You say it's your birthdayI mailed CLH's birthday present after trying unsuccessfully to find a store that sold gift wrap by the length instead of by the roll. I found a sun-and-moon gift mailing bag, anyway, and a good blank card. I strolled through the Tabor Center. I enjoyed going to the gym there, but otherwise the Center kind of depresses me. Temping is a miserable way to earn a living, but that's not why. When I worked in that building, the food court was being renovated and that was ugly and depressing, and to look down the two-block long corridors lined with stores, corridors empty except for during lunch hour, also seemed depressing.
However, it does have the neato game store where RDC bought me my birthday 3D puzzle of Camelot to add to my collection of castles, and a kite store.
Anyway. So I mailed that off. I guess that was my big accomplishment for the day. I didn't Nordic Track--I hadn't since Thursday--but I figure skiing counts for Saturday and walking, even only three miles, on Sunday.
What's alive? Less than you thinkToday I went to the library during lunch, where I found that Ramona makes herself a coloring book in Ramona the Brave, in which she's in first grade. I didn't look at the publication dates of Ramona the Pest and the Brave, but there must be a few years in between. You can tell from the tone that the time is different, '70s instead of late '50s, and--big clue--no more Louis Darling illustrations. He lived in Old Lyme, illustrating others' books and writing his own; he died in 1973 or so. So Ramona the Brave must have come out after that.
In high school, while I worked at PGN, checking out books one day, I took a stack of books and library card from a woman whose name was Lois Darling. "That's a coincidence," said I, always willing to refer to something almost no one would understand. "One of my favorite children's illustrator's name was Louis Darling. "That was my husband," said Mrs. Darling. Louis and Lois both illustrated and wrote books, and it was partly my thunderstruck delight that catalyzed Lois into finally organizing an exhibit of their work to display at PGN, as SMS had wanted her to do for years.
Also I witnessed a very sad thing. I was in the stacks looking for two other books that Imagining Women discusses, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, which I found, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, which I didn't, when I heard two boys reading a list of books. "The Clan of the Cave Bear, To Kill a Mockingbird, A River Runs Through It, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--aw, that sucks-- The Heart of Darkness, Gulliver's Travels, Alive--aw, hey, that's the best book, it's like a thousand pages and I read it in like a day..." and some other titles I forget. I was intensely curious about a reading list combining classics, regular modern literature like The Clan of the Cave Bear, and high interest, low level material like Alive. "Excuse me, may I ask you, what is that reading list for?" They told me their geography teacher is making them each read one of the books and then report, not on its characters but on how its geography affects the plot. I thought that was a really cool assignment, except how the fictional geography of Gulliver fit the criterion I don't know--if fictional geography was okay, then LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy would've been an excellent inclusion--and told them so. They pro'ly thought I was a grown-up for being intrigued by a school assignment. Anyway, they started looking for Alive in the stacks. "It's probably in non-fiction," I told them, and off they went. Sigh. I bet they expected the non-fiction to be arranged by title.
And home. 3.8 miles on the Nordic Track. I vacuumed, scrubbed the bathroom, ignored the laundry, did a little grocery shopping, watched some Olympics, massaged Blake's cranium, wrote a bit. A good day.
Flock TimeRDC asked if, when we named Blake, we knew about his "wheet wheet" noise. I think not; RDC suggested "Blake" on the way home from meeting the bappy only because of Percy and the Romantic poets, three days before adopting him and beginning to learn his endearing traits. In the Songs of Innocence and Experience are poems about chimney sweeps. They would cry "'weep, 'weep" as they walked the streets, to solicit business; of course, the "weep" is a portmanteau of mournful Blakian social commentary and the elided "sweep."
(Merriam-Webster defines "elide" as the omission of a vowel or a syllable, not of a consonant. Bear with me; I don't know another word.)
"Blake" is a good name for a dog, probably; and best for a dog with some white in its coat, as "Blake" is related to some root somewhere meaning "white." I don't think it's the best name for a cockatiel, even for one with sexy white racing stripes on his wings. "Blake" is, at least, short and assertive, like him, rather than longer and soft, like Percy. Of course, we develop and notice those traits we think coordinate with names we give in addition to mercilessly anthropomorphising our pets. But I think if we had named Blake better, we wouldn't call him Buddy so much now.
I put Blake to bed to have a snack before sleep just before ten, as usual. However, as is unusual, the Olympics were on, and after his snack and his cover-up, he couldn't go to sleep until after the pair skating was over: too many hoots and whistle and such noises to respond to for him to sleep. Such a sweetie.
O Slug-a-MoonI have no idea where this came from. Maybe the full moon tomorrow, maybe some lingering thoughts of Lady Bertram-ing away several more whiles of my life, but today my internal jukebox set to music the song Yona the Hedgehog sings in "The Story of El-ahrairah's Trial":
It's in Watership Down. Look it up.
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