Reading: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

Not yet given up on: John Milton, Paradise Lost

In the midst of: A.S. Byatt, Biographer's Tale; Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter

On deck: Suburban Nation; Invisible Man; Don Quijote; Tam Lin

Moving: walked five miles

Watching: "Nurse Betty"

1 March 2002: A good start to the month

Winter has arrived, nearly at the end of its season, but it's here. We had a couple of inches of snow earlier this week and it got quite cold (quite cold = 0 to 20 degrees; under 0 is unnecessarily cold); and overnight we got the most snow of the year, four whole inches. It was 4 degrees when I walked to work.

Yes! For the first time in three hundred years, I walked to work. It was lovely, stomping through the snow (which was not the styrofoamy crunchy sort Denver usually gets, but a good wet late-season snow), listening to the silence, cozy inside all my fleece. And I walked home. A coworker thought I was insane, that it was too cold to walk. I thought this person was acting unnecessarily grandparenty. One, 2.5 miles; two, seven whole degrees above zero; three, if any of me went numb I could walk a short block and pick up my regular bus (after standing around waiting for it).

I got home to find RDC shoveling the walk. We're required to within 12 (24?) hours of significant snowfall, and some folks get it done before they leave in the morning. Not me. But anyway, March started well, with walking and snowing.

We spent the rest of the evening sensibly inside. I just acquired the latest in my comfy-at-home dresses, a waffle-knit grey amazingly comfy thing. So we watched "Nurse Betty," ate Tagalongs, and watched a few Blackadder Goes Fourths* and afterward I tried to read him Bad Girls.

See, I just read RDC Walk Two Moons, with instructions that he should love it, lest he die. And he did (like it, not die). He was so wrapped up in it he didn't realize Mrs. Cadaver's significance until Salamanca spelled it out. And when Sal wrote about blackberry kisses and missed her swimming hole and prayed to trees, and I asked him if he could tell why I love this book so, he could.

And now I'm befuddled about what to read him next. In his head, Cynthia Voigt = Judy Blume, and I mocked that. Tell Me if Lovers Are Losers = Forever? A Solitary Blue = Then Again, Maybe I Won't? Izzy, Willy-Nilly= Deenie? David and Jonathan = Summer Sisters? Bad Girls = Just as Long as We're Together? Hey, wait a minute....No, Margaret wants to wear a bra; Dicey doesn't, and Sally J. Friedman and Sheila the Great are no Gwyn. Whew. I told him he should give the first chapter of Bad Girls a chance, and if he didn't like it, we could try something else. I really like how Margalo and Mikey are named, how Margalo starts manipulating from the first, and how simultaneously brash and vulnerable Mikey is. I like how Cynthia Voigt implies stage directions.

So I started reading, with RDC not entirely enthusiastic. Knowing that, and confronting written but not oral jokes like how Mikey writes her initials (ME) versus how Margalo writes hers (Me), and Mikey's bad spelling ("how nows?" for "who knows?"), and Mrs. Chemsky's Many Rules, right there in the first chapter, I decided this wasn't going to work. I think some E.L. Konigsburg is in order. Thanks to Dora, I finally have both From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The View from Saturday. (She also gave me Walk Two Moons, as a matter of fact.) Also Father's Arcane Daughter might be in order, because the protagonist is brilliant (as are the four in View).

* In addition to the best "Blackadder" line ever, "Better than sitting around here on our elbows," this series has another nearly-best line: describing how harsh and mean the Huns are, Blackadder says, "German has no word for 'fluffy.'"