Watching CNN in the reflection of a photo collage

Reading: Throwing Shadows and The Bottle Factory Outing

Moving: housework and toting Haitch's unbelievable duffel bag

Listening: KBCO

Watching: Something on Sundance, eventually

30 December 2000: House

Over breakfast this morning I finally finished Sons and Lovers. As expected, a waste of 420 pages of my reading life. And it took me a week, interrupted with two children's books just for my sanity's sake of course.

The spandy (I originally mistyped "spendy," which is also true) stuff we have for the quarter-sawn white oak furniture is Seeds' Wood Dressing, allegedly since 1885. It's some sort of oil, but it doesn't say what sort. Actually it's probably just a Restoration Hardware scam. I dusted the furniture, applied that stuff and let it soak ("as long as convenient for maximum nourishment"), then buffed. The wood just gleams now. It's wonderful.

Otherwise I emptied a lot of the living room. It's soon to undergo the same treatment as the dining room has, starting with the windows. RDC stripped one today. I don't know what I'm going to do with the plants on the mantel. The little bookcase ABW gave us for our wedding has been in the living room since the assault on the dining room began, and now it's in the sunroom. If the plants go in there they'll freeze. All its books and those from the built-ins flanking the fireplace are on the family room floor. We need bookshleves. How difficult could it be to sink plaster anchors so I can mount the metal thingies and hook brackets into those and shelves on those?

Forget it. I like having a wall between my study and the furnace.

From the 'brary Thursday I borrowed a 1987 Lowry and 1979 Konigsberg. Rabble Starkey was okay, mostly. Lowry doesn't command the Pennsyltucky dialect that, say, oh just a random name here, Susan Creech does, so the voice fails. And then, after a bookful of "We was" and "Me and her did this," right at the end, all growed up and responsible now, Rabble gets concerned with her grammar. What I liked was Rabble's name: Parable Ann, Rabble for short. I like names. Throwing Shadows is better. In it and in Altogether, One at a Time, Konigsburg assembles her stories by a theme.

The name Rabble reminded me of a dog belonging to a neighbor of HPV's--the one into whose driveway the path through the woods between our houses let out. Its name was Rebel. By the time I started babysitting for 3SK, that dog was old, which I'm thinking excuses the fact that I never could keep its name straight when it was born and I was little--I called it Pebble, spelled it Rebble.

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I was sitting on the dining room rug reading Throwing Shadows, eating two oranges, and talking to DMB when RDC came upstairs from stripping the window. "What time do you pick up HAO?" he asked.

"Um, now," I panicked. It was 1:19. Luckily I was tidy and braided and even wearing a bra, if only a stretchy comfy at-home thing. I swapped sweatpants for jeans, found shoes wallet phone keys jacket book and sunglasses, and scarpered.

I was at her gate at 1:53. I love driving.

A woman who deplaned ahead of Haitch--at 1:58--wore a jacket of some uncategorizable fur, colored like a coyote but shorter like a cow, and overall not a regular animal or even a good imitation. She dressed her hair in a harsh upsweep and looked like she hadn't smiled in months, by choice. Haitch emerged staggering and yawning and I took her tote bag off her shoulder. She needed to make a pit stop and I waited outside for her reading my book and people-watching. The outfit of one prune-faced woman, an unbelievable southwestern print shirt with a fringed suede vest and pegged jeans, caught my eye and tried to pull it out of its socket. Determinedly I dropped my gaze back to my book, just in time to notice her cow-coyote hybrid jacket tucked through the strap of her shoulder bag. Whew: only one of them.

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RDC made pancakes for supper on the new griddle. That was a useful selfish present. Jessie, come back! We don't have to make puny ones that will all be tough and cold by the time there's enough!

And now I'm on the futon in my study reading The Bottle Factory Outing and RDC is watching M*A*S*H reruns. The very last regular one came on, the one where Margaret builds a time capsule. "I hate this one!" I said in response to RDC's invitation I go and watch with him.
"Why?" he asked.
"You watch what they put in that time capsule, think of which item would mean the most to me and how they betrayed it."
He knew immediately. When Radar went home several seasons before, he left his teddybear on Hawkeye's cot. When Hawkeye offered the teddybear for Margaret's time capsule, it was a different bear. Somebody lost the prop, that prop, a teddybear. Grrrr.