Reading: Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, and Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose.

Learning: about the Marquis de Sade

Listening: Avalon

Viewing: Snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow and a kestrel at the bus stop this morning.

22 November 1999: Snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow

It's snowing it's snowing it's snowing it's snoooooooowing. In Connecticut I counted myself lucky if there were snow before Thanksgiving at all. Now I feel deprived if we don't have a good snow before Hallowe'en. And we did, but I was in Santa Fe. It's snoooooowing and I'm jumping around gleefully.

I woke at 3:15 for some hideous, unknown reason and tossed fretfully for a bit. I did get back to sleep eventually, in time to be dreaming about a friend of my mother's when the alarm went off at 6:00. I knew it to be this one friend but she looked like this other friend and she told me something that struck fear into my heart, like that my mother was pregnant or something.

So I went back to bed. But I got up at 6:15, washed my hair, tidied up the kitchen (cookie sheets temper well, like a wok, if you leave them in a sink overnight), made Blake's breakfast, ate my own, packed up the laptop so I could work on CLH's Myopoly at lunch, remembered to pack the digital camera (since I discovered a few days ago that it's not dead as a mattress and I could have taken it to Connecticut), dried most of my hair, shoved all of it under my big black felt hat, threw my beloved DEDBG-scarf around my neck, and was off.

And my bus wasn't even very late! And its heat wasn't blasting so I could keep my coat on without dying, unlike usual when I either swelter or keep it on my lap to everyone's including my annoyance!

At Dot Org, I took a few pictures of the park and went and jumped up and down some with my friend A, since we like snow so much.

Two CT stories:

One: I bought my first UConn sweatshirt probably along with my first semester's books. I loved that sweatshirt and wore it all the time. It broke in well and I could wear it inside out (when I wanted a plain grey sweatshirt) and I loved it and it was mine until sometime in grad school when CLH came home and was cold and borrowed it and wouldn't give it back. Since my wardrobe was full of her cast-offs, which I loved, the least I could do was spare her the sweatshirt. She didn't quite have to pry my cold stiff dead fingers from the garment, but I was pretty reluctant, right though she was. So I bought another. This didn't break in well; it just wore out. I wore it without reverence until 1998, when I called it dead and replaced it. That one's chief fault was that it was Champion. Too high-quality to break in properly. Sigh. My present one is a Champion as well.

So last Friday morning when CLH emerged from her cocoon on her couch wearing my original old sweatshirt, I got kind of covetous. I liked to see her in it and I don't want it back, but I'm nostalgic about it. The project this winter is to acclimate to a cooler house in preparation for paying for our own heat in our own house maybe sometime in the next decade. I think I'll get a lot of use out of the sweatshirt this year. So might Blake. He's why we like a 72-degree house. He can live inside my sweatshirt when he's cold.

Two: The weekend I went home, it had been seven weeks since I fell. My leg is just fine. I have a scar on my calf which is both large and ugly--I wouldn't mind smaller and ugly or large and less ugly--and visible, since it's on my calf. I don't really have a scar from the wound on my thigh, which was an inch or two below my butt. It's discolored, but the muscles have full functionality (which is the most important thing), it's perfectly shaped (or, if not perfect, at least the same shape it was before), the skin is just about the right texture, and the discoloration is fading. My leg is fine. Considering, I think it's beautiful. Friday in Boston in the middle of some totally other sentence, my sister interrupted herself: "Let me see your leg?!" She wanted to make sure she saw it then before she forgot to ask later. I pulled up my skirt and peeled down my tights and showed her. It didn't horrify her, and she was assured that the limb wasn't necrotic. The next day, my mother interrupted herself in the middle of some totally other sentence and demanded, "Let me see your leg?!" Since I called her almost immediately after I was home safe and clean, wanting her to act like my mommy, all loving and concerned, and since she did that just fine, she was entitled to see it, no problem. I hitched up my dress and pivoted my thigh toward her. She examined it for a couple of seconds and asked, "Are you going to see a plastic surgeon about that?"

She makes me crazy. If I wore skirts so short the mark would be visible, she'd have a thing or two to say about that. Is it on my face? Or my neck or my bust or even my hands? Or on my back, which I consider the most aesthetically pleasing part of me, or on my shoulders or arms, anywhere it has any chance of being Seen? I can see it if I look in a mirror and I don't mind it; RDC can see it whenever he wants and he doesn't mind it; the world can see it only when I wear a bathing suit (or don't wear one, and she'd have a thing or two to say about that as well) and I bet no one ever asks me what grievous injury I underwent.

She pushes my buttons, no? Perfectly. Every time. Effortlessly.

Plastic surgeon. Ha.

It's snooooowing....wheee!

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Last modified 22 November 1999

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