pameladean

It's November. All over the screen behind a storm window that has been closed for months because the screen has a hole through which once entered a hapless mouse and later a hapless sparrow, the ivy I should not have let grow so high is turning delicate shades of pink and lemon and gold. The inner shaded leaves are still the palest green. Beyond the ivy, the volunteer Norway maple that grew stealthily through the neighbors' peabush hedge is also turning gold. On the boulevard, its probable parent is half gold, half green.

We went to a delightful outdoor MinnStf Halloween party at Dreampark last weekend, and on the house, which is gold with red trim, the same ivy was turning the same colors, like living Halloween decorations. That was in back. In front, there were more than a hundred pumpkins and a host of ghosts and a very large mechanical black cat that turned its head and made you jump. But in the back, the ivy was a very good decoration all on its own. Also I toasted marshmallows for the first time in decades, and talked with many people I miss and value.

I am mired in tax stuff. So much stuff. So very much so very late stuff. If I do not hear back from the accountants via email very soon I will have to pick up the telephone. I loathe and abominate the telephone. Ursula Le Guin once said, "For me the telephone is for making appointments with the doctor with and cancelling appointments with the dentist with. It is not a medium of human communication." Now for me, it is a medium of human communication, but only with people I am intimate with. I do not want to make and cancel appointments on the telephone, nor describe the precise morass I am in with the taxes. Email is ten thousand times better for that.

I quite successfully emailed our excellent handyman, Jake, about the hand-sized holes the squirrels chewed in a different office window. He came out to look at the window, prepared to cover the tempting wooden trim of it with aluminum at once. However, it's in a very awkward place, a basically unintelligible niche between the front porch and the side of my office, which is a sunroom that sticks out from the rest of the house for the better provision of windows to earn its name. The ladder he has won't fit in there, largely because of the porch roof; and also he forgot we have brown trim on the house and bought white aluminum. We didn't actually care about the color of the aluminum, but obviously the inadequacy of the ladder was an issue. In the end he came upstairs and helped David take the air conditioner out of the window, and then hung out of it measuring everything. He will return on Thursday, when it will helpfully be ten degrees warmer outside, with a mysterious structure composed of scaffolding and an A-frame, which he says will permit him to reach the window; and also with brown aluminum.

I will just add that the fascia board than runs just below the roof along the entire front of the house is also covered with brown aluminum from the first assault the squirrels made on the house.

In any case, all these arrangements were made either in email or in person. The telephone was not required.

In other news, I have finally read Caroline Stevermer's The Glass Magician, which was published in 2020 and which I bought then because Caroline, and also because pandemic. But I didn't read it until this week. I loved it a lot. I was quite puzzled by the very pared-down prose and affect at first, but soon saw that this was a reflection of the face that the protagonist, Thalia, shows the world. There is more to Thalia, a lot more, but the spare language made a very effective frame for a story of shapeshifting, stage and actual magic, family secrets, and more. I've never read a book quite like it, so obviously I am going to have to read it again when I want that wry, astringent, slowly accumulating flavor, so rich and layered by the end.

David and I have had our booster shots and Lydy should follow soon. I'm still not going to restaurants, nor going indoors without a mask and only out of dire necessity, say for example because my doctor wouldn't renew a couple of prescriptions without seeing some new lab work. The lab work was unexpectedly good: my A1c has not changed since April and it's in quite a good place. Everything else that was checked was fine. It is apparently not yet time to look at the B12 levels, but I can still feel improvement in the areas I think the deficiency affected, so I'll be content until the next time. I hope when I next need to come under a roof that is not my own, all the numbers will be less dreadful. I've had many conversations with friends about what Minnesota did wrong; the most popular answer is, "Chose our neighboring states unwisely." But there are so many variables, I don't even know.

We're thinking of hosting a small Thanksgiving, with liberal application of rapid antigen tests beforehand. I hope the numbers are better by then.

I haven't planted the species tulips yet, but it will be warmer at the end of the week. Ideally I'd spend one warmish day clearing space for the tulips in the amazing jungle that the yard and garden beds have turned into, and another actually planting them. I'm also tempted to go through my ridiculous hoard of old seeds and fling onto the ground any that say they can be planted in the fall. We'll see.

I've put my book aside for all the tedious paperwork of the taxes, and the only good thing I can say is that I'm starting to see the faintest stirrings of a desire to get back to it. Thus are we spurred to the work that should be our delight, in these parlous times.

I continue to value all of you exceedingly.

Pamela

Among the pleasures I listed as temporarily suspended are things like having tea with my excellent ex Elise, having lunch with my sharer of theatrical interests Cindy, and a number of "we should really get coffee sometime" meetings that haven't happened yet but that I was sure would. My long-running tea group scheduled our next meeting for May, now located in another century in subjective time.

I've lost track of how many entities have emailed me to say they were stalwartly staying open and then (quite reasonably) reversed course and closed after all. My yearly diabetes appointment, originally scheduled for the 26th, has been moved to the end of April. My dentist's office is open for emergencies but not for routine visits. I have a hygiene appointment on April 22nd, but right now both that and the new doctor's appointment might as well be in 2030. Our bank has closed its offices, leaving ATMs and drive-throughs going for the nonce. Bachman's stayed open somewhat defiantly and then suddenly decided they wouldn't.

When I logged into the Instacart website, Cub division, earlier today, it said that the next available delivery slot was next Tuesday. I put together an order and closed it out to secure the delivery slot, but when I actually got to the point where you choose your delivery time, it offered me Today, Within 2 Hours. I took it. I wonder if I will get one more package of toilet paper or any pasta or rice. I think I might get the whole-wheat spaghetti, which seems unpopular. We'll see. The toothpaste both Raphael and I use was on sale, so maybe we can get a couple of extra tubes of that.

At least this means the menu planning for next week is done, though it has a lot of "some kind of veg" and similar temporizing spots in it.

I've talked to my mother on the phone. She is maintaining a cheerful demeanor, and had her "completely unconcerned" cat in her lap. My brother, who lives with her, emailed me about streamlining her garden to be lower-maintenance but still pleasing, so we are brainstormng that. It's much too soon to do any gardening in Minnesota right now, but it's an engaging thought exercise.

David and I had our usual date yesterday, staying in and ordering from Pizza Luce, which has at least apparently demonstrated good practices during this crisis. We wiped down the outsides of the pizza boxes and discarded them afterwards, though I would usually store the leftover pizza in its original box. Then we watched several episodes of the Great British Bakeoff, petting such cats as stopped by.

I'm trying to read more fiction and stop scrolling through Twitter so much. I've been just starting a reread of Nevada Barr's Hunting Season for more than a week. Maybe this evening. I have an essentially infinite number of books to read, especially if I can get my brain to stop erasing the existence of e-books. I don't mean in general; I mean that anything I acquire in e-book form, even if I eagerly anticipated it, falls out of my memory instantly. Several kind friends have patiently explained how they keep track of their e-books, but my failure happens well before any system of any kind can be invoked. I think I need to make myself a note in Evernote as soon as I finish a download and set some kind of alarm to poke me. It is a weird thing for my brain to be doing, forgetting all my delicious e-books, and it well predates any breath of coronavirus.

My doctor has been reminding me periodically to fill out what she calls an End-of-Life Directive, though apparently it's a subset of a living will generally, in Minnesota, called a Health Directive. Having misplaced the one she gave me, I downloaded a new form. It requires two witnesses and a notary to be complete, but putting the information and preferences in is better than nothing. I am still pondering the details, but it's a start. I should have done this when I was thirty and updated it from time to time.

This afternoon I found myself sitting at the computer glowering at my book, suddenly feeling quite hungry, and deciding that I should have lunch, but not getting up because I would have to wash my hands first. Eventually I did get up and did wash my hands, and then ate the leftover pizza. It's definitely better to put off eating than to skip the hand-washing, but I need to be more efficient about the order in which I do things. I come in from taking out the trash or upstairs from doing laundry, immediately wash my hands, and then realize that I need to pee, so after that I have to wash them again. Then, invariably, though I might sneeze once or twice a day at most, within five minutes of these operations I'll sneeze and have to blow my nose; and there I am, back at the sink scrubbing away. There's also the bit where I take a shower and then put on some skin cream for a minor medical condition and then have to wash my hands again as per the directions on the tube. I was using a glove to apply the cream and then discarding it, but disposable gloves are in short supply, so I quit doing that; I had felt guilty about it anyway. I am grateful for the existence of so many moisturizers and for David's habit of giving me strange new ones for my birthday.

I'm sure my hand are not actually going to fall off. I'm not sure of much, but that's probably a safe bet.

And since that is the case, it's time for me to work on my book before making dinner.

Stay safe and well, all of you.

Pamela

P.S. Another thing I forget is to tag my entries; apparently being sure that I tag my Patreon posts has taken up all the brain space allocated for such functions. I did kind of tag this post.

P.P.S. The spell checker used by Dreamwidth has taken to telling me serenely "No spelling errors found," when there are totally spelling errors to BE found. Perhaps it's stressed about groceries too.

I will be doing a reading at Minicon from 5:30 to 6:30 on Saturday evening, in Atrium 2.

I'm going to read some material that was cut from Going North, because I can.

My voice doesn't hold out very well for an entire hour, so I'll probably read for a little over half an hour, take any questions or sign any books people want to offer up, and then let you have a little more time between the end of my reading and the beginning of Emma Bull's at 7:30 than you would if I persisted until 6:30.

Pamela