Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, though not noticeably

24 June 2002: Work weekend

Friday we had our usual Friday hot date--Home Despot and grocery shopping. Mulch and caulk here, groceries and dinner from Whole Foods. By the time we headed for home, it was raining: solstice with a thunderstorm. RDC said he had a conscience about going to Whole Foods, since we've been regulars at the Colorado Boulevard Wild Oats for three years. But Whole Foods says "Ten items or fewer" (Wild Oats says "less"), Whole Foods has much more and better organic produce, Whole Foods has great ready-made stuff. I have two problems with it, though: the sign on the lobster tank still says, "We will clean your lobster's for you," despite my writing a nice note about it; and it's two stops instead of one, because we still almost always need to go to Home Despot.

Saturday I weeded the front garden and added more mulch, hoping that the greater weight and light-deprivation of a deeper layer would thwart the bindweed. I expect I am deluding myself. RDC fussed with the swamp cooler, which has been fixed so that it is an evaporative cooler instead of just a big fan. Over the weekend, he adjusted the water level to the merest trickle, and the whole main floor was cool. More humid, of course: towels on the rack don't dry in a jiffy and glasses of water sweat. The whole main floor doesn't need to be cooled, either. His study, so he can work; the bedroom, so we can sleep; maybe the dining room, because his study (from whose window the cooler lurches) now gets glacial.

I packed up and rode the five or so miles to Cook Park and swam. And swam and swam and swam. I might be in really nasty shape, because lap swim lasted for only the 60 minutes it ever lasts, but it felt much longer. I lost track of my laps before I did ten and then didn't bother to count. But I'm sure I did a mile, 32 laps in the 25-meter pool, and it felt like it might have been 2K, 40 laps. Certainly I was swimming faster than the swimmers who flanked me, but the port one did breaststroke, not to get her hair wet, so that's no measure.

Is "breaststroke" the only word in English that has the string "ststr" or even just "stst"?

It was a gorgeous day. The thunderstorm cleared out some smoke--all of last week was very sad and hazy--though the mountains were still hidden. Directly above me, it was a gorgeous day, with that bit of sky as blue as it ought to be. "My father says the only perfect view is of the sky over our heads." "I imagine your father's been reading Dante." Excuse me. A brief "Room with a View" moment, now past.

And hot. Hot as I rode back home, but with a long rope of hair dripping on my back, quite comfortable.

As I clattered into the backyard, I heard puppy-barking. RDC had told me that our neighbor adopted a puppy while I was gone, but he couldn't remember its name. I dragged up a chair to the fence and from the neck up invaded my neighbor's privacy. He brought the puppy around to meet me. It's about four months old, looks mostly like a boxer except it's black, which made the Dumb Friends League vets think it's part Lab, had a white chest and paws, seems really good natured, and has (at only four months) an inch-plus, jaggy scar on the top of its head, but the neighbor didn't name it Harry or Potter anyway. I offered myself up for dog-walking and -sitting. Damn bird.

The rest of the day, I snipped cherry sproutlets, hoed the vegetable garden, and weeded the south garden. A productive day.

Until the evening, when we watched "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back." I thought it was going to be all referential to "Dogma," "Clerks," "Chasing Amy," and "Mallrats" (the last of which I haven't seen), and while it did have the two clerks, Mooby the golden calf fast-food joint, and a cameo of Amy, it didn't have much else nor anything I thought "Mallrats" might have cleared up. I still haven't seen a Cheech and Chong movie, but I figure it's about that level.

Sunday I went for a walk with Haitch for the first time in a very long time. The reverential last-time-before-the-move type walk. We walked for almost two hours, giving up when the heat got too much--this would have been about 10:15, the half-way point, ooof--and covered, I hope, more than five miles. Maybe not. On the way home I stopped for orange juice, that one most vital foodstuff the one thing we forgot. Also raspberry sorbet, because it was hot, three Valencia oranges, because yum, and a Deep Blue Dream smoothie, because blueberries are my heartsblood. Here I discovered another reason to go to Whole Foods: no cashier there has flirted with me yet.

Now, I like how friendly Colorado is. I even try not to mind being called "hon" by random females. So it's not that I discourage banter with the help. But. The (male) cashier greeted me, "Hello, young lady," which is a mode of address I've grown unfamiliar with over the past ten years, and I glanced at him as I unpacked my bag onto the roller, still with the reflexive smile and hello. A good look at my face should have set him straight about the "young lady" thing, since he was about my age. He continued, "What a pretty smile." I do have a hard time accepting compliments, and my response was to wonder whether I had blueberry--from my smoothie--in my teeth. "No, just such a pretty smile." Yeah. Let me just pay and scamper, 'kay? I had my own bag and should have received one "wooden nickel" as bag credit; he gave me three. With his fingers touching my palm just a little longer than necessary, enough to squick me. Also when he handed me the pen to sign the debit receipt. "See you again soon, I hope," he finished as I dashed away. I paused to drop the wooden nickels into the donation box and felt him still staring at me.

Bleah.

The other drama was that Saturday night, in an innocent kitchen drawer filled with placemats and oven mitts and napkin rings and wine accessories, RDC killed a cockroach. A small one, less than half an inch. I don't mind spiders (in theory; and I don't want to in practice), I don't mind that beetles will sometimes come in on the line-dried linens, and if I catch moths and throw them outside it's because sparrows like to eat them. (This year is the peak of the eightish-year cycle of Miller moths. Sparrows pounce like raptors on moths almost their own size in broad daylight.) Cockroaches are another story.

Therefore when I got home Sunday afternoon I removed the contents of the kitchen from the room, scrubbed it--walls, cupboards (tops, insides, doors), drawers, counters--with diluted bleach or TSP-substitute. By the time I quit at 7 I had heard "Space Oddity" twice (on two different stations, I think because David Bowie's touring through next month), upset Blake by not having him on my shoulder all day, sang crazy-happily along with Madness's "Our House" (which I hadn't heard in years), admired the moulding RDC routed and mitered and installed in the front landing, washed everything washable, freely changed stations when any Led Zeppelin song started (since RDC wasn't right there), broke for chips and salsa, vastly amused RDC by lustily accompanying George Thorogood on "One Scotch, One Bourbon, and One Beer" (another song I hadn't heard since high school, though this one without regrets), wiped the outside of every can and bottle with a bleach solution, determined I am going to get shelf paper (at Target? where would I find it?), and found no evidence, carcass or excrement, of any roaches.

Two cupboards I haven't done: under the sink, which will be scary, and the appliance pantry. We have two closets in the kitchen that I call pantries because they're in the kitchen. One is a "California cooler": low and high in the closet are two vents to the outside, long since sealed, and when the realtor pointed out the vents on the external brick he guessed that the kitchen would have been redone in its 75 years. But it hasn't: the shelves are original or at least slatted as the originals would have been, for air circulation. The floor of that pantry has linoleum (?) tiles, maroon and tan like Fugly, that happily had been prized off the rest of the kitchen floor by the time we saw it. The other is to the right of the fridge, with deep shelves on the left side and shallow ones on the right and across the back. Blake squeaks when its door opens, because his treats live in there. As do the brooms and mops, hanging from hooks, all of which he fears.

Also I haven't done the floor. I didn't do the whole room from top to bottom but each section, and I wonder if I can shampoo the two rugs.

But no cockroaches. Perhaps that single one, quickly smashed, was the expedition guide. Maybe not.

Cockroaches and bindweed will one day rule the earth. To quote Beth, "only one girl could stop them."