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pameladeanI cannot believe, even after all the other horrors and lies, that the government of the country I live in has declared something called Marriage Protection Week, with such grotesque and hideous and irrational rhetoric. My only consolation is that they must be scared out of such wits as they ever possessed to do anything so completely moronic. Maybe that's not consoling. Scared powerful people are dangerous.
I have ruby-crowned kinglets in my yard. For about a week I've been hearing bird song that was familiar, but not the regular yard bird sounds, not cardinals, bluejays, house finches, chickadees, house sparrows, or juncoes. A few days ago I was out with Ari, and he had concealed himself in the long grass of the neighbors' back yard to watch the squirrels rampaging in the trees. I sat down on the retaining wall between the yards. We were both very still for ten minutes or so. I heard the song again, and saw a small bird fluttering very rapidly at the branch tips of the huge old mock orange bush. It landed briefly. Yes indeed, broken eye bar, yellow tips to the wings, very small, going like a melodious telegraph, fluttering at branch tips for insects. A kinglet. Yesterday I saw four or five of them. I wish Eric were here.
I woke up with a sore throat yesterday and have been applying zinc and echinacea and vitamin C with vigor. We'll see. I note as I have noted before that zinc improves my mood dramatically. Overapplied, however, it makes me crabby, and it raises my blood pressure too. But it's an interesting datapoint.
I'm rereading Parker's Spenser novels; first I read the later ones in chronological order and then I decided to read the three leading up to A Catskill Eagle. I haven't read that one as many times, which makes it oddly compelling even though I know it will drive me nuts. I have to be in the right mood, as if I were going to read a comic book where certain realities are considered as non-binding.
I've seen two new houses (new to the people who just bought them, that is) in the past week; mercifully, I don't wish to move, only to clean up a bit right here. I did do about a third of the library, which had not been dealt with in so long that in places the dust lay like flour. I suspect the sore throat of coming from that. I keep forgetting to put on a dust mask when I clean.
My mother got me some frost-resistant pansies, and I must go plant them soon. We are having ridiculous weather. It was 86 yesterday and it's going to be 84 today. And dry as a bone. I watered the arbor vitae yesterday, which was very exciting for the robins.
Pamela
I have ruby-crowned kinglets in my yard. For about a week I've been hearing bird song that was familiar, but not the regular yard bird sounds, not cardinals, bluejays, house finches, chickadees, house sparrows, or juncoes. A few days ago I was out with Ari, and he had concealed himself in the long grass of the neighbors' back yard to watch the squirrels rampaging in the trees. I sat down on the retaining wall between the yards. We were both very still for ten minutes or so. I heard the song again, and saw a small bird fluttering very rapidly at the branch tips of the huge old mock orange bush. It landed briefly. Yes indeed, broken eye bar, yellow tips to the wings, very small, going like a melodious telegraph, fluttering at branch tips for insects. A kinglet. Yesterday I saw four or five of them. I wish Eric were here.
I woke up with a sore throat yesterday and have been applying zinc and echinacea and vitamin C with vigor. We'll see. I note as I have noted before that zinc improves my mood dramatically. Overapplied, however, it makes me crabby, and it raises my blood pressure too. But it's an interesting datapoint.
I'm rereading Parker's Spenser novels; first I read the later ones in chronological order and then I decided to read the three leading up to A Catskill Eagle. I haven't read that one as many times, which makes it oddly compelling even though I know it will drive me nuts. I have to be in the right mood, as if I were going to read a comic book where certain realities are considered as non-binding.
I've seen two new houses (new to the people who just bought them, that is) in the past week; mercifully, I don't wish to move, only to clean up a bit right here. I did do about a third of the library, which had not been dealt with in so long that in places the dust lay like flour. I suspect the sore throat of coming from that. I keep forgetting to put on a dust mask when I clean.
My mother got me some frost-resistant pansies, and I must go plant them soon. We are having ridiculous weather. It was 86 yesterday and it's going to be 84 today. And dry as a bone. I watered the arbor vitae yesterday, which was very exciting for the robins.
Pamela
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no subject
Date: 2003-10-08 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-10 11:08 am (UTC)Pamela
no subject
Date: 2003-10-08 03:08 pm (UTC)Funny, I find myself struggling with a cleaning impulse myself, coincident with my sister's departure. Funny because the house is already pretty tidy, right down to clean floors and baseboards (I always go on a domestic rampage once a show closes), so I'm having to be creative, go deeper: Tonight I plan to start rearranging the closets. If that doesn't satisfy the urge, I'm thinking of renting a carpet steamer this weekend to get at the black circle the cheap casters of my office chair have graven onto the Berber carpet. Maybe calling a chimney sweep. Changing the furnace filter. Checking smoke detectors.
Something about fall, and loss and a niggling desire for control over what little is truly controllable, in my case.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-10 11:09 am (UTC)I always feel impelled to clean in the fall; I generally direct these impulses to the yard, though, which always has a vast array of plants that have sneaked in when it was too hot to work outdoors.
Pamela
no subject
Date: 2003-10-10 11:55 am (UTC)And yes, with my gardener gone, I have to get to the yard as well; she did a good deal in the front in the frenzied days before her departure, but there are still Edible Things in the back beds, and I want to harvest them before it all turns to slime...
no subject
Date: 2003-10-08 05:08 pm (UTC)My mother got me some frost-resistant pansies, and I must go plant them soon
I read this as "frost resistant panties".
no subject
Date: 2003-10-10 07:11 pm (UTC)I don't have any post-CE favorites yet. My early favorites are Early Autumn and Looking for Rachel Wallace.
Pamela
no subject
Date: 2003-10-10 07:34 pm (UTC)Dust from Jane Yolen
Date: 2003-10-09 10:23 am (UTC)I live in a late nineteenth century New England farmhouse, and it collects dust as if it saving up to sell on ebay. Amazing.
No, I do not underestand dust.
Jane
Re: Dust from Jane Yolen
Date: 2003-10-09 10:48 am (UTC)there is some massively weird something going on in the closets of my house--they shower dust on my clothes--i've never had this happen in a house's closets before and i have no idea what's up.
Re: Dust from Jane Yolen
Date: 2003-10-10 11:10 am (UTC)Elvis Costello has a splendid song about dust.
Pamela
opionation from Graydon
Date: 2003-10-09 06:32 pm (UTC)Also check for age of plaster; when it is somewhere between eighty and a hundred, old oxblood plaster comes apart, and you get a lot of consequent dust.
The farmhouse I spent much of my childhood in benefited mightily from electrostatic precipitators being attached to the forced air furnace, dust wise.
Re: opionation from Graydon
Date: 2003-10-10 11:12 am (UTC)Our dust, in my opinion, comes precisely from the fact that we no longer have a forced-air heating system with a filter, but still clean as if we did have.
Our dust is in no way surprising. It would be more surprising if there were none. Then again, I'd find Lisa's dust surprising. But here garments shut up in closets are fairly safe from all but cobwebs.
Pamela
Re: opionation from Graydon
Date: 2003-10-10 03:01 pm (UTC)Wink -- my sister's twenty two pound not-fat mostly-Siamese black cat -- would, in the finest pantherish fashion, creep down the cold air returns when we had the gratings off to clean them.
The first time he did this, we noticed when a loudly complaining dust creature started banging on the replaced grating in an attempt to dislodge it.
Dad was able to reassure us that the static precipitators had covers, so Wink wasn't going to get zapped out of his remaining lives, so we mostly stopped worrying about this particular habit of his.