Reading: Anne of Avonlea

Moving: I just missed the first day of the rest of my life

Listening: "Freaks and Geeks"

Watching: not much

5 December 2000: Gloopy Eye

After an evening, two long days, and a regular day of contacts on the old side of their fortnight, and all three evenings being around smoke, and I don't know, something or other, I have yet another case of nonbacterial conjunctivitis, probably. I had a severe headache Monday and today my left eye is all bloodshot. Blinking, squinting, and any facial movements that involve the eye hurt. So I saw a doctor who prescribed some drops, and if there's not significant improvement by tomorrow morning I have to see an ophthamalogist.

I wore my contacts for long days all in a row because I was at a Dot Org meeting in Boston. I did not see Jessie because letters are easier for me to remember and I remembered E (and dialed 3) when I should have remembered 2. I did not see SLH, though I left him voicemail. I looked up Columbine's number but couldn't find it.

I did see a lot of my sister.

Wednesday night I brought some Dot Orgeristas and colleagues to her restaurant, where we consumed quantities of flesh. Thursday I played social with the meeting but wound up back at the restaurant for a drink at the end of the night. Friday I lost my coworkers and so walked alone to the Public Gardens, said hello to the fowl on the lake (if the book were written now it would be titled Make Way for Goslings--all Canada geese and few mallard ducks) and hopped on the T to Harvard Square. I found a new (to me) bookstore called Curious George Goes to Wordsworth. I grinned at the door to Gnonom Printing, because it has a great door. I didn't attempt to find the Pooh Tree in Harvard Yard, or Harvard quad, or whatever it's called. I wound up back at CLH's restaurant where I had lamb chops (much better than the beef filet mignon Wednesday) and roasted mushrooms and talked to two fellows waiting in the bar for their table. I was sure they were gay, which assumption CLH later ridiculed. She'd met them too and her gaydar, much more astute than mine, hadn't bleeped, but when she saw their picture in the digital camera, she understood why I thought so. Furthermore, one of the men's name was Ron. I, being me, forget the other one's name and the only reason I remember Ron's is that he gave me his business card so I could email him the photographs. He sells antiques. I left before 10, because that's when my systems shut down (being the wild woman that I am), and had time to stop in Avenue Victor Hugo. Tig is, of course, long dead; the current cat is Blue Bonnet and still protected by several signs around the store, "Do Not Stick Your Tongue Out at the Cat." I found a hardcover Shell-Seekers, a paperback English Patient premovie and therefore with the original cover, and two Madeleine L'Engles. I think A Severed Wasp is in print but I doubt The Small Rain is, and here they were with companion covers. That works, because Katherine Forrester is the protagonist of both.

Saturday, after the meeting, CLH picked me up. We bought a tree, set it up more easily than either of us had had a tree go up in the past, and decorated it.

I can't tell if that's in focus (see Gloopy Eye, above).

We also plundered a crafts store for shit to glue on other shit. I brought my own glue gun. That's all I should've wasted my time with--she had a mind-numbing quantity of paint, ribbon, miniature this and that, pine cones, notions, and my piddly contributions of some of the crap she told me to keep rather than bother shipping to her after Aspen I could have left in Denver.

She has a great apartment in the Fens, but I have no idea where she keeps all this during the other eleven months of the year.

---

The other thing I saw, but only a very little of, was Old Lyme. Our direct flight was cancelled and we connected through Dulles. Flying from DC to Boston took us over the New England coast. The land was cloudy and the Sound sunny, so my picture of Old Lyme is only of Griswold Point and Great Island. I guess the air quality is really not as good as over whatever city Shelley photographed. Or maybe I can blame it on the clouds. Anyway, the top of the picture is south, Long Island Sound. The water on the right is the Connecticut River, and the land/water mix in the other clear section is Great Island, Griswold Point, Black Hall River...home. It's so beautiful.

---

Reading Disgrace, I was startled to recognize a line from Jude the Obscure. When I say Coetzee's depressing, I mean it. I'm not surprised at this one line I remember from Jude, since it's the most horrific specific thing that happened.

---

I read Alison Weir's Life of Elizabeth I on the plane. I did not stamp cards.