ProcrastinationWith my own paper to write, I spent my day procrastinating and working. I cleaned the house, dusting and vacuuming but ignoring the bathroom, and scrubbing the windows and getting the cement off the sliders from having our new deck laid, before retiring to that deck with Blake and my books.
Also I talked to DMB and the younger RDC for a while.
I wrote a bunch of letters to the recipients of the wedding photographs. I am so glad I got duplicates; there are pictures for CLH (of course), RRP, DEW, Gretchen and Heidi, and my cousin Michelle. Plus I wrote to an aunt and uncle on my father's side who wanted to send my mother a card for her wedding but who, my father said, didn't know her new name, and he wasn't sure of it either.
My mother was convinced no one in my father's family would ever know she has remarried. One of his sisters, the one after whom I am named, lives in Old Lyme; his brother lives two towns away. From my father's letter it sounds like it was my aunt who asked my father about it because she had heard something already, not that he told her about his ex-wife's doings.
So the letters were procrastination too. When a neighbor came by bearing a pumpkin, Blake said she was a good boy, buddy, but I don't think she understood him. Can't imagine why. I read some articles and took some notes until the sun left the deck. Which is one thing about winter and our apartment: we do get more sunlight with the apparent lower angle of the sun.
Then we went in and I began to make cookies. Those Ghirardelli chips are highly superior to Hershey's, which in turn are superior to Nestlé. Of course, Nestlé Tollhouse cookies are nothing but an exercise in fat consumption anyway. I make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, a much superior beast. Possibly the first time I tried to make them away from the ancestral home was when I first lived with RDC. The recipe on the canister of Quaker Oats looked off, and among other wrongnesses required fewer cups of oats. Hello? But Quaker and Hershey clearly had mated somehow, because now the recipe called specifically for Hershey chips. So I called my mother and got the proper recipe. Or should I say receipt, as Jane Austen did. Definitely receipt.
Walk like a man, talk like a man(What will I do when I run out of song lyrics to preface my walks?)
When RDC got home there were cookies cooling, which I hope was adequate reward for his hard day's work. While the dishwasher toiled away in its ten-times-louder-than-the-sun way, we went for a walk.
Our usual walk, except this time we saw a fox. When we saw a fox in RMNP last summer, I thought it was small; RDC said it was the regular fox size. This one looked like regular fox size to me; RDC at first thought it was a coyote. It was grey with red tips, I think, and moseyed along through the fields on the other side of the canal. We moseyed on our side, watching it. I think it found a mouse or something along the way, because it paused and looked like it was crunching something.
Mosey: possibly derived from the slang or slur for Jewish street vendors, Moses, who ambled along their routes bearing the weight of their wares. Or so says Rosie Boycott in her book of eponymous words, Batty, Bloomers and Boycott. Merriam-Webster lists the origin as unknown.
The cottonwoods are at their peak, and while in Denver there are no hills on which to enjoy a slopeful of changing leaves, cottonwood yellow against Denver blue sky is pretty spectacular on its own. Plus we saw a fox. It is not at all wild where we walk, but it's rural enough, even though it's still in the city and county of Denver, that houses along the paved trail have horses and chickens and that foxes, hawks, bunnies, and prairie dogs can get along. Since finding the trail I don't feel as disconnected as I once did here.
Saturday night we ended up watching "The 39 Steps" that I borrowed
from HAO.
It's a really old print and should be remastered: it's too bright and then too
dark and the sound is unreliable. But it's a great movie. Also it's clearly
not far removed from the silents: much more is expressed through gesture and
expression, upon which the camera pauses, than is through sound. We watched
"Rebecca" a few weeks ago, which is Hitchcock's Hollywood premiere.
"The 39 Steps" is British and even has, in the beginning, a still
explaining that it has earned the censors' okay.
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