Reading: Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series

Moving: walked to work

Listening: Yaz, You and Me Both

Watching: "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"

Learning: what-all was behind the garage

3 November 2000: Week in Review

Friday 27 October: Supper at Bistro Adde Brewster for HAO's 28th b-day. "Adde" is the chef? owner?'s first name; he is Scandinavian. Whence the "Brewster" part I know not; it's not his surname. Query: what defines a bistro making it more specific than any other restaurant? Lesson learned: never turn down a free glass of champagne. When the server came to ask if anyone wanted dessert, I pointed at Haitch and mouthed--because I was being so subtle, of course and as usual--that it was her birthday. The server brought out a chocolate sampler with a candle. Over the sampler, she opened her presents. Adde was touring the dining room, stopping at each table, asking how everyone's meal is, chatting with regulars, during this, and asked Haitch if she would like a glass of champage. Of course.

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Saturday 28 October: Until Thursday, the best idea I had for a costume was to be a die. I had a big monitor box left over from packing, not quite a cube but nearly. Thursday I ran errands and at Costco saw a display of two different sets of plush Christmas ornaments modeled on Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer characters. If the spotted elephant from the Island of Misfit Toys and the Bumble had been in the same box, I would have bought that box, but they weren't and the weddings tapped us this month and it's just Consumerist Materialism and I was Being Good and getting only starvation rations, or so went my rationalization. So instead of possessing a spotted elephant ornament, I decided I would be the spotted elephant for Hallowe'en. I bought cream-colored flannel to cover my eventual ears and trunk with. I puzzled over how to create a trunk and then how to attach it to my face. I left a message chez PLT & STL asking what toy the elephant in Goodnight Gorilla had in his pen at the zoo, since I wondered if maybe I should carry Hamlet in case my ear-and-trunk construction failed (to clue people in to what I was) or even if it succeeded (for company). Saturday morning RDC suggested being Charlie-in-the-Box instead, since I already had the box and appendages befuddled me. I decided the spotted elephant was way too personal a totem to expose at a party even if I could make appendages, and I didn't have to be grumpy even if Charlie-in-the-Box was, and if I was Charlie I would still look like something even if no one recognized me whereas if I were a crudely made elephant or even a well-made elephant no one would remember the spotted elephant. So I painted the monitor box pink instead of black, made myself a black velvet jongleur's collar with bells on the points and a red velvet hat with fake fur trim, bought a cheap white leotard and glued diamonds of grey, red, and black felt upon it, and became Charlie-in-the-Box. Soon after my arrival at the party I began Charlie-out-of-the-Box, a hermit crab looking for a new home, because the box was too cumbersome to carry or to suspend from the crude belt-and-compression-strap arrangement I'd strung together, let alone pop out of.

(See the square in the top right of the in-the-box picture? I furnished the house. A Restoration Hardware catalog, a spare of scissors, and a spool of tape--much cheaper than the actual 3D pieces, if less functional. That's our magazine rack. Also in the living room, we have a couch, a leather couch, two bookcases, and an audio cabinet.)

"A spare of scissors" has to be one of my more interesting glitches. Proofreading (I do do that, if not very effectively), I spotted that. I liked it so much I'm keeping it.

RDC was a product, the generic idea of a product, with slogans all over him ("4 out of 5 doctors recommend," "New Large Size," etc.) HAO was a black widow. Her date Doug was her dead husband's pallbearer. Which set off my auto-amuse function. Soon after they arrived, they passed through the dining room where I was into the kitchen. Doug had the coffin, a shoebox--painted black, lined in red satin, containing a poseable black spider--in one hand and a six-pack in the other. I cracked up. And had to explain it to Sabrina and her friend, the (pre-house) Wicked Witch of the East. And I did, in maybe only six sentences, a new record. Let's see if I can again:

When I took Chaucer as an undergrad, we had weekly quizzes with lines to translate from Middle to contemporary English. Despite my fondness for good old Alysoun, I gaffed spectacularly with lines from her Prologue:

As help me God, when that I saw him go
After the bier, methought he had a pair
Of legges and of feet so clean and fair,
That all my heart I gave unto his hold.
He was, I trow, a twenty winter old,
And I was forty, if I shall say sooth,
But yet I had always a colte's tooth.

I remember this not because it was the only time I got under a 90% on any of the quizzes but because it was such a stupid fuckwitted mistake. Alysoun falls in lust with the legs and feet of the man who would be her fifth husband not when he'd following the beer at some kegger but when, and this is what makes her such a great character, he is following the bier, whose spelling hasn't even changed, of her fourth husband. So there went Doug carrying a bier and some beer and what can I say, that amused me.

Sunday, 29 October: A gorgeous day. The first day of Standard Time is almost always beautiful, perhaps to make you regret sunset's being an hour earlier. Or perhaps to help you wake up with the sun instead of well before, or to celebrate having noon at the sun's apex, just when it ought to be. We walked down to the Tattered Cover in Cherry Creek. Reading in an armchair in the children's room, I heard a clerk telling a customer that yes, these were very popular...and I looked up to see what they were talking about.

Philip Pullman, whom Jessie had just recommended to me. I would, I really would, eventually have read The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown without her encouragement, because they were on the School Library Journal's list of the 20th century's 100 best books for kids or that other list of kid's books I was reading my way through and currently can't find. Despite how much those books rocked my world and ripped from underfoot the rug of superiority that kept me saying "I don't like fantasy" all these years, I still only bought the first book in the His Dark Materials series, The Golden Compass. I thought that if I didn't like it, I wouldn't have spent the money also on The Subtle Knife. What a loser I be. I grovel at Jessie's feet. I still maintain that I don't like genre fantasy for adults, and by genre I mean obviously and inescapably formulaic, like sword & sorcery boondoogle, but some of my favorite books are fantasy for kids and nonformulaic fantasy for adults: Tolkien (whom I enjoy but who didn't change my life [maybe because I read him too late]), Watership Down and A Wrinkle in Time (which did), The Mists of Avalon, Alice in Wonderland. OMFB, The Golden Compass. I should have named my polar bear Iorek Byrnison, not Pokey (except I had Pokey in 1976, 20 years too early to know the other name). Ainsley has been superseded as a name for my hypothetical child by Lyra. I want a new stuffed animal I can call Pantalaimon. The Golden Compass is the best book I have read since, oh, The Hero and the Crown this spring, which was the best book I'd read since The Blue Sword the week before.

Monday 30 October: I told Minne there's another book she must read. We discussed how she once gave The Blue Sword to Box (to whom I still refer with her proper name, among my coworkers) when Box was going through some personal difficulties. Minne doubted she ever read it. I said of course not. That's why she's Box. Furthermore, if she had read it, it wouldn't have meant anything to her, because she's Box. I walked to work in the morning and used the Nordic Track when I got home in the afternoon. In the evening, RDC and I went to Buca di Beppo, which just opened a store in Denver this year. We reminisced about the one in Seattle with ASZ &. Co. and I realized I haven't written to him since Christmas, not even for Max's first birthday. We were disappointed by the garlic bread, which did come in a pizza shape, as it did in Seattle, but was not so paved with slices of garlic that you couldn't see the bread, as it was in Seattle. Our waitress confirmed that they've de-garlicked the garlic bread because Denver needs its taste buds adjusted. On the way home (with leftovers), I bought a pie pumpkin because I was too late to buy a jack-o-lantern pumpkin. A pie pumpkin, though small and unsuited for carving, would at least alert potential trick-or-treaters to the fact that I would be open for business.

Tuesday 31 October: At lunch, I finally returned the size-12 suit to Ross. I ate leftover caesar salad and garlic bread for supper and waited for trick-or-treaters who never arrove. Little fuckers. Then I had miniature Reese's peanut-butter cups for dessert. I did not exercise. I watched "That '70s Show," whose Hallowe'en episode was a spoof of Hitchcock flicks. This reminds me to mention that Sabrina and Barbie's costumes were from "The Birds." They had fake stuffed crows attached to their clothing and hair, with fake blood dripping. Sabrina could hunch her shoulder and make the crow on that side attack her neck.

Wednesday 1 November: I finished The Golden Compass on the bus in the morning. During my lunch hour, I bought The Golden Compass and The Amber Spyglass (the latter signed!) in hardcover and The Subtle Knife in paperback from the downtown Tattered Cover and reserved a copy of The Subtle Knife in hardcover at the Cherry Creek store (since the LoDo store is out). I cannot wait to read The Amber Spyglass and I must own them and it would be shocking indeed to own two paperbacks and a hardcover. Books should match. So I asked a clerk if I could return The Golden Compass (bought on Sunday in paperback) and The Subtle Knife (bought right then in paperback, because I couldn't wait) in the evening when I picked up The Subtle Knife in hardback. Yes, she said. So when I ate my supper (the last of the Caesar salad, a slice of leftover garlic bread, and most of the chicken parmesian), I did so very carefully not to mar the book. I used the Nordic Track and congratulated myself. Also in the evening, before the TC trip, I exchanged the velvetty shirt I picked up at Target when I bought the cheap leotard for Charlie-in-the-Box for a Large. I also returned unused bits of closet to the new Home Depot on Colorado Boulevard. I told the cashier I bought the bits ages ago at the Santa Fe store (meaning, on Sante Fe Boulevard, not in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I'm careful to say "on Colorado Boulevard" instead of "on Colorado" for clarity's sake; at least I'm not British saying "in Colorado" to confuse further) and had no receipt. She didn't care and gave me cash. That was nice, because RDC left his debit card in an ATM on Friday before Haitch's b-day dinner and, discovering this on Sunday, we canceled the cards. This means that my return to Ross and exchange at Target left me with store credit (at Target I got credit on an exchange because the shirt had gone on sale in the meantime). I didn't have the card, but as long as I remember that I have these slips of paper in my wallet, that's okay since I frequent those stores. It just makes me angrier at that stupid store where I bought a pair of shoes intended for one of the weddings, shoes I returned three days later (Friday to Monday), unworn, with a receipt, with the card, for store credit only. Which reminds me, I should go shopping there with Lou some lunch hour. She dresses a lot more imaginatively than I do and could conceivably find something there.

Thursday 2 November: I walked to work but didn't Nordic Track. Instead I ate the last of the garlic bread and chicken parmesian with Reese's miniatures, glad that RDC would return Friday: I have no more leftovers and I don't want to eat the whole bag of miniature peanut butter cups. I watched "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," at least until "ER" came on. All through the book, two characters insist that when the author's book gets turned into a movie, they want to play themselves. I don't know if Joe and Mandy play themselves, but the Lady Chablis (who, in the book, never insists on that) does play herself in the movie--AMB told me that when we talked about the book in October, which made me want to see it. I had heard the movie sucked and in fact only liked the first half of the book, which is vignettes of Savannah characters--the second half is mostly trial. I wasn't expecting much from the movie, which I figured, for plot's sake, would be all trial, but I would watch it for John Cusack, Kevin Spacey, and of course the Lady Chablis. It pretty much bites, movie-wise, and Kevin Spacey sports a mustache that ruins him for me. But Chablis is eminently watchable.

Friday 3 November: I walked to work and here I am, writing during my lunch hour instead of starting The Amber Spyglass. I'm out of here.