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

If I were reading My Sweet Audrina, would I admit it? Not here.

Moving:

Watching: "Happiness"

5 March 2002: It started with a mirror

So I finally bought a full-length mirror. We had harbored pipe dreams about a finely silvered, elegantly beveled oval mirror pivoting in a quarter-sawn oak free-standing frame, but instead I bought a ten-dollar thing to mount on the inside of my closet door.

I am still trying to figure out our bedroom. Someone from a few houses down said that owners subsequent to the librarian ones were the ones to knock out the wall between the two rooms and that the back one (the "nursery") was accessible only through the other. Whereas I thought that there might be two doors, that one and another to the back landing. The placement of the two ceiling fixture is not symmetrical along the vertical length of the room, but the room was two, so if the back room was narrower, then its fixture being a bit to one side makes sense.

And the back room was narrower by about a foot. The back closet's depth is that foot plus another foot or more jutting onto the back landing.

But then I can't figure out the back landing. There are no scars on the floor from where a wall might once have been--but then there isn't in the bedroom either. Whoever joined the bedrooms must have refinished the floors, which makes that job less than 15 years old. Actually I just discovered a circle in the living room floor that at first glance I thought I had made with the tree stand, but its circumference is too small, much more the size of a floorbuffer.

More than its floor, the back landing's wall befuddles me. It's drywall, not plaster. Was the back landing once larger, as the plaster wall of the back stairs would suggest, or narrower, as line of the the kitchen wall would suggest?

I was talking about the mirror. I haven't had a full-length mirror since I left my mother's house. Sometime when I was a teenager, my father installed one on the outer sliding door of my closet (which you could walk into, unlike that in my sister's room, but only because that's where the hip-high aperture to the front garret was.) My mother-in-law has bemoaned this lack in each of the three Denver domiciles she's visited. My sister discovered, while we shopped one day, that her newly-tailored pants had been unevenly hemmed--that is, one leg had not been lengthened at all--and said that if only I had had a mirror, she would have been spared that. Now I have one.

It's not thoroughly installed yet. I don't think it's meant to be on a hinged door. Even the one on my childhood bedroom's sliding door had four grippy thingies for its corners. Mine is cheaper, with only a bracket on the back. I installed two screws for less tipping than with one, but it's still only hanging from screws, so when you open the door, the bottom of the mirror flies out in the draft. Mostly I remember to open the right door first and then the left, mirrored door, for less draft, but it's only a matter of time. Mostly I'm hoping to remember to buy some other sort of fixative. Industrial double-sided tape, to hold the bottom of the mirror? I have no faith in my ability to install the clear lucite L-brackets of the earlier mirror in a useful pattern, not without taking the door off the hinges.

Improperly installed or not, it does in fact reflect. That much it does. Which was my point several paragraphs ago. So as I got dressed this morning, I decided that the greys in this outfit that I've liked so much since I assembled it in November do not actually match. The skirt is gray and the sweater is blue-grey: different tones. But the main thing that I noticed is that my hair is really long. It's amazing what a full-length mirror will show that a medicine cabinet mirror reflecting from chest-up allows you to ignore. Loose, it's to the small of my back. I topsy-tailed and braided it, two procedures that reduce its hanging length, and my braid is still past my bra strap.

Huh.

And I've been liking it very much lately. The arm-and-a-leg shampoo and conditioner I bought from the salon do make it behave better, I think because there's a lot of oils in them. After a few hours in a simple braid, strands escape and fall around my face in what I've been thinking has been a softening wispy kind of way, not the Statue-of-Liberty Thelma-and-Louise kind of way they used to.

I remember the worst SoL-TaL effect being during our 1997 trip to Glacier, and what a surprise! Driving through Montana with its daytime speed limit of "reasonable and prudent" in a 1993 stripped Toyota Tercel without air conditioning means lots and lots of wind in the hair. Which is then camped in, this hair, and sopped on a Monday with biodegradable soap in a frigid lake and not touched again until the Friday morning we left, when we took pay showers in a federal campground, and the stall I happened into on the women's side did not emit water from the middle range of the nozzle but only either hot or cold. I believe this was the trip when those epithets were first applied to my head, as a matter of fact.