Reading: Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Moving: Not that walk I theorized earlier.

Viewing: Low late afternoon sunlight vivid under a city-wide, dark cloud bank; the clouds were as dark a blue as the night sky.

Listening: Dave Matthews Band.

Learning: Iolite is a rare stone.

26 February 2000: Iolite

Fedex arrived at 10:30. The baptismal start-up bong of the G4 sounded kind of hollow without external speakers. "Why don't you take these speakers back?" I suggested. I don't use them. I should have known better. Everything has to be new.

At CompUSA, we found photograph paper, a USB hub, and speakers adequate for my prince with the pea in his ear. No, that's from Corelli's Mandolin. Lunch and groceries from Alfalfa's to the accompaniment of a hammered dulcimer. The musician didn't play much folk, which is what I expect from a dulcimer. The theme from "Dr. Zhivago," "Norwegian Wood," something or other from "The Sound of Music." Also "Dixie."

Unusual instruments like dulcimers and mandolins will always remind me of REBD's mother, who would play every Saturday night at the Bee and Thistle. Considering that the Inn under their ownership was decorated in Tag Sale Best and only indifferently maintained, it must have been her music that earned the place Connecticut magazine's "State's Most Romantic Dining."

The plan Thursday night was to go out for lunch someplace other than a grocery store and then shop together for something resembling a ring for me, but now RDC needed to play with all his new toys. So I dropped him off at home and went out myself. A few weeks ago when I finally bought myself a new pair of sunglasses (as I'd been meaning to do for a year), I admired first the eyeglasses and then the rings of the clerk at Sunglasses Hut (not the piercing through her chin, though. I'm pretty squeamish). She saw that I wear silver and suggested Pandora's on 13th and Sherman, so there I went. I found a ring with iolite in it, an oval with pointed ends set landscape-wise into the band. The band fit my right pinkie in the store, I swear, but now it's too big--was the store so hot and is the house so cold now to make that much difference?--yet too small for the next finger up, which is my left ring finger and spoken for anyway.

So. I wonder if HEBD would like it? She's taller but I think has smaller fingers than mine, except she's heavier now than I usually remember. Otherwise that's $11 down the drain--literally: I nearly lost it down the drain doing dishes tonight.

I headed south on Broadway and went into Mano e Mano (I think that's the name). I found another iolite ring, but I didn't like the setting and the stone was scratched. On a lower shelf I saw a bracelet which I asked to see, and the clerk got it out for me and proceeded to ignore me as I repeatedly failed to work the clasp with just my left hand. Rick Werito she was not. I was already hating her by the time she eventually turned back from the (personal) conversation she was having with another clerk and asked if I'd like some help. "Yes please," I said, which was also a mistake as the odor of her nearer presence confirmed what her tortured voice and leathery hide had indicated. That was two strikes.

The bracelet, meanwhile, I really liked. It wasn't anything like I usually wear, tennis bracelet style with a clasp for a grand total of three bracelets when I've been wearing two and only two and happily two for over a decade. But it was pretty, all silver with round and rectangular iolites all along it. Hmm. Furthermore it was three times the uppper limit of what I had decided I might spend on a ring. Hmm. Usually in these cases it's best if I just carry the item around in the store for a while before putting it back or not. So I did that. Also I called RDC.

"I'm looking at a tennis bracelet type thing that I think I like but it's a tennis bracelet."
"Uh-huh," he replied noncommittally.
"But it's $120 and I'm not all to pieces over it so I'm just wearing it in the store for a minute."
"Oh!" He was obviously relieved. "When I hear 'tennis bracelet,' I think $10,000 or so."
"That's because you're used to EJB's mother." Whom I've met only once and who I'm sure is a very nice person but apparently the cache of stones she wore to the wedding we attended wasn't dress-up out of the safety deposit box but her daily array, someone for whom a $10K tennis bracelet would be nothing extraordinary.

Anyway, he didn't think it was too much to spend, which indicates how our finances have changed, but I did. Too much to spend on an item I wasn't absolutely certain about for itself, on a piece that would intrude on my forearm, whose clasp I would probably break, and whose salesperson now had three strikes against her: she had commenced the hard sell. I had the bracelet off and was looking at it in the sunlight at the window, where I had noticed that several of the stones were scratched. That in itself is nothing, since I'd scratch them myself, but at least two looked downright cracked. When she approached to tell me the price might be 20% off, I knew my having it out of the cabinet for four whole minutes now had frothed her up. I said I liked the look of it (which I did) but that a few of the stones were flawed. She looked at them over, through, and under her eyeglasses and said she saw nothing. I said she might feel it if she sketched a fingernail over that rectangular one third from the end. She must have noticed then, because she said well, the owners wouldn't lower the price again, but she didn't feel any scratches. "I didn't say they ought to lower it," I pointed out, "but those chips are a reason I've decided against it." She nearly hooked her talons into the hem of my jeans trying not to let me out of the store. Salesclerks must take lessons from puppies and cockatiels in how to give that hurt-and-wounded eyeball thingie when someone abandons them.

Also I went to Iris Fields on Mississippi and Gaylord, which I've loved every time I've gone in. I fell in love with another pair of sunglasses (drawing the path of my shopping into a neat bow) but desisted because I had already bought a pair. The pair I bought are a Bono pair, as HAO astutely pointed out, but these were more my thing, more tortoise-shelly and more cat's-eye and less Bono and with tooled fake silver ear-pierces. The ear-pierces nearly had me, but I resisted. Also I resisted a celidon chiffon scarf with lavender embroidery. Perfect colors and very lovely, but I never wear scarves. I told RDC later that if he ever wants to buy me a present, he should go to Iris Fields because anything he sees in there that he thinks I'll like I probably would like.

Except the stuffed animal mini-backpacks at the back of the store. They're not as bad as the strung-up tigers, but they're pretty bad.

So I finished the day at my favorite Denver library branch, Decker on Florida and Logan. It's a 1912 (?) Carnegie library, very small, one big room forming two sides of a square. One leg is the children's section. A fireplace is set into an alcove in the short wall with settles built in alongside and a huge teddy in the corner. You can cuddle against the teddy and stretch out on the settle with a crackling fire beside you and a library book in your hand, and what's better than that unless you have a fireplace, big teddy, and settle at home, and a dog and a mug of hot chocolate? The short wall of the other end has tall windows with two comfortable arm chairs in front of them. It's not a quiet library since it's all in one room: phones and quiet conversations and children. All of that is okay. A new addition I most emphatically did not like was piped in classical music. Had it suddenly become a bookstore? The library's deliberately instituting noise furthermore detracts from the library atmosphere and people talk as if they're in a bookstore, not a library. It made me sad, but I still love the Phoebe-like architecture so I sat and read Amber Brown Forever and checked out Rabbit Hill to make sure I hadn't forgotten it.

I haven't. I don't know why I didn't read it as a child, or if I did why I only read it once and didn't remember it well. I suppose I figured that it was an animal book and that someone would die. I don't know how I ever got through The Yearling, and when I read Animal Farm I was only 15 and scarred for life. It's set in Connecticut, after all, if the other side of the state from me.

Leaving the library, I met a Scottie named Gussie (and her mother). I'm fond of Scotties because of Marjorie Flack's Angus books. The woman was also walking her friend's dog, which looked like an albino boxer. I paid more attention to Gussie, who was a) black, as dogs should be if they can help and b) Scottish, a nationality I'm going through a phase of currently. Henry II's great uncle was David I of Scotland, and it's making me crazy that I can't verify whether maternal or paternal. His grandfather Henry I of England married a Saxon wench as a conciliatory gesture; would her sibling have been king of Scotland? Doubtful. So I'm a little obsessed. Alison Weir has another title: Britain's Royal Families: The Complete Geneaology. Help. On Gaylord, I met what I think was a mutt, waiting patiently outside a store for its parent, with its leash around a street sign. I checked its tags for a name: Mallorca. So I asked the dog if it was a Spanish island, but I didn't know if its offering to shake hands meant yes or no. It had great ears, very mobile and swivelly.

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DEDBG and I recently made a pact. If she gets her master's, she buys me a ticket to Paris to celebrate; if she doesn't, I buy her one to Denver to commisserate. Of course, I'd rather she get those pretty letters after her name than not, but I wonder if seeking out the cathedral of Saint Julien in Le Mans (where she lives) just because Henry II's father is buried there is quite the celebratory fête she had in mind. Or an Arthurian tour of Brittany. Or a quick hop to Bayeux--but no, the tapestry's not there, is it. Chartres, at least, does lie directly in the path from Paris to Le Mans.