is the crocheted afghan in plain sight.
Kal hosted me for dinner cooked by her newish boyfriend Ziggy, and we played Cranium afterward. The instructions call for teams of at least two, but what the hell. One would read a card, the second would perform the task and would progress based on whether the third got it. For the record, I cannot hum Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion," the only words of which I know are the title two. The hum kept sliding into "Sweet Home Alabama," "Smoke on the Water," and "Walk This Way." I can hum "Stayin' Alive," or at least someone can guess what I mean when I flaut the rules and gesture, if pointedly pointing my chin up and right or down and left like John Travolta counts as gesturing.
There was chaos and hilarity, of course, as these things dictate. My spelling words were ridiculous, like "larva," and I dropped my head to the table with a clunk when this question a) was included at all and b) as a multiple choice: "Stars trace a circular path through the sky because of Earth's rotation on its axis/ Earth's revolution around the Sun/ I forget the third choice/ the galaxy's rotation on its axis." Oh, the humanity.
The funniest thing during the evening was not Kal's shut-eye drawing of a stick shift that looked like a priapus, especially after she added action arrows spurting from the knob much more indicative of ejaculate than of a standard transmission. The funniest thing was Marlowe the cat. He had wanted On the table during dinner (Ziggy made stuffed shells) but was not allowed; after dinner he figured he was sure to be allowed On. He launched up, landed front paws on the edge ready to scoot forward when his back legs followed, but before his eyes on the table lay the Cranium box, not heavy or overtall but unexpected. His hind legs now arrived on the table edge, but instead of continuing the propulsion of his noggin into the box, he abruptly dropped to the floor. We cracked up, me braying. Ziggy considered which was funnier, the cat or my laugh. I love people who appreciate my laugh.
(Of the four Yank drunks we were seated with at the Amsterdam Japanese restaurant, one looked like Dick Cheney so it was awhile before I got past that. The final straw that got me past it was his complimenting my laugh.)
Cranium was fun, if not nearly as challenging as I had hoped. I won, even though I couldn't guess Imelda Marcos ("look at my shoes!") and had no idea whether the Chicago Cubs had ever won the World Series.
In the morning I read Briar Rose, and in the afternoon Kal and I went to the Botanic Gardens. We had blown off the plant sale the two days previous, but more important was its being lilac season. We had a blanket, books, fruit, and chocolate, and we read on a spatch of ground under the lilacs. Also we talked, and also we called our mothers, it being Mother's Day.
(I miss using "spatch," and not using it means I don't have any spatches. My other current spatch is on the grass at the break of the otherwise semi-circular parapet that bounds the Dot Org patio. I have other spots--under the cherry tree, on the floor between the couch and the bookcase, on the porch swing--but no other spatches. City Park is too full of goose shit for good spatching.)
Before we left we ambled through other parts of the garden. The Botanic Gardens grows lilypads in a series of connected waterways (which might be ponds if they didn't have concrete or stone bottoms). Seemingly grounded walkways separate them, but there are culverts connecting them. On a rock in the middle of one roosted on one leg a mallard duck, beak in wing, and with, we counted, six ducklings underneath her. On another rock the drake also rested. Little heads, little wings, big feet, and oo! such irresistible yet ethically untouchable down. The drake flew off, and two little ones detached themselves from the pile and dropped into the water.
Of course, I had thought of bringing my camera, but because Saturday's weather changed all day, today I brought my parka, leaving no room. Not having pictures of flowers or of Kal is one thing. Not having pictures of ducklings is another matter.
These ducklings were so young they were no bigger than their eggs. If they were two days old I'd be surprised. Can they swim that well so fast? Be so adventurous so quickly? They were so young they didn't know how to sleep yet. One's head drooped forward, forward, as it fell asleep, until it rested on the tip of its beak. Several stretched their little legs out and then forgot to draw them back under their bodies. The sleeping ones were awfully cute and and the swimming ones were terribly cute and we watched and cooed.
When do you use "adventuresome" and when "adventurous"?
Eventually all the babies woke up and swam with their mother, and when they had sorted themselves out they were nine. The two most adventuresome had swum under our feet, through a dark low tunnel, to the next pond, and when the whole clutch were in the water, the duck changed ponds by walking (too big to fit through the culverts) and the ducklings paddled under her feet. Maybe they were older than we hoped, because she must have taught them that through how many repetitions?
How can ducklings be so cute and grow up to be just ducks, and how can cockatiel babies be so very ugly, undercooked dinosaurs with hedghog spikes, but grow up to be parrots? It is a mystery.
I biked today for the first time since mid-April. Across an intersection I saw a car with its hazards on. When I got alongside, I asked the driver if she was okay, needed a phone. She was fine, thank you. That's something I wouldn't've done in a car.
At work, Intern had me look up when HBO would show a boxing match (I have to look it up so he doesn't see anything about the bout ahead of time). Somehow this eventually led to his saying about my not watching Oprah, "I thought she had a lock on you guys." Apparently he didn't know that not "all women" watch her show "religiously." I told him I ought to smack him for that. But then I admitted that--had he heard of the time she gave everyone a car? yes?--I did watch that footage online, because that was happifying. And that I had once watched, if not Oprah, a soap opera; but I had an excuse: it was Luke and Laura's perihelion. He hadn't heard of them, but I told him that if in 1978 I could know about Leon Spinks, he would have known about Luke and Laura.
From behind us, Ernie said wonderingly, "Did you just say Leon Spinks?" He was amazed that I knew a boxer. (Hey, "Evander Holyfield" is one of my favorite names!) After we pulled him onto the boxcar of our conversation, the three of us talked about the movie "Ali" and Intern offered that he just saw "Cinderella Man" and current movies led to my other confession, which is that I am going to see "Revenge of the Sith" on Thursday.
So then we all got to complain about the second trilogy, which Ernie hasn't seen any of. I told him that of the two, only the second offers only about 45 seconds near its end that is worth watching, of Yoda getting medieval on Christopher Lee. Ernie of course recognized the "Pulp Fiction" allusion and gratifyingly thought that was pretty funny.
Late last week as I didn't clean the house as much as I had planned to for RDC's return but instead reread trashy novels, I hated myself and the world and was in a really pissy mood. Mid-cycle or because I wasn't regular with my medication while traveling? I wish I knew. Since Friday, though, I have been happy, happy to have RDC home, happy to garden, happy to sit under the cherry tree and read, happy to alphabetize the CDs* onto the shelves of the television shrine while watching a few episodes from Buffy's second season, happy to have inane conversations about boxing and Oprah with my coworkers, happy that someone might mock me knowing Leon Spinks's name but then laugh at my suggestion of Yoda with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.
Ha! Except later, Kal was debating what to get her parents for their wedding anniversary. What, anything besides a card? I asked, "Is it a big number?" meaning 25 or a number ending in 0. She calculated, "2005, 1968..." and I grinned, because that is an obvious calculation for me, and she continued, "Yeah, 37 is a pretty big number." I chuckled through my grimace, and she tried to dig herself out by saying it's a long time to be married, not a long time to be alive. That's a new downside to a friend so significantly younger than myself, whereas my making myself incomprehensible through dated pop cultural referents is my own fault.
* finishing with the classical, RDC has now stored electronically all our music.
My sister bought her house! Yes indeed. She wanted some help identifying weeds in her garden, so I found a UConn site with weed flashcards (I have a lot of prostrate spurge and roundleaf mallow and some bull thistle in addition to bindweed; dandelions are not a weed). I recommended the UConn Cooperative Extension Center to her and added something, meanly and obviously unnecessarily but this is my sister, about how our mother spoke of their helpfulness and knowledgeability and, I therefore assumed, how much they must have dreaded her calls.
CLH replied, "with the UConn extension, can I email the appropriate person with a description and ask? and were you serious about BJWL, wouldn't that have been a toll call...what if they kept her on hold."
Ha! So I replied with perhaps the longest single sentence I have ever run:
You mean like the time the summer after I broke up with SSP and she called me at work in Waterford to tell me she had fetched the mail and he had written me a letter and by the time the call was transferred to me who was not at my phone at my desk in JBM's office but somewhere else legitimate so that the switchboard tried Westinghouse first and then Engineering and maybe CHC's assistant whom I also worked for and finally into some other office of which I would have zero memory except that this is where I was run to earth and I picked the phone up and the first thing I heard was BJW, expecting that this was the switchboard again, irritatedly saying, "You know this is a toll call that I'm paying for" as if it were the switchboard's fault I was an office floater and I said "Hi Mom" because who else would it be and she, having called as if in kindness to tell me I had a letter from my dumped and now regretted exboyfriend but not in so much kindness that three minutes of paying for a toll call hadn't already taken its...toll, now made her call even longer by telling me her story of switchboard woe before finally getting around to telling me why she had called in the first place, which intent didn't do a pisscup's worth of good for my state of mind, already poor, because I was an utter wreck for the next three hours until I could get home to read the thing. Hence why I never give her my work numbers anymore. She used to call me for no good reason at all at Phoebe too.
I just made up "pisscup."
Oh, and my freshling dorm had a switchboard too. There was one phone in each of the six floors' three sections, for incoming or campus calls. She had called me I don't know how many times and the switchboard had picked up so she paid for the connections before being switched up to 4S where someone would pick up, knock on my door, and rouse no one, probably deliberately wasting her money. When I came back from wherever, I took a shower, so that the next time she called that afternoon (what was her name, the woman at the end near the phone who therefore always had to answer? poor thing), someone said I was in the shower, which the neighbor dutifully reported to BJWL, and since I was physically present, the neighbor then was commanded to go into the bathroom to alert me, where I protested I was in the shower, whereupon the next step was that I should just wrap a towel around myself and get to the phone pronto. This in itself was pretty damn funny, since I did not have a bathrobe freshling year (do you remember you gave me your old Victoria's Secret peach terrycloth one by sophomore year, a good thing since then I was in a co-ed dorm) but the two towels she was least unwilling to risk to the rigors of campus living, worn to a crisp and waaay too small to "just wrap around myself" as I came to the phone. Once at the phone I asked for 30" to scurry to my room to put on actual clothes, she told me no because she had already called x times and had to pay for each call even though I wasn't there (this was a Saturday afternoon) and she had to tell me this even though, again, it made the call longer than it needed to be. Which was pretty damn short, since as I remember whatever it was she was calling to tell me was not, as she says, "earth-shattering."
Yet it was between the freshling year making me stand exposed dripping and lathery in the hall and the Millstone incident of 1991 that she expended next to no effort to track me down to tell me that Gram died in time for me to attend her funeral. NCS and I had gone to his house for the weekend, and that was a phone number she had. Although even if she had called there, I can just imagine the guilt I would have received from both ends, from the one for leaving school for the weekend (Labor Day weekend, before classes started, and I had been living with the Beasts for the past few weeks to work Add/Drop anyway) and being so very far away in time of crisis, and from the other for so selfishly wanting to leave his home to attend my great-grandmother's funeral. I was dependent on others for transportation in any event; do you think if NCS had been unwilling to chauffeur me and I had taken the train to Saybrook, anyone would have picked me up?
Yeah, I think that's how the extension office works. The Colorado one is downtown, near Dot Org's previous address. That used to be pretty convenient (yep, still--well, not bitter, but a tad resentful: working in the hinterlands has not yet become just a funny story, as these former resentments about our mother have). I used to go over and talk to them about dealing with bindweed and identifying trees and how to compost. But not all the time! Not in a bothersome way! Not demanding attention if they were otherwise occupied! I promise!
And huh, I hadn't thought of how BJWL would have dealt with calling Norwich. This could be one of the ways BDL has improved her general outlook and her stranglehold on her pursestrings.
Not, thank heavens, mine. I would be somewhat more somber and off my rocker were that the case.
Last night we ate on the patio, and as RDC grilled and I surfed, suddenly Blake, in his cage on the table under the umbrella, cocked his head to peer at something nearly beneath him and shrieked. "What's in the raspberries?" I asked. We looked: a baby starling.
Three years ago we stayed out of the backyard all one Saturday (scheduled to be the tomato-planting day) because parent starlings wouldn't attend to their fallen baby when we were in sight. They fed the thing all day, but later when I was in the grocery store and had called RDC to ask him about some item or other, I heard our buddy shriek and a whole bunch of other bird agitation: RDC said a crow had just swooped by the window (scaring Blake) futilely pursued by all the starlings in the neighborhood. When I got home, there wasn't much to throw away besides the feathers that I left where they had been torn out.
Last night there were no parent starlings around. The hatchling was nearly fledged and could get a couple of inches of loft before succumbing to a force greater than its own. Overnight it succumbed to a force greater than gravity: I spotted its little big-footed corpse on the walkway as I laced my bike shoes. I used a terracotta pot to transport it to the dumpster (is that why pots should be washed between plants?). Then, as I wheeled Shadowfax to the street, I saw another dead bird, this one a housefinch old enough to be male-colored, dead in the grass under the pear. So I've got that pleasant task awaiting me this afternoon. Is my feeder diseasing the birds? This is the fourth whole (not killed by a predator) dead finch I have found on my property in the past six months.
I called RDC from work to tell him the starling didn't make it and that I'd thrown it out but to beware of the still-there dead finch. He called me a while later to tell me a magpie was eating the squab from the pigeons' nest the neighbors never clear from their soffits. He knew that would cheer me up. And it did. The avian flu that I would prefer be responsible (rather than myself) for the finches' death killed a large fraction of my favorite local bird--it's been months since magpies made a daily appearance in my life--so I hope fresh warm squab offers a lot of yummy nutrition.
Revenge of the Sith: Nothing I say could spoil it, because you already know that Darth Vader is Luke and Laura's--sorry, Luke and Leia's--father, Senator Palpatine is the Emperor, and that Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader. Oh, you didn't? Where the fuck have you been?
A few impressions (where the fuck have I been?):
* Only when I was 15 and "Return of the Jedi" came out did I learn there was an Emperor.** Who would have thought, from "Star Wars" (which I will go to my grave not calling "A New Hope") and "The Empire Strikes Back," that Darth Vader didn't reign supreme?
** Maybe, if the Emperor was ever mentioned in the first two (was he?) I blocked him out, because Darth Vader was scary enough. This is kind of like Aslan being enough and the Emperor-over-the-Sea, whose son Aslan is, seeming like overkill.***
*** Narnia might have occurred to me because one of the plethora of previews was for "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," which will be out in December. I wonder how much it will suck and how much its production will derive from "Lord of the Rings." Confidence is high, however. I am a sucker.
(The movie is titled as Peter Jackson did his: "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Not "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew." Know why? Because to reorder a set of books, even if to the author's wishes, so that the first one explains the magic of the entire series, is to render the Chronicles lifeless. At least the movie industry is not so stupid. Also this titling implies that others might follow. I expect that "The Last Battle" might have a better movie audience than book audience, given that another preview was for "Revelations," which looked like either part of or distilled from the "Left Behind" drivels.)
Overall, much less sucky than the other two. It had more scenes of Yoda fighting, which seemed more natural and less deus ex machina than in "Attack of the Clones." It didn't have any goddamn stupid pod races or zipping through a Bladerunneresque city's air traffic or navigating a "Chicken Run" pie-making-machine gauntlet (to clarify: that was great in "Chicken Run"; in "Attack of the Clones," it was stupid and derivative).
Most of all, I wish I had been stronger and resisted going to the first in a theatre, which viewing compelled me to succumb to the subsequent two. "Sucking less" doesn't equate to "unsucky enough to be worth it."
P.S. Anthony Lane, I love you: "The general opinion of "Revenge of the Sith" seems to be that is marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes....True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion" (The New Yorker, 23 May 2005).
P.P.S. Anthony Lane, allow me my childhood heroes. He says, "...What's with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. 'I hope right you are.' Break me a fucking give." (Ibid.) Except that Yoda wasn't a childhood hero. I thought he was just a Muppet--and he was--and didn't come around to doting on him until the rerelease of "Star Wars" (which was, frankly, the first time I had thought of him in a zillion years). I need to introduce "break me a fucking give" into my idiolect.
South City Park is a fine neighborhood, dog- and garden-wise, but it has its fair share of crime. I am more concerned with property crime (because it can affect me me me) than with the selling sex or drugs, but I am hardly blind to the facts that illegal activity--whether or not it should be illegal--dims the tone of the neighborhood and makes people fearful, and that drug trade increases property crime. Smoking your homegrown pot is one thing; buying meth and crack another.
So last night was a neighborhood meeting with police officers and city council members and RTD representatives and neighborhood residents and business owners, so many of us that we spilled out of the coffeeshop and hijacked the art gallery a few storefronts along. I volunteered to take notes more for my own peace of mind (my notes wouldn't spread grammatical errors) than out of generosity.
One hotel, with a bus stop out front, is the crime nexus, but everyone was aware that if the hotel became a veritable buttercup, the crime would only move into the alleys. People vented about cops harassing those who report panderers (report the badge number and behavior), and all taking breaks simultaneously such that more deals are done during their lunches at the café than at other times (the commander said they're not supposed to do that); and being distracted by a patrol car's windowful of bosom while two deals were done in plain sight half a block away.
It was a good meeting, and gave me a few ideas about neighborhood involvement. Also about the fact that apparently I live in the boring end of my neighborhood.
I'm still quizzing myself on capitals of the world. I tell myself it is unkind to dismiss the Carribean and Oceania as too puny to matter. I mean, the Greater Antilles are not so puny, and Charlotte Amalie is a lovely name even though I would say the actual capital of the U.S. Virgin Islands is Washington, D.C., and Dominica is easy to remember because it's the only island left with any native population, thanks Columbus, but Nauru, Palau, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu have done nothing to distinguish themselves to me and they all sound alike.
It's the sound alike problem I have with Africa. I went through the list and noted the mnemonic I use for each country, and the capitals left are all too similar. The game I learn from is matching, which is good for my level because although I recognize Antananarivo as the capital of Madagascar when I see it, I couldn't fill in a blank with it. But the give-away of matching leaves me with three-syllable words that seem alien to me except that they're familiar to each other:
Equatorial Guinea : Malabo
Mali : Bamako
Uganda : Kampala
There is no reason for me not to know the capital of Uganda: Idi Amin happened in my lifetime. But it hasn't stuck in my head yet. Most of the other capitals have, though many only to the point of recognition:
Algeria, Algiers; obvious
Angola, Luanda; Angola borders Zambia to the left, as Luanda comes alphabetically left of Lusaka
Benin, Porto-Novo; known from Egg's trip
Botswana, Gaborone; Gabon-like
Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou; long and complicated like neighbor Ivory Coast
Burundi, Bujumbura; alliterative
Cameroon, Yaoundé; oon, aoun
Cape Verde, Praia; pretty islands, pretty name
Central African Republic, Bangui; alphabetically before Gambia; as is deceptively similar Bangui
Comoros, Moroni; LDS' homeland
Congo, DRC, Kinshasa; known from history
Eritrea, Asmara; sounds geographically appropriate
Ethiopia, Addis Ababa; known because has always been favorite country name
Gabon, Libreville; annoying, because distant from Sierra Leone and Liberia and from Botswana
Gambia, Banjul; alphabetically after CAR; as is deceptively similar Banjul
Ghana, Accra; alphabetically before other g-n Guinea; so is "akr" Accra
Guinea, Conakry; alphabetically after g-n Ghana; so is "akr" Conakry
Guinea-Bissau, Bissau; obvious
Ivory Coast, Yamoussoukro; long and complicated like neighbor Burkina Faso; also given as Abidjan, which erratically east African.
Kenya, Nairobi; known because has always been favorite country name
Lesotho, Maseru; geographically near Mozembique therefore both Ms; vowels in alpha order, therefore before Mozambique; begins with m, like obviously southern african Mbabane in Swaziland which is between Lesotho and Mozambique
Liberia, Monrovia; known from U.S. history
Libya, Tripoli; known from living history
Madagascar, Antananarivo; both long
Malawi, Lilongwe; long country, long in word
Mauritania, Nouakchott; sounds geographically appropriate
Mauritius, Port Louis; island therefore port
Morocco, Rabat; known from history
Mozambique, Maputo; geographically near Lesotho therefore both Ms; u comes after e therefore after Lesotho; begins with m, like obviously southern african Mbabane in Swaziland which is between Lesotho and Mozambique
Namibia, Windhoek; sounds geographically appropriate
Niger, Niamey; known because of Nisou's sister's Peace Corps work
Nigeria, Abuja; only one of the 10 most populous countries in the world: no reason to remember its capital
Republic of the Congo, Brazzaville; known
Rwanda, Kigali; known from Hotel Rwanda
Sao Tome and Principe, Sao Tomé; obvious
Senegal, Dakar; known from UConn Senegalese community
Seychelles, Port Victoria; island therefore port
Sierra Leone, Freetown; similar (reason for) name as Liberia
Somalia, Mogadishu; known from living history
South Africa, Pretoria; known from living history
Sudan, Khartoum; known from living history
Swaziland, Mbabane; sounds southern African
Tanzania, Dar Es Salaam; sounds like 1001 nights
Togo, Lomé; known from Egg's trip
Tunisia, Tunis; obvious
Zambia, Lusaka; Zambia borders Angola to the right, as Lusaka follows to the right of Luanda alphabetically
Zimbabwe, Harare; Nancy Farmer
I know Central and South America cold and most of Europe. I never remember Moldova and I sometimes swap the Baltic states. Matching might help me memorize Asia eventually, but Brunei still has not justified why the longass capital, and several -stans trip me up.
When I walked through the backyard this morning, my feet were wet with dew, of all things. Goodness me, that doesn't happen often. The mild, moist weather is over, for now; forecasts predict highs in the 90s. I was hoping the low 80s would last through my mother's visit, because while the altitude alone might subdue her, blistering heat will flatten her.
Last night the neighborhood bookgroup minus one assembled at Scarf's to work on a baby gift for the absent one. I have decided that this is a good concept and I am going to repeat it for other babies whom (or whose parents) I know better. So what I worked on is a draft. Possibly it's a draft of itself, because it didn't turn out as well as I hoped, but since I doubt I'll have time to redo it before Final Assembly next week, I think it's just a draft for other babies. I'm being obscure because one recipient reads this. Hi Haitch!
Yesterday morning as we couldn't get out of bed, RDC offered me the car. What happened to that person who was never late to work? I think she went away with the person who worked downtown. The car made me less late, and I seized the carton of styrofoam beads that's got fuller and fuller since December and hied myself to work. During the day Kal told me that her bike had arrived--it was shipped to the office--and I offered to bring it home in Cassidy since she doesn't have a hatchback. So except for the bit at the end of the day when I moved the carton from the hatch to the front seat and lost a score of evil popcorn bits to the wind, I was An Efficient Car User.
With the bike in its box in the back and the carton in the front, I drove to the nearest UPS store that takes back styrofoam. That carton has been in the sunroom making me feel guilty for months. I hate that shit. And now it's gone. Wheee!
At home, I worked on my other Secret Project, which is only secret until I get after pictures, and it's been on the to-do list for months so it's really not secret, and now it's almost done, which will be Just in Time. Kal walked over (to admire the SP) before we went to Scarf's and afterward I drove her and the bike home, and how tidy is that?
Her cat was intrigued with the box. Nearly bike-long and -high but not very deep, the box had "access holes," which is what they're calling those four-finger-width holes in boxes spaced exactly to place your hands for carrying, instead of "handles," because if a "handle" tears and the box drops, the box company can be sued, whereas if an "access hole" tears, what were you doing using it as a handle? Or something. The cat sniffed at the holes, which might have smelled like Minnesota or at least like Other, and the box swayed on its long depth. We lay it flat on the floor, because no one wants to wake up at three in the morning to a bike in a box falling to sprain a kitty's tail.
Doing the SP has got me through a lot of Brothers Karamazov in audio. RDC is now listening to Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and I should listen to more non-fiction myself. Though that I read in high school.
Beginning and During.
Ow. I used my new tool, which I want to call a mattock because that's a cool word that distinguishes the thing from "garden trowel" though unfortunately is incorrect, to dig out the grass in the north easement to place "stones," and in the south easement to dig out the fragments of flagstones I had previously used as a border. I guess I grip with my index and middle fingers the most, because I wound up with a blister on the ring side of my middle finger. For best gription, I used gloves to place the stones--prefab, concretey foot-squares—along the curb in both easements. Then I started stripping a table, and the taut blister popped (without my help this time, I promise) perhaps when mineral spirits dried out the skin just enough, and yowza, that hurt. So of course I trimmed all the dead skin away, because it could not protect the bed of the blister, and I am continuing to work with my hands, continuing with alcohol, so I have acquired as well a few slits in the exposed blister bed. Yum.
On the other hand, I did get a large mailing out with only one paper cut across the knuckle of my left pinky, and without aggravating the post-blister much.
The stripping is going okay, I guess. I have never used chemicals to strip finish before and the only time I have stripped (began to strip) a piece of furniture at all, I was a child and used sandpaper and gave up and to this day in my mother's house there is a bed table none of whose surfaces are protected by finish--except that of the face of the drawer--and have not been for 25 years.
Whoever last worked with this table had no taste. It is stained so dark it might as well have been painted black. The citrus-y chemical worked really well to lift most of that out. There are two half-oval flaps, a top a foot across, a drawer, and the legs. The flaps and top are fine. In fact they're lovely. I still don't know what kind of wood they are, but when wet--can you say wet when it's not water?--with mineral spirits, the color is lovely. The finish I cannot get out (three applications of stripper so far) I am calling "grain enhancements." The legs, though, the legs make me very sad. There are six fixed and two that rotate 90 degrees each to hold up a flap. The eight legs and attendant railings are turned, or look like it, so have waists and fatter bits and narrower bits and rings and they are not my favorites. The fattest part of any round section shed its finish fairly well, but the narrow waists and in-curvings that expose more grain, not so much. And they take so damn long, painting the chemical on, scrubbing and rubbing it out.
I am using up so many rags on this endeavor. The entire under-utility-sink cabinet in the laundry room was a pile of rags--clean, so hopefully no more a fire nest than a closet full of clothes--that I was going to, get this, fold before my mother's visit. (I folded the painting dropcloths tidily into a box in the coal cellar, instead of just heaping them on the floor.) Now I don't have to because I doubt they can come clean. It seems a pity to destroy RDC's worn to shreds "This is your brain on Rasta" t-shirt for this, but so it goes. Also we've been getting the Denver Post, no idea why, for the past several weeks, free to the door, but since The Chronicle of Higher Education is exactly the size of Blake's cage floor, I don't need the local rag. But whatever doesn't get recycled gets stripper with dissolved finish dripped on it.
After
The Saga of the Table began before my involvement. My mother had it from one of her grandmothers, I think the paternal one. When my sister moved to Boston, she was allowed to use it there but returned it before she moved to Aspen, though whether by my mother's request or my sister's choice I don't know.
What I do know is that when RDC and I moved in together, my mother lent us a lamp. She was careful to say it was a loan, and it was a lamp from my sister's abandoned bedroom that she surely did not miss in the 2.5 years we had it. I returned it before we moved to Denver because I wasn't going to bring a loan across the country. I was careful to return my mother's loan because even her gifts have been chancy: she suggested that the heirloom china she gave me at my bridal shower should not go with me to Denver, and if a gift was that susceptible to her whim and regret, then a loan was even more so.
I told how the thing came to be in my possession here, and how my mother first began to hint of its return here, and how when we bought a house with a dining room and acquired a dining table of suitable size and retired the two-person, dropleaf gateleg table, she was offended. Further gibes occurred when she looked at photographs of the house and later when I told her about the house falling over into a swamp: when I told her about the disintegrating concrete and support posts and lolly columns, she asked, "And where is the gateleg table in all of this?" I bitched to my sister about that selfish insensitivity, and I should have bitched to the transgressor, because CLH put herself (did I hint that I wanted her to do this? I hope not) in the middle by telling our mother how inappropriate a question about a single piece of furniture is in the context of the structural integrity of an entire house. She reportedly replied, "But I wanted her to know I was concerned about my table!" to which my sister reasonably replied, "She would have appreciated your having some concern for her house" without adding "especially on her birthday" or bickering about the possessive pronoun.
The table was stained very dark. I don't like dark colors except black in dogs and dark brown in eyes. I like wood grain. So I stripped the thing and finished it clear.
The table is handsome now. The leaves and top glow with mahogany--when I brought the top to a woodworking store, they identified it as such. Its turned legs were a bitch to strip--I discovered sanding floss, a wonderful invention--and where the shape cuts across grain, some stain remains, and that's true of the edges of the leaves and top too (but as with an old refinished floor, I'm calling that "character"). Also, a page about Victrolas makes me think that the top might be of red mahogany and the legs of brown, because they do look quite different.
Attractive or not, its legs are still turned, and therefore dustcatchers, and it's still an occasional table, though for what occasions I'm not sure. Now that I know how easy it is to dismantle, I might declare the project's aim not merely to improve the appearance of a piece whose purpose eludes me and whose design fails to thrill me but to furnish my sister's new house. But I will check whether my sister would consider the table merely a mathom. If I didn't find an occasion for it in my house, I can't assume she would.
Whew. After next weekend, my summer is unencumbered. I have planned jaunts to San Francisco and Seattle then farther, both for pleasure though the latter follows being run roughshod at the Big Top, but other than that, two months of freedom. Does one run roughshod over the victim, or does the victim run roughshod? Merriam-Webster is not helpful. Its first definition is to be shod in calk shoes and its second is "marked by main force without consideration or justice." I expect that it is difficult, painful, or even injurious for a horse to run in calked shoes, so to be driven roughshod might be to be crippled.
How anyone is shod, run, or crippled at the Big Top occurs to me today because I wore slingbacks and ow. Last summer I happily wore them traveling and to a rehearsal dinner but I think with talcum powder. Today the half-mile round-trip to the grocery store for my lunch was unpleasant. So I don't think I will wear them with my shell-pink suit (knee-length skirt) or butter-yellow sheath or khaki (knee-length shorts) suit to the Big Top, except I will try again with talcum powder and see if that helps enough. I have to have sensible shoes because I will be doing a lot of trotting and galloping and wanting to dig just a small hole and hoping no one boots me in the elbow for it.
That's it, the theme of my literary allusions for the Big Top this year will be horses, as long as I don't have to think too much of that one illustration in King of the Wind that gave me nightmares. Perhaps I should stick with Robin McKinley.
I began by saying that after next weekend my summer's obligations are over. I've been working in the garden fairly regularly since spring; we've done house-y things like replace the porch carpet and refinish a table and purge all the crap tossed into storage areas without a second glance; for the past two weekends I've cleaned; and this weekend my mother and her husband are visiting. But after that, as long as I water the tomatoes and weed, that's it.
The mild weather gave way to heat late last week and for the first part of this week highs are forecast in the mid 90s, but the later part of the week might reach only the high 80s and that would be good. I hope my mother can manage. Lots of sitting still in the shade, a glass of iced tea, a book. She should be fine.
We broke late on Saturday afternoon and went to the pool. RDC swam a k in the indoor pool and lay out and I sat immersed to my sternum on the steps of the thoroughly occupied outdoor one with The Razor's Edge for a blissful hour.
In July I might see PLT and his two daughters, but not their mother because she will be away. I have never met the younger, who is 4 (does seeing her mother before she announced the Impending Sprout count?) and the older is 8, so that should be fun. Also a ex-coworker of RDC's. It's weird to say "PLT and S" but not mean PLT and our own dear SEM, whose name is a homophone but not a homograph for this coworker. In August I go to the Pacific Northwest. I have been anticipating the mother-visit for weeks if not months, and it will be over with two months of summer to go. The plan is to kayak one day a weekend and spend the other by the pool. And read. Truly, my life is a difficult one.
The extra tad of biking got me to the Botanic Gardens. I had said between 12:30 and 1, I know I did, and they had been waiting since 12:20. I was allowed to stow my bike in the back of their truck, since the plan was to go see their campground afterward, and I changed from bike shorts back into linen in the triangle of the truck's cab door. My mother laughed, with only some embarrassment: she is used to my having no bodily modesty and it wasn't a crowded parking lot and Usans have such stupid hang-ups.
A reason I wanted to get my hair cut just before she arrived showed itself here: walking back from the truck to the entrance where BDL waited, I pulled the elastic out of my hair, and in the three seconds of its freedom between hasty biking ponytail and folded twist under my beloved clip, she said of it, "Your hair looks nice." I didn't know how to respond to that, because it didn't. Immediately after shaking my hair out, I look like Cousin It, though now with shoulder- rather than waist- (or ankle-, as on It [I was going to make It possessive but both options, Its and It's, made me squirm]). She wanted to say something nice about my hair--I expect my sister briefed her--and the best I could do was not laugh at her carefully impossible timing.
The Botanic Gardens went over well, I think. We rested on shady benches and drank a lot of water and, thank goodness, the sky clouded over, a breeze picking up meanwhile. Some plants had additional information tied to the Lewis & Clark exhibit, and that went over well. There was only one duckling.
On Saturday my mother's first cousin and her husband came to Denver from Wyoming. Cousin brought photographs and I produced the one of my mother at 4, which hangs right next to the wedding collage she spotted on my wall, which led to the wedding video (apropos, because Friday was our 10th anniversary), which led to the wedding album, which led, as a reward for looking at all that (she said she wanted to! and my mother had never seen either album or video), to my showing them the Glamour Shots, which remain as hideous as I remember.
Was it years of baggage with my mother or a real difference between them that made Cousin's similar generational tics easier to accept or volley than my mother's? The men--my stepfather BDL, the cousin's husband, and RDC--conversed, but Cousband better with either than BDL and RDC with each other. RDC and Cousband could talk about travel and fly-fishing and current events like eminent domain, and Cousband and BDL could discuss the Way Things Used to Be, but, RDC reported and I can easily believe, when Cousband and RDC spoke of something not of immediate interest to BDL, he would begin to make puerile jokes. BDL's idea of a current event was whether the young blonde woman who disappeared in Aruba (where darker skinned people live) had been found yet.
Overall the whole visit was fine. I could feel my mother restraining herself and I know I restrained myself. About the table she said that I did not do a good job, but it's my table to do with as I want, "or at least so you always say." I did not point out that I have asserted my ownership only once, when she wanted it back during its tenure as my dining table.
I had made reservations at a neighborhood restaurant on Friday night, asking for the patio please because it was our tenth wedding anniversary. After we placed our drink orders, our server told us that another table was treating us to an appetizer for our anniversary, and when we looked over to that table it was Scarf and Drums. I asked the server to give them a round of drinks in return, and I am really pleased that the Happy Couple did not protest: I did not know, when I made that request, that the HC had told RDC before we left the house that dinner would be their treat.
They had already met Scarf and Drums the night they arrived. I needed to deliver my contribution to the baby gift to Scarf and asked my mother to come with me to meet some of my neighborhood friends, since they live just around the corner, and RDC suggested we all go and stroll through the park afterward. Hanging out on Scarf's porch were she and Drums and some other bookgroup people and another neighbor I hadn't met before. There were introductions and a little chat and we walked on, very slowly even though my mother said neither the altitude nor her foot troubled her. BDL teased her for walking with her hands in her trouser pockets. His teasing was about how her hands couldn't quickly balance any stumble or break any fall; I said nothing because it always has looked an uncomfortable physical pose and to me belies emotional discomfort as well.
Also we met another bookgroup member and her husband, walking their three dogs and carrying a cat! in a cat-carrier! like a baby-carrier! I totally have to get that for my sister. Despite the wonderful view of Denver from behind the museum, and the wonderful rose bushes that are remnants of the first planting of the Botanic Gardens before it occupied its current space, and the lake at sunset with geese and goslings, my mother kept asking where we were going and why. I had asked her about altitude and her foot (she had a bone spur a few years ago) to know whether a walk would be okay, and we covered less than a half mile altogether, but she doesn't use anything but a car for transportation so this was pointless to her.
Back on the hospitality front, I had also made reservations for tea at the Brown Palace. Granted this is a Girl thing and it best follows a tour of the Molly Brown House, but I could do nothing else with BDL than bring him. I should have told them that tea is a meal and not assumed that that was obvious by my saying "I made a reservation for tea" instead of "we're going out for a cup of tea." Also I should not have assumed that their being in the city would have altered their wardrobe. BDL wore a promotional t-shirt, but at least he took off his cap when he went indoors. I should have asked the restaurant to mask the prices on the menus, or clarified that this was my treat because she asked the server how much was just a cup of tea. At that point I said it was a meal, not a drink, and it was a special occasion kind of treat, and my treat to boot. The same thing happened with the Pike's Peak train. I told them that I expected to pay for all the reservations I made, and please try to accept hospitatlity as the gift it is instead of as a burden or debt.
She seemed to like the house, which made me happy. There was no snapping on either side and criticism only of the masked sort that she seems no more able to rein in than I can stop my eye-rolling. I am not sure she liked RDC's cooking, protesting that we shouldn't take any trouble, instead of accepting that we were making an effort for our guests' pleasure, not for their guilt, in order that they should enjoy good food, a scrupulously clean house, flowers, and having their tea and coffee refilled chairside with the morning paper.
They both liked Blake at first, but on the strength of his initial curiosity about them, they both later overstepped his boundaries and tried to pick him up or pet him when he was deep in a preen, was eating, or otherwise would have appreciated some notice before a strange hand invaded his space and person. He bared his beak at them, indicating pretty clearly to leave him alone, but they didn't pay attention to my telling them as well to back off, and continued attempts occasionally got them beaked, at which point they decided he is spoiled. Which he is, but not because he fends off unwanted mauling.
The house and Blake, maybe; Denver, not so much. Denver, especially Colfax Avenue, made my mother's teeth itch. She kept finding ticks that would turn out to be a flake of scab or bit of dirt, and would not just take my word that Denver has no deer ticks, and what ticks Colorado has are in the mountains or at most the foothills. Also she identified a plant in my neighbor's easement as poison ivy, when Colorado doesn't have any anyway and my neighbor is a scrupulous gardener.
Today was Intern's birthday and his two-year anniversary at Dot Org. Lou, whose birthday was last and therefore did this next, brought in ice cream bars. Also, Kal and I went out for a celebratory lunch and had milkshakes. In the evening, RDC and I ate on the patio at the Del Mar Fish House on Larimer and finished with gelato that we ate by the creek. A three-ice cream day. Urk. Splat. Also yum.
The evening sky over Denver shimmered with pink and gold. I hung my head over the back of my chair, looking up, and the server asked if I was looking at the building, which has a classic Old West brick façade. "Nah," said I. "I've seen the building. I'm looking at the sky."
The kind of day you shouldn't have too often. Egg visited Dot Org today on her way to a long weekend in the mountains, as she did last year; as happened last year, Dot Org happened to have a cookout on that day. My department finally took its turn, and instead of the burgers that every other department has done, we did fajitas, and had a casual salsa and guacamole competition. (There is a more structured chili cookoff on Hallowe'en.) Everyone said it was the best lunch Dot Org had ever had, and that we had raised the bar. A great part of the day for me was Egg's visit. As she and Intern and I chopped peppers and onions and sliced skirt steak (and the chicken that Tex reluctantly allowed despite its not being authentic*), she told us about her recent volunteer vacation in Thailand, a week of post-tsunami assistance and a week at an elephant sanctuary.
We hugged hugely downstairs, and when I was ready to let go she hugged me harder and longer, which was fine by me. I am a fan of the long squeezy hug. We trotted upstairs saying hi! Hi! HI! and how are the dogs? and how is Blake? and as we reached our floor she asked and how are you. I socked her lightly on the arm and bounced: "As of Tuesday, I am a research analyst!" She cried, "Get out!" and flung her arms around me again. (That's what the celebratory lunch was about yesterday, my promotion (and raise! wheee!)) Later, after everyone had helped themselves and now we could serve ourselves, she and Intern and I, with Kal and another Orgerista to my left, sat on the parapet around the patio, soaking up the sun and talking and talking and laughing and laughing. Egg asked about the promotion, and I told her about that, and, since she has mother-issues as well, that my mother had just visited and it went fine, and there was Kal now, and RDC and I had just had our tenth anniversary. "And I'm proofreading the magazine!" Unfortunately this came about by the death of an editor emeritus and the health-related resignation of another, but after an error of antecedent that had one of our articles implying that a state killed an individual, I'm glad to be on board. And Egg is a terrific cheerleader. She sounds like Willie Wonka. "That's fantastic! That is fabulous! That is so amazing!" Her happiness for me was thorough, her praise so very worth having, that I got all happified about these things again, plus I was so glad to see her, and enjoying being comfortable among my coworkers, that I got fairly giddy. I asked to be slapped around a little and brought back to earth, but Egg said I deserved a little giddiness.
I had remembered to bring my camera, so I took pictures of Egg and Intern and Kal and Tex and a few other Dot Orgeristas. Plus I flung the thing into someone's hand to have pictures of me with Egg and Intern and with Kal.
Later in the day, as Egg was leaving, Trey called. I hadn't heard from her in six months, since Yule cards, just before which she left the organization she left for Dot Org in 2000 and then returned to in 2002. Her husband is still with NCSL and reachable, so earlier this week I emailed him asking to be sent on to his lovely wife because I had gossip. Now she called, and my greeting her happened alongside my hugging Egg goodbye, and Trey squeaked, "Egg's there?" The really groovy thing about this is that I was happy to talk to them, who now live Elsewhere and Away, without getting all miserably mopey about the past and Change Is Bad. And that is why I want to stay on Lexapro. Maybe it's cognitive therapy, or psychodynamic therapy, that has enabled me to function in the now without looking over my shoulder so much, but I am certain the drug affects me in good ways.
Trey has encouraged me to do More and Other nearly since I've known her, and I knew she would be happy to know I am Off the administrative track and On the research track. Plus I got to hear about her new job, which she loves and finds wonderfully challenging. Also I told her, woe am I, that the haircutter she found and converted me, Nebra, and Haitch to moved to San Francisco. (Damn, I'm the only one left in Denver.) Plus about Haitch's podling.
In the evening was The Razor's Edge with the older bookgroup. Even the one person who thought Maugham's writing was pretentious found the book eminently readable. Several people thought several of the characters were unlikeable, but everyone thought Maugham wrote about them with affection. I brought up The Corrections, which I just reread, as an example of much less likeable people (I didn't find anyone exceptionally objectionable in Edge), whom, some readers say, the author despises too. And I have to commend Maugham for saying no he wasn't there but this is how this conversation could have gone, whereas Dostoevsky--merely following the literary convention of his time but one I dislike--used an omniscient narrator despite that narrator being a resident in the town.
* Faja means "belt" and "fajita" therefore "little belt," in English the skirt steak from around the beef's ribcage. Tex sneers at impossibilities like "shrimp fajitas."
We walked down to the Cherry Creek Arts Festival and I was going to buy The Alchemist from the Tattered Cover while we were there. But we passed the library and I darted in and found it. I am extremely glad I didn't buy it. The festival was okay, boilingly hot as usual, and we cooled down as soon as we left the commercial streets for the shaded sidewalks. It also began to rain, and the only amusing incident of either book or festival happened then. I tucked the book at the waist of my skirt, because nothing gets wet under the tit umbrella. Apparently this is an expression I had never used in RDC's hearing before.
Saturday, boarding my kayak after lunch on an island in Dillon Reservoir, I fell and banged my right knee.
This morning, I stopped to fiddle with my front brake. I unlatched from my right clip easily enough but could not disengage from the left pedal. So over I fell, skinning my left knee, and the front cluster dug into my right calf as I fell so I look like I was clawed by a werewolf (a short one).
Both my knees have scabs on them! I'm fixed! Aiming (or lack of aiming?) in life always to have two scraped knees is probably neither dignified or ambitious or world-changing. But it's doable, and it's me.
A while ago Kal and I went to see "Ladies in Lavender" because of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. One of the trailers was for "March of the Penguins," which I would have forgotten about except that Jessie just reminded me. Kal and I will waddle over to watch the penguins marching at the Mayan (eh, the prepositional phrase follows the wrong verb, but alliteration is vital) next week.
Also Jessie's reminder brought up a kayaking tidbit.
I have a history of mistaking things on water for other things. It was my seeing the nearly-drowned tops of the pilings of a decrepit dock as ducks that made my mother realize I needed glasses. Saturday, kayaking on Dillon Reservoir, I saw...penguins. They were flocked like birds, white with black edges and tops like penguins, and bowling pin-shaped and pudgy and clumsy like penguins, and I guess I didn't Believe hard enough because the grown-up in my head could not reconcile these obvious penguins with anything that was likely to be at 7,000 feet on Dillon Reservoir, close to the continental divide of North America. They were up-ended Canada geese--fat white bellies, dark sides and tail.
This morning, after RDC roused Blake but before the latter had emerged from his boudoir, I disappeared into the bathroom. I was there long and quietly enough that Blake must have assumed I had left for the millet factory and so crawled up to RDC's neck for his morning nap. When I ran water, letting Blake now I was still home, he shrieked--right in RDC's ear--communicating with the errant of his flock.
Yesterday after work I stopped at a nearby store to order a pair of Dansko sandals. It took the clerks about nine years to place my order, but the shoes should arrive by next week. I love my brown ones but I want them in black, because I have become someone who wears black in the summer. I have a black dress with white polka dots and a black floral dress, both of which prefer a prettier shoe than my also-beloved Dansko clogs. The black microfibre mules I bought for Haitch's wedding I now hate (they're not particularly comfortable plus are loud on stairs) and with those two dresses, plus the dress for Haitch's wedding and an outfit based on my black linen skirt, I will be fully outfitted for the Big Top--four days of Dot Org working and socializing from 7 to midnight on one pair of shoes.
Shopping by bike continued zooward, where I did not find a zebra. Tapirs and meerkats made me covetous, and also a little perplexed: these more obscure animals, and regular elephants and lions, but no zebras?
Then I went home and melted. I am so glad to have the swamp cooler. It claims an extra shower's worth of water a day, but our water bills are quarterly so I haven't compared this latest period's usage to last year's. It uses less electricity but more water, of course, than air conditioning, and I am thinking of planting a tree--something ornamental, sure to stay small--where it drains.
I made pesto from the prolific basil and RDC made salad. Naturally Blake got his own piece of rotilli but then he needed salad too: no one had given him evening spinach and sprouts, and he could see that we were not sharing. He doesn't get dressing, of course, so I gave him his own, and later his own half-cherry. After that I reread Then There Were Five (we'd been talking about stills).
I am making excuses not to spend an hour at a time with The Name of the Rose. Starting Saturday I'll have the new Harry Potter to distract me, and Friday evening we will Consume in Cherry Creek North--RDC's new sport jacket will have been tailored, I'll hopefully seek a zebra from Kazoo & Company, and acquire the next two bookclub books from the Tattered Cover--still not Umberto Eco.
Have I mentioned my idea for body art? The only idea that's ever appealed to me occurred to me after Blake woke from a nap and left on my shoulder a single buddy footprint, four toes and an ankle imprinted in my skin: a brand in just that shape. It would have to be a brand, not a tattoo, because the point is not just the shape but the imprint; but it cannot happen, because the only reason I would need a false imprint is if the real imprinter were no longer on my shoulder.
Buddy is going to be 10 in August. We're discussing letting his two outermost primaries be, to give a little more power to his glide. I don't know if cockatiels get osteoperosis, but they do get old.
Although not yet. We are on the couch, watching "Queer as Folk" and playing with iTunes. There is a parade with whistles and hooting on the show, and Blake is participating, prancing and bobbing. For the record, Blake would love a good gay parade. Parrots are chockful of ego and love to be conspicuous. Oh no: except that parades have balloons, and there hasn't been a parrot yet who could tolerate a balloon, nor similarly flippy flappy things like banners and pennants and the dread pompons and lethal pinwheels.
My sweet little scaredy-cat.
A lovely evening on the porch swing before the onset of a week's worth of triple-digit heat. I called my father (it was his birthday) and opened a treasure trove of real mail: an invitation to a wedding in Italy (neither person is Italian), a letter from my sister full of gossip and yet more clippings of Thomas Kinkade shit from the Sunday supplements, and a letter from Nisou with photographs of Emlet and Siblet.
After that I read The Name of the Rose on the porch swing for a while, until Blake very obviously wanted tactile companionship. After a day spent in his cage, an evening on the porch swing in his cage isn't too much of a treat. I had just brought him inside and opened his door when Scarf came by with her dog. We spoke of heat, pregnancy, and Umberto Eco, while the dog nosed about and Blake shrieked from within. Poor Swee' B.
Last time I tried to donate, my pulse was 48, and I was told that that was too low: the acceptable range is 50 to 100 beats per minute. Today, I had Tex take my pulse in the morning, and it was 48 again. The vampires frown on exertion before donation, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. I ran the steps, glancing at the donation station at every descent to see if I could be taken right then, not to give my blood a chance to slow. After 54 steps four times and a few laps of the first floor, my pulse was 64 bpm and a vampire told me that I can sign something indicating that 48 bpm is a regular and healthy heartrate for me. That no one offered or knew that information last time is why I get to call them vampires instead of nurses.
I think I had given ten pints before 1997, when having had Lyme Disease became a deterrent until 2004 or so. Now I've given 12.
An uneventful evening flight and a quick SuperShuttle pickup: how fair is it that I was last on but first off the van? Sorry, co-passengers.
We took the ferry to Sausalito looking for art galleries and interesting food. I had a calamari steak, which was damn good, and maybe we didn't walk far enough from the dock to find interesting galleries. Well, interesting combined with possible. I loved some tapestries but they ran to several thousand dollars apiece and what would I do with a tapestry? What I can't launder, dust, vacuum, or scrub, I am not going to bring voluntarily into my house unless it is, say, a couch.
I had come to San Francisco ready for reasonable temperatures and trusting too much to Mark Twain, who said the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco. I had left Denver at 104 and 102 degrees. So for San Francisco and Sausalito to sizzle was cruel, damn it.
For dinner we found merely adequate sushi. The concierge's recommendation looked like Friendly's but with fish, and at 7:30 on a Saturday night was empty. So we strolled on until we found a place with customers in it and whose menu was not solely in English. That was better. But not great.
There is something amiss about Bay Area Rapid Transit: the signage is clear, the oral announcements are comprehensible and accurate, and it's even rapid. Gee. Coming out of a tunnel where the view of is an industrial warehouse section of Oakland is not quite pretty, but the rest of the East Bay was fine.
RDC's friend (and now mine) picked us up in Berkeley and we went to their house to meet his nigh-wife, their daughter (12 and "almost 13" though how late July is "almost" for a December birthday is one of those nuances that geriatric arterial hardening has scoured from my mind), and her cat. They were all great (and the view from their house in the Berkeley hills is decadent), the daughter particularly. We went to a beach in Alameda because the pool they intended in Berkeley was closed, and a beach is better than a pool anyway. We talked Harry Potter and other children's books, and two hours later but kind of only an hour late, PLT arrived with his two daughters.
That was wonderful. I had not seen the elder in almost five years, and 8 is more sustainable fun than 3. Four is great too (as is 3, really), as the younger soon demonstrated. We played in the waves and I gave motorboat rides to the younger and was available for dolphin rides (scarier, because involving going underwater) to the older. I advised Almost 13 that it was her responsibility as a tween to dunk her mother, who was making immersion worse for herself by one-inch increments. However, she was not to be solicited into misdemeanor.
PLT and Sprouts could not join us for dinner, which involved fajitas (made of skirt steaks) and avocados, but we had later dinner plans with that bunch. A strange thing about Berkeley houses: they don't have screens (the coworker commented on our screens when he visited Formigny), just like France. I saw insects, but no pesky mosquitoes. However, because of the cat, this family cannot keep doors open. I'd rather have ventilation. That preceding is what you call sour grapes, right there.
Saturday was the only unnecessarily hot day, which is good, because apparently Denver dropped to bearable on Sunday and if I had left hot for hot when my regular hot had cooled, my grumping would have been unprecedented. Sunday was lovely and Monday started out just as well.
We went to SF MOMA and looked through a Richard Tuttle exhibition, also at So LeWitt's Wall Drawing #232, Location of a Square, which I liked because it could be drawn only on this particular wall. On any other wall, the same geometrical measurements would have been inaccurate or altered. Also a Olefer Eliasson's Aerial River Series, a series of photographs, seven by six in a rectangle, of a river from mountains to sea.
Then off to Chinatown and to eat dim sum, and once we finally pinned PLT and STL to the mat about which of two evenings left we might descend upon them like locusts, to a Peruvian restaurant, Limón, for the most amazing meal ever. Plus service most excellent, the perfect complement to the food, and unexpected (though welcome) for such a casual setting. I don't need my table crumbed between courses or my napkin folded if I leave my seat, though those are fine things; to me, good service is inobtrusive and doesn't try to clear one diner's plate before the other has finished his. I had ceviche with Peruvian corn (the kernels much bigger than those off the cobs I'm accustomed to), some sec and some not. Also arrizos con mariscos. I forget what mariscos are. RDC had a Peruvian bouillabaise with succulent broth. For dessert, chocolatl bandido: a flourless chocolate cake with mango and strawberries.
Wandering yesterday, we passed a Masonic temple with advertisements for the Universe Within, which I remembered Weetabix adoring. A little research in the evening proved it to be not Weet's Body Worlds but a copycat; still, we thought, likely pretty cool. In this we were mistaken: it had potential, but the bodies, however plasticined, were falling apart; their parts were haphazardly, inaccurately, or not at all labeled; and it was quite small. So go see Body Worlds, but give the Universe Within a miss.
After that we walked down to the wharves so I could say hello to the sea lions. We might have made a few comments about how to distinguish between the sea lions on the docks and the ones on the quay (the latter had video cameras). We were strolling aimlessly and I am glad, because though we stayed too long on an unattractive stretch of the Embarcadero, when we decided we should head back to North Beach, the only thing between it and us was Telegraph Hill. This we climbed, using whichever set of steps leads to the summit right next to Coit Tower (which we gave a miss).
Partway up, I heard the distinctive screaming that can come only from parrots and looked up in time to see a dozen or score of the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill, which I knew about only from a trailer for their documentary. In North Beach, after eating scrumptious eggplant parmesan, we found City Lights Books, where I bought The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Heh.
That evening we took BART to Berkeley again, this time for PLT and STL's house. We had spaghetti for dinner, and I am totally moving to Berkeley, or at least somewhere in California. Sunday's corn on the cob was perfectly sweet and tender, and Tuesday's salad probably grew about two feet away, plus STL served yellow raspberries for dessert. I had never heard of these things. Also, RDC and I ate wild blackberries up and down Telegraph Hill. What a town.
I played with the sprouts, which is all I wanted to do, and when it was time for bed I wanted to read them their bedtime stories but apparently they wouldn't've settled down in my presence. I'm a bad influence. Also a good one.
Poo. Berkeley is too far away. Even within Colorado, dear little Gethen is all the way up in Fort Collins. We did discuss Thanksgiving in LeMans, that hotbed of traditional New English food, speaking of too far away.
Before my flight home, we hied ourselves out of Union Square, where the hotel hulked, into the Tenderloin for some real food. I thought I wasn't hungry, but I was wrong. Saag, naan, beef in one preparation, lamb in another, and I thought I was going to die of overstimulation of the palate. We've got Indian food in Denver, but not Pakistani, and not this good that I've found. It was a total hole in the wall whose primary business was take-out, so I shoved our leftovers into a bowl, paved the top with naan, popped a lid on it, and called it dinner. But then I had to leave the city where we ate tremenous dim sum for $18, spectacular Peruvian at all (Sabor Latino in Denver is yummy, but it's General South American), and perfectly flavored Pakistani. Sigh.
After work I scurried to the vet to fetch Blake from camp. He screamed leaving the boarding room, but as soon as we were out of the building he began to chatter, chastising me for abandonment and telling me about his time at camp. At home we had a little bit of headpetting, but he smelled like a kennel and I didn't have time to shower and dry him before bookclub. Is it being surrounded by several other birds or a cessation of preening while at camp that means he comes home stinky? I'm all about the buddy scent, but this is stank.
Anyway, bookclub was great. We all loved the book, even those of us who would never ever ever touch speculative fiction. I spoke of it in terms of Harry Potter, any one of which books falls apart upon too-close reading, because I think this would stand up to a scrutiny of its timeline and characterization that I, in hotel and plane, didn't care to give.
Fun fun fun. I was glad of the first half of the day, steady current but no rapids to speak of, to practice for and appreciate the difference in the second half. The Arkansas is three hours away and the cost per person is more than a lift ticket, but fun! and no ski boots.
A perfect day, clear hot sky and clear cool water.
I had earlier shied at RDC's suggestion of rafting through Royal Gorge, but now I think I could do it (as a crew member under a guide, that is).
When RDC spoke with his mother the next day, she said she could not remember which day we planned to raft but thought it was Sunday because she had a strong sense of our being in danger. Shyeah.
What's the last river I swam in, the Mt. Hope? Lots of times in that, and before that, if not in the Fenton, then in the Roxbury, all in Connecticut. The Arkansas is a leetle different. From rafting yesteray, I thought the current strong but manageable. Of course, I was not trying to keep to one spot, did not have a destination other than back in the raft, and did in fact have a craft to cling to (by requirement).
Today, by contrast, I made a series of what could very easily have been fatal mistakes. I 1) approached an appealingly slanty rock from upstream a) because I had allowed for the current to bring me down to it as I crossed from right to left bank toward it. I b) paused on a shoal to gauge the current, but 2) thereby got a feel of the current over the shoal, strong but doable, not of that as it met the rock. I saw riffles upstream of the rock and failed to appreciate that they indicated an undertow (I cannot call this one an undertoad). I 3) failed to appreciate that a river bottom is likely to--and in this case did--drop suddenly because undertow suction will have pulled rock and dirt out. I aimed for the left bank upstream corner of the rock and expected it to be a lot slopier than it was, and yesterday I could juuuuust not return myself to the raft with a grip on a handle and the perimeter line. Today I could not pull myself up on a rock with only occasional faults and cracks for handholds, especially when it did not slope as much as I expected. I learned nothing from the sea lions on pier 39, apparently.
I could tell, too late, that I did not want my feet under the rock, because there was no rock within their reach to brace myself against, to push against, but instead possibly plenty of space for my body, lungs and all, to follow braceless feet. I had aimed for it facing downstream and feet first, as rafting instruction had indicated the day before, to see obstacles and encounter them with the more expendable body parts. The rock remained obdurate, and I, noodle-armed, could not pull myself up. Less of me was now above the water: when the current first thrust me against the rock, I was shoulders and head over, arms above head, as I planned, but as I was pulled from left to right along the upstream edge, I was also pulled under, inch by inch. I was pushing now against the rock, instead of trying to pull myself up, pushing against the force driving me under it, underwater. Finally, only my face, turned up, rose above the hardly tranquil surface, and then my face, too, went under.
Up and a breath, and I would not stop shoving against the rock until the water jostled me around the corner to the side parallel to the current. Puny of might but stony of will, I got past the corner without having inhaled any water, and now I could thrust with my legs. Free of rock and undertow, with only current to contend with, I swam for the right bank. I turned broadside against the current, to offer it more resistance; I swam sidestroke, despite its not being efficient, because my breathing was not at all steady and I would not readily submerge my face again. Swimming hard against a current I can do. I landed only a tad downstream from where RDC stood watching helpless, and there panted and shook--one reason I wrote all this was to calm my nerves.
RDC at first said "nearly drowning." I don't, because I never inhaled water. (I remember from seventh grade science that the human lung can extract oxygen from among water molecules; it merely cannot expel the water as it can air.) I don't deny I was in peril of my own making, and I won't soon forget the feel of the merciless water closing over my face, but I didn't nearly drown. I told CoolBoss on Friday that the weekend's plans were to camp and raft together and then for RDC to fish while I lolled about on the riverbank in a decorative manner. I got as close as ever I wish to be to "The River's Edge"-style decoration.
Catching up from my commonplace book. Really, I don't get to call it that. I'm channeling Quigley Quagmire is all.
Etymology:
flim-flam?
Somewhere in San Francisco, probably in SF MOMA, we saw a photograph of an early 20th century law practice: Flam & Flam.
Eh, probably just nonsense syllables.
From our 2002 trip to Steamboat Springs: looking around at the local businesses, RDC asked if Jane Austen had written a book called Taxi and Taxidermy.
The hotel room's guide to San Francisco writes that the neighborhood of Noe Valley is pronounced "Noh-ee." This works better orally. But Noe Valley is spelled with an e.
We saw a sea lion tattooed with number 382x--we couldn't make out the fourth digit. Perhaps it was in a swim race.
A public announcement: next summer, I plan to participate in the Danskin triathlon. It's not much of a triathlon: swim .5 mile (or .75K, a difference of 50 meters), bike 12 miles, and run 6 miles. I say "it's not much" but let's see if I actually do it. I don't, after all, run, at all, or swim particularly fast, or bike racingly. But I think I can do it. I deleted a photograph of me jumping into the San Francisco Bay because my ass was an affront to the eye. I cannot pull myself into a raft. I had a nightmare last night that I must be pregnant, because look at this belly! but it was just fat.
My littlest boy with the big feet is ten today. We tossed around the idea of having a party, but he can't have ice cream and cake and is afraid of balloons so maybe not. Instead he had his head pet lots and lots, got to take a nap with his daddy, had a shower, helped daddy shave (serenading prevents scrapes), had pasta and basil stems with his dinner, and is now making small tired squeaks in a one-footed, beak-chewing way from my lap.
He's ten! I don't want him to be old.
That foot! That foot raised in mid-step! That is just too adorable. By the bye, when he raises a foot asking to be picked up (to be stepped up) is different--he raises the leg higher and holds the foot horizontal, and manages to change his expression to pathetic instead of curious.
In the other garden, there is an eggplant about the size of a baby's foot, not yet eaten by a squirrel, and miles of squash vines with exactly one zucchini. We can't eat the lettuce fast enough, we can keep up with the cucumbers, and the honeydew melon that is growing is ovoid, not spherical. Edited 30 August to explain that I planted spaghetti squash, not honeydew melon, and I can somewhat but not entirely excuse my failure to distinguish between squash and melon leaves because it's a jungle back there with zucchini zucchini über alles.
I awoke before the low moan of dawn to attempt an earlier flight to Seattle. Miraculously, I got on the first of the four I was trying for, in a seat with footroom even because a mechanic just brought the seat back into service. So I was the last person seated, one of the first off, and, okay, I had to gate-check my bag, but I entered the hotel lobby before 11:30 PDT and a good thing because Ernie was stalking me.
I was walking in, sunglasses, nonbinding travel skirt, wheelie, and Dot Org "briefcase" (Lands' End, and canvas, but everyone else calls it a briefcase and it has our logo on it so I follow the crowd), and saw Ernie at the registration desk. He was about to ask the desk if I had checked in yet, but at least now he was spared tracking me down. There was a problem with the report. He said it didn't need to be fixed until tomorrow afternoon, but I said it needed to be fixed now because tomorrow I would belong not to my department but to the registration staff.
I called Denver, and Minnie was still in the office and would not only fix the error but oversee a fresh batch of photocopies and the shipping. Photocopying would be more expensive at this end than shipping at that.
I made the required visit to Pike Place Market, where I bought flowers for my evening's hosts, took them to my room and ventured toward Seattle Center. Here the line for the Needle was 30 minutes, after waiting in however long the ticket line was, and I had changed from traveling clothes to city clothes and stupidly had not brought either printed or audio book with me. So I bagged that. I will dine alone, attend movies solo, travel by myself, but I will not wait in line by myself without a book. Frankly if I'm waiting in line with someone I'd still rather have a book. I have seldom had tolerable conversation in a queue.
On the bus up to Jackson Park, I listened to The Killer Angels. War novels are not my usual fare so it's a good audio choice, but I need paper backup for maps.
I arrived at PSA's right on time. I had not seen him, my first boyfriend, since 1998, and he and his were the reason I wanted an earlier flight--a Tuesday departure for Japan meant Monday was the only available evening. I met his wife and their two sons, one three and terribly excited about all his visitors especially his cousins, and the other just a month or so and much quieter. I spent more time talking to PSA's 11-year-old niece than to him, but she was great and we were immediately pals. The 3-year-old's best cousin was not this girl but a younger boy, probably because closer proximity in age but perhaps because of his splendid Elvis impersonation. PSA's brother I met one Thanksgiving a thousand years ago, and his wife and I made female chat.
We talked about family resemblances and toy sushi sets, ate cookout foot and lychee nuts, and all of a sudden it was time for me to leave. Next time I'll make sure to talk to PSA more than his niece and to have more than an abbreviated evening to get to know his wife.
PSA announced to all that I kept a blog, and besides that I otherwise affect an "Internet? What's that?" persona, I had to protest "blog." This site has existed long before weblogs, and it has seldom had much to do with the rest of the internet. Lucy and I will be the last blog refuse-niks.
Seven o'clock in the morning to six in the evening is no joke, especially since my regular workday is this Fantasyland seven-hour thing that is reason the nth for me to cling to Dot Org with my dying breath. Registration released me at 4 when Yet More needed to be done to the report.
Since I am a research analyst I may now have remote access to the file servers, but that process is not automatic and required my running the right person to earth and asking that he set me up, which took him about 30 seconds but is not what he attends the Big Top to do. I tweaked this and made that pretty and so forth and finally it was Perfect and loosed upon the world and I was free.
Officially I was supposed to go to the social event but realistically there was not a chance in hell, given that it required shuttle busses, crossing the threshold of a professional sports venue, and mingling among people I do not know. I missed that chance to meet CoolBoss's squeeze, but hieing myself to Elliot Bay Books was much more important and gratifying.
Unofficially I had tentative plans to meet my high school classmate MEWN but realistically there was not much chance of that either, since my dearest wish was not her company but solitude. She understood this fully ("especially after a conference, ick!") which is why her company is so worth seeking out and off I went to Pioneer Square.
First I stopped in Magic Mouse. I might not have browsed in the store so long if I had not almost upon entry spotted and seized a nearly-life-sized emperor penguin. I clutched him to myself and laid my cheek on his head and if it wasn't a real bird or a real dog I know it did its best anyway.
When I transferred wallet-y stuff to my purse I took my booklists with me. And so, in Elliot Bay Books, I cut a swath. Hot damn, it beats the Tattered Cover--both stores combined--all hollow, and probably the third one, whose existence I ignore since it is in The Land of Beige All the Same (Highlands Ranch), even hollower. In the LoDo TC recently, there was no William Styron, no Erskine Caldwell, and only A.S. Byatt's most recent title and not even her Booker winner, not even with a movie cover. The new fiction titles in Elliot Bay, and oh, its YA section, were several and varied and, best of all, at least a third unknown to me.
I restrained myself in the new section except for Thomas Pakenham's The World's Most Remarkable Trees because I could think of nothing more comforting (than a dog, a buddy, or a plush penguin) than a book about trees. In the used section, I found Regeneration, All the Pretty Horses, A Pale View of the Hills, and Breakfast at Tiffany's, without any of which no library is complete, and Upon the Head of a Goat for my other life goal (besides always having skinned knees) of reading all the Newberys. Then a present for my sister, and then I stopped. I had packed pretty minimally so I could fly stand-by, leaving RDC to haul some of my vacation gear, and as yet I had no idea how to get any of this home.
What the hell kind of great city has interesting parking garages? No I didn't note the address, but somewhere near Pioneer Square is a parking garage built into a descending triangular intersection. It looks almost like sculpture.
I read the Newbery Honor book with my dinner (a mushroomy pasta dish on the patio of a little Italian place better in service, setting, and food than I expected anywhere in the touristy area I was in to have), stopped in a nightclub briefly when I heard live jazz and saw people dancing, and taxied back.
Could I have walked? It wasn't quite dark yet--an indication of how much farther north Seattle is than Denver--and that area of the city is laid out in a grid, but it was dusk and would be dark before I got home, and it was an unfamiliar city, and, this being the primary reason, the Dansko Alexa sandals in black that I bought specifically because I've lived in the brown ones all summer and needed a comfortable shoe for the Big Top with illusions of looking slightly more professional, were murder. Each pair is individually made and despite being the same pattern and size, these black ones are vicious. I wonder if I complained to Dansko whether the company would care.
And they I stayed up until I finished Goat. Not on purpose, and I lay awake even after I finished, because, clearly, my body hates me.
On my last morning of registration someone came up to the counter on a Segway. I told him I would give him one million dollars for a short ride, and he said I could ride it for free, which was a good thing because I was lying about the million dollars. Kal passed through, laughed at me, and took out her camera, thereby reminding me of my camera. Wheee!
Seattle has hemlocks! They all died in the early '90s in Connecticut (in New England? in the whole northeast?) and of course they're too wet a tree for Colorado. They're mournful things, but they made me smile in recognition.
The mountain came out a little bit, its top third peeking over clouds. Hello, mountain.
Another smiley thing was meeting RDC at Boeing Field and leaving the city for the uncity. We flew to Campbell River, British Columbia, about two-thirds of the way up Vancouver Island's east side, and ferried across to Quadra Island, one of the Discoveries. Vancouver Island is big! and has high mountains right in the middle of it! and glaciers! (or year-long snow).
We stopped at a little market for dinner. The pizza place (The Lovin' Oven, whose sign was decorated with frogs. Run by Quebécois or serving frogs on their pizzas? We were never to know) had closed at 7:30. Fig Newtons, the most vital of outdoor foods, were not on offer. Other regular Usan products were labeled in two languages! It was almost as if we were in a whole 'nother country.
From e-mail to Egg:
We went on a whale watch on a Zodiac, a kind of inflatable boat with a motor. You're not much above the water! My east coast whale watches have been for humpbacks and happened on ferry-type vessels, and the one off Orcas Island in 1999 was a generous-size motor boat. Not this! Four benches for four passengers each, and a pulpit for the captain. Inside the pulpit was the world's smallest washroom, as he put it; I would call it a head, since it was on a boat, and there was no washing happening. Also we got to wear these astronaut suits. I had worn a heavy long skirt for a windy day but had a short hiking skirt in my dry bag, which I quickly nipped on--another benefit to skirts instead of trousers, easily changed--and put on the suit, which protects you from wind (high), spray (cold), and also floats you if you fall off.
We saw orcas! The first pod we came across was part of A pod (we also saw I Pod, and RDC wondered if Apple paid a royalty for the name). They were asleep! The resident orcas eat salmon and vocalize a lot when they're awake, whereas the transients, who have a larger range, tend not to talk so much amongst themselves because their prey are mammals so can hear.
These were residents and the captain said "Let's call them up on the Orcaphone" and dropped a microphone into the water. First we just saw a bunch of dorsal fins--a dozen or so--rhythmically rising and sinking--and they were swimming in such tight formation and so silently that the captain said they were sleeping! Swimming and sleeping! They can turn off a part of their brain so only the keep-with-others and swim functions are on, and one whale will stay awake to be a sentry. Two pairs were cow and calf.
They woke up a bit when they cruised through a herd of salmon. Humans were fishing for the salmon as well, from boats, and the arrival of orcas, sleeping or not, scattered the salmon. Poor fisherfolk. The whales woke up and talked a little and maybe had a snack and fell asleep again. Kind of like that Wiggle. We left them to sleep and went farther north in Johnstone Strait through whirlpools you would not believe. Whirlpools in the currents between the islands, fifty feet across some of them with vortexes five or more feet deep. It was wild.
We found another clan of A pod and what the boat does is stop behind them, watch for a bit, and zoom out and around them and pause again in hopes the whales will pass nearby when they've caught up. This other clan was more awake and we heard them echo-locating the boat and discussing amongst themselves what they should have for lunch ("Let's have salmon again!" "Okay!") and where they should go for said lunch. Later we saw a part of I Pod and even I, who had never heard them before, could hear how different their dialects were. The resident pods have the same language though different dialects, but the transients have a different, lesser-used language as well as a different diet and habitats. In general their dorsal fins are pointier triangles rather than the residents' more curved ones--/\ versus /)--but despite those differences, they have not yet evolved different teeth.
I saw a few black-and-white dogs including a Landseer Newfie, who of course with the being so big and being black and white is the perfect dog for me, and a smooth-coated border collie, and though I don't think Orca is a very good name, I might make an exception if the black and white were better distributed. Better for a cat. Also a 12-week-old regular black Newfie named Posey. Such big paws! And a 4-month-old black lab named Beau.
Quadra Island was gorgeous, much more beautiful than Orcas Island and its waters were warmer. But everything about our lodging and activities was colored by our "hosts," Coastal Spirits, and not colored in a nice friendly way but in a dim, bilious orange. The third photograph on the right, being at the top of a page titled "Lodge-Based Tours," implies that the lodging is in that "lodge." It is not a lodge but the owners' house and it is quite clear guests are not welcomed in or near it. I am not sure I was even welcome to walk through the grounds near the gardens. Only on this photo gallery page, in the fourth row, is the guest lodging featured, as a "cabin," again suggesting something cabin-like and maybe that the pictured building is a single cabin. It is, in fact, a single building, but contains three units smaller than an average Usan living room with a corner walled off for shower stall and toilet. The fourth photograph on this page is of our room, with the adjoining door to the middle unit open deceptively to suggest more spacious accommodation than is offered. Two of the three units have ventilation only through the unscreened sliding glass doors and the bathroom window. We had the far right room with a window on the front, unscreened doors on the side, and bathroom in the rear, (and an unwindow, a fixed sheet of glass, over the single sink) but even marginally more ventilation did not spare us from the smell of mildew.
Dampness I expected in British Columbia; mildew in a professional lodge I did not. One of the things about lodge-based adventures I thought worth paying for was outdoor adventures ending in a dry bed, hot shower, and clean toilet, in a lodge. I might have lived in Denver for a decade and developed a horror of mold, but mildew is not just dampness but smacks of inadequate cleaning.
Nor was the cleaning the only inadequate thing. I have not slept in sheets with such a low thread count and high polyester count since a freshling year romp with a fellow in the next dorm. Freshling year is also probably the last time I had to resort to a single, puny towel (smelling of mildew) after a shower (there was no tub).
Coastal Spirits calls itself a bed & breakfast, but it is not, any more than a Holiday Inn offering an, ahem, continental breakfast is a B&B. At a B&B, you eat with the family, who enjoy having guests. At a B&B, your coffee and your breakfast are made for you. At a B&B, your breakfast is more substantial than a small cup of yogurt and a mini-muffin. There might even be orange juice.
Which brings us to the included lunch. When you're kayaking or hiking, you want a substantial lunch, something resembling the meal pictured in the third photograph of this page. But no. A single cheese and vegetable sandwich apiece, good but not ample or especially delicious, small nearly bitter apples, granola bars. The hot mint tea was yummy and refreshing, at least, and usually there were orange slices.
The "hosts" had not a single damn thing to do with the lodging or the tours. Our guides, who--the primary ones, anyway--were fine, told us that the owner might take one tour out per season. None of them appeared to enjoy either people or "adventures."
On our last night, at about 10 o'clock, I stood in the middle of the lawn looking starward through binoculars. Someone had left the lodge in a truck just as I went outside, which I noticed because I had turned away from the headlights not to ruin my eyes for stargazing. He returned just a short time later and again I turned away from the headlights in a clearly suspicious manner, and once out of the truck he called, "Who is that?" I didn't answer, because I didn't know he was speaking to me, because he couldn't have been speaking to his own guest in such a way, and because he should have known by this time who I was anyway--if he hadn't interacted with me directly he had seen me enough over the past few days to recognize a woman of my height and build and hair as a guest. Also I didn't answer because he had no reason to use such a rude tone.
When he called again, I deigned to reply, "Are you speaking to me?"
"Yes--who are you?"
"I'm Lisa, I'm your guest in number 3."
"What are you doing?"
"Stargazing." What the fuck business of his what it was I was doing? Stealing kayaks? Puncturing life vests? Stargazing? It was all equally criminal in his eyes. We were happily televisionless but there was just one reading lamp, on one side of the bed, aside from the glaring overhead, and the island is fairly without nightlife and the hosts weren't exactly inviting us into the house for cribbage or backgammon or Pictionary; so stargazing, even at sea level in a humid environment, struck me as a fine activity.
The one pleasant surprise was the optional cat. Gizmo, a guide, not a host, told me, was that very dark brown that looks black, and was the worst beggar of a cat I have ever met. He made himself known the first day, begging for In and content to cozy up on a lap and read for a while. Subsequently he appeared for breakfast so he could lick the foil tops of the yogurt tubs or possibly be given some in a bowl.
That was the lodging and board. The tours are the other half. We paid for Tour 6: Glaciers, Waterfalls and Lagoons. The first day we kayaked through the Breton Islands and the second day on the chained lakes. The third day we hiked. By the fourth day, we and the other guests asked when the glaciers, lagoons, and waterfalls would happen. There are no waterfalls on Quadra Island, come to find out, and though Coastal Spirits' site promises a trip to Elk Falls Provincial Park on Vancouver Island (where a 200' waterfall stops the salmon in their tracks), the guides said that not only was that not on our itinerary but that they had never brought any tour thither. Glaciers we could see atop the mountains on Vancouver Island and the mainland, and that's as close as we came to one. The left picture in the fifth row is of "Emerald Lagoon, Discovery Islands." Again, not only were we not ferried to Elk Falls Provincial Park, we did not kayak to any other island in the Discovery archipelago or any lagoon on one.
Paying for several days at a time, several weeks in advance, should have got us a better rate than parties joining us at the last minute for single-day tours. Ahaha, no. Planning so far ahead should have given Coastal Spirits time to arrange everything they promised, except that reportedly they never deliver everything they promise and it's not deliverable from Quadra Island anyway.
Quadra Island is gorgeous, and I had a great time when I wasn't dealing with mildew or our hosts. We want to return, but there is not a chance in hell of our booking through Coastal Spite or giving it any but the worst marks in honesty and hospitality.
The first day we kayaked from the tip of Rebecca Spit around the Breton Islands. In our party were three Canadians, mother, daughter and son; two Scots, boy and girl; one Japanese man; and us. Minus the Scots, these six would be together for the next five days.
That morning, some hoodlums had poached dozens of pink salmon. Their corpses, filleted and bloody, lay strewn on the beach. I asked if salmon eyes were a delicacy, like seals' eyes: these fish were blind. But no, corvi and gulls had taken the easiest pickings. Also I asked why the poachers hadn't taken the fish whole rather than spend time on the beach butchering them. They wouldn't want to be caught with the fish, the guide said, though being caught with oodles of fish steaks couldn't be much less incriminating. In the afternoon, upon our return, baby crows begged their parents for salmon guts even though the guts lay right there for easy picking.
At the start, I was screamingly incompetent. A kayak with a rudder? Getting the pedals properly adjusted was a bitch, and for a while I pulled the rudder up entirely rather than let it steer me in circles. At that point, the kayak was dead in the water, impossible to keep on any course at all, so I let it down again, but I still wanted to steer with the paddle.
We saw a bald eagle, harbor seals, and seastars. The eagle perched nonchalantly on a rock only a few feet above the tide line, perhaps napping off a large meal. Seals by the score napped and rested just feet away from us. Harbor seals vary in color and spottiness, but no matter how pale or dark or mottled they are, they all blend perfectly into rocks from a distance. Closer, they separate into tails and flippers, noses and eyes, cow and calf.
Lunchtime meant time to look at seastars and tie bull kelp into knots. Bull kelp, thick and strong as it is, is an annual. It is barely rooted to the seabed, and the stem that grows from bed to surface is solid but resilient and tough, like cork. Kayaking through a forest of it, plastic hull against hollow kelp, sounded like--yes, I am of the television generation--armless Hawkeye drifting among the cast-off limbs in "Dreams," one of my favorite MASH episodes.
Julie, a 17-year-old Ontario transplant to British Columbia, tied the kelp in knots as Bill, the guide, told us how Indians used kelp to straighten wood (for spears or arrows) and treated it to make it last, for storage, for syringes. He showed us several types of seastars, all of whose names I forget.
A little more paddling between the Bretons and Quadra and then another stop for a walk or a swim. Julie or Leann first tried to wade in, but that water was 58 degrees. I asked Bill if there was a jumping rock, and there was. All three of us jumped in, and I am glad to say I was not the only one shrieking off the worst of the shock. The shrieking did scare the nearby seals farther off. Sorry, seals.
I surprised and pleased myself staying in as long as I did. When I waded into the sea off Orcas Island, it was to say I had done it, and that was plenty cold for a 31-year-old. I expected this water to be much colder, that much farther north and six years on. I went in expecting only to come out again, just to say I had done it, but we all three stayed in for--well, not long, maybe 15'. Longer than just a plunge, anyway. The other two complained about the cold in their nipple piercings. Oy.
Saturday was a little drizzly and Sunday was supposed to be more of the same, except windier. All six of us voted to kayak on the lakes. This time our guide was Shale, if her name is spelled as it sounds. Oh, the lakes. The sea had been beautiful, but frankly cold and drizzle do not make for a nice kind of beautiful. Starkly beautiful, deathly beautiful, coldly beautiful. The lakes were warm and still and clear. I had not expected clear with such warmth and all the trees rotting slowly away beneath us, but clear we had.
Another reason for the clarity was the overcast. On the lakes, there was none of the wind forecast for the sea, and despite its being a Sunday in August we were nearly the only activity on the lakes, even the one surrounded by little cottages.
Oo! And lest I forget, this is the day RDC and I tried the Divorce Boat, i.e., a tandem. And it went fine! RDC has always staunchly refused the idea of a tandem bike or kayak as another thing, like wallpapering, that couples should not attempt (I would say no one at all should wallpaper anything. Bleah). Perhaps it worked so well because I could just paddle like an automaton and let him steer, which policy works in general in our marriage too.
So we paddled through the lakes, from Village Lake (the cottage'd one) to Main Lake. To get from one to the next, we paddled through a creek that looked on its way to becoming portage. The water was less than a foot and, when seven people shut up and barely paddled, quiet as heaven.
Today more people swam--the Canadian boy, Phil; the Japanese man, Tatsuro; and RDC. I could have stayed in forever and ever, so warm and perfect was the water. But I didn't have goggles for a real swim and it was a kayaking, not a swimming tour. Next time, when it's just RDC and me, he can go off fishing in his float tube and I will swim and bask and read.
After lunch, Julie took the front of the tandem with me in the rear and RDC her single. I think I'm just not a good steerer. Also--and this surprised me--RDC and I struck a paddling rhythm sooner and easier than Julie and I did.
In Main Lake, there was an island with a house on it. A house on an island in a lake on an island! I wondered if there was maybe a spring on the little island to make a little tiny pond, which would have been even better. A pond on an island in a lake on an island! When Julie and I come into our money, that's the house we're going to live in. Also I wondered if, say, a Briton would be as excited as we were about that little island-lake-island thing. All I would need to live there is internet access and a dryer.
Speaking of dryers! In the evening we used the laundromat at Heriot Bay Inn, which has a campsite adjacent. Dry clothes! What a pleasure.
Monday we all seemed to be in agreement that a day off from kayaking would be good after two days and before the next two days. We climbed to the south peak Chinese Mountain--hardly a mountain--with tremendous views of the south side of Quadra Island, sunlight on the sea, alder and Douglas fir forests below us, Vancouver Island, the mainland, possibly the most beautiful view I have ever beheld.
RDC was a little offended for Colorado's sake. It's not Colorado's fault it lacks water, and water is what a vista needs to be first class. Water, land, more water than land, well mixed up, and not too much evidence of humanity. Certain boats are okay but points off for almost all houses. I had even said of Main Lake that it is what Uncas dreams of at night, so he could have been offended for Connecticut's sake as well.
After that we hiked through primeval forest, covered with moss and ferns and looking like home except without brambles and other nasty underbrush, me expecting a dinosaur to peer out from behind, if not one of the 70-year-old firs of the second planting, then one of the massive trunks still rotting away from the clear-cutting before that. We found our way to Morte Lake, colder than the chained lakes but still swimmable (and I finally brought my goggles), especially since the sun finally came properly out.
I learned that hemlocks tend to tip at the top. Before that pointer, I could sense them even though I mis-identified them on closer inspection. I was pleased to see, when we shuttled days later between Boeing Field and Sea-Tac, that the trees I called hemlocks the week before were hemlocks. It's a Blink thing, maybe. Malcolm Gladwell posits that you can recognize the last stranger you interacted with--a waiter, a clerk at the post office, whoever--but you'd be flummoxed if you tried to describe that person to a third party and even would confuse your own memory so that after the effort you might have lost your recognition as well.
At this point I was happily losing track of days. Tuesday we kayaked from Hyacinthe Bay past Open Bay towards but not to Village Bay. We saw bald eagles and some seals. RDC and I were in a tandem again and our strength and endurance, greater than those of the rest of the party, now swelled with day-trippers again, were showing. Tatsuro was in better shape than either of us but he was in a single.
A tandem gave RDC and me an advantage, but on this day we six--well, five, it was Tatsuro’s last day--decided that we would put our hind feet down to the hosts. We had all paid for tours that were customizable to our abilities, and RDC had twisted his ankle and didn’t want to hike, where Phil’s back protested against another day of kayaking. We saw no reason Coastal Spirits couldn’t give us two guides for two different parties.
I would like to state for the record that here, on a point of Quadra Island shore between Open Bay and Village Bay, I successfully skipped rocks for the first time ever. My mother has tried to teach me, RDC has tried to tell me, but me, I learned from Julie. RDC can send a rock out for yards before it touches down half a dozen times before sinking, and Phil got tremendous numbers of skips. Me, I got twosies and threesies, but after nearly 40 years of plunks, twosies and threesies were just fine.
So Tuesday afternoon we asserted ourselves, and Wednesday the Canadians hiked (poor Julie wanted to kayak) and RDC and I kayaked in a tandem with Bill in a solo. Bill is not only of course a superior paddler but also had a nifty, light little tight little tippy little craft, so we were well matched. We started in Granite Bay and paddled out to the mouth of Small Inlet. There, we saw seastars more than a foot across. We looked down through 40' of water to see kelp at the roots. The water was staggeringly clear, crystal, gorgeous, the most beautiful color, tremendously cold, and heart-rendingly lovely. We paddled up Small Inlet, seeing salmon jumping and bald eagles drying their feathers and seals spy-hopping (does it count as spy-hopping if it's not by whales?), more seastars, jellyfish Bill called moonjellies that he said had no sting (I didn't test this assertion) and looking at the remnants of old-growth forest on the very least accessible ridges and high points above us. When Bill was using a tree, he found a whole abalone shell in a midden. Another midden had been used for shellfish for thousands of years, he said; when I first saw it, it looked like snow.
At the head of Small Inlet, we found a spring Bill had never found before. When Bill put his hand to the ground, he startled a frog, who leaped to a branch over the surface. We saw water bubbling up through the mica-sifted bottom, and Bill filled his water bottle. I was tempted, but am not a native, and he's been drinking water from all over the islands, sources less pristine than this, for 20 years. And that water was cold. It felt just above freezing.
So that was our last day. Thursday we had a long day of travel, the quick ferry to Campbell River (I said goodbye to the water and an eagle perched on a tree as the ferry left Quathiaski Cove), through Campbell River to the airport, helijet to Boeing, shuttle to Sea-Tac, and two hours in the airport before the flight home. Baker and Rainier were thoroughly out, saying goodbye.
I thought I was coming home in time for Haitch to deliver, but my new nephew increased Haitch and McCarthy's joy five whole days early. Welcome Increase!
I am sitting on my porch swing (Blake in his cage alongside) writing entries from mid-month and watching a squirrel eat the berries off the European ash.
Sunday night neighbors had a progressive dinner of all tapas. I remember a couple of times babysitting for 3SK when they went out for progressive dinners in Old Lyme, which occasions now strike me as a bunch of inebriated people driving around town. This, happening all in walking distance, was safer. I had about a half-glass of well-seltzered sangria and stumbled on the sidewalk when Inga's family walked me home, and they laughed at me for having no tolerance. A silver maple had buckled the sidewalk! Really nice company and conversation and dogs and babies.
I came home with one of Scarf's wineglasses in my cooler and a request to borrow a movie, and in the mailbox today was a key to Inga's house, since I had offered to walk her. So today I did something daring: I walked Blake. Not on my shoulder, as I once brought Percy to do laundry, fetch the mail, or even drive to the video store, because Blake is so much flittier than steady Percy, and not in his travel cage, mostly solid with vertical slits for ventilating cats not optimally placed for a cockatiel to watch from, but in a small cage about the size of the travel cage, but vertical, a bird cage intended for wee things like finches. Percy lived in it, between us on the moving truck's bench seat, on the drive from Connecticut in 1995, except of course he was mostly on my shoulder; his regular cage was in the towed Terrapin along with his playpen and other awkwardly-shaped things.
I don't know why I kept that finch cage. Blake has had the more suitable--horizontal, sturdier, opaque--travel cage since 1999. But he hates that, I hope only because he can't see out of it. He hates his harness to the point I would never trust that he would ever stop struggling to extricate himself, and either do himself an injury in the process or by trying to flutter away from its leash or by successfully fluttering away from it altogether. So into the finch cage he went.
This was interesting! This was new! He leaned forward, steering. I left a note at Inga's about an obvious leash and supply of poop bags, dropped the movie at another house, and brought the glass to Scarf's. We sat on her porch and chatted with Blake between us and her dog, a huge Lab/Newf cross, gently curious about the bird, at our feet, sniffing. Blake chucked at the dog in greeting, but then huffed when she turned her head quickly.
Anyway, it gives me hope that maybe he could get used to a dog. And I love the neighborhood group Scarf has pulled us all into.
On Monday I knew only that Hurricane Katrina struck east of New Orleans. I was shopping for Increase and constructing storage for my book-indulgence and listening to a movie I know pretty much by heart rather than watching the news, until Wednesday. I knew Eliza was okay, and she was my only personal connection to the area.
Then on Wednesday I began to read and to watch and to imagine and to grieve.
Give your blood, give your money, give your words, give your participation, give your time, give your vote. Give your heart. Give.
It might have been slightly unfair to have an uninitiated fourth at a game night with CLH and RCL and me. But you need a minimum of four people, and so this non-reading, non-gaming person was dragged in. In Cranium, she started awkwardly, attempting to do the "Seven-Year Itch" skirt thing and then forfeiting, but she laughed when I stood and bumped a hip and cooed "Happy birth-" and my sister guessed Marilyn Monroe; and she rallied enough to laugh at herself when some book thing turned up and she said "I don't read books. Magazines, maybe. I like the pictures."
I submitted "oenophilia" as a hobby during Scattergories, and Uninitiated Marilyn didn't see how that word begins with an O. But CLH had had to spell "subpoena" during Cranium and I offered Oedipus and economics as other sneaky "oe" Greek words. I offered "defenestration" as a fear beginning with D, and first no one believed it was a word, but did not two of the other three people in the room also learn about the Thirty Years War with Mr. Hage? Please. So RCL learned anew that ^ often indicates a dropped S, and at least CLH remembered learning that from Mrs. Degree.
That shared growing-up-ed-ness is why it would have been criminally unfair for CLH to be paired with either her sister or her friend of 35 years. She and Uninitiated Marilyn won Cranium and RCL won Scattergories. Me, I could do Marilyn Monroe but I couldn't do Porky Pig and when I started with "oink oink" all I could think of was Herbie luring the Bumble out of the cave in "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and also I couldn't guess RCL's hummed rendition of "YMCA" and that's why we lost Cranium.
I love game night.
My mother called me at 8:30 p.m. on the 14th, and I thought there must have been a tragedy, because since when is my mother awake at 10:30? And also I thought "Drat!" because I wanted to leave for the airport by 9:15 and was still attempting to nap a bit. Having answered the phone, I was obliged to talk to her until the bitter end, since I lie badly overall and worse without warning. I figured she wouldn't talk for a whole 30 minutes, not on her nickel, and I listened to her complain that I had sent her a broken picture of Haitch and Increase (the same picture my sister received without problem), which reminded me of other babies. I told her about the two new neighbor-babies and walking Inga and said that maybe my coworker would have her baby before I got back.
"Back from where?"
At this point I still could have dissembled, if I were a different person with any wit. But no. "Just make sure you come to CLH's on Sunday."
I had an exit row all to myself, which did not make up for the flight's being delayed 90 minutes but helped. It meant CLH could sleep that extra time, though, since I left her voicemail. She picked me up just before I got to the front of the line at the Logan Starbucks, which is not really a Starbucks and so had a sign reading "We apologize for the inconvenience but we cannot except the Starbucks card" [sic]. If I'd got to the front, I could have corrected it (I did so Tuesday night, buying a Brambleberry Tazo to make up for my rudeness).
I told her about my flub as soon as I was in the car. "Damn it, Jwaas, I shouldn't've even told you that you were coming." Yeah.
I got to see the whole house, all over, and get to know it very well: it rained four out of the six days I was there, and the Sunday was the family cookout. RPR and husband and my adorable niece came too. I thought I would never admit any child to be more beautiful than ZBD, so I'll have to say they tie. And Emlet too. Three (or four, including Kitty of course) different beauties: how blessed I am to have as my own the three most beautiful children in the world.
Two of my nieces. Someone recently asked, probably only for clarification, "You call your sister's cat your niece?" Well, yeah. As much as my nonblood friend's child is my niece, my blood sister's nonhuman child is my niece. I don't see a problem there.
Monday we went to the lake, and I lay half off a raft to whose foot CLH clung and butterfly-propelled us to the west end. Even she with her vision couldn't make out the boat launch, and that's a curiosity. Also some new forsworn house is going up on the other side of the hill, not visible from the lake but the missing trees make the ridgeline look like it's missing a tooth or several. Rant. I kicked us back--does this count as a half-mile swim?--to the beach, which is being Renovated in a Change Is Bad way. The pebbly beach is sliding downhill into the water--last summer there was a bit of a point and this year it's bigger. An admittedly handsome stone retaining wall is being built, but I wonder how long it will last: the rockpile is within inches of the surface this year and I wonder if that unmortared stone wall will become a rock jetty.
Then we sat and read, me this time with Iain Pears since here was no television to render me incapable of anything needing more attention than trash.
Blake's jowls are raggedy and slightly matted because he is so sensitive in his moult that we don't want to cause him any more discomfort. I tried to rub a chunk out of his beard but a feather came too, a blood feather. He squawked in pain and scurried away from me, to his daddy to be rescued from mean mommy. Now he's forgiven me and is tucked on my shoulder, on one foot, provocatively having shoved his curved neck under my nose. But I can't tickle him with my nose because he's all porcupiney.
CLH's Kitty is a nice cat, for a cat. She has an aloof act but, Blake-like, she wants to be in the same room with you. And for a tortoiseshell with a bad dye job, I wonder how far back in her lineage the Siamese is. She has the loudest mah-rrowr I have ever heard, even including dear departed red-point Kato Beast.
She doesn't have any particular smell, either. Not doggy like a dog, rank or puppyish. Mostly she smells like my sister's house. Not like Blake, who smells like the best sort of dusty popcorn.
Have I mentioned how sweet my baby bird is?
What a nice weekend.
Friday Kal and her squeeze came over for dinner. (I think he will just have initials--I don't know his middle name but he goes by an also-name more than by his given name--NZZ. Or perhaps I could call him Split, for Split Enz, or Neil? Neil works, since it shares its initial with his actual first name.) We had a marinated sirloin and roasted potatoes and heirloom tomatoes with mozzarella and chocolate mousse. And conversation, and a walk to the park, and I didn't quite fall asleep at any of these times.
Saturday we lay about all day reading, and Sunday we went to Golden Gate Canyon State Park and hiked through turning aspen.
Tuesday night I was awake until five whole minutes after 10.
At noon I jogged, and I ate my lunch at my desk around 2. At 5:30 (5:37, because I did not run fast enough for the bus), I met Trish downtown. I had had to stop for caffeine before I caught a bus, and when I came out of the Starbucks I walked downtown-ward instead of backward to the nearest stop, four blocks away instead of a half a one. But seven minutes might be less late than I have previously been with Trish. So we walked, passing at least two other Starbucks, from one of which I obtained another tea and a maple-oat nut scone, my old favorite, to the Tattered Cover. Once we found the end of the line for the line [sic], there we stood and gossiped, and my weaning myself from the board showed here because I did not bring up TUS first. Well, I did earlier when she showed me her bright red bag with blue dancing elephants on it! and I asked if it was from the place TUS had mentioned (no). Our arrival in the line garnered us spots in the 220s for the Signature of Neil Gaiman, for it was he we had come to see.
The hall holds about 250 people before fire regulations are severely strained, so we sat at the back. Immediately in front of me was a woman with a ~1.5-year-old child, whom she would stand on her lap, from which it could yelp gleefully or screech frustratedly, and whom neither she nor her three companions removed from the room for the length of the 40' reading. My consolation was to roll my eyes at Trish, and this was actually quite consoling. We talked smack about real live people in the room instead of about our invisible internet companions. I'm not sure if that's progress.
Gaiman read from Anansi Boys, which I keep thinking is Anasazi Boys, and it sounded a little Douglas Adams-y. Which is good, because when I heard Douglas Adams read (from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency or Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, I forget which--aha, the first lines of each, as Amazon provides them, suggests the latter), he was funny (as you'd expect); which is bad, as well, because sounds derivative. Or not: maybe I'm conflating two authors with a rabid and strange cult following whom I heard speak Britishly and in an over-crowded room, and because Gaiman wrote an introduction to an omnibus volume of Hitchhiker's, and because he spoke of going to Iceland and how mean the Norse gods are while the scene Adams read was of the woman inconvenienced at Heathrow by a Norse god-human trying to fly without identification. Self-conscious, deliberate humor, that is.
Tangent: when was that Adams reading, anyway? Was I going out with KFC, because I remember my favorite of his acquaintances, whose name I forget but not his morbid obesity, being one to ask a question? ("Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?" A pause, then, "Don't.") It's unlikely mostly because I dated him for what, a month or six weeks during freshling year. It must have been sophomore year, when I still saw some of those Buckley 5N men since NCS lived there too. Besides Adams's response to Whatsisname, I remember his explaining about towels (he kept losing his while on holiday with friends in Greece); and understanding his frustration (or feeling superior, whatever) when a stupid question showed how closely the asker hadn't read the book; and how pleased I was to learn that my favorite line from the book (approximately, "You don't get the same quality of passersby anymore, do you?") was also his; and later, a campus landmark of a geek pointing to his feet and asking if those socks were in the superintelligent shade of the color blue). Oh, and that's right: a UConn engineering professor always set as a project how to design the Nutri-Matic. Which further reminds me of another question--when asked how to make a Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster, Adams said that terrestial conditions were impossible but the best approximation was to pour one liquor store into another.
Yeah. So in 17 years will I remember Neil Gaiman as well as I now remember Adams? Probably not. I liked and had read all easily accessible Adams at the time while as of now I have read only the first volume of Sandman and Coraline. Besides the rude parent of the screaming baby and the amusing and probably not as Adams-y as I think bit that he read from Anansi Boys, he said two things I remember as actually funny (which is a small fraction of the things that drew laughter from the slavering crowd): caricaturing a Hollywood executive and imitating Terry Pratchett using their pre-arranged, escape-from this-hellishly-insane-meeting word (which had to do with planes, so Pratchett gestured plane-fully); and saying that, upon his early July, early morning arrival in Reykjavik after leaving Minneapolis in the the evening and not having slept, he decided just to stay up until it got dark. I liked that bit because it was self-deprecating, and also it was interesting since during this sleepless sojourn, the seed of American Gods came to him.
Trish mercifully decided not to wait for the 227 people ahead of her to get her book signed. I was desperate for a pee and for something large and recently dead to eat. This we found at Appaloosa Grill. We started with crab-risotto cakes (me) and chicken satay (her) and both ordered the sirloin sandwich: marinated in lime and chili and with a garlicky mayonnaise. Jared joined us and had crawfish etouffee. At 9:45, after my appetizer, I still was ravenously hungry and wide-eyed awake. Then I ate my sandwich, trying unsuccessfully not to wolf it, and in a pause in conversation looked longingly at the bench seat of the booth and asked the time. 10:05.
I'm the funnest person I know, obviously.
Maybe I don't want to be, anymore.
When I happened to be going home for Nisou's wedding in 1996, I looked up someone from my class whom I knew lived in town and asked whether the class of 1986 was going to have a reunion. She said, "Good idea," and took it from there. I created a page listing our names and some things I thought anyone from Lyme or Old Lyme might google if noodling about for their school.
Now we're drawing near a 20th and my contribution to the reunion is the page and googling contact information. I found one fellow's fundraising page for a marathon he's running. What makes me sad is how many of his sponsors are our classmates--people he is still close enough to, 20 years on, to ask to donate, while in contrast, I am friendly with 1.5 persons. One graduated with me after being new in 10th grade and another I grew up alongside from nursery school onward until she went to private school and we had had, as Egg said, a fight over a lunchbox anyway.
Eh, Smacky (is that better than O My Friends and Brothers, O My Future Biographers?), I'm not the worst off. We had four people who were new in 12th grade, and at least one moved away the summer before. Spending your 12th year among strangers must suck, as must growing up among the same core group of 60 or so people yet being able to call none of them friends, which I know also happened. If I didn't walk away with lifelong buddies, at least I left with a few shared smiles.
I'm so healthy I shock myself. And mostly don't wonder if I'm being disloyal to my high school self for being so. A little regret in a reminiscent kind of way, but not a paralytic crippling. Wheee.
I know Oscar Wilde only through plays and epigrams. I didn't know what I expected from a novel. Not much novel, anyway, lots of epigrams (which Lord Henry Wotton supplied in abundance*), melodrama, decadence.
It was better than I expected, and even lacked a goofy curse, spell, or other gimmick to explain the phenomenon. But just because it was 19th century does not mean it needed the faux science of Shelley and Stevenson and Wells.
I didn't understand the botany. First lilacs, then tulips; and iris bloomed before cherries were ripe.
* In abundance: deliberate "Rocky Horror Picture Show" reference, since that's how excessive I expected it to be.
What a perfect weekend. My neighborhood bookgroup, all of whom except Scarf need better nicknames, or nicknames at all, went up to Kal's family's cabin in the Poudre Canyon. Just one night, but we felt like we’d been away relaxing for ever.
Blake and I drove around the corner to drop off the cooler, a canvas bag of games (Taboo and Pictionary crowded into the Scattergories box, and I remembered to bring the dry-erase board Dexy gave us for scoring darts, for Pictionary), another bag with goodies packed inside Blake's cave-box, and an overnight bag. He was in the finch cage, to which I'd added his favorite rope perch and piñata chew-toy, which fits on my lap, but we were seven people, two dogs, and a 'tiel in three cars: I scurried home and put him in his regular cage and we were picked up from there.
The first plans for this weekend called for RDC to be home, but on Wednesday, at an hour's notice, he left for Florida. Wednesday night when we readers converged to give the baby quilt to one of our members, I asked if anyone minded if Blake came with us. No one did; if they had I would have asked Inga's mother to give him his dinner and breakfast (as she had offered to do after September's Inga-walking).
We stopped in Fort Collins for coffee and met Papa Scarf. I'd met Mama Scarf before and seen little resemblance, and this is because Scarf looks so much like her papa there is no room on her face for mama. The coffeeshop, Mugs, had a patio, and I skittered back to the car where I had, guilt-stricken, left Blake in the backseat (in 60-degree shade), and there was always at least one of us and generally more outside while others ordered. Fort Collins is a genuinely college-feeling town and I wish it weren't more than an hour away, besides that I have no affiliation thither.
Saturday was just lovely. I had been up the Cache la Poudre river and canyon exactly once two years ago. It is more than two hours away, which is some justification, and this summer the weekend I was to have gone up to meet Kal's family and the cabin was the first weekend after Hurricane Katrina, when I could not justify a solo car trip for pleasure. The river and its canyon remain lovely even without my supervision, and up we climbed, and continued to climb.
I had had no good idea of the cabin's lay-out. It slept enough to sound big, but was called a cabin. Well, it's a perfect cabin. Yes, it has five double beds, but three of them and a single are nestled in a loft that overlooks the A-frame ceiling, sitting room, and kitchen. Two other bedrooms and a bath are under the loft. It's cozy yet ample. It has a kitchen "better equipped than mine" in one reader's opinion in combination with the kitschy tchochkes, secondhand furniture, pens run dry of ink, and left-over books that mark the best cabins. It looks over the Mummy Range, is unwinterized, warms up with a century-old woodstove, and is bedecked on three sides with patio furniture and birdfeeders. The south, Mummy-facing, A-shaped wall is all glass. And it's perfection.
One reader stayed behind from the walk because she wasn't feeling well, so she got solitude (well, except for Blake) and the six of us and two dogs walked five miles, had a picnic, and went for a swim in a wee pond. Actually, only the two dogs and one of the humans swam (my bathers just happen to be the same fishbelly hue as my nethers). The five-month-pregnant Scarf and 9.5-year-old lab-St. Bernard cross, Mija, did just fine on this walk, and Mija--also not her real name, but close--showed more agility and endurance than any of us expected.
We had split up meal-duties, so after the picnic we had guacamole and chips and salsa, and wine with sunset, and salad and lasagne and brownies, and Scattergories and Cranium (someone guessed "astronaut" after a six-second sketch) and stargazing. There were so many stars (and trees) that I could not find any constellations. The Milky Way was obvious, but we didn't have any red flashlights to read the starchart by and I reprimanded myself for not finding either bear. I did spot Mars, and two falling stars. Scarf's and my meal was Sunday breakfast and I made a baked French toast type thing. Someone else cooked bacon and brewed coffee. It was heaven.
Saturday was wonderfully sunny but clouds obscured Mars even as we watched at midnight. I slept on the sitting room floor, close to Blake on the dining table and because no one in her right mind wants to share with me anyway, so when Kal started the fire Sunday morning I warmed up right there four feet away. It was, again, heaven. Rain began, and if there's anything cozier-sounding than rain on a cabin roof I don't know it. Scarf left early, having another obligation (hence the third car), and we played another round of Scattergories. (My insect-beginning with J, the jaying mantiss, who crosses the street against the light, was rejected.)
Blake was mostly okay. He was a little nervous, seldom having been in unfamiliar places--he was skittery the first time he entered Formigny too--and here be'd dogs. Mija, by age and breeds, was inobstrusively interested, but the other dog, goofy and sweet though she mostly is, was, like the jackal she resembles, fascinated. As I sat cross-legged on the floor with Blake on my knee, she'd watch him, riveted, but as he got comfortable and decided he needed to hop down to prance on the floor (he needs his exercise), she'd immediately rise to approach, and I would scoop him up and she would lie again. I should have flapped him in a closed bedroom to give him exercise, but he got to hide in his box, and I gave away the more interesting feathers he dropped, and the dog was not the only one who found him and his preening and scratching and bowing and hiding in his box eminently watchable. There were no pooping incidents, and he didn't get bitten in half even once, or trodden on, and when he gave his discontented squeaks the only person they bothered was me, so I counted the weekend a success, Blake-wise.
And in all other wise, as well. What a splended retreat.
This weekend as Blake shed feathers I gave the occasional one to Reader--just contour feathers, and a racing stripe feather. No really good ones--crest or tail--fell out, and that's fine because I'm possessive of them. But just now as he crawled down from my shoulder across my lap to his box (next to my legs on the recliner's footrest), a feather turned in a nearly-out way from the base of his tail. On the pretext of tugging his tail in a teasing way, I have this feather now in my paw. It's from his underside, and his entire hindquarters from drumsticks to tail is meant to incubate eggs. Almost a third of this feather is fluff while the outer is contour. The fluff is so soft I cannot stand it. I should make Increase a baby blanket with cockatiel fluff, except that it doesn't keep its loft the way goosedown does. I do know I'm a little insane, but he really is irresistible.
I am home because the rain that made the drive home unpleasant that turned to snow overnight caused some sort of short, putting out Dot Org's phone lines and server connection. No phones, no email, no files. I finished my book, tidied my desk, looked at everyone else's tidied desk, discovered no photocopying jobs, and fled.
If in morning bleariness you slosh orange juice into your cereal bowl and realize this a split second later, do not shrug this mistake off and finish with your regular liquid just because soy milk might tolerate this better than dairy milk. Just because it won't be as gross doesn't mean that it won't still be gross. Start over, even if you feel guilty for wasting a second bowl of cereal in one week since earlier this week you dropped the travel mug full of cereal you were bringing to work because you were late.
If you once thought it was cute to let your pet share your cereal bowl because his species doesn't have saliva and is very small, don't succumb to the temptation because eventually (i.e., the very next morning) the pet will assume this is the Way Things Ought to Be and insist on eating out of your bowl and turn his beak up at the exact same cereal you just removed from your bowl and put in his dish because of course the mere fact of the food's leaving the bowl means it is not as good.
If you are enslaved to a creature 1/757th your size who insists on sharing your bowl, you can perhaps deceive him by tapping your spoon against his dish as if depositing a fresh portion of your food therein. Because he is only 1/757th your size, it will take him long enough to prance over to his dish, examine it, and turn his beak up at it again that you will have time to take a spoonful or two on your own before he returns.
If you are late to work again (cf earlier this week) because the convenience of using the car has gone somewhat to your head, do not expect to rise from the breakfast table in any sort of timely fashion when your pet has found the Exact Right Spot among the folds of your fleece robe to take his post-breakfast nap and is now compressed in body but enfluffed in plumage in his most irresistible manner such that getting up would Inconvenience him and wrench your heart.
If you and your pet are accustomed to snuggle while one of you watches television and the other has his pre-bedtime preen-and-nap, consider watching something less convulsively funny than "Shaun of the Dead." Your pet will not appreciate his perch (your person) rollicking and braying with mirth.
The invitation said, "Play games. Drink something. Mock non-attendees. Eat"; also that dogs and nursing babies were welcome but men should stay home with the cats. I reneged on that last when I had a cancellation on each Thursday and Friday and Kal said that Neal wanted to come. I am not sure but I do think having even just one man changed the dynamic. I made Boboli pizza, one pesto cheese and tomato and the other tomato sauce, cheese, and pepperoni; I had (boughten) chocolate chip cookies; I made sweet potato crack with both sweet potatoes and yams; I served sliced mango; there were two bags of chips. Other contributions were a strawberry cake, more chips, and chocolate chip bars far superior to the CostCo cookies. So the food was covered.
We didn't mock any non-attendees, and only a few people drank a few beers while most stuck to water (thank goodness: it never runs out), and the newbies voted for Pictionary so Pictionary it was.
A developer recently razed an unregrettable building along Colfax and two historic if decrepit houses behind it in a neighborhood. The lots are zoned B3 and R4, which means that the floor-to-area ratio and other requirements would allow just about anything, like say an automobile dealership, an autobody shop, a chain restaurant, or just a nice crop of asphalt like that planted throughout much of Denver. Initial neighborhood resistance led the developer to consider instead a project zoned MS: where B and R are for business and residential, MS is for Main Street: more pedestrian friendly, less asphalt, street-level windows, specific setbacks, and other good things.
Problem is, the project is MS-2, which allows for taller and denser than the MS-1 that the city planners, and the two involved neighborhoods, intend for our stretch of Colfax to be. Attendees at last night's meeting could vote for the new MS-2 or continue B3-R4. That was the choice. Our vote is not binding in any way but only a factor the city council considers when deciding about the zoing.
The fear, and it's a reasonable concern except presented last night as a boogeyman, is that if this first project, whose planning began before the MS language became an option, is allowed to be MS-2 instead of -1 (MS-2 was intended for areas closer to downtown), that that will set a dangerous precedent.
I say, MS-2 is better than B3. It's not better than R4 alone, but those houses are gone, the developer elected not to buy and raze the third historic but decrepit house such that its survival preserves a sightline, and MS-2 is better than the B3/R4 combination.
I wish to the Climbing Tree that some of the people the most involved in the neighborhood would present themselves better, would act less like the boogeyman is after them, would whine just a soupçon the fuck less, and would obsess not at all about parking. It's a city: act like it. You do not own the spot in front of your house, and in this neighborhood you probably have a garage so put the car in there (I should talk), and let's encourage pedestrian and public transport!
Years ago we used to dress up, go out at night, drink, and dance. Now the Hallowe'en party is at 10:00 in the morning (11 in our heads, so not that bad), has nearly as many children as adults (we do our bit to keep the ratio rational), and the entertainment is jumping in piles of leaves.
Which, I have to say, was big enough for toddlers but not for adults until I asked to use the rake. RDC teased me: I'd rake this lawn but not my own? Hey, when this lawn gets re-leaved over the next few weeks, I won't be frustrated. I raked the backyard, minus the leaves caught in the ivy, and later part of the frontyard. I like to rake, what can I say, especially when there are kids to jump in the heaps.
I hadn't seen Margaret since maybe last year's Hallowe'en, and we were catching up (Buckbeak is going to be a big brother this spring) and RDC interjected about my promotion. She was all happy for me, which was nice, but, either out of modesty or false modesty or just never being able to be happy with what I've got or needing to make everything a joke, I said I was still sending other people's faxes, and that one of my goals in life was never to send anyone else's fax.
My goals in life: to rake a good-size lawn every fall (or a few smaller ones), to read all the Newbery Medal books, and not to send anyone else's fax.
I saw my best friend Gethen, who after 10 months didn't remember me. But she's still Gethen, still sweet and charming, and we and Scarlett played well together. All the children were charming, in fact, but four-year-old girls are among my favorite people ever. Gethen might remember me if she sees me not too long from now, like for a Yule party.
And at such a party, do we have one, I shall have to refrain from quite so many airplane rides. This morning my left bicep was sore, in a reasonable way, from the gardening; this evening my back is viciously painful. I hate being a grown-up: I don't receive the airplane rides anymore, which sucks; and now giving them sucks too. Damn.
Should I have a television category? Should I not censor books into their own category?
Trish lent me the first season of "Gilmore Girls" and she was right that I would like it. I couldn't've watched it as a television show but as 20 hours of smarm-set-in-"Connecticut" it did fine.
The other town troubadour runs a Kinko's in Groton? The town was founded in 1779 but had (or not) a battle in the Revolutionary War, which is chronologically possible but highly unlikely, and what New England town with any pride gives such a late date? Even Old Lyme, which wasn't named until the 1850 split from Lyme, claims "settled" so it can weasel a 17C date. Hartford is 30 minutes away from what seems like a Litchfield County town? Hartford is a nice place for people as displaced in time and culture as the grandparents to live in? (Oh, maybe it's the Hartford from "Judging Amy," another show I tried for the Connecticut tie-in.) You can walk to all these great places in Stars Hollow, which has fewer than ten thousand people and was founded in the 18C but has a distinct downtown with three-story edifices? Driving from Stars Hollow to Hartford takes you past the Gelston House in Haddam?
And don't even get me started on the fact that Lorelai declares she and Chris wouldn't be where they each are if they had got married at 16, as if by contrast being a single, teenaged mother didn't hold her back at all. And that house, and those clothes, on the income of the manager of an inn?
Anti-feminist subtext aside, mostly all I want to say is that Stars Hollow is no Cicely, Alaska--which I'm sure also couldn't exist but at least had a better personality along the way.
Where's season 2?
Reportedly, only Usan English has "fall" and the other Englishes, even Canada's, say "autumn." Autumn is merely a season and might only be poesy, not a season but only a section of calendar for those freaky wrong places where leaves do not fall. Fall is a season and a mood. Fall is wonderful.
This morning I looked out at the birdfeeder that I have left empty since July but neglected to take down, and upon it perched a hopeful finch, the first bird I have seen on it since a week after I left them all to starve. I also noticed raindrops on the last of the nectarine leaves. I took a hint and filled the feeder before retreating to my breakfast. Over no more time than breakfast I watched the rain turn to snow turn to bright blue sky and strong sunlight.
I do like Denver. And fall.
Over dessert at Café Star (chili chocolate pot du crême for me and Key lime pie for RDC), we saw former neighbors, chatted with the bartender, drooled over the new winter menu, and delighted that all this was here within walking distance in our neighborhood that we love. The bartender comped us a dessert after I told him and RDC about how, at the latest Other bookgroup, a woman asked about new nearby restaurants to take friends to and Kal and I blurted, in unison, "Café Star," and when after our descritpion she continued that these friends lived in Highlands Ranch, we said, again in unison but more emphatically, "Café Star." Suburbanites need to see Colfax Avenue, the grit and vitality of a real city street.
On our walk home I suggested that in whatever kind of town we lived, I'd come up with justifications for why it was the best. The favorite boast of some of our Connecticut friends is that from their houses they can see no neighbors, but though I wouldn't mind space enough for more trees, it's front porches and sidewalk and proximity that make my neighborhood a thriving community. Do people who can't see their neighbors get trick-or-treaters?
The one Connecticut house owned by friends of my generation that I admire is an 18C farmhouse in North Windham--old enough still to have character, near a real town square instead of in the faux country of two-acre lots, imbued with the love that only owners who are doing the work themselves can bestow on a dwelling. RDC pointed out that North Windham is basically Willimantic and who would want to live there, and I countered, "But what is Willimantic other than the Colfax of Connecticut?" He retorted, "Yes, all the heroin and none of the restaurants."
I think Romantic Willimantic has a new tagline.
I love the NameVoyager and its creator's commentaries. Today's mucking about reminded me of my own naming hypotheses.
For a while my hypothetical daughter's name was Ainsley Cynthia. Reading Margaret Atwood's Edible Woman in 1989 was the first time I noticed the name Ainsley, and Cynthia is obvious. I don't remember what name I planned before. (After my reading The Thorn Birds at 13 and my later falling in love with Peter Gabriel's music, my name for a boy was Dane Gabriel. CLH mocked that one hard, and I parenthesize it because yeah, what was I thinking?)
When RDC and I began thinking long-term, family names came up. In my address book are listed 11 women roughly of my generation who didn't take the name of the heterosexual partner they have children with. The children of eight have the man's surname--even the child of the unpartnered parents, even the children of parents whose names differ only in vowel, as in Smith and Smoth, but differ enough, as in Smith and Smoth, such that naming the children Smoth instead of Smith seems cruel. Then again, for another set the father's name is the preferable so maybe it's a good thing they have it. One child has both surnames, with father's last and mother's as a middle, and another set of two siblings has both their parents' surnames, in the older the father's dominates and it's the younger sibling whose mother-name dominates. For only two of my acquaintances who kept their names and had children, does the first-born child bear the mother's surname.
I like my name. I am determined and independent--marriage was going to be "Let's be independent together!" like Rudoph and Herbie--and my hatchlings would have my name. My potential husbands' names had been, serially, diminutive, inelegant, difficult to enunciate, and now hard to spell and pronounce. Even as we realized that hooray, the other person didn't want children either, we argued about names (name and arguments being fun). At that point, the hypothetical (except certainly singleton) child's name was going to be either Bly David or Bly Cynthia. Bly is pleasantly androgynous so worked for either and was a family name of RDC's to balance my insistence on my last name (a point which I had not won) and David has long my favorite boy's name as well as also a family name of RDC.
My first dog's name is going to be Phoebe, so it had better be female. Recently I've favored more unusual names, and a series of hamsters should get these names out of my system (as should the mere consideration of hamsters). Mathilde. Aloysius. Maebh. Evelyn. Malachi, nicknamed Dactyl. Oo, that could be my next bird's name (because parrots have zygodactyl feet). And if I named a dog Evelyn, around its neck instead of a bandana I would have to tie a special doily with quivering fringe. Er. Not after reading Dogs of Babel and deliberating not reading Lives of the Monster Dogs could I name a dog anything implying modification, further or otherwise.
Remembering how Emlet stretched and luxuriated in her bath at four months, I asked Haitch if Increase likes to bathe. She described his spa treatment--mud mask, pedicure, ear-candling--and said that yes, he likes his bath and just about everything except honey, haycorns, and thistles. She is reading him Winnie-the-Pooh and recognizing lisa-isms.
We each recently dreamed about the other--she must drive carefully today especially and I must not turn into a Gilmore Girl--and I must watch "Me and You and Everyone We Know" and she must read The Myth of You and Me and she laughed at my latest mother-story and if she keeps going to Connecticut for Thanksgiving then maybe I will too.
I miss my Haitch.
Last summer my sister and mother arranged a family reunion. One earliest arrival was a first cousin of my mother's and her husband, who responded to my greeting with the tale of their daughter's suicide attempt. I have no skill in politely disentangling myself and little ability tactfully to redirect inappropriate conversation. Eventually, after having had poured in the porches of mine ears information about my unknown second cousin's depression, school, distance from her parents, church fellowship, and morbid attempt, I blurted, "I'm sorry, but you're wearing sunglasses so I can't see your eyes and is your daughter alive?" She was. She survived her crisis, and her parents saw fit to honor that survival by exacerbating her trauma by breaching her privacy to whoever, including a perfect stranger who happens to be blood kin in the second degree, months afterward. I was horrified to be the passive partner in this intrusion. After my blurt I said that I was sorry for her troubles and theirs and was profoundly grateful to the next arrival, hostessly obligations toward whom I claimed as excuse to extricate myself from this violation of common decency.
My mother just told me that another child of this gossip is soon to marry and that she (my mother) and another cousin are going to travel together to the ceremony. I refrained from asking if intimate details about this near-tragedy will be printed in the program. The woman might recognize that her own idle chit-chat has ensured that everyone in her reach however unconnected to her daughter already knows everything she has seen fit to divulge, but she might not.
I don't remember exactly when the following was my favorite outfit, but I think eighth grade, and I think so because when it became certain that I would go along on the class trip to D.C., I packed immediately and did not thereafter reconsider the clothing I'd selected; but I packed in Connecticut in February and suffered in Washington in early May. Gray wide-wale cords, white oxford, and a sweater that I loved, having picked it out myself: gray sleeves and back and an argyle front of lavender and pale green diamonds and a white stripe. It was a little tight in the sleeves and my mother told me that that was an area clothing manufacturers often skimped on. I remembered it recently when I was trying on a sweater similarly tight in the arms, as if women with solid torsos and unmistakable bosoms should somehow have spindly capellini arms. Or maybe it occurred to me yesterday when I noticed someone wearing a shirt reminiscent of my favorite one from 1985 (I wore it for my 12th grade yearbook picture). It was collarless, white, and not pinstripe but with two narrow gray stripes alternating with a narrow black stripe on the white field. I wore it with a graphite pencil skirt. Ha! It was graphite-gray and, as I recall it, pencil-thin. No pun intended.
I started writing this yesterday in the meeting where I spotted that dated pattern. It also occurs to me that I have claimed lavender as my favorite color for a long time, remembering a lavender henley that I wore to bits throughout college, but that maybe gray is just as long-lasting favorite and isn't just a cockatiel thing. If I were that into mother-son matching outfits, I'd wear orange and yellow too.
Ralph Fiennes is perfect as Voldemort. Despite the makeup, his icky Ralph-Fiennes-ness was evident in his mannerisms and gestures. Frankly he didn't look a lot different than he did in "The English Patient," before or after the burns. To my way of thinking he'd be just as scary-looking with no makeup at all.
I got all bouncy during the preview for "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," which looks like it might be worthy, and TMH confessed she hasn't read them. I leaned as far away from her as I could. She suggested borrowing mine, and while I could easily lend The Last Battle, which I think I've read just twice (the first time and when CLH gave me the boxed set), Lion is as necessary to my household as a dishwasher. I've owed her Sound and the Fury for a while now, so afterward I bought her both and explained that though Lion is marked #2, it is really the first, because while C.S. Lewis could write them he had no idea how to order them. How do these 6-1-5-2-3-4-7 heretics explain the order of the movies?
Anyway. Discussing Half-Blood Prince after its release this summer, I said I was frustrated by Rowling's sudden invention of the convenient Retiring Room, but a Suspect said it did appear previously, in Goblet, during the Yule Ball. I emailed myself to check that, and today I finally did. It is there, indeed, as Dumbledore's well-proportioned room of chamberpots, in a line as seemingly throwaway as any other. Now I know very well than Rowling deliberately plants disguised clues, but jesus. Harry has to refurbish his Potions kit as well in Goblet, and is essence of belladonna going to be the key to everything in #7? There are artful disguises, and there red herrings, and then there is mishmash.
The movie's a lot better than the book--Harry's not as whiny, his fight with Ron is shorter, Fleur's disdain for all things non-Beauxbatons that comes off as nothing more than Brit disdain for all things non-British is absent.
Kal and I dined at Piscos, whose focus is South American cuisine rather than fish, and had a remarkably good meal. She had a stew with beef and several colors of potatoes, and I had a pork chop with squash and several kinds of cheese. Oo, and the biscuits beforehand were just tremendous. She brought from Maine chocolate-covered blueberries for bootleg concessions.
When we saw the trailer for this before "March of the Penguins," the plan was for at least me to sit in the hindmost row so I could make self-hanging gestures as needed without disturbing anyone. But this weekend I watched the 1995 miniseries and reread large chunks, such as April at Rosings. I don't like that the Langton version skips over Elizabeth's accidentally getting pretty near the truth about Georgianna with Col. Fitzwilliam, and that it doesn't explain why the obviously charming colonel isn't interested in Elizabeth. So I had had sufficient doses of Acceptable to innoculate myself against the possibly Totally Unworthy.
But it was fine! It's not Pride and Prejudice, and that was okay. Mr. Bennet calls Mrs. Bennet "Blossom," in addition to saying wearily that because she wants to tell him something, whether he wants to hear it is immaterial. He stops a much more likeable Mary from playing badly at a ball, but he consoles the sobbing girl afterward. Mary is merely plain and has not practiced that song enough instead of not playing well.
Two things only made me mutter aloud: Mary's saying Miss Bingley's line about conversation instead of dancing being more sensible fits her character; but while Miss Bingley must of course be rude, her saying Bingley's line about that's not resembling a ball doesn't fit. I read somewhere that the British release ends with Mr. Bennet's being quite at leisure for any more young men, and I wish the Usan cut stopped there too, because the "Blue Lagoon" scene with the Emmaish discussion of terms of endearment ("Mrs. Darcy" rather than "Mr. Knightley") was just wrong wrong wrong.
Other things made me scowl, if not flinch or mutter, such as almost all instances of non-Austen dialogue and the Bennets being portrayed as poorer than they are (poorer than the junior Musgroves in "Persuasion"). And Darcy go anywhere with his collar unbuttoned and no cravat? Never (though I do crave the long coat in that straight-off-a-bodice-ripper-cover scene, just as I long for Mr. Bennet's in the Langton) But Judi Dench especially made me happy and all the casting I hadn't steeled myself to ahead of time (Keira Knightley) except Bingley who looked like Peter Pan was suitable. I don't need and didn't expect a slavishly exact cinematization; I wanted, and got, eye candy and fun.
The other bookgroup had its annual brunch and gift exchange at Le Central. I had pain perdu, offered The Bookclub Cook Book, and received a set of notecards in a box (it's always about the box) shaped like a circus tent.
Afterward I strolled up the to the library, where I have barely set foot since Dot Org moved to the hinterlands. My first destination was a performance by someone from the Colorado Shakespeare Festival called "Shakepeare's Sister." Almost as soon as I entered (a little late, but not disruptively), "Joan"--Shakespeare did have a sister so named--asked for a volunteer to be Titania and called on me. She sat me down on the edge of the stage, asked if I could snore (yes), and then put something "on your pretty hair." At that I was putty in her hands. To a portly man who had to play Bottom without any prop, but who did get to bray, I got to say--well, repeat, phrase by phrase, like wedding vows,
I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:
Mine ear is much enamour'd of thy note;
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;
And thy fair virtue's force perforce doth move me
On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.
Because no, I don't have a tremendous lot of Shakespeare committed to memory. I can, however, snore, and speak such lines with eye contact, affect, and without balking at the pre-vowel "mine." When she released me, I began to return to my spot but she had to remind me, "May I have my tiara?" So that's what I got to wear. It was just like the one I got for Haitch to wear at her graduation party.
It was fun, if not so fun as the audience-participation Richard III in The Eyre Affair.
Afterward I wandered happily about, browsing, selecting Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor and in between discovering, in the jacket matter of The Basic Eight, that Daniel Handler--i.e., Lemony Snickett--at least used to live, if not still lives, in Old Lyme! Damn, I wish I had known that when I saw him in October so I could have pestered him instead of just handing my book to him with a smile and mere hello.
Later the Denver Gay Men's Chorus performed in Schlessmann Hall (the atrium, pretty much, except not Greek). They sang the national anthem and several secular Christmas songs, including one piece memorable for its being African instead of European, with different voices chanting in different rhythms, really nice.
I stopped into Capitol Hill Books on the way home and found How the Grinch Stole Christmas for pertinent English practice for the frenchlets, and even The Trumpet of the Swan to go with the Audobon stuffed trumpeter swan I picked up ages ago. I mean to replicate American fauna in the frenchlets' house, it's true. They already have have a bison named Wyoming (a hard sound for French speakers) and a bald eagle named Sam. I mean to find a skunk and a raccoon, but after those I'll have to look up specifically North American critters. Or American, like mountain lions.
When I gave blood today my pulse was not 48 but 64. So much for having the heart of a horse. More worrisome is that my blood pressure was 137/80. What the hell's that about? Perhaps keeping my weight under my IQ is unrealistic but my systolic is nigh on lapping my brain as well and that's unacceptable.
I don't know how we managed this but we had about 30 guests this year, same as last year, with only five repeats. Last year seemed like more maybe because there were more children. This year weather deprived me of my best friend Gethen, despite my having the red and white pipecleaners all ready for jewelery-making and had bought stickers and set out construction paper and crayons. Pynchon discovered the tupperware from which I supplied the cookie trays and commenced stacking, and I showed his mother the treasure trove of more tupperware, so there was more stacking and knocking over. I also speak enough baby-sign to tell a mother when her child has asked for more.
Once again I shoved Booboo in the fruit cellar, and a good thing I did because Pynchon also discovered Pantalaimon. After that I brought out Hamlet and Monty and from downstairs Tigger and Opus and Babe and Ophelia the okapi too. Trish wanted me to wear the Rudolph nose (the battery contact is made when the roundthehead elastic is taut) so I did, and another baby thought that was peculiarly interesting, but he didn't want to wear it. I turned Hamlet into the Red-Nosed Elephant instead.
Friday night AEK organized drinks at Café Star before carpooling to Blossoms of Light before cocoa and cookies at her house. I took a shine to a man at whose unpronounceable last name I stared on a business card and who was gobsmacked when I assessed the origin of his name (Hungarian). "She's really smart," MDD offered, and I was giddy and flirtatious and agreed, but when he and RDC started talking geeky tech talk I flirted with a baby instead.
Thursday was Dot Org's holiday party, and Saturday before my own party I was feeling grumpy and ill and unsociable (but I rallied); and when Sunday dawned just as buttclenchingly cold as the all the days of previous week, I blew off Jack and Diane's party in Beigeland and a neighborhood 50th birthday party and hibernated.
But in the evening when Charenton called to invite us to their New Year's Eve party (as they might have even if I hadn't invited them to our Yule fête), I was sorely tempted.
Haitch, please dispatch your penguin candle holder and the penguin candy dish and penguin cocktail shaker to hold an intervention at our house. RDC reports that our penguin cocktail shaker is drinking more than its share of vodka.
This morning I picked up Morgan from the neighbor who's had her since Wednesday; her parents are away for New Year's. She is a nine-year-old black Labrador Retriever with very sore hips whom I thought Blake could tolerate. He can mostly ignore her--she is on her bed at my feet and he is tucked on my shoulder; they're both asleep--unless she is wagging her tail. Unfortunately, this is her default activitiy when awake, and she has a proper Lab otter tail, and Blake has never liked windshield wipers and this is worse.
The vet said last week (in addition to admiring Blake's excellent plumage, assessing his muscle tone as excellent, and observing that he didn't have to inquire about Blake's vigor or opinions) that a dog could hurt the buddy under the paw or in the mouth but not by inflicting a fear-induced cardiac arrest. Well, the tail is certainly a danger too, and so is asphyxiation. I had forgotten how much a dog smells. Her coat is lovely, not as oily as Shadow's was, but she has her share of dog-stank, plus dog-flatulence.
We had a little walk this morning that seems to be as much walk as she could handle. We saw a dachshund and two beagles and Pele the Hawaiian soccer god-terrier, and though I thought she was picking direction I think the duration was too much for her. I don't know her well enough to be certain whether her gait was lamer at the end than at the beginning, but she hasn't stirred from her bed (except for changing positions) in almost three hours.
She seems sad, too, which makes me sad. She must miss her human parents and her two canine and five feline siblings. Her tender hips mean she can't manage kennel life, so I get her, and that's nice, but does she feel abandoned? Is her job at home not as to be a toe-warmer, such that my foot is only an obstruction and not also communication, contact, and affection?
I have missed how a dog stretches her toes in her sleep. For her hips' sake I have resisted tickling the hair between the pads of her hind feet, but her ears are all mine. The three of us have sat here napping and reading for a while now, and Blake smells better, but Morgan snores and and snorts and is bigger and keeps both my insteps warm and she doesn't think that her mission in life is to remove the freckles from my neck. Ow.
Plus she's already a guard dog. She didn't rouse from her sleep at all when the mail rattled into the box but when RDC returned from his errands, she growled as soon as he turned the knob and barked until he opened the dog and she recognized him.
Both bird and dog have really cute eyebrows, and hers are big enough that I can admire them from farther than my shoulder. No crest, though.
Oh, what fun this site is. Some misspellings are mere ignorance (elementary for alimentary), but other make terrific puns. "A posable thumb" would make a lovely painting, though I want to avoid the visual for "balling your eyes out." I can see how "antidotal evidence" might cure a bad situation. I came across "reeking havoc" some time ago and it makes brilliant sense. I'm sure for some people, "never regions" is synonymous with "nether regions." And perhaps certain eels are gregarious--social morays.
Addendum: I don't know who owns these gems; I read them on Miss Snark's site who identifies them as first lines from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine's slush pile. My favorite might be "'Be good,' he called after her as he bit back the tears in his eyes," with "He whetted his lips" second. The best ones involve eyes in unfortunate ways, like the above and "Mona was on the liquilounge, her dark eyes pouring over him like warm jello."
Me, I always have to be careful not to spell vertical as "verticle." But that doesn't lend itself to great puns or mixed metaphors.
Yesterday and today I tackled mementos and correspondence. I hauled the boxes out of my closet and commenced to sorting. Two years of cards and letters, sorted dated and bundled. I did find some stuff I could throw out, like envelopes and newspaper articles, and some stuff that I could cram into photograph albums and scrapbooks, like photographs and newspaper articles. I don't know how I continue to do that.
To the scrapbook, I added the newspaper photograph of RKC as honor essayist at high school graduation, tidily on the same page as her older sister's college graduation. Is it tacky to have obituaries in a scrapbook? I put in the notice from the religious organization to which RDC's aunt and uncle made a contribution for prayers in perpetuity for Granny, which is personal, but are public death notices as well weird to include? I am going with no, since I am the only person who will ever look at the books. Or maybe my father would be proud to know that I included the newspaper mention of his first hole-in-one (I love a small-town paper).
Monkey--which is what I'm going to call her here no matter what she is named--finally arrived, almost two weeks past the due date. While she and Scarf and Drums remain in hospital, RDC and I get to host Mia. Despite being a year older and half St. Bernard to boot, Mia is spryer than full-Lab Morgan. Poor girl, she has been away from home since labor began, not because of doggy germs but because she and Scarf are so devoted to each other that her not understanding why her mama was in pain and consequent agitation caused Scarf further pain.
I don't know whether it will be better to walk her past her house, to let her know that she's near it and let her sniff it or if that will upset her.
Before we dognapped her, Mia spent the day in the yard of a neighbor who doesn't care for dogs in his house. I guess we were the first to act upon his message--please take her home with you--because when RDC went over in the late afternoon to see if she was still available, she was. Conveniently, Drums had just darted home to shower and change. So we have her food and leash, and during dinner someone came by with her bed, and right now she and I are in the living room reading and snoozing.
During dinner and also now, but now sadly muted by the dishwasher, Mia has been snoring. One of my private theories is that I began to sleep with men only because, away from home and at college, their snores were my only substitute (I suppose I should be grateful that my roomie wasn't a snorer). I have considered getting a white-noise generator for waves, crickets, and rain; I wonder if any is available with dog snores and sighs.
Oh, and while RDC was cooking dinner Mia lay in the doorway between dining room and kitchen, on the cold mean hardwood floor. Eventually she rose creakily and hoisted herself onto the one rug in the kitchen--which is exactly in front of the sink. When I patted the corner of the dining room rug she came immediately, and she was only a couple of feet further back than her position in the doorway. But I like that she wants to be just as much underfoot as she can be.
She might not smell as rank in body as Morgan, but she has worse breath, and if she's not as rank she's still a dog and therefore no flower. Objectively, cockatiel dander smells good, while dog does not; but if Dog is an acquired preference, I've certainly acquired it.
Really, it's the best sound ever. Deep doggy breaths from the doggy bed. When we came downstairs after dinner, she rose from her first choice of spot on the rug, stood leaning against the couch, and lay her chin on the cushion. Blake could not have indicated what he wanted any more clearly. While dogs do not go on the furniture how ever much they are loved, I am otherwise at their beck and call, so I went up and got her dog bed.
This is whom (fine: what) I got to dogsit and then let go home in the shortest two weeks ever: Morgan and Mia. Maybe because of her hips, Morgan is the only adult lab I have ever known who has lain down with her legs outstretched behind her, like a puppy. I should have taken close-ups of her amazing ears.
Neither dog seemed to pine pathetically, but Morgan didn't eat much and almost bounced when her mother came to get her. I wasn't home when Mia's father arrived but she was ecstatic to see him. I hope she likes her new human sister. Oh, and Blake dropped a shoulder feather today, round (so obviously shoulder joint), dark gray with just a fleck of racing-stripe white. I'm sure he doesn't remember his mother at all, but her name was Blaze for an un-hen-like streak of bright yellow through her otherwise dun crest. I pointed out to him how Mia had a similar streak of light-on-dark, but he failed to feel any kinship with her because of it, nor because he clearly had Mia-colored feathers--(not quite) black with a tip of white. Both dogs ignored the bird, thank goodness, but that is not something I expect of either a younger dog or a dog who is more confident of her family.
I think the first time Blake met a dog was Thanksgiving of 2000, when Maggie came with Clove and Dexy. I wouldn't doubt that he had a headache from carrying his crest so far forward (is that why I like the Grinch's dog Max, because of his antler? I think of him getting caught in the sewing machine and hopefully waving from the back of the sled more than gradually dropping from over-antlered-ness). Perhaps because he's older, because because these two dogs were older, he could relax in their presence--play in his box, have his head pet, go to sleep on a shoulder.
He's such a good boy, but he's not a dog.
Thank goodness! My mother is referring to her stepdaughter's new baby as "my grandchild" instead of "my stepgrandchild." When in the course of human events, people consider the children they parented with someone else to be their new partner's children as well, to the point that the one's children inherit part of the estate of the other's antecdent, then the one had better damn well call the other's grandchildren her own. My sister and I were beneficiaries to part of our mother's husband's mother's estate, and I thought (privately, not to my mother*) that was pretty messed up, and more messed up when, after her stepdaughter fell pregnant, my mother for months said that her husband was going to be a grandparent but did not say the same of herself. That was then, though, and this is now. The younger German Shepherd had a puppy today and all is well, both in mother and child's health and in how my mother names the relationship.
I said something to RDC the other evening about when "my parents" visit us this coming May, because that's shorter than saying "my father and notstepmother." Depending on context, I also occasionally refer to my mother and her husband as "my parents." I don't think either of my actual parents would be pleased to know that I refer to a stepparent as parent. I don't know. I have never called RDC's mother "Mom" although she has welcomed me to do so. Perhaps it's okay if I refer to the sets as parents for convenience as long as I don't call people by onceling titles.
* Privately, because how anyone disposes of their belongings is none of my affair. My father wanted my okay about offering my sister some financial assistance, and I told him that his money, now and after that thing that he's not allowed to do, is his to do with as he wishes, and I promised him, solemnly by Shadow's memory, that it would never be a problem, and he had my okay if he wanted it but that he didn't need it.
The other baby is my mother's first cousin's new grandchild. Its raising will be more of a group effort than certain people might expect, and I'm all for village-parenting especially when the parents are as young and unexpected as these are. The baby, its mother, and my mother's cousin all live close enough that I hope my mother can work off some of her grandmother-jones on this kid too.
When I congratulated my mother on becoming a grandmother, because she had emphasized "finally" I offered that 20 years is a long time to wait. "But you've only been married 10 years," she replied. But you've known since before I married that I wasn't going to spore, I didn't say. Instead I finished my earlier thought, which is that my sister and I have been grown for 20 years. She, probably wanting to be supportive, once told me while I was in college, that she hoped I would tell her if I got pregnant. I didn't tell her that the fewer people who knew, the better off I would be--because heaven knows there's reciprocal gossip-sharing among her family--and that I would dread both her support and her censure.
Two significant things in therapy:
I am going to taper off Lexapro and see how it goes. Either it has helped me remember how to be me, in which case I'll be okay, or I won't be okay, in which case I might see it as medication to treat a chronic condition--dysthymia. The previous sentence's two clauses are not parallel. I know.
Between fall of 2003 and June 2005, I saw my shrink almost weekly. Most of the hiccups in that weekly schedule were unscheduled cancellations (occasionally I would get a call in time but more often I would show up at the clinic at 8:00 a.m. for my appointment and she would be absent). She excused herself by illness; of course I asked her if she was okay; and of course as a professional she thanked me for my ongoing concern and said only, "It's being addressed." Last June she graduated (I see psychiatric residents at UCHC) and referred me to her friend and classmate, whom I have seen perhaps a half-dozen times since. Yesterday, this second shrink told me that my shrink--who by dint of longevity and frequency is still who I think of as my shrink rather than this new (also excellent) person--died over New Year's. She was 34.
When the new shrink told me about the previous shrink's death, which had occurred less than a fortnight before, she said she wanted to make sure I learned it from her. I was glad to know (how do you say that? I'd rather know than not know, though I'm desperately not glad it happened), but I thought it hugely unlikely I would have heard about it otherwise.
I was in my cube at work when a colleague arrived to chat with CoolBoss for a moment, catching her up on an ex-DotOrgerista. Colleague spoke of the difficult year (school, baby, parents' health) the exDO had had, and then said something along the lines of how to cap it off, on New Year's Eve a friend had died, suddenly, and gave other details, including a name.
So I would have found out, not two weeks after it happened, not two days later.
It's something she and I talked about at the end of my sessions with her. She said Denver was a small town, really (it is?), and how would I like to handle it if we happened into each other? A million people in the city and another million or two in the hinterlands, sure, but it is a small town: I believe not only in six degrees of separation but also in the fact of overlapping demographics. Similar neighborhoods, income levels, political leanings, tastes in food, reading, and music, and hobbies will keep you among similar people. That's why it's important to keep punching at the bubble around you.
Also, I finally remembered something. One of the names Scarf and Drums were considering for Monkey was Sylvia, and the day I learned that, that night I dreamed of a Sylvia I once knew. For the past several weeks, I would remember this woman but not her name. It's interesting that even though her name was safe in my subconscious, my subconscious didn't retrieve it for me, either by sudden recollection or by dream, until I heard the name in such an unrelated context.
I was her assistant one day a week one summer at Millstone. She was sweet, not in the best of health, and had four adult strappingly large children (how did "strapping" gain that meaning?); at that point a fair way along the nonbreeding path, I wondered if gestating and birthing them had done her in. At the end of the summer she gave me a purple backpack that served as my gymbag during grad school.
But who I really have to get in touch with from Millstone is my main boss. Last year was the first time I heard from him rather than from his wife (whom I also knew) in the annual card exchange. Just the fact that he took pen in hand to write to an employee from 1991, though not just an employee but the amanuensis to his Grand Poobah, meant that he had more time than usual on his hands. Dear man. His wife is a dear as well; I met her several times when Poobah took me out to lunch because a proper Southern gentleman does not take a young slip of a girl to a public establishment without a chaperone. And he always stood up when she entered the room. I last saw them sometime in the mid-'90s when they returned their son to campus--and took me out to lunch. Poobah kept offering me more butter for my bread because, though he won our weight-loss wager, I had kept off the weight I'd dropped and he had not.
A few weeks ago I looked in This Name Store and That Name Store for jeans. I didn't like the denim washes in either place. I looked in Another Name, eh. In Foley's--a department store whose quality level, I've decided, is more like Sears than Filene's--I found jeans whose denim I liked but which I wouldn't try on because their label was enormous, and other acceptable denim whose tag emphasized that they sat at the waist. I was looking for jeans to replace the at-waist, straight-legged Levi's that I barely wear.
(Last March when Kal and I went to see "The Incredibles," I found a ticket stub in the pocket for the previous October's corn maze. At this October's maze, I found the movie stub.)
Friday night I went to Old Navy, and yep, I'm too old for Old Navy, or too something, because--how excessively picky of me!--I prefer my jeans without holes in them. From there I ventured to Ross and T.J. Maxx. I don't know what A and R stand for after numerical sizes in Tommy Hilfiger jeans--average? regular?--but a 14 in one swam on me and a 10 in the other was a tetch too small and of course there wasn't a 12 of either and what is it with these new jeans that they strangle your pelvis and billow around your legs? And who cares if you have the trendily jeans-molded ass when the overall effect makes you look fatter?
On to Park Meadows, which houses the nearest Nordstrom, because this night's expedition was for the three most harrowing garments: jeans, bra, bathing suit. (Hooray for consumerism: Nordstrom is taking over Lord & Taylor's old space in Cherry Creek, providing me with a nearby department store at a reasonable price point, between Sears and Saks.) Nordstrom shoes made me homesick for Haitch--we last ventured there together looking for her bridal shoes--and I called her. I told her she had to be my link to the real world for jean-selection.
"No tapered legs!" She has known me for a long time, but those tapered legs aren't as long ago as I would readily admit, and I think tapered legs ended before 1996 anyway.
"I know!" I saw that light all by myself. "But what about this exposing the belly thing? and the unflattering softball-sized gap at the back, where my lumbar tattoo isn't and I don't want to get a cold in my kidneys anyway? and the pelvis-constricting factor? and 'muffin-tops,' which body part I own but would not call anything so supposedly appealing (as if) nor ever display? and thong-top-show? and butt-crack-show?" New jeans, sure, but not a new lifestyle. She held my mental hand and talked me through it.
Lord I miss shopping with Haitch. I asked her to justify "shrugs," which are, at least, merely unflattering, rather than uncomfortable and impractical, as the New Jeans are. She said they are allowable only on the pregnant, and they certainly do emphasize the belly in a way only Fabienne of "Pulp Fiction" would find attractive. Once I randomly interjected, "Oh honey, that look's not working for you at all," and I finally see a need in my own life for a camera-phone, because oh, how I wanted to share the visual with her.
My minimal rule about Fat is to cover it with clothing, whether taut or baggy. The flab of the unfit-but-slender is still flab and should be covered. The flesh of those who are fit and slender and possess a healthy fat percentage should not be corseted into bulge. So the quest for jeans continued. I bought a new bra, same make and model as last time, because it supports the flab at the proper midpoint between shoulder and elbow and disallows all bounce. I bought a new swimsuit, same make and model as last time, becuase I know it fits and is comfortable, but not new goggles because I forgot them until I was in the interminable cashier line. But no jeans.
Enough. I headed home and stopped at Target for sheets. Passing through the clothing department on the way to the cashier, on a whim I looked at jeans. Levi's. Huh. New but not overly dyed or flayed or streaky or objectionable denim. I tried a pair. And I liked them!
Should I recite Steve Martin's "Cruel Shoes" bit? Because that's what I realize I sound like. Except not funny.
Low-waisted but not hip-waisted. Not so constrictive as to force bulge up, and low enough not to cut into belly or bladder. I crouched and contorted to check for buttcrackitis or underpantitis. Full-legged but not bell-bottomed. Amply long but not impractically floor-length, and just right with my near-daily Dansko clog. Victory.Levi Signature Mid-Rise Boot-Cut Jeans, in Ocean; where "Signature" means "line invented for Target and even lower-end stores."
At home, I took a seam-ripper to the label while RDC and I watched Haitch's latest recommendation, "You and Me and Everyone We Know." I close letters with "oxo" instead of "xox" because I prefer hugs to kisses and the shape is more rotund, more like me; but in future I think I will sign ))><(( .
Today I wore the jeans to Kal and Neal's new house, of which RDC and I took digital pictures for the gratification of the distant. And there I am, in new jeans, with a tank top under my sweater to spare the world (or just neighborhood) sight of my pasty excess and for weekend-level breastal restraint, and y'know, excess is not the less repellent for being covered. So much for following even my own minimal rule. Jeans to (not above) the waist would cover, if not disguise, that bulge more acceptably.
The option of ridding myself of that belly, of course, well, let's stay in the realm of possibility.
I only recently realized that Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde is by Robert Louis Stevenson, not H.G. Wells or Jules Verne.
Yesterday I read an excerpt from Louis Sachar's new Small Steps for which, I am glad to know, he takes Armpit as his protagonist instead of Stanley or Zero.
I gave Emlet The Trumpet of the Swan and the Audobon plush trumpeter swan, another in the line of American animals I am giving her. Her bison's name is Wyoming, for American English practice.
That's all my Louis news.
Further proof, if any were needed, of my hypocrism:
When I arrived at work Friday, the receptionist returned my greeting by asking, "Didn't you get the message?" and I saw that he was dressed a little casually and perhaps had layered a sports jersey over his other clothing because the heat in the building was dead and the office was closed? He was continuing: "The governor's message?" Had he declared a state snow day, so the office was closed? Finally the rest of what the receptionist was saying sank: Both the Colorado governor and the Denver mayor had asked their constituents to wear orange on Friday in support of the football team. I don't know if my hatred for orange clothing began in childhood for St. Patrick's Day's sake or if even without the Sassenachs I'd've wound up hating the color, but hate it I do, and football is about the least likely reason on earth to change that. I begged off, pointing out that my punishment was brief fiery but dashed hope of a day off.
In late morning I scampered down to the receptionist's desk for another errand, while vaguely craving elevenses. The receptionist offered me a little round orange sticker to affix upon my lapel. I declined again because I am that much of a grinch. What's the deal with the city building a privately-owned football team a stadium, yet that stadium being named for a corporation rather than for the city, and afterward seats in that stadium not being freely available to the citizens who funded it? Grr. And I still don't understand why a team's players come from all over the place instead of from that team's area. High school teams are drawn from that high school, but city teams not from that city? I don't get it.
After being chastised for declining, I sought out Kal to tell her how glad I was to be out of the city (if not the state) this weekend, and planned to stop at someone's candy bowl afterward. On the way, though, I saw free chocolate cupcakes on a low table. "Score," thought I, and picked one up. At Kal's desk I asked if I could give her further proof of my hypocrisy--"of course!"--and told her about being glad to leave town and declining even stickers--"You have no spirit at all"--and finished by showing her the cupcake, which I had helped myself to despite its blue and orange frosting.
Go Broncos.
Addendum: This was a story as soon as I showed up at Kal's desk cupcake in hand, so I'm glad I didn't take a bite first. That would have destroyed my story because the cake was pointless, as (with apologies to Melissa) I think the cake in most cupcakes is, and the frosting, being blue and orange, wasn't chocolate, and therefore was also pointless. Broncos suck!
Almost five years ago after a day on my own in the park, I browsed through some shops in Estes Park. Not the ones that inexplicably sell salt-water taffy a thousand miles from the ocean, but the giftish ones. I found a cabochon iolite ring for my right ring finger, and well-timed because my moonstone Tolkien ring was really about to die. After we determined on Saturday that there would be no more snowshoeing on Sunday, I said I wanted to window-shop a little.
In the Glacier Gorge parking lot, a car leaving one of the a perpendicular parking spaces that line the north side must have swiped Cassidy's right front fender, helpless Cassidy patiently chewing its cud in one of the parallel spots lining the south side. The parking lot is icy and snowy and we did the same thing four years ago, giving Cassidy its first (and until yesterday only) dent. But we left a note on the car we'd struck with our phone number because we are not cowardly gits.
I mention this because in the course of making out an accident report at the station, the ranger noticed that RDC's license was expired. This meant that, since I'd definitely do the rest of the weekend's driving, I could make sure one stop was a touristy jewelry store.
What is wrong with me, or with Denver, that I can't find what I want in town? Sterling silver, cabochon iolites or amethysts or maybe moonstone or garnet or turmeline, substantial. Even though I didn't replace the five-year-old iolite on my right ring finger that is now beat to shit (the top of the stone is severely scratched, the sides also but not as badly), I did find a ring for, this is new, left index finger. Six little iolites surrounding a seventh in a little flower pattern.
My wedding set is allegedly white gold but it looks fairly yellow, and the sapphire's setting clashes with my usual, so another left-hand ring has been hard to find. Now I have decreed that one whole finger between yellowy white gold and sterling silver is adequate metal-separation, and the hexagonal setting is somewhat closer to the sapphire's traditional setting. I still want (need) a sterling silver bangle and want other right-hand rings. But whee! I have a new ring.
Here, in approximate order, are books I have read aloud to RDC:
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Richard Adams, Watership Down
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Various mostly American short stories
Steven Levy, Insanely Great
James Howe, Bunnicula
Authur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons
E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Roald Dahl, Danny, Champion of the World
Joan Aiken, The Shadow Guests
Jane Curry, The Bassumtyte Treasure
E.L. Konigsburg, The View from Saturday
Robert O'Brien, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling
Sharon Creech, Walk Two Moons
Louis Sachar, Holes
Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Egypt Game
Mildred Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
David Sedaris, Naked
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Penelope Lively, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe
Jean Craighead George, Julie of the Wolves
Most of the adult books have been during road trips. The first, the Lewis Carrolls, I read using e-texts and his first laptop as we roadtripped to Pittsburgh for a wedding, because the idea of an English major who hasn't read Lewis Carroll makes me shudder. Then my two favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird and Watership Down, and short stories to roadtrip to Florida with and Stephen Levy to move to Denver with. And then vital children's books. Bunnicula isn't as vital to children's literature as it is to understanding my insurmountable fear of white asparagus.
Recently I finally bought myself Thomas Kempe, which, like Aiken and Curry, combine those apparently irresistible elements of being set in England, in a very old house, with a ghost. It's fun, but, like Swallows and Amazon, fun to no purpose. During Ransome RDC kept asking when they were going to get a keg, and seriously, these kids didn't even walk around barefoot. After we finished the Lively I asked if he would rather be a hermit in Alaska or in the Pacific Ocean, and both choices had Canine Mortality. It was only this morning as I was brushing my beak that I remembered Julie has Avian Mortality too.
I tried the first page of The Giver and that didn't work; I am not going to try The Blue Sword on him because he was never a 14-year-old girl; I think no one should live ignorant of Gram Tillerman but we have already failed with Jackaroo and Bad Girls so I might not attempt more Voigt.
But after this, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and probably My Side of the Mountain, I am not sure what to read to him next. Hmm. The Slave Dancer, definitely. Maybe Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy. Oh, A Day No Pigs Would Die. Maybe Ghosts I Have Been and The Cat in the Mirror. And The Machine-Gunners.
Good gracious, look at the proportion of male protagnoists. All the pets in Bunnicula are male, but, as Mo said of Watership Down, it's bunnies, whatever. Swallows and Amazons stars the Walkers, but there's no denying Nancy's ascendancy. Maybe Lucy is the protagonist of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but really it's Aslan. The View from Saturday is three-quarters male. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is narrated by and stars Cassie but the story is Stacey, Taylor's father's. Likewise--and unlike Bunnicula--Mrs. Frisby is the central character but the book is about mostly about Nicodemus and Justin (and Mr. Ages and Jeremy and Timothy). Alice is merely a spectator to Carroll's opiate dream.That leaves The Egypt Game, carefully balanced by race and sex but focusing on April, and Claudia Kincaid, Salamanca Tree Hiddle, Turtle, and Miyax Julie Edward Kapugen, six girls, to seven boys: Cosmo Curtoys, Tommy Bassumtyte, Jesse Aarons, Jody Baxter, Stanley Yelnats, James Harrison, and Danny. Does Danny have a surname, or is his epithet enough? I had to look up Jesse's, and I wouldn't've remembered James Harrison if I hadn't just read it, and I needed to ponder on Jody and Penny before I recollected Ma Baxter.
The to-be read pile is two-thirds boys: Karana, Erin Gandy, and Blossom Culp to Sam Gribley, Jesse Bollier (another look-up), Eustace, Cor, Rob, and Chas. Maybe I should read him some All-of-a-Kind Family or Laura Ingalls Wilder just to bump up the chick count even though they don't really belong to the theme.
This, perhaps, has been my favorite piece from Tutankhamun's tomb ever since, 30 years ago, my fascination with him began.
I was eight years old. 1976 was the Bicentennial, an Olympic year, and the first presidential election I paid any--okay, an average third-grader's--attention to. "Roots" was on television (and I was permitted to stay up until 11 o'clock on six nights, some of which were school nights, to watch), Dr. Dolittle was my third-favorite non-family person (after my speech therapist and maybe still Captain Kangaroo), and King Tut was in New York.
Phoebe had a book with clear plastic pages, the next generation after the thin tissue of anatomy books whose successive leaves peeled away skin, muscles, nerves, organs, bones, that showed the layers of Tut's sarcophagi, coffins, mask, and linens. Also in this book were the 1922 photographs documenting Carter's room-by-room discovery and the 1970s photographs of the treasures.
The alabaster unguent jar. The cow bed. The cup made of calcite in the shape of lotus flowers. Another jar with an ibex, and Tut as Anubis the jackal. I loved it all. Even the song, though that would not come for a couple of years.
Particularly Marshamosis of The Egypt Game was fated to overtake Dr. Dolittle (if not Jip and Polynesia and Too-too) as my favorite fictional character. I agreed with April and Melanie about how fascinating ancient Egypt was. And I longed to be taken to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to see this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of a once-in-a-millennium discovery. Vocally, and joined by my older sister, and we weren't asking to be brought to see the Bay City Rollers. But It didn't happen.
(Four years later, deep into my love of Greek mythology (thank goodness the proximity determined by Dewey Decimalism led me from Guinness to Loch Ness and ghosts straight to the D'Aulaires), my mother did bring herself, Granny, and me, through the magic of a museum's chartered bus, to the Met to see the treasures of Alexander the Great. Which I loved, though I was disappointed that Claudia and Jamie Kincaid's bath-fountain was now mere extra seating in the cafeteria; and which was not enough to make me forget Tut.)
Thirty years later, it happened. When I first learned of it, I was mad at Egypt for going back on its pledge that Tut's treasures would "never leave Egypt again," and then I laughed when I learned that the country just needed the money. We discussed going to Los Angeles to see it, but then Ft. Lauderdale worked better.
Less than half the exhibit was Tut, but all of it was ancient and noble and chock full of Dust. When I finally entered the first room of his own possessions, I got the involuntary choke right under my sternum, of sentiment and awe, that I had hoped for.
The next step of my 30-year campaign is to get my mother to train down to Philadelphia next year to see it.
When this memory first surfaced today, I am pretty sure it followed a train of connected thoughts. No idea, now, how it came up. But anyway. Freshling year of college, I didn't have a decent winter coat, having outgrown the brown woolen one with the toggle buttons. Winter descended with my usual amount of money (none) in Storrs's usual accessibility to goods (minimal). At Christmas, my mother gave me funds toward a coat, an amount she could scarcely afford but which still would be inadequate, I thought. Funds plus a ride to a discount coat store, where indeed I did find what I needed. I now cannot imagine what I was thinking (likely, warmth + affordability): I can't imagine a big puffy coat like that would be as warm as wool, let alone synthetic fleece, and it was a ski jacket, ending at the waist. Also, it looked like a Domino Pizza deliveryperson's jacket, the same shades of red and blue, except where the Domino's jacket was blue over red (I think), mine was the reverse (I know).
The following year an itinerant vendor made UConn an annual stop with a supply of used, wool(ish) overcoats. I bought a gray tweed that went smashingly well with the scarf Nisou knit me for Christmas that year and I wore it until the bottom corner of my backpack rubbed through it. Whew.
What I chiefly remember about the Dominoesque jacket was how huge it was--I think it was a men's jacket--and how convenient that was for me in state facilities that were obscenely overheated (72 or more degrees, when I had grown up in a puritanically spartan little village): upon entering a building, I could take the jacket off immediately without having to pause to shuck my backpack, because I wore the pack underneath. A little hunchbacky, but sensible!
Tuesday night, home again home again, I emptied my canvas Dot Org briefcase into my backpack, but not well. No, I didn't bring my travel-sized shampoo to work Wednesday but neither did I bring my wallet. I began to suspect when I arrived at work and leaning the backpack into the sensor didn't unlatch the door (my key card lives in my wallet), but that's okay because I could and did ring the front desk to release it just as they do for Fedex etc. I knew for certain as lunchtime approached. My checkbook lives in the organizey-panel of my pack, so I had that, and I called the supermarket a quarter mile away to ensure that they would take my check without photo ID. No--even though my employer could identify me, even though any number of their own employees would recognize me as a frequent customer. It is to protect against identity theft, said the manager undeserving of the name since he clearly was subordinate to a computer. My identity is safer in the minds of clerks and the files at Dot Org than in a vast database, I didn't say. Instead I borrowed some cash from Kal and bought myself a burrito from the faux Mexican place and sulked.
Leaving work, Tex unnecessarily but kindly held the door open for Shadowfax and me. We chatted for a moment, and I saw a man strolling onto Dot Org property with his dog. I am--I decided this on the instant--Dot Org's official on-site dog inspector, and any human using our dumpster to dispose of dogshit must submit to my interview. Tex laughed at this and left me to it. Angel was perfectly happy to do so, front paws on the top tube, face in my face, tail awag. She was half Lab and half Irish Wolfhound, mostly Lab-looking but slightly taller and leaner and with beguiling bearding. Her human thought I was insane. Stupid human. Angel clearly could have ridden away home with me without a backward glance.
About halfway home I paused to give another dog a chance to cross the street toward me. He was an 11-month-old Great Dane named Smith ("What was his other Dane's name?" I can't quite get that right), undocked but for neutering. I am not sure I've seen a Dane with a full measure of ears and tail--they have great ears! and a waggable tail! which looks disproportionately short and stripling compared to the rest of the dog. He was already hip-high to his daddies and had another two inches and probably 20 pounds of bulk yet to grow. A great dog. Why must all giant breeds be droolers? It's that even more than their abbreviated lifespans that keep me vaguely sane about them. But a harlequin Great Dane like Darcy's in "Pride and Prejudice"? Eminently craveable.
Last night I dreamed up the best-ever home for Minnie. As I told her this morning, it was quite a favor I did her and she'd have to pay me back by letting me live with her. It was a treehouse, though resembling a hobbit-hole in coziness and proportion. Its most enviable element, though, was its windows, every one of which looked out over water and islands and mountains, and where the walls were not paved in window, they were paved in books. And despite being in a tree, or perhaps because it was in the right kind of tree, there were also gardens out every window, flowers framing the view.
Being off the anti-depressant has been fine, though I expect it'll be a month or more before I'm clean, in reverse of the time for it to take effect. I chopped my remaining tablets in half and so only did one step down before off. RDC says the effect for him was immediate (and appreciated): I abruptly stopped my kickboxing kangaroo parasomniac act.
I am watching "Summertime" for the first time. I had feared it would be technicolor and sappy but it's sweet. When Katharine Hepburn loses her gardenia in the canal, RDC said, "So she'll always known where it is" while I said "Tomorrow I'll steal you another." If he quotes "Harold and Maude" when I can manage only "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," then he is more romantic that I am. But he's still the one calling flowers the amputees of the plant world.
My mother-in-law laughed and repeated aloud the question her visiting friend had just whispered: "Helene just asked if your boobs were real." MIL and I cracked up because we both know what kind of alternate universe it would have to be for me to do that to myself deliberately.
The next evening RDC's sister, modeling the outfit she was going to wear out, finally drew my attention by calling my name: "Lisa, you're honest. What do you think?" And I was stymied, caught between honesty and unkindness. I vacillated, saying--truthfully--that our tastes were so dissimilar, and--I thought truthfully--that since I don't wear anything that tight, I couldn't tell whether that was the look she was aiming for.
Helene piped up: "'Not that tight'? How about what you wore last night?!"
I am even more emotionally than rationally opposed to having, let alone continuing, any similarity with RDC's sister, and my first thought was that I should burn that shirt. It doesn't take an exceptional eye to notice I am overly endowed, but if the friend asked her question not because they're obviously big but because they're unnecessarily prominent, then I must have looked like a tacky whore.
When we were alone I put the questions to RDC--whoreishness? should I not wear that shirt anymore? He said not at all and the two outfits had nothing in common. My outfit was pretty and suitable and flattering, not demure but certainly not immodest. Which is what I had thought but wanted a non-Florida opinion about. The shirt that had elicited the question of augmentation and possibility of similarity was sleeveless, because I like my broad shoulders and strong arms, and a pale salmon-peach color like this one, which works well with my skin tone, and slightly stretchy so it skims my torso without clinging; plus I wore a long straight "undyed" linen skirt. In contrast, the outfit I would never wear involved skin-tight jeans that fought viciously against a protuberant belly (she is regularly asked if she is pregnant; an intrusively rude question but often asked by the intrusively rudely well-intentioned) and gave a denim water-tower effect; a black tank top; and a sparkly mesh shrug that, as shrugs do, emphasized the belly, which didn't need any emphasis. The paving of eyeshadow matched the maroon yarn of the shrug.
It's true that the barrel is my least favorite body shape. Some people are forced by genetics toward it, but it can be balanced by developing some muscle in the limbs instead of idling into flabby toothpicks and with good enough nutrition to minimize fat stored at the waist. At the very least, if you've got that shape, your belly is not what you should draw attention to.
That incident, plus late-night watching of "What Not to Wear" in the hotel (yes, I'm ashamed) led me to think of my own sartorial rules:
The two universal basics:
Also:
Everything else is idiosyncratic. Well, idiosyncratic in that they are my personal preferences, not that I have committed these offences (recently):
My personal rules:
George Orwell said of his own rules for written English, "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous." I am not that reasonable. Break any of these rules (except about weddings and funerals) to be yourself, as long as as you don't break my eyes, and are no tackier than you must be.
A reason we chose to see Tut in Ft. Lauderdale rather than in Los Angeles or Chicago was to see RDC's family. His grandmother, who now was living with his mother, had been in ill health for some time, and he hadn't seen her since October and I since March. He cooked some of her favorites for her, like a pasta dish with escarole ("shk'DALL") and sausage, and we took her to have her hair done, and hung out in a mild kind of way with cannolis and "Skating with the Stars."
A priest visited her yesterday, and her daugher and granddaughter and great-grandson and a cousin, plus a hospice nurse, were with her this morning as she died. She was 85.
RDC left for Florida this morning. We have not (I think we have never) done anything for Valentine's Day together but when he left I called AEK and ask her for a dinner date.
We ventured to Something Else, a new Sean Kelly restaurant (he is one of Denver's big-name chefs). It's where Claire de Lune used to be, a restaurant that I am sad never to have tried (it was painted a very pretty blue). Kelly drops the g from the restaurant's name so I am deliberately "mis"spelling it. They don't take reservations, and during the day the host I spoke with said they didn't anticipate a crowd, but when we arrived there was an hour wait and no bar. Therefore we retreated to Sparrow, on Seventh, which AEK had thought was a boutique, and there is a shop called Sparrow on Seventeenth. We had calamari tempura and bided our time, then returned to Something Else with what the host called perfect timing. We shared fried plantains and broiled mushrooms, and then she had a lobster bouillabaisse and I Moroccan-spiced lamb ribs.
It is the first time I have hung out with AEK on our own, and as nice as neighborhood bookclub or a weekend in the mountains with bookclub or Thanksgiving with a few people can be, one-on-one conversation is also great.
I had thought to go see "Brokeback Mountain" on Thursday but it was so unnecessarily cold that I did not venture from the house. Friday Kal invited me to dinner but when she called I was already in thermals and fleece and shivering over a bowl of chicken soup and disinclined to acquiesce to her request (one of the male figure skaters used music from "Pirates of the Caribbean"). Instead I stayed home and watched "The Aristocrats," except I had to switch over to the news while I finished my dinner, because if I didn't puke from the nauseous humor, I certainly risked choking and spitting with laughter, and that's just not pretty.
Saturday morning Kal invited me to go to a dog show. I went, because though it was 5 degrees at least the sun had the decency to be out. I guess last year she and her friend...um, Koa, because he spoke on KOA (a radio station with three call letters? That's even wronger than call letters beginning with K) in what is now my new favorite story about him...discovered it. She and he and boyfriend Neal and I went. They assured me nothing was sacred and the point was the mocking. We mocked the people, not the dogs, doing the agility course, and we clapped when dogs successfully navigated the see-saw (that first paw past the fulcrum is obviously scary) and laughed when a dog overshot the entrance to the tunnel and face-planted against the lip. We wandered through the judging area and I pulled my scarf over my eyes and or hid behind Neal's hood when French poodles were in my line of sight. The horror. While we sat in decades-old seats (before Usans got so uniformly fat) and watched St. Bernards being judged, Koa considered which breed, if he had to be raped by dogs, he would choose. I suggested a smaller dog as less painful. He was leaning toward the St. Bernard, because they would give the best cuddling. He really needs to see "The Aristocrats."
KOA had asked him to speak about übersexuals, selecting him by randomly calling local colleges GLBT offices until someone turned up. KOA is a conservative mostly-talk station, and the topic was the latest buzzword, übersexual. The host asked him whether he thought Rush Limbaugh was one. "Have you heard that word before?" Koa interrupted himself to ask. No, but I live under a rock, I admitted. "Neither had I," he assured me. He said on KOA that no, Rush couldn't be because he doesn't meet the word's three main criteria of being cultured, treating women well, and taking care of his body. Then the host asked if he thought the term would last, and he said no, the only lasting contemporary coinages, he thought, would be "metrosexual" and "santorum." The best part of this story is that the local talk show host apparently didn't know the latter term and asked him about it; he said he couldn't define it on the air so the host suggested to his listeners--this was during rush hour, lots of listeners, to the station that airs Rush Limbaugh's show daily--that they google it when they got home.
My ongoing question--less amusing than Koa's, but such is my fate--is the Colorado Kennel Club's justification for the sign at all the show's entrances: Only AKC dogs and registered service animals were permitted. Why? I understand the possible threat to a bitch in heat, but, let's hope, most pets, mongrel or not, are neutered, and unintended mating by an AKC-registered dog of one breed to a bitch of another still would result in mutts. Unintended mating within the same breed can’t be desirable either. Bigots.
Judging and valuing a dog by its conformance to physical standards, instead of by its petfulness, loyalty, or actual usefulness in its appointed field, is ridiculous and abhorrent anyway (yet there I was, forking over a $3 admission fee to further the cause, yea me). It's wonderful how I can shunt those principles when I get to see lots of St. Bernards and mastiffs and blue heelers and border collies and merle-coated dachshunds and Portuguese water dogs and Rhodesian Ridgebacks and sheepdogs and Bernese Mountain Dogs and Irish wolfhounds (or Scottish deerhounds: I can't tell the difference at a glance) and Great Pyrenees and Gordon Setters and Clumber spaniels and bull terriers (I called them all Bodger) and even a Komondor, which I might never have seen in the flesh before. An owner--a groomer? a handler? another other fucked-up aspect of these things is how many budgets (not households) a dog is split (not shared) among--cut his eyes at me when I observed too loudly to Neal as we passed a grooming area that Bedlington Terriers look like sheep.
In the afternoon, AEK and I went to see "Transamerica." I am shocked, shocked that such filthy ideas are portrayed on film: in Phoenix, lawns of Kentucky bluegrass! bordered with saguaro cactus! Outrageous! Morally bankrupt.
Then she made dinner for me and MDD, a crab chowder that I think I could make. I copied the recipe. We'll see. Sunday I cooked one of my standards, a broccoli-tomato quichesque, and thought that pine nuts would be a good addition. I tried to toast them in a saute pan, as AEK had for her salad, but there was no visible effect on low heat and they burned as soon as I had my back turned (that right there is the Thing That Goes Wrong with my culinary efforts). Instead of whole pine nuts charred on one side, therefore, the quichesque has ground charred pine nuts.
I fed it to RDC when we got back from the airport Sunday night and he liked it. This makes me feel deceitful* because I am certain that had RDC seen the nuts, he'd've wanted them omitted or substituted with a different batch; also it makes me grin, grateful to know that sometimes he really cannot detect the pea under his mattress, and that reassures me.
*Deceit:deception::receipt:reception. "Deceit" wants a p. Silly language.
When Blake eats his buddy chow, he disembowels kernels of corn and swallows the sweet innards. The inside of a kernel is sticky, and a cockatiel is a messy eater.
One of Blake's least favorite activities is having his beak cleaned of quinoa (also sticky) and shreds of pea and corn guts, especially when his food has glued itself not just to his beak but to his jowls as well. However gently we rub a strand of jowl feather between our fingers, we sometimes detach not just the desiccated food from the feather but also the feather from the skin. This smarts and is undignified to boot.
Sometimes when he's munching on a single kernel of corn, working out the meat with his hammer tongue, the kernel jacket hooks itself on his lower mandible. This large thing he can shake off, leaving residue behind on beak and feathers to be polished away later by his parents. But while the kernel hangs there, effectively over his chin, he is Cornbeard.
Lay It Down, Lay It Down (Michael Timmins)
I'm So Open, Open (M. Timmins)
License to Kill, Early 21st Century Blues (Bob Dylan)
A Few Simple Words, Rarities, B-sides, and Slow, Sad Waltzes (M. & Margo Timmins)
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Trinity Sessions (Hank Williams)
Brothers Under the Bridge, Early 21st Century Blues (Bruce Springsteen)
Hunted, Pale Sun, Crescent Moon (M. Timmins)
He Will Call You Baby, One Soul Now (M. Timmins)
You're Missing, Early 21st Century Blues (Bruce Springsteen)
Black-Eyed Man, Black-Eyed Man (M. Timmins)
River, for a recent tribute concert (Joni Mitchell)
Just Want to See, Lay It Down (M. Timmins)
Miles from Our Home, Miles from Our Home (M. Timmins)
One, Early 21st Century Blues (U2)
---
Townes' Blues, Black-Eyed Man (M. Timmins)
State Trooper, Whites Off Earth Now (Bruce Springsteen)
Sweet Jane, Trinity Sessions (Lou Reed)
I dosed myself with two blisteringly strong teas beforehand, plus since the Fox Theatre is enough like a nightclub that it has service on the floor, I had a coffee at the end of the opening act: With the doors opening at 8 and the first band onstage at 9, I expected the Junkies to begin approxmiately at my bedtime. I am writing this at 6:30 the next morning because the new alarm clock is working so well that I not only get up on time on weekdays but wake at 6:15 on weekends as well, whee. On weekends I can come back to bed, but it's perverse merely to be awake at this hour.
I had not been to the Fox Theatre before--the last time I was in Boulder at all might have been Kinetics at Boulder Reservoir in 2001 (the festival that year featured the Cowboy Junkies). Thank goodness I brought a book: doors opening at 8 with the opening band due at 9 meant idle standing around. I stood at the edge of the stage, reading Patricia Highsmith in red stage light, until Milton Mapes came on.
The name Milton Mapes was glancingly familiar, how I don't know and perhaps only from the marquee. My stance used to be that I couldn't get into live music I didn't know (and thus would rather dispense with opening acts); maybe because I see only the Cowboy Junkies these days and am more likely to like what they like, but I have liked almost everyone I've seen with them--Sarah Harmer, especially Tim Easton, and tonight Milton Mapes. Bluegrass and blues, good stuff.
Directly behind me were a pair of women desperately flirting with a man. They conducted their conversation throughout Milton Mapes despite frowning glances from me and a few others. Perhaps they thought Milton Mapes was like movie previews. Hint: wrong. The man said he'd been listening to the Junkies since 1981, a neat trick for someone who said he'd lived in Boulder his entire life and therefore not in Toronto, where they're from, when their first album was released in 1986. One of the women shrieked, "I"m a new Junkie! Only four years! But I love them so much!" I doubted she was in the band but glad to know she was such a fan because that meant she might shut the fuck up during the show. But no, and the glances turned into pointed and scowling glares, and "shhs." If you're at a show to hook up, back off from the stage: not rocket science. During a very quiet "You're Missing" with only Michael, Margo, and Jeff onstage, with a conversation about Stephen King and Boulder clearly audible--would I have minded so much if the women weren't up from Castle Rock (actual Colorado town, fictional Maine one) and Stand tourists?--I reached my breaking point, turned to touch the closest one on the arm, and said, "Would you please just stop talking?" I think they moved off after that.
I was the closest I'd ever been, actually leaning on the stage. Margo looked five years older, which was fine; I've seen Michael that close only once briefly but he looked about the same. The biggest change was to Pete. Was that Pete? Or was this a case of all humans looking alike to me? He was wearing glasses, and maybe that was it. He had hair, which was surprising enough, but it was silver and he looked older than his two older siblings. I recently saw U2 on "60 Minutes" and Larry Mullen, also the youngest of his quartet, has aged the least gracefully, so maybe this is usual for drummers. But it wasn't Pete: Margo said her little brother finally turned 40 and promptly threw his back out. I missed the substitute's name [ed. Randall Coryell]. Of course I could hear Michael count into the songs but for the first time I noticed how he gestured everyone else to spin out a passage, to wind up a percussion bit, to allow Jeff to jam on his electric mandolin, etc. (Electric mandolin. It works, oh yes it works, but it sounds only slightly less silly than "electric hammered dulcimer.") During "Hunted" and "Just Want to See" Jeff was, to borrow a word, incendiary.
They plan their sets, which is unfortunate, not least because I can learn the whole set beforehand if I look for and look at the playlist. Of course I did, and I jigged at "River," which I figured would be part of the River Song Trilogy. Nope! It was Joni Mitchell's "River," which they had recently sung at a Music For Youth, Joni Mitchell tribute show. When Margo introduced the song, I had forgotten what I'd read on the setlist, and hoped, momentarily, wildly, for "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow," which is possibly my second favorite song after "Sweet Jane"; for Margo to sing it would have blissed me into a coma. But it was "River," and though I don't know Mitchell's titles necessarily, the song I knew.
As usual, Margo made eye contact (and some conversation) with the crowd, and this time, with me. I don't care if it's for show but prefer to believe, as with lovely Italian skater Silvia Fontana, the smile that's part of the act becomes real because you do love the act. When her eyes met mine and I grinned joyfully, I like to think that her answering smile was truly in response. Plus, three times--after "One" as they left the stage, when they returned for "Townes' Blues," and when they left for good after my beloved "Sweet Jane," Michael looked right at me, back at me, and waved. They're my best friends!
A good show.
Previous shows:
This is the show I learned about the day afterward in 1999: I Saw Your Shoes, Cause Cheap is How I Feel, Southern Rain, A Few Simple Words, A Common Disaster, Five Room Love Story, Townes' Blues, Good Friday, The Highway Kind, Hunted, Misguided Angel, Those Final Feet, Sweet Jane, Miles From Our Home, To Live is to Fly, E: Blue Guitar, If You Gotta Go Go Now.
Edited to add that I am not going to read the message board on the Junkies' site again. I read setlists for Crested Butte, Telluride, and Aspen, and I don't like my jealousy. I had my show, and that's that. My hunch is that the crunchier artsier towns get better sets, and I note to myself to, in future, see them in Boulder in addition to or instead of Denver. Telluride, the most exclusive of the three--which is saying something--got two songs from Caution Horses, my beloved "Sun Comes Up" and PLT's favorite "Cheap Is How I Feel." But I got to see them and to hear "Sweet Jane": I had my jam today, and that another town got better jam shouldn't mar my own pleasure.
GodDAMN, this is so unfair: "I was just in Mary Queen of Scots' bedroom." He didn't see the spot where David Rizzio was murdered nor Kirk o' Field, but he did see the Tree of Conspiracy, whatever it's called, or its site. Yesterday he visited a distillery that he described as Epcot with scotch. And he has a new t-shirt for James VI/I: "My mother got her head cut off and all I got was this lousy t-shirt." Plus Scotland and England have a rugby match today so Edinburgh has even more men in kilts prancing about than even is usual.
Perhaps this trip will open his eyes to how manly and dead hot sexy kilts are. Would a Napolitan Italian-American who some people think resembles "that younger one in the Sopranos" (a notion I scoff vehemently, since RDC's equally large, dark, and prominent eyes spark with intelligence and kindle with kindness, wholly unlike Christaphah Moltisanti's dull self-serving inward gaze: look past the oversized nose, people!) look out of place in a kilt? I doubt I'll ever find out, but I think not.
"One" suits the anti-war message of Early 21st Century Blues and I reflexively prefer it to U2's original, but I surprise myself by preferring Warren Hayes's cover to either. When I first saw (and heard of) him, he was opening for Phil Lesh at Red Rocks in 2002. It took me a couple of bars longer to recognize "One" than it should have, perhaps because I had mostly broken up with U2 by the time Achtung Baby came out, and perhaps because Hayes is the superior musician and not the ego-thumping strumpet Bono was when I saw them in 1992 (obviously not having entirely broken up with them, but U2 in Boston on St. Patrick's Day? It was their last best chance).
A friend of mine who was dumped in early 1991 made himself a Tunes to Kill a Camel mix tape o' misery that I had cause to borrow not long after. Among other songs, there were the Church's "Under the Milky Way," Laurie Anderson's "Sweaters" and "Walking & Falling" and, through his roommate's contribution, Eric Clapton's "Promises," and the Cowboy Junkies' "Cheap Is How I Feel."
That was my introduction to the Junkies, and I immediately needed more. I might not have lived the 15 years since bereft of their barbituate blues since a little less than a year later I housesat for friends and, as usual, availed myself of their music collection, which included Trinity Session, but it was a good thing for me to have had Caution Horses throughout 1991 instead of only afterward--and I was glad to tell Michael Timmins of the debt I owe that album during a meet-and-greet at Twist and Shout.
Like I needed another lesson in How Cars Are Bad.
Saturday I drove to the Mayan because I wanted to stop at Gart Bros. and get a new bathing suit. The one I bought in January, even though it looked like the exact same Nike model I was replacing, must be cut differently or I must be fatter because my right arm stroke pulled that breast half out to the side, and that just doesn't work in swimming. This new one is a Speedo, possibly higher on my sternum than the Nike, and definitely more around the side than the Nike. I used it yesterday and everything remained properly contained. The Gart parking garage's stalls are not divided only with yellow stripes on the surface but also with yellow columns. Backing out, I passed too close to the column and cracked the side headlight.
And I could have taken the bus! I could have taken the Colfax west and transferred downtown to the Broadway but nooooo because--even though Gart is right on Broadway--waiting for two southbound Broadway buses would have been inconvenient. I could have walked from downtown, at 15th, to Gart at 10th, but it was getting dark. I could have walked from Gart to the Mayan at 1st, but it was dark by then. And it's not as if I would have had to take the bus home at 10 o'clock, because Trish offered me a ride and was even surprised I was in a car: she said it was the first time in the two years we've been hanging out that I drove. Well, usually we meet downtown, whither it is ridiculous to drive especially from my house. Instead I cracked the headlight.
RDC suggested I not drive much until it's fixed, not to worsen the damage. But I drove this morning! Because I am going to grocery shop after work. Because I didn't grocery shop after my tri-attempt yesterday because I was too tired and my panniers were too full of sneakers for a gallon of orange juice and it could wait until today.
35 mph in at a 20 limit, in a school zone to boot.
Cars suck. So, apparently, does my driving. Fuck.
Well. This is a fine how-d'ye-do. From Pop Culture Junk Mail I learned about a site that uses facial regognition software to compare your face to those in a database of celebrity photographs and shows you the top 10 matches. I tried my Dot Org staff photograph from 1999, Haitch's wedding in 2004, Amsterdam 2005, and a short-hair experiment from last week (lots of pins). I know I don't have a girly face and that suits me fine, but holy shit, I don't know whether to call the software malicious or faulty or to draw a veil over the rest of my life.
The strongest resemblance the software found for the 1999 photograph was to John Goodman, at 64%. Jesus Christ! Which is an exclamation, not another match. We both squint when we smile, fine. Next, at 63%, Martin Scorsese--I didn't start waxing my eyebrows until 2000. Of the ten matches, not one of them was to a woman. I don't know who Christian Barnard, Lothau Mathaus, and Benjamin McKenzie are. But Adrien Brody? I'm sorry to say that my eyes are nothing like his, and glad to say that my nose is also nothing like his.
The least flattering of the other photographs, from last week, produced Holly Marie Combs first, at 68%. No idea who that is. Then Susan Sarandon! This might explain RDC's attraction to me, since his mother bears a strong resemblance to her; but in her it's the prominent, expressive eyes and in me it's the square jaw. Susan Sontag! There's a woman I'd like to resemble, even though I haven't read a drop by her. Alberto Santos-Dumont, whoever that is. A flattering photograph of Joan Cusack, which is problematic because to the extent I resemble his sister, John Cusack will probably not prostrate himself at my feet in adoration. (Interesting: it seems I think resemblance to a parent is attractive in a mate, but not resemblance to a sibling.) Ingrid Bergman! Life is worth living again! Preity Zinka? No idea who that is, someone from Bollywood whose trademark IMDb says is her dimples, which I don't have. Robin Gibb? Not sure whether that's a man or a woman. Aha, a man, in a "Transamerica" kind of way. Cate Blanchett! Robin Wright Penn!
A photograph of me in Amsterdam last year shows off my resemblance to my father. Does it ever: Martin Scorsese again at 70%. No women at all. Two fat men, though: Babe Ruth and Bill Clinton. Also, hooray! Kirk Douglas, in a recent, not Spartacus-era, photograph. Again, no women at all.
The picture for which I had the greatest hopes, of me at Haitch's wedding in 2004. Rubens Barichello? H. David Politzer? Benjamin McKenzie? James Horner? Roman Abramovich? I have no idea who any of these people are. Zamfir?! There really is a master of the Pan flute? Also, Haley Joel Osment, and two pictures from maybe the early '80s, Debra Winger and Sigourney Weaver. That last I can live with.
Susan Sarandon and Ingrid Bergman and Cate Blanchett and only two men out of 10 might mean that perhaps last week's is not the least flattering photograph of the four, but that's just too damn bad. I'd rather like how I look, Martin Scorsese or not.
My favorite dress: Meryl Streep's. Least favorite: Charlize Theron's. The latter's no surprise because she does nothing for me. She was no less attractive to me in "Monster"--where I admit she acted--than in "Cider House Rules," which I regret wasting my time on. That thing on her shoulder and just way too much black; without the bow the dress had a chance. Or Naomi Watts's--the thing on the waist was no good. Thank you, Meryl, for not wearing black, for showing just enough cleavage, and for wearing a train.
It's not just personal, whether I like someone's dress or not, because I liked Jennifer Aniston's filmy overskirted train. Salma Hayek is heat on two legs as ever. A rubenesque woman winning, I don't remember, art direction? succeeded with a one-shouldered dress; Kiera Knightley did not (and a ponytail? yii). Mm, Ziyi Zhang's dress is yummy too, stiff but flowy, sparkly. I shock myself by saying that Jennifer Lopez's dress has some excellent points--its flow as she walks, and the immobility of her breasts beneath it--despite its nauseous color and who is inside it. I am pleased that Michelle Williams is more attractive than Alma and it's probably just my conservatism that questions her dress's color but I am confident that the ruffle around the neckline is wrong.
I love Jennifer Garner's smile so it does not matter that I do not love her dress. I love how she recovered from her stumble.
Waiting for the Oscars to build up, I watched last Thursday's "ER." I saw Maria Bello and I thought it was cheesy of her to return to her old show in a different role just because her current series is being canceled. Then I bothered to look her up, and it turns out that there is someone named Mary McCormack and that she and Maria Bello are two different people. We just re-nth-watched "Harold and Maude." JGW had asked me what my favorite scene was, and it will always be when he says "I love you! I love you!" and she says "That's wonderful, Harold! Go and love some more!" But I do love as well when he says, "You sure have a way with people," and she replies, "They're my species!" Sometimes I wonder if they're mine, because so many of them look alike to me.
I haven't seen "Walk the Line" or "Hustle and Flow" and I am torn between Philip Seymour Hoffman, big love there, and David Strathrain. Oh Philip, yea. RDC said that "Walk the Line" was "Ray" with white people (and Jon Stewart said the same thing) except that he never believed Joaquim Phoenix was his character as thoroughly as he did Jamie Foxx. Hoffman's companion's dress was a poor choice.
Um, I will never see "Memoirs of a Geisha" but it had better have some unspeakable cinematography to have edged out "Brokeback Mountain." Oh, hooray, "Brokeback Mountain" got adapted screenplay and director. And wow, I have hardly heard of "Crash" but mostly confused it with the 1996 "Crash," and it beat the three others, all excellent, that I did see.
My favorite Oscar dress continues to be Halle Berry's the year she won for "Monster's Ball"--crisp taffeta skirt, mesh and embroidered top through which we could see skin, covered but exposed, and her waist, and especially that notch over her hip bone, zounds--and Oscar moment to be when Adrien Brody dipped and smooched her the next year when she presented his win for "The Pianist." Still this year, pretty dresses and good recognition for the bits of films I loved best.
I had bookclub tonight in Katie's stead, and we discussed History of Love and hated on My Sister's Keeper and Scarf brought the Mia-woof and Drums specifically asked for a doggy bag when he learned I was hosting--illogical except that he correctly expected that I had made cookies.
Saturday I decided on Enchanted Broccoli Forest's Green, Green Noodle Soup but today I realized that a staining green soup with fettucini is not a good lap food. So I resorted to my usual, tortellini with pesto. I used half from the freezer and half fresh; I would have made all fresh but the basil was sold in big plastic boxes and my panniers have only so much capacity. I added just a little cilantro, too, and that turned out really well.
Plus Friday I made Chewy Chocolate Ginger Cookies, froze some for JGW to bring home, boxed up some for Kal's aunt, and had plenty for tonight, both for here and for people to take home.
Mia gave me a thorough face-washing and a second coat on my twill pants. I have to admit that I do like a doghairless house. Sherry commented on the lack of dogfur tumbleweeds so I pointed out the confetti of splattered corn and millet on the walls in Blake's corner.
I played my crooning and covers playlists while people were here, and cleaned up to Cat Stevens on shuffle. Of all the albums RDC lost through years of partying, thank goodness he never lost In My Tribe, bought in its first year. I only just learned "Peace Train" was dropped from later presses so the Maniacs wouldn't have to pay Darth Stevens royalties. Listening to only a dubbed Maxell from 1988 is no way to live.
I have another load to run through the dishwasher, but Blake's earlier occupation of Erin's ankle, chosen because she had sexy socks, was not good for dozing because she kept moving in a way contrary to the cockatiel code of behavior, so now he's making up for lost nappage on my collarbone. So I think I'll sit here a while longer.
Honestly, we do have better reason to renovate the bathroom than only the leaking of the sink (whose fix requires a new faucet, not just a new washer) and the flickering of one fluorescent bulb. There's the absence of the storage and, most important, of a tub. I have found the single best reason, trumping even the tub, and I found it in an advertisement in 5280 for Carpet Exchange. The caption is "When it comes to an incredible selection of flooring materials, carpet is just the tip of the iceberg" and the illustration is a mosaic of marble and granite forming two penguins on an iceberg.
Flooring is the only aspect of Formigny's permanent decor that should be patterned, and we do want to replace the hideous linoeleum with tile. Instead of the train station-looking black and white ceramic hexagons we've been assuming, why not equally black and white but more interesting penguins? Mr. Killjoy was unmoved. He correctly pointed out that I do not actually want to tromp on penguins. This means he probably won't want magpies or badgers either. Foiled again.
Kal and Neal gave us dinner last night, a yummy lamb curry. We brought champagne to toast their recent engagement--
--last week Scarf and I were in their house to feed the kitty when the phone rang and the machine (they have a machine!) answered and Kal's voice said, "Lisa, I just called your house and RDC told me you were here so if you're there, pick up!" Scarf was closer and she picked up and said hi and was instructed to pass the phone along to me, and the first thing I heard was "We're engaged!" and I squealed and jumped up and down and pointed to the appropriate finger for Scarf's benefit and she squealed and jumped up and down and Kal reported to Neal in the background, "There's a lot of squealing and jumping up and down"--
and we toasted their engagement. As we sat down to eat, Neal picked up his wine glass and said, "Two bay leaves and two cardamon pods and four innocent palates--" at which point I laughed because only then did I realize he was counting instead of toasting "to bay leaves and cardamon pods, and for innocent palates..."
Also, he believes in butter with peanut butter toast. Another voice of reason amongst the legions of dry-toast sufferers!
The intern has mentioned enough housemates that I assumed he lived off-campus, but I was mistaken: he lives in a "townhome" on campus. This must be the difference between a state school 20 years ago and a private school now, I grinned. Überboss strolling by and seeing the grin said I looked like the cat who'd swallowed the canary (dreadful simile, which I as Empress strike from use). I said, "Oh, we're just jeremiading." Überboss is too kind to point out that someone who laments the way things used to be shouldn't be verbing nouns all the time.
At the end of the day I told Überboss I had a language thingie for him. My mother sent me an article from the Lyme Times about the Peck Tavern, which my highschool classmate's mother has been running as a B&B for a quarter century. It was built in 1680 so of course George Washington and Benjamin Franklin each slept there, probably: "While that historical fact probably will remain apocryphal...."
The Superficial:
Things I Haven't Tested in Some Years:
Characteristically lisa:
More Important than That:
Yesterday Maven was walking by the house on her way to work when I came out on my way to work. I walked Shadowfax alongside and we--Maven and I, not my bike--talked until we reached her office. This morning she was walking by again when I emerged, in much different clothes and without my bike. She correctly deduced that today I would drive to work. She's clever like that.
It is handy, using a car at lunch, especially when RDC is away and I can do errands during the day instead of prolonging Blake's already lengthened day. I returned a thing for RDC and purchased new earbuds and sunglasses. I broke the stem of the previous earbuds' left side underfoot some months ago, and for many weeks the right bud has preferred to be in two or more pieces because apparently I don't know how to clean them. Finally the actual speaker piece entirely disappeared, along with both pairs of non-prescription sunglasses, so I bought new ones of each. This means that at least one pair of sunglasses is due to surface soon.
I still have errands to run after work: paper for invitations to a party my sister's having, groceries including a dish for bookclub tonight, and hopefully a new spray bottle for Blake. The nozzle on his current bottle works only haphazardly (and isn't clogged, not even with that orange mineral build-up our water deposits), and the only other bottles we have in the house otherwise have dispense jets instead of sprays. Fluid emerging from them looks like the meningitis vaccination UConn delivered in spring of '93, so high-powered that it punctured skin and dissipated into muscle without time-wasting needles.
Friday I went to REI to spend our member's dividend. If RDC had been home, we'd probably have a GPS. My goal was a triathlon suit. I don't know what brands REI might usually stock, but at this point it offered only Danskin unitards and plenty of them. I took a large and an extra-large into the fitting room, already dubious about the minimal padding at the crotch for biking: enough to interfere with swimming, not enough to comfort even a sprint-distance bike ride. I tried on the large first--I live in hope--and it was fine in its lower half. I had to struggle to get the zipper up my ribcage, though, and as soon as I raised my arms it unzipped a little in what I imagine it would prefer to be a lot under the added strain of running. I had raised my arms to see how my breasts were contained, and goddamn, I don't think anyone at Danskin has actually ever seen a breast.
For starters, the struggle to close the zipper indicated an insufficiency of material at the bust. With the zip closed, my breasts were smashed southward. I could see my nipples--flimsy fabric--and they were farther south than I hope to see them before I'm 70. I hauled them up above a seam just below the bustline that suggested but did not provide support. I ran in place in the fitting room, and it was an ugly sight. My breasts sloshed from side to side and downward. I tried on a medium, hoping for more support, and the bottom was still fine but the top only constrictive.
Safely back in an actual bra, I sought a salesperson. First I found two men, neither of whom either had breasts or was an athlete. Then I found a woman who was an athlete but almost entirely lacked breasts, lucky wench. I asked her, just to be clear, if this seriously was meant to be the only garment worn during a triathlon. Yes. She suggested I could add bike shorts over it and a bra under it, and with those additions the point of buying a unitard would be what? This I didn't speak. The suit still would have shoved my bosom down and to the sides and, I now resentfully imagine, smashed them out and under the bra; and why would I wear padding during the swim and run if I didn't have to?
This is what I'm going to race in, since there no nudity is permitted in transition areas: my running shorts, of a loose but flimsy fabric that I haven't swum in but which I think will be okay; an athletic bra, because it supports and restrains adequately; and a running shirt I spent part of the dividend on, which unlike my usual running attire comes as far up my sternum as my swimsuit does (reducing drag); and for the bike portion, bike shorts on top of running shorts. If the shorts in the water are weirdly floaty or a hindrance or if the elastic waist wants to crawl down my torso and off my person, I can add my tankini bottom over them. Running shorts under bike shorts is the problem: I don't particularly want the former embedded in my crotch but that's where they might end up.
I want someone to justify a triathlon suit to me. No one suggests wearing the same footwear throughout--yes, swim in sneakers! run in molded biking shoes with a metal cleat! bike barefoot!--so why one piece of clothing?
Eh. I am doing a sprint-distance triathlon, maybe only one. I am not competing in but only completing it. I don't need gear.
I didn't swap storms for screens today despite its being a time-change day. That will no longer be a reasonable schedule anyway, since as of I think next year, daylight saving time is legislated to encroach even further into actual time, before it's warm enough for screens. Yesterday and today I savored the quiet house: no forced-air heat (if I had a scrillion dollars I would change Formigny to steam heat: silence and even though slow heat is a fine exchange for noise and responsiveness) yet still two layers of glass against city noise.
I had mostly decided that beforehand but a gusty wind made me feel prudent instead of lazy about it: handling glass sails up a ladder v. not doing that. The wind was so strong that it knocked over and rolled away my water bottle at the pool (and I didn't find it in the flowerbeds or in the leisure pool or anywhere) and blew away the gym's towel (which probably didn't escape the walled enclosure to become litter, I hope).
Afterward I grocery-shopped and, home again, had my lunch on the porch swing with the buddy and a book. The north wind was so strong I heard the lion roaring. Occasionally we hear the sea lions barking during feeding-time, and I've heard an elephant trumpet a couple of times, and it's easy to hear the several wolves howl or the dozens of peacocks cry at roosting time, but the lion's roar was new. It perhaps shouldn't be, at less than a mile away, but perhaps in areas where you really need to hear the lion's mood, traffic doesn't drown him out.
The porch swing sojourn, however pleasant, was short, because I had been gone more than two hour-years in the buddy brain and he was begging for step-up (holding one foot out flat and waving it frantically: pick me up, pick me up!). Inside the house he can come out of his cage, and he did, joining me on the chair not to snuggle into my fleece sweater (sunny but windy) but to play in his box. I gave up sun for an invisible box buddy.
I spend the rest the REI dividend on a dress I can hike in: no waist, unlike my hiking skirt. It's pale blue, not periwinkle, not frost or smoky blue. Just pale. Pastel, in fact. Yii. Also a fleece sweater that has, get this, horizontal stripes of periwinkle, celidon, peach, ivory, and pink. That's what I wore today, dress and sweater, and I look like an Easter egg and entirely unlike myself. Horizontal stripes! Sherbet pastels! More than two colors at once, and none of them a neutral! The color on one half not picked up anywhere in the other half! It's craziness, I tell you. But I think kind of pretty.
Scarf, Kal, Harrison, and London (and I) were the only ones who liked Wide Sargasso Sea. At least everyone loved The Golden Compass last year, and I know my priorities. Someone new attended, someone whom Scarf collected on "the walk." I asked about her dog, but Scarf said it was the baby walk. Oh. The new person does not, in fact, have a dog because of an allergic husband. I refrained from blurting that allergies are for the weak, because I figure I should at least choose a book that more than half of us like before inflicting my perverse ideology on especially a new person.
In two weeks London has a piano recital that she invited us all to, and I am slightly torn--just a tiny rip--because at the Tattered Cover that night is a reading by both a DU professor we know and, uh, the UConn equivalent of its poet laureate during my tenure. Another UConn writer I knew spoke of him scathingly--"You mention his poetry and you can see the bulge in his pants rise"--and I am, still, crippled by nostalgia. I liked him, or at least one of his poems, well enough once to transcribe it into my poetry journal. But I'll probably go hear London instead.
Speaking of the Tattered Cover, the Lowenstein project got a third tenant, an independent cinema, with a café! Retail and entertainment: maybe this thing will survive.
A few things about my household:
So the other day I came in the house and, as is not my habit, dropped my keys on the cagestand where it stood, as is its habit, by the livingroom window so Blake can watch the world go by. Sometime later in the day, I viciously cruelly and wantonly abandoned Blake on his cage, and he was forced by the utter invisibility of the several toys in his cage and the threat posed by approaching dragons to attract my attention by dropping the keys off the stand, nudge by nudge. But the keys are not a long thin pole but jointed and complicated.
Blake loosed the keyring from his beak a moment after the keys went over the edge. He let them go and pinwheeled (or whatever it's called when a cockatiel does it) and escaped gravity, but only just.
Okay, that was really long, but it was really cute.
I was wearing a ladybug costume (my black-clad limbs and head stuck out of a fat disk upholestered in red with black dots) and about to go into a classroom.
The classroom was off the laundry room in my own house. I was listening to a Walkman, definitely not an iPod, which was supposed to feed me ladybug facts that I could spout at the kids. I was late getting into the room because the headphones tangled (iPod headphones in design and tangliness, though black). I wanted to zip the hood of the costume completely over my face.
My shrink was the teacher. In "Big Love," Jeanne Triplehorn is a teacher, and my shrink, at this point my ex-shrink, is African-American; their association is that both are my kind of lovely: not conventionally pretty but appealing and wholesome.
The tape in the Walkman was U2's October and--tape? who can find the right spot on a tape?--I had no ladybug factoids. Instead I just blathered. It turns out that insects have strong political proclivities. Ants and bees, of course, are communists, all working to death for the common good of the dictator. Who is herself enslaved, a consideration the second-graders were not interested in at all. Ladybugs are liberal: benevolent, tasty, nonviolent. That's about as far as I got.
The kids weren't interested in West Wing, either.
So I was flailing to save myself verbally or physically. I was also trying not to laugh at myself and the kids, and that is a really good thing for me to dream about: I realize this is a ludicrous situation and I am not going to panic about it or let a bunch of four-footers jeering crush me. I--this is from the notes I scrawled at 5:30 this morning with my light-pen--apparently threatened to kiss one, and I received a text message (on my cell phone? because I had one of those but not an iPod, and the cell phone couldn't've told me vital ladybug information?) from one of the kids, "Kis1." I told the texter that if I kiss someone I'd do it right, with two s's. Even in a dream I am a snob.
The alarm saved me this time.
Definition of a best friend: someone you can call from the station not because you are stranded (though you might be) but because you have become so distraught by the wanton abuse by the person you asked politely to get off your toe in the train that you just really need her.
The first few weeks off Lexapro I thought I was going to be okay. The several weeks since the drug has cleared my system, not so much. Last night I left work for home, remembered about 2/3 of the way there that I hadn't bought vegetables for buddy chow, and detoured toward a supermarket.
At home, I cleaned and tidied and puttered and filmed the house to show Nisou. RDC gave me a video camera for our anniversary and so far I have footage of Blake (lots, as expected), magpies, Rocky Mountain National Park in July, and seeing some sprouts in Berkeley. I examined the cables available and could figure out how to charge the camera but couldn't find a USB one to move snow-shoeing in RMNP in January and today's house from camera to computer. Fine, I decided, I'll take the snippets of the garden in June (the day after I got the camera) and of RMNP on Independence Day that I could find on RDC's machine (mine, at four years old, cannot store that much data or manipulate it in iMovie) and make a DVD that I can play in Moonshadow and that will be nice.
I sat at the computer for over an hour, iMovie book (a subsequent present) in hand, listening to The Planets--Dava Sobel's book, not Holtz's suite--trying to figure this out. I had clips in iMovie, but I didn't want to compress them into Quicktime and iDVD would only take footage straight from the camera through a USB cable I couldn't find. I did not make buddy chow. I did not pack. I told myself that if something didn't click by 8, that was that. Nothing clicked, I was frustrated and stupid, The Planets was done, and that was that.
It was 8 o'clock and I went into the kitchen to start the chow. Two hours before, filming the kitchen, I had stared straight through the viewfinder at the clear glass canister where the buddy quinoa lives and not noticed that it had a half-inch of grain in it.
Eight o'clock. Whole Foods is two miles away and is open until 10, I have a car, this is totally possible. And eight is a much better time to go than five--rush-hour neither in traffic nor in the store. But I haven't had a panic attack, if that's what it is, that bad since I broke my sister's car 2.5 years ago--preLexapro, but one of the final spurs toward therapy. When I could breathe again, and see through my tears, I drove very carefully to the store with Hamlet in my lap.
I didn't bring the elephant into the store, and I have to get sanity credit for that. In the bulk food aisle, quinoa in hand, I asked a stocker about hazelnuts, which I haven't seen for weeks. I don't know whether I was blind or WF had not had any, but there they were. I had breathed easier when I saw the nice full bin of quinoa, but now I may have smiled too.
Home again, I freed Blake and began to prepare the quinoa (lots of rinsing before boiling and steaming). I roasted hazelnuts. I added water to the honey jug and nuked it into liquidity. When the quinoa had soaked up all its water, I stirred it into the vegetables. I still needed to bag and freeze the chow, but (having and) not burning the quinoa as it steams is the hard part. I rubbed the skins of the nuts and threw them into the food processor, then added chocolate chips, honey, and condensed milk. Only the noise of the chips reminded me--even though I had consulted the recipe to find time and temperature for the nuts--that the chips should be melted, not just chopped.
But see, hazelnut spread is not vital. Buddy chow is. A hostess present is a good idea, and I had opted out of chewy chocolate ginger cookies a couple of days before. The spread is not vital, and the nuts were still piping hot from the oven and melted the chocolate some, and friction from the processor helped, and for heaven's sake it's chocolate: there's a lot of leeway before it becomes inedible.
My mother makes jam--elderberry is the favorite but they cannot be cultivated, also raspberry and blackberry--and gives jars for birthdays and Christmas, and last week when I walked to the post office one of the things I mailed was a box of empty jars, returned by her request. Charenton gives me jam too--blueberry and currant and quince--and in the box where I accumulate presents all year are empty Charenton jars. Jam jars are good things to return, but Amelia Bedelia taught me that a plate should not be returned empty. She filled home plate with cookies; I filled jam jars with faux Nütella. (I hope no one gets salmonella from eating it after the time of my travel without refrigeration, but Charenton keeps eggs on the windowsill so I don't stress too much.)
Packing was the hard part because Blake Knew. He stalked back and forth on the plank (the footboard of the bed) before pouting in a corner of the mattress. He didn't even want to play cave in the suitcase. Running shoes and zebra (for Siblet) and cardinal (another American animal for Emlet) are more important than video camera, and I shouldn't use it until I know how to store and manipulate its results, so thphbt.
So. Realizing I had not the food I needed to prepare for Blake on the eve of camp was a reasonable thing to beat myself up about, given what I was doing instead. I might not have beat my breast about it so much if I had been on Lexapro, but I recovered quickly and well. Recovery is all well and good, but not having the attack at all despite stimulus, or, even better, thinking more clearly and focusing better so as to prevent the stimulus, is what the drug does for me.
The only thing more endearing than Emlet's irrepressible giggle every time I mooed at her was watching her figuring out how to tell the joke.
"Knock, knock."
"Who's there?"
"Interrupting Cow."
"Interrupt--"
"MOO!"
Except she's a very polite child, and four, so it took her a while to figure out how to MOO! before the respondent completes the response "Interrrupting Cow Who?"
There was plenty of other endearing stuff. She's as devoted to Nanabush as I was to Booboo as a child (I only wish I had given him to her), she has delightfully Continental consonants, enunciating t's as few Americans do (she says "twenty" and "mitten" instead of "twenny" or "mih-en" and even hypercorrects "cuddle" and "middle"), and for the first time she addressed me by name: "Tante Liesl."
ZBD and I were talking about the riddles Gollum and Bilbo ask each other. The only one I remember, besides nothing or string in the pocketses, is "30 white horses on a red hill, first they champ, then they stamp, then they stand still." Gollum jeers "Chestnuts!" at Bilbo because that's such an old obvious one, and that's what ZBD thought the answer was! I am so in love with her. She can tell you umpteen details from The Silmarillion and where the Rangers are from (she, not I, remembers their proper name) and contemplate the origins of Tom Bombadil but she has enough child's literalism to take a figure of speech straight. Also, her least favorite chronicles of Narnia are also The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, demonstrating her good taste.
Siblet doesn't speak much yet, just lots of purposeful babble in no particular language but her own. She has at least one extremely French gesture that never failed to crack me up: arms up and bent bringing spread hands to shoulders, and a shrug, indicating "I don't know" or "no more" or "such is the state of the world," depending on facial expression. Unfortunately I never quite captured that on film, only on brain cell. After fruitless searching of Kazoo & Co. and the zoo and the Museum of Nature and Science, I had no idea where to find a zebra until Maven told me that the herb and tea shop Apothecarie Tinctura had one (I mentioned my quest when Scarf received a lovely monkey for the Monkey at her baby shower).
Emlet saw the zebra change hands and asked if I had brought anything for her. I reminded her of the Playmobil giraffe and the Jan Brett beaver that had gone swimming in the hot tub, and she nodded, and then I gave her the cardinal. It's the Audubon series that sounds the bird's call when you press it, and though Emlet is not quite coordinated enough to press hard enough in just the right spot, she could tell what she was meant to do: "Press here," she read aloud.
It was an Everyone weekend but I still had good one-on-one Nisou time. She picked me up at Framingham and we talked from 11:15 when she fetched me to 2:00. On Friday SEM and his girlfriend arrived, and TJZD and her two kids RED and ALD; the younger just turned one but I hadn't met her, except in utero, yet. I knew I was going to like Girlfriend, and I did--we toured the house and garden and brook, talking--and RED and Emlet are two months apart and play well together. It was chilly enough that, once in, I wanted to stay in the hot tub, but the kids, afraid of being too hot, stood on a bench up to their knees for minutes on end. Brr.
SEM and Girlfriend were home for the weekend for his stepbrother's wedding, and Nisou and TJZD and I signed a card I harebrainedly managed to remember to get for him and his bride.
We left a generous Maman with the four under-fives and nipped out for lunch, stopping at Tranquility because we saw a car with New York plates and there plucked up N. She didn't remember me, but I am Elephantine not only in belly but in memory too and I remembered her. At lunch, a schoolmate of the local set whom I had not met showed up, and her father popped in to say hi. He taught music theory and I told him his class was my husband's favorite from UConn, and he'd probably remember him, he sat on the left? This is funny only if you know that that course was taught in von der Mehden, a 400-person auditorium I know best from its Friday night art flicks.
In the evening, many more locals arrived. I am a pathe enough freak really to want to go to their 20th high school reunion, but a self-aware enough freak to know that wouldn't be right. Also, coincidentally, the day after I got home I had e-mail from one of my own classmates, emerging from the woodwork and wondering what was up with our reunion, and from one of the organizers, promising she'd get on the ball right quick. There were photograph albums and yearbooks at Charenton that night, and when I actually counted up my acquainti, I realized anew that while I do have more friends from that school than from mine, I know only about two dozen (plus several outliers from other classes) altogether, whereas I could reel off many more of my own classmates' names and perhaps recognize them. I am not such a yearbook-memorizing freak as that seems: I recently compiled a contact list of not only the 120 people I graduated with but also the other 60 or so who appeared in a yearbook between sixth and eleventh grades. But I'm still a nostalgic freak.
At Charenton Friday night, then, were all my heavy people--a Kate Bush phrase, for me meaning this set of friends--except PLT and his family, and then some. Seven kids--six under five--and 16 adults including me: a good time. Nisou's newest niece baptized my arm and I showed my childfree colors by immediately thrusting her at her father with a "here's your spitting child" and stalking off to rinse my arm. The elder niece, named for Maman, is the size of a five-year-old (she's a bit more than 2) and I heartily approved her wardrobe--lots of overalls, and when the snaps on the inner perimeter of the legs are unsnapped, they look like dresses.
Saturday some of us went for a short stroll along the Nipmuck Trail in the rain. The pond just upstream of the grist mill looked temptingly clear and wet, even in the rain, even in the cold (it was about 40), and I flung off my clothes and jumped in. For less than a minute: my companions were waiting. Or maybe a bit more than a minute, because you should always swim for longer than it takes to undress and redress. The only bad bit was putting on socks over wet feet.
In the afternoon we continued the perusal of photograph albums. Nisou has pictures of NCS and me that I had never seen. I haven't seen him since 1994? and so in the picture he looks like my memory of him, but I look like such a child! I think I have only one picture of the two of us, and because it is familiar to me, the same 20-year-old face doesn't look as infantile as in Nisou's unfamiliar one.
Sunday morning I visited the Beasts, meeting the new batch of cats and admiring the renovated house and garden. In the afternoon the children and I dyed Easter eggs. Red vinegar works as well to fix the color, or whatever vinegar does to dye, as white. Next time, balsamic! Also we searched for chicken eggs, and the Easter egg hunt can only be easier than that, since humans will have hidden red and aqua (and one lovely celadon one that says "Liesl") eggs rather than hens hiding pale green and brown ones. In the evening Nisou crashed early and I stayed up late with Maman and Papa talking, and then she woke up and we stayed up later talking.
Monday morning we had a run involving some hills, which are not so much in my flatlander's repertoire. Maman asked if I had room in my luggage for sirop d'érable ou pain, or both, and what a question! I would leave something behind rather than pass up Charenton Pretty Virgin syrup* or her bread. But my luggage was now minus a zebra, a cardinal, three jars of Nütella (which went over well), Miss Hickory, and two Playmobil figurines, plus a wee plastic hedgehog and an equally wee beaver, so space there was plenty. Lunch was leftover paëlla and quantities of Maman's bread with framboise, and it ended late, with noticings of the time and last-second photographs and hugs.
*Is that as funny a grade as I think? I love the punly options of "relatively virgin" and "attractive virgin."
Papa drove me to Framingham and I just caught the 3:30. Thank goodness, because the 4:00 would have encountered more traffic and possibly delivered me to Logan a hairsbreadth too late. Me, I prefer an entire hare between me and departure.
Maven was going to lend me Morgan for the night so I wouldn't have to sleep in an empty house but I just crashed. The sleeping went fine: I don't actually sleep with Blake and he doesn't snore, so I didn't notice his absence. But the solitary breakfast with a whole bowl of cereal to myself felt wrong; if a cockatiel doesn't share my cereal I would appreciate at least to drink my orange juice cuddling with a four-year-old having her milk.
I love my heavies, but I love my neighborhood too. We congregated at Scarf's to plan the next baby quilt, and Scarf read Goodnight, Gorilla for the first time, and I learned a Spanish equivalent to patty-cake ("When I came here, first I learned to sing, then to dance, then to work"), and Mia washed Monkey's face, and afterward AEK walked with me and Mia to the new hot dog stand. AEK shared my fries and Mia the hot dog, and we sat talking on Scarf's porch until the fries and limeade were gone ("they had eaten every one"*). Saturday AEK and Maven and I will dye Easter eggs--unless you got it out of your system last weekend" (no)--and Sunday several of us are having brunch; also we're planning a Cinco de Mayo progressive dinner.
Can conservatives have progressive dinners? Maybe they call them something else.
* Besides Gödel, Escher, Bach, The Flanders Panel also made me want to reread Through the Looking Glass.
Scarf herded us all together for Easter brunch after some went to Mass. We gathered chez lui a bit beforehand for photographs, and then we processed to Café Star. She had set up a curtain at one end of her porch and added a vase with flowering branches, which was a nice touch, but so was full sunlight. When we walked, I called to Mia, and she got her feet under her and lumbered toward us, but, too eager for bellyrubs, she lay down too soon--while still on the slope over the sidewalk--promptly rolled once down the slope, and, poor dog, we all laughed at her. But then I gave her a thorough belly rub.
In addition to the usual bookclub suspects were other neighborhood agitators whom I have met through their dog, the Hawaiian soccer god Pele. (They named him after the god, but he's black and white and about the size of a soccer ball, so for me he's both.) They would like to have a political bookgroup, and I absolutely could do with more nonfiction reading, and political reading more in-depth than The Nation and news sites. I hope that gets off the ground, as long as the age thing doesn't matter.
Saturday night AEK had had an Easter egg dyeing party, which should cement her forever as My People except that Sunday morning, looking at Mulchman's house, she said that instead of giving him her leaves, she throws them in the Dumpster, loose and unbagged. I suggested she doesn't have to bag them just to barrow them across the street to him and offered my wheelbarrow. Anyway, I wrote "Blake" on one egg in orange and dyed in yellow, and on another wrote the household's four names--me, RDC, Blake, Formigny--and dyed it green. She had all this newfangled stuff--Paas, which doesn't need hot water or vinegar, and newer Paas tablets that give a marbled effect. I am going to have a Yule cookie-baking party in December--more food coloring, though no crayons--and empty lots and lots of eggs through blowing so that next Easter we'll have lots of shells. Since Blake didn't come to brunch, for the family pictures one of us held his commemorative egg.
This was Café Star's first brunch. They served blueberry crepes (the first item on the menu, and the point at which I stopped reading it), lobster bruschetta (with an egg on top, gack), duck confit with a duck's egg and potato pancake, lamb--Eastery but not 11-in-the-morning-y, mushroom quiche, a savory crepe with trout and asparagus, French toast with ricotta and strawberries, and a few other yummy things.
It was a lovely, three-hour-long event, and afterward we broke Blake's heart by almost immediately leaving again for the gym. It was halfway through April and 83 degrees and I had meters to swim before I slept.
Oh, good. Asta from "The Thin Man" is also Mr. Smith in "The Awful Truth" and George in "Bringing Up Baby." Nasty little cur.
Today when Mia detoured from her regular walk and gallumphed toward me, I saw her before she shoved her snout in my leg so I didn't shriek as I did the other day. (RDC came running out to see what was up, and Drums was all apologetic.) But I have a very low startle threshold. I like that she heads for the house on her own.
But when she came along with her parents to our house after dinner out last Friday, we had no doggie treats for her and she was peckish. I have to add those to the grocery list.
After Mia washed my face and hugged me, she and her family went on their way, and a moment later another neighbor walked by with her dog. This dog found me very interesting, all Mia-scented, but this neighbor did not come with glad tidings. We have a very old neighbor whose dog died some years ago, and since then he is seldom seen outside. Today he came out in such a bad state that someone called paramedics for him. I don't do anything for him but shovel his walk and bake the occasional cookies, and I doubt my previous solution, of his getting another dog, will do him good any more.
Background: Lots of bungalows were built with a pantry feature I've heard called a "California cooler." It's a closet on the exterior wall with two screened apertures at top and bottom, through the exterior wall to the outside, and the shelves ("Shelves in a closet! Happy thought!") are slatted for air circulation.
When I returned from grocery-shopping today, I called my parents to confirm their arrival time. I was on the phone with my notstepmother when I opened the pantry door and saw the nearly new tin of cocoa powder spilled on the floor. I had just made cookies the night before and figured I hadn't set the tin squarely on the shelf. A few minutes later, when my notstepmother had handed the phone off to my father, I wandered back into the kitchen and looked at the spill more closely: the plastic lid hadn't burst off on impact but had been chewed through. I got off the phone fast.
First, was the squirrel still in the house? The absence of little chocolate footprints leading away from the scene of the crime let me hope not. Plus, the door was closed, though not on the latch. The powder was all over the pantry floor, but not much on the kitchen floor. That was good.
I called Scarf and Drums, asking to borrow Mia, and when I got to their house, Drums came back with me, Mia, and a squirrel cage. Mia assessed the house and found it free of rodents, and then the three of us went outside where Drums and I measured the lower aperture. I set up the extension ladder while he and the dog went home to cut a square of wood cut exactly the right size, and he even screwed it into place with a drill.
So as squirrel attacks go, it wasn't bad. I should have realized a squirrel was burrowing into the house, because over the few weeks before, I had noticed a lot of dirt on the containers on the top shelf. I noticed that the canvas or whatever material someone had used to close the opening (once only screened) was bent or torn, but even that didn't activate the squirrel-light in my brain. If I hadn't been able to borrow a carpenter as well as a dog, I would have filled the tunnel with bricks (the exterior wall is two sailor-bricks wide, but the aperture isn't stretcher-brick wide) to protect the house (do squirrels eat cockatiels? threaten cockatiels? mock their manliness or in any way mar their happiness?) while I scurried off to buy my own bit of wood. Then I would have wondered if I might affix the wood to the wooden trim of the aperture without first painting it white (like the rest of the house's trim) and without the approval of the house foreman (despite his absence from the country). Plus I would have nailed it crooked rather than screwed in on straight.
As it was, I emptied the entire pantry of food and shelves, ditched all the open food--it had chewed into the cannister of oats as well--ran all the containers (the floor is Tupperware territory) through the dishwasher (cocoa powder and possible squirrel pee), and still made it to the party I was aiming for. The bottom aperture already has a wooden cover, and both need to be sealed on both inside and outside, and maybe with alumninum in addition to plywood.
And I shouldn't say "it." I am sure it was the little female who regularly perches on the dining room windowsill and peeps into the house in a brazenly cute way: first, because she's evidently fearless; and second, because the first food she attacked was not the oats in their more vulnerable cardboard canister but the redolently tempting tin of Ghirardelli cocoa powder with its plastic lid.
I have been Not in the Mood to socialize recently, which is especially bad when Other People often keep me from excessive navel-contemplation. In college, on the last page of the notebooks in which I wrote my journal, I kept a list of Things That Make Me Glad I'm Alive, which were mostly interactions, the story told, the laugh shared. In that spirit, I don't want to forget last Friday's Other Bookclub party (and the date, the boyfriend, and the fiancé, or even the squirrel attack that preceded it), or last Saturday's neighborhood progressive dinner, even though I neglected to make the guacamole that Scarf thought I was bringing, or this Saturday's evening at the Ninth Door and Trios (tapas and jazz) with RDC, or last night's craft night, when the nabe gathered to cobble together the next baby quilt. Or afterward, when Maven came home with me to get some interfacing left over from the vest I tried to make, and how we choked with laughter at my sewing-butchery.
I had the nicest birthday I've had in a long time. In 1994, Nisou gave RDC and me and SEM dinner at her house and a cake; in 1995, RPR came running into the house with a handful of roadside flowers asking for a marker, because I had said I wanted a birthday cake with flowers and my name on it and the marker was to write on the clear plastic grocery-store container. In 1997, Haitch and RDC and I went in quest of sushi but it was Sunday so Wallyworld was closed and we were confined to the Cheesecake Factory (Denver has improved significantly since then).
On the birthday, my department took me to lunch, and in the evening, at Other bookclub, a cake that someone had bought for another woman's retirement turned into half a birthday cake too. Plus I got to brush a long-haired cat named Poppy enough to make another cat. Plus KDF's aunt attended, her first non-medical outing since she got sick.
Then today, we had a party. I thought the invitation shouldn't mention any significance to the date at all, but word got out, and I received, in addition to an evening with my neighborhood friends, flowers and a box of Revolution Earl Grey with Lavender tea and a book by V.S. Naipaul. And a cake with my name and rosettes on it. Plus, Maven's visiting brother drew a pen-and-ink portrait of Blake based on this photograph.
In addition to all this, there was the unintended birthday present...
Wednesday morning a couple of birds were in the street in front of the house when I woke up (when they woke me up). I had no idea what they were, apart from partridge-shaped and non-flying and vocal; Animal Control said they already had a report on them; and when I called the zoo at 9:30, the receptionist was sure they were peachicks--despite their necklessness, and non-peafowl-feet--because, after all, some zoo patrons call a gopher a chipmunk even when another patron (me) says gently, no, it's a gopher, and so everyone in the city must be that stupid. At any rate she didn't know of any escaped animals. When I got home from the millet factory, they were still browsing along the same stretch of houses, and RDC finally recognized them as guinea fowl--his grandparents kept them. Aha, I said, catching on. I had seen guinea fowl only once before, in a large Ashford backyard, where our friends kept some for tick control.
In the evening, RDC decided they and motorists would be safer if they were in our backyard, eating our bugs, shitting their nutrient- and nitrogen-rich shit in the garden, and not causing accidents. At this point, Animal Control didn't want them because they weren't a rabid dog and it doesn't deal with wildlife. Does it deal with livestock? I think they're captive, like cockatiels, rather than domesticated, like Leghorn chickens. They might be feral, like cats, but our guess is that someone was raising them until they realized how loud and unhideable they are--they're against Denver code--and then the someone released them into City Park.
Thursday I made more calls. RDC posted a query to a guinea fowl board. The Wild Bird Center suggested a poultry store, naming it as the only place in Denver that sells chicken feed and is allowed to keep chickens. I called that place, and the man said, none too enthusiastically, that he could try to find a place for them. We would bring them on Saturday. Thursday night I went to bookclub, and Friday we had a party.
RDC hosed the patio with a dilute bleach solution, and the hope was that the birds would stay in the yard and the people on the bricks. But the birds kept wanting the basement window, on the patio. RDC wondered if that was for shelter, but they had the overhang of the garage for that; I realized oh! their reflection. So I brought out the full-length mirror from the inside of my closet door and propped it horizontally against the compost bin. They loved that and had no more interest in the patio. When the guests came, we had a conversation piece, and neither the toddler nor the dog molested them. Scarf already knew about the birds and wanted them, though I teased her that they are no relation to guinea pigs (she wants a guinea pig again), and she called her mother and asked if she wanted the birds. She said yes. Throughout the party the birds behaved well by not screeching. One jumped to the garage windowsill to admire its reflection, and when I yelled at them "No sex at my party!" at least that drew everyone's attention to their clumsy balancing act, which was acrobatic and amusing, and as dusk fell they bedded themselves behind the comfrey along the south fence and slept.
Saturday morning, Maven lent her dog's flight crate to the cause, and RDC and I coaxed the birds into the narrow space alongside the garage, and then, with mirror and groundcloth, into the crate. That actually wasn't as difficult as I thought, because squawk and flap though they did, they couldn't get six feet of loft to clear the fence. Then Scarf and I drove south to her mother's fenced lot and released them.
I don't know how good a solution that will be. Though her backyard is large by metropolitan standards, she still has neighbors in the sort of neighborhood that might not want livestock. It's large, but it doesn't offer much shade or shelter, and I don't know how much it offers by way of insects or even how much the fowl need. I wasn't sentimental about their fate--I thought the poutry place was a better idea and said so--but home again with the crate scrubbed and returned, I literally washed my hands of them.
UConn's library, Homer, didn't fall over into the swamp, but its face did fall off. Precipitation leaked behind the brick facade, froze, and popped bricks right off. From 1987 to 1995 the building was swathed in plastic to protect passersby before eventual correction. Snopes says no architect ever did forget to account for books in the weight of a structure--though it does say that Homer's floors are sagging. As are Formigny's.
RDC observed, or at least suspects, that the house continues to settle: has the dining room floor sunk, or was there always that much space between the oak planking and the floor molding? does the porch roof continue to pull away from the house? Are those two bookcases with 42 feet of shelving altogether compressing the flooring? The answer to the last is yes. So this weekend I emptied them and brought the books downstairs, where they can weigh on the cement foundation as heavily as they like.
In August, I bought a larger bookcase for the nonfiction. The 36x36x12 bookcase that that displaced has been in a corner behind the closet door and held only Ann Lauterbach and D.H. Lawrence so far. One of the upstairs bookcases could fit there, 84x36x12, the only spot in the basement with high enough ceilings--my study is sunken but still has walled-in ducts in some bits. I removed one of the shelves from the standard-and-bracket ones we installed on the wall to the right of my desk and from beneath them removed the little chest of drawers and the little bookcase, so the shorter bookcase now fit in their spot; and I added its last shelf to another case (a step I avoided because it results in two short shelves).
Neither of us has used the NordicTrack or Total Gym in ages. The latter has been collapsed and away at least half of those ages, and the skier merely collects dust. RDC says he can't imagine our not belonging to a gym, and so they're both going to go live on the farm. The skier's absence frees the west back wall for two pieces of furniture from the sunroom, where RDC has begun to build the breakfast nook--the gateleg table and the cookbookcase.
The table in the den has been pieces of board left over from building the drawers in my closet (under the hanging shirts) supported on two crates. I removed one crate and one board and put the little chest of drawers in its place with the little bookcase on top.
So much for arrangement of furniture: now to arrange the books. Forty-two feet of shelving, but once all the books were downstairs, only about 35' of books, into 30 additional feet of cases.
The standard-and-bracket shelves by my desk had had a shelf each for writing books, favorite authors, favorites, and kids' books in pulp, and the little bookcase had had my reference books. I purged some reference books--I don't need the Merriam-Webster dictionaries of law and etymology at my fingertips--and some writing books--Annie Dillard and Sue Hubbell could join general fiction--and the favorite authors--Atwood and Byatt, except for Possession, also could join general fiction. Reference and writing merged, favorites (including Possession) remained, and bracket height dictated that pulp books remain as well.
Some of RDC's particularly favorite fiction--DeLillo, Hemingway, Kerouac, Tim O'Brien, Pynchon, Gary Snyder--had been upstairs but the bulk was cultural, literary, and information theory. Fiction would be easier to categorize than nonfiction, as well as beginning at the far left of the available shelf space. It all had to come down, case by case, beginning with A for Atwood. I emptied the first case, Edwin Abbott to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and filled it again, Abbott to Don DeLillo. I emptied the second, Penelope Fitzgerald to Wally Lamb, and filled it again, Dickens to Ken Kesey. From there to the end of the alphabet was faster because I didn't have to empty before filling. Fiction now ends on the second shelf of the second case, with the fixed third shelf of impractical height holding a Riverside Chaucer and one Riverside Shakespeare and one Pelican, and Shakespearean and Chaucerian criticism. The third case is all fixed shelves, but only the top one is a silly height, at slightly less than trade. It had held my Penguin medieval and Renaissance collection, but now the pulp-sized Penguin is on the pulp-sized shelf and the trade-size is at the end of general fiction (I'll work the latter into general fiction but I forgot during the main project) but now it holds whatever nonfiction is short enough to fit. I dislike arranging books by height, but so it goes. Other than first three feet of short books to hand, I kept some groupings--women's studies, history, cultural studies--but otherwise arranged the non-facetious non-fiction alphabetically by author or editor. Not by LOC, because RDC prefers to go by author and because I am not going so far as to label the books. Yet. Facetious non-fiction--Cynthia Heimel, Uppity Women of Medieval Times, Al Franken--and a slew of Norton anthologies end the hoard.
Cullings: Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi in pulp, since we have them in a Twain collection, vast but more readable than pulp. A duplicate collected Yates. One Riverside Chaucer. Ellen Tebbits, even though it was a gift, because it is not a Beverly Clearly I grew up with. James Howe's The Watcher. Yellowed pulp versions of texts that are readily available online, like Malthus and Veblen. Pulp Dreiser, since neither of us will ever read him again for pleasure and Sister Carrie, though not An American Tragedy, is available through Project Gutenberg. Learn Downhill Skiing in a Weekend.
Next, the cookbookcase will leave its temporary quarters in the bedroom for the den. Because we digitized the music collection, the CDs don't need to be easily accessible. Cramming rather than shelving them will free up space for how-to books in the television shrine, and eventually the sunroom will take back the cookbooks--another whole new bookcase! And then I will have to go on methadone. Or we'll have to decide that we don't need two different editions of the two-volume Norton collection of American literature, or perhaps not the one-volume version at all.
This is how to manage a 90+ day in Denver: after breakfast, start in the back yard and work until it gets too hot, then in the front (west) yard until it gets too hot, and at noon, make a smoothie and read on the swing until the sun reaches that far into the porch. At that point, around 2, either work in the house or take the book into the backyard in the shade of the neighbor's tree. Later in the afternoon, when the sun has freed itself from that tree and hasn't entangled itself in the big silver maple across the street to spare the porch swing, go to the gym. Return in time to tote camp chairs and a picnic dinner to the park for the weekly jazz concert in the warm dusk.
Convict tang fish, rainbow parrot fish (my favorite, despite how garish it is), ringtail surgeonfish (my other favorite for its blacklight blue outline), angel fish, coral, sea cucumbers, some of these, some of those, a few of these other ones, and several others.
As ever, it took me a couple of breaths to adjust to breathing under water. Even seeing underwater is novel for me, since I usually don't wear contacts under goggles. But the scenery here justified the risk. Unfortunately, the water-resistant camera apparently wasn't, hence others' photographs (not that I was likely to capture a fish in a lens anyway).
I forgot all the things you forget in the last moments before escape, but at least now I have these great neighbors. I had a vegetable-watering neighbor and a potted plants-watering neighbor and the unbidden promotional newspaper- and flier-spotting neighbor; and while I remembered to bring a bag of cherries to AEK last night when I dropped in at bookclub (Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire), I didn't notice the tomatoes, avocados, apples, and bananas until Wednesday morning. I sent another email announcing their availability on the porch.
On the flight to San Francisco, I read; in the noisy Red Carpet club, distracted, I watched "Sense and Sensibility"; on the flight to Lihue, I read. I will never fly without earplugs and a horseshoe neck pillow again. When the pilot pointed out an island to the south and RDC said, "Oh, wow," I corrected, "No, it's pronounced 'O-ah-hu.'"
And so we landed in Kauai. We had a red convertible so even though we were on the wrong island we were "Magnum, P.I.," except I have forgotten the theme music. The airport and Lihue look like Anywhere, U.S.A., but then you leave Lihue for the rest of the island.
We passed through the Tree Tunnel on the way to our lodging. You put your head back (if you're the passenger in a convertible) and, since the speed limit is 20 and they mean it, get three whole minutes to zone out under swamp mahogany.
Once we'd found our room, we threw on bathing suits in about four seconds and went to find the beach. And that is where we stayed for the next day. I brought, and not only brought but applied, SPF 30 sunscreen, plus I stayed in the shade of various trees (palms are tricky: even if rotation didn't move my spot into the sun, palm fronds dance a lot in the wind). I got a tiny streak of red on my butt, probably while snorkeling, but that was all.
No sunburn, but the little waterproof camera I took died on my third shot. So until RDC posts his own photographs, I rely on the kindness of strangers at flickr.
Today we saw Kauai from the air. We took a helicopter tour through Waimea Canyon and over Mt. Wai'ale'ale and above Alakai Swamp and along Na Pali coast and heavens above, parts of this island are heaven on earth.
Then we saw Wailua Falls, only from its overlook because we hadn't yet figured out that signs saying "Danger! Do not pass fence!" do not mean "We'll arrest you if you pass this fence, you trespassing malihini" but only "You might break your crazy neck." Another person was willing to break his crazy-ass neck and every single other bone in his body for those falls, though: he rock-hopped from the riverbank across and downstream to stone forming the very lip of the falls, and there he stood, on a surface damp and slippery with spume, so on the edge that his feet sloped downward and his toes grasped at nothing, and played his guitar for the the falls.
For the rest of our visit, upon whatever inaccessible cliff or peak or rock in the surf we saw, we'd point out the guitar player.
The other falls we attempted were Kipu Falls, just a walk downstream for two seconds but to approach the pool below you had to cross the stream, in waist-high water just above the falls, and then clamber down what looked from as close as we got like rope made of twine. RDC didn't want to cross with his camera, and we had been warned most strongly not to leave anything in our car--a cop was taking a report at the access road from someone who'd just had his car robbed, and I didn't think it fair to go if RDC couldn't, so we didn't swim beneath Kipu either.
But we swam at the beach when we got home in the late afternoon, and we'd swum in the morning before we left, and though I've never swum under a waterfall, I can't get enough of ocean either. Floating face up, I could nearly nap (except for the current and the surf); face down, I looked at fishes (I kept my goggles on).
Next time I go to this island, and I have to go again, I am going to stay on the north side of the island. I think. Its waters are more dangerous and I wouldn't kid myself about swimming here, but it's less developed and geographically more stunning. Because of Na Pali coast, the island is not ringed by road. So we followed it widdershins to the end, gorgeous and goddamn slow and so at least gorgeous, to hike part of the Kalalau Trail. We did not aspire to the Kalalau Beach, eleven miles out, only to Hanakapi'ai Beach and up to Hanakapi'ai Falls, four miles or less one way.
We didn't manage even that. We didn't start until late morning, and then what with the steep trail with lots of fun big rocks and the pausing to gawp and to photograph, we didn't get to the beach until after 1. The trail upstream is unmaintained and, we heard, more treacherous and we had not availed ourselves of proper provisions so what the hell, we played on the beach.
A suitably wide, deep sandbar allowed a nice safe kiddie pool of ocean water that might have been hot and calm had Hanakai'ai River not flowed into it. So it was warm with a noticeable current and not outrageously salty. Beyond the sandbar, surf pounded cliffs and boulders and even I was not tempted. RDC photographed this and that and I paddled in the kiddie pool and finally rinsed off in the cool fresh water as it tumbled and fell toward the ocean. No huge falls, but nice ones nonetheless.
The stink we emitted was admirable, from stink's point of view, when we returned to the trailhead. This is conveniently alongside Ke'e Beach--protected, shallow, lovely, green, with cliffs overhead. I scrubbed my skin with sand from the bottom and began to feel less like slime mold during a quick swim. It had to be quick because that sunscreeen I had not sweat and swum off I had now scrubbed off. Also because we were ravenous.
We had Bubba burgers in Hanalei--one of two meals I would enjoy during the week in one of only two villages that seemed worth exploring--and motored back to the south shore for more swimming.
We rented cabanas, not to have to chase shade all day; I read Omnivore's Dilemma and RDC read The Last Season; we watched surfers and surf crash on the reef aways out; and, oh yeah, we swam and snorkeled and floated and bodysurfed in the perfect water on the glorious beach. Life is good.
Okay, I didn't hike 22 miles down to the Colorado River and back in one day and maybe therefore cannot say that I have seen the Grand Canyon. But I've looked into it from many angles and hiked a whole half mile along a trail into it (not a half-mile altitude change), and while it's grandly big and grandly lovely, it's just a little too large for me to make friends with. I liked the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Perhaps I should raft through the Grand to correct my opinion. Mmm...
I also liked Waimea Canyon better. For one thing, it's greener. Its cliffs are red, like Colorado, and it gets 19" of rain a year itself, but it enjoys runoff from Mt. Wai'ale'ale, which gets over 400" a year, and you can see ocean to the south.
At the top of the road up the Canyon is Kalalau Lookout. While the canyon was perfectly sunny, beyond it clouds descended. While we hoped to see something like this, instead we saw something like this, only cloudier. Like this, except more so.
We walked a mile after that to a trailhead, and a mile along the ridge that forms the head of Kalalau Valley. Makai (toward the sea), clouds socked in the view even below us, which we could glimpse only as damn steep. Mauka (toward the mountain), under pristine blue sky and sun, stretched forest and forest and more forest in more shades of green than anywhere, back to the edges of the canyon. Pretty much we walked from the right crest to the left here. The last bit was not walking but hiking, almost climbing, over roots and stepped trail, very fun.
This day we had our shortest swim, little more than a dip, but I didn't want there to be a day when I didn't immerse myself in the ocean at all so swim I did.
Our last splurge was a catamaran tour of the west side of the island. We had to be at the dock at 6:00 a.m., which is best forgotten, and churned diesel clockwise around the island to the Na Pali coast. It was spectacular, eye-bendingly beautiful from a helicopter, from the Kalalau trail, and in the single glimpse through a momentary lapse in cloud cover from Pihea trail, and it continued to be mind-boggingly gorgeous from the ocean.
It was a big sea, with seven- to eight-foot waves, and I have previously been seasick, nauseated though managing to hold my gorge. I have decided that this is from the fumes and throbbing of ferry-type whale-watching vessels' motors, because it doesn't happen on regular boats, like Key West snorkel boats, or even on highly irregular Zodiac boats that jump and skitter over the whirlpools and waterfalls in the strong tides off Vancover Island. But it did happen crossing Lake Champlain on a ferry. Anyway, here I was fine, I am glad to say.
On the way out, we saw spinner dolphins and green turtles. The dolphins rode the bow waves and lived up to their names by spinning (along their longitudinal lines) as they leaped. The turtles were mostly green and solemn-looking.
If the wind had been amenable, we would have sailed back a lot faster than the motor could bring us, but it wasn't. Instead, RDC and I lay on the "trampolines"--a seemingly solid mesh strung between the two bows that water permeates--and bounced and jounced all the way and got impressively wet. Just as wet as we would have got snorkeling, which the captain judged the water too choppy to allow. We could swim and snorkel afterward, at our own beach, and we did. We even managed to find our second good meal, at Pomodoro.
In between the way out and the way back was the way, and the way was amazing.
Another full day on the beach, again with cabanas. The SPF 50 I'd acquired specifically for the boat had performed admirably and I especially wanted not to sit in a plane for nine hours with burned skin, and woohoo, I didn't. Coolboss said that, frankly, she was surprised, and Scarf said I had made the jump to full-fledged adulthood. More swimming. More reading. More swimming. More sunning. More swimming.
We pulled ourselves from the water with just enough time to shower and dress and eat before our evening flight. And that was that.
Perfect water, lovely snorkeling, challenging endurance swimming (I always breathed to landward, whole lengths of beach to one side or the other), great weather (despite the clouds obscuring the view down into Kalalau Velley), the ocean everywhere you looked, three books, waterfalls in lots of places you looked, tours by helicopter and catamaran, two good hikes, swimming every day, salt water and fresh, sleeping with the balcony door open to the sound of crashing surf, no sunburns, no flight delays, and lots of water. A good time.
Instead of swimming another 1000 meters, I lay in the shallow water of the wide steps into the lap pool with my new book (The Quincunx) on the deck and read a chapter.
Lord, what a heavenly day. No hotter than 80 after a smidge of rain Friday night.
Home again, I attacked the baobab trees in the backyard--the cherry sprouts and insidious sumac--that had threatened to split my small planet asunder in the week of my absence. I discovered that two of the pumpkin hills I planted did sprout and removed their competition (cherry sprouts and bindweed), and I rubbed the needles off the branches of the Yule tree to add to the compost. (I donated only the trunk and major limbs to TreeCycle.)
Then I ate raspberries straight off the cane. Also I read on the porch swing for a spell.
Another thing I love about my neighborhood is free concerts in City Park on summer Sunday evenings. Possibly also that we can just walk to them, because they're not of such a calibre that I would otherwise make a particular effort for them. But plenty of other people do, and the streets fill up.
Ha! I just thought of this--that the curmudgeons who overtake every neighborhood meeting with parking issues because they seem to believe they have a right to the stretch of curb in front of their dwellings probably hate the concerts because they attract, gasp, traffic!
Yes, car and bike and foot traffic all, and dogs, and toddlers dancing, games of Frisbee and catch and and people you know and people you don't know reclining on blankets and noshing as if at a Roman feast and talking into sunset.
Mia is not so good with other dogs, so she didn't come, but Morgan did, she of the softest ears in the entire dog world. I petted her snout, that spatch of short fur just behind the nose being one of my favorite things in the world, but at least didn't tickle the hair between the pads of her hind paws, what with the bad hips. I have that much mercy.
Sunday night at City Park Jazz, London and Wolfman (as in "Werewolves of London," and for his name) mentioned they were going to the Botanic Gardens to see Aimee Mann and Richard Thompson. I suggested the four of us walk over together, but London teaches until 5:30 so that didn't work, but we could carpool. Which of us has the smallest car? I asked. They have: a Mini Cooper! Wheee!
Now, I didn't know a thing about Richard Thompson before. His name was familiar, as was "and Linda," and I thought he was a folky singer-songwriter. That's all. So he came out and sang a few songs and then spoke. He's British: who knew? In my head, folk singers are American by default--Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Simon & Garfunkel. The venue is lovely, of course. Kal didn't know Aimee Mann but said she'd see anyone there, and I countered "almost anyone" and that Hawaiian music would send any sane person screaming across the Pacific. I haven't found a setlist yet but he had a funny song about penile performance in old age and "Dad's Gonna Kill Me" which I thought was just his "Goodbye English Rose" version of perhaps "'Nam's Gonna Kill Me," because he said as Vietnam soldiers call the country 'Nam so do those of the current war call Baghdad just 'dad. His last two songs got the most response from the audience, one I particularly liked all of whose lyrics have now fled my head, and a tune I guess is named "Valerie" showcasing his guitarissimo. He reminded me, in my ignorance, of Leonard Cohen, for deep voice and solo guitar, which I mean as a compliment.
Aimee Mann didn't keep me waiting. I have to thank Egg again for bringing her to my attention and calling Bachelor No. 2 one of the best albums ever. I hadn't brought a pen, but in the 90 minutes she had, she and her band played at least the following, order uncertain except the last three:
Goodbye, Caroline
You’re with Stupid Now
Save Me
One
You Do
Video
It’s Not Safe
You Could Make a Killing
Medicine Wheel
Nothing Is Good Enough
Frankenstein
Wise Up
Deathly
I was so happy that she sang "Nothing Is Good Enough" that I determined that that would be enough. After "Frankenstein" (during which she called for volunteers to fill in percussion), she said that that was usually her last song but could we please imagine she had already left the stage and come back for an encore and skip the pretense? And went into "Wise Up," my absolute favorite. This had the same effect on me that "Solsbury Hill" did at Peter Gabriel four years ago, exploding me to my feet. I scurried to the edge of the stage--which I could not do at Peter Gabriel--for the final two songs.
After leaving almost an hour late, my flight landed at Logan only 20 minutes late, and I got to Jessie's within an hour.
I had planned to take the bus to the airport and had a good reason for that--my return flight would be late enough to warrant a cab--but when RDC came home from D.C. Thursday night, that reason skittered out of my head. I reserved a cab so I could spend four whole hours of the entire week with my husband. Then the cab driver, in addition to being late, was the stupidest ever: it was suspect at the start that he didn't know the best way to DIA from my house, but then that he didn't know the way from my house to Colorado Boulevard, not once but twice wanting to turn west away from it, made me fret. I wanted to sleep in the cab, as I would have in the bus, but I was watching to ensure he actually did exit at the correct spot and then, once on Peña Boulevard, could find the airport at the end of it. And then I wanted to get away from him as soon as possible, so instead of using a card I hurled the last of my cash at him and fled.
JetBlue's site posted the flight as late, but all the displays at the airport listed it as on time, making me nearly late. And--is this new?--a security guard asked to see my boarding pass as I walked through the portal. I didn't notice that this unexpected request had surprised me enough to forget my suitcase until I was exiting the train at Concourse A. So I took the train back, went through security again (boarding pass in hand), made TSA give my bag back (and the two TSAers I spoke to replied slowly and walked slower, as if unfamiliar with the time pressures of air travel, the fuckers), and yomped down the stairs to the train to the concourse to my gate, where my flight was in fact still late.
Now I had plenty of time to go to a cash machine, but I didn't, contenting myself with grumping at the lateness of the hour and the tedious conversation of my flightmates (yes, we all know that flights are late and that passengers are treated like cattle; please talk about something else now) that penetrated The Great Influenza. By the time I landed in Logan, three hours and 20 minutes of flight and slightly less sleep than that, I had entirely forgotten about the need for cash until I was standing in the (off-airport) rental car agency realizing I had no way whatsoever to pay the toll to get through the Ted Williams tunnel.
The only thing that went well in this trip's travel was the clerk, who gave me five bucks out of his own pocket. I wrote him a check, which I hopes he trusts enough to cash. Also, another clerk decided I was waiting too long for a car and upgraded me to the next available, which had power windows, woo.
Then I got to Jessie's. I was looking on the left side of the second-to-last street for her own, but immediately realized when I overshot. I never get her house number right and she had reminded me of the correct one and that her house color had changed, but wrong house numbers and her attempts at camouflage could not keep me away.
Jessie and I hadn't seen each other for almost three years, so that was fun. I wondered about the laughing and waking up her roommate, who as my Buffy-enabler I have reason to be nice to, but apparently he sleeps well. We gossiped about you and McTeague and insane family and I borrowed more cash from her because I am shameless.
And then I left with spandy directions which did me no good whatsoever since signs are just not comme il faut. It took me most of an hour to get to the Mass Pike, but once on it I threw caution to the winds (as much as I had left in me after Cambridge tried to suck me into its vortex) and got to my sister's house in not much more than an hour.
Oddly, I found the government's censorship during WWI vaguely reassuring, since it meant today's strangulation of the press is not without precedent. The tracing of the disease's origin, course, spread, and dissipation was interesting; and the author makes a good case for its having been influenza, not a small stroke, that weakened Wilson and allowed Clemonceau to name the terms so disastrous for Germany (and the rest of the world).
But the narrator I wanted to throttle. He emoted. He emoted so much. The author must be faulted for repeating "It was only influenza--only influenza" scores of times throughout the book, but the narrator takes the blame for dramatizing sentences like "The doctors were WRONG and they would soon LEARN...HOW WRONG."
I slept through the last hour and change and I don't even care.
I do have a slight connection to the epidemic. My other grandmother's older brother died in WWI, on Nov. 8, 1918--after cease-fire, three days before Armistice. She was 12 at the time and had idolized him. She lost another sibling, an older sister, to the flu either that fall, during its first rampage, or one of the subsequent two major waves. My grandfather, who fought in WWI as well, was meant to marry that older sister, but married the surviving younger one when she turned 16 (he was 26). I learned all this well after her death in 1989, but it gives me insight to her character. She idolized my grandfather as she had her brother, and at least this man, that brother's age, had survived. Meanwhile, she herself was second best, being merely the surviving sister of, rather than the preferred, girl. My father is named for his uncle.
We cleaned and raked and toted and cooked and polished and stashed the NSFW stuff and mostly it rained. When the water didn't rain, it hung in the air in a way I do not miss at all, especially when the sun emerged for three minutes together reducing the world to a steambath.
In the evening we ate on the water in Stonington and had ice cream in Mystic. English continues to elude me and when we browsed in a store that sold dog and cat accessories, I said "water jacket" instead of "life preserver" like Koko signing "water bird" when she didn't know "duck" and that was my sister's favorite phrase for the rest of the weekend.
Saturday she had a combination housewarming for herself and surprise retirement party for our mother's husband.
Two of BDL's gifts from two of his fellow cult members were books: Humility and Absolute Surrender and one by Bill O'Reilly. The giver of the latter couldn't just give it and be done but proselytize about O'Reilly and Fox News--I had disliked this man nearly instantly and now I had reason besides my suspicion of the cult and irritation with his demeanor, dress, and voice. I was sitting on the staircase, looking into the living room but not crowded in, and at the O'Reilly love I quietly rose and let myself outside through the second floor to breathe the warm wet air. Also by this means I avoided asking if anyone else thought that Bill O'Reilly had a lot to learn about humility and surrender.
On the other hand, at least there's an assumption among the cult that members are literate.
The real treat of the day was the attendance of CLH's and my history, economics, and (for her) Russian novels teacher and his wife. CLH didn't get the numbers she hoped for--who could have guessed that Saturdays in June are such popular days for weddings--and so, aside from my actual family and one friend of my sister's, they were the only people I could have a conversation with. He was pleased I remembered so much from his teaching, his teaching methods, and his personal attitudes. The night before CLH had asked what were the only three dates that he wanted us to remember, and I said 1066, 1789, and 1870. But she said 1066, 1215, and 1789. He didn't remember exactly which himself, though his other contender was 742, and he wondered at 1870. Emancipation of U.S. slaves and Russian serfs and the unification of Germany and Italy, I said. We talked about swimming and the gossip from LOLHS and Omnivore's Dilemma and Fathers and Sons. I guess he didn't offer his class in the Russian novel when I was in 12th grade.
I met some of my sister's colleagues, some of whom I liked fine. About one, after I finally extricated myself from his monologuing, I asided to CLH, "That man has to stop talking to me now." He wasn't even hitting on me: he merely has no sense of the dialogue aspect of conversation nor perception of the social cues everyone else has. Later in the day I suggested to my mother that we sneak out for cigarettes, and I was very proud of her for immediately understanding that I just wanted a break and to talk with my own mother for a few minutes by ourselves. Specifically, a break from people for whom "an" is an unknown article. My mother said I shouldn't judge people by that but could not give me a reason when I asked her why ever not. She told me about a cousin who was getting married this day and I said yes, the 24th of June is an excellent day for weddings. She caught on to that too, although it mystifies her that RDC and I could be apart on our anniversary. Last year we had houseguests, I said: we've never been romantic. And she even remembered that she was a houseguest. I was very proud. CLH praised me for how well we got along, and my mother didn't even complain when I hugged her (I'm "too strong").
At midnight, having been On since noon with perhaps nine hours of sleep in two days, but waiting until other coworkers showed up to spare her being alone with an unattended man, I excused myself. Sunday continued to pee with rain as we cleaned up (I suggested the next house she buy have, if not a dishwasher, a large enough sink, maybe with a window over it), and into the afternoon that I had looked forward to spending at my lake. Instead we had a late lunch with our mother and BDL and then a little more time on our own before, at 6, I left for Logan.
Between Norwich and Framingham the rain did not merely pee but piss and bucket. I actually drove under the speed limit. I returned the car, praising to a manager the clerk who'd helped me, caught the shuttle, and got to Logan in time to learn that my flight was two fucking hours late. I stretched out on the floor and watched "The Usual Suspects" and the beginning of "Traffic" before boarding, and once seated shoved The Great Influenza in my ears. At this point in the book, I cared so little about the disease that I wanted the author and the narrator to die of it. I couldn't take melatonin because a mechanical glitch threatened to postpone the flight further, but I fell asleep anyway during the nearly two hours we sat on the tarmac, waking only during takeoff, hooray, and missing the end of the audiobook and waking sometime during John Adams, which I will rewind.
I am never doing that again. I did it for the family reunion, foregoing sleep for blood family when my chosen family were all in France surrounding Siblet's birth. I visited my sister in September of last year, and she couldn't control the weather then either, but six days in Connecticut with only one afternoon at the lake? Yeesh. And I did it this time because she really really wanted me to. I'm not never doing that again but I am not going to do that again for a couple of years. An hour and half with Jessie and a pleasant conversation with my old teacher and maybe four hours--two on Friday evening and two on Sunday afternoon--to relax and talk with my sister do not justify hellish travel.
I tended to the front gardens a bit when I got home from work. I gave Maven more sage cuttings, which if left unhacked threatens to take over the world, and it turns out that she knows Babushka, who came tottering by. Babushka doesn't look well. I gave her sour cherries off the tree, raspberries off the cane, and some basil and spinach. Maven had some basil too. Then Kal called announcing a new subject of photography, photographs of whom the grandparents obviously had to see.
Lena is about three months old, black, is short-haired but has the tail of a long-haired cat, and thinks that old brother Marlowe's tail is the best toy ever.
A good party is dancing "Ring Around a Rosie" with two-year-olds and a few hours later talking about sex toys with Scarf, London, and Wolfman. It is turning Monkey into a murcielago, and Blake bowing when a little boy shows him various sticks, and petting a good pile of squirrel-deterrent off Mia, and showing a little girl where to pick the first zucchini of the season, and admiring Maven's great new haircut, and being spared too much "Ring Around a Rosie" when the littluns become much more interested in picking raspberries than in dancing. It is melodramatically singing and dancing to "Hotel California" with a Where the Wild Things Are puppet on one hand.
I was looking at my favorites shelf after shoving The Quincunx into place, and Girl with a Pearl Earring is missing. That's an autographed copy! Whom would I lend that to? Possibly my sister. Or possibly it is lost. Yii.
It sprinkled on my way back from the gym, strengthening into showers in about the last half mile. I picked green beans and basil and spinach for supper in the rain, and by the time Blake and I got out of the shower, it was sunny again. We had burgers (left over from the party) with tomatoes (not our own) and spinach and a green been salad (blanched, with basil and almonds and olive oil) for dinner, then sat on the porch and read for a while. I am, to no one's surprise, not liking Naked Lunch and picked up Kate Remembered, the Scott Berg biography of Hepburn I was given a couple of years ago. It's being about Kate will only possibly overcome my distaste for nonhistorical biographies, for celebrity biographies. Well, I have books on hold at the 'brary, so it only has to last me until tomorrow.
While we swung on the porch, rain began in earnest. First we took Blake off his column and put him under the porch roof, then farther back, and finally in the house, because now the rain was lashing down in a gale, with thunder and lightning. Neither of us can remember a cool Fourth of July of the 11 we've spent here.
Maybe the anthem sing-along concert at Fiddler's Green in 1996 wasn't savagely hot, but I'm sure it wasn't cool. Red Rocks in 1997 and 1998 for Blues Traveler was hot hot hot, at least until sunset. In 1999, when we were in Vail and Grand Lake with the Beasts, it was so hot in Rocky Mountain National Park that the elk had retreated into the tundra. In 2000, we went to Grand Lake with Haitch to escape the city's heat; in 2001, RDC's aunt and uncle were here and we sweltered at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival. In 2002, wildfires rampaged; and if I don't specifically remember vicious heat in the previous three years I am quite sure it wasn't 50 and raining.
It's being that cool, and raining with thunder and lightning and strong winds, means nothing to our neighbors: they still have their air-conditioner on, the freaks.
RDC went out to check the gutters and Blake panicked. He doesn't like stormy weather and particularly dislikes lightning. But the gutters are fine and the basement is dry as toast and Gore-Tex is a miracle fabric. Blake and I watched the rain from inside, so he could be safe and warm-footed on my shoulder, and RDC made hot chocolate for the grown-ups. Now I am sitting in the leather recliner with my feet loosely crossed, and he (Blake, that is) is playing in the crotch cave, between my knees and under the laptop. It's still raining lightly, and we are not walking out behind the museum to watch the downtown fireworks. But we can hear them.
Aside from the nothing-to-read feeling, it's been a great day. I love rain.
Every day as I bring my bike through the gate into the back yard, my eyes are on the garden. How are the carrots? Does the eggplant have a blossom? Are the raspberries quite, quite over? Today I shrieked in dismay and grief, because squirrels scaled my sunflowers and decapitated them again.
The first year, I naïvely planted regular sunflowers--big, happy-faced, seed-bearing sunflowers. Squirrels decapitated them as soon as the flowers bloomed. The next year I planted a non-seeding variety that put out several small flowers instead of one big head, and that they left alone. Last year I planted what were called Mexican sunflowers, also many-flowered, non-seeding, and of several colors, and those were spared as well. This year I tried a variety called Moulin Rouge, again non-seeding, and the first blossom that emerged had absolutely lovely petals, dark red in front with yellow backs.
Non-seeding but still tasty, apparently, and the vermin don't care whether something's in fruit anyway: they dug up both eggplants while they were yet seedlings. I expected them to, when RDC wanted to give eggplant another try, so the one plant's death didn't break my heart and I don't expect them to spare any fruit from the survivor. But sunflowers! Those two years lulled me into hope. Plus, since these sunflowers were not along the fence, the rodents had to scale them, cracking or at least weakening the stalks, so I doubt any more flowers can come.
Fucking squirrels.
So bookclub is just what I needed. We talked about Bel Canto and ate lox and talked about immunizations (for Monkey and for Stick, which is what I'm going to call the stick-loving two-year-old we all adore) and Erin's 170-mile bicycle weekend. AEK and Maven want to come cheer me on Sunday, which is so sweet, and the three of us in a tangle of legs and hand-massages consulted only our own calendars before announcing to Kal the weekend we want to go to her cabin. Scarf and I danced to whatever salsa-y music the hostess was playing.
Maven pretended embarrassment at whatever mystery she's reading now and I said hey, I still read Jean Auel, so have no shame. She hasn't read the latest one, and I offered to lend it to her if she wanted, as unsatisfying as it is, from my cache of trash, with the V.C. Andrews. She said Flowers in the Attic had inspired her to take ballet lessons, and we all cracked up: "As long as that's all it inspired you to do!"
It was a nice evening and distracted me from my savaged sunflowers.
This morning someone complimented my ensemble (only because "outfit" connotes a different thing) and I thanked her and she observed that it is a new color for me and asked if the outfit was new. The cap-sleeved, v-neck green t-shirt is recent, I admitted, but the skirt I bought in 1988. It's still a lisaish pattern--vaguely floral, mostly abstract, muted--but is in two shades of rose, two of slate blue, and a green on white. That is, unless brown leather sandals count, there is hardly a neutral on my body. I am trying not to feel garish.
Between that and the skirts--plus the pacifism and mission of social justice--I think I would make a good Quaker. You know, except for the earth-worshipping pagan bit.
My plan was to attend two clinics in the morning--a course overview and a first-timers' hand-holding--and register as soon after 12:15, when last names A-L were welcome, as I could. I arrove at the site to a big line, but hooray, it was only for 10 o'clock entry to the exposition, not the registration line. I had glazed over the "exposition" bit, but oh yes, in addition to clinics and registration there were things to buy. I found out vital things, like my race and wave numbers, and picked up my mandatory swim cap and non-mandatory lime-green advertisement-shirt. The course overview Oprah-lecturer said the one thing she advised us to get today--because everything else we should have worn before and trust--was open-water goggles. I did that, and planned to test them in Chatfield Reservoir, where we were going now to spend more of the afternoon paddling than we thought when I was going to have to wait until 12:15 to show my face and pick up my chip and sign my waiver and have my limbs marked with my number and bond with my fellow participants.
Luckily the bonding wasn't mandatory.
So we spent the afternoon paddling at Chatfield and, for me, drinking even more water than usual. In a small inlet, upstream of an old beaver dam, I saw fish jumping. I suggested portaging around the dam, and then we could sit in our kayaks against the dam, RDC fishing, me reading. This was a fine plan except for the mosquitoes. So we didn't. We found a beach not quite deserving of the name on the main body of the lake and ate our sandwiches, and then I settled in the private shade of a small cottonwood to read The Persian Boy--first in line regular-sized paperback, after library books, which I wouldn't risk even in a drybag. I propped my 100-oz. Camelbak bladder on my camera and used it as a pillow even as I emptied it. Meanwhile RDC tried to fish from his kayak, but it's no float tube, so he gave up on that, and from shore he couldn't cast far enough to be deep enough.
Upon leaving, RDC tugged his kayak into the water and immediately slid in, whereupon one inflatable chamber burst from its zipper. Luckily it didn't break the zipper, but it did mean that he had to sit with his right leg bent nearly out of the cockpit and paddle with his right arm straight out. Or something. After that, I let Watership Up gradually acclimate from hot sand and sun to warm shallows to paddling depth and only then clambered in. All this meant that our plan to swim off the kayaks, within the buoy line but far enough from shore that I, at least, might be able to overlook the muck at the bottom that shore isn't deep enough to mask, was out. When we got back our starting point, hooray, I had lost--in the car? on the beach? as we carried the kayak between car and tree-shade and water? part of the pump valve, which meant that we couldn't reshape RDC's boat and go out again. And I wasn't about to swim there, near the fishing beach and small-boat launch, when I couldn't see my feet in water that didn't reach my knees.
I didn't try the open-water goggles, which give you a larger field of vision than regular socket-only goggles, but that was fine because I couldn't find them anyway when I finished packing Saturday night.
The short version: I was satisfied with my performance until I checked the results. I wanted (to want) only to complete it, not to compete, but a final time of 2:04 disappointed me. I would have been under two hours if I had transitioned better. At least I placed in the top half, both overall and within in my age bracket, in the swim. Lesson: be happy within myself without consideration of numbers or comparison.
The long version: Last Monday at bookclub, AEK remembered that the triathlon was six days away. "Can I come with you?" Was she insane? I wanted to leave at 5:30, and AEK more than most people does not get up early (except to ski). Maven wanted to come too. I was touched and pleased and slightly dubious, the more so after I ascertained that all attendees had to be off Powahton Road by 7:00, when the first wave entered the water. RDC and I had already determined that he didn't need to go, because we have one car and I didn't expect him to get up before dawn either. But they were adamant: "You can't go to your first triathlon alone!" said AEK. Better yet, we would take her car, and lo, I wouldn't have to drive afterward, and could even braid my hair after I left the house, and RDC could go fishing as he strongly desired to do.
I slept little and fitfully after 3, and RDC got up at 4 to drive up the Poudre Canyon and hike up the river into RMNP and harass the trout. I got up at 5, RDC 20 minutes gone, and he called at 5:05 to make sure I was up. He'd made the buddy breakfast, and I wheeled the buddy to his usual daytime spot at the living room window except it wasn't daylight yet: Blake did not like the looks of this in the least. I made my smoothie--banana, yogurt, frozen blueberries, a dash of orange juice, a suggestion of protein powder. I dressed: running shorts, bra, running tank (three layers breastal support total, not nearly as high on my sternum as my regular swimsuit but cramming my bust enough to reduce drag somewhat, especially since I'm not at the level drag makes a noticeable difference, though I did shave my legs), wool socks, bike shoes. I checked my pack: chip and ankle strap; numbers for torso, bike, and helmet; goggles and swim cap; bike helmet and gloves; sneakers, Thorlite socks, evaporative neckband, sweatband. Plus six pints of water: one to drink on the way, one on the bike, two mixed with Cytomax for transitions, and two frozen in a bottle for afterward. Also a towel, not for drying but to lay my gear on and get sand off my feet after the swim; a small bottle of alcohol to dry my ears after the swim; another banana and two packets of energy gel; sunscreen, eyedrops, another pair of contacts, prescription sunglasses just in case, lip balm, phone, insurance card.
Also a totem. HEBD crocheted me a small--smaller than my palm--pouch and when she gave it to me I'm pretty sure she called it a totem. It hangs in my study on one of those quilted boards with ribbons for notes and photographs (also a gift) along with Emlet's and Siblet's birth announcements and a yellow rose from Granny's grave and things like that. I have a tiny blue glass cat from childhood that lives in my little cedar chest. "That," not "who," because if I ever named it, I've forgotten, and because before today it had been out of that box maybe once since the box arrived late in twelfth grade, to accompany me to the GRE. I might not have thought to bring it then except that it had helped me take the PSAT and probably both (or three?) SATs. That went in, and a Blake crest feather, and a shell from my beach, and a piece of Granny's sea glass. I strung my engagement and iolite rings on Tigger's box chain and added those three things and called it done. I might have left my rings on, but they wouldn't fit through the crocheting whereas without them Tigger might, and I wasn't going to risk him in the swim or run.
On the porch swing I drank my smoothie and smeared peanut butter on most of an apple (Blake got a slice) and sucked down water and watched bats flitter toward their beds. I re-inked myself, since sweat and sunscreen had faded yesterday's marks. I went in for a final pee and to brush my beak--three minutes, max--and on the way back stopped dead in my tracks between dining and living rooms because my bike was no longer propped on the porch. I churned into overdrive and burst out the door to see, of course, AEK and Maven loading my bike into the car. Oh.
Google steered me east on 70 and south on 470, but yesterday the Oprah chick had warned about traffic on 470 and Wednesday when I drove from work all I had to do was go east on Sixth, which eventually turns south. So we did that, and while we did join a one-lane traffic jam eastbound on Quincy, this way did spare us two or more miles of it. As traffic jams go, it was okay--unidirectional and unidestinational--and we were parked by 6:20. I ate my banana as we packed up, gave Maven the totem to keep in a pocket, hugged and kissed my friends, and mounted Shadowfax to ride the mile to the race site there to to rack the bike and set up for the transitions.
Goggles and cap in hand, I entered the swim chute. The swim entry was the boat launch--concrete to two feet down--and thank goodness, because with 25 waves of 125 women, the less churning of "lake" bed at entrance and exit the better. I am really glad I did the open-water swim on Wednesday because even with many fewer participants, it gave me an idea what the actual swim start would be like. AEK and Maven shouted for me from the fence--they'd found me, that was amazing! Sally Edwards, who perhaps started this event? but who is anyway a fitness author and cheerleader, counted each wave start at four-minute intervals. As with a ski lift, once one wave had started, the next group could enter a corraled bit of water. Each wave had the same cap color (mine had the decency not to be orange or pink) and while we waited in the water, Edwards would give us a word for a mantra (wave 10's was "sensational" and while I might rather have been "invincible," at least I wasn't a Pre-Teen Sensation called Mavis) and ask what the best cap color was ("Purple!") and have us high-five our wave-mates ("You go, girl!") and it managed not to feel hokey at all.
The swim start was a total hippopotamus wallow. You know how as the rains end and the rivers dry, each hippo lives in a smaller and smaller bit of water, and then mud, and then the fighting begins? There wasn't any fighting and I didn't get kicked in the head or, as far as I could tell, kick anyone else in the head. But it was a tangle and I was nearly to the first buoy before we finally spaced ourselves. The 750m course was triangular with the apex at the boat launch, and I, unable as usual to swim in a straight line without a stripe under me (possibly the open-water goggles would have helped, since they would have afforded more peripheral vision, but fog is fog), nearly went left of the first buoy. It was within arm's reach of my right arm, instead of my left. Whoops. I put it on my left side and headed for the second buoy. This every fifth half-stroke that I've been breathing? Out the window. I breathed every left stroke until after the second buoy, in the homestretch, and I so badly wanted not to go off course that I checked more often than I needed to, wasting time.
And then! The thing that killed me! With the concrete ramp under me, I ripped off cap and goggles to start the ride with a nice cool wet head, ran up toward the transition area (grinning at AEK and Maven who found me again), and located the four racks for wave 10, but I could not find my bike. Again, good drugs: I was angry and frustrated but not paralyzed by these emotions. Once, I glimpsed the bike and headed toward it, but it moved away from me. Perhaps Shadowfax knew that I would have liked to have a street bike for this section of the race. Finally I ran the elusive thing to earth. Whew. I whipped on shorts and dropped to gulp Cytomax, bite sport goo into my maw, squirt alcohol into the porches of mine ears, rub sand off my feet, pin the number to my front, and don socks and shoes. I buckled my helmet, shoved hands into gloves, triangulated the particular rack with a tree and a bluff and a building--for next time I know to do that first and to know not just that there are x racks per wave but that mine is the yth rack from this direction and the zth from the other--and walked the bike to the gate. I lost minutes upon minutes in this transition.
The 20K bike ride was fun. Yes, I have a mountain bike and it's heavier than a street bike, but it has street tires on it. I hadn't bothered to remove my lights and rack because again, I am not at that level, and besides, mountain bike. RDC asked me if I wanted to carry a toolkit, and that'd be real nice if I knew how to use it but since I don't it'd just be weight and guilt. The only weight I wanted was the goop in the tires that has saved me from many a flat, and I relied on that to keep Shadowfax from throwing a shoe. If the bike spit out its bit, well, I can get a chain back on with my fingers. A couple of weekends ago we checked the gears and brakes, but otherwise the only maintenance I did was to pump psi high enough to feel every last crumble in the road. Shadowfax was naughty to hide during transition, but I expected it to behave during the race itself and it did. Whatever slope I was on, I spun. My bike is geared low enough and I am not in shape enough that any pedaling in even the highest gears effects no change in speed on descents, but I spun anyway. I am a calm swimmer and I did not expect to push myself on the run, but the ride was fun and I grinned maniacally throughout.
I found my spot quickly on the second transition and only had to shuck bike shorts, change socks and shoes, tie on my neckband, and gulp the other half of the water and goo, but I spent another minute trotting to where someone had left a Usan flag on the ground to drape it over the rack. This was such a touchy-feely race, what with the high-fiving and the volunteers in the water who'd reassure you if that's what you needed or accompany you the full distance, whew, that I still didn't know transition time would count toward the total. So I scampered quickly but didn't scurry to the 5K run start.
Where AEK and Maven found me again! I scooped up a cup at the first water station and they were just past it, and I shoved the empty cup into AEK's hand. Thanks! Now, I realize the limitations of the location. The race can be at Aurora Reservoir because the facility is nearly in Kansas so doesn't have a lot of traffic to disrupt, and it doesn't allow motor boats so doesn't lose as much revenue as Cherry Creek or Chatfield Reservoir would from half a day's closure. Having an out-and-back bike route on a suburban road is one thing, because the road is wide enough to accommodate four bikes abreast in each direction plus the double yellow line makes for an obvious divider, but an out-and-back run on a regular-width sidewalk is not such a clever set up. The by-phrase "on your left" meant nothing and those people I passed I did so when no one was oncoming, and I tried to keep right but walkers made that inefficient, and sidewalk? Ow: not a good running surface. The worst thing was that people to the left on my way out were congratulating people on their way back, and I kept hearing "You're almost there!" when I had barely begun. I set myself a pace that I thought I could maintain and stuck to it. And I guess I have no sense of how far five kilometers is, or even how far a mile is, because when I got to the first mile marker all I could think was, that's it? The turn-around on the bike hadn't felt like six miles at all, but the turn-around on the run never came at all. Except it finally did, and I hadn't walked on any of the slight hills, up or down, on the way out, and so I didn't on the way back either.
Nearly at the end stood AEK and Maven again, waving a hot pink ("We know how much you love pink") sign that read, "Go Lisa!" AEK yelled reallyfast, "We'll meet you at the playground past the finish line." Past speaking, I thumbsed-up with my left--the non-gimpy thumb--and sprinted for the end. (I had given a thumbs-up to some participants who were walking their bikes up hills, but did so with my right hand. My right thumb doesn't straighten fully, and I always worry that people think I'm being sarcastic. Whatever.)
Oh yeah, and I crossed the finish line, high-fiving Sally Edwards as I did. I was handed a bottle of water and a medal and someone misted me and I was done. These percentages are the reverse of the usual: 76% means I would have been 76th in a field of 100, not 24th.
I found the playground but had a more pressing need. Lavatories stood alongside, with a line out the women's door. Fuck that. I knocked on the men's door and entered, calling "Woman coming in!" and anyone who had a problem with that could kiss my sweaty ass. But no one said anything, a damn good thing. Now I was dry inside and out.
For all I had drunk--a half gallon in the past four hours--I didn't pee much: that's how much I had sweat. I finished by 9:45, but the day's high was 104 and it was probably over 90 for the run.
My sweet friends found me as I emerged from breaking whatever law and waited while I skittered down the beach to dunk myself again. I could have stayed there forever. The worst part of the day was waiting 30 minutes to get out of the transition area: the exit crossed the start of the run, so people could only get out in gaps between racers. We walked the mile to the parking area with AEK remarking on how I was still pacing faster than they were. On the way home we stopped at a farmer's market ("Unless you mind? Are you too tired?" "No. I am going to eat peaches until I explode"), and a shopper exclaimed how how strong my (bare) feet must be. It struck me as extremely funny that my feet, and not the numerals pinned to my front and inked on my skin ("I am not an escaped convict!"), are what he noticed. And my number! I hadn't thought of the calendar, only that I didn't know who sat on the English throne in that year--some Dane named Cnut, whatever--but Haitch pointed out it's her birthday. So she was there with me too, whee!
On the Formigny's front door, Stick and his mother had taped up a sign! It said things like "Congratulations!" and "Way to Go!" and had little drawings labeled swim bike and run, and Stick's lettering and spelling are extremely advanced for a not quite two-year-old. Also it had decorations in scribbles in many different colors.
All day I was tired, but not sore or weary. I think I felt the lack of sleep more than the race, yet afterward I didn't sleep. I ate peanut butter toast and bananas and peaches and drank lots of water and watched "Pirates of the Caribbean" and pet the buddy head and made RDC stop for ice cream on his way home.
I was unaccountably tired on Friday, no swim, and collapsed on a blanket on AEK's front lawn, where we idly threw balls for the dogs and drank mojitos (I had a mouthful of one but didn't like it). We watched the sunset in the clouds and I observed to Kal that my father says the only perfect view is of the sky over our heads. She responded, of course, "I imagine your father has been reading Dantë." She spent that rainy weekend up at the cabin, and even I watched only "Philadelphia Story" instead of also "Room with a View" and "Persuasion." Enough time has gone by for "Room" to have rejuvenated, and my next project is to suck "Persuasion" as dry as I have "Sense and Sensibility."
The neighborhood hasn't had a baby for six months and we are almost due for our next. This one's quilt turned out much better than last August's baby's, much less clumsy. Scarf's assembly and construction of our different squares was fine last year, but I think the squares are better this time. I gave Runaway Bunny because my square was the scene of his being a flower in a garden, and Kal gave Very Hungry Caterpillar for the same reason. Also pajamas with weensy dinosaurs and another set with dogs, and Olivia because she's a badass with a big mouth.
I violated gender protocol and spent some time on the porch with the men instead of in the (hotter) house with the women. A yellowjacket got me in the left eyesocket, not through the lid to the eyeball thank goodness, and though near the outside and halfway up to the eyebrow, my left eyebag now deserves the name. It's even swollen enough to deprive me of some peripheral vision. If only it were bruised, then it would look really punk rock. But goggles hurt, and I did not swim.
I'm watching "A Man for All Seasons" and reading along. Three of my favorite movies--this, "The Sting," and "Jaws" have Robert Shaw, and I might have to seek out his other movies.
This week I did a lot of lying around icing my eye. I reread books (A Man for All Seasons, Becket, To Kill a Mockingbird), and watched the fifth season of "Gilmore Girls," supplied weeks ago by the obliging koroshiya. Why do I keep watching this show? I hate everyone in it. Off the top of my head from the latest few episodes: 1) I hate Rory for saying "Traffic on the 95 was bad." The 95? What is this, California? No one says "the 95," even the freaks who call Boston Post "the Post Road" or "Route 1." 2) I hate Sookie because she tells Jackson that he's having a vasectomy, even though he wants more than two children, right now today, no discussion. 3) I hate Jackson for meekly agreeing. 4) I hate Lorelei for considering selling the Dragonfly as if Sookie has no say in it whatsoever. 5) Paris, Michel, Taylor, Kirk, Zach, Emily, and Richard are obvious and easy. 5a) I hate Rory for forgetting she has a best friend, but I like Lane all right, and Miss Patty. 5b) No, I don't like Lane. You can do a lot more than kissing without coitus, cupcake. 6) I hate the writers for inventing a "Stars Hollow," which, though based on Washington Depot, is 30" from Hartford and 20" from New Haven--triangulation which actually lands you in Meriden or maybe Waterbury. I hate that there's nothing vaguely Connecticutesque about the setting. I hate that it sets up unrealistic expectations about the consequences of unexpected teen pregancy, about excess eating, about finances, and about everything, probably. Most of all I hate that I watch it. Still.
Ha! Now I am rereading sixth season recaps to be ready for fall's seventh, and I am reminded that I hate T.J. too but like Liz. And I do like the fast-paced dialogue, though I lament it's only for comic relief and not for the emotional rollercoasting as well.
Ha! I must further confess that TWOP has made me laugh: "Thank God nobody on Deadwood uses the internet...although I sure would like to see what Al Swearengen would put on his blog, naturally to be found at "CocksuckersIKilledToday.livejournal.com."
Two 3.7-mile city rides.
Monday afternoon I saw a woman and boy on a tandem looking like she'd picked him up from summer camp. I waited at an intersection near them, and he was narrating some melodrama from the day as only a nine-year-old can.
Tuesday afternoon I got to pet the horse cops, who were in the hinterlands instead of downtown for the National Night Out. The horses are yet another thing I miss from working downtown.
Wednesday morning I met a Bouvier. I don't think I've ever seen one before.
This morning I saw Maven as we both headed for work. Hooray for the foot-powered commute! We talked about the upcoming book (Kal doesn't like it, though I didn't know that at the time) and another dress she will probably fit better than I do and whether she's coming to ballet in the park tonight. (Unfortunately, what came out of my mouth was, "Are you going to ballet tonight with AEK and I?" I blanched, and gabbled desperately, "Me. With AEK and me.")
Dresses! We had a clothing swap several weeks ago and Maven took the two dresses I brought, a short yellow sheath that has been snug across the beam for a while but which was now snug across the bodice and tight across the ass, not a good look in yellow silk, and a long simple celadon number that has always been snug across the bodice--reasonable in stiff linen--but now didn't want to zip.
And last summer or the one before I bought a white linen dress from J. Crew. White linen is already dicey, but it had a huge seam across my non waist and possibly a vertically bisecting seam as well and it's not doing me any favors. Maven is paler than me so it might not work on her either. Maybe we should make like Henny and dye Ella's dress in tea. One of the later All-of-a-Kind Family books
However! The Little Black Dress I bought in 1990 that, sometime in the past, I thought I really should give up on, maybe fits acceptably. It is certainly snugger than it was, but it doesn't give me pit-tit and my paunch isn't nauseating. I can't say it made RDC fall out of his chair, as the 1990 man did, but he thought it was fine (in more than a "you look pretty" way). I love simply cut clothes: it does not scream its year to me as much as some glaringly (to me) outré other, trendier pieces do.
HEBD stayed with me this past weekend while she was in town for a conference. She liked Blake, about whom ZBD wanted to know everything, and if Blake didn't fall in love with her the way he does with mostly men, he liked her fine and bowed and chucked to her. We went to the Botanic Gardens and to the gym to swim and to jazz with the neighborhood on Sunday, and Monday she came along to bookclub.
A surviving sunflower. The other weekend I brushed a guinea pig-sized pile of fur off Mia and stuck clumps of it in the cleavages of leaves to stalk of this surviving sunflower. The other one--only two of these seeds sprouted--squirrels toppled when they decapitated its newborn flower, this despite my carefully choosing non-seeding varieties. I guess the flowers still taste good, or--here's a thought--maybe the squirrels are just malevolent vermin.
Yesterday AEK, Soccer, and I drove out to Littleton where our friend George was in an arts festival.
(I would call George "Monkey" because she likes monkeys a lot, except that Scarf's daughter is already Monkey, but George has precedent as a woman's name and a monkey's name and her square for our first baby quilt was, of course, of Curious George. She is in the neighborhood bookclub, though emeritus for having removed to Capitol Hill.)
She and her mother design and create handbands and purses. Handbands as an accessory I could take or leave (meaning, leave), but her fabrics are fabulous and AEK and Soccer looked adorable in theirs. The purses are works of art and I actually bought one, pretty and impractical as it is. It joins the dress I bought a couple of months ago and am reserving for my upcoming 20-year high school reunion.
Thursday as my coworkers and I discussed the new restrictions on carry-on baggage, I lamented that I didn't want to check a bag containing The Dress and risk its going missing in Cincinnati, where I have to connect. CoolBoss and Minnie liked the dress I was wearing at the time, thought it flattering and appropriate and lisaish, and therefore wanted to see The Dress. I brought it in on Friday to model briefly and they both approved. They didn't question my workaday Dansko sandals with it, but Saturday when I told my three bookclubmates about my plans for the purse, they wanted to see the dress, and later when they saw (and strongly approved) it, they hated the sandals with it. RDC agrees that they are "too big" for such a dainty dress.
AEK has my same sandals but in bone, which I thought was too close to the dress color (and privately considered to teeter between white leather and cringeful taupe). Maven suggested black, since the purse has black in it, and I have the sandals in black too but I don't like black shoes with pale colors. Scarf suggested red shoes, for sassyness. But I am not sassy, and I do not believe Cynthia Heimel's suggestion that all you need are white sneakers, black boots, and red heels. I would not be comfortable in red shoes. I would consider, say, celery- or lime-colored shoes (oo, I sound like Treehorn's mother, trying to find a hat that matches her dress, in just the right shade of green). But not red.
Then I remembered my linen slingback sandals, "natural" colored linen and thinly trimmed in brown leather. I can walk and dance in them, they are dressy and belong to that small number of shoes I keep in their boxes, and they do good things for my legs.
Sunday RDC and I stopped for a bite of sushi after the gym, and as we walked home we passed Scarf and a visiting friend of hers whom I had met on Friday and liked immediately. I abandoned RDC and accompanied them shopping, where they tried to suggest wedges and stacked heels and toe-floss and t-straps and shoes that tie up the calf and Scarf insisted slingbacks don't go with a sundress (?!) and I stood fast.
I am going to wear eyeliner to this event, and that is enough costuming for me. I am not going to wear garish shoes--garish in color or style--too. Plus if I wear the slingbacks, my additional refusal to have any pedicure that involves sloughing off my callouses (which I need to walk on) or putting make-up on my feet won't shame the local What Not to Wear collective. Based on photographic evidence, Haitch called the Dansko sandals atrocious with the dress, buth both she and my sister said the slingbacks, on the other hand (literally on the other foot, since I posed in one of each) were fine, so I'm calling myself done.
But it's awfully fun to have girlfriends (and a friend, and a sister).
I ventured into my first Sephora and allowed someone to brush a powder foundation on my face. While I stood there, another woman entered. She wore garments whose conservative cuts indicated her fundamental religious stance.
This interested me. She bundled her hair into a bun and wore a white net cap over that, and the garment's skirt skimmed the top of her feet, its sleeves ended past her elbows, and the collar buttoned closely at her neck. The whimsy of the fabric, in addition to the manner of her head covering, led me to assume she was Christian rather than Jewish or Muslim: white with multicolored polka dots in a pattern I would choose only for a romper for a toddler. She stood at a shelf inspecting products a few feet from where I stood, so I could see further that she wore white flip-flops, and makeup on her toenails--pearly pink translucence, but still color. I was befuddled: her body and hair disguised but nail polish? and looking at cosmetics?
And me, yeah, considering how foundation looks on me. What it looks like, applied by someone who supposedly knew what she was doing, is powder accumulating in and therefore enhancing the fine lines around my face: a lot more offensive than whatever is allegedly wrong with my 38-year-old skin.
Two puzzles.
We had reached Idaho Springs when a dread thought occurred to me. RDC was already annoyed with me for having to drive all the way back to the vet to drop off Blake's food--not only had I forgotten his supplies, all bagged and ready by the door, but also my phone, so when he noticed soon after I left he couldn't tell me. Oops. So I didn't say anything until we stopped in Frisco for lunch: I had forgotten my boots.
My Merrills are nine years old and leather, so arguably I needed new boots and maybe lighter hybrids anyway. We found me a pair of Asolos at Antlers and the crisis was, for a reasonable fee, averted. I could not have gone backpacking in hiking shoes, which I had packed, low and no ankle support.
Away from Aspen, I remember how beautiful it is; being there I know how much more beautiful it is than I remember. And I hadn't been there for two years, since Lou's wedding. My first time over Independence Pass, eleven years ago, was an adventure: hard rain had loosed a rock- and mudslide over half the road--my half--and I didn't know what the downhill car meant when it flashed its brights at me. Around a curve I saw: my half of the road was impassable, so I had to go into the oncoming lane, against the drop-off, without a guardrail. It hasn't been so interesting since, not even in the winter when the fun passes close and you have to stay on the highway.
If I were a bazillionaire, Aspen is where I'd live. It's unwaveringly liberal and unspeakably gorgeous. It's also not a little unreal.
Fr'instance, the whole of Pitkin County has fewer than 15,000 residents. It doesn't have a lot of people but it does have a Dior shop. (In Michael Palin's Around the World in 80 Days, he describes the place as looking like a small town but spending like Rodeo Drive.) This paragraph is foreshadowing.
If I hadn't been breaking in new boots--which luckily didn't need any breaking--this is the sort of hike I'd've worn hiking shoes with. As with the Hawaii trip, while I wait for RDC to process official pictures I rely on the kindness of Flickr strangers.
This picture was taken in late June; late August had less snow. We saw more green than this and autum wildflowers instead of spring.
It was heart-stoppingly specatcular, especially the weather. We had strong sun, light rain, heavy rain, and light snow, and all the clouds and variations in light that such changefulness warrants.
RDC went to do responsible things at the National Forest Service and I idled off to window shop and read by the Roaring Fork.
On the way to dinner the first night, we passed the Dior shop, and I fell in love with a gown in the window. Stormcloud gray--a few different shades of gray, all lovely and harmonious--strapless, floor-length, gathered into a slight train behind, and from the bodice poured a sweep of (chiffon?) in a paler gray. I had a lot of fun being in love with that dress until today, when in daylight I finally noticed that in its variation of gray was lettering, "Christian Dior" around the hip. Abruptly, my crush flopped.
I looked at jewelry, always on the search for new rings for my large hands and a bangle for my right wrist. In one shop I met a large hairy black dog named Jack and when the proprietor asked if anything caught my eye I said, "Just the dog." Only later did I realize I might have insulted his goods. Oops. In another store I met a Great Pyrenees the size of a Newfoundland, with legs as big as a lion's; my first words to it as I flopped down beside it were, "Hello, rug," because I mistook it for a polar-bear rug at first.
In the library, I updated my Pitkin County account (Colorado goes by counties, and I have seven bar codes on my card), borrowed a book, and continued down Mill Street to the Roaring Fork. Tragically, the riparian spatch I had in mind for reading was occupied, so I continued downstream along the 'Fork hoping to find another.
I had more of a walking along a river day than a lying along a river day.
And that was a great thing, because on Saturday I felt myself getting sick, and Sunday I knew I was sick. Hiking at 12,000 feet was gorgeous but more exertion at less altitude than I needed. Walking five miles along the Roaring Fork in the more abundant air at 8,000 feet, inhaling all the glorious scent of the black willow cottonwoods, healed me right up.
Or so it felt.
A mountain taxi brought us to the trailhead by 8:30. We hiked up Conundrum Creek to Conundrum Hot Springs, arriving by 2:30.
(Dogs met: a Vizsla mix that looked like a hound, named Muddy, and a half-blind heeler, Sammy. Another reason Aspen is great: dogs everywhere, in the stores and on the allowed trails.)
Sunshine and the magical exhalation of redolent trees had masked my illness the day before. After nine miles and 3,000 feet of elevation gain with 40 pounds on my back--despite more sunshine, aspen, and blue spruce--I knew I was sick. Damn.
We set up camp with our minimalist gear and sprinted for the springs.
For hot springs, Conundrum Hot Springs is neither very hot nor very springy. The main pool is merely a bermed area of creek, maybe two feet deep. Whatever it may lack in depth and heat, however, is far surpassed by its surroundings and more surroundings. Happily, the few people there during our stay knew better than to risk their health with bathing suits--though I'm just as glad that no cameras appeared either.
I was sick indeed if springs, nudey-dipping, scenery, and squeaking pikas didn't make me feel better. On the way up Conundrum Creek, we'd even seen a snowshoe hare, all brown except its gigantic white feet, and the creek and valley were spectacular, and we were seriously backpacking because here we had definitive proof of the age-old question of whether the bear shits in the woods. But I wouldn't let myself think about being sick. Well, except for when I told RDC I felt like Tucker, having to blow my nose on ferns instead of Kleenex. Tucker's Countryside
We admired flowers and stars and rockslides and boggled at people traversing a scree field on the way up Conundrum Peak. I discovered, not at all to my surprise, that I prefer a hole I have dug myself in nice clean dirt to campground toilets. We shivered in the springs and shivered getting out. RDC took photographs and I read The Persian Boy. We ate rehydrated "lasagna" and brushed our beaks with cinnamon-flavored toothpaste because that was the one travel-sized tube we had found. And I was not sick, damn it.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Hiking from Conundrum Hot Springs to Triangle Pass brought us through the most spectacular, eye-wrenchingly beautiful scenery I have ever beheld or imagined--and that's from someone who's seen both Kauai's Na Pali coast and Emlet laughing. Unfortunately, my health was not up to the task and I spent a lot of time looking at my feet. I was trudging, not hiking.
We passed treeline almost immediately and no thousand feet up has ever felt like so much to me. I had had a nice smooth shoulder in mind and when I finally saw the already steep trail angle up again for the final ascent, I gasped, "I can't do that!" and really could not imagine how I could. But I could, the way I had moved for the previous two hours: one foot ahead of the other, sometimes just ahead of the other.
At Triangle Pass, we rested, drank, and ate, and let the vistas back into Pitkin County and ahead into Gunnison County dazzle us. I was glad of the GPS indicating where Copper Pass ascended from the trail down to Copper Lake, because the trail itself didn't look like much. RDC wanted to go down into the bowl and up again closer to the Copper Pass, but leaving the trail, descending into the scree fields, looked like rockslides and severe injury waiting to happen.
I was steadier where the trail had washed away from the scree, leaving dirt, because all I could think of was rockslides and how the one best friend died in The Last Season. RDC found his footing better in the scree, because on his every footfall in the dirt, he felt himself--15 pounds heavier than I and with five more pounds on his pack--slip. I had held his hand on some stream crossings, not because I could keep him from falling but because that handhold is another point of reference for balance, and I did the same here. I could have traversed this bit on two points while being careful to lean starboard into the mountain rather than port toward the drop, but his being nervous and slippery frightened me onto a third point, my right hand. I went ahead, to scout footholds.
We both were supremely glad to reach Copper Pass with all of our bones and ligaments and backpacks in the right places. I had been so supercharged with adrenaline that I had actually breathed clearly, but on reaching the summit and comparative safety I clogged up again, and RDC had been charged enough to become jittery, which is exactly what he didn't want. But we had made it, and if I ever want to hike between Aspen and Crested Butte again I will not take that pass.
At Triangle Pass, I had already asked that we eliminate the detour down to Copper Lake. After the fright and delay the traverse between passes caused, I was even gladder now to face back into Pitkin County and down.
The landscape down from Copper Pass into East Maroon Canyon nearly compelled me to break into song--"The Hills Are Alive," as either Julie Andrews or Ewan McGregor did it, and of course the last scene of "The Sound of Music" with the von Trapps traipsing into Switzerland. It was beautiful enough that I wouldn't so violate its sanctity, of course.
We violated it a little: we tested the valley's echo, which was in terrific voice and reverberated for many seconds.
This valley looked and felt a little more like home. There was moss! and big trees! and fallen trees! and babbling burns and becks and brooks, though I am not allowed to say "brook" west of the Mississippi and perhaps not "beck" or "burn" at all. And a lot like Colorado: sunshine and mountains and big trees and contorted rock and lightning strikes and vistas and illegal cairns and no litter and creeks and criks. From the top of Copper Pass and for all the miles before the end of our trek, we had eyefuls of the Maroon Bells and sister peaks--not like home at all--and the beauty bowled us over from every new perspective.
Uphill is laborious but downhill is abusive. I had a physical the week before I left and came away with a referral to sports medicine and words like "meniscus" and "MRI" in my head, none of which did me any good here. We cranked right along when the trail approached level but both goosed gingerly along any descent.
We wanted to get far enough down and out that Thursday's trek wouldn't be all day. I could have continued past 4:30, I thought, but ahead of us the topographical lines began to run very close together: bad camping, too steep. Our first trailside exploration showed us dead snags, bear scat, and many game trails, and we pressed on. Just past a little stream that cross the trail, we found what was obviously a popular site. Not too popular: we hadn't seen another human for 30 hours. But frequented enough that perhaps bears would avoid it. Or perhaps prefer it, for scavenging.
Overnight I managed to sleep through a storm whose thunder shook the valley for long moments after every crack.
Thursday's hike down and out was a lot easier than the downward angle we'd begun on Wednesday afternoon: walking down, rather than hiking down and rocks. It was so easy, in fact, that it's a frequent horse trail, which meant the heady smells of aspen and spruce were sometimes overpowered. It had two great creek crossings that were fun but took, I thought, longer than they should have needed. But you have to take off your pack to loose your river sandals, replace it, change your footgear, and knot your boots (with socks tucked inside) around your neck such that they don't swing and upset your balance. The actual crossing takes no time, and next time crossings will not be the only reason I bring my trekking poles. Drying your feet with an already damp backpacking towel from water that's not only very pretty but rushingly cold and wetter than common is the other long bit.
When we were nearly down, we saw the road, the wonderful, dear road, and the periodic bus to Maroon Bells (no regular traffic is permitted). The bus, I suspected, could be a mirage. We waited at a campground for maybe three minutes before the next mirage arrived, and when the driver opened the doors I told him he was my favorite person in the world.
Back to Aspen, back to the Independence Square, and as RDC checked us in I carried both packs up to the room (by the elevator). The desk clerk was a little clueless about the one small bag we'd checked and I think needed all the minutes it took me to scurry (slowly) the three blocks to the car to get RDC's duffel and my wheelie. But he did produce the bag, and there was much rejoicing. Also there was showering. Sweet, sweet showering. And shampooing. And shaving.
We had a snack at the Jerome, a nap, and later a yummy light meal at Pacifica. I was not quite so tired as I was our first night in London, when I fell asleep sitting up three times and spoke as if inebriated, but I was finally allowing myself to be the level of sick I had suppressed for the past three days.
Have I mentioned the ducklings? Last spring in the Botanic Gardens Kal and I watched a clutch of duckings doze in such a heap that we could not accurately count them what with the odd leg sticking out, and we watched one duckling fall asleep so inexorably but inexperiencedly that it didn't tuck its beak in its wing but just let its head fall forward, and down, and down some more, until its head and neck rested on the tip of its beak. I was about that tired, if not as cute.
I spent a day in Aspen napping, reading, listening to books, and soaking in the hotel's rooftop hottub watching storms pass down the valley. I'd call it a waste of a day in Aspen except for the scenery and the sleep, neither of which I could get enough of.
In the late afternoon I achieved enough verticality to windowshop a little more. By the time RDC found me in a boutique, I was modeling a fabulous jacket. It might not have looked as good if I hadn't been wearing a brown linen skirt, but look good it did: luxurious soft fawn suede (fawn-colored, not made of--I think), lovely embroidery, foolish clasps closing the asymmetrical front, completely impractical and over the top. And beautiful.
The shameful thing is that its price, while ridiculous, was not out of range. It was out of sense and reason, but not range. For the price I'd rather fly somewhere--somewhere more exotic than Connecticut. But it reminds me of RDC's and my first Yule together, when I had fallen in love months before with a violet glass and worked "silver" perfume spritzer-flask thingie in a William Morris style, and I thought it was enchanting. We did not spend money on completely impractical and solely decorative things, except he did on this occasion. The difference in their prices and our reactions to them illustrates the change over the past 14 years. To be clear, no, I didn't get the jacket.
I had wanted to get s'mores from the St. Regis to bookend breakfast from the Main Street Bakery and Café but after dinner at whatever the restaurant now in the Howling Wolf's space, my energy was spent. More sleep.
We got up early and forewent another breakfast at the Café--blueberry pancakes at a communal table there is my favorite meal maybe anywhere--to get home and pick up Blake from camp. I wanted another nap before J's blessing ceremony that afternoon.
I did achieve laundry, but that was it.
The ceremony was lovely. She had insisted that she didn't need anything new because she had everything left over from Stick, but she is our dear beloved and Scarf wanted to mark the new arrival--especially since we all have such crushes on Stick.
We made a baby quilt, again, as we have done for all the babies. Mine was not a scene from a children's book but a moon-and-stars scene taken from a greeting card NBM sent lo these many years ago and that I have always found lovely. Several people did yoga-themed squares, including a wonderful book Kal found, a Babar book called Yoga for Elephants. It tells you how to hold your trunk in specific poses. Yoga and elephants both are good for J.
Also we each brought a bead to string together, that probably she won't be able to have with her during the baby's arrival but anyway. And London played a piano piece and Sherry danced a belly dance. I learned only this year that belly dance is usually performed not only by women but for women, during womanly rituals like marriage and birth.
And that was all the energy I had for on Saturday, and besides, the pregnant one and the recently hatched one didn't need me breathing on them too long.
I managed banana bread and chocolate-zucchini bread for the block party. It was really nice, especially since in the past year I've spent so much time on the next street over. Even during the party, Drums came over to borrow one tool or another, and Stick's father walked Stick and the dog past and he showed off the new stroller--that's right, J admitted that the one new thing they would like is a double stroller, so that was our group gift. Dodger the dog kept snapping at yellowjackets and eventually caught one, poor thing. Later in the day I had Stella over one leg and Rosie on the other. Stella I love, a golden retriever, but Rosie, a six-month-old black Lab, was new to me. She rented Dodger's downstairs apartment. The people too, course, but though we spent hours with them I'm not quite at alias level. Oh, and since we were only two houses down we occasionally heard Blake yell when he happened to hear one of us. I fetched him and set his cage on the porch wall, where he immediately got happy and only sweetly chatty rather than frustratedly yelly, even though he was still inside his cage, and we stood in the front yard rather than closer to him, and the presence of dogs.
Another four hours there and I was tired again. I came home at 7 but RDC was there until after I was in bed: we do have great neighbors.
Thursday night I didn't go to bookclub to discuss Lynne Withey's Dear Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams, partly because I had whatever to do before leaving today and partly because in anticipation of its being the evening before leaving I hadn't made the effort to finish the book. It would have been a good companion to the first volume of David McCullough's biography of John Adams that I recently finished listening to, if the first 100 pages had said more than that she missed her husband and if it hadn't had three glaring grammatical errors, just that I noticed.
I had made a list so packing went well. I would have mailed my dangerous make-up (a lot more dangerous to me than to anyone else) had my mother been in town, but she and her husband were away. I was indulging in expensive nostalgia and girliness, so Fedexing a small box of items vital to my vanity like contact lenses and Burt's Beeswax wasn't that much worse. To me, an eyelash curler is much scarier than lotion, but I don't make the rules.
The flights went well, but I reserve the right to be grumpy about nondirect flights within the contiguous states. I had a long enough wait in Cincinnati to eat, and I chose Outback Outpost as the one sit-down place. It's an airport restaurant: people do not dine there but only fuel, and therefore having to wait 30' before even ordering narrowed my eyes. Don't tell my sister but I asked for the bill when the server deigned to bring me my meal and tipped far less than 20%.
I landed at 8:45 and was zooming away from Bradley by 9:35. With a stop at my mother's house to pee and brush my beak and of course add contact lenses, I arrived at the Hideaway, previously the Elephant Walk, by 10:15. Since I would never speed, clearly I discovered a tesseract.
Everyone looked great! I recognized almost everyone immediately, the exception being the woman who was new in eleventh grade, whom I got on the second try. I made a circuit of the room, because that's what I do, and talked to everyone. My late arrival meant I missed two people I hoped to see the next night. One of the five intraclass couples, who've been together since freshling year of college and comprise a girl who was particularly friendly to me and my first kiss (ninth grade), sat at the bar side by side so cozily I had to ask them if they had seen each other since graduation. Another conversation that lasted longer than a chat was with my ninth grade crush, who was trying to figure out how to fold sailor hats out of paper, 25 of them for his son's fourth birthday on the morrow.
We all closed the bar at 1 and because the weather was bad, the planned "hike" at Devil's Hopyard was scratched. This felt a tiny bit like high school, when a select few made the decision for the masses who might not know about that decision. Being one of the select few who was told, even if I didn't vote to cancel--what's a little rain?--didn't make me feel any better about the ones who didn't know. However, now, unlike in high school (when I wouldn't've known anyway), I protested, questioning whether everyone knew who ought to.
So Friday was successful.
Instead of a hike in the nearly nonexistent rain, there was breakfast. When CLH called to say hi and good morning, I told her we were in Pat's Kountry Kitchen in Saybrook, selected as a nearby spot that could seat us all, but yeah. Kountry. Amy, Kim, Shaye and I were there for about an hour before another four people showed up, and in that time we had coffee and stories. Also they waved to the phone and yelled hi to my sister.
Surprisingly to me, Kim and Shaye didn't remember one of my favorite stories--a funny one that also was a mother thing. So for all three of them and not just Amy, I told the story. In ninth grade, one Tuesday or Thursday when classes ran 4-3-2-1-7-6-5 and we therefore had Ancient & Medieval History first period, before Latin, they were dreading a test and not wanting to take it and therefore invented National Latin Teacher's Day. They left that particular teacher's room--easily, I'm sure--to use the payphones, and actually got their mothers to go to the store and buy cake and soda and decorations and bring them to school before 8:57 a.m. The Latin teacher bought it, and we had a party that day instead of the test. Shaye didn't remember that but she did remember the "Who Died?" incident, sympathetically for my gaffe as well as for the others' bereavement.
Relating this to my sister on Monday, I said that of course the thing that strikes me most about this is not that the teacher bought it or went along with it but that these people got their mothers to go along with a scheme that involved their children's evading a test and their own running unplanned errands with unplanned money at the drop of a hat and quick-like.
I asked if anyone had got in touch with Ken, who left after eighth grade to attend a private high school but still lives in town. Yes indeed, many had. I told how I had invited him to junior prom (we didn't have a senior prom) because maybe, unlike every boy actually in my class, he didn't hate me, and because maybe he'd like to see people and I would be an acceptable means even if he did. Most of my best stories are told against myself, and so I told these three women that I wouldn't tell them how many boys I asked to prom before finally giving up and going stag (four), and that when Ken said no I heard only rejection but that the conversation--burned with shame into my memory--probably indicated something else. The way I recall it, anyway, was that I looked up his number and called him and asked him, and far from saying no immediately, he went to ask permission; and when he came back to the phone what he said was no and "I guess I've had too much fun this year." At the time, I heard only "no," but the fact that he had to ask his parents or father and returned with that line eventually--over years--suggested to me that his father, not he, was the one saying no. My three companions agreed that that was likely--and that was reassuring even after 20 years and I don't care.
The classmates who joined us eventually happened to be four of the several boys who participated, in twelfth grade, in a Spirit Week talent show, and their talent was a beauty pageant in pathetic drag with tennis ball boobs. Indicating just what sort of popularity contest the school was, they won, rather than the 10th-grader who did a traditional Cambodian dance that took actual talent; or Bruce, Erin, and Anne's rendition of "They Are Naked and They Do Dance," which was actually funny; or--someone else remembered this--Lynn accompanying herself on guitar singing the Eagles' "Desperado," which took both talent and bravery. But I chortled, "No, that wasn't Lynn who sang 'Desperado.' That was me, describing my attempt to get a date to prom!" and I cracked up. Everyone else laughed--thank goodness--with Shaye saying she loved how I laughed at my own jokes.
After breakfast, which lasted three hours, I went to the lake. Despite its being the Saturday of a holiday weekend, no one was there, perhaps because of the weather. The Forest Service has built a retaining wall to keep the bare little stretch of not-beach from eroding into the lake, which makes nudey-dipping much easier: you can grab your towel, and suit if need be, without leaving the water, though two inches of water doesn't disguise much. But no one was there! So I swam happily for a while.
I stopped at Kenny's market to add my voice to the throng inviting him, encountered a closed Phoebe since it was after 1:00 on a summer Saturday, walked along the boardwalk at the DEP (and no one rents kayaks at Ferry Landing that I saw), drove to the beach and wrote for a while, and finally bought a sandwich and brought it home to eat. I ate on the deck in the now-heavier rain because I find the house so oppressive even without other people in it. Besides, I like rain and trees and wind, which the house didn't provide from the outside.
The most frustrating aspect of my preparations late that afternoon was locating the iron. I remembered my mother recently ironing in what she now refers to as her sewing room, so I looked there first. This is the only reason I looked in closets, but not the only reason I noticed that boxes in many closets were labeled "Store in [whichever] closet next to [whichever other] box" but not labeled with, say, their contents. Whatever, it's not my house. Unless her wardrobe really requires no ironing such that the appliance is tucked away in one of the unhelpfully labeled but neatly arranged boxes, my mother's iron was not in the main living quarters--should I call the Kim who lives within a half mile?—and then I remembered laundry. A miracle worker did do some damn thing or other in the cellar which has rendered it nearly dry in the five years since, and that's a good thing even at the cost of the floor being a foot higher than previously. (Before that, the laundry machines were on a platform three feet up and you stood in the stairwell with the washer door opening nearly into the ceiling, often surrounded by two feet of water.) The improvement is not quite so good a thing, nor is the room's height quite sufficient, to justify the iron and the ironing board being set up for use there, with a towel on the cement floor to cushion the feet a bit. But a cement cellar is tough to torch, I grant, and the clothes are right there out of the dryer. At any rate I ironed my dress.
After that my luck was good, beautifying-wise. The one thing I hadn't had was a haircut, because I knew I'd wear it up anyway. A cut would only delay its getting long enough to put up easily, and I have missed that since June. But I got it arranged, back if not up, and not even in April's updo that was more pins than hair. The Egypt Game I put in a small braid at one side, rolled the two sides back and secured them with clips, and used a plain faux tortoiseshell barrette to make a flat ponytail, hiding the clips. Plus I'd got a manicure and, heaven forgive me, a pedicure. Yes, I wore makeup on my feet, a pink so pale it was barely other than nail color, but shiny. The eyelash curler didn't pinch my lid. The eyeliner went on neatly. The mascara didn't clump. It was decidedly weird. So off I went.
The other best current story (I really liked my "Desperado" line) happened Saturday evening. My ninth grade crush, I decided, had not signed my yearbook, and I wanted him to do so now. We swapped books and, pen in hand, I flipped his open to my picture, and there in my likes and dislikes I saw that he had underlined the initials JPS. I wish I could cock a single eyebrow--and Saturday night I discovered that one of my classmates can do that, though now I forget who, Laura?--and asked him why he underlined that bit.
"Jon-Paul," he replied. "He was always saying you had a crush on him and here you confessed. He underlined it."
"Tom, that's my dog."
He and I and people overhearing laughed, and we discussed how I was going to have to go break Jon-Paul's heart. So I found Jon-Paul elsewhere in the room and showed him the initials and told him I'd have to douse the torch he'd long been carrying, because that was my dog. So my 20-years-on signature in Tom's book spells out Jessiman Pachaug Shadow, so there will not be further confusion.
But when the time came for a group shot, and I was among the last to join the group because I had been using the mic to herd everyone toward the bar, I was therefore at the front, and got to sit right next to Jon-Paul. I cooed at him and my luck.
I didn't have a crush on Jon-Paul in high school, no. I did have a crush on Tom, when he was new, a short-lived one and possibly memorable only because he broke my little 14-year-old heart. I asked him if he remembered what he called me, and yes he did. Ha! And where the name came from, and he said it was a television show.
So I am not the only one with Poppin' Fresh Memory. But I think that I remember so much school stuff because I don't have a lot of more fun, more meaningful, off-campus personal interactions to remember instead.
It was a lovely time. I would have been glad of more people, and the two people I missed on Friday night didn't come to Saturday night. Plus there was a weird thing by which the manager of the restaurant was one of our classmates, I think trying to remain incognito, successfully until a classmate's spouse told the organizer who'd been arranging the event for months with this woman, who she was. I think she didn't appreciate being outed. Or perhaps she felt she'd been slighted by the organizer, who in my opinion was in no way obligated to know that Generic Name X was Generic Name Different LastName. Whatever.
Shaye told me that Saturday afternoon when they went shopping and dishing after breakfast, they were talking about me--about how cool I was, and had I been this cool in high school? Answer: not really. I am glad I spent my high school years alone. Less peer pressure. A proving ground: could I think for myself, and what thoughts would I come up with?
The bit of current peer pressure I enjoyed succumbing to concerned shoes. I searched Zappos.com for the first time. Red was out for certain, Scarf's best efforts notwithstanding, but I filtered the site for green sandals, slingback mule or slide, and found a fetching pair of celery-colored slides, tooled leather with a stacked kitten heel. The footbed was outlined in what looked like pinking, a last pretty detail. This pair of shoes was waiting for me at work when we returned from Aspen, and they fit comfortably out of the box. It was at this point I scheduled a pedicure.
Gretchen and her husband are both gorgeous. And they could dance! When it came time for the group picture, I stopped midway across the room realizing my plan to go to everyone individually was not efficient and asked the deejay to use his mic. I started calling everyone by name, classmates and companions (a feat of name-remembering that apparently impressed people). I called him, who had been politely reluctant to join a class group picture, and a Kim corrected me. So I called him again, using the moniker by which he was better known: "Hot guy who can dance, get in the picture."
A Kim and I could remember the third girl who shared a room on the eighth grade trip to D.C. but not the fourth. I'll have to look through the 1982 yearbook. She and I danced swing together, while another Kim and I did salsa. I led the swing and followed for salsa. Later: it was yet another Kim (a tenth of the girls in the class were named Kim), who actually graduated with us, unlike the girl we could remember, who did not.
The only other couple who danced, until right at the end, was Laura and her husband. They maybe weren't hot but they were enjoyable to watch, actually knowing some steps, and he was my favorite non-classmate spouse. Her smile is the same and her manner, and my particular anticipation to see her again paid off.
The deejay asked what we wanted the last song to be, and after rapid discussion we asked for "Tainted Love." The entire evening had been '80s music, of course, but we hadn't had Soft Cell yet. Jodi and I blared at each other "and that's not nearly all" like we'd been dancing together all along and not last (and first) together at the AFS Cruise to Nowhere after twelfth grade.
Confusingly, two songs followed the announced last song. I don't remember the penultimate but the deejay, announcing that his time was now thoroughly up, said he'd chosen a special last song, "from 1987!" to groans that evidently did not change his mind. He played that hideous and anachronistic and absolutely dreadful song from the hideous and dreadful movie "Dirty Dancing." Mass exodus from the dance floor.
I joined Ken, a Kim, and Connie's conversation, and Kim admired my shoes (which are, in fact, super). Connie said she could never wear shoes without backs, and Ken admired how I could dance in them too. I said something or other about how I was never a girl about shoes until I discovered mules and slides, and I'm still not much of a girl. Kim said in a tone that nearly pat me on the head, "Thirty-eight years old and finally a girl. All grown up." I grinned. Ken said my ungirlishness seemed like me, that I was always kind of a bohème. Now, this is interesting, because however true that statement is, and I like to think very, I cannot think that I could express it before the end of eighth grade, when our acquaintance stalled. But his correct impression of me goes along with his immediately recognizing me that afternoon. He also asked what sports I do, because I looked like I do something. Possibly he said this after seeing the racerback tanline on my back, but his saying that was an opening to mention the triathlon. He also said something about the success of my anti-aging campaign. Wasn't he delightful?
When I walked into the market Saturday afternoon, his aunt was at the register as ever and I asked her if Kenny was in--the Ken my age, 38. He was. I walked to the deli counter and in a few moments he emerged. "Hi Kenny," I said, and he, not to be outcooled, immediately returned, "Hey Lisa." Just like Zaphod and Ford (did I just uncool myself?) Now, granted, he probably had heard from Amy and maybe others that I was due in town, but still. So there was that. Also Saturday night, Chris told me that when I walked into the bar the previous evening he would never have known me. I leaned to kiss his cheek. "I'm serious!" he protested. "So was the kiss!" I hadn't suck out his tongue by the root, for heaven's sake, but affectionately kissed his cheek. Whatever.
Both Ken's immediate recognition and Chris's non-recognition made me tremendously happy. I've known Kenny since infancy, and though I forget whether he went to Mrs. McGovren's nursery school, we were together certainly from kindergarten through eighth grade. Chris was either new or new to me when the elementary schools combined in middle school. I like that Kenny recognized me from when I was a cute little kid and that Chris didn't recognize me from my awkward teens. Besides, that weekend I was prepared to be tremendously happy with everyone.
A Kim said something flirtatious or something to Ken and I continued the flirt when she'd turned away, asking why he hadn't responded. He said he made a living reading body language and unspoken cues and would not have, and I understood he meant Bruce's reaction to Kim's remark. I mention this only because it has bearing on something otherwise unrelated that followed:
Another reason I could have spent a few more hours in Ken's company was another form of validation. I mentioned staying at my mother's house, and how with her away it was easier. He nodded, "I can see that," whereupon I apologized, because no one wants to spend an evening listening to me complain about my mother. "No, it wasn't that," he assured. It's just that my mother comes into the store occasionally and he tries to engage her and joke with her, as he does with most people usually successfully, and he has never been able to connect with her. "So I figure she might have been hard for someone like you to grow up with. I can imagine the fun quotient just wasn't there."
Good lord. Of course none of my friends can meet my mother without prejudice, because even if I don't bitch about her incessantly anymore I do still stress about her plenty. So for someone who knew me from infancy, who perceived a few other true things about me from an hour of company after 24 years of no communication (aside from the botched invitation, which I successfully resisted mentioning), and who has had his own independent experience of my mother even after her second husband ameliorated her somewhat, to observe that simple truth, was tremendously gratifying. It's not all in my head! Just like that, he jettisoned a piece of emotional baggage. Sweet man.
This later conversation happened at the bar we retreated to when the restaurant kicked us out between 11 and 11:30, and there we stayed until closing at 2. As we left the bar, I crowed that I was turning over a new leaf: closing two bars in two days! Bruce wondered if that was a good leaf to be turning, and a Kim asked if I was okay to drive. I cracked up: "I've had nothing but club soda all night!" and she cracked up, because she was not okay to drive (but Bruce was).
Thus Saturday went well too.
Sunday morning I managed to get to the coffee shop for coffee, even though Kim and I wondered why we weren't going to Kenny's for coffee. I stumbled in, and Shaye observed that I looked like I had just rolled out of bed. Her teasing comment was absolutely fine, both because in fact I had and because she had observed equally accurately the evening before that I looked fantastic.
I bought coffee and a doughnut for $2.12. Two dollars and twelve cents, people! Small towns, sheesh.
Also I got to meet some offspring. RDC and I have opposite impressions of Denver, him that it's blonder than Connecticut and me that it's not. He grew up in a town predominately Italian and Jewish, and I grew up in Old Lyme, and this morning I met five blindingly blond children. Iseult of the White Eyebrows blonde. Whew.
Afterward I called my math teacher to see if I could invite myself over. I could and I did. RCS and Ms. RCS, whom I struggle to call by their first names as I have been further invited to do, and I had a lovely visit. I was proud to find myself (and RDC and Blake, in a recent Yule card) on their fridge.
And that was the end of the reunion and Old Lymeing, and presto, the rain had cleared into perfect blue. I returned to the lake and had a proper swim (Saturday I'd forgotten my goggles) before driving up to visit RPR and our little girl. SFR tells fascinating stories, compellingly listenable-to-able, wholly nonsensical, impossible to follow, and charming. We sat by the outdoor firepit and talked, and MPR did all baby-wrangling and cooking so RPR and I could talk for five hours. And we did.
A long talk at night made up for leaving early in the morning so I could spend a full Monday with my sister.
We did some yardwork and I performed some camel duties by carrying bags of mulch thither and yon. I think I should give her a wheelbarrow. Her various gardens look great, all full of flowers, even cuttable ones. We shopped so I could be the one to tote the 50-pound sack of birdseed (she still doesn't like birds but the feeder is for Kitty's amusement, of course).
In the dingy, scary, throwback store (Ocean State Job Lot, not that we were in Rhode Island), she pointed out a thing I haven't seen for nigh on 30 years but that nonetheless immediately made my entire skin tense. I might even have turned my head away as I closed my eyes to scurry past, and I know I didn't go back later and look at the product more carefully. My sister told me it took tremendous ovaries to invite Ken to prom after not seeing him for three years, and maybe it did, which means I was braver at 16 than I am at 38. What she pointed out was a basket of sticks of cocoa butter.
The summer before third grade, I jumped into a pool backward off its deck, but not far enough backward, and I slammed my chin into the edge with a noise my father remembers sounding like a rifle shot. I got three stitches that day, and to keep the laceration supple and facilitate healing, I was given--is this how backward 1976 was?--a stick of cocoa butter. Not a lotion, not an oil, but a solid less spreadable than butter, Play-Doh, or putty. To apply, by rubbing, onto a wound that had taken stitches to close. I had nightmares for months about an ogre who would turn me upside down and apply salt and pepper to the site and eat the contents of my skull from chin to crown.
Anyhow, that's how backward this store was, that it still stocked that. But I bought from it a nail buffer, because I admit with shame that I like how the manicure looks.
We had lunch at Norwich Marina, right against the water, and that was pretty. Norwich does have potential, having been poor long enough that not much was built in the soulless modern style. It has great fin-de-siècle brick commercial buildings, and Colonial, Federal, Victorian, and Craftsman houses, and not a few that look like the Four-Story Mistake.
At lunch CLH told me about a movie she'd recently seen called "In Her Shoes," a chick flick for sisters, and when we got home it was on so we watched it and got all teary together. That's so fun. In the evening there were brownies and ice cream for dinner, and she slept on the couch and I on the floor (with Benedict Kitty further deserving her name by sleeping with me instead of with her mother) until an alarm rang at 3:30.
Thus ended a lovely little getaway vacation, with a 6 a.m. flight.
I got to work shortly after noon by airport bus most of the way and taxi the last little bit, found almost everyone left for the meeting, and just the one task I'd come in to do yet to be done. I was done by 2 and ÜberBoss, who agrees that sleeping on planes doesn't really count, let me go. I have the best bosses.
Some of RDC's colleagues were in town today. I missed the one visiting family in town who came over for lunch (though RDC relayed to me her admiration of house and bird) but not the two for dinner. One I hadn't met before but the other is a long-standing favorite. I got caught in the rain on the way home from work, and after greetings called through the front door and then another through the side window--"I'll wait to hug you until you're dry"--he went back on that good plan and squeezed me as I passed through the kitchen.
I dressed more up for dinner than the weather or occasion called for, but I wanted RDC to see me all gussied up as I was last Saturday night. This huggingest colleague, always ready with a compliment, also appreciated it.
I like other huggers and am so glad RDC understands the difference between affection and flirting. Kenny had said that, if he was counting, the goodbye hug might have been the fourth one I'd adminstered to him that evening. I don't think he minded. I hope he didn't mind. Anyway, we four had a lovely dinner and conversation at Parallel 17. When Chat asked about my bike commute, he mentioned he was trying to sell his motorcycle because he was weary of attending funerals; and I was able to produce some statistics gleaned while proofreading the magazine about fatality rates and helmet use. I felt like Shelley in The Luckiest Girl when she realized she actually was using the biology she'd struggled to learn (for cooking, of course; the book's from the '50s).
When the colleagues dropped us off, I walked over to show the final ensemble to the What Not to Wear collective, and RDC came with me. I found Maven and Soccer at AEK's house--I hadn't seen AEK's invitation from earlier today for pizza and beer in the evening. AEK had seen the shoes but not the whole shebang, and the other two hadn't even seen the shoes. But they approved retroactively, so that was fun. They were watching "Princess Bride," and RDC asked after a bit, "Isn't this that movie you like?" I told him, just because it fit at the time, that he had six fingers on his right hand, and someone was looking for him.
London and Wolfman finally had their '80s party on Saturday. It was an absolute blast. Everyone's costume was great or at least funny.
RDC wore what he wore in the '80s--jeans (though current), a tie-dye t-shirt (from 1993), and his Levi jacket from 1985 ("Do you know where I bought this?" "Bob's Surplus?" Where else?) with the back panel painted black with a mushroom and Steal Your Face painted on that, and a bandana to cover his non-'80s hair. Thank goodness he donated his '80s tinted aviator glasses years ago and didn't grow the caterpillar.
In a last-minute shopping expedition with Soccer last night, I found a three-layer crinoline-and-lace skirt, à la "Like a Virgin," a black (of course) Ramones t-shirt, and--this was a great find--a pair of Converse High-tops, not in black or my own white but in preppy pale green lined with pale pink. I saw them first and since I had resolved not to be preppy or prep/New Wave ("Totally different head--totally"), I decided to do "casual punk" the way "casual black tie" means you can facetiously wear a flashing bow tie or white socks. I had to be, since the Ramones shirt was actually a "Rock and Roll High School" movie shirt and I doubt any self-respecting punk dressed like Madonna. Black tights that I cut off, because I thought they were footless but they weren't, and white socks. My high school class ring (which I didn't even think to consider for the reunion) and my earrings were my only actually '80s relics. The earrings were faux bronze Greek dramatic masks, smile on the right and frown on the left, that I have barely ever worn for fear of ripping my earlobes. I'm not sure that they scream '80s but they do date from 1985. I considered wearing the t-shirt from the 1987 Peter Gabriel concert at Meadowlands, but it wouldn't've worked: I still listen to So, and not just from nostalgia. Ideally, I would have been either Claire Standish or Alison Reynolds from "Breakfast Club," but it wasn't to be.
The hosts were Cyndi Lauper and Axl Rose, and also in attendance were Joel from "Risky Business" complete with candlestick microphone, Alex from "Flashdance," Maverick from "Top Gun" (and I pretended to be weirded out whenever Maverick and Joel stood next to each other), Indiana Jones (whom we made dance with us girls during "Whip It," because of course), a Robert Palmer girl, and a few Valley Girls and punks. Also, my ideal man in college--faded jeans rolled to a peg, black loafers, oversized thick white Oxford, and oversized houndstooth blazer. Him I called Flock of Seagulls, because he looked like the one on the couch in "Pulp Fiction."
The best punk was Maven, because of her makeup. I tried to put a lot of black shit around my eyes, like Alison Reynolds in "Breakfast Club" (speaking of black hightops), but I don't actually possess any such makeup. I knew I should have gone over to someone's house for dress-up. She had a plaid miniskirt and kick-ass boots and black tights with glowy skulls printed on them and a Kiss t-shirt. Kiss! on a punk! That killed me. Soccer wore a black velour pantsuit and a gold zebra print jacket she bought at a flea market on the way up to the cabin last year, and animal print shoes and belt, with a sideways ponytail. I think she's the one who left three lines of blow on a mirror on the back of the toilet.
London and Wolfman had found a gizmo at Target for twenty bucks that had Pac-Man and some other games on it, and they had a poster for blacklighting (is that '70s? did that carry over?) and Rubik's Cubes and an exceedingly fine playlist.
When Maven and I started slow-dancing to "Sister Christian"--which last weekend's bad deejay didn't play but which was audible at the coffeeshop the next morning, yeesh--a male voice piped up that finally this party was getting good. We--the women, rarely a man except Wolfman--danced. After "Addicted to Love" for the Robert Palmer girl, Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll" for Joel, and "Man-Eater" for Alex, the dance floor was open. Gary Numan's "Cars," of course, the sine qua non of '80s pop. Bow-wow-wow's "I Want Candy" and Toni Basil's "Hey Mickey" and Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl" and Tommy Tutone's 867-5309" and John Parr's "St. Elmo's Fire" (those two "artists" I had to look up) and Prince's "I Would Die 4 U" and the Pet Shop Boys' "It's a Sin" and the Romantics' "Talking in Your Sleep" (which I always thought was Hall & Oates) and Animotion's "Obsession" and A-ha's "Take On Me" and and Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" and Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" and Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and of course Simple Minds' "(Don't You) Forget about Me" and Michael Jackson's "Thriller," and Salt-n-Peppa's "Push It" and I am very proud of RDC for sticking it out and not running away screaming.
When Big Country's "In a Big Country" came on, I hadn't expected it--the playlist was so sugargum pop that the closest thing to alternative previous had been R.E.M's "It's the End of the World as We Know It"--so I shrieked with glee and proceeded to jump around happily for the next 3.5 minutes yelling lyrics. But then someone put on Van Halen's "Jump!" and I had to jump around again (though not "sing") and I decided I have lost significant aerobic capacity since the triathlon, which is the last time I ran.
But I had enough left in me for the Clash's "Train in Vain," though London Calling is 1979 and, unlike "Cars," does firmly belong to its decade.
After that someone started streaming from a Rhapsody account and there was harder stuff. Journey probably doesn't count as hard but it was for me in high school, and the Robert Palmer girl and I heartbrokenly emoted during "Separate Ways." After that came some Motley Crue and Def Leppard that I sat out, and Foreigner's "Jukebox Hero" which is one song I probably really hadn't heard in 20 years, and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine," which I did not sit out--because here was my chance to dance with Axl Rose!
Then it was 1:30 and we left, but that was the third time in eight days I had been out partying past my bedtime.
This kind of thing is best enjoyed only rarely, and I could not have such a party myself unless RDC and Blake both got lobotomies (both of them hate '80s music, with RDC saying even Eric Clapton wrote shit in the '80s and Blake just not finding a lot that is bob- or chatter-worthy), but if I did I would also have played Violet Femmes, both "Blister in the Sun" and "Kiss Off," and Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and Modern English's "Melt with You." I listen to Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel and the Waterboys not even from nostalgia, but those feware definitive '80s songs everyone should know and sing. Which reminds me, there wasn't any Echo or the Bunnymen either.
But it was a lot of fun.
An early Hallowe'en party last night. I stole an idea from last weekend's '80s party: I was a Robert Palmer chick, since I had the dress, stockings, and heels; and because it was a Hallowe'en party, I was a dead one. A Robert Palmer chick already has the deathly pallor, so in addition to the thick red lipstick and nailpolish I added three drops of blood down my chin. I bought press-ons because my actual nails are not stupidly long and I painted them and walked away: this is how I am applying nailpolish from now on, when my nails are off my fingers. Also I wore false eyelashes. That's three nights of makeup in three weeks, though costume makeup isn't so bad.
RDC wavered about whether he was going to go such that by Saturday noon he didn't have a lot of costume options. I reminded him of the Cat-in-the-Hat hat we bought at a Dead show circa 1993. He considered this, and decided to add tire tracks so he could be Roadkill Cat-in-the-Hat. I drew whiskers on his face and blackened the tip of his nose, and pinned to his black turtleneck and pants the red velvet bow-tie and black velvet tail I made for the hat's first year.
This morning I went to Stick's second birthday party, at the gorilla playground in the park. We had bagels and fruit salad and breakfast burritos and cake and dug with toy trucks in the wood-chip surface of the playground. I think only the adults swung on the swings, though. Today is beautiful, all blue and green with autumnal touches of yellow. A perfect day for a party in the park.
I went to two parties this weekend, only half the number I was invited to. I don't even recognize myself, and not just because of make-up. It's a good change.
I saw in the Tattered Cover's announcements recently that an old acquaintance of mine from DU, since moved to Ohio, would have a reading, so last night I went. Her short stories have touches of the same wit that makes her such a delight in person, and I saw some DU folk and had a delicious if short gossip afterward with my first DU acquaintance, and bought the former's book and Lemony Snicket's Beatrice Letters, and walked home with the woman from the nabe who works there. (I think I'll call her Michaela.)
When I got home I'm glad Blake was in a prancing, exploring mood, because the Snicket was not a lying-on-the-couch type of read. If the book gives any worthwhile clues at all to the mythos of the Unfortunate Events, I wasn't able to see past the marketing ploy I'd succumbed to to make sense of them. Also I didn't have an internet handy to check for anagrams. My laptop was closer than the Scrabble game downstairs, and all I was thinking was whatsisname from Rosemary's Baby whose last words were "The name is an anagram" and Rosemary Scrabbling out which name and what it meant.
Edited to add that Kal said she and Neal were in the TC last night looking for books for their honeymoon (British Columbia! I must connect them with Chat) and heard a laugh and looked for me. Obviously to no avail, but I'm glad to know my laugh is still distinctive. Also Kal knew I was going to be there. Also I should say that when she and I were in the library yesterday, I did not laugh or speak loudly.
Also when she came and told me that today, I realized anew that she's getting married! and I am her closest friend in Denver! so I get to throw her a shower! After that I might have got distracted from plans for Hecate Strait and a picnic reception in the meadow until she talked me down, pointing out that September a little early to fuss about a May shower. It's not too early to fuss about a July wedding, though, and that's another thing I get to do: go bridal dress shopping. Wheee!
Bookclub discussed The Secret History tonight. The cabin had to close early this year so in Soccer's backyard firebowl instead of in the mountains a couple of people disposed of their own secret histories. It's such an alien idea to me, admirable in those who can do it and want to but alien, deeply foreign to me. We told stories from journals and not from journals, and it was a good evening. After what seems like weeks of neighborlessness, it's a whirl of gaiety again: tomorrow yoga, Wednesday a haircut by AEK's person though I haven't decided how drastic and maybe the IMAX about ancient Greece afterward, Friday "Lion King."
We finished Island of the Blue Dolphins recently and I had to tell him the rest. Scott O'Dell kind of omits what happened to Karana's people 18 years before and to Karana herself: they all died of European diseases within weeks of reaching the mainland. Karana died, apparently of dysentery--can you imagine discovering fresh fruit for the first time?--in two weeks or months of removal. Around 1940, someone took a photograph of her decayed hut.
I scanned the shelves, wondering what next. King of the Wind, I decided, even though my edition's illustrations are in graytone instead of color. Sham's birth, with the shaft of sunlight, does not work in grays. But I don't mind the beating scene, which gave me nightmares, being toned down.
Can my memory be correct, of learning about vivid writing in third grade? Because I remember a textbook--one of the Lippincott readers that we used from first grade to fifth?--using the fight between Sham and Hobgoblin as an example of how to write a lively, descriptive action scene, and that I already knew it. What that memory, false or not, does mean is that I am reading RDC a book years younger than our normal fare. Reading Island for the first time in years I noticed that even its sentences are quite simple, but King is even simpler.
And I still have to get through the whipping scene.
But after that comes The Slave Dancer, which I don't currently own. When we read The Yearling a few years ago, Fodder-wing made me sadder than Flag. I expect that now the Middle Passage will make me sadder than that vicious man.
We walked through the gorgeous afternoon to eat tacos at Chez José, and on the way back discussed snorkeling and diving and detoured a block to the dive shop and wheee, signed me up for scuba certification. Just like that. I have an orientation class Tuesday night and a weekend-long course in two weeks and then an open-water dive in New Mexico next month.
And I was so proud of myself. As we sat down to fill out paperwork, I said to the instructor, who was the charismatic instructor-type as well as the ebullient diver-type that I am not a strong swimmer, that I am just at the point I can blow bubbles in the water. I kept a straight face for about two seconds, enough to see his face, before relenting.
If anyone pulls my mask off in the water I am sunk.
Kal and I took advantage of one of Dot Org's optional holidays and went shopping.
A few days later when I filled out the timesheet for the midmonth pay period, I replaced "Optional Holiday" with "Genocide Day." Last week we had two anti-Columbus Day speakers neither of which wants the day called "Indigenous Peoples Day" either, so "Genocide Day" was it. I understand not exalting Columbus, but both sides of the debate are disingenuous to allege that the point of the day is to celebrate Columbus as a person. When a holiday is about an individual, it's on the birth date--King, Lincoln, Washington, Christ--or if a saint, the date they were martyred, e.g. Patrick (though not Valentine). But neither is the advent of mass European arrival and conquest and American genocide worth celebrating. Anyway, it's an optional and we took it off, and the above was one of all my reactions to their spiels that I did not tender to the speakers.
So. The point of the shopping was to find a wedding dress. Besides the everyday absence of Haitch, her removal to Canada, New York (as McCarthy puts it) meant that I got only one day of wedding shopping with her. With Kal, I get another, vicarious wedding.
Our first stop was a shop out west on Alameda whose address sounded like the one where Trey's dress came from. It was. At this shop, during Trey's final fitting, I was instructed how to operate the dress, how to fasten the train up after the ceremony and photographs so she could walk and dance during the reception. (I just looked for mention of Trey's wedding, which happened on my birthday in 2002. Nonesuch. In sum: she got hitched in Utah and the next day RDC and I went to Arches National Park.) This time, Kal and I were assigned an adviser whom neither of us warmed to. Me, because her gray eye makeup made her look like she had flu; Kal, not as given to snap judgments about appearance as I am, because she didn't take seriously Kal's guidelines on materials and cut suitable to a meadow wedding or on price. That was one of my jobs, to be a bulldog, and I excelled.
She tried on dresses and I took pictures. I had brought my own wedding earrings for her to wear to add to the look. We left that shop having added only one dress to a list of possibilities. Also, while Kal was in the restroom I looked at the accessories. A saleswoman passed me while I posed with a thing on my head. "That's a cake topper," she told me. "Right now it's a tiara," I told Ms. No Imagination. Plus when Kal came out I tossed her a box: "I think you need this." It was something I might need to put in CLH's stocking: a tattoo-covering kit.
Our next stop was lunch, and then another shop in a strip mall, unprepossessing in location and appearance. But then we entered, and the saleswomen were nice and responsive.
And we found the dress! Yes we did.
Which I cannot describe, it being Not My Secret, except that it is perfect. This is what I love about wedding dresses, that everyone's dress suits her perfectly. Perfect in fit and fabric, perfect in figure and flatteringness, perfect for setting and budget, and best of all not requiring the corsetty bra thing. The one thing I had to take Kal to task about is that, while ivory is a chancey color for a guest to wear to a wedding, I could wear my ivory reunion dress if she had chosen a white dress. So inconsiderate of her! And now I have to shop and possess yet another summer dress. Woe am I.
And then Kal became the saleswoman's and my own personal Pancake Rabbit. The clerk, Sherry, asked if Kal was considering a veil, and she said no, not particularly, and told her that I had woken with a vision of Kal in a crown of daisies. Sherry asked if she could try one anyway, and she was kind and not overly solicitous and had even found The Perfect Dress based on two Kal and I had found ourselves (it combines what she liked best about the other two), and what is wedding dress shopping without sampling all the ridiculous excess, so Kal said sure. Sherry draped a veil at the back of Kal's head, and when Kal and I looked at the effect we both cooed. "Damn, are well ever well-socialized," was my opinion there. After that the floodgates were opened and I made Kal my personal Oolong, trying tiaras and other sparkly headgear on her and if dorayaki or whatever else had come to hand there's no telling what I would have balanced on her patient noggin.
And then we cooked up the penultimate gigantor zucchini with pasta and watched "Mrs. Henderson Presents."
A few weeks ago I trundled the wheelbarrow out front to bring 80 pounds of birdseed and six breadbox-sized bags of coffee grounds from Starbucks to the back. I didn't notice until I tried to wheel it away that the tire was flat, and a wheelbarrow tire has no tube, and when you mash a flat tire against its axle, it comes off its axel. And though bike tools will enable you to shove the tire back over its rim even without spokes to lock the thingies against, a bike pump is not sufficient to the task.
RDC was at a point between coats of paint on the breakfast nook and took it to a gas station, bless him. I'd still be out there with the pump. Also he aligned some bolts better and oiled it, necessary maintenance it would never occur to me to do.
I trimmed the vinca, which grew out over the sidewalk during the summer, so that in case it snows ever this winter, it won't become an ice nest, and barrowed it to the leaf pile. Plus I barrowed the huge pots on the porch columns back to the compost bins. After that the wheelbarrow could rest. I harvested the last of the chili peppers and a spaghetti squash, two cucumbers, a zucchini, and a mound of carrots.
RDC chastised me Saturday morning for fingerprinting chocolate on the pantry door, and I, the not-colorblind one, cleaned off the streak of basil, glad that glossy latex paint does not stain as readily as do fingernails and wooden spoons and the plastic bits of the food processor, and gladder that with RDC away all last week, I was able to harvest and process the basil without him to freak at the kitchen in the meantime. I had the damn Birnham wood in there with me, and did I think to hose it all over before I brought it inside? I did not. But the kitchen smelled great and I froze pesto in convenient ice cube-sized portions.
The next huge thing will be rendering all the carrots into soup.
Anyway, the garden's mostly out. I left the tomato plants for now, in hopes the squirrels do not eat all the green tomatoes currently on the vine--in vain hopes, since I found at least four victims strewn hither and yon. The other victim was my pumpkin. I am considering bringing it to a Halloween party later this month, because I find squirrels pretty scary at this point. But I figure the shorties will not find rotting pumpkin other than smelly and I agree with them enough that it just belongs in the compost.
Today I changed the windows, or most of them. Early, since it's not Standard Time yet, but we've wanted the heat on a few times and all next weekend I'm in class to get certified to scuba dive and the weekend after that, the usual weekend, will be too late. Only two sides of the house, the long sides, but the living room I can do from the porch and the back has only four that I need the ladder for. It was more important to swim.
A note to myself about books to query Loganberry Books about:
Solved: Oscar Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost." I came across this title while searching likely terms but dismissed the possibility as not a children's book and not the right period. But Jessie suggested it and at that point I bothered to search within its text for "paint." That's the one, and now I wonder how and when I came across it. A short story is not at all what I remember, and a genre I eschewed as a child. I guess I am content having false or unreliable memories as long as, when they're proven wrong, I realize it. But the faint visual memory of a (cover?) illustration and the stronger recollection of its being a book-length tale aren't resolving into Oscar Wilde. Plus it means "The Importance of Being Earnest" is not the first Wilde I read. Wild.
I am glad I at least remembered the ghost as being dryly witty: the vital Wilde characteristic.
I spent all of Sunday sitting very carefully propped on the couch in the den. I have no idea what I did except to move Crimson (baby sister to Scarlet, daughters of Begonia) from one side of me to the other while we were seated in an armchair at Saturday's party. And she is what, three? Not heavy, though weighing more than the fairy she was dressed as. RDC left the party to run errands and go to the gym, but my idea was to go for a run under the beautiful sky when I got home. Walking home I did notice that the path describing the park's perimeter was a quagmire of melting snow, but it was my back, which I noticed when I got home, that kept me housebound. I don't believe my resident back expert that stretching and massage are bad for muscle strain--for vertebrae and discs, maybe, but surely not for muscle. But neither is sitting in an armchair reading Shiloh letting whatever noninjury I hadn't noticed yet harden a good idea: I didn't stretch it out when it happened and after hardening didn't want to later, and of backrub I got none. Sunday morning I was worse, actually spasming, and this is the first time a night's sleep hasn't fixed me.
My distractions: My So-Called Life in the DVD player. Brainiac and several issues of The Nation. Bills to open and lots of filing to file, at which point I wished I had put in contact lenses so I wouldn't have to bend my neck to look at bills and check stubs and so forth and match them to their folders. The funnest distraction was, of course, beading.
I finished the innards of the As, R, and O and affixed them to their stockings, and that is regular and basic. But Jessie's been making earrings and that reminded me of how much I liked making stuff, even of, as my sister says, glue-shit-on-shit quality, and when I was recently in a craft supply store, I was pleased to see its enlarged bead section. So I broke free of regular and basic to make a pair of earrings with my new playthings.
Beading and sewing letters on stockings made oodles of sense when I had to hold my work on my lap and looked mostly straight ahead rather than bending my head to look down. But I got through the day, which was lovely. This might be my favorite day of the year, the day that stupid Daylight Saving Time goes away and time goes back to normal. It's always a long and satisfying day.
(Also, I am so very glad I violated my own rule and put the storms up two weeks early. It has snowed twice between then and now, the usual time, and balancing off a ladder with large panes of glass in fragile sashes was not going to happen today.)
I mentioned to my sister recently that Cassidy had been in the shop getting dents undented (I roll my eyes at anyone caring about a car's appearance, but RDC said they'd hasten rust) and a headlight fixed. CLH asked how the car got beat up, and I told her the small dent was RDC's fault and the big dent was a cowardly git's and the headlight was mine. Harkening to my 1992 accident, at which each of our parents projected their anger at me for causing it onto her, who was involved only as the reason I drove a) a long way and b) in the Middle of the Night, she asked, "Now remind me, how was this headlight my fault again?"
Hm, I hadn't thought of that. "Well, I had gone to that store to get a new swimsuit, and we all know what an athlete you are," which made her snort, "and I was on my way to see 'Brokeback Mountain,' which is about gay men, and your best friend was gay, and that's why it's your fault." Embellishing the blame to my sister with exploitation of our parents' homophobia: a great excuse.
When I was but a tot, I scurried crying to our mother that my big sister had bitten me. I showed her my arm, clearly imprinted with upper and lower tooth prints. She began to yell at CLH, who pointed out that the toothprints were all of baby teeth, while she had at least two adult teeth by then. I don't remember what happened to me for lying and trying to get my sister in trouble.
Another time, CLH wanted to play with Jennifer, HPV's older sister, alone. I don't know why HPV wasn't available to me: a path through the woods connected our houses. (Nearly; the neighbors across the road from the Vs' house didn't mind our scampering through as long as their German Shepherds knew us. I knew Rebel from puppyhood to his old age, by which time I used the path to get to only my babysitting family, but just now I realize that I should remember his mother's name too but don't.) Anyway, CLH told me that if I let them be, she would bring me gum. No gum was ever forthcoming, and CLH got in trouble for that.
Almost fourteen years of less than Usanly average consumption came to an end earlier this month. Our one-car-ism began involuntarily when Fugly died, and RDC might not have replaced Sugaree with the Terrapin in 1993 if I had been able to use its clutch, and if 1996 had been financially feasible at all, one-car-ism might have ended then. However, one-car-ism might still exist if Dot Org had not moved away from downtown or if I had changed jobs to remain on a busline or if I were more disciplined about biking when it's colder or wetter than I prefer. As RDC put it, he brought Cassidy in for engine maintenance (an earlier shop-visit than the body maintenance shop visit) and then had to get home somehow.
Enter Stella, another Subaru Impreza Outback, on the lot configured just as RDC wished ("and I even like the color"). We're already saying "your car" and "my car"; Banzai remains in Cassidy; RDC is unlikely to decorate Stella with a University of Connecticut sticker but I bet he'll get a "reality" fish (a skeleton); and I'm happy to have the old car because its tape deck means I can use my iPod, while Stella's lack of deck and an incompatibility between iTrip and the iPod means that RDC is stuck with CDs for the time being.
Kal and I read our lunches together for the first time in months. She's reading Nobody's Fool, and she loves it, thank heaven. I'm reading Ken Jennings's Brainiac, which is not only about his stint on "Jeopardy!" but also about trivia as a pursuit. I learned, with a gasp of dismay, that J.M. Barrie did not invent the name "Wendy" for "Peter Pan." Kal said she thinks she learned that from me (probably when we saw "Finding Neverland"), and I apologized, and she said she's since told someone else that, and I apologized again. Truth evidently is not the only virus out there. She giggled and would tell me what she giggled at (a great Nobody's Foolism, "Don't tell your mother," and when Sully's hourly rate went up). I told her Thomas Edison set prospective employees impossible irrelevant "general knowledge" quizzes, e.g. the population of Japan and the weight of air in a 16x12x12 room.
Another factoid in Brainiac is that Australia is not the only country with native kangaroos. New Zealand? I wondered. "Does he tell you, or leave you hanging?" she asked. He tells you, but at the back of the chapter, and I have to read to the end of each and get all my trivia questions answered at once. "Okay," Ms. Reasonable said, "but can I look now?" I handed her the book and she nodded sagely: "That makes sense." So of course I had to cheat and look prematurely: Papua New Guinea. Perhaps kangaroos can swim.
What else. I volunteered at MoveOn.Org tonight and felt unclean, because what I was doing was calling people (MoveOn members, but still) in their homes, disrupting their private lives. Letter-writing or nothing for me for me, and I wonder what sort of penance I can do. Data-entry for whoever maintains the no-call lists? My best contribution was two commas in signs on the wall: "This Week's Volunteers" and something like "Let's Set a Record." That's me, making the world safe for democracy one punctuation mark at a time.
I bought a pumpkin (because the squirrels ate mine) on Monday (instead of the weekend because of my back) and didn't carve it (because of my back) and then today when I got home it was 35 and I didn't feel like sitting on the cement sidewalk touching cold pumpkin guts. So intead of candle-lit jack-o-lantern and outside light, the markers of This House Open were a plain pumpkin and outside light. I wanted to say "universal" sign of "This House Open" the way Hawkeye (or Trapper) mocks Frank for deliberately misunderstanding a surrendering soldier: "Don't you recognize the international sign for 'touchdown'?" but of course trick-or-treating is no more universal than American football, poor old universe.
Because I did only survivalist grocery shopping on Monday at Whole Foods, I didn't get candy: Hallowe'en essentials full of high-fructose corn syrup are not on its shelves. On the way home I stopped at a regular supermarket whose shelves looked like Mother Hubbard's cupboards. I grabbed something that looked like Hershey's miniatures, but of course good stuff like that (well, 75% good because of Mr. Goodbar) was gone. They were milk chocolate with different nuts, except the substitute for Mr. Goodbar "I suck the most" was white chocolate.
Well, that could have meant only that I wouldn't eat the stash myself, which is fine, except that I was expecting Stick and his parents assume that he could be, as his mother is, allergic to nuts. So I set out a banana to give to him, hoping that, at two, he wouldn't realize what a cheat that is.
Stick was my first guest and definitely the cutest (no surprise). He was a lion, and when his father asked him to roar, he would say, at normal volume and in regular tone, "Rore." No growling, no gnashing of teeth, no need to warn Lucy and Susan to plug their ears. But still, insanely cute. Of the nine kids who came to the door, only two had hand-made costumes. I find this very sad. It's the costumes, the Eureka moment of realizing what I was going to be and figuring how to make them with whatever came to hand and the excitement of a parent finding the box the right size, that I remember.
But I didn't tell anyone to get off my lawn. (Maybe only because I don't have any lawn.)
This is the best spam ever. I feel like a bald soprano being led around by a leash:
"The shabby pig pen slyly cooks cheese grits for the apartment building
over the cocker spaniel. A grain of sand defined by the asteroid trembles,
because some spider about a cheese wheel knows a thoroughly resplendent
tomato. Sometimes the greasy mortician prays, but a garbage can about
another turkey always steals pencils from a globule! Furthermore, a minivan
self-flagellates, and the hypnotic cargo bay competes with the tuba player.
A garbage can is somewhat precise. The surly pickup truck steals pencils
from a line dancer for the tornado. Some wheelbarrow is ridiculously
mean-spirited. When the pathetic fairy rejoices, some earring gets stinking
drunk. A spider of a nation conquers the familiar microscope."
On the other hand, it reads kind of like one of my more random dreams. Usually I refrain but now I have to mention that yesterday I had a slash dream about Jondalar and Michael Jackson.
Since I brilliantly managed to leave my lunch on the kitchen counter this morning, I walked out for a sandwich at noon. As I waited in line, a coworker showed up a few places back. He is the primary author of Dot Org's weblog, an recent entry of which mentioned, in the context of addiction to PDAs, someone who admitted checking his Blackberry under the table while the president of the United States was speaking--actually responding to a question he himself had asked--and only reluctantly hanging up when his neighbor indicated his gaffe.
(Now, I understand a normal person wanting to distract himself from the sound of that man's voice and the idiocy of his speech. But this person was a grateful, invited guest at the Crawford "ranch" and presumably does not usually flinch at the noise.)
I told the author that I was glad to know a pack of unschooled teenaged athletes wearing flip-flops to the White House had been out-ruded by a single adult, a state legislator to boot. We discussed the incident for a moment and I moved forward to pay. As I tucked bills into my wallet, both the coworker and a little girl arrived at the counter. The girl was short enough that she needed one hand to pull herself high enough to reach straws arrayed in a mug behind a little barrier. She grasped with a hand just out of seastar-shape, ineffectually struggling against the dried beans holding the straws upright. I drew one out and handed it to her, and she took it but began reaching again. I drew out another and asked her how many she needed. "Two," she said, and scampered away with her straws. I said "You're welcome" after her, because I'm mean like that, especially considering I had deprived her of the unlikely satisfaction of retrieving her own straw. "Never get between someone and their straw," my coworker smiled.
Is the nongendered third-person plural pronoun so pervasive now that people default to it even when the antecedent's gender is obvious? Was he making such a global statement that he needed a nonspecific pronoun?
This makes me slightly crazy because the "blog" (a construction I have not yet ceased to hate) is written in just such a colloquial manner. Our organization's reputation for thoughtful, objective analysis and reporting is vital to its survival, but I believe we risk it when we release sloppy writing, indicative of sloppy thought. I said as much upon the weblog's launch, and I have suggested corrections in many entries: the 70s is a temperature range, not a decade, and "Bluetooth" should be capitalized even as an adjective, and a hyphen is not an em dash, and an apostrophe serves no purpose in "PDA's" other than to annoy me and perpetuate that mark's misuse, plus several non-trivial syntactical confusions. A casual tone might suit the medium but a casual (I might say slapdash) approach to punctuation and spelling and most importantly construction does not necessarily follow.
On Tuesday Dot Org had its usual Hallowe'en party. One group had a good idea and material but, I have to say, poor follow-through: they were "Heathers" but the third Dot Orger named Heather wasn't in, and two Heathers are not "Heathers"; they wore nametags with the surnames but were both dressed in black instead of red, yellow, or green; and worst, they had no Veronica. If there had been three of them, I would have been Veronica for them. Even though I wasn't wearing blue, my hair is dark, if not that dark, and about the right length, and if not Veronica's style, closer to it than their side-of-head '80s ponytails, which the Heathers didn't wear either, and most important, I know the dialogue. I admired their courage during the costume contest, though it seemed few enough people knew their concept for the audience to recognize the inadequacy of its execution.
Anyway, I fed them some lines and plot before the contest. I said that "Is this just another spoke in my menstrual cycle?" is one of my favorite movie lines ever. Then I announced, "A naked American man stole my balloons," and they asked if that line was in the movie too. "No, sorry, I was just blurting my actual favorite movie line."
Next year I am totally going to find a pasty-flesh-toned body suit and wear strategically placed, colorful (and inflated) balloons. "An American Werewolf in London" is an appropriate movie to dress up as for Hallowe'en, n'est-ce pas?
Speaking of French, RDC's favorite movie line is this exchange from "Deconstructing Harry":
Doris: You have no values. With you it's all nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm.
Harry Block: Hey, in France I could run for office with that slogan, and win!
I don't know how to make that into a costume. A platform with three planks so labeled, and a little French flag?
Or, and this just gets better and better, a party where you dress up as your favorite movie line and another prize of the evening besides best costume or best line is how many other people's lines or movies you are able to guess.
Hm.
A scar down each cheek, blood on the belly of a pirate shirt, and a sword. "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father prepare to die." Princess Bride.
A snake on one shoulder and a seaplane on the other and maybe the number 44 on your shirt as an anachronistic hint for those so inclined. Or several snakes and carry a pane of glass. "Aw, that's just my pet snake Reggie!" (I had to look up Reggie Jackson's team number for the Yankees.) Or "Asps! Very dangerous! You go first." Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Therefore, of course, a dog costume and perhaps a map of the 19th state."You are named after the dog?" "I've got a lot of fond memories of that dog." Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Birthday-cake numerals 5 and 0 on a crown, and snaps and Cartesian coordinates on your garment. That's a stretch, but I can't think of how to costume my actual favorite lines from that movie, which follow:
Henry II: I hope we never die.
Eleanor: So do I.
Henry II: Do you think there's any chance of it?
and
Geoffrey: I know. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it. We're a knowledgeable family.
The costumed line is Henry II's: "I've snapped and plotted all my life. There's no other way to be alive, king, and fifty all at once." Lion in Winter, of course.
An ostentatious diamondish necklace and smallpox. Sing "Lydia the Tattooed Lady." Offer people use of a pogo stick and tell them about your dream. Or something.Diana Lord from Philadelphia Story. Except that this ensemble represents no single line, and the pogo stick bit is Uncle Willy's.
A flower-child type smock. Carry a milk carton with your childhood photograph on it. Ask to turn off the music. "Rock stars have kidnapped my son." Almost Famous.
Dress in black and white. Carry a jar of salsa and chips. Act it out but don't say it. Salsa shark! We're gonna need a bigger boat! Man goes into cage, cage goes into salsa. Shark's in the salsa. Our shark." Clerks
Which leads to...a camera, some yellow barrels (a Barrel of Monkeys is a nice manageable size), and perhaps under your denim jacket an optical illusion t-shirt illustrating how size is a matter of perception. Or roll one pant leg up far enough to show your scars and carry a shot glass."I need to have something in the foreground to give it some scale." Or "Okay, so we drink to our legs!" Jaws
I was pleasantly surprised that South Dakota rejected the abortion ban. The Democrats have the House and might have the Senate. Rumsfeld is resigning. This should be a good day. But I just don't understand: I expected Colorado to authorize civil unions just as much as I expected it to define marriage (as a union between one man and one woman). Of course the marriage-definers largely overlap with the no-union people. Of course they voted for the definition and against partnership. Of course they did. Of course. I'm dismayed at the referendum's failure, but also at my failure to anticipate this and my ongoing utter incomprehenseion of why people oppose strengthening households and family units and enabling personal responsibility and lessening governmental interference in individuals' lives. I just have this blank space where "understanding the other side" usually functions. I know and understand and even sympathize with many points of view contrary to my own on any number of issues. But this one, I don't even have a starting point for. It bewilders me.
Lo these many years ago a friend and I had a mock argument about which form of toast was superior: peanut butter or cinnamon. The difficulty for me in this is that toast is not only automatically buttered (including pre-peanut butter toast) but also two slices. It took me a while to embrace the heresy of two different types in one serving.
Once I got over that, applied taste-testing demonstrated that in most circumstances, peanut-butter toast is superior to cinnamon.
And it's a good thing that peanut butter gets toast, because mint is unquestionably the superior complement to chocolate. I know this because it's the time of year again for mint Hershey's Kisses and for peppermint bark. This year I think I might try to make peppermint bark on my very own.
Also I want to have a cookie-baking party this year. I need some new blood in my stable of cookie recipies and someone a little less slipshod to guide actual baking and then decoration, preferably also several ratchets less chocolate-rabid than I to suggest variety.
The only one to complete in her class of three and the only woman to complete in my class of seven ended up being each other's diving buddies this weekend. Lucky Star and I met Monday night at dive practice and reviewed skills together, and I tried not to despise her when, Tuesday, we happened to be trying on wetsuits at the same time and had rather opposite problems of fit. I had my revenge this weekend, when I was mostly fine and she was shivering violently. But I rubbed her back and chafed her hands and we had a good time.
You have four open-water dives altogether in your certification, but only three per day. After the first one Saturday morning, Instructor Mark thought perhaps we would stop after the second one, because Star was cold, and do two Sunday. I wanted to get done, and Star, good buddy that she was and a trooper, decided she could manage three. After that, and retreating to the hotel for showers, we met at the Comet II (I never did ask what happened to the first one) for lunch. We were six: Star and her beau, two instructors, and RDC and me. During lunch, the restaurant played early Madonna, and Star began dancing a little in her seat. I looked at her solemnly and said, "You can be my lucky star, Star," and she danced some more.
This alias became even more appropriate Sunday morning when we swapped contact information. The first thing I asked about her seven-character email leader was what her middle name was. This is perhaps invasive of me to ask without context as often as I do, but the leader--what do you call the string before the domain name?--began obviously with her initials. She told me, and then because of the last four characters I asked if her birthday was 24 May. It is. "May 25th!" I whooped and we high-fived. I told her my very good friend's birthday is the 24th (when he and I were inseparable, we called ourselves twins, not only because we share a birthyear as well), and she said "Gemini power!" but is too young to have offered the "Wondertwin power--activate!" fist so we just high-fived again.
An alias for her is an unnecessary vanity, since I doubt she will figure much in these annals, but I liked her and she made for good story.
So I am all certifimicated. We went to the Blue Hole in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, where the water temperature ranges broadly throughout the year, rather as Dorothy Parker described Katharine Hepburn's acting range, from 61 to 64 degrees. RDC dove with the other "instructor," who was kind of the Miss Bates of scuba diving, talking a lot while saying nothing, though at least he must have been quiet underwater; Star's beau Andy didn't dive but kept the cocoa, towels, and fleece ready; and Mark put Star and me through our paces. A specialty class 80' below stirred up the silty bottom, murking the usually clear water, but the hole was still blue and shining. It's lovely. The Washington Post says people lie on the bottom on winter nights and watch the stars, and if I had a hood and gloves I'd join them. Because it's pretty (and cold).
As long as I can figure out what to do with my ears.
I began on the surface to equalize the pressure behind them--hold your nose and try to exhale--but could not do so enough. I'd descend a few feet, shriek into my regulator (the bit you breathe through), ascend to less pressure, try again to equalize...I took a long time descending, and this made me feel bad for Star: the sooner we completed skills, the sooner we could leave the "platform" and start swimming around, i.e., circulating our warm blood around our extremities.
Cold water and the ignorance of my inexperience meant that I came away with barotrauma: inadequate reaction to changes in pressure. Fluid, including blood, clogs my eustachian tubes. The actual tympanic membranes are fine, and my hearing is not (yet) threatened, but my balance is off and I hear every internal noise more than I ought. Although my sinuses are clear, I have the stuffy-head feeling and sounds. Brushing my teeth, scratching my head, chewing, water from a shower pounding on my neck and back--all of this I hear inside my skull. I saw a doctor Monday morning who told me that this is not a contraindication for diving but that the blood, coagulating as it does, will take four to six weeks to clear. Four to six weeks, beyond which if it hasn't cleared on its own, icky things must happen in hopes of safeguarding my hearing.
I spent the weekend badly disoriented (and disoccidented, and I want words for dissouthed and disnorthed and why do we orient ourselves in English when European navigation relied so much on Polaris? hmm). We napped and read Saturday afternoon in the hotel and drove six hours each on Friday and Sunday. But High points included one, my leaving just one peg in the board on my first try in years at Pyramid Solitaire, at dinner at Joseph's; two, spotting what turned out not to be another game but a merely display of little burros on a board filled with holes for their little feet, and these little burros were flame-breathing. They were lighters, sparked by thumbing the ears back. I was sorely tempted, but even if I needed a lighter, these were bad lighters in both spark and duration. But they were cute burros. And three, most excellent pie at the Comet II. We bought one to bring home and had it for dinner Sunday night. Oh, and four, the victory jumps. I was kinda scared, all my grown-up brain's fault whining about danger from 10 or so feet up. Other divers shouted Star, Andy (in just a bathing suit), and me in, and they jumped, and I didn't, and RDC says on the video camera that maybe I couldn't hear, and finally I jumped because I was not going to back out at that point. Then Andy and Mark decided to go again, and it was fun once I actually got myself off the ledge, and I wasn't freezing like Star, so off I went again. They jumped together and from higher up, all Butch and Sundance, and once again I had to get over my own cowardice/good sense. Swimming back to the steps in a wetsuit was unfun: the buoyancy and immobility a wetsuit enforces made me feel and swim like a bloated carcass. So I went in again in just bathers. If it had been sunny, that would have been fine.
Because the dinner restaurant was named Joseph's, as we approached it RDC called "Joseph! Joseph!" like Clarence in "It's a Wonderful Life" wanting to be rescued from Bert's arrest at the abandoned house The place was packed, as we could see from the outside, and so RDC said Joseph must be giving out a lot of cash-register wings.
Future diving will happen in warm water, which will require few to no millimeters of neoprene compressing my body and restricting my movement, and which is less likely to cause barotrauma, and which is clearer and has more to see. I knew before I started that I would like the wateriness and the underwaterness and the weightlessness, and I figured I wouldn't have the I'm-underwater-I-can't-breathe panic that bested some of my classmates and I didn't. I don't like having water against my nose when I can't breathe through it: it's unnatural. But now that I'm certified I don't have to prove again that I can remove and replace and clear water from my mask, so I don't have to overcome that instinct anymore. The permanent very bad thing is that I hadn't connected champing on a regulator bit with actually having to breathe through my mouth instead of my nose. That I don't like: it makes you stupid and dehydrates you to boot.
Photographs eventually, plus perhaps video of the first jump.
Early last week Amazon reminded me of my own husband's upcoming birthday. I wouldn't have forgotten! Not me! So I ordered him a couple of books off his wishlist. Then in clearing out some email I saw a message I've been sending to myself all year as ideas occur to me. So RDC got another present.
After the kitchen was done, we bought ourselves new china--actual china to replace the Service Merchandise stoneware. In addition to plates and bowls and so forth, we bought a teapot and some serving dishes. RDC wanted the gravy boat too, since it would increase our outlay for the day by only a weensy percentage, and I said we didn't need it because we have a gravy boat that was Granny's. We ended up not getting it, and the very next day when GJW arrived for the annual ski trip and RDC made waffles, I served heated syrup in a Pyrex measuring cup. "Gee," said RDC. "That gravy boat would sure come in handy." Thus was born a faux argument. But wouldn't a gravy boat be a swell present just before Thanksgiving, one of the handful of occasions in a year we use the thing.
When he unwrapped the logo'd box he mock-grumped because I had ruined his fun. He was going to buy it and put it in the china cabinet so when I climbed over the fridge to retrieve the good china on Thanksgiving, there it would be. Aha! I win.
I had bookclub tonight. It is usually the first Monday but I had dive practice so asked if I could shift it (before I asked the group, I asked RDC if he minded it was on his birthday). Someone asked if she could cook and I gladly accepted that offer. I made a double batch of ginger-chocolate cookies, of course, but after the meal and giving everyone a half-dozen to take home, that was that for them. We talked about Holly traveling and the unnamed Fred staying at home, and evidence for Fred's being gay (I didn't notice the first time I read it), and bird cages.
Scarf had spoken of a progressive Thanksgiving, but I didn't know that had no momentum so didn't invite her chez nous, and by the time I invited London and Wolfman they had made plans, and everyone else has local family, so Thanksgiving will be only Maven and Mr. Maven (and Morgan! they have to bring Morgan!) and RDC's mother, sister, and nephew, and us, and London and Wolfman for pie, and Kal and Neal and her aunt and uncle dropping by. Scarf said she was angling for an invitation but I wasn't taking the bait--when did this happen?--and so made plans with another neighbor, and I am continuing my bad behavior by encouraging her and Drums to blow them off and bring Monkey and Mia to my house.
While imprisoned in glasses, I wore only small studs, and in the years since have worn only a few pairs of earrings regularly--my goddess ones, mostly, a pair of male and female stick figures, and a pair of plain silver drops. Lately I've been rediscovering my collection, some of which is too tarnished to wear. Two pair of earrings from Thailand that SEM gave me after successive trips. A pair of twisted silver wires from the Benton Art Museum. Venus-symbol earrings (♀). Two ornaments meant as pendants, a representation of Gemini intended for PLT that he, unsurprisingly, would never wear (it was probably a selfish present), and large amethyst from HEBD.
Seeing "Mountains of the Moon" in my Bad Year, I was struck by Mabruki's wearing ears as earrings so that he could hear the spirits. Everyone was gone that year--DEDBG in France, SEM in Japan, TJZD in Russia, HEBD estranged, PLT blessedly only in Boston, no farther than my sister--so I opted to, since I could not hear them, hear their gifts. One pair of SEM's earrings are Thai coins with danglers that whisper on their own, and chattered more when I wore the two pendants in my second holes. I wore those four, plus my Tigger pendant, all the time, as constantly and unchangeably as my rings and bracelets.
I set the pendants aside for polishing only because they were tarnished, with no plans to wear them again (I have no idea why my earlobes didn't rip apart at the time). But diving and frolicking with Lucky Star, another Gemini with that birthday (though scads of years younger), and then actually polishing them the next day, made me reconsider. I strung the Gemini on a necklace (which officially belongs to another pendant with continued emotional significance but declining aesthetic appeal) and am wearing it today. It belongs with HEBD's amethyst but the latter's bale is too small for the available chain.
I'm wearing something I wanted to give to a lover 15 years ago, something representing astrology to boot. It's not the usual Gemini symbol that resembles "II" but two human figures running side by side carrying a tree or torch before them, so (to me) it doesn't represent faith in a snake oil belief but friendship. Plus, it's still pretty, just like the SEM earrings I'm also wearing.
I had to go to Seattle to find a chain for the tanzanite pendant RDC gave me. The one thing I cannot find in this town is my kind of jewelry: where do I go to get a box chain that will fit through the amethyst's bale?
Everyone else and I in the neighborhood raked our yards today. Mine is an easy one in fall, since I leave most of the leaves in the gardens as protection for the plants against cold and sun for the winter. But I groomed the front a bit and raked the side yard under the nectarine and pear trees. Most of last year's leaf pile has rotted into satisfying dirt, so I removed the groundcloth from the area whose grass and bindweed I'm trying to smother, rake the leaf mold over that, and dragged the tarp full of this year's leaves over it. I took out the tomato plants and cages and the bean trellises, covered the gardens with groundcloth, tossed a length over the woodpile, and omitted to sweep the walk or vacuum the porch since AEK called about our Tattered Cover date.
She wanted to go while the sun was out, and I, not done, suggested our being together as some safety against human dangers, but she countered that safety in numbers is no protection against sunless cold. Besides, this way I could stop. So I hosed off and off we trotted.
I gave my mother-in-law All Families Are Psychotic almost three years ago and she has been asking since for similar books. I finally found one in Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother. I found that but not Paula Fox's The Slave Dancer, which is next up for reading to RDC--King of the Wind is pretty young. AEK will travel to family for Thanksgiving and chose some picture books for the younger nephew and chapter books for the older--Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and, on my suggestion, Bunnicula, though tragically not Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I also suggested Because of Winn-Dixie; if a seven-year-old can manage Mrs. Frisby he can manage Winn-Dixie as well. But she had already bought enough.
A global regimen of regular skipping and watching Blake yawn would bring world peace (and lower blood pressure) in no time.
Blake likes to hide in his box and to know we know he's in his box. Somehow, having him in his box on the chair next to me is better than having him in his box way off on top of his cage: even though I can't see or feel him, just the proximity matters. His latest oatmeal box held two 4.5 lb. bags and has a handle in one side: a narrow oval window, like an archer's window. Depending on what he's doing in his box, sometimes the tip of his tail pokes through either door or window and it is not permissible (though it is naughtily fun) to give the feathers a quick tug. Sometimes just the beak emerges around an edge of cardboard as he widens the apertures, and if he's concentrating very hard on his chewing sometimes he doesn't notice a finger laid on the upper mandible, at least not for a moment or two. If I could find a box to fit in his travel cage, I bet he wouldn't fret nearly as much on those rare occasions he has to be in it. It would have to have proper acoustics for singing and beak-tapping, of course.
Thanksgiving was a rough day for the buddy: we were cleaning and cooking until 2, and then after guests arrived pretending to be normal people who don't let a bird roam around the house, on the floor, on the dining table, whining whenever whatever is not quite to his liking. I had set him up in the opposite corner of the dining room than usual, out of the way of diners' chairs and with a good view of the kitchen. After the turkey came out of the oven, we opened his cage; during basting he had to be locked up. His schedule was so interrupted that he took his mid-afternoonn nap on top of his cage. I really wanted to get a photograph of him tucked on the corner of his cage--"Blake supervises the Thanksgiving preparations"--but clean hands and tuckage never coincided.
Finally, well after dinner, with RDC's sister and nephew and Maven and Mr. Maven and I playing Scattergories around the dining table, Blake perched on RDC's knee in the living room and told him and his mother his tale of woe of the day. This is a prolonged dirge (or hey, perhaps my new vocabulary word "threnody") about the calamity of his day, distinct from the whistling that accompanies shaving and similar fun activities and from the "I'm so lonely I have to sing to my own foot" blues and from the "I'm not a songbird at all and not a songster like my older brother Percy but I do love this keening that my parents indulgently call song." It involves some whining and some chattering but mostly he sounds like the Scarecrow--"They took my arms and they threw them over there! and then they took my legs and they threw them over there!" Immediately upon finishing (it took a long time, maybe 20 minutes), he yawned himself into a tuck (each yawn ends with his head turned farther and farther around) and went to sleep. Such a hard day.
Since I've been typing he has emerged from his box and demanded a cave. I bent my knees to either side, so he has been playing between my calves under his box. Aha, back in the box. This means I can sign his parent-tether over to RDC without disrupting his play or breaking his heart.
London, Wolfman, two friends of theirs, and I joined the throngs at Freak Train last night. As I remembered from my first and only other foray thither, the emcee was the best reason to attend. Most of the performers were bad and not in a good way: rapper Dave, who was permitted two sets, did not enunciate, shoved too many syllables into the wrong cadence, and prolonged about three discrete ideas into each of his five minutes. The emcee followed: "So to sum up, bring the troops home, Dave doesn't give a damn, and Bush doesn't care." A "singer" asked for a reverb(eration) chorus on the microphone, and told the audience he makes his music on his computer and has been showing his CDs around town but had had no response. When he left the stage (after telling us he was looking for bandmates; good luck with that) the emcee described as a mix of Thomas Dolby and Oscar the Grouch, minus the talent. Two stand-ups, one full of fish puns and the other by Bigfoot who finished his act by adapting Michael Richards's recent tirade to the conflict between Sasquatch and human, were laughable but not as they intended.
The best acts were three guitarists, who were okay, and, far surpassing all others, "I Smell Puppets." This last consisted of a seated man with a puppet on each hand, the three of them lip-synching a sped-up electronic version of "Bohemian Rhapsody."
The female emcee I remembered from two years ago, but the other (the one on the left) was new to me. He looked a lot like Topher Grace as Eric Forman in build, hair, face (but not expressions), and some mannerisms. (It was Eric's role as straight man, his faux deference and facial expressions, that reminded me of PLT.)
As at the dog show last winter, the primary purpose of attending Freak Train is to mock. Perhaps, until I get on that stage, I shouldn't. Ha! Of course I will.
One (and so far the only) idea I have for RDC's stocking this year is a kitchen timer. He is perfect and so doesn't need one, but still, the kitchen has that hole in it. I told Kal of my difficulty in locating one: in addition to desiring various visual aesthetic points and no battery, I don't want a really obnoxious ding. I said I didn't want to alienate the entire staff in Sur La Table and while the effect sounds no better than if I were Oliver with his sheer joy at the noise of it, I'm just comparing buzzers. She got it, hooray (what the fuck kind of profane cover is that, though?!). We were at work, and went our separate ways in a moment, with me saying I had to go investigate Tribble Customs in the Sudden. That she didn't get until I clarified it was Tribal Customs in the Sudan (such being one of Dot Org's chief investigative topics).
Tonight we--Kal, Neal, AEK, and I--went ice-skating. At least, that's what it was called, but of ice there was little, either in area or in surface. For a rink in the middle of a faux town center, it wasn't as puny as the one in Cherry Creek, but neither was it a hockey rink or even the size of a decent pond. The real problem was the surface. I didn't see where a Zamboni could have been parked nearby, and one certainly hadn't serviced the surface in some time. It was bubbly and chunky and covered with shaving. These flaws makes pond-skating charming but a rink should be free of them.
The four of us were equally clumsy. Kal and I, having grown up with water and cold, owned our own skates; AEK and Neal, who didn't, rented what they said were decent skates from a booth (where maybe there was a miniature Zamboni). I haven't skated since maybe 1994, and it showed. When I began to learn to ski, I was told you do not ski like you skate, and maybe you don't, but here I applied skiing to skating. When I found my feet, I kept my blades parallel and tried to push off from the inside front of either skate. Apparently the perfect incline for me is more tilted than flat ice but less tilted than your average mountain. I'm picky. And if I could skate at all, I would have only one foot on the ice at a time and get more glide off each push. Whatever.
My point is that I can't skate. At the beginning, I picked up one skate and put it down, picked up the other and put it down. "Look, Kal! Guess who I'm being!"
"Me!" she guessed.
"No! Oliver!"
Friday night and Saturday morning I made two batters that need to be chilled. I found a recipe for a chocolate snowball without shortening and made that, and I made gingerbread, since the point of the party was to get all messy with decorating.
With so many cooks processing the broth, the snowballs were rolled and baked in no time, but they had ground hazelnuts, so when two-year-old Stick, whose mother is allergic to nuts and who might be himself, arrived, he was unable to eat any of the already-baked cookies. He was a tremendous help with cutting out gingerbread, though. I pulled out a box for him to stand on so he could reach the table, and the silicon mats were perfect to protect the table from the cutters' edges. With lots of Play-doh experience behind him, Stick got the principle of cutters immediately, if not how to press one all the way through the batter or how to transfer it to the baking sheet.
When the sheets with his cookies (mostly shapes, because his reindeer tended to lose their heads and his trees to get bent) went in the oven, he folded himself on the floor in front of it to wait (you know that way little kids sit, like a capital M?). I then turned on the oven light, and that was just terrific. Soon after the first gingerbread emerged, his father brought over baby Twig and the parents switched kids, and Alex did not want to leave, even to follow the warm gingerbread home.
While gingerbread cooled, Kal made cookie candy-canes and I made snickerdoodles. These I had never made, and they were pretty good despite lacking chocolate. The candy-canes were fun to make but tastewise didn't work for me.
When it came time to decorate, the dogs (Soccer brought Maisie and Maven brought Morgan) were very happy because finally everyone was finally in one spot, at the table, instead of in the living room and the dining room and the kitchen needing constant attendance and herding. And Blake was happy because he was finally let out: he has decided that oven mitts are not just whistle-to-able but worshipable too, so he had to be imprisoned while the oven was being opened and closed and trays were hot. And Maisie was happier because Blake was out. She finds him fascinating, while older, placider Morgan ignores him.
Decorating cookies was definitely a smock event. Stick would have been a champ at this but I was just as glad he had left by now. Maybe after the breakfast nook is done, I will welcome toddlers there to use food coloring and frosting to decorate cookies. We grownups were messy enough. Lots of stained teeth and fingers and hot wet towels later, we were done.
Done decorating, anyway, but not done distressing Morgan. Because she is unsteady on her feet, she prefers rugs to slippery wooden floors. Even getting around the chair at the corner of the living room to step between it and the dining room takes careful negotiating. During cleanup, her mother and I were in the kitchen, and you could tell she would much rather have been underfoot than under the dining table. She really is the sweetest dog.
The best thing about having eight people over to make cookies is that they take most of the cookies home with them. I had all the fun of baking and decorating four batches of cookies and way less than one batch in the house to eat.
Margaret's card arrived on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Others are trickling in. Last night AEK and Maven came over for dinner, thank you RDC, and afterward AEK and I watched three episodes of "Gilmore Girls" with me addressing envelopes throughout. Affixing address labels, that is, recipient and return.
Saturday we plan to find our tree. Sunday the Other bookclub is going to the Brown Palace for tea, so RDC said he'll probably go skiing. That's good, because I'll bake present-cookies before and after tea--peanut butter for my father, as usual, and ginger-chocolate for my mother, and something or other for BDL, and also print cards.
If the printer doesn't die, I should be able to mail everything on Monday, which would mean I'd be done with everything remote. Making and wrapping local presents is much more fun.
Months ago Maven said her brother (who was visiting at the time and attended my birthday party) mentioned the accidental guinea fowl in his weblog. I didn't even pretend ignorance of the concept ("a weblog? what's that? what a notion!") but asked for the address. Finally she remembered to send it to me.
In May he was fine, if a little quiet, and gave me a really nice pen-and-ink portrait of Blake done from a photograph on the website. Now though I question his motives in drawing my little buddy, because come to find out from his weblog...he's a furry.
Kal, Neal, RDC, and I went out for sushi, on the way passing the All-Inn, which supposedly isn't as much of a crack hotel anymore. It now has a bar at street level, the Rock Bar, whose foot traffic should suppress at least some drug traffic. Neal or RDC said he meant to go there one of these days, and so we agreed to go after sushi. Sushi was great: good and close to home. The Rock Bar was fun in an entirely different way.
First of all, me in a bar. Consulting a physician soon after we started dating, RDC mentioned that he now went out for milkshakes more than for beer. The doctor told him to stick to beer. I have employed various excuses to avoid bars but the main one, smoke, went out the window when Colorado recently banned all indoor smoking. And what the hell, I'm all kinds of adventurous these days and--I only just now noticed this--never seriously considered bailing. Note: caffeinate self thoroughly before such evenings.
We settled into a huge semi-circular booth, three whiskeys and a club soda. Kal was drinking whiskey! Wine, sure, at book club all the time; I might have seen her drink a beer before too. But whiskey, when her and my previous activities have been going to author events or to see "Ladies in Lavender" (starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith) or to stroll around the Botanic Gardens. Once on an apparent bender we saw "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" so this on its own cracked me up.
RDC says it is not the dive-iest bar I have ever been in--true, I even had a shot, an Alabama Slammer, at the PS Lounge once--but it was low rent and down-market and, for a meat market, a novelty to me as only a bar instead of mainly a restaurant.
I was seat-dancing for a while, too chicken to dance alone or to throw myself into the company of the unknown women already there, until Kal decided she could go with me. My god, the music. Van Halen, the Scorpions, Billy Squier, Foreigner. During "Jesus Is Just All Right," Kal left the Doobie Brothers and me for the lav (an adventure in itself: someone threw up on Neal's shoes and RDC swore he saw bloodstains from a misjudged heroin injection) and I danced with the two women remaining from a group of several who had arrived together but long since paired up with the luckier among a bunch of men whom--my table was sure--they had never met before.
We showed our ages in various ways: Kal by never having heard the by-far lightest song all night, the Cars' "Shake It Up" and Neal by suggesting RDC and I have an '80s party and not following the subsequent bickering. RDC would have a '70s party instead but without Roxy Music or anything from Zenyatta Mondatta or even The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I showed mine by having no idea whatsoever of the songs that really filled the dance floor later in the evening. I had long since left it, not recognizing Metallica or Iron Maiden (but at least knowing their names when Neal and RDC, respectively, identified them), but I had little desire to return to it when it got really crowded. Crowded and the crowd mouthing the words (or singing; who could tell at that volume) indicate a popular song, and I hadn't the least idea.
But hey, when we left it wasn't at my suggestion.
I drove, that being my duty in the social order. I had heard RDC's story about EJB's having to drive RDC's car one night because even in his ignorance of standard transmission he was safer than RDC, but the bit RDC had never included before was "We tossed a coin to see who would drive and EJB was the only one who could find it." So I was already laughing (at the turn of phrase, not at the DUI) when we passed the hotel window, where we all cracked up because there in the lobby stood one of the dance floor couples, probably asking if they rented rooms by the hour.
Okay, it is not perfect: perfect would be in the den, where his parents sit next to instead of near each other. But close. Blake has had a lot of headpetting, and singing into the hand, and pinking the edges of Yule cards, and helping me bead stockings, plus, each of us had toast for lunch. (Blake is Alex from A Clockwork Orange: he has eggiwegs and lomticks of toast.)
I finished the last cards just before the mail came and then sat with my laptop, watching "Amadeus" with headphones and stitching stockings. Blake chewed on his own string of beads and then tucked for a nap. Unusually, he tucked to his right shoulder. I whispered to RDC to look, and he asked if the buddy was turned around. So it's not just me who knows that Blake usually tucks to his left. This is something every birdie tailor needs to know about so accommodation can be made in the appropriate shoulder's plumage.
The other day I popped into African Grey to look for a toy for Blake's stocking. I left my shopping bag from another store on the counter because the shop is quite crowded, and looked for toys and spoke with the owner about a cockatiel she had for sale who was surrendered (for sale?!) by her person because when she laid eggs, her poop smelled funny. I really hate people sometimes. She was a pretty little pearl, 11 years old, named Caraway. I took to her immediately and wondered if Blake would, but no. When the owner and I returned to the counter, the guard cockatoo (an umbrella named Rags, very promiscuous, had inserted itself into my arms earlier) was way up on its perch laughing and nibbling something it held in one paw. Karen pointed out that the package of candy canes had been skidded out of my shopping bag and ripped open, and the crook of one cane had been broken off. There it was in the happy cockatoo's claw. Bad bird.
Perhaps another element to make Blake's day really perfect would be avian companionship, especially of the female persuasion, but no. RDC gave him a pita chip, his new absolute favorite munchie, and that will have to do.
Last night was Dot Org's fëte at DMNS, tonight is Solstice chez Scarf and Drums, and tomorrow everyone goes to Blossoms of Light at the Botanic Gardens. This time in snow! We are having a snowstorm, a real one.
I called work when I was already late, and the phone rang twice, giving me hope, and then the receptionist answered. Poop. Half an hour later when I was almost out the door, CoolBoss called. I pranced. I jigged. RDC asked if I was going to be this excited all day, but he's the one who's tipped three shots of espresso down his gullet while experimenting with his new coffees. Who's hyper now?
Whee, a day off. I pranced out to shovel, and what the hell, I shoveled our side of the block, which is only nine houses. Actually eight, because I ignore one house. If they ever shoveled themselves, I might occasionally spare them the effort, but they do not. They're on the corner, and do not shovel either in front or along the side, and that side is in the northern shade of their house and snows gets packed into ice and I have contemplated reporting them to the city. But I am only passively mean, so actively shoveled out the other eight stretches of sidewalk, plus the walks and steps of the two elderly households. Babushka emerged to thank me, just in a turtleneck and vest while her miniature schnauzer wore a jacket. By the time I got back to our house, you could barely tell I'd shoveled. Eh, I won't go out again until late afternoon.
Kal might come over to enjoy the fire, should we ever light one, and to wrap presents. The only presents I still need to wrap are RDC's, which means downstairs in my study not near the fire, but we'll work something out. Oh, I can work on RDC's stocking.
The only thing about the day off and maybe tomorrow too is that I cannot give ÜberBoss his cookies.
Waiting on my desk Monday morning was a package, wrapped in blue, with four rubber duckies swimming across its surface. I brought it to give ÜberBoss's office to open. He didn't know that CLH and I exchange rubber duckies and variations on that theme--there's a rubber-ducky ornament (glass, not rubber) on my tree--and how perfect these are. They are a police officer, a firefighter, a construction worker, and maybe a miner, and therefore looked a little like the Village People. I thought that immediately upon seeing them but didn't say so to him, but he mentioned it so we got to talk about that. I am sure I have given CLH a biker ducky, so all we need is an Indian one.
Opening the package, I told him how much I've enjoyed his previous gifts, that after my cookie-baking party a few weeks ago I got to use my snowman cookie jar, and that this year's card (penguins) would go on the mantel next to my penguin snowglobe, and that Kal and Stick enjoyed Robert Sabuda's pop-up Winter's Tale. He smiled a little at the mention of a cookie-baking party, and the first item I drew from the festive tin was a cookie cutter. A penguin? Yes, looking up. And another, larger penguin, looking down. Plus black food coloring, and orange. (Black and orange? Maybe penguins are Hallowe'en birds too; that makes as much sense as their being Yule birds. When Christmas gets thoroughly secularized to a "winter holiday," then they'll be perfect.) So I was effusively grateful.
Monday night I baked hazelnut chocolate chip cookies and mixed dough for chocolate-hazelnut snowballs. (Hazelnuts will figure prominently in everything I make this Yule because I might have just kinda let the bulk bin empty into a sack at the grocery store a few weeks ago.) Last night after the party, I baked the snowballs (the dough needs to chill, hence the day's pause) and attempted spritzer cookies. The ink on my recipe has faded and I guessed at one cup of flour. But the three ounces of cream cheese, .5 cup of butter and .5 of (non-hydrogenated) shortening didn't make me think that maybe that wasn't enough flour. Even the dough's goopiness in the sprizer didn't set off enough warning bells. I made a tray of misshapen poinsettias, shoved them in the oven, and mixed green into the other half. At this point I looked in the oven, just in time to keep the melted poinsettias from dripping off the tray.
So today I was going to give ÜberBoss hazelnut chocolate chip, hazelnut chocolate snowball, and chewy chocolate ginger cookies, and feel bad about no spritzer cream cheese cookies or ginger- or shortbread penguin cookies. But now I have the rest of today and maybe tomorrow to try again. Except that he will not be in on Friday and possibly the rest of the year. But certainly I will bring him penguins sometime.
This evening when we venture out to Scarf's Solstice celebration I will distribute cards to the block and the packages with the hatchlings' stockings and the jars of faux Nütella (hazelnut-chocolate spread, no surprise).
It's snoooooooowing! The snow won't be fresh but it will be present on Monday: my first white Christmas since 1995, when we were in Aspen. A festive Yule for all, so long as the electricity lasts.
Poor AEK cannot get home from NYC so might spend Christmas with friends in Chicago; Maven's sister was supposed to arrive yesterday and now will not come at all; Kal's aunt and uncle were supposed to have left today for her parents' house and, for missing Christmas with their family, at least are safely in their own home; Kal and Neal are supposed to fly to her parents' on Saturday but that's up in the air, except not in the air but rather grounded. Again, they're also safe at home. If Scarf, Drums, and Monkey succeed in flying to his family tomorrow I get Mia for five whole days! My most worrisome personal connection is my mother's first cousin and husband who drove to DIA from Laramie and have been in DIA since Wednesday, and the man needs dialysis. I am hopeful that this puts them in some sort of priority standing as far as evacuation goes. They are welcome here, and a good thing, since intra-city travel might be possible before either Monument Hill (on I-25 between here and Colorado Springs, where a son lives) or 25 from here to Cheyenne (or 80 between Cheyenne and Laramie) is passable.
Meanwhile, the Solstice party was sweet. London played carols and we sang, and Neal knows the second verse (both that there is one, and its words) to "Frosty the Snowman," and I sang "I Wonder as I Wander" even though I am not Caroline Bradshaw. Stick unwrapped both his and Twig's stockings and though his mother was pleased, he is old enough to know that anything that looks like clothing is not a good present. So he asked what the other bag was (Monkey's stocking).
The Botanic Gardens was closed yesterday and is likely closed today, but perhaps by tomorrow it will be open. We can snowshoe thither.
Most of my block was out in the street today, shoveling and pulling kids in sleds and romping with dogs in the snow and even the reclusive non-Babushka elderly neighbor emerged to thank me for shoveling. One is having an impromptu party this afternoon. Mentioning the evacuation of people from DIA by caravan (buses immediately behind snowplows), another asked, "Where will they bring them? The convention center?" because we are all about the gallows humor here. Of course people who travel by air tend to be better off than people who have no means of leaving a city and are unlikely to be as ignored and maltreated. But I hope one of those buses goes to a dialysis center.
