Reading: Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles Christmas: cookies Learning: icing cookies might not be worth it. Moving: 3 mile walk Listening: (Friday) Peter Gabriel, So, Passion, Us, Live Viewing: (Friday) "Grosse Pointe Blank," and today, magpies and a storm front |
18 December 1999: my Shadow puppyWhen am I going to get over that dog? JPS was born this day in 1977. No dog, save Odysseus's, ever lived 20 years, let alone 22. I'm not going to check Guinness. I mean what I mean. I never wrote about that. Months ago a book caught my eye in the 'brary; I flipped through it but knew it would be too wrenching to read all of: a collection of authors writing about dogs. I suppose most wrote about their own, but Richard Adams, whose The Plague Dogs I attempted to read for Watership Down's sake but could not, wrote about Odysseus's dog. I don't remember now if Adams gave him a name; I think Homer didn't. Anyway, this dog has been waiting 20 years, the past several on a dung heap, for Odysseus to come home. The dog is the first to recognize the homecomer, but recognizing his master is the last thing he does. Like Jefferson and Adams each waiting for July 4th to die, the dog has managed 20 years only by strength of his hope. Hope fulfilled, he dies. Homer goes into no detail, but Adams gets into the dog's head as he reminisces about how Odysseus trained him as a puppy then left him to guard Telemachus. Now the dog just waits, and then he sees, walking near, his dear old master returning, and in his joyful recognition is cut off mid-sentence--because he dies. No wonder I didn't mention it. Stupid Homer. Anyway, not that I'm bitter about someone who was blind and died 2900 years ago on another continent or anything. Over the past few days I've made four batches of cookies for a party tonight. I don't think four batches were indicated, and they certainly weren't requested, but I'm so glad of the excuse to bake. The snowballs I made two weeks ago are gone, of course, so I had to make more:
Why doesn't HTML support decimal tabs? So. I'll make pesto later and I bought two kinds of tortellini, roasted garlic and cheese & herb. Blake will enjoy having some fresh basil and I bought plenty of piñon, just in case. CostCo has been stocking a large jar for the past several months and RDC has suggested it but I would each the little buggers by the fistful. Oh, but it's good fat. And I'll paint two canisters to receive the cookies. Last night I went back to the mall again and found a gift for RDC's grandmother. I foresee a strained thank you and a prompt exchange, so I'd like to consult with DMB. I don't want to have to shop again. Also I found a gift for the exchange at the party tomorrow night. Pasta, present, and pastry. I'm prepared. Also I plan to have the house nice and clean for my prodigal husband's return and I want to go for a walk. Better get cracking. --- Cracking after basic a journal check, anyway. Just the essentials. Just in case. Just hoping. I had been reading on-line journals for more than a year and a half when I discovered Beth. For the two and a half years since then, she has been my favorite journaler, even when she wasn't writing publicly. So I was giving myself a stern talking to as I read today's links, today's entry, the rules for the award, and finally the list, and especially as my vertical scroll bar indicated the end of the page was nigh with no stroking of my ego in sight. But I was there I was I was I was! What a great award, too. Best lexicon. I do like my own individual patois, and I like that someone else likes it. Beth likes me! Wheee! I was amused the reason she gave no link was that the site has gone kablooey. Kablooey was how I described it in a mass email sent from another account, and while I cannot, unfortunately, claim to have invented the word myself, I want to do my part to bring it back into common parlance. As I told her in my Miss America acceptance speech, words like kablooey have been sadly underused since Bill Watterson retired. This is as good a time as any to explain that "swave" is a deliberate misspelling. A reader who points out my multiplous typos and misspellings (the next day, instead of giving me a month to reread myself) thought I wouldn't want to leave "suave" as "swave" until Aslan might rise again (alongside Arthur, according to C.S. Lewis, who thinks the sooner the better for ol' Wart). When I say "suave" I mean suave and when I say "swave" I mean a phonetic pronunciation, swayve, and I mean someone who so un-suave as not to know how to pronounce suave. So there. This I adopted from SEM and his swave and deboner gang of geeks. I didn't misspell debonair there either. Swayv and deBOHner. Get it straight. --- I did go for a walk. I watched a pair of magpies harry a third, I watched a storm front roll in from the mountains, I hugged a tree. A good walk. Plus I got the mail. I got a box from Amazon addressed to me. I am officially not looking at my wish list again. |
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