Reading: Margaret Drabble, The Radiant Way, finally. It reminds me of Rosamund Pilcher (possibly only because it's so British) more than of A.S. Byatt

Moving: lots

Watching: "Emma"

Listening: David Gray

11 June 2001: Snippets

Songs that easily could make me cry: the theme from "St. Elmo's Fire" and David Gray's "Babylon" from White Ladder.

1 June

I fell running for the bus. This proves that riding the bus is unhealthy. I was trying to be all pretty (as an excuse not to walk or ride to work and wearing my favorite pretty dress. Luckily I did not tear it but I did open my knee and ankle as I skidded on my left shin, which looked like a cat had used it as a scratching post. Gross, deep, several-layers-of-skin wounds with lots of blood and bits of parking lot, plus everyone on the bus got to see me in my moment of glory. Hello.

2 June

We walked to the People's Fair to look at arts and crafts and such like. Local musicians played here and there throughout the fair, and at one point I said, "I can't believe that man is playing Ozzy Osbourne in a country/western style." RDC had toned out the music and his first reaction was denial. Fain to deny it (ooo, first "Room with a View" quote in a long time), that was "Crazy Train." And it works! "I'm going off the rails on a crazy train...." It's the right theme, anyway.

We watched "Oscar and Lucinda," which I started in book form at SPM's once. I can tell it could be a good book (I liked the first three pages) but the movie did nothing for me. Actually it did three things: confirm my dislike for Ralph Fiennes, increase my liking for Cate Blanchett, and crack us up a bit later, when we watched an episode of "Real Sex" on HBO. Lucinda has a glass works (and I bet the novel is chock-full of glass metaphors), and one of the bits on "Real Sex" was a company that makes sex toys out of Pyrex glass. Good contrast.

3 June

HEBD and I were discussing the origin of names. Somehow I had it in my head that Beth means God in Hebrew. Since Elizabeth means "consecrated to God" I thought my derivative name meant Consecra. But you probably have to bring something to the house of God to consecrate it, since Beth in fact means house. But anyway, HEBD described me as an action word with a touch of the divine, which is one of the best compliments I've ever received.

4 June

Further instances of "any more" used to mean "these days," in a positive construction:
"I have very few topics of expertise any more."
I first noticed this in Richard Russo's novels, which are set in upstate New York, and I took it as a regionalism. Since then I have heard it elsewhere, and I call it simply wrong. I would accept "I don't have many topics any more" or "I have fewer topics these days."
CoolBoss asked me to set something twice on a page and then makes copies of it to cut in half. I asked how many we would need to distribute. "Thirty-five," she told me, and I laughed, and then she caught on. I told her about Homer Simpson going on spring break and announcing to Marge, "Guess how many breasts I saw today? Fifteen!"

5 June

I talked about "Traffic" with someone who has a problem with the use of color in the filming. Mexico is yellow, hot, dusty, grimy; Ohio aseptic and blue and cold; La Jolla fresh and clear with true light reflected off the Pacific. He asserts that the technique perpetuates stereotypes and is ethnicist; I couldn't counter it because I'm a WASPy gringa and couldn't articulate that color sets tone and mood or further that Ohio's bloodlessness wasn't flattering either. I am waiting for Haitch to watch it (I lent her the DVD) so she can tell me how to explain myself.

At Bark in the Park a few weeks ago I saw a sign for "Purebread Dogs." It wasn't a joke.

More meetings today. Yesterday was "any more." Today was worse: "It sounded like that there was..." and "I wish I would have done x instead."

6 June

Reading Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle reminds me of the adult Betty MacDonalds I want to read. I thought of Onions in the Stew and put it to music. Specifically, the Doors: "Riders on the storm..."
Oh! And there's a Tillie in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle! I am trying to figure out why three mothers on opposite coasts called their naughty or sluttish (in the archaic sense of slovenly; I loved how in Alias Grace Atwood used the archaic term for dust bunnies, slut's wool) daughters Tillie. In Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, the first girl to befriend our eponymous lady learns to wash dishes properly and her father says he prefers this version of his child to Tillie Slopwash. Now the thing is to find whether that name occurs in a book.

7 June

I went to the doctor because my ankle looked angrily red instead of happily healingly pink, as my knee looks. He declared it not infected and I walked home, but the huge bandaid that's been protecting my foot from my Teva strap started peeling off so I walked most of the way barefoot. I have to build up my callouses.

Walking home, I met another neighbor, an amusing woman with two dogs named Katie and Ginger. We walked the dogs together and I overshot my own street because I was enjoying her company and yea! I love my neighborhood.

8 June

I walked some longish distance with Haitch, from her apartment to the swallow overpass at I-225. I had no chocolate all day. I brought plastic bags to a proper recycling place and lots of detritus to Goodwill. All in all I felt quite virtuous.

9 June

Haitch, Trey, and I took three trips with a dog apiece, a different dog each time. Once we took three Huskies or Malamutes. One was kind of mangy and looked, Haitch said, like Eddie Munster; I thought it looked like Wacko from the Animaniacs. Then we had an amusing lunch together at Wild Oats, and then I went home and declined to scrub the exterior trim because of a wind- and rainstorm.

Instead I stayed in and disgusted myself by wasting three hours of my life watching "The Patriot" (and reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) which was a combination of "Braveheart," "Rob Roy," and "Scream." The lines of Continentals ranged along a field across from redcoats was obviously "Braveheart," even if the Brits weren't wearing red yet in William Wallace's time; Heath Ledger was tied behind a cart as was Liam Neeson in "Rob Roy," plus Neeson and Gibson each took a licking and kept on ticking; and finally, if Heath Ledger merely had watched "Scream," he would have known--as the survivors at the end of "Scream" did--that you have to kill the bad guy dead dead dead and still not trust that he might not kill you. What a wretchedly bad movie. Item: in the 18th century, women and girls did not wear their hair loose.

10 June

I drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park. On the way, I pulled over to take a picture of these cranes? geese? flying overhead. I have yet to identify them. I took a hike around Moraine Park to look at wildflowers, took a photograph of a ruby-throated (I think) hummingbird from about three feet, and sat by the Big Thompson (not very big yet) and read Margaret Drabble. Then I came home and scrubbed exterior trim. Martha, the golden retriever neighbor, came by, and seeing my UConn shorts told me she had been a visiting professor at the UConn School of Law. We established that I am from Old Lyme and she told me that she and her partner while in Connecticut visited the Florence Griswold Museum and were given palettes and easels with and upon which to dabble as they toured the grounds.

The hummingbird in RMNP reminds me that a few days ago I saw, hovering around a huge flowering bush whose species I cannot guess, a thing I guessed by its size to be a moth. The flowers it was sucking on were flat and white, which also indicated a moth. But it wasn't quite sunset yet, and besides, that thing was flying wrong. It was a hummingbird, a weensy one. I am so glad that we have one even before planting friendly shrubs. I don't want to have a feeder because apparently they can die of infection from a dirty feeder in no time flat, and I barely wash one bird's dishes once daily, let alone more or any belonging to birds I can't cuddle, whose feet I can't tickle. So I have to have the right flowering shrubs.

At the museum in Moraine Park I learned that in the early 20th century Moraine Park was a resort area, and the museum building's original purpose was a lodge. There was a golf course, and so few of the grasses here are native.

Trey and another coworker Nebra came over to watch "Sex and the City." We all think Mr. Big is so cute so I had to tell what a disappointment it was to see footage of him at the première party with a mustache. I showed them photographs documenting how a mustache can ruin an otherwise noble and eye-able face. Also mine from Glamour Shots, which Trey had been wanting to see for a while.

11 June

At the shelter Saturday the three of us ran into Nebra, who had come looking for a cat but been turned back by allergies. Sunday she reported she had adopted a cat from another shelter. She and Egg each rescued a three-legged pet recently, two very funny stories, so when she saw an all-white, blue-eyed, three-legged cat at another shelter, she had to have it. It has one hind leg, so I have suggested Ahab. She likes the name. Trey does not, but she offered that her mother had a cat with one missing foreleg, whose name was, equally appropriately, Hook.

The city pools opened today, so I finally got into the water. I took the pool like...a duck to water. I swam in the lanes and fooled around in the non-lane section; floating, I thought of "Jaws": "Three tons on him." Haitch might say I'm paranoid, but I think I'm floating better because of higher fat content.

Floating, I recalled that since I am flying with someone else's miles, someone without my name, someone who will not be accompanying me, I therefore have a paper ticket and should find it. I remember taking the paper ticket and putting it somewhere absolutely logical so I would have no trouble finding it; I had no idea what that location might be.

An aside: I cannot abide "When was the last time..." and "Where that location is..." I hereby decree the following: What was the time or When did this happen; or Where was the place or What was the location. Please.

So I scurried home. I found the tickets exactly where I expected, or hoped, they'd be, in the mess on the futon in my study. From which I easily could have removed the packet along with stray correspondence and paper to be recycled.

I watered the lawn (erk), talked to a new neighbor (she bought the house the first day it was shown), met her dogs Oscar and Odie, slammed the sliced eggplant I'd slid into marinade before my swim under the broiler (do I know how to use the grill? no), talked to another neighbor who was concerned her teething baby might have kept me up (answer: no, I sleep like the dead, and anyway with Blake around I am hardly justified complaining about the cries of an infant in pain), ate my eggplant with Margaret Drabble, contemplated the trim on the east side of the house, dismissed it, and retired to right here at my desk where I have been for two hours.

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Before I leave I have to finish washing the trim, scrub Blake's cage so the vet doesn't call social services on me, find tapes to go in Haitch's videocamera, pack, not panic re traveling, make buddy chow, do a mess of laundry, and grocery shop. And a slew of other stuff I don't remember right now because it's past my bedtime.