This face is not my reaction to the following book, but I must confess that there is a description of a middle school dance at the end of chapter 7 whose painful truth really struck me.

Reading: Crooked Little Heart.

Moving: nope

Watching: Maybe "Emma" later. I'll enjoy it despite its being the Gwyneth Paltrow version because the Kate Beckinsale version, except Harriet, is equally poorly cast.

Listening: RDC through the heating vents. I'm in my study and he's upstairs talking to SPM on the phone about router bits.

5 January 2001: Sailor vs. Soldier

I learned months ago in the Home Depot Home Improvement 1-2-3 that all the different regular square ways to arrange bricks have names. If you arrange them end to end, lengthwise, that's called a stretcher. If you arrange them end to end, lengthwise, but with the skinnier of the two long sides facing up, that's called rowlock stretcher. On the butt vertically with the wider of the two long sides against that of the next brick is called soldier course. On the butt vertically with the narrower of the two long sides against that of the next one is called sailor course. Today I finally remembered to search for the origin of the term, and online I found a page with diagrams of the different patterns. I didn't mark it, though, and now, searching again--still google for "masonry brick soldier sailor course" or permutations thereof, I can't find it. Lots of Cervantes and Whitman and Shakespeare and Melville, though.

I am guessing that the names are because sailors stand shoulder to shoulder and soldiers stand front to back. If that's true. While diagrams were helpful (more helpful than my description), I want the etymology of the terms.

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Last night during my workout RDC suggested sushi, which I was hardly capable of discussing. Not that I opposed the idea. We sat at the sushi bar, watched a chef prepare our own and everyone else's rolls, and ate a California roll and an eel-and-avocado roll and lovely chunks of sashimi yellowtail, snapper, mackerel, flying fish roe, octopus for him and salmon for me, and of course tuna. We also kind of ordered our dining room chairs, which might take as many as four weeks to be delivered. They're upholestered, not made of raw fish, and lend themselves to long evenings spent around a table drinking wine and talking.

We hurried through the grocery shopping because while I had set the VCR for "ER" I would hardly be a happy camper watching it taped at 10. An advantage of living in Denver is Mountain Time television--I can watch ER and still go to bed at 10. At Alfalfa's fish counter we waited behind the man who'd annoyed me, the supertolerant, on sight elsewhere in the aisles. He just looked kind of off. At the counter he disgusted me, reeking of unwashed smoke and generally being an Impossible Customer. I left RDC to place our order and scampered off in search of pasta. When I came back with rigatoni and fusilli and canned peeled tomatoes, RDC filled me in on what I missed. The other weird customer, the artificially-taloned, smoker's skinned, skanky-haired female in acid-wash jeans, whom I'd also noticed with displeasure, came up to the man and they kissed, sloppily and tonguily, before she proceeded to the deli around the corner. Then the man wished her opinion on something, and called to her, but, RDC said, it was obvious he didn't know her name.

There are times I could happily live elsewhere than in a city.

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ER is such a damn soap opera now. Mark's alive, at least for now, spontaneously returning from an open-eyed, open-skulled seizure, and neither the father nor the son died. Everybody's got a happy ending. I continue to watch it wide-eyed and slobbering for more, of course. It would have to do much worse to lose my devotion. One thing: Mark's life flashed before his eyes, his boyhood and Rachel's babyhood and bits of med school and whatnot, and of all his time as a doctor there's one case he (and we) will always remember, that portrayed in the episode "Love's Labour's Lost"; that wasn't among the vignettes. The audience would have gasped and connected further with the character if the writers had included a bit of that.

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SPM dropped by on his way to Home Despot. It's going to be great having them so close. He hasn't been over since Labor Day and so hadn't seen our dining room, which since has been painted, rugged, curtained, and tabled. He approves, and alleges that redoing the bathroom would be cake, and had great ideas about the kitchen. I hadn't thought of cabinets over the doorway, but those would be attractive (if not conveniently functional. He is not among the fans of our lavender bedroom, so I'm glad he likes the dining room.