Reading: Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Moving: walked to work, climbed the stairs to my floor (seven flights), 100 crunchs. Yesterday too.

Listening: up to Richard III.

25 September 2001: Home

I am so glad to be home. Yesterday I was in the breakroom filling my half gallon jug when--hmm, I'll call her Chile for now, since that's where she taught English and is a geographical name, although her actual name by my pattern would be Colorado, which isn't very feminine, is it?--Chile came in and asked about my trip. As we chatted, someone came in who, I had heard, drove home to Denver from D.C. with three other Dot Orgeristas in the days following the attacks. Our famillies and friends had all said "I'm glad you're home safe," which indeed I am, but this fellow was the first to say to me something I had not yet heard: "Welcome home."

Yes indeed. Welcome.

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I guess I'm still recuperating, or maybe I became slightly de-acclimatized to altitude despite the heights of Sacré Cœur and le Mont St. Michel, because yesterday I came home with a killer headache and it's not gone today. Yesterday I left the piles of laundry washed and dried on Sunday in their heap on the floor of the bedroom, gathered the mail, cleaned the kitchen, and retreated downstairs for a night of vigorous couching not unlike how we'd spent Saturday. I brought a book, a glass of water, a banana, a pear, and my buddy. RDC joined us shortly, and therefore witnessed one of the sweetest demonstrations of attachment disorder Blake has ever displayed. I ate my fruit, and the moment I draped the banana peel over the pear core and set the plate aside on the table, Blake waddled up my supine body from my knee, where he'd been preening, to under my chin. He had observed that as my hands were now free, they should rather be petting his head than lying idle. But he was so determined about it.

Later in the evening, we ate pasta in front of the tube. Blake also knows that during mealtimes, he stays with his food and doesn't pester us. Or at least we think he should know it. Last night he refused to stay put and hopped from his tray to RDC's knee, bowing to him, two or three times, until we silly humans remembered that of course he would want pasta. So we gave him a piece of rotelli and he wolfed that down, hopping back to RDC's knee with a most impressive beak sculpture and perhaps not understanding why we laughed so at him.

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This weekend as we first saw all the displays of flags around town, I saw, or noticed, flags displayed vertically for the first time in ages. They all had the union in the upper left. This looked wrong to me, because if you spin that flag up vertically, you get a backward flag. I looked it up in my New York Public Library Desk Reference when I got home--why not online? who knows--and I am wrong: the union is always to the viewer's left, whether the stripes are vertical or horizontal. I accept this, but it still looks wrong to me, like an upside down cross.

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Today I at least folded and put away the laundry.