Reading: Straight Man

Moving: walked 2.7 miles, swam 2K

Learning: what that flower is!

Watching: smoke descend

9 August 2000: Health and exercise

Last night RDC made me a delicious supper with Vidalia onion and red pepper and oyster mushrooms and sea scallops in a white wine sauce over a saffron risotto. Afterward we hung out downstairs, in the cool of the family room, watching the Dave Matthews Band concert I taped off PBS a while ago, him reading or working or whatever and me reading Captain Butcher's Body, which cracked me up. Scott Corbett wrote a lot, as I saw from the front matter, and I remember his early-reader books about the magician, Dr. Merlin's Magic Shop etc., but the only ones I remember really well were the ones for later elementary reading, Captain Butcher's Body, Here Lies the Body, and The Red Room Riddle.

Captain Butcher was how I first learned about years being dated Old Style or New Style (and about Julian and Gregorian calendars). I remember being convinced that I would discover which island he meant by Broadmoor, Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket or Block Island. I remember planning to go there in 2046, when the events would repeat. I remember calculating how old I would be (78).

Of course, HPV and I had firm plans, very firm, to figure out which word it was in Tonke Dragt's The Towers of February so that on the next Leap Day (1980, when we would be eleven), we could go to the beach and go to IMFEA, the mirror world. I was convinced the word was moixa, the mirror of axiom.

Life was more fun then.

Anyway. My question of the day is Where are all my Christmas cards? I have gone through all my art supplies and all my Christmas stuff and found nothing. All the boxes are unpacked now, I think I can say that safely. I decided that last night looking for a light bulb. I unsealed the box marked "bulbs" (a Christmas edition of a case of Coca-Cola, which must date from a Christmas party at least three years ago) and finding within it, in addition to bulbs, two filters for the Dustbuster and a squirt gun.

RDC remembers my having spare Scotch tape with my Christmas cards and I think he's right, and he's sick of piecing together his expense reports with packing tape (of which we have more than four complete rolls, since he bought a six pack before this latest move. Why so much? I have no idea, since I am Never Moving Again). So I started hunting. I sorted all the boxes and piles of random, peripheral stuff in the furnace room before RDC's family arrived; I unpacked the last of my study the week before that.

Where? Somewhere, I have the rubber stamps I made my cards with, and holiday postage stamps, and gold and silver pens, and the cards we received last year, yet to be cut down into gift tags if the picture's appropriate and there's no message on the inside front. Where? I have three boxes of bows and ribbons. Three. Shoebox-sized boxes. (Well, one is full of non-Christmas gift bows and paraphrenalia.) But no cards. Any ideas? I'm totally and completely serious, just like Lloyd Dobbler. At this point I figure people who've never met me or been to any of my residences have as good chance of locating this stuff as I have.

It occurred to me today that I've never given the URL of the house pages here. If you'd like to see them, drop me a line. If, looking at the pages, you're suddenly inspired about where my box of Christmas card materials might be, I'll send you my rabbit again.

I began this entry with the title on purpose and wrote the first line deliberately. Looking at the title again to add it to my index page, I realize I never wrote finished the idea. Typical. Anyway, after a nutritious dinner, a little walk in the park, and a good night's sleep, I woke up before my alarm rang at six feeling completely spritely and normal. I walked to work. I bounced. I ripped a piece off a total stranger's plant and demanded coworkers' help in determining its name. I also wrote to Beth, who actually knew, even without looking at the wilted pathetic thing. I swam after work. I'm all better, yahooo!

RDC just came downstairs and showed me how he added me to his Palm Pilot as a billable client (project: brushing hair). As he showed me, I typed the previous sentence and created the link and went back to the page to make the anchor and he read all that (he'd come up with the project on his own). I have to go now: he has work to do.