Reading: Nobody's Fool

Moving: nope!

Learning: how addicted I am to clear skies and good weather

Watching: hazy skies

7 August 2000: The week we got back

RDC left for San Francisco at 8:00 Tuesday, ten hours after we got home from vacation (which is why we'd had to do laundry at midnight). Blake was not a happy camper when he saw the suitcase being filled and a dress shirt being buttoned up, and that set the tone for him for the week. Of course I was anxious to spend time with him as well, but I am Not Good Enough. He was desperately clingy even though I was clearly inadequate, and he did not perk up nor his appetite return until RDC brought it back with him on Friday.

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Wednesday I painted doors for an hour and then went to swim and was greeted with this sign at the pool: "Due to VOMIT we are closed today and will reopen tomorrow." Great. So instead I went shopping, the clear alternative. I don't know why I didn't think of going to the Cook Park pool. I found a piece of furniture to keep Blake on. In Orchard Acres (our CT tenement), Percy's cage sat on the dining table. In Cypress Point (there, I named it; now stalk my former place of residence at will), the bird cage sat on top of the box the speakers came in. With my considerable sewing prowess, I stapled fabric around the box to make it look less, but only slightly less, like a box.

A priority for the house is actual furniture. So adamant was I about this that the box, considerably weakened over five years, didn't even make it into the house. Since we moved, therefore, the cage has been on a pair of stacked milk crates. Several weeks ago I saw a so-called jelly cabinet at Bloodbath and Beyond for $100, but when I got it in its laminate glory to the counter I learned that it was actually $200. I left it behind. I even looked in K-Mart one night, since it's near Home Depot and a coupon was packaged with our change of address stuff from the USPS. Nothing there.

Waiting in the mail when we got back from vacation was a 20% off coupon to BB&B, so I decided to capitulate and get the thing, just to have it, for $160. But in the store that night was a new thing, a butcher block slab with two lower, wire shelves. With the coupon, it was half the cost of the jelly cabinet, and bewheeled to boot, so I was all over it. And a shower curtain rod and curtain rings, because we have to make the downstairs bathtub useable. Curtain rings on ball bearings, because this is the type of luxury item I indulge in now. And a picture frame.

When I was in her house, my mother brought me around to see this and that, although neither this nor that was my stash of high school yearbooks, Lymen '83, '84, and '85, all of which I pray are in the house somewhere--the only one I brought with me was my senior year, 1986. In my grandmother's room, my mother told me to look around and see if there was anything I wanted, because apparently DEW has authorized such vulturing activity. I looked, and I saw a photograph I've always loved, of my great-great-grandmother Eva Lucinda (Featherly) Moore, taken when she was about 12. Two greats or not, I remember this person, naturally as a very very old woman, in a wheelchair, with one leg, lap covered by an afghan. I look like my grandmother, and my grandmother looks like her grandmother, who was Eva. (I also look like my mother, which is less peculiar or noteworthy.)

I picked up the picture and examined the girl's eyes, which look just about like mine and Granny's. This is what I wanted. I brought the picture to the nursing home for Granny to approve, and of course she did. It was in a gruesome dimestore frame, though, and so I bought this new one. RDC is trying to get a photograph of his paternal great-grandfather, an exceptional one we saw for the first time in November, that truly captures his Ellis-Island-immigrating, manual-laboring character, and they will flank each other on our dresser.

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Saturday we bought SPM's birthday present. Well, RDC did. He got a fly box and lots of flies to go into it. I meandered around that section of Gart Bros.' sports. Gart has skis and bikes and weights and machines and basketballs and everything, like fishing. Oh, and hunting, which is right next to fishing. It sells rifles and shotguns, which makes sense for hunting, but also handguns, which I wondered at until I remembered target shooting.

I was better off in the fishing department, where the dead elk I ate last year at the Wynkoop wasn't staring down at me from a wall, or at least so I thought. I saw all the fly-tying material, like the pheasant breast feathers and cul-de-canard and whatnot, none of which bothers me. When our friend MRC walked into our tenement for the first time and saw Percy, his only comment was, "You'll never get any hackles off of that!" which is of course all a flyfisherman cares about, bird-wise. Then almost at the end of a shelf I yipped.

I understand the theory of pressed duck--one duck, deboned and flattened. I picture an ironing board here, but I understand I'm mistaken about that. What I was seeing here was pressed rabbit. One rabbit, smashed. Looking closer, I saw that it was more than the "rabbit mask" the label called it, since it had paw skin. It had eye holes from the actual eyes. "That's probably the skin of the rabbit you ate last week at Le Central," RDC reminded me. Yep.

After that, followed by a distinctly non-meat lunch at the purely vegetarian restaurant Watercourse Foods, we saw the Jackson/Fielder exhibit at the Colorado History Museum. This is something I had wanted to do for months and this would be the last weekend. A century ago, William Henry Jackson took photographs all over Colorado, and more recently, John Fielder repeated his shots. Jackson went where the new railroads would take him, which means that in the mountains, Fielder's shots are often the more attractive, since they don't have fresh scars from cuttings. However, where Jackson had to train and hike to, Fielder could probably drive, mostly, which we kept in mind. And the photographs of Denver and Colorado Springs, of course, robbed us of any fantasies that the state looks better now than it did then.

And after that, RDC took a nap, which is how I got three uninterrupted hours on my computer, hours which ended in no updating. And after that, I wrapped SPM's present ("Do you think he would like a Curious George sticker?") and we went to the party.

The previous Saturday, around the table on EJB's deck, RDC's old friend and I went off at a gallop about books, and her husband chided her that the only male auther she reads is "that guy from UConn." It turns out that she likes Wally's Lamb's second, I Know This Much Is True, more than his first, She's Come Undone. She said she also reads Richard Russo, although she amended that he and Lamb are exceptions. Earlier this day, RDC had found the Guess Who's "Undun" for me, so I heard that finally for the first time in my life, which startled Dexy considerably. "Oh, I must have played it at my house sometime," he asserted. No. Since its first line is "She's come undone" and that line repeats frequently, and I've been wanting to hear the song since I read the book, I would remember.

Anyway, we started talking books. Unlike at EJB's, more than two people read a lot, and unlike at previous gathering of the English grad students, people are reading for pleasure--now that our group is mostly ABD. One man surprised me by having read almost every Booker in the past ten years--discussing Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan and Graham Swift--but never having read Possession or Pat Barker. RDC told me later that that man doesn't much read female authors, but hell, given Barker's first name and her subject matter (WWI), who can tell her gender?

A good time, a good night, and with cheesecake.

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And then we beavered away until Wednesday brought family. RDC, his mother, her new husband JTT, and her grandson/RDC's nephew RDC2 went Thursday to the zoo, and Friday to the Musem of Science and Nature. The whole point of the visit was for RDC2 to see dinosaurs, but he was so distracted by the sight of the waterjet fountain he wasn't interested in them at all. RDC and I took him to the fountain when I got home from work. (A similar thing happened on Thursday at the zoo, when he would have been happy to gallop through the zoo; if an animal did something new or cute and his attention was directed back to it by one of the other three, he'd say, "But I've seen that one already.") Friday night it rained a bit, so Saturday dawned clearer than it had been since we got back from vacation, just in time for all of us to go to the mountains (just Keystone and Breckenridge). Sunday before 4:00 a.m. I woke with the nastiest stomach flu I've had in years, and DMB didn't want another day of driving, so RDC and JJT went to Boulder while DMB brought RDC2 back to City Park to play in the fountain and the museum's gift shop.

I stayed home, mostly asleep, either in bed or in one of the camp chairs under the cherry tree. (We bought them in Connecticut on the way to Cape Cod with me disparaging the idea of a chair at the beach until RDC pointed out we could probably bring them home with us. I've never liked the camp chairs we bought to go to the Pacific Northwest; these new ones have arms and footrests. Ooo the luxury.) I filled up a basin with water and put it under the footrest, and whenever I got too hot I'd plunge my feet in. I also brought Blake's spray bottle out since he often tries to bathe in his water dish when he's outside, but he didn't like that at all. We've started cautiously allowing him out of his cage outside, so I put him with his stubby wings on my knee in the fenced backyard, under the cherry tree past its fruit-bearing stage that no longer hosts big scary magpies or crows, and tried to shower him. He hated that, fluttering to the ground to get away, so I shoved him back into his prison. I had a laptop with wireless DSL, Charmed Life, The Archivist, and Straight Man; but I mostly read journals, not books. I highly recommend a laptop with wireless internet for anyone's next illness.

I called RDC around 3:00. Saturday night was incredibly windy and cleared out the last of the smoke, so Sunday was spectacular. At the top of Flagstaff Mountain (a foothill, really) in Boulder, RDC had pointed out Long's Peak to JJT. JJT said, you know, seeing that, I really don't want to bum around in Boulder. So they went to Rocky Mountain National Park, and when I called they were climbing Trail Ridge Road. They ate their lunch on the first overlook, with Moraine Park spread beneath them, and climbed up and up to the Continental Divide, at whose cool heights elk congregate in the height of summer. Once there, seeing how elk-viewing hampered the east-bound return trip, they decided to do a loop and continue through the west side of the park and home over Berthoud Pass. They had a good day; JJT said it was his best day in years and that the European Alps--and he's seen Austrian, Swiss, and Italian ones--offer nothing as spectacular. Heh.