ante meridian: I've had enough of Blake and am pulling his head off.

Reading: Ragtime

Moving: nothing yet

Watching: "Chocolat" last night

Listening: Ella Fitzgerald and Swann's Way

post meridian: Maximum Cockatiel Alert

13 January 2001: Chocolat

Because I have just finished A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Haitch at supper last night: "You've never read that?" Me: "It was my Book of Shame"), a not-very-stream of consciousness about "Chocolat":

It's in English? Is the mayor one of the husbands in "Enchanted April"? I like that red cloak...The secretary/mother looks like the mother in "Pleasantville"...Haitch was a clever person to have peed before the movie...I wish I looked like Juliette Binoche...perhaps I could just spend more time looking at her...I think I need to pee...look at her collarbones! Ralph Fiennes could much more easily have been in love with her supersternal notch than with that of washed-out Kristin Scott Thomas if he still had had lips at the time...chocolate...Johnny Depp...I've just got to pee

From there I degenerated into drooling over the chocolate, lusting for Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, until, Climbing Tree help me, needing to pee overwhelmed even those two primordial urges. I haven't been so uncomfortable since 1988. At one point I was actually going to leave the movie--with Haitch and four innocent bysitters in my way. So I dealt. The movie had just ended with the credits not yet rolling when I excuse-me'd, pardon-me'd, and apologized my way out of the row, up the auditorium, through the throng waiting for the next show, and gratefully into an unoccupied stall with no waiting.

I believe it was NCS who sat through "Ghostbusters" in an unairconditioned cinema. From then on, any reference to that movie made him sweat. I figure my desire for chocolate and my lust/envy for Juliette Binoche will escape unscathed.

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I talked to my mother this morning. She is buying a computer to go with her spandy new sewing machine that can download stitches (and patterns?) from the net. I find this extremely amusing and am pleased she's pursuing her hobby again.

She called just as I was pouring cereal into a bowl for Blake and me, which meant that she got to hear his whining anxiety as I wasted time pouring soymilk into it, pouring OJ into a glass, and sprinkling the cereal with dried cranberries, instead of immediately giving him his flakes. My mother doesn't understand the bird thing, which is fine because no one else does either, but when I told her we'd decided against a dog for the time being she was sympathetic about the danger to my little guy. So that was good.

When my parents built the house, my father didn't want a dishwasher. There was also some confusion about whether, with the $1000 my mother had saved from her job, they would buy a refrigerator (her idea) or a motorcycle (his idea). No lie. We didn't have a dishwasher until I was 10, and as an adult I told my mother it was a lucky thing for her that my father's mother had had a clothes washer. If not, he would probably have considered them too new-fangled as well.

She told me today that again, she saved money from her part-time jobs for a clothes washer, but he didn't want to install it because of some water concern. Yet it was she, not he, who, with two toddlers in tow, wasted time every week at the laundromat. She didn't have a clothes washing machine to use in her own house until I was in nursery school.

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I just bought one of those exercise balls, for stretching and abdominals and as a desk chair. It's big and blue and inflated, and therefore a very very very scary thing. Blake was petrified of it upstairs fresh out of its box, and now, several hours later, I'm at my computer, which is generally when he loves to be with me, but I'm sitting on the ball, and I think his the muscles at the base of his crest must soon be exhausted from holding it at so forward.

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Today I scraped the windowsill clean while listening to Swann's Way. The city picked up the Christmas tree for mulching. I received a wonderful card from HEBD full of pictures of ZBD and wrote her a letter with actual paper (and colored pencils, because that's what I was in the mood for). I sorted through all the pictures I've received in random cards and things. ABW id'd a mystery baby as her second son, and so now I know who all the little iguanas are, but I still have no idea what I'm supposed to do with those smaller-than-wallet-sized pictures.

Well, I have one idea. A few Christmases ago, my notstepmother gave me two pictures of Devil's Hopyard (a state park in Haddam, just north of Old Lyme), one portrait, one landscape, both in silvery portrait frames. Only after moving into the house did I search out new frames for those pictures, which have joined the ranks of All the Other Non-Air-Force-Blue stuff I've covered the walls of my study with.

I used one of the silvery frames for pictures of my nieces and nephews: TEHW as a flowergirl, Emma (not quite three) "reading" Sense and Sensibility to Claire (not a year), the two Zs with their arms around each other at TJZ's wedding, last year's Christmas picture of V kids, which is now out of date as a fourth arrived in September, and one little wee one of neonatal AEW, only because it's the only one I have of him without a grownup in it, and a wallet-sized one of his older brother in a preschool wallet. Those are the primary, or at least the cutest, kids.