More morning sun. A freshly laundered buddy not smelling quite as good as he does when all dusty.

Reading: Pamela Dean, Tam Lin

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

Moving: walked two miles

Watching: Sunday night tv. I programed a season pass to Dennis Miller, so that we can listen to his monologue and then delete it, except for last night, when his guest was Jon Stewart.

3 March 2002: Where the Wild Things Were

Yesterday we brought the futon upstairs in lieu of actual furniture. Opening the door Wednesday night, I exclaimed to SEM, "SEM! You have hair!" and he replied, "Lisa! This room's still empty!" But the living room is painted, it is. Anyway, a futon on the floor is in its way superior to a couch, because it's easily kicked into the path of the sun. I did occasionally read on the futon in my study, but I more often sat on the couch in the den, where the TV is, and it's a terrible thing but I have a hard time being in a room where a television is with the television off. It's this big blank staring eye.

So anyway. The futon in the living room meant I could lounge on the floor, propped against the wall, keeping on eye on Blake on the windowsill, and read. It was ver' nice. It will also come in handy for fireside snogging, if it ever warms up enough to have a fire again. Thermarests (camp mattresses) are inconveniently narrow and slidey.

Tam Lin. Following on the heels of To Say Nothing of the Dog as it did, it's had the following similarities thus far:

• Quotes. Quotes in context, quotes I like, quotes showing literary geekitude, but quotes that, nonetheless, sometimes serve to do nothing but show off. For which I do not at all empathize. Not me.
• Robin knows bus times like Baine knows train times.
• Okay okay okay already! I'll read Three Men in a Boat.

I mean, criminy. It's on a shelf with Euripides and Keats and Wrinkle in Time. Pamela Dean could have, with no more subtlety, broken the narrative voice to intrude authoritatively and say "This is a book you should read."

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Blake started singing--in his happiest, nice whistle, rather than the other screeching singsong voice that he likes just as well though we don't--as soon as RDC strolled through with his electric shaver. He continued singing throughout the following foam-and-razor follow-up shave. Which just shows that he hasn't figured out that shaving often presages a Leaving of the House. He knows about keys, sunglasses, button-down shirts, ties, and jackets. But not shaving yet. All grooming is still Four Legs Good to him.

Last year when we went to the Opera, it was ten degrees; last night, when we went to the "ballet," it was less than ten degrees. I wore the same dress, too, not being overrun with formal winter wear. And I still have a problem with people who go out in ten-degree weather with open-toed shoes. And with children in clothing sophisticated beyond their years.

Which, ack, was particularly bad tonight. As we strolled into the performing arts center, we saw a passel of little girls in white dresses and winter coats and galoshes. I wondered if they had all had their first communion and this was their treat for afterward. I have enough of a problem with little kids making commitments to a church they cannot have a full understanding of and with putting little girls in tacky white wedding dresses. But no, this was worse. As they filed in the door, I asked in carefully measured tones, of an adult with them, "What's the occasion?" She said, "They're eight-year-old debutantes, being introduced to the ballet."

Debutantes? You mean the outmoded fashion of girls in their late teens being launched into the marriage market? And this is being inflicted on girls who're hopefully years away even from puberty, let alone adolescence?

Luckily, I had to scoot off to will-call for our tickets. I think I was in my post-period Saturday grumps, because everything was pissing me off. In order,

• RDC took too long to feed bills into the parking lot's paybox
• This organized mental abuse (which unlike the other grievances was a rational one)
• how long it took for the coat-check volunteer to take our coats, when he must have seen that there were people behind us, and surely it would have been faster for everyone to post a sign advising those seated close to the stage to keep their wraps* rather than to tell each party individually
• Whatever adult dressed a no-more-than-five-year-old daughter in a (fake) leather jacket with (faux) leopard-fur trim
• Whoever allowed another young girl to wear eye makeup
• The other various sartorial offenses people were committing

I realized I was going to hate everything if I didn't snap out of it, so I looked around for a cute little kid in an age-appropriate outfit, found one quickly, smiled at how cute it was, and felt better. For a little while, until these dozen and a half girls were presented one by one to the audience, walking halfway across the stage to be crowned with a ringlet of flowers, bobbing a half-assed excuse for a curtsy, and walking off again. If they had just been little girls being introduced to culture including ballet, I probably wouldn't've had a coronary. But for them to be described as "debutantes" gave me hives.

I should have gone another night. But then it was over. Oh, except for how their names were arranged in an insert to the program. About half were "daughter of Mr. & Mrs. John Smith." Ampersands probably to save space over the three-character "and." Also some were "daughter of Mr. John Smith & Ms. Jane Doe." Which was my favorite: neither obviously married, never married, nor no longer married. Also "daughter of Ms. Jane Doe, Mr. John Smith." Because even though the child is still the offspring of these two people, the pairing implied by the ampersand is just too much to bear.

*Out of mercy for the dancers inside the Wild Things costumes, the temperature was low in the auditorium, but we in the mezzanine were comfortable.

Now, the Denver Ballet. I use the term loosely. RDC says that its motto should be "Stomping in Standard Time." I really do wonder if they are as thumpingly (thank you, Salamanca Hiddle) loud as they seem or, if Denver had an orchestra for its ballet instead of canned music, whether the live music emanating from a stage-level orchestra pit would do something to mask the thumping. There were two pieces, "Sachertorte" with music by Strauss pere et fils (can you use those terms with Germans? How are the Ptolemys distinguished?), which was unsurprisingly waltz-like and had bits that reminded me of the folk dance that Maria and the Captain do in "The Sound of Music"; and "Where the Wild Things Are"; with an intermission between. The first just filled up time and space and the children weren't the only restive members of the captive audience.

At intermission, I turned to my husband and said, quite sincerely, "I'm sorry."

But he hadn't lost his sense of humor entirely. He said, "I'm not sure I'll follow 'Where the Wild Things Are.' I don't know the libretto."

Our first Denver Ballet was "Romeo and Juliet" with Haitch and her then-roommate; I knew I didn't like it but I needed Haitch's ballet know-how to tell me why. The next season, she and I went on to see Coppélia and I think another Shakespeare and a Balanchine piece that, despite that choreographer's strictures, was not noticeably better than the rest. It's maybe not Denver's fault but Prokofiev's that Mercutio took longer to die than Romeo, Juliet, and Paris put together. But anyway. So I was trying to remember what the other Shakespeare was and when I wondered whether it was A Midsummer Night's Dream, RDC said that no, we'd seen that properly staged. And I contradicted that no, that was The Tempest. And then, because it still rocks my world, I recalled, "And we saw Macbeth in the Globe." RDC drily rejoindered, "It was only a model."

So he hadn't lost his sense of humor entirely.

Finally it was time for Max and some Wild Things. I was reminded of NBM's having brought one of SEM's brothers to a dance production of "Harold and the Purple Crayon." As I recall her description, it was mostly one dancer trailing a thick purple ribbon, and Jack was maybe too young for such a concept piece.

(Is there a word for the relationship between NBM and her son's half-brothers? One of the things I liked in The Sparrow was how a linguist can learn about other cultures based on their language--wow, what a revelation--how they look at the world, what's important to them. Tex saw The Sparrow on my desk on day and asked about it in a general way, and I tried to to tell him, a devout Catholic, about it, equally generally and without mentioning its Jesuits or spiritual crises. When I mentioned the language thing, he pointed out something that I had learned from him a while ago and pounced on as so useful: Spanish has different words for your wife's brother and your sister's husband, instead of calling them both, as English does, merely "brother-in-law." Neither it nor English has a word for one set of grandparents to refer to the other, though. Even more deeply parenthetically, I am pleased to report that other versions of European French, maybe Flemish or Swiss, do have words for "seventy" and "eighty" instead of saying "sixty-ten" and "four-twenty" as the French (with their rigid Academy) do.)

"Where the Wild Things Are" was expanded for the stage. When Maurice Sendak gave the Convocation address at UConn in the fall of 1990 or so, he said he had intended to draw horses, realized he couldn't, and resorted to drawing his aunts and uncles. So it was funny to me that one of the things Max was naughty about was a pack of visiting relatives. He had two mothers, one in real-time and one that he dreamed about in the land of the Wild Things, and the first mother was comic in an odd way because she was in drag, I think because the dance required lifts. I should think a female dancer quite strong enough to lift a male dancer, but whatever. The best non-Wild Thing part of the dance was the sea journey, when a pair of dancers became the sea monster before a plywood sea monster made an appearance.

In the land of Wild Things, the first critter Max saw was a goat, not in costume but just a human with horns. RDC asked, "Is that Caliban?" but then it started being mischievious and he decided instead that it was Puck. He was naked but for a loincloth (and his horns) and leapt a lot, so that amused me while I waited. Finally, the Wild Things entered to riotous applause. There were five: the one with horns and a stripey torso, the one with long red hair and duck feet, the vaguely bisony one, the roostery one, and the one immediately behind the bison when Max is riding on its shoulders. They immediately commenced to doing my Happy Dance, which delighted me.

I was going to say which basic ballet foot position you stand in to perform the happy dance, but as much time as I want to spend on a google search provided me only with the curricula of various companies and no basic foot maps, or whatever they're called. Whatever its name, the position with heels together and feet at 45-degree angles. One foot out, heel down, return; repeat with other foot. You can do whatever you want with your arms as long as it's a boppy kind of nonsense. And that's what they did.

The Wild Rumpus didn't last as long as I really wanted it to, but the Wild Things were nine feet tall and mostly head so probably tired easily. They were charming. Expensive, considering I only wanted to see about ten minutes of the evening's performance; but I'm glad I saw it.

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This morning I tore up a stale tortilla and threw it out the dining room window between the two fruit trees. This was enough for the currently invading squirrel to extract its head from the birdfeeder and investigate. It seized a big piece and scuttled up a trunk, awkwardly with the wide strip in the way. Another squirrel hopped off the pear tree, seized a piece, and scuttled up, more awkwardly, having chosen a bigger piece. Then either the first or a third squirrel came down the nectarine tree, took another piece, scampered up the tree and onto the neighbor's roof, there carefully to bury the piece under the snow.

Squirrels aren't that bright.

Goodness, it's my 1990 floppy short hair. The right side isn't quite right, but the left flops just about right.

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It is March. Blake's devotion to various sexy socks and fleece garments (my fleece socks are the worst of all) has become louder, more insistent, and snappish; plus, as I pet his head this morning trying to distract him, two feathers fell out. Molting and musth. Poor thing.

I showered him, hoping that his having to preen damp plumage would distract him. He certainly does enjoy the blow-drying now. I always cup one hand around his head to protect his eyes and ears and he's realized that this is the exact thing he often begs for, a cupped hand for an echo chamber to sing into. So he sang while I fluffed him up, trying to get him completely dry. The house feels much colder than 62 degrees.

I am glad we finally installed cellular blinds in the sunroom and kitchen, they help; and even just simple panel curtains in the living room reduce somewhat the heat transfer through those windows. But today I am going to cut down the white felt I used to use as a tree-skirt into panels for some of the basement windows. None of them have storms, and we lose a lot of heat through those.