Reading: Atonement

Garden: it's raining! hard! with tornadoes and thunderstorms: real weather for the first time in months

Watching: not Buffy, since despite a season pass and a manual instruction to record that time slot, I didn't get "Fear, Itself."

Moving: walked 2.5 miles. I would have walked home, but there were tornado warnings; then an evening stroll

28 August 2002: Finding a book

Cozy and safe at home, in my bathrobe, with Blake on my shin preening his tail and RDC beside me. Finally, rain, fast and hard and forming lakes over all the impermeable surfaces in town; rain, soaking me as I scarpered between work and bus and house.

Today at lunch I bussed down Broadway to the strip of used book stores. No King of the Wind with color illustrations. I have to make a list of what Dr. Dolittles I don't have. I was vaguely tempted to get one of set of four really cheesy YA novels, but not in hardcover, alone, for nine bucks. The love is not that strong.

The author's name is not M.M. Kaye, who wrote Far Pavilions, right? but it's something Kayeish. Each of the books is named after one of four sisters: Lydia, Cassie, Daphne, and Phoebe. They are the Breakfast Club of sisters, much more stereotyped than Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte, and Gertie. Hence the cheese factor. I read them soon after we moved here and they were the best fluff in ages.

One book I crave but cannot pintpoint. I can't remember its title, its author, or its protagonist. The author's last name might begin with L or M, because my vague impression is that it lived in the tall narrow bookcase to the left of the children's room entrance at Phoebe. When I couldn't remember Katie John's name or author and posted a question to a listserve remembering only her dog, Heavenly Spot, I gave a range of authors, Blume to Cleary, because of where the books were shelved. Bingo: Calhoun.

I posted a description of this last book to Loganberry Books:

A boy and his father, maybe newly mother- and wifeless, are new in a rundown house. They choose and lay new (blue and yellow?) linoleum in the kitchen, the first room they reconstruct. The boy starts his new school and it doesn't go well. Somehow he becomes (wakes up as? walks through the front door?) another boy who lives obviously in the future, in the same, though modified, house. He kind of watches out of that boy's eyes, a dual consciousness so the future boy doesn't flub anything up--like watching his mother repair a torn rugby shirt with an iron-type device. The future boy can draw, and the now-boy learns to draw through him. He draws the mother from the Swiss Family Robinson for a school project, and a view from a cliff that's recognizable but inaccessible as well as illegal in his own time (this scores him points with his classmates). He's working on a complicated portrait of the future-boy's sister (whose name is Helen?) as he realizes who the future family is, and that for time-continuity (?) he has to put the portrait in the chimney (he and his father are now working on the fireplace) and not submit it as the school project he intended it for. The final scene in the book might be the future-family discovering this portrait in their own chimney, and the future-father is mystified and haunted because his father, the now-boy, died before either of these grandchildren (the futureboy and his sister) was born, yet here is a wonderful portrait of the girl. It's set in England, was published in the late '70s to late '80s (I'm guessing early '80s), and the cover has a boy opening the door into a rowhouse, yet through the door is not an interior but a lightly clouded blue sky.

It took several months, maybe a year, for someone to identify Toby Lived Here, but it did happen. I have no idea how to search the web for the book's identity: other humans' memory seems my best chance. "Desk Set," you know.

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I am so excited about the new astronomy wing at the Museum of Nature and Science. This (top) view does not happen often--it is rare for that much snow to last into full leaf season--but it is theoretically possible from the roof of the museum (or a helicopter). The new space atrium will make that view accessible to the (admission-paying) public, not just to publicists, the mountains from Pike's Peak to Long's and beyond. Cheeseman and City Parks both used to have that view, but trees grew to obscure it. Cranmer still has the view, because west of that park, the city slopes down into Cherry Creek.

RDC laughs that I have such issues with the portrayal of Denver in promotional pictures. You can't call them photographs, because they're so doctored. I'm not such an automatic fan of Denver as he is and that could be why I consider such pictures lies when he does not. They're not meant to be art but, as far I consider, representational of the beauty of the city. Since they're misrepresentations, they're lies. The mountains are taller than the city buildings, of course, but that's not your perspective from the foot of the buildings. This is a lovely view of the city, if you happen to have access to the roof of that high-rise apartment building. Since most people haven't, it's deceptive. (None of the downtown buildings has a public observation deck like the Empire State's or the Hancock's.) This view, on the front page of the city's own site (and don't miss the logic and aesthetic of that URL, and that Denver's all puffed about an automobile race), could never ever ever happen--the mountains would have to move not only east into the city but considerably north for Mt. Evans (the main peak in the Denver skyline) to be among the downtown buildings. Here's another version of that lie. This shot was taken far enough from downtown for the buildings to drop in perspective to the mountains, but the photographer must have used a telephoto lens as long as an arm as well as doctored the building skyline in relation to the mountains.

(Ow. That last site sells puzzles of city views. Its sadly outdated view of New York City calls it the financial capitol, sic, of the country; its view of D.C. says the Capital, sic, is visible in the distance.)

Ow again. This site speculates on Denver's alleged next skyscraper, Trango Tower. Interesting concept, but this site dates from 1999. It claims this 1050' anorexic slab would make Denver the third tallest city in the country.

I have got to ensure I keep going downtown after this stupid move.