Reading: Middlemarch

Listening: Mona Bone Jakon, Little Earthquakes, 200 More Miles

Watching: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

Moving:

17 August 2002: Blake

RDC is away so I had to remind Blake that he spends dinner time in his cage. Blake is used to my being a lot more permissive than his daddy. So now he's in his cage gnawing on a blowcard, and not even sneaking peeks at me to ensure I notice how good he's being.

He is frequently okay playing around his cage for whole minutes at a time, but when he wants out, he wants out. He perches on the top of the cage door possibly because he knows we think it must be so uncomfortable to grip a bar the same circumference as his toes but probably mostly because he can rattle the door against its hinges. Percy used to lift his dishes and let them drop, also noisy without yelling which is naughty, when he was mad or wanted to make a point.

I remembered as I reached for Blake's chow that I had to make more. There was none in the freezer and it was already well past his dinnertime, which is usually immediately after work but on weekends slides quite a bit. So as I started quinoa boiling, I set him up on the kitchen windowsill with everything else: his water dish, his seed-and-pellet dish, a handful of baby spinach leaves, a couple of halves of grapes, a segment of grape vine, some seedballs. All of this is standard, but he knew he was missing his proper supper. I mixed three bags of frozen vegetables in a big tupperware and scooped him out a dish of mostly corn and warmed it up for him. He eviscerated one ritual kernel and returned to his spinach and grape. It cracks me up that although he didn't need the corn or even much want it, he has his rituals and he Must Have Corn.

It reminded me of what we called "snack dinners" when we were little. These almost always comprised grilled cheese sandwiches and carrot sticks. We loved them, because grilled cheese sandwiches are the best. I had not particularly thought of them for a decade or so when my sister commented how much easier they must have been on our mother than what she considered good food, and how unfair that we preferred them to real meals. I wonder if she served them on nights she knew our father wouldn't be home or, since I remember his not being home a lot more than I remember grilled cheese or pancakes for dinner, on nights she was just too bone-tired to do anything else.

So watching Blake munch a single kernel of corn, the symbolic element of his real chow that I didn't have ready for him, made me remember my mother in a good light.

Haitch was all proud of me recently, naming among my accomplishments that I get along with my mother. It is strange, but the result of conscious effort. Last June, in 2001, my sister's and my trip was so fraught with tension that she told me she would never be around our mother and me simultaneously, ever again, unless one or both of us lightened up. This June, in 2002, that's why CLH and I went to Maine instead of Old Lyme together--the day after I spent a comparatively pleasant day with my mother.

Not that she doesn't still make me crazy. I haven't had a brain transplant. But I'm working on keeping my trap shut and on being a stone in a stream over which a flow of commentary flows without making a mark. I should still work on growing a layer of algae, though.

Besides that I heart my laptop (who started that, Evany?), the laptop combined with the chipreader is just a delight. The chipreader is a white triangle with a purple face, two slots in the face for different sizes of chip. When I first got the camera, more than 2.5 years ago, I put the chip in a mock floppy and then had to bludgeon my Mac into reading the chip and it took an unnecessarily long time to read each picture. Maybe a minute apiece? A long time.

Now I have iPhoto, and I remember to keep the date and time set correctly on the camera, and I have the chipreader, which is itself pretty though not as pretty as my pretty pretty pretty iBook, and I am just as happy a computer camper as I was when I first adopted Veronica, my Macintosh SE, in 1990. I miss a forward-delete key, and OS X might not support keyboard- (rather than mouse-) driven navigation as well as 9 did, and either the computer does not understand the setting "Ignore trackpad while typing" or I don't type at a pace it accepts, but overall, love the iBook. Portability, yum.

So here I am. I keep hoping that someone will notice my all-grey wardrobe and mistake me for Francie Nolan but I doubt it. I don't have the hat. Or the pumps. I am not trying to match Blake. He is gray, and I wear grey--steel gray is not dove grey. Also I don't wear orange. I would consider racing stripes.

The bottom shelf of nightstand behind me is empty because my five animals are on RDC's side of the bed. I can't sleep with Boo any more because he won't hold up to my thrashy sleep, but he can sleep on the pillow on the other side of the bed while Pan copes with me.

The page at the top corner of the mirror is from Shape or some such. The caption reads approximately, "For strong teeth and bones and a healthy coat, lift once a day." The woman, who is toned without being huge, is lifting a box of Special K. I keep meaning to find an appropriate sticker to cover the box with. I haven't eatend Special K since I graduated to it from Cheerios four hundred years ago, and I don't like brand names as decoration. But I want a channel down my back.

Speaking of brand names, Dot Org just changed its supplier of copy paper and the current supply is in a stack of white boxes, not green or patterned or otherwise branded. I am seriously considering bringing home a supply so that the stacks of boxes in the furnace room--RDC miscellaneous (two), photographs, souvenir clothing we will neither wear nor give up, etc.--will be tidier-looking and less commercial. Yes, I'm anal. Is this news?