Reading: Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles; Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots; and Jane Louise Curry, The Bassumtyte Treasure

Moving: Nope

Viewing: The wind in the branches outside my study window, and Blake asleep on my ankle

Learning: Yes I do confuse fact (Fraser) with fiction (George) quiiiite a big

15 February 2000: Recovering

When I, with fingers trembling from the DTs, retrieved my email yesterday afternoon, there were, as I expected, messages about the Glamour Shots. All quoted without permission:

PLT followed his subject line "lisa pics--oh. mah. gawd" with "Lisa was replaced by a pod person with makeup!"

Shelley seems to understand how I was in two minds about the experience:
"I loved looking at them all and I can completely emphathise with you: I think Glamour Shots would make my butt tight, too. You're better off to have a trusted friend with some semblance of taste and a decent camera with a tripod. You could spend all day taking pictures that were Just So. Lovely, dreamy pictures of you with proper makeup and no humiliation. Doesn't that sound fun? It sure does to me."

Jenn: "[Two relatives' pictures] were -all- out of focus. I think they think that fuzzy look de-emphasizes any flaws you have, like airbrushing, but cheaper. I have to say, I think you looked much lovelier in your New Year's Eve pics. And the fact that this made you so uncomfortable probably says good things about liking yourself the way you are."

So. I'm glad to know Everyone Understands Me.

Because I've had serious doubts over the weekend about that entry, peaking in actual Fear on Saturday night when DMB called us. RDC picked it up, and from across the room and through the cell phone I immediately recognized her voice, so when RDC said "web page" my heart dropped. She easily could have found the page, or JJC could have, and hurt feelings would abound.

I was willing to go along with the Glamour Shots, eager to see if I could be gorgeous and pleased to spend an afternoon with DMB though shying from the pod probability. As it happened, I was uncomfortable with the process: disappointed that the cosmetician wasn't a make-up artist, disdainful of the dirty establishment, fastidious about the tacky clothing options, unable to follow either DMB's or the photographer's cues (let alone both, when they were contradictory, as did happen), and uncertain about how much I could assert myself in choosing prints, which is why I shut up after the one absolute veto of the cleavage shot. And overall, guilty about this not being as much fun for DMB as we wanted it to be.

The web page DMB was calling about was RDC2's, not mine. RDC removed that page (primarily pictures) when we changed hosts and neither of us ever remembered to put it up again. JJC had just discovered it wasn't on line and made DMB call to complain. (She knows very well how immune her brother is to her whining, which is why she had their mother ask instead.) So I hove a sigh of relief at the time but now wonder just how foolhardy, how unnecessarily hurtful, that entry might be.

I've read it and reread it and there's nothing in it that's not true. I've tried to describe accurately my response to the whole thing: my vanity, my desire to do chick stuff with my mother-in-law, my humiliation in getting Done and being unable to Be Done Correctly, my acute hypocrism in getting Done at all. So other than the usual grammatical and syntactical revisions (which I make freely), the entry stands.

And just to show that I have continued not to learn prudence, my mother's latest note, quoted exactly except that I changed names to initials:

Hi Lisa hon---

A quick note--thought you just couldn't "live" without the "enclosure"!

Maybe I told you, don't remember--but I "sorta" remember telling you about b'day dinner at Randall's Ordinary in Stonington. What I don't think I told you about b'day from BDL was Giorgio toiletries which I love. Kitchen remodeling under way.....
In haste and lots of love, Mom

I was all set to rip into her bizarre overuse of quotation marks and frequent inability to use the first person subject pronoun, but then I realized she signed herself just Mom instead of "Mommie" (yes, with the quotation marks) and I'm so grateful for the simple signature that I'll desist ranting about the rest. Well. I will say that I wouldn't eat deliberately or for an occasion in any establishment calling itself ordinary. I know nothing about Giorgio. It's got to be better than Jean Naté though.

The enclosure, by the bye, is a photograph from the New London Day of a squirrel hanging from a rain gutter reaching for a bird feeder. Because the bird feeder is made from an upside-down three-liter plastic soda bottle, and because the space between the houses is flat and evenly white, I expect the photograph was taken on frozen-over, snowed-over Roger's Lake. I recently went to terraserver and found my corner of Denver, and in Old Lyme, my mother's house, my lake, my beach, and the estuary.

Sigh.

I stayed home from work today. I'm glad of the extra rest. I'm finally going to finish the Mary Queen of Scots novel but now I'm going to have to reread her biography.

I'm insane and we all know it, so here we go:

• Phoebe's in this picture. Lyme Street runs mostly up and down, and where Beckwith Lane joins it from the left, just up and on the other side of Lyme Street is Phoebs. Terraserver dates from 1994, so this is just before her expansion.
• Here, on the left, Hamburg Cove (an arm of the Connecticut River); on the right, top to bottom, Norwich Pond, Uncas Lake (officially a Pond), and the northern end of Roger's Lake.
• As the Connecticut empties into the Sound, Old Saybrook (specifically, the neighborhood called Fenwick, where Katharine Hepburn still lives) on the west and the Old Lyme on the east. The big island is called (imaginatively) Great Island and that long spit of land is Griswold Point. Where the Point joins the landmass, a little to the east (east of the tiny pond) is my beach.

It's not just homesick I get looking at these pictures--it's dizzy as well.