Reading: The Name of the Rose.

Learning: Eco is a semiotician and anything he writes is going to pummel me with my own ignorance.

Listening: Erasure

Viewing: Snow in Summit county, though not yet on Mount Evans. It's colder, though. Magpies.

Moving: HAO and I walked my regular walk plus an extra mile in the other direction.

21 November 1999: One of those Sundays

I did every last shred of laundry in the house yesterday, dusting socks and dishrags and Blake's cage cover and ever'thing and so got to wake up on mostly-clean sheets. Lots of stretching. I read The Name of the Rose for a while, then went out for a paper. It's cold! Finally! Hooray! Back in the nice warm house, I woke Buddy, started his breakfast, and watched "CBS Sunday Morning" and read the Post. I cannot believe Usan investigators assumed the co-pilot downed EgyptAir 990 deliberately on the sole scrap of evidence that he uttered a prayer--a prayer that devout Muslims utter 100 times a day. Cultural context is all.

HAO came and we walked and talked. Clearly she hadn't read my journal for a few days because all of my stories were new. We saw Bailey and Casey (and I have got to remember that the black Lab puppy is Casey and the adult golden retriever is Bailey. I always confuse them). Back in the house, she moped because a quick inspection of the fridge showed no cheese. "You always have cheese!" And we had now as well, but it was hiding. RDC found a Brie and Cam(em?)bert with garlic and basil that's just remarkable. And some kind of mozzarella rolled around prosciutt' * and basil that she couldn't have even if she ate meat because it's for Thursday (as is the vanilla ice cream and a bunch of other tempting morsels).

*I spell it the way RDC pronounces it, without the final vowel. I put the a on mozzarella because I knew about that before him.

I should go cook or something. The theory is that RDC is going to help me make pie crusts today so I can do the pies on Wednesday. If I have to the crusts myself, they'l come out of a box.

Speaking of boxes, I put one in Blake's new pet taxi. He tolerates the pet taxi but he loves boxes and luckily his favorite oatmeal box fits in the taxi. So he's ready to fly.

Plus I should attempt to do something about our burgeoning books, like three new hard-cover Harry Potter books all needing to go on the shelf. And I want to make cookies. There are eight pounds of butter in the freezer, 32 sticks waiting to be wrapped in waffles and consumed, Homer-Simpson style.

Just random stuff. I feel like puttering and that makes for more disjointed writing than even usual.

Later...

I thawed two sticks of butter for cookies and measured out three cups of oatmeal. If we're likely to be out of anything it's oatmeal. I had all the butter cut into smaller pieces and softening on the counter when I opened the cupboard and realized we were nearly out of brown sugar. Eeek! I had RDC add it to the shopping list; while oatmeal chocolate chip cookies are not traditional Thanksgiving fare, apple pies are and I feed them brown sugar. I was just about to pour in a make-up amount of white sugar with molasses to make up a full cup of brown sugar when I realized I had a full cup of butter in there, all cut up and squishy. Poop! I gauged a quarter cup and eased it out, coated with brown sugar. So I have some other amount than 3/4 cup of butter, some other amount than one cup of brown sugar, more white sugar and a damn sight more molasses than the recipe calls for. And did I mention that the oatmeal I measured was the unflavored instant kind from packets?

Well, at least Dot Org has a sweet tooth for even the worst mistakes. Which this isn't. I've done much worse.

After HAO and I walked we took our recycling to Safeway. Carrying a box of newspaper along the sidewalk, I looked up at our new upstairs neighbor (the previous ones with their rat-blood-sucking toddler are long gone). I happened to look up because I heard a burp, and when I looked up there he was in his bathrobe with a beer in his hand. "Hi," I said lamely. "Hi," he responded. Looks like another winner of a neighbor (and I wonder why I know no one in Denver). I should add that it was 12:30 in the afternoon. I'm kind of a Puritan that way. I'm from New England. I'm allowed.

Speaking of which, that was another argument at Dot Org in favor of my being a witch. Two pieces of evidence: my previous email address of darkstar@, and the fact that I was from New England. And maybe the women's studies major. More and more of this "evidence" comes out the longer I work there. So anyway, I could understand someone not a Deadhead wondering about darkstar, but being from New England? I exclaimed, "We're not all from Salem, you know!" Which would annoy contemporary Salemites, I'm sure.

So anyway later this afternoon as I sat in the study and RDC was in his bathroom (off the study), we heard the upstairs neighbor scream. A curse, from his bathroom. As we made supper, RDC asked, "So what was he doing on his deck at noon with a can of beer?"
"It was a bottle of beer," I elaborated. "So he's not as bad as you think."
And woohoo! RDC laughed at that.

---

In the Denver Post's expansive, beyond Jason and Jennifer three-page book section, I see that Susan Cooper has a new book out--two kids swapping places in time between the Globe Theatre around 1600 and now. Very Shakespeare. This reminded me of something I wrote to Beth about her search for historical biographies. For background, I've been calling Joseph Fiennes "Jofe" after his brother for a while now in my ignorant mocking way, even though "Rafe" is an equally correctly way to pronounce Ralph as well as much sexier. So I asked Beth,

Did you like "Elizabeth"? I loved it. I was also surprised that RDC really liked it. Aobut all we have in common are childhood faves and "Harold and Maude" which we love and adore. "Elizabeth" was criticized for having no plot, but hey, we already know what happened to her. D'you think Judi Dench and Jofe Fiennes got it on on the set of "Shakespeare in Love" for old times' sake?

---

We lit the fireplace last night for the first time. I hope Thanksgiving isn't a Red Day with those wood-burning restrictions; I'd like a fire during the meal. I realized this is the first time I've had a fireplace fire since I lived with my parents, since Holcomb's fireplace had been for show only for years, and of my two grad school rentals, NMB's condo didn't have one and LEB's house had only a woodstove. But then I remembered NBM had a fireplace the first time I stayed with her, during Christmas break junior year so I could work at Scheduling. Then, in my usual obsessive fashion (just ask my sister), I couldn't remember the road that house was on. "Past the post office--that was across from South Eagleville. Off the next one, that led to Hank's Hill. Started with an M?" RDC couldn't remember either. I am so grateful I wound up with someone from UConn, from the same years of UConn though we didn't meet till grad school, for common points of reference. If he'd grown up in Old Lyme, that would be too incestuous for me. So I dug out my address book. "Flaherty. Not an M. Irish anyway [like NBM and SEM]."

---

The cookies turned out fine. Molasses is a Good Thing, unless you're Walter Cunningham. Speaking of Good Things, I asked RDC not to tell Martha [Stewart] that I'd used instant instead of regular oatmeal in the cookies. He alleged that Martha would be in favor of it and produced an excellent imitation with her phrasing and pauses about how the finer cut of the instant made for a more delicate cookie texture. Later he asked if I thought 13 was an excessive number of cookies to have.

---

I taped "Millennium" from CNN to watch after "X-Files." Tonight was the 17th century and of course Newton. There was a scene with flying kites, which made Blake squeak his warning signal. He knows that flying things are dangerous. Channel-hopping afterward through Animal Planet or somesuch, we saw a bunch of gnus--or wildebeests; are they two different animals?--crossing a river despite the crocodiles. One snapped at a new gnu and despite its being a new gnu, it got away. "He got away!" I cried. "He got away!" Just like Dorothy about Toto. Then a few channels later, "The Wizard of Oz" was on. The Wicked Witch of the West was just about to send the flying monkeys after Our Heroes. So naturally we had to wait to see the real Dorothy watch Toto safely away from the castle. Before she gets to say "He got away! He got away!" herself, the monkeys fly. Blake, ever vigilant, warned us about those too. I guess he didn't spot the wires.