Buff or beat? That sounds obscene.

Reading: Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

Moving: walked 2.7 miles and moved 3 cubic yards of dirt

Listening: "Fathers and Sons," tape 4

1 May 2001: My Inner Stanley

This weekend I delivered a card. I miss small-town connections, so meeting a babysitter-turned-librarian for former owners of my very house made me really happy. I wrote her a card and enclosed a stamped note, requesting her to send it along to the owners. I wonder. Anyway, I tried.

Thursday evening last week we scampered to Cherry Creek again to gripe about our chairs.They're upholstered, and within several weeks the fabric at the joint of the seat had ripped from that of the back, or torn from the leg, or something. Although the initial delivery of six had taken six weeks, the exchange of three happened the next day after our first complaint, because they were in stock. And now again. We showed a clerk how even the unused chairs on display had these rips, and assured him we loved these chairs, wanted these chairs (or perhaps were so happy not to have to look any further), but we wanted them whole. The clerk said someone from the furniture manufactory would call us Friday.

It's Tuesday. No call. Today RDC is going to call them, and then we will see some proper action.

Anyway I brought that up to say that while in Cherry Creek we ate at Mel's and saw RDC's adviser and some other folks from DU. It's nice to run into people we know, but Mel's is too expensive a place to go to make that happen.

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Having been asked, I would like to clarify that in the picture from Friday's entry I am not flaunting two day-glo pink dildoes. Or Powerpuff Girls' light sabers, should they carry any. Those are the candles my sister gave me. Blinding, aren't they? I decline to speculate what the bunny appliques would add to the experience, but otherwise, as dildoes those tapers strike me as rather slender, inadequately slender.

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I've been quoting Shakespeare without trying to, not that Shakespeare mentions hot pink bunny vibrators. What play is "proper action" from? Also Sunday as I read The Way of All Flesh (which reminds me, and this is not a compliment, of Of Human Bondage), someone tells a boy that some are born stupid and others have stupidity thrust upon them and the boy is both, compounded. I had thought Winston Churchill coined that about greatness, but this predates him; and while he might have repeated it I doubted he had thus paraphrased and immortalized Samuel Butler the way FDR immortalized Mark Twain's "New Deal" (which is from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court). The bit about thrusting greatness--I'm really not talking about sexual aids--is a speech of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. And recently I posed behind Blake and called him my Forest of Cockatiel, more threatening than the Forest of Dunsinane.

Who said "proper action" though? I want a Shakespeare concordance. I think RDC has an outdated CD-ROM. Well, a web one doesn't have that phrase all; the only time the two words occur anywhere near each other is in two separate clauses in Othello. Damn. Okay, I'm not so hifalutin as I hoped. Perhaps I've got Shakespeare on the brain because Jeanette Winterson in Written on the Body uses the sonnet Marianne recites in "Sense and Sensibility."

Speaking of which, that's a super book, and it reminded me of A.S. Byatt's writing that one of her first ideas for maybe Still Life was to write a novel completely without metaphor. She found it impossible. Winterson raises the art of metaphor to new heights. Yesterday in 3WA's Guess the author thread, I used the following paragraph, chosen at random but alluding with Napoleon and fruit and passion to the other three of her books that I know.

She split a pear; one of her own pears from the garden. Where she lived had been an orchard once and her particular tree was two hundred and twenty years old. Older than the French Revolution. Old enough to have fed Wordsworth and Napoleon. Who had gone into this garden and plucked the fruit? Did their hearts beat as hard as mine? She offered me half a pear and a pice of Parmesan cheese. Such pears as these have seen the world, that is they have stayed still and the world has seen them. At each bite burst war and passion. History was rolled in the pips and the frog-colored skin.

Thus inspired, I finished the book yesterday afternoon on the porch swing eating two pears sprinkled with grated Romano, which blew the nifty little vegan thing I had going for a few days there. No. A day and a half: RDC made waffles, with eggs, butter, and soy milk, Sunday morning.

Which means that today I'm back to The Way of All Flesh. Sigh.

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No reading tonight though. Instead I got in touch with my inner Stanley. After work, I took delivery of three cubic yards of garden soil. Three cubic yards. That's a four foot by four foot by five foot pile of dirt with a cubic foot leftover. As I waited for the truck I assembled my new wheelbarrow, clipped more of those insidious little cherry sprouts, and watered the compost and the raspberry bushes. I had had a brilliant idea of moving the dirt through the garage, but the door turned out too narrow for the wheelbarrow. Instead RDC set a wide piece of particle board, meant to be part of a closet organizer, as a ramp at the gate between the alley and back garden, and he inflated the wheelbarrow tire for me. But I, I, moved every inch of that dirt myself.

The length of fake wood wasn't quite enough to make a shallow ramp. The wheelbarrow holds four cubic feet, so I pushed it at least 20 times (81 cubic feet) up a 45-degree slope. My neighbor pulled into the alley, parked in her garage, and came out again to ogle the mound, which I neglected to photograph, damn it. I told her "I am going to be so buff. Or in traction. Whichever." I would back up to get enough speed for momentum to get the barrow up, and toward the end when the frame was full I was basically lifting wheelbarrow loads up and in, since I couldn't dump the barrow over without spilling out of the frame and onto grass. So the word "manhandling" came to mind. There's not a nonsexist exact equivalent. So I mentally chanted "by main force by main force by main force" to stick that alternative in my head. ("Main" derives from the French le main or from the Latin manus, meaning hand.)

RDC came out to check my progress and I told him I was getting in touch with my inner Stanley Yelnats.
"What?" he asked.
It's a good thing I read him Holes. "Holes," I reminded him.
"Oh yeah."
In contrast Stanley had to dig a five by five by five hole, 125 cubic feet, 4.6 cubic yards. Also I had gloves, plenty of water, an overcast late afternoon, and loose happy loamy soil to transfer from mound to wheelbarrow to raised bed. I didn't have inadequate water, broiling sun, no gloves, or hardpack Texas dirt to hurl over my head and out of a hole. It was still hard though.

This was not the only literary allusion that passed through my one-track mind.

• I hesitate to include the following but honestly I remember it not because I've read Pet Sematary since high school but because when I did read Pet Sematary (before 11th grade, after which my literary tastes expanded (laterally) to Ayn Rand and Jean Auel, wheeee!), it struck me as illogical. As I remember, a gravedigger says there's never enough to refill the hole. I never understood how that might be. You dig a hole, and you refill the hole first with a box and then with the original dirt, yet somehow the dirt you removed is not enough to fill the hole? Even though digging out shovelfuls of dirt has somewhat of a sifting effect, and sifting a measured cup of flour results in more than a cup of sifted flour? This never made sense to me. I ordered three cubic yards of dirt because my garden frame is one foot high by six wide by twelve long. Seventy-two cubic feet, and then I rounded up. My frame is full, and more nine cubic feet extra feet is mounded up. When the dirt settles, the frame will still be overfull. Did Stephen King ever dig a hole of his own, or did he merely invent something that sounded spooky but is in fact specious? Hmmm.
• RDC asked me why I selected this wheelbarrow instead of another one I'd considered. "Well." I said. "You know why I'd want a red wheelbarrow."
  "Because so much depends on it?"
  Yep.
• When the frame got too full for dumping and I had to lift the stupid thing as if wheels had never been invented, of course I felt like Queequeg.

It took me two solid hours and a little over, but I moved all of it in. I am one determined Irish peasant, and I did it.

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When I finished--dirt in, tools away, garage locked--I scooped my rings and bracelet off the table, gulped the last of my water, stomped inside, staggered downstairs, and ran a tub. I hadn't used the tub since we've had the house. It's a paint-brush cleaning, buddy-cage scrubbing kind of tub, to be honest. It's in a little tiny brown room, no windows, no pretty, no Calgon-take-me-away kind of atmosphere. I scrubbed my feet in the sink and rinsed off before I soaked. I didn't want the water to be the color of Jill's in "Brazil."

Soaking, wondering where the folks in movies get tubs in ordinary houses that fit two people and fill to the brim apparently without overflow drains, I listened to RDC on the phone in the den. He was helping to get a website up. In anticipation of increased traffic, friends of ours moved their site to a higher-volume server, but in a snafu everything was put in the wrong level of directory so nothing worked. They all sorted it out, and a good thing: I am so stoked for Barbie and Sabrina--their business is going to be on the Today show tomorrow morning!

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RDC taped both episodes of "That '70s Show" for me, which was good for him because he ended up being on the phone while they aired, and good for me otherwise I would have missed the "I'd like to teach the world to sing" Coke ad and Eric dressed as Steve Tyler of Aerosmith.

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And it's going to snow later this week! Hooray! It's allowed to snow up until 12 May, which is when all my little photosynthesizing miracle-sprouts get transplanted.

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I was about to upload when Blake shrieked in pain--he bent one of his incoming feathers the wrong way and will fuss and fury until it's settled--and scuttled off my shoulder (clearly, I had caused this tragedy) onto my desk. He likes to climb my organizer and chew the box of Alice in Wonderland greeting cards (the box is allowed; the cards are off-limits) and hurl my little pewter knight to the floor and climb from the bottle of ink to the pocket book of American Impressionism to the greeting card box to the asparagus pencil box to the left speaker in pursuit of the Little Prince eraser Haitch bought for me in France (it's on top of the speaker). On top of the organizer in addition to ink and knight, boxes and speakers, are seaglass and stones from my beach. There used to be shells from my beach, too, but I had to remove those when he discovered how fun they were to reduce to shards. I don't take kindly to that. So I moved my delicate little Long Island Sound shells to the top of the little CD rack on the other side of my monitor, which he can't climb. From his perch on my shoulder he must have spotted the shells there, or perhaps he can smell them (though a cockatiel's sense of smell is not that good); he used to ignore the CD case but now is trying to figure out how to climb it. Either for shells, or to get away from me, whom he blames for his plumage problems. He's like the Cowardly Lion: "Someone pulled my tail!"

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I'm bushed. I'm beat. I'm off to bed. I hope I can walk tomorrow.