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In brown and yellow
Mar. 17th, 2004 04:47 pmMy maternal grandmother was Irish. I am sitting at home, wearing brown and yellow, and plan to go on doing so. I'll probably look at some photographs of my grandmother and some of the cards and letters she sent me. She died in 1990. I used to get confused as a small child about whether it was she or my grandfather who was Irish, because she always cooked German food.
Yesterday, a lot of people fed me. My mom picked me up as usual, it being Tuesday, and, not as usual, we went back to her place and had lunch there so that I could help her clip her cat's claws. She gave me soy cheese and oatmeal bread and pickles and tomatoes and hummos and mustard and soy mayonnaise (the good kind), with cashews before and raspberries after. Non-vegetarians are no doubt wrinkling up their noses, but it was really, really good. Birds sighted included chickadees, red-winged blackbirds, white-breasted nuthatches, something that might have been a red-breasted nuthatch, a pair of cardinals, a lot of house sparrows. We talked about family, politics, cats, and the weather.
I pottered around at home for a bit, doing laundry and things like that, and then David and Lydy and I got into the car to go have dinner with Marissa and Timprov and Mark and CJ. David had handed me a set of MapQuest instructions while we were waiting for Lydy, and asked me if they looked okay. Well, they looked familiar, so we got into the car, and then David asked Lydy if Silver Bell Road sounded right, and she said it definitely did not, the address had a bird in it, Kingfisher or something. After a moment she produced the correct bird and the street number. I went back into the house and looked that address up on MapQuest, going through several different ways of saying "Street" before getting to the right one.
I printed out new directions and tried to leave. Somehow, I set off the security system. It whooped about a time and a half before I got it to shut up. I came back upstairs and reassured Raphael. (The last time we went to Eagan, to the Silver Bell Road address in fact, we had done something -- probably failed to lock the door properly -- that set off the alarm in earnest, well after we left, so that Raphael was alone in the house with a whooping alarm and very properly had absolutely no inclination to go downstairs and check anything out, and let the police show up and do so. This time, since I was still here and had shut the thing up, Raphael agreed to deal with the security company, and we made sure zie had the information to do that, and I left again, twitching a lot and making extremely sure to set the alarm very very carefully and lock the door behind me.)
We were late for dinner, for the second time, but nobody scolded us. After much laughter during the preliminaries, we were given roasted red pepper soup, mushroom risotto, and cucumber salad. It was sublime. I don't actually want to live at Marissa's house because I couldn't have any cats there, but it was a near thing. I was sleep-deprived and felt socially stupid, but it was a very pleasant evening indeed.
I came home and had a nice cozy conversation with Eric. About an hour later he called me back, having forgotten something he wanted to complain about and explaining that I was the only sympathetic ear available, considering the hour. Then we had one of those miracles where the complaint blossomed naturally into a huge complex nuanced philosophical discussion, at the end of which I said, "My head feels all illuminated" and Eric said that his did too. We have these from time to time and they are particularly reassuring in a long-distance context. They cannot be made to happen, except by providing frequent opportunity. Eric said he thought this one was caused by our having talked daily for some time, and he would like to go on doing that, and of course I concurred.
I need to get back to serious work on both my books, rather than just picking at them. At the moment I'm a bit distracted by a potential glitch in our refinancing plans. The mortgage broker told Lydy that apparently the city was rezoning some parts of our neighborhood so that, should a house be more than fifty percent damaged, it can only be rebuilt as a single-family dwelling. This substantially reduces the value of the house. Lydy is having to get something called a "rebuild letter" from the city. I think the city has its head up its fundament if it is doing anything of the sort, but I guess we'll see.
Pamela
Yesterday, a lot of people fed me. My mom picked me up as usual, it being Tuesday, and, not as usual, we went back to her place and had lunch there so that I could help her clip her cat's claws. She gave me soy cheese and oatmeal bread and pickles and tomatoes and hummos and mustard and soy mayonnaise (the good kind), with cashews before and raspberries after. Non-vegetarians are no doubt wrinkling up their noses, but it was really, really good. Birds sighted included chickadees, red-winged blackbirds, white-breasted nuthatches, something that might have been a red-breasted nuthatch, a pair of cardinals, a lot of house sparrows. We talked about family, politics, cats, and the weather.
I pottered around at home for a bit, doing laundry and things like that, and then David and Lydy and I got into the car to go have dinner with Marissa and Timprov and Mark and CJ. David had handed me a set of MapQuest instructions while we were waiting for Lydy, and asked me if they looked okay. Well, they looked familiar, so we got into the car, and then David asked Lydy if Silver Bell Road sounded right, and she said it definitely did not, the address had a bird in it, Kingfisher or something. After a moment she produced the correct bird and the street number. I went back into the house and looked that address up on MapQuest, going through several different ways of saying "Street" before getting to the right one.
I printed out new directions and tried to leave. Somehow, I set off the security system. It whooped about a time and a half before I got it to shut up. I came back upstairs and reassured Raphael. (The last time we went to Eagan, to the Silver Bell Road address in fact, we had done something -- probably failed to lock the door properly -- that set off the alarm in earnest, well after we left, so that Raphael was alone in the house with a whooping alarm and very properly had absolutely no inclination to go downstairs and check anything out, and let the police show up and do so. This time, since I was still here and had shut the thing up, Raphael agreed to deal with the security company, and we made sure zie had the information to do that, and I left again, twitching a lot and making extremely sure to set the alarm very very carefully and lock the door behind me.)
We were late for dinner, for the second time, but nobody scolded us. After much laughter during the preliminaries, we were given roasted red pepper soup, mushroom risotto, and cucumber salad. It was sublime. I don't actually want to live at Marissa's house because I couldn't have any cats there, but it was a near thing. I was sleep-deprived and felt socially stupid, but it was a very pleasant evening indeed.
I came home and had a nice cozy conversation with Eric. About an hour later he called me back, having forgotten something he wanted to complain about and explaining that I was the only sympathetic ear available, considering the hour. Then we had one of those miracles where the complaint blossomed naturally into a huge complex nuanced philosophical discussion, at the end of which I said, "My head feels all illuminated" and Eric said that his did too. We have these from time to time and they are particularly reassuring in a long-distance context. They cannot be made to happen, except by providing frequent opportunity. Eric said he thought this one was caused by our having talked daily for some time, and he would like to go on doing that, and of course I concurred.
I need to get back to serious work on both my books, rather than just picking at them. At the moment I'm a bit distracted by a potential glitch in our refinancing plans. The mortgage broker told Lydy that apparently the city was rezoning some parts of our neighborhood so that, should a house be more than fifty percent damaged, it can only be rebuilt as a single-family dwelling. This substantially reduces the value of the house. Lydy is having to get something called a "rebuild letter" from the city. I think the city has its head up its fundament if it is doing anything of the sort, but I guess we'll see.
Pamela
