Holding Tigger, listening to Shrub swallow more of his consonants than I do, make more spoonerisms than I do, and make even less sense than I do.*

Reading: John Fowles, The Magus

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Listening: Toni Morrison, Paradise

Watching: Shrub in the reflection of my photographs. Meanwhile, "The Day After," which scared the pants off me when I was 16, is on the SciFi channel. So appropriate.

27 February 2001: Pictures and confession

Last night I attended the first night of a five-week class at the Botanic Garden, "Garden Design for Novices." It might be good. It might not. The intstructor has nearly the name of my middle baby-sitting child, which ought to be have endeared him to me more than it did. I thought this class would be just want I needed, but this seems to be for people who haven't read any books. I think what I need is "Garden Design for Illiterate Novices with a Kick in the Ass for the Literate but Undisciplined."

He asked, as a courtesy, for us all to keep the class fragrance-free, as he is allergic to nearly all perfume. Am I sympathetic about allergies? No. Is this unkind of me? Probably. Do I repent? No. Especially since, just a few minutes later, he handed round a pad of 11x17 graph paper for us each to plot our property on over the next week, and before the pad even came to me I knew I would just pass it along to my neighbor. Even if I hadn't already plotted out our lot on much bigger paper, much more finely graphed than 16 squares to the square inch, I wouldn't've deliberately handled anything that reeked so repellently strongly of tobacco smoke, put it into my knapsack to stink that all up, touched it at all to make my hands smell.

Sympthy is not in my repertoire when someone is so hypocritical and so stupid.

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I know I should bring leftovers for lunch, but I've been buying prepared foods. Wild Oats sells stuff by Amy's Kitchen, which, so far, tastes pretty good. It uses organic vegetables, rah rah, though none of the dishes is low-fat. So far. I'll keep looking, though of course I prefer the stuff with the most cheese. The packages each bear a paragraph about the company, which I paraphrase: "In 1987, when our daughter Amy was born, we learned we didn't have the time to prepare the healthy foods we were accustomed to. So we started Amy's Kitchen to fill that need." Something like that. Basically, they didn't have time to cook but they did have time to start a whole company. Huh.

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Pictures!

Blake's on the dining table and RDC is lying underneath it, attracting his attention so he'll peep over the edge. I love the way you can see just the tip of his crest, like Alfalfa's, tipping over the top of his head.

In other pictures you can see more of his shadow flashed onto the ceiling. He's some monster bird, several feet high. He hates the flash.

This is an old picture: no cast on RDC's hand and his wedding ring on.

Even older pictures from soon after Christmas, when Blake received the treat of a honeystick in his stocking.

(Blake's stocking is larger than either of ours. Mine is a relatively skinny one my mother made for me in some later-'60s time when paisley, rickrack, and corduroy were near to hand, and RDC's is one I modeled after my own, made from felt so I wouldn't have to hem it. My notstepmother bought Blake's from Lands' End, and it's monogrammed. It's not monogrammed; it's got his name on it. What's that called?

Blake doesn't even have initials. My goodness, my own son doesn't have three names to make into a Three-Letter Abbreviation! How can this have escaped my notice for five years?)

Anyway, here he'd already eaten the easier bits off the lower part of the stick, and is holding the stick in his right talon, partly to hold it still and partly to pull himself up toward the top, chunkier part of the stick. He is so adorable.

RDC tried to disguise his cast with a sock with the toe cut off, wondering if the pattern of the fiberglass was the one element that drove Blake over the edge. Unfortunately it's the fact of the cast as a whole.

Perhaps if RDC had covered his cast with a dog, Blake would be afraid of it instead of in love with it. We did try aversion therapy, posing the big scary blue ball with the cast, but it doesn't work. Blake's head spins (metaphorically) and I can't really tell the difference between aversion therapy and teasing, so it never lasts long.

That one longest tail feather, grey in contrast to his gray body, has been since broken off. Now he's down to two tail feathers, both steel gray, on his right side. Clumsy git. Or as his vet has said, snake's breakfast.

And you'd think Blake would be happy that the shape of the cast facilitates scooping (which this is--the buddy in one hand with fingers actually permitted to touch the buddy back and the other hand diligently stroking the head and neck). Far from happy, though, he probably snapped at RDC just moments later, because, as you can plainly see, RDC, slacker that he be, is splitting his attention between buddy and the television.

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Saturday we went to the Mardi Gras parade in Manitou Springs. It was about as cheesy as it was my first time, so I loved it. I just searched my archives and found I never mentioned the first time. I was sure I had. A couple of years ago, RDC and I explored Garden of the Gods, a rock formation park near Colorado Springs, and then went looking for lunch, which we found in a town called Manitou Springs. When we emerged from the restaurant, there was a small-town cheesy parade.

I've wanted to go back, and this weekend we did.

Maybe even for a small town, it seemed like a short parade, but especially for a small town, I thought the costumes were great. I had just pet an adorable pit bull puppy (see my muddy left thigh) when I met this lion.

A while back Haitch visited Manitou Springs with a college friend who lives in Colorado Springs, and in Manitou she found her new favorite store, chock full of penguins. We picked up this friend again, went to the parade again (first time for them), visited the penguin store again (first time for me). Also we went to a great restaurant called Adam's Café, which I recommend highly.

The glory about having a digital camera is that you can take pictures of ridiculous things like penguin angels.

It's got its penguin wings folded demurely over its front. I expect angel wings on penguins are no more stupid than angel wings on humans, since both species already have forearms. Yes, penguins can't fly, but just because they're birds they look even goofier with extra wings than humans do. Or maybe it's the coy "don't look at my tummy" pose, or the stupid belashed eyes. I held the camera case behind the wings so the white would stand out, and also in my hand were my new View-Master reels of Rocky Mountain National Park.

There were cool penguin things in the store. I'm pretty sure. I wouldn't want you to think Haitch likes kitsch. Not she. Just me, with my View-Master reels. I love those things.

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* I have never stated so explicitly, I think, but I don't speak very well. I garble. I speak fast, even for a Connecticut native, I stammer, and I never entirely got over my last, physical speech impediment, the misalignment of my jaw that befouls my vowel-r combinations. My Shakespeare professor, whom I love and adore, told me, in her gentle but direct and unmistakeable way, that this would impede any teaching career I pursued. The degree varies with my emotional comfort, enthusiasm, level of inhibition. I'll never speak professionally because of it, but also because of it I get to make up great words like "blee."

It's as much part of me as my love of dogs, my voracious reading, my thoughtlessness; I wouldn't be me without it. I'm trying to think now why, in almost four years of public journaling, I haven't mentioned it or have mentioned it only glancingly, unlike those other three oft-discussed lisa traits that first and immediately leapt to mind. I expect because I don't think about it as much as I do dogs, books, or inconsiderateness.