Reading:Middlemarch.

Watching: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season two. Also "Insomnia," Scandinavian version, which was really good but, I'm sorry to say, is rated CM.

Moving:

20 July 2002: New sheets

So yesterday I said I offered RDC a newly ripped sheet for a keyboard pad.

Last Saturday when I made the bed, I noticed a shredding hole in the fitted sheet. So I scampered to Bloodbath & Beyond for a new set. I scored 600 threadcount sheets before I went off for the bra-shopping torture.

It was either those, luxurious and durable, or the hitherto unknown extravagance of two sets of sheets.

This isn't a topic that comes up often, but I've come to understand most peopole think one set is ridiculously insufficient.

I remember one time in middle school or so when I ran into a classmate at the beach. We were friendly enough and talked, and in my fascinating way I somehow mentioned something or other about my bedsheets, probably about whether they would dry by nightfall on the shaded line in the humid day, that led Kathy to exclaim, "You only have one set of sheets?" Her being taken so aback is why I remember the remark.

Haitch wanted me to read one more Anne Tyler before I gave up on that author solely because of Breathing Lessons. So I read Waiting for Caleb, and in addition to depressing the hell out of me, it contained an exchange between two relatives in which a fusty aunt-type was horrified that the peripatetic protagonist had only one set of sheets.

Why is this so bizarre? I had one house-cleaning tour, for a stint I didn't take on, in which the woman showed me the stack of sheets in the closet and explained I should ease out the bottom set of the stack--rather like pancakes--to make up the bed. Freshly laundered sheets would go on top of the stack, and thus all the sheets would be cycled regularly. I remember carefully not wondering aloud why anyone would need 20 sets of sheets. (I loved "Gosford Park" for a lot of reasons, not least the look into servant culture. Helen Mirren's meticulous focus on using all the sheets evenly reminded me of that .)

One set was adequate when we were poor and now more than one seems unnecessary. A stack, or even just a few sets, means the sheets you put on the bed aren't fresh off the line.

Yum, fresh off the line. One thing I looked forward to most about having a house was having a clothesline. It's a problem in the winter, with less and weaker sunlight, but a few minutes in the dryer takes the edge off.

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This morning RDC got dressed, all pleased at the results of a few weeks of weights and Nordic Tracking. "Belts will be worn tighter this year," he announced gleefully.

I got his movie reference (unlike he mine yesterday). Probably because it's one of my movies.

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Tonight for dinner I ate a dozen string beans (raw, because I have no idea how to cook them with sesame oil and garlic the way RDC does) and basil (done into pesto, over pasta) that I grew myself. It was a heady meal.

The pear tree is dropping some of its fetal pears. I wonder if that's a water-saving measure on the tree's part. I've been using the hose spike, a yard-long tube that delivers water more directly to the roots, on the five fruit trees. The pears that remain are growing.

It did rain about a millimeter this evening, cooling off all the baked bricks of the houses, the softened tar of the streets, the sidewalks you probably could sunnyside-up an egg on at noon, the low oven of the cars. This afternoon was another unnecessarily hot one, and I noticed cloud cover only when it darkened my curtained living room where I was spelunking. Blake and I took advantage of the lovely cool, or lesshotness, to sit on the porch swing until dinner.