Notes

I'm not doing as well as I'd like at, well, anything, aside from doing my twice-weekly stint at looking after elism's fine orange cats. Trying to look at my works in progress is indescribably icky, though I do it every day anyway, hoping that so doing will serve as a desensitization program and I can get back to work soon.

The juncoes are back, pretty much on schedule.

I've seen three dead birds and a dead cat on my walks recently, which is distressing.

I have four social events to attend this weekend and really don't wish to leave the house, though I am going to a friend's housewarming party for sure, and that might stir me up.

After the coolest late September and early October in sixty years, we are going to have a modest warming trend, which looks as if it will be very pretty.

The trip report has stalled out after I finished writing about Moss Beach, but I'm going to put the three entries that I have finished up anyway.

The first is merely about last-minute preliminaries; the second describes the flight; the third describes a day spent at Moss Beach. I found dividing them into smaller pieces beyond my present mental capacity, and I'm not going to use cut tags. I hope people who prefer cut tags can work around this.

Pamela

How we went to California

This is long. This is probably the most boring entry of the lot. But it does have a cat in it.

The Last Day -- Preliminaries to the Journey

I spent Wednesday, August 27, at home, running madly in all
directions trying to get too many things done. I always have an
impossible list of what I would like to do before I leave home
for a while, generally including luxuries like cleaning various
parts of the house so I don't recoil from them in horror after a
week of wallowing in hotel rooms cleaned by other people. Most
of this at-home cleaning never happens, and this occasion was no
exception. I did pack clothing for myself, and managed to
remember my medication and other indispensable objects. I forgot
to pack any jeans and so, once in California, went around
perpetually without back pockets and perpetually worried about
where I had left my wallet. I did manage to take my cat out for
a long session -- it had been too hot for several days previous
for this to be remotely feasible. I didn't get the lawn mowed.
The grass had simply given up for the moment, but the weeds were
more robust, a flourishing mixed crop of ragweed and plantain.

In any case, Eric arrived at a little after noon on Thursday, the
28th, to borrow David's car for the afternoon. Lydy had used it
in the morning, and had gotten back a bit late, so David, who
wished to squeeze in a couple of errands before handing the
vehicle off, left late himself. This caused me unnecessary
worry, since the car was in fact back in front of the house by
the time Eric arrived. We went back to his apartment, where I
was profoundly (and, once more, unnecessarily) dismayed by the
amount of cleaning left yet to do. The inspector was supposed to
be there at two, but I suggested changing the appointment to
three. Eric, having had similar thoughts himself, called and
left a message to this effect, the inspector being out for lunch.

We took the cat, who was dubious, and a large collection of
miscellaneous objects that had either been lent to Eric by my
household or that were now being lent or given to my household by
Eric. We dashed into my house long enough to deposit the cat,
set up his litterbox and food and water, incarcerate
Christopher's cats to avoid bloodshed, and empty the car. Then
we zoomed back to Eric's place to finish the cleaning, stopping
at an ATM on the way to get some cash for the trip. Eric was a
little concerned about having parked the car so close to an alley
entrance, so he got his cash first and went on back to keep an
eye on things. As I walked down the sunny sidewalk to join him,
I had a brief moment of utter inability to believe that we would
not just keep doing this, living in Minneapolis and doing various
practical and impractical things together. Eric had originally
talked of moving within Minneapolis, his apartment not being
entirely satisfactory, and my brain insisted on believing in that
rather than in what was really happening.

I had already developed a great admiration for the brand of paint
used by the apartment management. It scrubbed clean in the most
amazing way with remarkably little use of elbow grease, and
unlike most paint I have had the misfortune to wash in my
lifetime, it neither came off on the sponge nor broke off in
flakes when a little pressure was applied to it.

In the cleaning done already, I had worked on the bathroom, which
was essentially finished aside from an irritating tendency to
accumulate lint from the rest of the apartment every time anybody
used it, and Eric had worked on the kitchen. It is a very small
kitchen, but what with the refrigerator, the oven, and the
cupboards' all needing to be washed, it had used up most of his
working time since I was last there. It was superficially much
as I had seen it when I left, but in truth utterly transformed.
Eric had also washed some of the baseboards in the main room.

We were not done with cleaning when the inspector arrived. Eric
had held all along that we didn't need to be, that the inspector
would tell us what else we should do to finish up and get his
security deposit back. I held tenaciously, why I don't know,
except that I become unreasonable under stress, to the notion
that if we were not finished something terrible would happen. I
was influenced partly by the alarming and draconian list of
things the apartment management had provided that must be done
before the security deposit could be refunded. These included
cleaning the blinds, which had been essentially unused and were
in fact not dusty, and cleaning out the light fixtures, which we
had no ladder tall enough to reach and which had not, Eric said,
been cleaned before he moved in anyway.

I'd also developed a serious case of microscopic vision caused by
peering at the baseboards as I scrubbed, and by considering the
floor from a distance of less than ten inches. It seemed
impossible to actually get anything really clean.

Eric was, of course, completely correct. The inspector came in,
looked at the refrigerator and oven, mentioned that a couple of
the upper cupboards had not been wiped out yet, looked at the
bathroom and asked if the bathtub had been scrubbed (it had, but
its enamel was not and never had been in good shape), and said
that if we finished sweeping and mopping the floor, we should be
fine. "I don't see any charges here," he said, and no
benediction was ever half so welcome. He did not get down on his
knees and examine the baseboards from a distance of four inches;
he only remarked that there were painters coming the next day so
that the new tenant could move in on Friday.

One of the many things I adore about Eric is that he has the
energy to be joyous when the occasion warrants it, even if there
are vast wastelands of exhaustion all around. Just the preceding
weekend, after loading his stuff into the van on a very, very hot
and humid day, and having to do an impromptu three-dimensional
jigsaw puzzle with it, he came upstairs beaming all over and
failed to utter a huge "Woohoo" only because his throat was so
dry. Similarly, as soon as the inspector was gone he made
generous happy gestures at me and uttered a few extemporaneous
cries of success, and we hugged each other; we both smelled
largely of Murphy's Oil Soap. When we were coherent again he
surmised that he had paid the entire months' rent for the
apartment and yet they were able to let the new tenant in several
days early, so perhaps that and the necessity to paint anyway had
made the inspector a bit lenient.

I finished the baseboards and, leaving Eric to do the floor, ran
off back to my house by bus -- I tried to believe that this was
the last time I'd take the bus from Eric's stop to mine, but I
couldn't manage it. I left because I needed to finish my
packing. I was seriously set back in this endeavor by the
discovery that the very capacious backpack I had planned to use
as my carryon luggage had fallen off the bed where I had
carefully placed it, and, since it was a piece of cloth or
something like cloth, on the floor, had been pissed on by
whatever cat does these things. (We have our suspicions, but we
don't know.) I became completely hysterical. Raphael rescued me
by emptying out a backpack of emergency supplies and proferring
it, while also telling me that I could panic on the plane but I
couldn't panic now.

Mercifully, that pissed-on backpack had been almost empty,
because most of what needed to go in it was supplies for the cat
on the journey and for the first few nights before Eric's stuff
arrived -- a disposable litterbox, baggies of food, bowls, and so
on. The rest was reading material, not yet decided upon, and
medications, still in use, and toiletries, ditto. So none of my
actual stuff was pissed on, just its intended container.

I was perpetually discombobulated by having the wrong knapsack;
that combined with not having any back pockets caused me to have
a minor meltdown one evening in California, but that was later.

Having packed, I turned my desk upside-down finding all the bills
that needed to be paid before I came back. I wanted to fill them
out and write the checks and put everything in envelopes, with
Post-it notes on the envelopes to let David know what the amount
was and when the bill was due. Then, when the checks he was
expecting came and he had deposited them, he could mail things as
paying became possible. I had a hard time finding anything I
needed, being in a perfectly ridiculous state by then, but I
managed in the end.

Then I did a bit more running about to make sure everything was
ready to go downstairs. At some point Eric arrived with the
cleaning equipment and the leftover food and so on from his
place, as well as his luggage. I did not know until I got home
again from California that he had called upstairs and left the
pleasing message, "Hi, sweetie, I saw your red hair flashing in
the window, but I guess you didn't see me. Anyway, I'm here."
Being foolishly sentimental, I have not yet erased it.

Having bid an affectionate farewell to Raphael, including fervent
thanks for calming me down in the matter of the knapsack, I
tumbled myself and my stuff downstairs, and crammed my raincoat,
hiking boots, clean sheets, and towel and washcloth into Eric's
second piece of checkable luggage. He did some last-minute
packing and rearranging himself, and went to catch his cat.

David and Lydy meanwhile kindly moved the contents of the car,
which contents he had shifted to the porch, into the living room.
Many of them are still there, but I'm working on the situation.
Lydy eventually went to help Eric locate the cat, who had gotten
under her desk and up onto a pile of boxes, so that he could not
be seen unless you almost lay down on the floor. He is a
claustrophile, and demonstrated this trait again on numerous
occasions after we arrived in California.

In the meantime, he was put into the fancy soft-sided carrier,
and sat uttering only a few plaintive cries while we loaded the
car with the luggage. David drove, Lydy rode shotgun, and Eric
and I got into the back seat with the cat carrier between us, and
we were off to the airport.

Pamela