I'll explain the stiff upper lip in a bit and will just say that someday my house will have a plaque on it like half those in the Northeast have about George Washington that says "Jessie slept here." Over my right shoulder is Where They Slept.

Reading: Iris Murdoch, Under the Net, and Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

Moving: Hiked 3.6 miles

6 August 2001: So tired

Gadget Boy, that being my new handle for my husband, reeeeeeally wanted TiVo. So here it is. I am, if any, even more susceptible to television than he is. I recorded "Excalibur" over the weekend. I recently discovered it has Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart and pre-famous versions of other such actors in it. I remembered it being cheesy.

My my my.

Last night, or this morning, at 12:47 by the microwave clock, Blake had a nightmare. By the time I got to him, he was flapping desperately in his cage, in the dark, scared out of his few wits, and worse, I didn't hear him immediately. I sleep very deeply, I think, but I am primed to respond to my baby when he's scared. But it was RDC who woke me saying "What's that?" and I who took a moment to realize "Blake."

He was so scared. As tall and skinny and alert as he can be, with his crest stretched way out, and I sat on the dining room rug with him for several minutes. Like 20. He had to be on my shoulder, not trusting even being held in my hand, and he refused to step off onto his perch. I tried my usual trick of bringing him up behind his perch and kind of scraping him off onto it, but he kept running back up my arm. In his flaps, his feathers had got disarranged, and he was so convinced there were cats and monsters that he'd dip his beak into his plumage for a split second and look up and around again immediately. So I didn't try to put him back to bed until he'd relaxed into his usual shape and could preen a bit. Which took forever. I immediately put my own self not at all reluctantly back to bed, but between guilt at just wanting the damn bird to go back to sleep and straining to hear him over the fans, I lay awake for about nine years. Like two hours.

I am so tired.

When I got home from work today, all I wanted to do was sleep. I watched "The Grapes of Wrath," which I had recorded as well and which I now believe I had never seen before. It was amazing. And then I tried to watch "Excalibur," but instead I did clean up after camping and houseguests--Haitch slept here too: she watched Blake for us--and make quinoa for a new batch of buddy chow and escape to my computer. That movie is cheesy to the point of embarrassment, I hope for everyone involved as well as for me the audience. So, so cheesy. A talking head introduced it as getting the breath of life after "Star Wars" made sword and sorcery movies popular, and there's lots of "Stars Wars" in it, indeed--Excalibur shining like a light saber, Merlin as Obi Wan Kenobi, armor and Storm Troopers, and while ordinarily I might say that George Lucas kept his Arthurian legend in mind making his movie, here I'd say these screenwriters thought first of "Star Wars" and only secondly, if at all, of Mallory etc.

What really cracked me up was how long it took me to place Arthur. I thought he was acting a lot more like T.H. White's Wart than a nonallegorical action hero ought to and wondered how much the flick was supposed to resemble The Once and Future King. But then I realized why he was so unArthurlike and so very very very Wartlike: Arthur was played by the same actor who played John ten years earlier in "The Lion in Winter." It must have been some reassurance for the actor, with his shifty glance and undershot jaw and mealymouthedness, to go from playing the most despised king in English history to the most beloved (if also legendary) one, but what was the casting agent thinking of?

So the stiff upper lip is me on the verge of a giggling fit when the movie ohsopredictably used Górecki's Third Symphony. It's as good as saying "We can't act, so we're going to use the most heavy-handed musical cliché possible to convey this mood."