Things might be looking up

[pameladean]

When I got up this morning, I found a message from Sharyn saying that my check was on her desk and that she would overnight it to my agent. This means I'll have it (minus my agent's well-earned percentage) in my sweaty hands sometime next week.

We have a closing date for our refinancing and home--equity loan application. This doesn't mean things can't go wrong, since David specifically asked about that and it sounded as if they were just beginning the process of looking at the paperwork. I hope that our cash shortfall doesn't make us look too bad. I hope that if they laugh at us, at least they won't point. If this all goes through, life will be about six hundred percent better all around. And Lydy might get to have the occasional lunch out, too.

I still passionately hate David's employers. If they had done what they said they would, we wouldn't have had a cash shortfall.

In household news, the skinny black cat with the poodle cut does not have cancer and is not yet in kidney failure. My own cat has purple pawpads from treading in the fallen ripe mulberries. David and I went to Northfield yesterday, past medians and slopes furred and silky with ornamental grasses, white and reddish and greenish. David remarked that he didn't know if they were native grasses or not but that they certainly seemed very pleased. I told him that one of them was called "switch grass" and (naturally) he inquired with preternatural innocence, "Which grass?" We had a nice visit with his mother, admiring her gigantic hollyhocks and meeting her trial cat. She has, at present, two huge black-and-white long-haired cats, one called Reuben and one called Violet. (She didn't name them.) This strikes me as amusing. We had dinner at an absolutely amazing Indian restaurant that I had not realized was there, and drove home into a weird sunset that featured, not a rainbow, but a rainblob, a circular blob of all the right colors in the right order centered on a spiral of high wispy cloud. To one side of that was the actual sunset, a towering wall of dark gray with red and orange on either side.

Raphael and I have been watching tapes of "E.R." I never could get into a fad when it was current, and I spend a certain amount of time Just Not Looking (it's interesting how much information one can get from dialogue alone), but I'm quite entranced.

My brother Matt was in town for a brief visit and gave me a barite rose from Oklahoma (or maybe Kansas).

Because of the demise of the lawn mower, the back yard had a chance to grow itself to the point where I absolutely could not mow a great deal of the north half of it, which is all full of black-eyed Susans and daisy fleabane. There's a splendid bit where ordinary Shasta daisies and daisy fleabane grow together, with the daisy fleabane looking like a minature version of the Shasta. I will have to remember that for future more organized years. In addition to whatever else I have said was blooming, I've got a dark-red hollyhock and a huge clump of echinacea. The echinacea never did like the bed I put it into, and it's now in the yard, three times as large and twice as floriferous. I guess it can stay there. It's not as if I liked the grass.

We have wrens. I think they are house wrens, but I will try to find out today for certain. They have a rigid schedule, which involves descending on the mulberry trees in a raucous cloud at about seven-fifteen, making a tremendous racket for about twenty minutes, and then leaving abruptly.

The book is creeping along. I think it will creep faster once I know whether we are actually getting this refinancing deal.

And Eric and I seem to be getting a little more talented at this long-distance affair. We've had some awfully good email and telehone conversations recently.

Pamela

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Was it a sundog you saw, or similar to a sundog?

Long distance stuff takes awhile to get used to. Then (when we were doing it) I experienced a period of panic that we were getting used to it. Then good again. Then bad again.

Oh, like the rest of life. Right then.

[pameladean]

I just googled on a whole lot of atmospheric optics, but I really don't know which sort we saw. "Nacreous clouds" really seems closest. I thought sundogs came in pairs or triplets, but I suppose there's no reason one can't have just one. The sun itself was not visible at all to us, and most of the photos of sundogs have, well, the sun in them. So I don't know.

Oh yes, I too feel odd about getting used to it. Then again, I have no idea when the relationship will be local again, if ever, so I suppose I should feel pleased. The problem is that I do ever so much better with a nice normal standard daily routine where no huge pressure is put on for any individual occasion. A long-distance relationship with visits is kind of like living on candy. But so far we seem to be surviving.

Pamela

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, when we were doing visits, we tried to have some normalcy to them, some time sitting together reading and not always going going going. But that's kind of maybe like chocolate-dipped apricots: slightly more wholesome than many candies, but still ultimately candy, still not a real norm.

[sraun]

Irene's plan is to have enough grass across the front yard for the mailman to walk across, and that's all! The front yard is mostly there - she'll continue to tweak it for years, I think - the back yard isn't even close.

If you're feeling ambitious, stop by some time and look at the front gardens. We put in an unspecified wild-flowers seed mix, and haven't the faintest idea what some (most?) of them are. I heard Bachelor Button & Poppy positively identified, but there's not a lot of either of those.

[pameladean]

Your place isn't an unreasonable walk from mine, so I'll try to do that sometime soon.

I salute Irene. It's harder to get rid of lawn than some people make out. My mom keeps telling me that it's easier to weed than to mow, but for me, it just simply is not.

Pamela

[papersky.livejournal.com]

When Jon Singer was here, I saw three sparrow-sized but bright yellow birds, which Lisa said were "goldfinches". You might consider putting them in the new novel so that future generations of Europeans will know what they are when they see them. We also saw two groundhogs, but don't put them in because nobody would believe you and they wouldn't be thematic anyway. (At least, I hope not!)

I do hope your agent doesn't forget your money on her desk the way she twice forgot mine. You might want to remind her about it on Tuesday. I really hope it all goes through as it should.

[pameladean]

Putting in goldfinches is an excellent idea. They have a lot of interesting habits -- instead of nesting in the spring like dull old ordinary birds, they wait until the thistles are going to seed. Then they have thistledown for their nests and, when they and the babies are hungry, thistle seed to eat.

My agent and I have had a long and serious discussion about this issue, and I believe it to be satisfactorily resolved. I haven't had anything to complain about in this department for some months now.

Reminders, however, are specifically encouraged, so I probably will.

Pamela

[(Anonymous)]

I must tell you about a lovely experience I had one spring at Carleton. It was an early spring day, and on a large patch of newly uncovered, newly green grass, I saw lots of dandelions out. "Oh, how nice to see dandelions again," I thought, and walked over to pick some. Whereupon they all rose up and flew away, being not dandelions at all, but little yellow birds.

--Helen

[pameladean]

Oh, that's completely perfect.

I too always felt that dandelions were the harbingers of spring. I loved how they sprang up in huge broad bands over the paths of the steam tunnels.

Pamela

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I very much enjoyed reading this post with so much good news.

And your unmowed yard sounds delightful.

[pameladean]

Thank you, Jackie. I always enjoy your posts, though I don't always say so.

The yard is gorgeous. However, there are far fewer mosquitoes on the mown part. Tradeoffs, alas.

Pamela

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

Very glad to read this.

[lcohen]

all the good luck in the world wished to you as you go through your refinance! may it sail through.

and woo! for your other good news. how was your hiking? i had a wonderful time in MN.

[pameladean]

My hiking was horrifically full of bugs, both the kind that want to bite people and the kind that just want to check you out by flying up your nose. I think it's a really good thing that we didn't try stargazing, but a dinner INSIDE might have been better than the hike.

Still, we got our exercise, and the park was very beautiful even through a fog of gnats. We saw lots of widow skimmers, a particularly fine kind of dragonfly, black or black and white depending on sex.

I'm very glad you had a wonderful time.

Thanks for the good luck wishes. (I've decided that if anything, good wishes from people who have had interesting times with the subject under good-wishing must be even more powerful.)

Pamela

[lcohen]

if that's true, then i may have just given you the most powerful good luck wishes you'll ever receive.

sorry about the bugs--i would have been a lovely buffet item for them, had i been around. i'll warn you next time i'm headed your way!

wrens

[sadstrangevoice.livejournal.com]

I'd give it about a 99% confident vote that your wrens are House Wrens. Slight chance of Carolina Wrens; they go on the Rare Bird Alert here. Winter Wren is also a very slight summer possibility in ravines in the S. half of the state (common in the North), but I don't know what they'd be doing singing in your mulberry trees! If they are all-over, fairly nondescript brown barred darker brown on back/wings/tail, with a song that is, to quote RTP, "stuttering gurgling...rising in a musical burst, then falling at the end", it's House Wren. Carolina Wren is a nice bright rusty color with a vivid white eyebrow and a very rhythmic clear "teakettle-teakettle-teakettle" song. I love wren music.

And how cool that you have echinacea in your yard! Must see if I can get anything besides dandelions, creeping charlie, and a few poor violets to grow in ours.

Re: wrens

[pameladean]

These little guys were brown and very pugnacious. I could see some barring, but they were moving around very fast and the light was not very good. And I was mosting viewing them from underneath.

I'd seen Winter Wrens in Butano State Park south of San Francisco in June, and they looked a lot like these guys, but, as you say, this is not really their turf. Sibley says the House Wren is "the familiar wren" of hedgerows and gardens and shrubs, so I figure that's the likeliest thing.

I'm not sure that singing was exactly what they were doing. They sounded like little buzzy teletypes, rratttzzattazzztattazzzzrattazzzz with a rrrrrjrrrrr on the end sometimes. I thought that probably they were scolding.

The echinacea is planted by me, but being native, it just stuck around until it could arrange things to its liking. Unless you have too much shade -- it's a prairie plant -- it will probably do well for you. If you add rudbeckia (black-eyed Susan) and some physostegia (false dragonhead or obedient plant), you'll have a nice show.

Pamela

Re: wrens

[sadstrangevoice.livejournal.com]

Oh gosh, that is the best description of the sound of an upset House Wren that I have seen. Exactly. :)

Re: wrens

[pameladean]

Oh, good. I'll take that as confirmation.

They had a right to be upset. I was out there with a cat on a leash, and the first time I saw them, the first notice I had that there were a lot of wrens out there, was when said cat flushed one out of the undergrowth. I thought he was going for a mouse, and I'm glad he missed.

Pamela