Reading: Back to A.S. Byatt. Or Myra Goldberg.

Moving: yardwork

Listening: "Sid and Nancy"

Watching: Blake preen

Learning: how much of a bitch it is to change the names of a Mac's hard drives. What happened to friendliness?

4 November 2000: Housekeeping

I am somehow glad that I liked The Amber Spyglass the least of the three. It makes it easier for the series to be at an end. Mulafi reminded me of why I've said for years "I don't like fantasy." When I woke up this morning, around sunrise, I read; at 7:30, I read something so shocking and terrible that I shut the book with total conviction that I wouldn't read another page. I got out of bed, found my robe and glasses and water and pill, came downstairs, and turned on my computer, all so I could find Jessie's phone number. She was home and didn't seem peeved to be called before 10:00--love that time difference--and I told her where I was at and that I wouldn't read another page without reassurance. It turns out she hasn't read the third book yet and had no idea what I was talking about, but she offered that children's books--unlike adult books--tend to end with everything All Right. Neither of us could remember the whole saying or its origin: "All will be well, and all will be well, and all [something else] will be well, and [something else]."

So I went back to bed and read some more.

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RDC and I went to Home Depot and Alfalfa's, both now conveniently located nearly adjacent to one another. Leaving Alfalfa's with groceries, we saw some acquainti we hadn't seen in a long time who didn't know we had a house. I invited them over, sure we had a spare paintbrush or two, but they begged off, inventing that they were helping someone move house or have root canals or something.. We're all very pleased there's a Home Depot so close, and I confessed how Barnes & Noble might be evil, and Wal-Mart, but Home Depot is different. "They're my people," Jae agreed. RDC said something about Restoration Hardware and I speculated as how it would be perfect if Restoration H. would just open a store in the space between Home Depot and Alfalfa's. "And then," Jae offered, "you could set up a tent right here, and never leave."
"Except that that would make the house--"
"--kinda redundant," she finished.
I should spend more time with her.

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We ate our sandwiches on the porch with Blake basking in the sunlight. A family walked by whom we could only exchange basic hellos, since we don't speak Vietnamese, it sounded like, and Blake was extremely offended that three whole people passed by and smiled and nodded at us, but didn't come over to say hello to him. He called to them, "Wheet wheet?" forlornly. He loves people. Then a woman came by canvassing the neighborhood not for voting patterns but to see whether she could sell any replacement windows. All ours are original and we turned her down, but she stayed long enough to admire Blake, which must have been some reassurance to him, and to have some Reese's miniatures, since I asked her to pretend to be trick-or-treating.

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I don't know if the nectarine tree will survive. They like to have open centers and this one was never pruned properly. Now it has one main bole straight up and has lost several side branches that were never groomed until they actually threatened the houses on either side. Today, with our new extension ladder, we took off a branch that threatened the neighbors' roof. Then RDC surveyed the gutters and I attacked the backyard. I cleared away the Virginia creeper or whatever it is from all around the garage doorway and snipped more baby cherry trees from under the parent tree (whose leaves have not yet begun to change). Then he went in to patch and caulk the dining room, which allegedly we are going to paint this week--didn't I say that Labor Day weekend?--and I cleared out the space behind the garage. It's not really behind the garage, since the back of the garage opens onto the alley for parking, but to the side.

Whoever killed the Russian olive (and left a ten-foot stump) left the major branches back there. Also when I pruned the nectarine myself a while back I tossed the amputations back there. Now all that wood is in a brush pile in front of the garage waiting for a real saw. I don't want to dismember limbs with a pruning saw. I figure a couple of good fires in the living room on a series of Blue days (when Denver allows wood-burning) will take care of most of it. And now we have a dogyard for the hypothetical dog. Also someone a while back decided this would be a good storage space for roofing shingles and some black tubing and a whole mess of black plastic. The roofing shingles got to live in the garage but the tubing and plastic went to the big landfill in the sky alongside my neighbor's leaves. People throw out their leaves. 'Struth. I shouldn't be surprised, after seeing grass clippings in the dumpster. Could I have done something with the tubing?

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I expect opposition to this but my new dog name is Pantalaimon. RDC has not read any of the three His Dark Materials books and might not understand this. Besides, I'd call the dog Pannie or something myself and that would be no good at all. Besides, Blake is my dæmon. To get the name out of my system, I decided to rename my two hard drives Pantalaimon and Iorek Byrnison, but that screwed up File Sharing and site management in Dreamweaver and untold other stuff so I changed them back to Fiver and Hazel. My hard drive at work is Harvey, Jimmy Stewart's friend. I didn't realize I had a rabbit thing going.

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Messing about with all this occupied my time while RDC watched "Sid & Nancy," which I didn't need to see again. We just taped "Trainspotting" last night and I suggested he put "Sid & Nancy" on after that, for a theme tape. This is noteworthy only because it made him laugh. I liked "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" back before I could tell Gary Oldman and Tim Roth apart. I saw "Sid & Nancy" long ago, but didn't remember Oldman five years later when I first saw R&G. Then I saw "Pulp Fiction" and "Immortal Beloved" and "Reservoir Dogs" and now it's all over; now I can tell them apart and have ruined the movie for myself. I had my Tom Stoppard moment though. At the beginning of my second year, at a Medieval Stuides introductory meeting, when it came to our turns I said "I'm Rosencrantz" and ABW directly after me said, "And he's Guildenstern."

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I moved a selection of my CDs to my desk. All the CDs had been in the tv shrine, and even after we repair the sterero and set it up in the living room, probably only jazz and classical will live up there. In the meantime, I haven't been listening to my own music enough. Now it's right here next to my computer with its CD drive and speakers. Thursday I listened to Yaz, You and Me Both. I thought it was going to be hard, all fraught with painful college associations, but it's not. None of my college friends liked Yaz, although maybe EKH had some Alison Moyet; it wasn't until CXJ that I met someone else in Storrs who liked Erasure. Yaz is all my own, therefore, and for all its synthesized misery doesn't have unwelcome associations. Then I put in Animal Logic, but my father called and we talked during most of that album. PLT made me a tape of the Cowboy Junkies' Caution Horses backed with Animal Logic, totally disparate bands and music, but now inextricably linked in my head. (I had asked for a full tape of Junkies, but PLT, in his infinite wisdom, decided that "Sweet Jane" was the only worthwhile song on Trinity Session, and so for ages I thought that was the first song on Caution Horses. Git.) It worked, though, "I'm Through with Love" on one side and "You Will Be Loved Again" on the other.

Babysitting for boomers' kids, I made a tape of James Taylor's Greatest Hits backed with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. That's probably the strangest combination. Later, All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes and Meat is Murder shared a tape, so combining the Junkies with Animal Logic hardly offended my musical aesthetic.

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Since I had my eyebrows waxed, I've spent a few moments every morning, post-shower ante-contant lenses, contemplating my face with a pair of tweezers in my hand. Previous to Wax, I'd be diligent about the inter-eyebrow supra-nose area and rip out the hairs growing into my actual eye socket maybe once a week. But now I'm spending actual near-daily time pursuing stray hairs.

Is this equivalent to using make-up? Chemical cosmetics? I think it might be. It's not chemicals, but it's Time Spent Vainly.

Contacts make me look more myself by freeing my face of alien frames. Brushing and braiding my hair gets it out of my way (or, a novel thought, I could cut it! right).

Plucking my eyebrows falls between the no-no of commercial, chemical slime and goo applied to my very skin and the sacrament of No (or not very many) Glasses. I don't like hair in my face obscuring the lines of my jaw and the glint in my eyes; my rationalization is plucking my eyebrows further emphasizes the planes and angles of my face.

But I know it's a rationalization.

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A few weeks ago I had my teeth cleaned for the first time in longer than I care to admit. I have no cavities but incipient gingivitis and have since become Floss Queen. The hygienist said that God was good to me when he gave me teeth, at which I didn't roll my eyes because she was holding sharp instruments inside my mouth and because she did mean it kindly.

That was before she insulted me.

Just two weeks before, driving to Orange, someone asked if we, including My Sacred Self, were from New Jersey. That was because of the plates on the rental car, not because of our accents or attitude or resemblance to Judy Blume characters.

Now, without provocation, this woman asked me if I was from Texas. If my jaw hadn't been propped open, it would have fallen open. "No!" I exclaimed. "How could you think so?" Had I acquired a drawl? a large belt buckle? an overweening nostalgia about the Alamo? I've got an attitude, all right, but I never want my New England superiority to be mistaken for snobbery from anywhere else. "Do I sound like I'm from Texas?"

"No, no, it's the tattooing on your teeth. Texas has a lot of artesian wells with very hard water." So it wasn't my name or face or speech pattern or accent or attitude but my teeth. Ah.

"No, the tips of my incisors are a different color than the rest of them because they were bonded in third grade after I fell off a jungle gym. I was supposed to have them redone when I turned 18 [and presumably no longer climbing jungle gyms, let alone falling off them--ha!] but also when I turned 18 I lost dental insurance." Basically, my two front teeth look like they have a French manicure. Also the center side of the right one has a slight chip at a diagonal. I never think about it. My teeth and their faults are as much a part of me as my hazel eyes that aren't as green as I'd like, my brown hair that isn't as red as I'd like, my pale skin that isn't as freckled as I'd like, my right thumb that can't straighten, the scars on my right hand from the pins that straightened the Smith fracture in my ulna, the other scars on my right hand from when Shadow bit me in a frenzy of fear and pain, the chicken pock in my right eyebrow. My teeth aren't cosmetically perfect, but they're structurally sound and they're mine.

This dental clinic does cosmetic as well as regular dental care. The hygienist--the nicest, most competent, cheeriest one I've ever had--and dentist suggested I consider cosmetic work.

I have a problem with this aside from the four to six hundred dollars per tooth it would cost (and they'd want me to have all six front smiling teeth done, so everything would match). My problem is that it would be make-up. I can wear mascara to a wedding and think I look better with it, until it inevitably seeps off or smudges, for a few hours once in a while. I can't dye my hair because it would be long-term make-up. I consider plucking my eyebrows--to complement my bone structure--a waste of time. My teeth are structurally sound, ivory if not vanna white, straightened and aligned (I can't believe braces are now a desirable fashion accessory), and Mine. Would fixing my caps, lightening and brightening the front six, filling in the chip, be make-up and therefore Wrong (especially if the procedures would threaten their integrity or longevity) or would it make me look more like me, as contacts and wearing my hair off my face (not often flatteringly, I know) and plucking my brows do, and be therefore Good?

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At Haitch's birthday dinner, the subject of my Glamour Shots arose, I think because I still couldn't find them--I brought them to TJZ's wedding and displayed them to wide acclaim and derision at Charenton and thought I left them in the suitcase for EJB's wedding but couldn't find them to show to RRP and SWBW. (I did find the pictures--while on the phone with PLT and emailing him this picture.) None of the poorly focused, unnatural Glamour Shots is a favorite. One ( ) of my favorite pictures of me shows me about as lovely as I've ever managed to look. RDC took that picture. My new favorite picture, also taken by RDC, is me trying to recreate a Glamour Pose, and shows definitively why I Don't Belong There:

I love this photograph. STL called me back about Goodnight Gorilla's elephant on the 28th, while the diamonds were drying onto the shirt, and after we sorted out what animal has which toy, PLT directed me to this New Thing he's programmed for a major commercial web site. Can I name it, PLT, or shall I simply hint that it's related to a major South American river? In return, I emailed him this photograph. There's one thing I don't like: how fat my left upper arm looks. But there's a muscle in the right one! I hope this picture inspires a laugh or two, but one of the worst things about long-distance friendships is that you can't hear the laughter when you send something like this. His chortle was just what I wanted.

Have I posted a photograph before in which it's obvious I wear my wedding rings backwards? The wedding band fits more snugly than my sapphire, and I'm much more fond of the sapphire than of the unengraved, absolutely plain and narrow band. Oh, and that's my watch. Did I mention I thought I'd lost it? Weeks went by and I couldn't find it. On the plane on the way to TJZ's wedding I was arranging my purse (which, Climbing Tree help me, I did carry), checking its pockets, and there in the back one that I never use was my watch. Wheeee! I love my watch.