Reading: Chasing Redbird

Moving: painting, went for a walk

House: Last coat of bedroom window trim, bought and assembled charming patio set (made of farmed, regulated teak).

18 June 2000: again

Earlier today:

What was Peter's turtle's name in Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing? I was trying to remember all yesterday. His eventual dog is, of course, Turtle, but who was the turtle?

A kiss on the nose and a bang on the ear to lovely Sara Astruc, who obligingly refreshed my memory: Dribble.

This afternoon, RDC finished the study walls. I'll do its windows, or start them, this week, and tomorrow we hope to clean from the floor the unspeakable contractor's splashes of mint green. This is the same contractor who left a hole in the ceilings of my study, the television shrine, and the furnace room. This is the same contractor who painted my study its unattractive blue--I can't blame him for the color, which was the freak's choice, but for its being one bad coat thin (I can hardly call it one coat thick), I do.

(I made lunch all by myself, which very rarely happens. Guess what I made. Fusilli with pesto. What a surprise! Usually I made rotelli with pesto.)

Meanwhile RDC was peeling edging tape away from the molding and door frames. Sage green walls, brilliant white trim, and a pale cream that, contrasted with the walls, is just a warm white. It's lovely. (I need new batteries for the camera.) Also I took the tape off the bedroom windows, so it looks much better. The house is going to be gorgeous, eventually.

We scampered out to Cost Plus World Market (an international CostCo?) and bought a patio set (table and four chairs), a little folding table for the grill, and a set of implements for the grill. Plus I saw what I thought was a slate blue vase, scattered with low-relief butterflies, and bought it for HAO.

Minutes later we were crouched on the patio assembling chairs. Almost immediately I regretted not having yet hooked up the scanner, because the assembly instructions are great: five squares in three rows. The first three squares are the usual hard-to-follow schematic, written and drawn by people whose native language is not that of the eventual assembler. The fourth square illustrates the chair on its back with two arrows indicating that you should flip it up on its four feet. The fifth square, two boxes wide, shows the chair whole and upright, captioned "OK!"

It just kills me that fully half of the assembly instructions tell you to right the chair and that the righted chair is okay, while all the Slot A Screw B Cam C confusion is crammed into inadequate space.

But we're bright folks and figured it out. RDC struggled with last screw of the last chair while I tidied away boxes. I told him how I had introduced the cam to the screw in its cramped corner. He persevered. I was weeding idly when he finally asked, "how did you do this?" and I told him.

To be fair, he assembled three of the four--the first to figure it out, a second along with my first, and his third while I finished my first. Sitting there surrounded by pieces of chair, RDC said, "I feel like I'm in the Plato factory."

I never had a Play-doh factory so that took me a second.

I myself never speak of the form of a thing. If I want to discuss the form of a chair or a dog or a chocolate sundae, I say "you know, the chair of the dog." This is because I remember that Plato illustrated his theory of forms with chairs much more reliably than I remember the term "form."

What else. Oh yes, I called HAO and told her I had bought her a present. She dropped by on the way to her cat-sitting house and admired the bedroom without tape and the lovely cool comfort of the study. In the study closet currently are RDC's shirts, and she asked if that would be his closet. I said it would probably be a coat closet and that I need to get another bracket to hang a half-width rod in the back closet, "if I can restrain myself to a half-closet's width of long dresses." I pulled out a dress and compared it to the wall, and a skirt, and another dress, and the dress I had on.

"Are you going to put the closet doors back on, or leave them off so you can keep doing that?" she asked. (I had done the same thing when Betty was here.)
We'll put them back on when we paint them, sometime in the next century. I might still compare my wardrobe to the walls, though, at least when I have an audience.

I hung my head; I can't get over this lavender thing. In fact the vase I bought for her (and momentarily seized back to rip the sticker from) wasn't really slate blue but sort of bluey-lavender. This was fine with her, though, as I have apparently poisoned her color sense as well. She uses purple ink all the time too now. When she first refuses to buy a garment because it doesn't go with my walls, we'll have to have a chat.

The patio umbrella came in natural, blue, and lavender. I didn't even consider anything but natural, so perhaps all hope is not lost.

---

I read The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle yesterday and do not understand how it rates as one of the School Library Journal's 100 most significant books of the century. I think they were looking for strong female heroines. Avi's a prolific writer, though whether influential I do not know. Charlotte's a brave lass, but not a very likable one.

This morning I read Chasing Redbird. The back matter says Creech name-drops from Walk Two Moons and Absolutely Normal Chaos. I noticed when Zinny's best friend turned out to be Sal Hiddle; as Dora recently wrote to me, "Long live Salamanca Hiddle." I didn't remember any names from the latter book, just the usual Pennsyltucky setting, but then I didn't like it--the book--much. I love the setting; I love the characters' figures of speech and the acceptance of eccentricity.

I have to reread Walk Two Moons. It's been a year, and it's one of those books you should reread at least once a year. I remember I had it from the same library batch as Out of the Dust, another Newbery medalist and also quite good, if not as luminous as Walk Two Moons (as really few books ever can be). (Luminous, moons: that wasn't deliberate.) These two Newbery winners share a vital plot point but are otherwise dissimilar.

Off to bed and to finish Miss Wyoming. If I finish my adult book like a good girl, I can read my other Sharon Creech (The Wanderer) and another Robin McKinley, Newbery winner The Hero and the Crown.