Just got up

Reading: Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I haven't given up on Lolita but am reading McCullers with Melissa.

Moving: later today, promise

Listening: Dave Matthews. Blake whining. The usual.

Watching: fish. Maybe some Shakespeare tonight. "The Hurricane."

3 February 2001: Just Checking In

It's 9:00 a.m. and we have just had some pleasant flock time with Blake. He called me out of bed making cute sounds after the sun shone fully into the dining room, after 7:30, and we had breakfast together with him only a little distracted. Afterward I ensured RDC still had his left arm under the covers and there we joined him, for some snuggling and head-petting and singing and chattering and whistling and "Blake is a pretty bird" and maybe we'll have an okay day today.

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I jotted a bunch of reminders in my DayRunner and now it's upstairs. It's also 9:00 p.m. This week, I was waved at by a firefighter, which is almost as lucky as having your hand shaken by a chimney-sweep. Thursday morning I woke up at 2:45 a.m., which is why I shouldn't read books like On the Beach before I go to sleep (I wrote about that here).

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Walking to the cobbler's this week I stopped to pet the noses of two police horses in the median of the 16th Street Mall. Red usually goes out with Curly and here was Red with someone else, so I asked an officer were Curly was, and the officer said, "Oh, Curly's dead," completely casually, and I looked up at him stricken, whereupon he said he was kidding. I understand why people hate cops.* I patted Red's muscular neck and bid him another good day fighting crime, and immediately jaywalked.

11 April 2001: * A reader criticized me for making such an outrageous statement, pointing out how injust it would have been about, say, an ethnic group. He's right, much as I hate to admit it. What we have here is sloppiness of thought and writing. What I should have said was something about how counterproductive his dismissal of me was as a piece of Public Relations, when it is for public relations that the equine corps exists.

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I have 145 books to read this year. I'm not going to beat myself up about The Women's Room--which I always thought was non-fiction--and tedia like Henry James or several of the others. I don't expect to read more than 10 books a month. But it's a goal. I also have to read Daughter of Fortune for the next Dot Org book group. Unlike Mopie, I am really liking The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. And I'll break for the Newbery winner.