Reading: Myra Goldberg's Bee Season

Moving: walked 2.7 miles, taped and primed the living room

Listening: KBCO

Watching: snow falling

Learning: how to share more than one album at Shutterfly

5-6 November 2000: Housework

A house weekend, finally. Sunday we worked inside--Saturday we wore shorts and ate lunch outside with Blake and Sunday it snowed--cleaning and patching the dining room. I washed its walls Labor Day weekend--which is how long we've slacked on the house. I hope damp towels will be enough to remove all the dust generated by sanding joint compound, wallboard paste, fake wood, whatever-all we've been using, and that I don't have to scrub the walls with the evil green stuff again. There's more sanding to do today, and I have asked RDC first to get more of those clear plastic alleged dropcloths. They don't make good dropcloths but they serve well to block the three doorways from the dining room into the rest of the house. I don't want to have to clean the whole upstairs again--I did yesterday just so we wouldn't track dust everywhere.

Dust! I don't understand this Dust.

Sorry. Too much Philip Pullman. I was trying to reassure myself on the phone with Jessie and came up with "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well" but couldn't remember the third clause or who coined it. Would I have remembered if I had actually completed my master's degree? Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love. And I call myself a medievalist. I call myself a librarian too.

Anyway. The house. The dining room. I wanted to have the main living areas done by Christmas. If we don't slack another two months, we could maybe get that done. The living room windows are going to be the main challenge. They're currently painted nearly shut, which is unacceptable. Some lunatic took the hinges off the outer two of the four windows that make up the dining room window as well. Why don't people want windows to open? It's a mystery. Anyway, RDC wanted to fill in the hinge and latch holes but apparently he can't, lacking some tool or other, and I'm glad because eventually I would like to pop them out and rehinge them. That doesn't sound possible, actually, since they're likely glued or nailed in place.

When we first moved in, the plan was to have the bedroom and study done in the first weekend. Ahaha. Despite the lessons those rooms taught us, RDC said that surely the hallway couldn't take any time at all. It took two weeks, what with replacing panels in the built-in closet and five doorways' worth of trim and our taking turns being sick. Then because the dining room had only two regular doorways (instead of one regular and two closet-length of the bedroom) and one window frame (containing four windows that open like doors, whatever that's called), and its walls were in decent shape (on the first survey), he even said after the hallway that the dining room would nearly paint itself. This is, in fact, what I told people in Connecticut when they asked after the house, that despite our tutelage with the bedroom, study, and hallway, the living and dining rooms have not learned to paint themselves.

So. I asked RDC also to get me a saw to cut down the branches to a fireplace size. "What kind of saw?" One of those saws, you know, flat on top with a squared-off end and a wooden handle. I don't know what it's called. "You mean the kind people play music on?" As an analogy, this startled me coming out of RDC's practical mouth. Yes, that's what I meant. "That's a lumber saw. You don't want that. You want a bandsaw, like a hacksaw with the bowed back and the replaceable blade." I do? The lumber saw I described is for fine work and would take too many strokes to cut up wood. It does? Okay. But I thought a bandsaw was electric. Anyway, whatever I used to cut down Christmas trees would be fine. "Or a chainsaw," he offered. "That'd be quick." And scary. I asked if I could chase him around the house waving it over my head. He said no. He said he'd buy me a t-shirt reading "Runs with chainsaws."

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The first ten minutes of the new "Simpsons" was the best. We have this thing about badgers. There's one living in our oven. We like them. "Malcolm in the Middle" amused as well. Then "X-Files." Which disgusted me. That actor was typecast as the Terminator and should remain so. Stupid thing. RDC scoffed at my continuing addiction to ER but I say the X-Files is worse. Not that I'll stop watching it either.

This morning I read Bee Season before I got up. (I finished Amber Spyglass Saturday. Wow.) Bee Season is kind of like Family Values in the interactions amongst the family members and I don't know if I'll want to finish it. Family Values reminds me of Haitch's birthday in 1998, because I had just finished it before that meal and commented to Carman that it was the scariest book I'd ever read. And I mention it because Haitch was trying to remember all her Denver birthdays last week at dinner and we remembered the chocolate birthday and the blizzard birthday and the Carmine's birthday but not her 26th. A bunch of us had dinner at Macaroni Grill or Olive Garden or whatever that was. If there were a transition between Italian chain restaurants and this novel, I would just have made it. Reading Bee Season (I just stacked and unstacked! In only one paragraph! Wheeeee!), I realized that deaf people cannot participate in spelling bees. I have no idea why that occurred to me, but it did.

Later that day, we crashed downstairs waiting for patches to dry, watching CNN and snuggling under the blanket. I told RDC this vitally important realization. He paused before replying, "Why can't they participate in Reese's miniature spelling bees?" I sat up and reached for the rapidly dwindling supply of Hallowe'en candy. "Nice subliminidal message," I told him. And yet later that day, Bart Simpson wrote on the board, "I will not write subliminal messagores." Or he might have had "subliminal" the potatoe way, I forget. Anyway, later again, Scully was looking for a kid in a school for the deaf.

Everything connects.

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I borrowed Bee Season from Haitch weeks ago. I've interrupted it with a lot of stuff and I'm using it to interrupt Biographer's Tale, whose thread I have so long dropped I have to start from the beginning, which is way intimidating. But I have to finish it before January, when it becomes available in the U.S. There's no point in my having ordered it from the U.K. if I don't read it before all the other Yanks.