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.
