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reader, writer, unregenerate comma-splicer |
With a blank mind and quiet heart today, I’ll let Middlemarch speak for me, because this makes me smile:
“Will did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him to embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her.”
Have a good weekend, y’all.
It is a funny thing, but sometimes when I look at the pictures of the house from when we first toured it, I get more excited about it than I get by actually living in it. Hardwood floors! Stained glass! A swimming pool! Good lord, I think to myself, those people are lucky.
Speaking of the swimming pool, I can think of almost nothing else today. All I want is to be lying by the pool in eighty degree weather, ideally with some beers and all of you people. When will it be summer already?
I spent all morning yesterday curled up in the library, planning out the garden we’re going to plant in the backyard. Just me, a pot of tea, the Sunset gardening book, a pad of paper and a flood of sunlight from the Southern exposure. Bliss.
Later in the day, full of tea and resolve, I determined to go uproot that no-good very-bad toadstool which had been overrunning the tree outside. Armed with a spade and little pink gardening gloves, I popped the toadstool right out of the soil — my first experience that I can remember of ever digging in dirt.
With the toadstool came, by my estimate, sixteen thousand creepy crawly things. Beetles, worms, centipedes, some sort of maggoty looking creature: all of them came poking their heads out as if to say “Hello! Welcome to gardening! WE ARE GOING TO BE SUCH FRIENDS!”
Are there any plants that you don’t have to plant in dirt? Like a nice air-based plant, maybe? I may need to redraw my garden plan.
Okay, I thought of a reason why I might have woken up sad yesterday and the day before that, which is that on the day before that, my grandpa died.
And I didn’t mention it because this is hardly the place for that sort of thing (i.e. things that are serious, things that are private, or things that actually happened), but now it’s received this slightly funny (to me) aspect, which is that it took me three days to make the connection between someone dying and me feeling sad. I’m kind of dumb sometimes.
Anyway now I’m thinking about it, and so I’m just going to talk about this one memory, which is that when my younger cousins and I were kids and would go over to our grandparents’ house, my grandpa would sometimes have us all line up in front of him and do jumping jacks while he counted them out army-style. “And one! And two! And three!” and so on. And then when he was tired of the whole trailer shaking from our noise he would say “Annnnd halt, one, two!” And we would all collapse to the ground with the largest possible thump. I like this memory because it’s the last time I can remember wanting to be really heavy and loud.
Rest in peace, Gramps.
Today is just one of those days. The kind of day where you wake up depressed for no real reason, and then you decide to snap yourself out of it by being proactive and hanging some curtains upstairs already, and then you, being terrible with tools, manage to snap the head off of Gene’s 3/32 hexagonal drill bit, and you get depressed again and give up, but not before drilling two useless holes in the wall.
So you think, all right, the weather outside is frightful, as they say, so I’ll just print out those recipes from our wedding cookbook and start organizing them. And for some reason you can’t seem to make the printer turn on.
Then you decide maybe you should just shut up and do some laundry like a good housewife, and you throw a load of clothes and towels in — and discover later that you failed to shake out one towel entirely and now the pine needles it was covered with are sticking to ALL your clothes and towels.
So, proactive again, you begin a helpful email exchange with your beloved husband which starts as a useful plan to buy a car and ends as a whiny rant about how everything should happen on your time line. After you send it, you remember you haven’t told him about breaking his drill bit yet.
And things go on like this, piling up and piling up, hour after hour, until eventually you find you’re huddled in the corner of a room eating cold bacon out of a Tupperware and staring at the wall.
You know? One of THOSE days.
I miss San Francisco today. I love this house of course, and Alameda is adorable, but I’m not quite acquainted with it yet.
I keep remembering a bit in one of the Anne of Green Gables books where Anne is describing Heaven to Ruby Gillis, who’s dying of consumption. At the end of it Ruby agrees that it all sounds very nice, “But, oh, Anne! It won’t be what I’m used to!”
If the rain holds off, I think I’ll go wander around the island today and see if I can get a bit more used to it.
Also, don’t be too sad for Ruby. Apparently Heaven includes Facebook. I’m going to friend Anne and see what happens.
I’m at this frustrating point with the house where I can see how I want most of the rooms to look, but so far I only see it in my head. In my eyes, all I can see is little piles of stuff everywhere with nowhere to live.
What we need now are storage containers and lots of them. Perhaps I should pick up a Primitive Old Wood Wooden Antique Water Bottle Storage Carrying Crate Box Bin Container Upcycle Repurpose for Rustic Cabin Style Lodge Ranch Cottage Decor Primitive Farmhouse Look. What do you think?
Kris: Victoria’s Secret is selling a gold bikini. As the wife of a Star Wars nerd, should I be obtaining such an item?
Gene: Let me see.
Gene: No. Leia’s bikini was actually made of metal.
Kris: So to fulfill the fantasy, I would need to wear a bikini which has been forged in fire?
Gene: Yeah, but it’s not just the outfit. It’s really about the whole alien slavery milieu.
Kris: So, forged bikini, and then we hire one of those guys who stands outside Geico in the gecko suit, and we convince him to get in this?
Gene: Sure.
Kris: All right, and after this you can buy a frock coat and jump into a pond six or eight times for me.
A few more book stats:
The last book I read before getting married was the extremely cheery and light-hearted Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi.
The shortest books I read all year were Terry Pratchett’s children’s book Where’s My Cow and William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, each containing just 24 pages.
The longest book was Miss Manner’s Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. Clocking in at a hefty 711 pages, this book was extremely enjoyable but had no perceptible influence on my manners.
I read 205 books in 2010. Of those books, I had read 93 of them at least once before, leaving 112 that I read for the first time. I borrowed 53 of those first-time books, which means I went out and bought, without having read them, 59 books last year. And of those books, I rated 57 of them as being above average on my own little ratings system. Which means that of the 59 books I paid good money for before ever reading them, only 2 were bad guesses on my part.
Conclusion? I should definitely continue to buy books before I’ve read them, because I am really good at it.