Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Brunch with my Aunt Kathy at the parental abode. Mom made an egg dish that was soft and savory, and she baked apples until they were soft enough for me to eat. Ohhhhh what a good idea. I think I will have another one soon. Probably not tonight -- I have enough other things to eat -- but definitely soon. I love baked apples, and she omitted the nuts from them in the baking (passing them around for everyone else to use as a garnish), and it was a very fine thing. Also it is trivially easy to bake a single apple, so I don't have to make a ton of them and then wonder who on earth is going to help me eat them.

Improvement. Still pain. But improvement. Yay.

( Collapse )

Now I'm reading John Boswell's The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. So far he is spending a lot of time arguing with other historians. Watching historians fight often amuses me. In fact, I think I'm going to get myself some water and flop on the couch with my book and see if there's a puppy interested in some time with a monkey who is sensibly willing to stay put. (This is a problem she often has with monkeys.)

Many of you already know that I am a List Person. I am a maker of lists, and this evening is the reason why: dealing with some pain on multiple fronts, some frustration on multiple fronts, and some just-plain-weariness. But there was a task that had been on my list for literally months, getting transferred from one week's to-do list to the next every single week. And now it's done, and I feel better even though none of the things that were actually bothering me have been fixed. (What? you say. Putting up pictures of your niece did not make your lack-of-teeth to heal over? But astonishingly it is true.)

I look at the week ahead, at the appointments and the obligations and even some planned fun things, at the stuff that needs doing in the spare moments, and I quail. I quake. And then I think, But wait! I have a list! And then I am mighty, and I am fierce, and on I go, because the list knows all and sees all, and what it does not know, I will tell it. And it is a million and one times easier to do things we know need doing.

My other method of getting things done is not nearly so pleasing. It is the stick to complement the list carrot. It is the crap on my desk. There is crap on my desk, the logic goes, because it drives me nuts to have crap on my desk, and therefore I will take steps to get rid of the crap on my desk, so that it will cease driving me nuts. It's not that this method doesn't work. Bills get paid extremely promptly around here, because otherwise they are on my desk, and I hate having things on my desk. But novels can't always be revised nearly so quickly as a $7 phone bill can be paid, and I'm not sure having crap on my desk isn't detrimental to that process.

So I will put it on the list and see what can be done.

Ista recently discovered that one of her grandmonkeys' floor vents contains a Cheerio from the previous occupants. So she decided to examine the floor vent in markgritter's and my bedroom. Humoring her, markgritter said, "What's in there, Ista?" and pulled the vent out for her to examine.

What was in there was a pair of extremely dusty and faded pieces of '80s soft-core pornography.

We were extremely amused. So markgritter checked the other vent, but it was, still to our amusement, porn-free.

Homeownership. It is a series of surprises.

Tomorrow the duct-cleaners come. Hee. Good timing, dog.

(I hear markgritter in the bedroom now: "No, Ista, we already checked in there." Hee.)