Daily Life

I can't imagine that the following will be of much, if any, interest to anyone aside from me and perhaps those who are mentioned therein. But it contains the kinds of details I'm always sorry to have forgotten.

Last night I slept downstairs in David's room. Since I don't sleep in that waterbed every night any more, I seldom look at it without remembering the day his old airframe mattress sprang a leak in the one spot that couldn't be reached for repair -- between the airframe and the water compartment -- and we had to sally forth to buy a new bed. We were terrifically excited at the notion of drawers and a headboard with bookshelves, and much taken with the lovely dark golden pine of the visible elements, which had been treated in some way that allegedly made it as good as hardwood. Certainly none of it has collapsed or shown much sign of wear even after eighteen years or so.

David was asleep already, being on a saner schedule than I am. He woke up a bit when I made the bed wallop, which was probably just as well, because the telephone rang at 2:45 and he got to say that well, no, he was in bed but not actually asleep. I was worried that something terrible had happened somewhere, but it was just somebody with an even weirder sense of appropriate timing than mine, wanting him to come look at a friend's malfunctioning computer.

I mostly find the waterbed too warm these days; I mostly find almost anything too warm. I'd compounded the difficulty by absently taking my multivitamin quite late in the day, so I got the niacin flush as well.

Arwen came in at some point, stood at the end of the bed, and made some remarks, but she wouldn't settle. Ari came and visited me in the bathroom when I got up at five a.m., but he wouldn't come into the bedroom either. I expect they're on strike, but they haven't presented their terms intelligibly.

At nine the phone rang again. David announced his intention not to answer it this time. I was not feeling so very uncomfortably warm, so we got some cuddling in. At some point he got up, and at some point after that the phone rang at a decent hour, and at some point after that I got up. He was still on the phone, so I didn't go say good morning and get to see whatever photographic stuff he might be working on.

The stairway was stuffy already and quite full of the three cats who frequent it. I made sure the food and water dishes were not empty and continued on my way to the second floor. Minou was waiting impatiently in the kitchen, and followed me into the bathroom, speaking earnestly on one plaintive note. He wanted his medicine, or more precisely, the wet food that it is put into. But I wanted my own medicine, or more precisely, its effects. I stood in front of the chest of drawers in my dark bedroom, shaking pills out of bottles into the weekly pillbox. I usually only put in three days' worth at a time, in case I lose the box or it becomes mysteriously waterlogged, as did once happen. I remembered with a jolt that I was almost out of lisinopril. So I took the bottle, the pillbox, a glass of water ,and a banana into my office, unplugged the printer from the network, plugged my computer in instead, and ate my banana and took pills with one hand while deleting spam with the other.

After the medicine was down, I called the HCMC refill line and left my information. I'd been afraid I'd have to go down to the pharmacy on Sunday morning, already out of the damn drug, but the message said I could pick up my prescription after 9 a.m. on Saturday, which is much less of a hassle.

There was a good south breeze ,but it was not very cool. I looked at the NOAA site and cringed. Lower nineties. Feh. I looked at a few weblogs that I look at. I looked at the Astronomy Picture of the Day. They've been doing a lot of Mars stuff recently, but today was the Dumbbell Nebula. They noted with their typical scrupulous slightly doofy humor that it was not called so for its lack of academic achievement.

At about the time the cats gave up on reminding me that I was supposed to give them wet food, I got up and did so. Minou gets three quarters of a tablet of Tapazole in the morning. He was almost out of his medicine too, but that was being arranged for. I washed out the cat plates, put a bit of warm water in one, dissolved the pill bits in it, and then mushed a bit of wet food into the whole until it was a gloopy mess. I put a dollop of wet food on a plate for Ari so he wouldn't steal Minou's. Both of them were schooling around the kitchen and making anxious noises. No, don't throw it out the window; no don't eat it yourself; give it to us, us, us. Ari finally flopped on his side in despair, and then had to get up again when I put the plates down. The plates were given to Raphael by my mother. They are blue and white, with stylized cats on them, and might have originally been intended for mixing your wasabi and soy sauce together for the eating of sushi.

I went into the bedroom to placate Beryl, who won't eat wet food but gets very exercised if anybody gets anything she doesn't; also so I could sit down while making sure the two cats in the kitchen didn't change places. Jordan came out of Raphael's room and walked into the kitchen and made for Minou's plate. I had to give her a dollop of food too. She usually only gets it once a week with her baby aspirin for her arthritis, but every once in a while she asserts her position as matriarch of all cats by stealing Minou's food.

I call Minou the slowest tongue in the west. He was still lapping away when Ari and Jordan wandered off, so I wandered off too. Now it's getting very sticky in this office, which is a sunroom facing south, west, and north; and I need to toss my banana peel into the trash before the fruit flies come from the ends of the earth for it, and to make some coffee. This feels like it's going to be a very slow day. I didn't take my blood pressure, but I can feel the drugs flattening me out, so it probably wasn't all that high to start with.

More thrilling dull detail later!

Pamela

Daily LIfe, Part 2

I should add that, because my version of Opera doesn't work with the New Improved Live Journal, and I like my version of Opera and am suspicious of all new things, I finally got it together to download Semagic, with which I am blissfully happy.

So while the drugs were having their initial flattening effect, I looked at more blogs and at alt.polyamory, and answered an email message from Carbonel about a stray cat she'd rescued, and took a message from Eric's current employer, and contemplated my nightgown. It's an ancient cotton sleeveless affair from Target. Possibly it was intended as a housedress, because it has pockets, one reason I adore it. It's white with a pattern of pink and blue hydrangeas. I bought it before I first went to Arizona to meet Raphael in person. I bought two nightgowns at Target before I first went to visit David in Minneapolis, too. Those were orange and turquoise, respectively, with the same weird pattern of toucans and palm branches. David never did like them. I didn't know his tastes in such things when I got them. Perhaps I even didn't want them to be to his taste. When one is not sure of the status of the relationship and casual nudity is not the norm in one's country, one makes these odd choices. I would not exactly have this problem nowadays. I might have specific acknowledgement that there's a question about whether the relationship is going to get sexual or not, but I wouldn't be in such a pristine state of suspension of possibilities. It's nice to know that one's ability to communicate has improved over the years. And let me just add: being raised a girl in the nineteen-fifties and sixties? No thank you. Don't try it. Profoundly sucky in the bad sense.

With the present nightgown I was triumphantly wearing pink ballet-like foam bedroom slippers. I don't normally wear pink. I got those, in despair, to wear when I performed Elise and Juan's wedding ceremony. Elise had not theretofore worn pink either, but had found herself fancying it, and I could not find any other pink shoes that I would be willing to have in the house afterwards. Elise herself wore white bedroom slippers generously embroidered with little pearl-like stuff, so we figured I could wear bedroom slippers too. Jon Singer's sweetie of blessed memory had pink Chinese cloth slippers for her wedding-guest apparel on that occasion, but I hadn't been able to find any locally. She offered to switch with me, but we didn't wear the same size.

Eventually I got so hot and sticky that I turned on the fan of the air conditioner. Ari had pancaked himself in the south window with the breeze, so I didn't really want to turn on the air conditioner itself, as that would mean chasing him out and shutting the window. Besides, it's been such a lovely perfect cool summer that I am cranky about needing to use the air conditioner. Being hot and sticky, I changed the litter box in the library and then took a shower. Dr. Bronner's tea tree oil soap, mmm. There is something weird about the water pressure. The shower curtains are starting to grow red stuff. Raphael just cleaned the sink, but it looks gross again. No cats visited me in the course of the shower, which is a bit odd.

Minou, as it turned out, was occupying my bed -- I had turned on the air conditioner in my bedroom so I wouldn't be sticky when I got dressed. Ari was still in the window. Jordan had gone back to Raphael's room, and Beryl, after trying to chase Ari out of my window and failing, had gone to sleep in an armchair in the cat-sitting room.

Phone calls after the shower included one from HCMC, which wanted its money after my last checkup, and another from Eric, who is progressing well in moving plans and also in reading Fire From Heaven. I am so happy that he is taking to Mary Renault instantly. It was very good to get his call so soon after the unpleasant one.

Pamela

Daily Life, Part 3

The next great deed involved getting dressed. I looked pensively at my lovely cool dress -- but it has no pocketses. And I just felt today was a Losing-Things kind of a day already. I looked at my shorts and sleeveless shirts. But only the lower nineties are forecast. Those clothes are for completely unbearable miserable weather that goes on and on. What if I wore them now for this wimpy-ass minor heat wave and then the Laundry Monster ate them and I couldn't find them when the real heat came on? But jeans would be too hot. I hauled out the big baggy green Freedom Pants from the Deva catalog and one of the really nice fine-mesh T-shirts from Junonia. All my Junonia stuff is in discontinued colors, because otherwise, even when finances are much better than they are now (buying clothes at all now is a ridiculous idea, and what a good thing that I work at home), I can't afford them. This one is a kind of sagey green. I am always amazed at the cleverness of the designers. I have a great many dearly-beloved oversized men's T-shirts from Target. They are comfy and voluminous and come in great colors. But nobody could say that they were flattering. The T-shirts from Junonia are flattering. Somebody made them for fat women, somebody who likes fat women.

To nod in the direction of the weather, I put on my Teva sandals. My sandals always last forever, because I don't like wearing them. I like socks. I almost always wear socks. If I go barefoot in your presence, either the weather is insane, I have run out of laundry utterly, even mismatched socks, or I trust you utterly. David found me these sandals on sale and I expect I'll have them for ten more years. They are recently laundered, since somebody with four feet pissed on them. They needed it anyway.

It was profoundly sticky, if not so hot as anticipated, by the time I had finished this vital and important process of putting on clothing so as not to leave the house. Ari was still lying around in my window without his bones. I turned the fan part of the air conditioner up. I collected several days' worth of mail.

A written notice about the bill I had just cleared up with HCMC.

The bank statement. Argh.

Credit card statement, ditto.

An envelope from the Department of Inspections and Regulations. Oh, shit. They must be getting on our case about the huge buckthorn that Eric kindly took out some weeks back. He sawed up the larger branches, but I haven't bundled them yet. And the Department of OWZINGE, as we prefer to call these people hereabouts, really hates piles of brush. Shit, shit, shit, it would arrive on a hot day, and they always give you a ridiculous deadline and then don't mail the letter for a week. I opened it. "Cut and remove all bushes, trees, saplings, or any other vegetation that hang over the public alley. An overhead clearance above the paved alley from the ground to a height of 14' is required." Followed by a list of ways to get rid of the branches and so on once you had cut them.

Say what? There isn't anything back there that COULD overhang the alley, public and paved or otherwise. I went outside. Gray, stuffy, everything drooping, even what I'd watered the day before. My insane neighbor to the north was mowing his lawn. I went past the neat pile of sawn branches and the larger pile of small leafy branches, past the weedy bit I once thought to make a shade garden of. Two garbage carts, two ancient green recycling containers sans lids; the driveway; another weedy bit on the other side of the driveway. No, really, nothing had grown up out of nowhere since I had brought the recycling out the previous evening. I looked at the southern neighbors' back parking bit -- they don't have a garage. Yes indeed. Firmly on their side of the crumbling retaining wall, a youngish elm is elegantly drooping its branches over the public alley.

This is not the first time we have been mistaken for our neighbors. We were chastised for keeping an inoperable vehicle on the premises, for having projecting sections in our front sidewalk, for having grass and weeds in excess of 8 inches high bordering on the public alley. All these terrific offenses were in fact the province of our neighbors. (I am not complaining about the neighbors. We have been guilty of plenty of offenses of our own, by these standards, including parking a car on the lawn and having a glorious brush pile with attendant wild grape vine and abandoned rusty red wheelbarrow. ) I figured out a while ago, when my first apoplexy had subsided, that our garage has an address on it, whereas the neighboring house has no garage, and has in front an address hidden by the jaunty slant of the porch roof. Our address ends with 1, and theirs with 7. I think I see the problem.

I called the inspector and left what I hope was a weary, patient message. I must say her voicemail message made me abandon any thought of sounding testy. She sounded harried, and pled that people leave their phone numbers CLEARLY.

My cat was still in the window, so I looked quickly at my email. A message from the splendid Sharyn November, about a bookstore in St. Paul that wants me to do a signing when my trilogy is reprinted. I hope I remember how to do that. I think I might be starting to get a little bit excited about this reprint business.

Pamela