Reading: Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Moving: yesterday I walked 3+ miles and swam 2K (1.25 miles)

Watching: fireworks later today, I expect; also the new colors on my house

Listening: power tools

4 July 2001:

I said that after such a lovely spring, Denver could do what it wanted for the summer. I am trying to remember that. It started getting hot in the middle of last week. RDC came home on Thursday and we hadn't seen each other in three weeks, and on Friday his aunt and uncle arrived for a week that's actually two long weekends. They are currently in Durango and return tomorrow. Saturday as we toured them around the Botanic Gardens with its Bird Haus Bash, the temperature reached 98; Sunday we did the Obligatory Tour of Rocky Mountain National Park and I'm glad we did, because the temperature in Denver was 101. Under 100+ heat on only the second of July, I think I can revoke the permission I had earlier granted for heat.

But Monday, Tuesday, and today have been successively cooler; or, if it really gets to the predicted 94 today, at least there are only two people in the house instead of four, and our time is our own. Someone asked me about an aunt and uncle, implying closeness of family for an extended stay, but these people were in loco parentis for RDC through two years of high school and have always been closely involved.

My goal for today is to finish the damn Golden Notebook. Since I started reading it again, in earnest for Dot Org's book group, in early June, I have interrupted it with birthday books: Dora gave me E.L. Konigsberg's two Newbery medalists, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The View from Saturday; Kymm gave me all four Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books; Dora again got me Ghosts I Have Been signed by Richard Peck; I bought myself a book on the Hundred Years War and two books of literary puzzles. I have not yet read The Peppered Moth, which RDC gave me. Oh, speaking of books and signings, I didn't know that Richard Russo came to the Tattered Cover until weeks afterward. I would love to be able to give someone a copy of Nobody's Fool but apparently I am too dense to keep proper track of author visits.

A word on Richard Peck. This is not Robert Newton Peck (though I thought so for years) who wrote the Soup books and A Day No Pigs Would Die. I confused them because I didn't like Richard's more obviously contemporary books and since Ghosts is set in 1913, that's clearly the same period as Soup and Pigs, or at least was to my elementary school self. When I reread Ghosts for the first time since high school or before, a couple of years ago, I was surprised and pleased at how well it stood up and at how much I liked Blossom Culp.

So Richard Peck signed it, "For Lisa, with a touch of Blossom Culp in her heart." I had wondered, tearing open the package, why Dora addressed it "Lisa 'B.C.' Houlihan." Except Peck didn't write "with" but an abbreviation from Latin, a lowercase c with a line over it. I don't know where it's used outside the medical field and harassed authors; I myself use "w/." I mention this because it leads to an amusing little BJWL tale. When she was first feeling her oats as an LPN, in her occasional letters to me--very occasional and very short because she's so very busy--she would write that c-with-a-line-over-it, and since I am so stupid and ill-informed, she would explain what it meant in parentheses. Not only in every letter but more than once within the same epistle.

Anyway, before I had got over my shock and pleasure and stunned amazement at the trouble Dora had gone through for me, I called her so I could effuse at her. I had sent paper notes for the earlier books--and, since snail mail is so much slower, got an irrirated note from Kymm in the meantime: "HEY YOU! Get anything in the mail recently?" and then a humble (relatively speaking, this being Kymm) email when she got the note. This is my etiquette dilemma: I like a paper note, but it's slow(er), much slower to get to Louisiana and New York than email. If I did both, then the personal touch of the snailmail is diminished.

In my time off, I have seen "Moulin Rouge," walked dogs, swam, and had my hair cut. That's another thing. I wrote a letter to my mother.