pameladean

They don't, of course, they are just getting ready for a different season; but I am a sucker for Tennyson.

Sorry I've been so quiet. I mostly wanted to let you all know that I just did a public Patreon post that has two cat pictures and also some photos of the yard that I took just before the hard frost. I don't feel up to navigating Dreamwidth's maze to put photos here just now, but anybody can view the ones on that Patreon post. Commenting here would be great; I don't think you can comment there if you aren't actually on Patreon.

Here is the link:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/november-cat-92199735

Pamela

Yesterday and today I made myself go out for a walk. Yesterday, though sunnier, was much brisker than today, with a searching breeze that made me glad I'd put a fleece jacket over my hoodie, though I was too warm by the time I got within a few blocks of home.

People are being very good, very locally, about distancing. I've seen a slight increase in the number of people wearing masks. I don't have one yet and simply stay well away from everybody.

The scilla is in full bloom, both in our yard and in the neighborhood generally. I used to covet those sheets of pure blue in other people's yards, and now I have one. It began with about three volunteers from the yard next door and a bag of 25 bulbs that I planted mostly in the shadiest part of the back yard, leaving a handful to carefully put in a chicken-wire cage with a handful of winter aconite and plant in the front instead. Both front and back yards are now dotted with individual plants pushing their territory outwards. All the purple crocuses are up and blooming. The yellow and white ones haven't put in an appearance yet.

Unlike most of my neighbors, I have not raked any leaves out of the lawn or flowerbeds. The Xerces Society, champion of pollinators, asks that one wait until the soil temperature is reliably fifty degrees at all times before raking up the shelter of many overwintering beneficial pollinators. But Minnesotans are out there way too early, raking away, as if bare ground were lovelier than a patchwork of leaves, as if a brown lawn were nicer than that patchwork as well. It looks tidy, I guess, but lovely it is not.

I do admit to having lifted by hand about six maple leaves that were preventing the opening of crocus buds, but that is all.

Quite aside from the question of pollinators, I am now vindicated because there will be a winter storm tomorrow, followed by several quite cold days and nights below freezing.

Yesterday had bright sun and cloud shadows dappling the new daffodils along my route and picking out the red shoots of peony and hosta. Today there was a kind of ghost sun, showing me a faint outline of my shadow, sometimes a human figure, sometimes a walking tree or pillar, sometimes vanished.

I'm having trouble reading fiction, even books I've read before. Basic hygiene, cooking dinner, and walking have been my accomplishments, along with a call to the Member Services Line of my health insurance company to inquire why my medication list had disappeared from their new website. (It hadn't, they'd just put it under a weird tab. Next time I'll just go through all tabs no matter how apparently irrelevant.)

We are all well here so far. I will get to wave to my local brother from a safe distance on Monday when he comes to collect groceries from our porch -- there were no delivery dates available in the suburb he and my mom live in, but Minneapolis still had a few. It has none now, though pickup dates are still copious.
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Saffron is having some issues with her food. She is prone to gum inflammation. For some time this has been kept in check by a prescription food called TD, which comes in large unwieldy chunks and must be crunched up rather than just bolted by the feline consumer. But she stalled out on eating a portion a few days ago and then refused to even try the next one. There's nothing wrong with her appetite; she agitated ceaselessly for actual food until I opened a can of wet food, which she ate with abandon. We tried her on the TD again after, we hoped, giving any minor soreness of jaw a chance to heal, and she did eat most of a serving but left several pieces, and left more the next time. So we are trying the soft food again, and hoping we aren't actually training her or allowing her to train us to just give her the damn wet food already.

After the first few indignities at the veterinarian's office, she has refused to let the vet look insider her mouth at all; and he said that if we ever did need to see what was going on in there, she'd have to be sedated. I hope it doesn't come to that.

How are you all?

Pamela

It is eight degrees below zero F in my corner of MInneapolis. The wind is getting up to mischief; watery sunshine is sparkling off the new-fallen snow. I have a cold and would benefit from a steamy shower, but the idea of getting wet on a day like this is confounding. I'm sitting in my office, a somewhat drafty sunroom, wearing a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, a pair of cotton knit pants, slippers, an ancient and enveloping purple fleece robe, and the little lap afghan with rosebuds on it that Lydy made me some time ago. Saffron, having stomped and thoroughly sucked on one shoulder of the robe, is curled up very tightly on the cat cushion on my desk. I tried  covering her with an old hand towel. She sat up, wriggled from under it, sniffed it thoroughly all over, had a definitive bath, and lay down firmly atop the towel. I'm not sure if it has been accepted or rejected.

The viral rather than the climatic cold is providing most of my discomfort at the moment; the only weather-related piece is that the radiator is slightly too warm for me to press my slippered feet against it. When I get dressed and put my shoes on, it will be perfect.

This is far from the most miserable cold of my experience, but it's removed my ability to focus. I've shovelled snow in the course of it and ordered groceries. I'm hoping to cook tonight. I think we will probably have to have soup of some kind, perhaps very miscellaneous.

The viral cold presented itself quite late on Friday night and caused me to cancel attending my tea group's feast, having a date with Eric, and attending my own family birthday party. I minded all that, but I don't mind being sick during this epic cold snap, especially since I did get some shovelling done. I should add, to be accurate, that I was assisted in the shovelling by a woman bringing her two sons along our block on their way to Butter, our lovely local bakery. The boys were, maybe, eight and ten, or nine and eleven, somewhere in there. They were very shy and wouldn't speak to me directly, but she got me to hand over the snow shovel and directed them in clearing the walk and tidying up the edges. She said they were bored and had lots of extra energy and it wasn't too soon for them to learn to be helpful. I thanked them all fervently; the rest I got from not clearing the public walk enabled me to widen the single lane I'd made in the walk through the front yard.

At this point the wind is blowing the snow around and the tidiness is somewhat marred, but everybody made a good effort just the same.

Tomorrow and tomorrow night are the really terrifying parts of the climatic cold; after that, we revert to more ordinary winter weather followed capriciously by a brief thaw. A February thaw is not unusual, but it doesn't usually ring itself in with such an air.

Saffron just tightened her sleep circle considerably, but I know that if I try to cover her with the edge of the towel, she'll just have to shake it off and start over. Cats are stubborn.

I'm going to try to clear my brain by showering and then either work on the less-complicated parts of the taxes or on my book, but it's possible that I'll just reread some old favorite or take a nap. I hope everybody who needs to be is safe from the whims of the climate and the vagaries of the weather.

P.

PAMELA: *despite having had the same desk setup since approximately 2004, knocks full glass of water onto the floor, where it drenches her jeans and sweater and the carpet, and spatters the power strip into which are plugged All the Things.

POWER STRIP: *flickers its light in the usual way and goes on powering All the Things*

PAMELA: *curses uninventively, turns off power strip, unplugs it from the wall, unplugs All the Things from it, dries plugs, cords, the front of the filing cabinet that holds up her desk on that side, blots the carpet, removes phone from wet side of jeans and puts it in a different pocket*

PAMELA TO RAPHAEL: Do you have a spare power strip?

RAPHAEL: No... what happened?

PAMELA: I upset a water glass into mine. Never mind, I'll go ask David.

PAMELA: *goes to door to stairway, opens it*

NINJA: *darts into the upstairs at the speed of light, hides under the armchair*

PAMELA: NINJA! This is not the time! I can't supervise you right now!

NINJA: Roooorrrorrawwwrrrrooo.

PAMELA: *gets new water and a book, turns on lamp in cat sitting room, sits down, starts waving a packing strap alluringly*

CASSIE: *pounces on packing strap*

NINJA: *rushes out from under armchair, pounces on packing strap, and slithers under  the sofa*

NINJA: Roooraaaaaarrrhow

NINJA: *sneaks out from under sofa, rubs face on container of cat food*

RAPHAEL: Does Ninja have a spare power strip?

PAMELA: Ninja IS a spare power strip.

RAPHAEL: Plug all the things into him!

PAMELA: I don't think I have the right adapter.

Eventually I shut the doors to all the bedrooms and the bathroom, and then when Ninja wandered into the kitchen, I shut the door between the front and back parts of the house, and I was able to pick him up once he had seen that there was nowhere to hide. I put him on the landing with plenty of pettings, got a bag of dirty laundry to fend him off with, and went downstairs. David wasn't in his room.

While I was putting the laundry into the washer, Naomi came in and began making strident and insistent demands. I went upstairs and fixed her some food, and then tracked David down in the media room. He showed me his FaceBook gallery of photos of our friend Rob, who just died. They are lovely photos, but I hate the occasion. He didn't have a power strip but he had a power squid, so I went down to his room as instructed and got that. Naomi had finished her food but demanded seconds. This  is not usual -- she has chronic kidney failure and is fussy about eating. Seconds involved thawing some of the chicken broth Lydy makes for her, which made her impatient. She ate about half of this helping, so I put the rest in the fridge.

Then I escaped upstairs and plugged the printer and my laptop back in. I had dried all the cords thoroughly and they got aired while Ninja was in residence; but I think I'll just let the rest of them air a bit more. The other Things include the charger for my toothbrush, the weather radio, and some kind of box that enables me to listen to stuff on our music server.

I think this event exemplifies why I never seem to get anything done.

Pamela

P.S. Saffron is attempting to steal the last of the Ninja Easter Vermin, a plastic pale lavender crab that lives on my desk but went over the edge with the falling water glass. Ninja Easter Vermin have nothing to do with our Ninja, but are in a vague way Geri Sullivan's fault.

The cats are still fine. They have done all the cat things: scampering (both of them), tail-chasing (Saffron), getting underfoot (mostly Cassie), demanding to be fed at the wrong times (both of them).

I finally received the Evenup Shoe Balancer that I ordered, which is a kind of sandal that is more or less bungied onto the shoe of one's uninjured foot, when one is wearing a walking cast or boot on the other foot. It's not infinitely adjustable, and it isn't supposed to get wet, and one is sternly enjoined against rapid walking or walking on lumpy surfaces like grass, gravel, or, I presume, snow. But it's still a great relief that the two pieces of my current footgear are now of approximately the same height. I made an incautiously fast turn while carrying a pot of boiling water and pasta to the sink, however, and there was a distinct wobble. NO RAPID WALKING, and no sudden changes of direction. But the various bits of hip, back, and knee that were complaining about my uneven gait have subsided quite a lot.

I'm poking at Going North, trying to decide whether I want to write an introduction to the short-story collection, and trying not to be too impatient. I don't need to cook tomorrow, so I might try doing some laundry. The excitement!

I also continue rereading Anthony Price and playing tag with the bad fairies.

Pamela

It's been an interesting few days. The weekend involved both my family birthday celebration and a date with Eric, one sort of in the interstices of the other. Both party and date were very pleasant indeed. During one of the date parts, I got email from David saying that water was coming up from the floor drain in the basement. I wrote back saying I'd call Roto-Rooter if it were me dealing with it, but he'd maybe liked Ron the Sewer Rat better when we had drain problems. He got a time window from Roto-Rooter of 5 to 9 pm on Sunday evening. It turned out that the water coming up from the drain was quite extensive and it wasn't safe to shower, run dishwashers, flush toilets more than very occasionally, or even wash one's hands vigorously. These restrictions have a very depressing effect on one's ability to do much of anything

The hours crept by and it was 9:30 and there were no plumbers. David called them and they admitted to running late and offered us a Monday window of 10 am to 2 pm. This would fall to me, since David had to work Monday. I thought of calling another emergency plumber that had once come through for us when Roto-Rooter got overwhelmed. However, I got an automated message from them saying that they were experiencing an unusually high volume of calls. While I was considering whether I would stay on hold, I brought up the MNDOT site and looked at the traffic map. It had been snowing pretty hard all afternoon and evening -- Eric and I had agreed that we would not try to go to the St. Paul Trader Joe's or our usual former Rainbow/now Cub in Uptown, and he brought me home early. On the MNDOT map the highways around the Twin Cities were solid orange and spattered liberally with purple squares enclosing exclamation points, When you hovered the mouse over them they said variously, "Crash," "Vehicle spun out" and "Critical Disruption on Highway 52." Okay, no. We had to resign ourselves to a night without drains.

I will not dwell on the situation further. It only lasted about 24 hours, but when nobody can shower, flush anything without consultation about when anybody else has last done so, run the dishwasher as a prelude to cooking, or do any laundry, things devolve rapidly into chaos. I set my alarm for 9:15, which is extremely early for me. Saffron woke me around 8:15 wanting to be fed, so I shut her out of the room, but about half an hour later I got up and used the bathroom and optimistically flushed the upstairs toilet, which is cranky and horrible but only has a tank capacity of 1.6 gallons, and fed the cats. Then I cleaned up with baby wipes and got dressed and put my shoe on my left foot and the Robot Boot of Doom on the right foot. I discovered about twelve hours later that I'd put the front panel on upside down, which meant I spent the whole day adjusting and readjusting the boot because it felt wrong and nothing would stay in place and my heel kept sliding around.

The phone rang twice once the window for plumbers began. The first call hung up on me, so I put it into a search engine and got a lot of very indignant comments about spam callers and being called 20 times a day by a number that never left a message. Okay, probably not the plumber. The second call also hung up on me, but when searched for turned out to be the Minneapolis Snow Emergency Phone Alert number. When I did hear from Roto-Rooter, they called my cellphone. The plumber arrived and sympathized about the walking boot, and we minced down into the basement to find a pool of water covering the floor drain and trying to take over the foot of the stairs. The plumber walked around muttering. "Shit," he said. He poked around, cleared junk from around the plumbing stack in what we'd like to be a basement bathroom one day, and said he could probably get at the problem through that stack. "Only," he said, "I have to bring a really big machine into the house and I'm not sure how to do it." He mimed its size and height. We discussed bringing it around the side of the house, but the snow there hasn't been shovelled. Raphael and I do most of the shovelling unless there's enough snow to break out the snow blower, when David does it; but Raphael is getting over a virus. Lydy has exercise-induced asthma. David had shovelled the last lot of snow in front but has long work hours. And I have a broken ankle.

The plumber finally decided to bring his machine in through the front door and see how it went. I moved a bunch of lightweight objects out of the path he'd have to take, and this sufficed. He bumped his battered Victorian-looking wheeled object down the basement steps. I retired to the living room to put my foot up. There was a protracted banging session. That stack is really old. I wondered if the access cap was stuck. Eventually there was a ringing thump as of a heavy metal object hitting a concrete floor, and then the machine started up. Then it stopped. The plumber came upstairs. "Ma'am? Where's your electrical panel?" I got up and came to show him. "I blew a fuse," he said. I managed to describe the location of the room with the panel in it, and stood at the the top of the stairs while he went in and dealt with the fuse and then walked around turning lights off and talking to himself. I decided he had things in hand and went to put my foot up again. A series of roars, rumbles, thumps, and sounds as if someone were delivering a series of oversized packages of rocks at the front door went on for some time. I'd been nursing the fear that something really dramatic was wrong that wouldn't yield to the usual remedies, and thinking that I knew plenty of people who would let me take a shower, or let all of us take showers, but that clumping around in the snow with the boot was not at all a good idea. When Eric and I had come into the house on Sunday he'd suggested that I brush the snow off my boot. I ended up taking the whole thing off and to some degree apart. It dried fast, but it's really not for wet conditions at all. Anyway, the longer the noises went on the more reassured I felt.

After about an hour, the plumber, looking somewhat the worse for wear, came back upstairs with his machine. It was, he said, tree roots. Lots of tree roots. But he had gotten through and the drain worked now. He also said he needed to get a new access cap out of the truck because he'd had to break the old one. As he maneuvered the wheeled monster that had fixed the drain into the front hall he said, "Oh, the snow's still there." I apologized for its not being shovelled and he said, "No, I didn't mean that. I meant all the snow. It's not spring yet." I said it did seem to be time for spring at this point. When everything was squared away and I'd parted with a large amount of money and we'd arranged for a person with a drain camera to come and check the line and make sure it was as clear as it should be, I locked up and with enormous satisfaction flushed the downstairs toilet, washed my hands extravagantly, and took my book and pillbox back upstairs. Whatever else I may have messed up, I did take my medication at the right time even though I got up three hours early/

Being able to put water down the drain was giddy-making. When I got over that, I realized I was hungry, so I got out some of the leftovers from the birthday dinner -- baby carrots, celery sticks, and vegan sour cream and onion dip. I would have some, put it away, and then realize that I was still hungry, and fetch it back out of the fridge to have some more. Finally I just left the remaining carrots and the container of dip, with the lid firmly in place, on a high part of my desk that cats have never gotten anything down from. Then I took a shower, which was luxurious, and got dressed again, and put my boot back on -- still with the front panel upside down -- and headed back to my office. Cassie was meatloafed in the middle of the sitting room floor. There was no sign of Saffron, but she often spends the afternoon either bothering Raphael or sleeping peacefully in Raphael's extra chair. However, as I sat down and put my foot up, wriggling my errant heel back into place, I heard very odd noises from the space between my desk and the wall. I thought Saffron might be stuck. I craned sideways and looked. She was not stuck. She was standing in the licked-clean dip container, assiduously licking the dip from the underside of the lid.

The carrots were right where I'd left them, untouched.

I took the lid and container away from her and put them with the other dirty dishes. I told Raphael what had happened, mostly thinking there might be digestive issues, but when I saw Raphael's face I thought, Oh, right, onions. Bad for cats. After a bit of discussion, Raphael looked up the effects of onions on cats. There were probably at most three tablespoons of dip left, and it was possible that Cass had gotten some of it, but when we did the numbers as best we could, given that the dip was not composed only of onions, it still sounded less than ideal.

This still left us at a loss, so we decided I should call the emergency vet and see what they thought. The person I talked to said that freeze-dried onions were usually not as bad as fresh, but that they didn't really have the information on hand, and she would give me the number for the ASPCA Veterinary Toxicology line. I called this number and eventually got a very nice woman who asked a bunch of questions about the cats and their ages and whether any OTHER cats might have been involved -- Ninja would have if he could, but he was downstairs -- and then put me on hold while she consulted a veterinarian. We were worried about getting the car out and getting to the emergency vet on the snowy streets, and I was worried about clumping around in lumpy uncertain snow in my boot. You can put a plastic bag on the boot, but that doesn't address any balance issues and in addition removes traction on slippery surfaces.

The conclusion of the veterinary toxicologist, when delivered, was a relief. They didn't expect any difficulties with such young and healthy cats. We should watch for lethargy, weakness, and pale gums over the next five days. The main bad effect of onions on cats is anemia, which can be treated. I also got a long list of protocols to follow in case the vegan sour cream caused digestive problems, and a list of under what circumstances I should call them back, and a case number. The service costs $65.00, but this includes all the callbacks.

Cassie acted just as usual for the rest of the evening. Saffron had a very very deep nap, which led us to think that she had probably gotten most of the dip and needed to sleep it off. She woke up for her supper and they both ate with their usual appetite.

After I fed the cats I sat down to adjust my boot again, and finally realized that I'd been putting the front panel in upside down. I am 99% sure that I only did that yesterday and today. It still immobilized most of my foot quite well, so I trust  it will be all right. There's nothing to be done about it, anyway; but this confirms my suspicion that my executive function is all being used up in navigating with the boot, and that resources generally available to make my brain work right are being diverted to the ankle.

I would say that no more exciting things are allowed to happen, but there isn't much point in that.

Pamela

"Random Jottings" has a particular literary source, but it's been so long that I cannot recall what that source is.

I think I've finally sorted out the cross-posting to LJ, but I guess we'll see. I assume that it will work perfectly now that LJ has finally gone off the rails for good and I should probably consider not posting there any more. I'll do a separate post asking people to tell me if they plan to stay on LJ and post there, because I don't like losing track of people even though I make it easy to lose track of myself.

I've been trying to be more active on DreamWidth/LiveJournal, but what this has resulted in has been my commenting lavishly and then having a very hard time responding to the responses even though I'm delighted to get them. I doubt anybody is feeling neglected or snubbed, but if you are I apologize; and even if you aren't I will try to do better.

The rest of this post is an International Bad Cat Day post involving tulips, followed by a section about the Guthrie Theater's recent production of King Lear.


Last week I got on a bus and took a large thick envelope of receipts and statements and forms to the accountants' office. I'm not sure when we last got the current year's taxes done by April 15, though we have managed to file an extension and get things done by August 15 a time or two in the last never-mind how-many years. I'm suddenly feeling much more chipper; I hadn't realized what a horrible burden having the undone taxes looming over me was, and yet doing them is such a nightmare. Tax law has no understanding at all of how self-employment works, and doesn't care either. Tax law secretly feels that if you get your money in large lumps rather than in increments week by week or month by month, you are somehow duplicitous, lazy, or both; or else just generally trying to get away with something. It hates me and mine and I hate it back passionately.

When I left, Raphael asked if I knew when I'd be home. I had no idea and was a bit short with R because I was about to miss my bus. (I did, in fact, miss it, but the next one was early, and it wasn't very cold out.) I sent a text once I knew when I was likely to be back, wondering a little, since I wasn't making dinner and we didn't have any firm plans for anything. R texted back that zie had gone for a short walk and might or might not beat me home. I got home first. When Raphael got home I eventually wandered through the kitchen to find her putting white and purple tulips in a Portmeirion vase. "It's a Saffron vase," said Raphael, and indeed the image on the vase was of meadow saffron (a kind of autumn crocus). We have the dinner plate but I hadn't realized that there was a vase as well. The vase was an early anniversary present and the tulips were for getting the taxes done. The overflow went into a Portmeirion mug (with sweet peas on the side) with a broken handle, and the vase spent the afternoon in my office on a high bookshelf, faintly scenting the room with tulip.

But at some point Saffron herself evidenced a strong desire to get up on the bookcase with the tulips. You could see her cat-brain doing the math. Can I jump up from this vantage point? No, not enough room to land. What about from the lower bookcase under the air conditioner? No, can't see properly. What about from the top of the air conditioner? That's better but some monkey has put a paper bag up there on my occasional landing spot. Pause. BUT TULIPS! What about this part of the pile of boxes of author copies and very old files apparently put here just for the convenience of cats? No, not actually convenient to cats. Scaling the lower shelves? No, too many useless bits of decoration and books stuck in sideways for lack of room. She had been allowed to sniff and examine the flowers before they were put in the vase, but she still seemed very determined, so I removed the tulips to my bedroom for the moment.

I was reading peacefully in my bedroom much later when she started the same set of calculations in there, ultimately making it through quite a number of random objects without knocking any of them down, until she was a foot or so from the vase. I removed it and put it on the front stairs. This was useful insofar as it's cold on those stairs, which preserved the tulips nicely. I let Saffron sniff them again before I took them away, but whatever she wanted with them, it wasn't that. When I brought the tulips back up at the end of a busy weekend, and on every day that I had them in my office, she did her mathematics at some point, but by then I was persuaded that she probably couldn't actually get up on that bookcase and was too smart to try and fail.

In late March, Eric and I went to see the Guthrie's performance of King Lear. I meant to write it up immediately so that local people would still have a chance to see it. The Guthrie had not done Lear in twenty years. Raphael and I went to that 1996 production, which was excellent; my main memory of it at this remove is Isabel Monk's tremendous, hilarious, moving performance as the Fool. I mentioned it to Raphael when I was talking about the recent production, and Raphael reminded me that Isabel Monk was so much more robust than Lear in that production that it transformed the entire nature of their relationship.

In this production, the Fool was played by Armin Shimerman. I gazed and gazed at that name and at the photo of the actor, which was not familiar. I was only clued in by the conversation of the people next to us. All of you are no doubt jumping up and down to tell me that Mr. Shimerman played Quark on "Deep Space Nine" and later, Principal Schneider on "Buffy." Lear was played by Stephen Yoakum, who long ago was Henry Bolingbroke in Garland Wright's production of the History Plays, which I saw at least four times, most of them on day-tickets. It was in that line that I overheard a bunch of late-adolescent girls fangirling Henry V. Not Kenneth Branagh, whose movie had come out recently; and not the actor who played Henry -- Henry himself. It was awesome, as was that whole run of plays. They did Richard II; a very long and deeply distressing adaptation of both parts of Henry IV; and Henry V.

I didn't recognize Mr. Yoakum, but I recognized his voice at once in the first scene.

It almost always takes a few minutes to settle into Shakespeare's language, and while that was happening I looked over all the characters who were on stage at the beginning and suddenly recalled the scene from the third season of "Slings and Arrows" in which Charles Kingman, meeting the rest of the cast in a production for which he had been invited to play Lear, asks the woman playing Cordelia how much she weighs and reacts very rudely to her answer of 107 pounds. This Lear would not have needed to do that even if he had been twice as rude a person: Yoakum's Lear is physically robust even as his mind breaks and breaks again into smaller bits.

Cordelia and Goneril both also had very robust physical presences. Goneril was tall and Cordelia was just very much present. Regan was more withdrawn and quiet, which made the later scene with Gloucester particularly horrible and creepy. I had forgotten how funny Goneril is; horribly funny, but funny. Another thing that struck me was that, when she has her first tantrum, she behaved and sounded really exactly like Lear just had when he flew into a rage at Cordelia and exiled her.

Edgar's first appearance was made with his hair falling into his eyes and a wineglass in his hand; he was clearly pie-eyed and may not have been completely sober until sometime after his transformation into a Bedlam boy. This made his complete cozening by Edmund more plausible than is sometimes the case. And of course it lighted up what's already present, his gaining clarity while feigning madness. Edmund was very well done; I had remembered that he is funny, but actors vary in how well they manage this, and this one did a very good job.

Armin Schimerman was an excellent Fool, much smaller than Lear but much more mentally present. The production also did something I don't remember seeing before. The Fool simply vanishes from the proceedings during the thunderstorm. At the end of the play Lear says, "And my poor fool is hanged," and there is, or was, much speculation about whether he means the actual Fool or is using a fond term for his daughter Cordelia. The parts were probably doubled originally, which explains the Fool's disappearance so that Cordelia can reappear from her exile, but it's still very weird how the Fool just falls silent. When Isabel Monk played the part, she deliberately withdrew and turned her back on the entire situation, wracked with many feelings. In this production, as Lear's mind breaks down, he stabs and kills the Fool without knowing it, to the horror of Kent and Edgar.

I was sad that they cut so much of Edgar's speech when he's persuading his father that they are standing at the edge of the cliffs of Dover when really he's been leading Gloucester in circles, but the scene was very affecting anyway. And they did leave in the bit during the torture of Gloucester where the one servant objects to what is being done and is killed for his pity. C.S. Lewis has said somewhere that while that is a very small part, it's the part he would want to play in actual life.

Pamela

I just took down the 2015 Minnesota Weatherguide Calendar (it does not do to be hasty about these things), the December photograph in which was a lovely one of a snow- and icicle-encrusted evergreen branch in the foreground, with a wave caught breaking in white spray behind it, and snow- and evergreen-encrusted islands on the horizon, somewhere on Lake Superior. The January photo for the 2016 calendar is also of Lake Superior, at Gooseberry Falls State Park, a rocky beach with lumps of ice perched atop the rocks, each one perfectly sized for its perch, as if a wave had come in and instantly frozen. In the background are the lake, looking very cold, and a low but brilliant sun. I read the Phenology section with great pleasure, because it almost always tells you to listen for the "fee-bee" call of chickadees establishing their territories, and the drumming of downy woodpeckers. And even in the middle of the city, I have heard both of these things already, birds not being great devotees of the Gregorian calendar.

Today a lot of house sparrows are yelling their heads off in the neighbors' pea-bush hedge, and occasionally a crow makes a pronouncement about some esoteric matter.

I'm hoping to post more, however mundane the content of the posts is. Here is a bit that I wrote but never posted just before Christmas.

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"Today I made vegan cream of mushroom soup, which is quite delicious, if extremely rich; but I didn't make it to be eaten as soup, but rather to be used in a casserole the recipe for which comes from the family of one of my partners. Then I made dinner for Raphael and me (macaroni and goat cheese and steamed broccoli), and now I am roasting some mushrooms, to be followed by green beans and cauliflower. The last-minute roasted vegetables I made for Thanksgiving (turnips, broccoli, and carrots) were so wonderful that I want to have some more at Christmas dinner. Sadly, some people I seem to be related to don't like turnips, so I'm doing these different vegetables. I had more mushrooms than I needed for the soup, and that is how it all arose. I expect these vegetables will still be wonderful, and I also got some turnips to roast later in the week." In the event, the roasted vegetables were very good, and I did roast turnips, carrots, broccoli, and more mushrooms a few days later. Also very good. I was sneaking the leftovers cold out of the fridge as if they were cheesecake.

The day before Christmas was a better day for pie crust than the day before Thanksgiving. All the pies came out fine. David has heroically finished the mince, and both pumpkin pies are still being worked on. I didn't assist the situation much by making two loaves of banana bread and then lugging one all over on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day but never actually getting it out at a party, so now we have to eat all of that too. The horror. It's a good batch. The recipe uses up to six bananas, with enough whole-wheat flour and sugar to hold them together and some rising agents, salt, vanilla, and cinnamon, with optional walnuts. Aside from the quality of the bananas, which is not really under our control, the keys to a good batch of banana bread seem to be increasing the amount of walnuts, toasting them thoroughly, using fresh cinnamon and good vanilla (thanks, carbonel!), and not under-baking the result. It's also useful to gauge the level of moisture in the bananas and lower the number used if they seem too gooshy.

Christmas dinner was small this year, but we all had a good time. lydy was gallivanting about the East Coast and David's sister couldn't make it, so it was just five of us. We had lots of leftovers, which was very satisfying. I tried to recreate my youngest brother's balsamic-mustard-maple-syrup reduction for the salmon, but it came out too mustardy. Still very tasty, just not sublime. And the oyster casserole was a great success with arkuat as a birthday treat. Follow Your Heart vegan cheddar substitute melts like Velveeta and makes a grand cheesy sauce with homemade vegan cream of mushroom soup. I had leftover soup and ended up making more cheesy sauce and putting it over baked potatoes after I'd eaten all the proper leftovers.

This seems to be a very foodish post. I suppose it's the time of year.

David and I celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary by going to Kyoto All You Can Eat Sushi. My favorite piece was the sweet potato hand roll, but it was all very good. On New Year's Eve Day David had to go deal with a complicated computer project. I made rosemary shortbread that was too dry and crumbly and slightly greasy, and oatmeal shortbread that did not work right at all. The rosemary was demonstrably shortbread, not greasy oatmeal candy like the oatmeal attempt, but it still wasn't right. I think Earth Balance has messed with the formula of their tub margarine so that it doesn't work right for baking, and I will henceforward need to only use the Buttery Sticks for baking. These are sadly no good for just putting on your toast or potato, which is annoying.

On New Year's Eve, David and I went to two parties. I actually hate this, and cherish a useless nostalgia for the comparatively few years when everyone I wanted to see attended the MinnStf party. Even then, when I had first joined MinnStf, there was at least one splinter group that had its own party; I just didn't know those people well and didn't care. The MinnStf party was hosted in a really grand fashion with chicken noodle soup, tacos with a vast array of possible fillings, and, it was rumored, a turkey breast; also huge tubs of hummus, interestingly flavored chips, vegetables (including what looked and tasted like heirloom cherry tomatoes of several varieties), and a plenitude of fruit and candy. The banana bread seemed surplus to requirements, so I didn't get it out. I had several pleasant conversations, and the general conversation upstairs was also nice. I felt guilty leaving, but was very glad, at the second party, to see at least six people I always love to talk to and a number of other congenial sorts, as well as two very self-possessed and fluffy cats. This party was also more than well supplied with edibles, so I didn't bring the banana bread out for it either.

We got home before 2, when I realized that I'd forgotten my knapsack with the lonely loaf of banana bread in it, so we had to drive back to get it, David exhibiting remarkable patience at my fecklessness. I am looking after Lydy's cats while she's gone, so there was half an hour of washing food bowls, parcelling out wet food to the healthy in small doses and to the cat with kidney issues in a larger one, refilling waterers, scooping litter boxes and cleaning up the floor where Naomi, the kidney cat, earnestly pees from inside the box. I don't even, but we love her a lot. Then when I got upstairs, Saffron produced a long fussy lecture about my deficiencies in being gone so much and then clattering around downstairs instead of attending to her. She had been quite adequately looked after by Raphael while I was away, but that was not, I take it, the issue.

She was very snuggly overnight. When I woke up I glanced at the clock and thought, 11:09, that's not bad at all. However, a closer look showed that it was 1:09, so there was some scrambling around. However, David and I had agreed that we would get to the Hair of the Dog party after three but before five, and we did manage that. This is one of my favorite parties, and it was really lovely. All but two pieces of the inadequate rosemary shortbread did get eaten. There were goat butter and good bread and goat and sheep cheeses and fava bean dip and Thai hummus and taramasalata and sesame brussels sprouts and fancy olives and six kinds of herring and celery and grape tomatoes and carrots and cornichons and a very chunky guacamole and a gingerbread trifle, which was not at all Pamela-safe, but Beth offered me a bite and it was stupendous. I had a nice conversation with Katie and Magenta and got to hear lemur anecdotes from Karen, and Josh let us look at the portable museums he'd contributed to the Kickstarter for. They are small blocks of lucite in which are embedded very small bits of museumy objects, like dinosaur skin and bone and a bit of tape from an Apollo mission's music selection. I liked the Japanese star sand the best (it's microfossils), but it was all well worth looking at and pondering. I also got to talk a bit to Laura Jean, which almost never happens, and to Tamsin, though most of my conversation with her had occurred the evening before. The general conversation around the museums also included Eric and David, and Beth and Barb J. and Bruce. It was not actually alliterative, though.

Eric and I had decided to just have our date continuing on from the party, so we went back to my house around ten, and I did a bunch more cat work. Ninja helped us make the bed, as usual, with an interruption from Lady Jane, who keeps trying to play with him but hasn't persuaded him to return the desire yet. We read our books and didn't stay up terribly late. Lady Jane leapt onto the bed for petting several times, but didn't want to stay. We had most of our date on Saturday, ending with brunch at the Himalayan Restaurant, a brief stop at the new coop on 38th Street, and a stop to fill up the tank of Lydy's car, which she had kindly lent Eric and me in her absence.

Then I came home and caught up on LJ and had many thoughts about people's 2015 roundup posts, about whether I am remotely a working writer any more and other somber musings. It's easy enough to fix this. Well, no, it's not easy at all. But it's very simple.

Saffron had more to say to me about my various absences, but this week will be normal, so perhaps I won't be scolded so much either by my cat or by my brain.

Pamela

Tomorrow there will be twelve people eating dinner here, if everybody shows up who might. I began the week with a stubborn migraine, but as of right now have dusted and vacuumed the sunroom, living room, dining room, kitchen, hallway, and media room, much to the annoyance of the cats. Lady Jane Grey, the newest arrival, has a very good "I do not approve" expression. I have also mopped everything but the media room and the dining room. The bucket of clean water with vinegar in it and the rinsed mop are already set out, but I can't do any more til tomorrow, since my lower back has almost as good an "I do not approve" expression as Lady Jane.

I've also made two vegan pumpkin pies and one mince pie, also, though incidentally, vegan. There were no catastrophes. The piecrust entered that tiresome state where it seems to need a lot of extra cold water, but you don't want to put too much in lest you produce the dread cardboard texture. The pies are not beautiful, but the crust seems to taste all right. I still need to make a smallish casserole, also some vegan mushroom gravy and, if all goes well, roasted turnips, carrots, and broccoli. The last is supererogatory but I want to do it.

Arwen kept me company by lying on her back either in the hall or on the kitchen floor and blinking benignly when I talked to her. She is a muted tortie cat, short-haired but plush, and has a kind of windowpane belly pattern in gray and peach. Sometimes one can pet it, but not today. She has a Siamese voice (actual parentage not really known) and made sort of quacky goat noises when I indicated an intention of petting her.

Ninja helped by putting his paws on my knee and looking winsome. He rode on my shoulders for about five minutes, but I am not his regular shoulder-steed and he eventually leapt down and curled up on a flattened paper bag that Arwen had moved into the kitchen in case she should want it.

Upstairs, Saffron raced up and down when I appeared, and Cassie stole half a corn muffin right off my plate when I stopped for dinner. I am afraid that I took it away from her, which seems very unfair.

David did much of the shopping and has put the turkey to brine. My youngest brother, who generally works as a bass player but was once a professional cook, is coming to dinner because his band is on tour right in the area at the right time. I'm hoping to get him to cook the salmon for the non-eaters of turkey. He's usually pretty obliging. My mom is bringing an apple crisp for non-eaters of pumpkin and mince (my other brother is allergic to pumpkin), and also mashed potatoes and some kind of vegetable. There's about a ninety-five percent probability that she will bring green beans, but she did once confound me by bringing roasted onions, peppers, and squash.

Other guests are bringing cranberry sauce and Eric is bringing wine, cider, beer, and maybe some soda, though we probably have enough left over from hosting the MinnStf meeting last month. Lydy had to work all week (so does Eric), but is going to clean the bathroom, undoubtedly with feline assistance.

It's been weirdly warm but very gray and dark outside, so that stepping outside causes cognitive dissonance.

I'm going to assemble my recipes and put them with the mop and the bucket of vinegar and water. I think I can keep all the tasks separate, and won't end up pickling the turnips in cat hair.

I hope you will have a good weekend, whatever you may be doing with it.

Pamela