Reading: John Fowles, A Maggot, Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy Was a Junior

Christmas: Nothing yet--look at the time. Tonight I'll get my mother's present and if I have the car after step (no, really) I can get my husband's and sister's last things too. Later: yes, I got it

Viewing: can best be described as hallucination.

9 December 1999: 6:10 a.m.

Scene: lisa' bedroom. Time: 6:00 a.m., over an hour before sunrise.

There is a sudden noise. That's the alarm. I flail out of bed, turn off the alarm, suck down my pill. I shower. I have "Rudoph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" in my head. I manage to open a new pair of contacts and get them in my eyes without popping out a pupil. I tug my bathrobe around me and glide into the kitchen, reach just above my head for the switch for the stove light in the hood, and press it. I pass into the living room to open the louvres, picking up my Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion on the way. Shaking some into my palm and smearing it into my skin (in a Wrong, rubbing up and down instead of gentle upward strokes, manner), I look out at the dawn and the sky, smile, and then turn my back to the outside to face the kitchen.

I left Buddy on the fruit bowl all night

I saw a yellow banana shaped thing perching on the edge of the fruit bowl and panicked. A split second more reassured me that this indeed was in fact a banana and not a banana-headed cockatiel, that it was banana shaped and consistently banana colored instead of just banana headed and then cockatiel-colored below.

The fruit bowl is one of Blake's favorite perches. It's the highest point he can reach on his counter, which is the raised L-shaped bar between kitchen and dining room or living room. He can see into both the living room and kitchen and thus keep an eye on both of us at once--literally an eye each since he wears his eyes on either side of his head like the goofy prey animal he is. This was more important in the old apartment when we used the dining area as a study and we were both almost always in the front of the apartment. (Now sometimes he has to walk down the long hallway between study and living room to check up on us. It's far when you're only six inches tall and walk like a pigeon.)

I might have panicked thus because last night we, probably I, forgot to cover him. This is but the second time, which doesn't sound so bad except the first time was also this fall. I was primed to find that we had neglected him worse. He's never slept a night outside his cage. Who knows how many cats and monsters prowl outside his house's safe confines, and besides, the fruit bowl doesn't have very wide lip and it's not comfortable to perch on long-term, especially when you want to perch on only one foot.

Just to clarify, Blake is safe in his cage, in the corner on his millet perch, up on one foot with the other drawn safe and warm into his belly feathers, head in his wing, to be woken in half an hour when RDC gets out of the shower. I have not peeked under the towel to confirm this, but I'm pretty sure that's just how he's posed. Whether on the left or right foot, though, I won't conjecture.

---

In other news, I had a freaky dream last night. RDC and I were somewhere with EJB & Tracy and SWBW and Bernie. This isn't odd in itself since the six of us were altogether the night after RRP's wedding last month. But we were in San Francisco or somewhere, not EJB's house. Anyway the freaky part is that I got a letter from NCS, whom I haven't heard a peep about in five years, planning his own funeral and its expenses. I just mentioned him to Dana last night as the driver in my own Martha-hunting drive through Westport, which is the only reason I can think of that he'd be at the forefront of my brain, but for him to cc me such a letter weirds me out rather. I haven't said much kind about him here, which is wrong of me: I properly should resent only myself for that relationship, since he was what he was and I should have known it and got my own self out earlier.

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Last modified 9 December 1999

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