2 May 1999: Sunlight

Sunlight, finally.

We slept late and then I staggered around reluctantly vertical, whereupon the sun came out. Immediately I felt better. We went for a walk, gimping, RDC with the arch of his right foot abdicating (to what he doesn't know) and my own left knee apparently on the brink of mutiny. Nothing brisk for us, but we passed our local prairie dog colony and set up the one hill in Denver (not so, but the only one near us) to a wonderful view of the mountains. The foothills broke up the clouds, although the peaks were still enshrouded. Along a line at the top of the foothills, snow began, and thickened up the slopes to the peaks.

We looked south where Pike's Peak belonged and it wasn't there, just a big mountain-shaped cloud. During the walk, it extricated itself and whoops, there it stood, just where it ought to be. The clouds captured it again until only the ridge down the eastern face was visible. A beautiful day.

In a couple of days when all of this wet is out of Denver's system, it'll be clear and perfect enough to watch clouds rising and setting. This is a phenomenon I never knew before moving here, air so clean and dry that you could watch cumulous clouds on the horizon like clipper ships coming into port. In Connecticut, no matter how blue the sky is overhead, there's always enough moisture or filth to obscure the horizon. Of course, there's seldom a horizon because Connecticut has trees and hills, too. Can't have everything.

Speaking of Colorado and Connecticut, at work last week a delegation from Uganda visited to study whatever it is we do at Dot Org (she evades coyly). Dot Org talked about this state and that state but the Ugandans--silly Ugandans--didn't have the states as readily to mind as Usans have, particularly Dot Org Usans. So they wanted a map and I made one, labeling the states with their two-letter abbreviations and appending a list of states with their abbreviations and capitals. I called HAO about Happy Hour after it was all over, except it wasn't all over so I hung up kind of fast, and at Happy Hour Haitch asked if my boss had walked in, so I told the story.

Happy Hour was at Hemingway's, a bar that looks surprisingly like Sloppy Joe's in Key West. I hadn't met a few of the people there, other students at DU. One looks like the Usan Ryan Whoever who was on "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" (and is now in the bad stupid Usan version with Drew Carey), and I nearly called him Ryan instead of his actual name any number of times. Anyway, Ryan was impressed that I knew all the states' capitals, and I refrained from saying, "Yeah, since fifth grade, even before Animaniacs."

That kind of snobbery is so like me, and not one of my more admirable characteristics. I figure any body of knowledge--or, as here, any set of information--that I have is only basic trivial knowledge and anyone who hasn't mastered it is clearly an imbecile. This is partly because I judge everyone as compared to me (kind of like astronomers comparing all stars to our Sun, which is a 1.00 on whatever scale that is) and partly a function of lack of self-esteem, by which anything I know is so simple and obvious that you must really be stupid if you don't know the piddling trivia I know. Or here, knowing the state capitals, if you're a Usan. Ugandans are excused. Contrariwise, anyone who knows stuff I don't know must be much much brighter or more diligent than I, or possessed of a better memory (unless the stuff is stupid stuff like football statistics, in which case the person is also obviously an imbecile for wasting brain space on that).

Anyway, by the time we gimped home the clouds were back, but at least they're bright clouds and you can tell there's a source of light and warmth above them, unlike yesterday when I was beginning to disbelieve in the bright yellow dot.

Later in the afternoon RDC scampered out for frappuccinos and returned with both coffee and chocolate chip cookies. I exercised my newly-strengthened resolve and stopped nibbling after I'd eaten the crust. (Yes, cookies have crusts. Anyone knows the edges tend to be cooked more, leaving yummier rawer cookie in the middle.) I was proud of myself and plus I'll have something left for obligatory Sunday evening television.

Continuing with my usual globally-critical commentary, I tried the personal model at Lands' End. Ha! One, I should know not to trust any company that has a grammatical error in its name and chooses to keep it, when using its official name means that I have to perpetuate the error. Two, there aren't enough specs:

Hair: dark, light, red, grey
Height: under 5'4", over 5'7", or in between
Shoulders: broad, regular, or narrow
Hips: narrow, regular, or wide
Waist: narrow, regular, or generous
Waist placement: low, regular, or high
Your model's name: Moose

So my shoulders are broad and it recommends stuff that minimizes shoulders. Ha! Furthermore, it alleges I have an hourglass figure. Ha! And it puts me in red, which I never wear, possibly because that's the only color the suit is available in, or possibly because I have dark hair.

And why would you need to indicate your hair color? To gauge your coloring, right? What spec isn't asked? What's more important than hair to basic coloring? Skin tone, right? That model is pasty fishbelly pale, white like me in April, not even like me in August, white like the Crayola color "flesh." I just went to Crayola to see if "flesh" ever really existed (yes, renamed "peach" in 1962) and saw on the main page that they're finally renaming "Indian Red." Maybe they'll change it to "Commie Red."

An on-line model would be a great idea if it allowed numerical measurements for circumference and height and asked what part of yourself you hate. I know I have Female Distortion Syndrome, but distorted or not I can still see myself. My measurements on someone shorter or taller would look a lot different than they do on me.

I wrote to Lands' [sic] End. I hope I'm not the first person to ask why they're stuck in pre-1962 Crayola land. Perhaps they consider that asking for race is insensitive, which is true, since it's a poor indication of color. But in that case the model could be an outline instead of colored in (except that the background is white).