Reading: Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

Moving: walked 5.2 miles

Watching: "Gosford Park and "Blow"

3 February 2002

I finally finished Anna Karenina. I wish all of them except Levin had thrown themselves under trains in fewer pages than 740. RDC asked if it was quite right for me to dislike a book when really I disliked the title character. And the translation, I pointed out. And how someone can twitch an eyebrow and convey yards of meaning to other people. And everything except Tolstoy's social, political, economic, philosophical, and religious commentary as delivered through his mouthpiece Levin. My favorite scene is I think everyone's favorite, of Levin's mowing the meadow with a passel of peasants. It was Christopher McCandless's favorite scene, I think. I'm not going to go die of starvation in a bus though. Or at least I don't plan to.

Last weekend I nearly turned into a pumpkin, getting home after Haitch's fête only just before midnight. Recently The Denver Post ran a chaming article about prostitution in City Park South, which is my neighborhood. I know it's not yet as cleaned up as LoDo, the trendily gentrified not-really-SoHo-ish area in LOwer DOwntown, but the news about my neighborhood, though not nearly as gentrified as LoDo, grieved me.

Anyway, as I drove up my street, I saw a man stumbling up the sidewalk who would pass my house at about the same time as I parked, if I parked. I drove on past, not doing anything foolish like braking, and called RDC from my cell at the next stop sign. He was sleeping the sleep of the righteous and didn't pick up. As I approached my house again, I saw a cop car approach the intersection. I flashed my brights at him and he turned. We conversed window to window, which now in retrospect amuses me because I haven't done that since I lived in rural areas where you would happen on a neighbor and pass the time of day from your idling cars. He greeted me, "Is there a problem?" very businesslike, and I told about the drunk and asked him simply to watch me safe into the house, that one there. He agreeably did that, and as I let myself in I called out "Thanks, officer" and he wished me a good night, not quite so brusque as at first.

It's not exactly ideal community involvement but I was glad to be chaperoned.

The next day RDC and I hung at home, glad to be home with each other with no holiday, no house guests, no impending business trips. I turned compost and discovered steam again, though unless I figure out what I'm doing wrong, or slow, next year I'll have to brings leaves to the city Leaf Drop. I'm not decomposing them quickly enough with my current set-up. We went to Z Gallerie and found two prints for the dining room. It is so unusual for us to agree on art that we bought them then and there. They lived propped against the living room wall for the week as we decided whether we could live with them, and we could. Yesterday we hung them.

Speaking of "hung," I discovered why you say "hanged" for humans and "hung" for pictures. I had assumed it was a distinction of respect. But actually it has to do with more archaic grammar, yea! The past participle of "hang" used to be "hanged" and evolved into "hung" in the, I've already forgotten, 17th or 18th century. Legal speech clings to older-fashioned speech and vocabulary as well as tradition, though, and so "hanged" hung around in legal usage. I love knowing that.

The prints are vaguely Asian in design, which works for the Arts & Crafts theme we vaguely comply with. Their frames are a meld of bronze and greeny oxidized copper, which goes well with the walls color and doesn't clash with the polished pewter ceiling fixture and curtain rod.

We also used my mother's Christmas present of a Home Depot gift card to get blinds for the kitchen and sunroom that we haven't hung yet. This spring I would like to plant a peach sapling outside the south sunroom window, which we need to rebuild--it is painted shut. If the window can open but the aperture gets some shade in the summer and with the blind not so much draft in the winter, that room might finally be what I wanted it to be when we first saw the house: Blake's bedroom. Right now its temperatures are too extreme, and maybe we won't be able to regulate it away from those extremes. Maybe we can. It would be nice to get him out of the dining room, but I won't banish him until I know he won't freeze or fry and will still have an interestingly tree'd window to look out.