Off the Cliff

Today was a classic Bad Knee Day and after doing a supermarket shop for, among other pressing things, tonic water to cushion the prophylactic gin, I should just have stayed in with the AC. But I really really wanted an ice cream cone, and remembering how my last two long walks resulted in limberness either then or the next day, off I went down the street. No limberness to be found today, just bone crunching on bone for four and a half long blocks. And when I got to Basking Robin there was a line-up, because TO has gone to a new level that allows patios but restricts the number of people inside any building. So I turned back and went to the Poop Cafe, which is some weird Korean sense of humour thing. They serve ice cream and coffee and poke bowls, so fine, I order a Hong Kong waffle cone with Moose Tracks ice cream and then sit out on the sidewalk, as per instruction, because they say it will take five to ten minutes. And it takes that long because they actually make the waffle themselves, outdoors in a little waffle iron. Which is a step up from B-R's cones, even if it's twice the price. Then back, bone crunching for the return trip up the street.

Still, I saw more people today than I have in months, since all of Toronto was outdoors enjoying the mellow warmth and sun.

 I don't usually check the 'wireless networks within range' thingy on my phone except when there's reason to believe mine has  cut out, which it does occasionally. But the other day I looked down the list and saw a nearby one labelled Sadie, which is south ND's dog. Sweet, except that the signal strength is about 50%, while (generic Bell no.) and tinier_bird_garden are close to 80-90. Generic Bell is for sure the other half of this house, but I'm wondering who has the tinier bird garden.

ETA: oh, right. Next door is two apartments. Bird garden must be the second floor one and sadie the first floor/ basement.

Also deleted a number of networks that haven't been around for years, like all three coffee shops at Howland and Bloor: Second Cup (d.2018), Aroma (d.2019), Starbucks (decamped, the cowards, in 2020.) Also the Starbucks in the ex-bank at Christie and Dupont. Don't trust yourself to some southern mega coffee chain, except of course that the Canuck coffee chain was the first to close up, because the owner evidently thought he could make more money from a pizza joint. And pizza joint did stay open but the one time I went in, nobody came to take my order so I left after five minutes.

Took half an ativan against a 7 p.m. Pepsi and consequently slept sweetly and well, but with my contact lens still in. Eye itches in consequence.

Did a fast cruise of Eurovision entries which demonstrates that I am too old for Eurovision. Oh the noise noise noise noise. Does no one do harmonious anymore?

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Fiesta has party sandwiches now. More than cake-- to which I have extremely little resistance-- party sandwiches are my downfall. The only thing that stops me from bingeing on them is that one has to go to Fiesta to get them (a hike in these crippled days, even if they're only two blocks away), and they cost an arm and a leg ($10 for four pinwheels and six fingers), and they don't do mix and match. So you get chicken party sandwiches or egg party sandwiches or tuna party sandwiches but not all together. But I shall be hard put to avoid them on my every ten day shops.

Though the last time they had these, from a different supplier, the cashier told me they couldn't keep them in stock because if customers didn't buy them, the staff did-- and then after a month, no more party sandwiches. OTOH Fiesta's other sandwiches are made in-store, and maybe they used to make the party ones themselves but found them too labour intensive.

Since joining a neighbourhood FB group I keep seeing entries about bikes being stolen in broad daylight (also of exhibitionists on Palmerston and knife fights at KFC: never thought Seaton Village was so criminal.) So once again I must hump the bike up the stairs every time I use it. Though it occurred to me last night, when I went out to do just that, that with the black rain cover on, the thing is practically invisible in my shaded front garden with its two trees. Still, safe than sorry.

To be honest I've been waiting thirty-some years for thieves and burglars to come to my area. The criminal demarcation line was always Manning Ave, the next street east of me. Past Manning there were always break-ins and mandatory alarm systems, because east of Manning was yuppies and UofT professors and open concept renovations and houses that, though small, screamed money. But from Manning westwards it was all Italian overwrought iron and tomato plants in the front yard and Nonna and Nonno sitting on the front porch all day and nothing of technological value inside. So definite was the cultural divide that the film producer owner of the house at the corner of Manning and Palmerston Gardens, which I rented with friends in the mid-80s, petitioned the city to change the address from 867 Manning, which was the front door, to 59 Palmerston Gardens, which was the back, becaue 'Palmerston Gardens' had so much more cachet. (Equally Yarmouth Rd., the first street north of me, suddenly turns into Yarmouth Gardens on the other side of Manning. I mean, Yarmouth Rd was good enough for Meghan Markle, but not for our professional types.)

But now the Italians are all but gone and the houses sell for over a million, and the new owners renovate the shit out of them or rebuild completely, so I guess we're sitting ducks.

Maybe it's just been the chronic grey weather or maybe the leaves on the cherry tree really did unfurl suddenly today, but this morning for the first time there were shadows on the back garden path as the branches waved in the 'gusts to 40 kpm' breezes. And while I know Prof Islamic Studies has barbecued on his back porch even when the temps were under 10C, because I could smell the meat cooking, today the neighbourhood was suffused by the smell of charcoal and charcoal starter. Could be someone else on the block, of course (see: wind gusts, above.) But spring is now definitely here.

I wasn't actually planning to celebrate my various May 12 anniversaries but spring, enh, so I ordered in sushi. Am not having luck with my delivery people this week. Yesterday was a grocery delivery, and the cheerful Voila guys have been known to park their vans eight doors up the street to lug their heavy loads all the way down to my place. There's a hydrant right across the street from me which makes the default 'two wheels on the curb' manoeuvre dicey, so I always tip heavily. Yesterday's guy just stops his van in the middle of the street, forcing the cars behind him to go over the curb, and then sits looking at his phone for five minutes before even getting out of the truck. I was going to tip him a twenty, but cut that in half after the first three minutes of 'looking at my phone screw you.'

Today's driver was confimed on his way to the restaurant but after fifteen minutes the restaurant called to say he hadn't arrived and very sorry and they'd call him again to see what had happened, and didn't say O-matase itasimasita only because they're Korean, but that's what they meant. Anyway, he did show up at my place fifteen minutes later, and I did give him the full tip because who knows what happened on the streets of Toronto? Bathurst will notoriously turn into a parking lot at the drop of a hat, asshole Trawntonian drivers *will* enter the intersections and block them while the light changes three times (oh I so do not miss my commute) and he had to cross Bathurst.

Dreamed of being on the subway again, getting on at the wrong entrance at Spadina (there is no wrong entrance in reality because both lead to the platform, but in my dream half the platform was walled off from the other half) and once again coming above ground in Paris. Was travelling with K-chan and staying with friends of hers, a couple who owed at least half their make-up to Kushner and Sherman. And one of them was utterly delighted because now she had someone to play chess with- me- and I didn't want to play chess and didn't know how but I had to anyway, in order to get my purse back (I don't own any purses) which had been suspended from hooks in the celing, along with my coat. And that last bit is from The Colour of Magic, the hooks in the ceiling in the Pern-spoof section, though what it's spoofing I have no idea because I never read Pern.

Because The Woman in White is much more readable than an anthropological analysis of guanxi, I read TWIW while bicycling, and came across this puzzling description of Marion Halcombe's new house: 

"My two rooms, and all the good bedooms beside, are on the first floor, and the basement contains a drawing-room, a dining room, a morning- room, a library, and a pretty little boudoir for Laura..."

OK, I know the English convention of 'first floor is what we call second floor' but this sounds like all the rooms that we expect to find on the ground floor are somehow underground. Did basement mean something different in 1850-whatever?

Managed to lose an expensive only available online leg brace sometime yesterday, possibly at the laundromat. It was only occasionally useful, is why I took it off in the irst place, so not too annoyed. My diva knee sometimes wants a brace below it and sometimes wants a brace over it and there's no telling from day to day or hour to hour which it will be. These glowing testimonials from people who can now hurray! walk after umpty many years or umpty many surgeries by using said braces obviously don't apply to those of us with quote bloody big bone spurs in the knee. So I should stop hoping for miracles.

For a change I put on Warren Zevon's Desperados Under the Eaves album (apparently its proper name is Warren Zevon, which of course is what I think Excitable Boy is called) to accompany my biking. Discover that songs work much better than music to distract me from fretful 'Isn't it 30 minutes yet?' checking of timer, if they're the right songs. (Seem to recall that Greatest Hits of the 60s was a complete bust.) What struck me today is how very much a Los Angeles singer Zevon is. The LA ethos is all through his music, the way New York is all through Paul Simon and-- err well, maybe New York, maybe Montreal, but anyway some north-eastern city is everywhere in Cohen. And I loathe Los Angeles, the very essence of unreal city, emptiness, no there there. He really ought not to work for me.

But that album is the epitome of a whole zeitgeist in my life. It's so much Tokyo that merely listening to it brings back detailed pictures of 30 years ago, and smells and noises and textures and the whole gestalt of new-in-Tokyo. And of course Tokyo is empty too, but it's a different kind of empty ie it's perfectly real to the Japanese who live there. It's just the gaijin in their gaijin reality who can't see it properly. (Whereas I'm convinced that Los Angelenos know they live in a vacuum or an ersatz reality, they just prefer it that way.) Possibly that explains why Zevon's other albums don't grab me the same way, even though I also had Sentimental Hygiene with me in Tokyo. It seemed inferior to Desperadoes, like something had gone bland in Zevon in the intervening decade. Which it had, if you look at his biography. Like Lowell, 'Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.'

Slept deeply and continuously until past 11:30, wakened only by the ringing of a non-existent phone which pulled me from a frustration dream of trying to block pop-ups that a Japanese anime webpage had put on my computer, whack a mole style. Having learned my lesson yesterday, I did half an hour's stretch and strengthen before breakfast and for no good reason found myself remembering Seoul in 1991, the three unpleasant days I spent there that July. Got rooked by a taxi driver coming in from the airport, got stared at by everyone on the street, was confronted by belligerent men carrying long iron bars at the doorway of every public building, this being right after the riots. Coming back to Tokyo I forgot my bag on the Skyliner and was going to let the staff at the inn call JR about it but then thought, No dammit this is my country- for certain values of 'my'- I can at least speak the language here, so went to Ueno's lost and found myself  and of course the honest Japanese had left my bag in the overhead compartment where the train staff had collected it and turned it in. Score one for Japan.

Friend from work, not seen since 2015 or so because she got a F/T job elsewhere so is now a FB friend, has been baking sponge cakes. I ordered one and she delivered it today. But the scale this morning reported the Christmas damage as two kilos and rising so- reluctantly- I took it over to south NND as an incentive for her to keep shovelling my sidewalk, since she did it again this morning. From which I discover that she has very sensibly duplexed her house into an upstairs apartment and a downstairs/ basement. (Naturally I rang the wrong doorbell first, but her tenant is a courteous person.) For all I know, the house was always divided like that, since there were tenants from time to time in the past. But like my house, the units were probably not partitioned off- my study was a second floor kitchen when I bought it- and now they are, very handsomely.

This is one way buyers carry the incredible mortgage loads an over-inflated housing market imposes on them: it may be zoned as single family unit but if you paid over a million for it, you don't get to live as if it were. What intrigues me is that she evidently never intends to occupy the whole house (see: partitioning walls) and I'm wondering if down the road she intends to have her parents live there, rather than doing the garage over as a laneway dwelling as first suggested. For one thing, the garage isn't a discrete unit: it shares a common cinderblock wall with mine. Putting on a second storey would be iffy, and even renovating what's there strikes me as a difficult undertaking. And the result is a very cramped living area: there's probably more floor space on her second floor apartment.

Anyway, after that I went to acupuncture, very unhappily with knees twinging in the cold damp and two surly cab drivers. My fault for not stretching properly this morning, but anyway: I needn't go anywhere unil Thursday when it's supposed to be well above freezing and raining, so at very worst can wear shoes. I have a grocery order coming Tuesday so can stay indoors and practise social distancing. Unless I decide I really really want a chicken to roast and decide to hazard the two blocks to Fiesta to get it. I don't trust Loblaws meat to be humanely raised, and even if organic, it's still far more expensive than Happy Cluckers at Fiesta. But we shall see. There's plenty of fish in the freezer needs eating, besides two packs of Happy Cow that I bought to make meatloaf with if I feel ambitious, or beef fried rice if I don't.

It's not just the half ativan I took to counteract the 6 pm Pepsi (also obscure back twinges.) I really do feel better today because I went inside an actual *bookstore* for the first time since March, and bought a pile of *books* (all Reginald Hills, which is what I was looking for in March when there weren't any, though today I was looking for Hazel Holts, but there weren't any) and it's just different than shopping for food, is all. Bookstore was closed for four months during lockdown and is only able to stay afloat because landlord cut the rent in half for the duration. Other places on the block, like the nail salon, are closed and empty. And I do so wish the 20 to 40 crowd would get their acts together so our Covid cases would drop again: though my understanding is that cases cluster now in areas of low income and high rises, suggesting it's partly an employment problem as well. Though the cluster is also in the luxury condos by the lakeshore, suggesting elevators and bloodymindedness factor in as well.

But since one must be satisfied with the world as it is, I shall be satisfied. Especially as I'm snug in my side room wearing the dragon scale arm warmers a friend crocheted for me and under a couple of incandescens' autumn coloured quilts. Having nice things around me is distinctly happy-making.

We're at that perplexing time of the year when it's colder inside than out but it's *September* and no way can one justify turning on the heat. Space heaters, maybe, for short periods, but the rest of the time one must just put up with cold fingers and toes. Whereas I wore a jacket to go grocery shopping in the 15C afternoon and sweated.

Also, in a burst of 'last blow of summer', the city has torn up all the intersections along the main through street, the Barton Corridor, which for some reason known only to the planning department they couldn't have done when they were repaving that same street last June. Is a nuisance for a crippled biyclist like me because it means taking main streets to get anywhere for ohh the next fortnight.

Yesterday was a write-off in terms of production because I stayed under the quilts all day reading a Gladys Mitchell mystery. Golden Age, yes, but somehow very uncozy. There's many more if I want them but I think I'll go with Elizabeth Peters for my next. Did however salvage part of the day by steamrollering through the Johnny Walker the Cat Killer section of Kafuka, so at least that's done

I have to be the most 'upon compulsion!?' person I know, bar a few of my sibs maybe. But by dint of staying inside for the last week- a first during this ostensible quarantine- I've succeeded in at least three things I put off forever because, well, I had to do them and therefore I wouldn't. Washed the older shower curtain and hung it in the sun to bleach; unplugged the now unused answering machine from the phone jack, thus freeing up a metre of extension cord so I no longer trip over it; and tied up two stacks of Animages from the basement for recycle come Thursday. But I haven't rehung the shower curtain, relying on the liner instead, which lets far too much light into the bathroom. Nor have I removed the plug from the answering machine, because it's behind a book case. And there are still dozens more Animages in the basement and dear lord but those magazines weigh a ton. But I've also been a little better about reviewing kanji, reading Japanese, and exercising more than once a day, which are the things that really count.

Because my current reading doesn't excite me greatly, I started working my way through the slim volumes of poetry I've only dipped into. First was The Imagist Poem that my mother gave me in my early teens. This time I read the Introduction. It was largely uninformative and certainly dated, but the poems are- some of them- still lapidary and beautiful. Though I could have done with less D.H. Lawrence, and possibly I'm the only person who thinks the second half-line in Pound's

'Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes'

is a flatfooted comedown. (Also, what the hell are you doing with arsenic, Ezra?)

But then I started The Book Cellar Anthology. The Book Cellar began life in the early 60s as a bookstore in a cellar, but in short order moved to a crowded two storey house on Bay St. Crammed with books, difficult of passage, it was where I bought my British ballet magazines and discovered C S Lewis' Perelandra trilogy. It was also a hangout for literary types, and the anthology was put out in the early 70s to showcase various Toronto poets. And oh did it fantod me in spades, being so extremely early 70s in its ethos. So very many young men wanting sex or not getting sex or having sex and feeling ambivalent about it, all in the flattest of free verse, and so very sure that they're not merely the centre of the universe but effectively the only people in it. Their lovers and wives are present only as bodies and have no existence otherwise. No wonder I was confused by and mistrustful of the arty guys I knew at university. They didn't think like human beings.

So far the only poem I like was written by a woman whose collection I already have. Though because I knew her personally, I'm still a tad ambivalent about her myself: Penny basically thought the same way the guys did and was therefore quite at home in a world that made no sense to me. It took me decades to realize that naturally it made no sense to a gay woman: its underlying principle- the primacy of sexual attraction to the Other- was simply foreign to my experience.

So I've just discovered the joys of Mapcrunch, that shows you random street views of random places. The Options button lets you choose specific countries and urban or indoor or whatever, though streetview's idea of urban is not mine. But it's amazing how much umm empty countryside there is in the world. If I leave the app to its own devices, all I see is fields and steppes and the occasional Malaysian highway. Did get a road in the Isle of Man once, which suggests to me that the Isle of Man really needs to attend to its infrastructure, because it looked like a waterlogged track through a wheatfield.

 Somewhere on ao3 is fanfic for Kipling's poem Tomlinson, in the same metre and rhyming scheme, which involves Satan/ St. Peter slash.

Sorry, didn't save the link. Found it while googling the poem in hopes of learning what the significance of Berkeley Square was. It seems that maybe Kipling was having a go at the arties of his time, but given how upscale the place has always been (Clive of India cut his throat there; Walpole and William Pitt the Younger and William Waldorf Astor lived there) it hardly sounds like a hotbed of conformist middle-class thinking.

Otherwise- I vaguely recall that when I read LotR in '02 my Ballantine copy of the middle volume gave up the ghost and I had to buy a new one. But I was sure I had vol. 3 intact. Only it's vanished as well, and of the original set only vol. 1 remains. I mean yes I have a duplicate RotK, but the typeface is tiny, and anyway I want my colourful covers back.

And of course, now that libraries have reopened for curbside pickup, two of my holds have come in. Am afraid to put RotK on hold while I read them in case I lose the momentum, but maybe I have to. Which of course is why I started a Kinsey Millhone mystery tonight.

The flowering bush next door, which I had to be reminded was a currant, sprang into flower overnight and has also spread much further than I had imagined. Caught a glimpse of it day before yesterday from the study window, white in the evening rain, but when I inspected it today the blossoms were ready to fall. NewNextDoors cut me a branch anyway from the slightly sturdier side, and one from the nearly in bloom plum, and they now perfume my kitchen.

The plum tree's trunk is just this side of the lot line but the branches have twisted so they're all on the other side. NNDs and I consulted about the back yard. I suggested, regretfully, that the  plum might come down without loss. It's too tall now to cut flowering branches from, and in a good year the fruit falls on the garage roof and rots the shingles. I shall miss it, of course, and its five-day sweetness, but this year is such a year of endings that it might as well go in the apocalypse along with everything else.

I never noticed the  plum blossoms, or the cherry's for that matter, until I got back from Japan in '96. That most liminal of years is what I think of when I remember white blossoms in the rain, and this year is another of the same sort, equally as unsettled and depaysee. The Toronto I came back to from Japan was not at all the Toronto I knew for forty years: was all unknown and unpleasant territory. (Red-neck premier, the likes of which red Tory Ontario had never seen before. Trump in miniature, and equally as disconcerting.) (Red Tories  are Conservatives with a conscience: middle of the road, the way we like them. Vanished breed now, of course.)

And this year is-- 

The Queen is preparing to ride down London Way.
Where will we all be on Coronation Day?

More mundanely, NNDs have a sonic raccoon scarer under the kitchen window, where raccoons were wont to poo, that seems to work, so I may put my own into the cherry tree and hope that will keep mama and babies out. Also they've gutted the kitchen, and discovered the mice and rat poo of decades under the counters and back of the drawers. Mice are no surprise, but I didn't know the rats had made it over there. 

It was snowing last week and my recycle bin was only half full, so I didn't put it out then, and two weeks ago my garbage bag was only half full, so I didn't put that out either. But now it's garbage-garbage night again and my bag is full and my nama gomi bag is full and I put them out and my bro and s-i-l weren't putting their garbage out and I'm desolate all over again. New next door has their lights on and did put their bin out, but no one answered when I rang the doorbell and when I called Howard to advise him that they don't have a green bin because the garbage men stole it, but they're quite welcome to use mine until the city gives them a replacement.

Dropped by bike store to buy a rear light that will stay on and ask about devices to pump tires that don't require upper body strength; was told that the latter existed but would cost me the price of several bikes and they'd be happy to pump them for me, then said they didn't need pumping. I know the rear one does because it has to be kept at 60 lbs per or else I can't heave the bike up the stairs, but I didn't insist. (There are lighter bikes around, I know, but the only kind that fit me are the Slovak behemoths that made even the prof of Islamic studies groan when he was hoisting it for me one day.) Tried several bike lights, none of which would fit on my carrier so I got one that wraps around the stem and that came in at $60 with the tax. I should have demurred but didn't. It's rechargeable, is why the price.

Since even in this laid-back town hand sanitizer is nowhere to be found, I bought the ingredients to make my own and shall do so once my elbows let me lift things again. My elbows don't like me typing this even, so it may take a while.

Came home to a letter from my investment advisor going 'there there' about panicked sell-offs. Can't think why he bothered, since I never sell off anything, but it was a nice thought.
( Wednesday meme hisashiburi ni )

Accomplished various mendokusai things I'd been putting off forever, or would put off if I wasn't forcing myself to act: cancelled the furnace inspection program for next winter because I don't feel like paying the $150 fee in March when both gas and hydro bills will still be heavy*; pumped bike tyres- I have to use my abdomen for this, like a weightlifter, because my elbows won't; went by laundromat to see if that's where I dropped my keys last week (it wasn't); got new keys made at Weiner's, and a new back light. And then, because being proactive puts me in a snit, screamed at a featherhead who'd parked her BMW in the bicycle lane on Bloor until she finally moved, averring that I was insane. At that moment I probably was, and a good thing hand guns are not easily purchased in this country. I mean, I'd only have shot out her tyres, but that would have clogged up the bike lane even more. I begin to think the city has the right idea, raising the lanes to be flush with the sidewalk on the south side. Do it on both sides, and stop the entitled air polluters from being entitled.

* and went through three separate levels of personnel, all of whom asked me the exact same questions. Verify me once, fine, but verify me three times? Why?

Bro and wife have been moving boxes from their cellar to mine. Came down to get laundry and found my round coffee table's respective pieces assembled in the mddle of the room with three wooden kitchen chairs arranged around it. Maybe they're planning a tea paty?

They've been looking at apartments and condos gor rent, but thd agencies won't rent to them because they don't have pay stubs. Professionals don't, as a rule. They have tax returns and a quarter million cash on hand from the buyer's deposit, but the jobsworths want paystubs. This would seem to put a crimp in any retired person ever renting, to say nothing of students or immigrants.

Tendinitis has gone berserk in right arm and writing with left is beyond me. Hope tomorrow's acupuncture helps.

Wouldn't be the start of the month if I hadn't put on a kilo. But this time I've put on two kilos and am annoyed by it. Half is waterweight, of course- my feet feel tight in their skin- but the rest is I don't know what, though I suspect rice.

Current reading is far too heavy for the backpack, so I rousted out Janet Flanner's Paris was Yesterday, the columns she wrote for the New Yorker in the 1920s and early 30s. But it too is brittle and crumbling and I must find something more recent. I can't remember when I first read it: I want to say 80s but it may have been the late 90s. It's unlike other expat memoirs of Paris in the 20s because Harold Ross, bless him, specifically told Flanner to write about 'what's happening in Paris, not what you think is happening'. Which burst the insular NAmerican bubble right there and forced her to write about French people.

Her foreword does talk more about the expats, which you can't do without name dropping (the community was *small*, like it or not.) She was a friend of Hemingway's, which counts as a black mark in my books, but also Sylvia Beach and Gertrude and Alice, so good enough. But I'm more interested in her reportings of the French art and literature scene than of the American one, which has been done to death by devotees of St Ernest. Even if the main European artists and writers of the time are mere ghostly echoes now, names I may have heard in childhood, like Maeterlinck.

What tickles me, on a more personal level, is that her society notes from 1926 and '27 mention several aristocratic ladies- Herminie duchesse de Rohan, Anna de Noailles, Mathilde de Rothschild- that I put intact into one of my Papuwa/ Eroica fics, having completely forgotten their sources.

Incidentally, the current meds make for vivid if mundane dreams. But a recent one involved an exam for which I had to write several different Eroica fanfics, one of which I cast as a letter written in green ink and properly enclosed in an envelope.

Woke at 10 this morning, looked out window, and said 'Thank you, God', because streets and sidewalks were wet but bare even as a thin snow fell. 'Well, if this is the worst of the morning rush hour, I can bike.' And did, blissfully unaware that the storm had arrived later than forecast and this was just the beginning.

It snowed all day and when I came out at 6 the streets were packed down ice and the sidewalks packed down snow. So I walked the bike home. Ah for the days when I used to walk to and from work with no problem at all. I prudently stretched before setting out but that didn't stop my piriformis from curling into a tight aching ball of pain. Is there no cure for lower back pain?

I at least stopped at an infrequently visited Japanese restaurant en route that's been there under various names for at least fifteen years if not longer, and had two glasses of wine as well as quite passable sushi. But it was still a long slog home, even as the bike took most of my weight and kept the knee from protesting too much. Must stretch well tonight, though my experience is that long slogging walks aka exercise actually loosens things up. Whatever. Acupuncture tomorrow, and the rest of the day at home.

Oh the grateful warmth of a space heater in a chilly house. I won't even say 'on a chilly evening' because it wasn't all that much- certainly less than midday when I went out in fall jacket and wool scarf, and at once wished I'd either worn a fleecy as well, or just caved and put on my winter coat. And gloves. And rain gaiters, because the misty rain did succeed in getting me wet by the time I reached work.

But now I have heat without having to limp downstairs and turn on the furnace and then feel too hot in the night and not want to go down and turn it off again. I would never live in a smart house where I, or any random hacker, could regulate things from my phone. But I could really use one of those Japanese all-in-one units that heats, cools (or overcools), and dehumidifies the bedroom at need. Maybe if I win a lottery...

I'm reading Winter's Tale still, and only just realized why it has a hundred year break in the middle, and also that Halprin was writing about the year 1999 in the early 80s, but since it isn't the *real* New York it doesn't matter that the zeitgeist is all wrong. Oh, and did anyone call this a fantasy when it first came out or did they figure that since it was by a guy it must be Seeryus Littrachure?

Am also reading Once Upon a River, recommended by my Rivers of London FB group. Went very well with last Saturday's rain and cold, but I'm tired of rain and cold (after only two days of same) and reading has lagged. I am, in fact, unwilling to read on in either book, or to read anything else, which is why I finished nothing last week except a volume of double crostics. The draining sinuses and strangling cough don't promote enthusiasm either, but those aren't stopping for another two months so I'd better find enthusiasm somewhere.

Case in point: my travelling reading is a volume of Nagai Kafu's short stories, including the famous The River Sumida in the Seidensticker translation. I read that before I'd been to Japan and thought it well enough. After living in Tokyo, or to be more precise, after having been to the areas he talks about- Asakusa, San'ya, Hashiba- I'm enchanted by his deep sense of place. But then some article tells me that Kafu deplored the changes taking place in Tokyo at the time- the time being 1910, eighty years before my sojourn there, before the earthquake and the firebombing even. Makes one wonder what he actually liked: the flat low houses of the Edo period jumbled together on narrow lanes? Meiji photographs always make the town look unspeakably dreary, not to say muddy and/or dusty as per season. So at once I lose interest in Kafu's world.

Rightly so, perhaps. Here's an article about him, including good ol' Seidensticker echoing the sentiment that all the fun parts of Tokyo have disappeared, though Seidensticker's nostalgia is for the city that Kafu hated. Those two, going by Hoffman's account of Kafu and Seidensticker's accounts of himself, had an awful lot in common, with emphasis on the 'awful'.

(Yes, I know. What people are *like* has no connection whatever with what they can actually *do*. Except that with writers, unlike musicians and artists, yer basic small-souled meanness will show through, whatever they do.)

Thursday was sunny and dry and I didn't hurt. Friday was grey and humid and I was crippled. Yesterday was sunny and dry and I went for a walk. Today is grey and humid and I'm in the sideroom with hot beanbags for elbows and hips and knees. So it goes.

But yesterday I pumped up my tires (which I hate doing- see elbows, above) and rode those 20 pounds of batteries down to the recycle, so go me.

Elizabeth's Meat and Delicatessan was on Bloor near Brunswick, back in the dawn of time- the 70s- and stayed there for decades until it suddenly closed in 2005. And I mean suddenly: owner simply locked the store one night and didn't come back. The venue became a reasonable pub, but that too closed and was replaced with an El Furniture Warehouse, famous for its entrees all being 5.95. Never been in there because lineups of university kids, and anyway pub food, but I was hungry for meat at 4 pm yesterday (4:30 is my body's idea of the perfect time to eat dinner) and no regular restaurant was serving supper then. So.

Well, even half full it's LOUD because they keep the music turned to blast volume, and so dark you can't read the menu, so it must cater to beer drinkers who know what they want already. I moved to the one table by the window and had their club sandwich and sweet potato fries. The portions aren't large, which is hardly surprising, but also a blessing since most pub food leaves me feeling bloated. I wish it was a bit more stodgy elder friendly, but that's not likely. So if I get cravings, I shall have to train my guts not to get them until 5 p.m. at the earliest.

In the alley the buyers come and go
Talking of downspouts and subflooring and soffit and fascia and and and

Many agents showing many people the house next door. Buyers will learn the interesting acoustics of cheek-by-jowl downtown housing soon enough.

Accuweather confidently predictd thunderstorms at 2pm and were out by only an hour ie just as I was emerging from massage. Got soaked of course, but as the lightning came closer I ducked into the local KFC to wait it out. Which was fine: I'd been jonesing for hot chicken anyway. It's a combined Colonel's and Taco Bell, but the Taco Bell machinery was closed for servicing, as announced by a sign on the door, a sign at the cash, and the removal of the Taco Bell menu items from the overhead boards. This led to tantrums from a woman who came in after me, who ordered Fries Supreme and was aghast when the clerk said she didn't have them, pointing to the cash register sign. 'But why didn't anyone tell me!?' Stupidity I can bear, having stupid moments myself, but stupidity and rudeness is flat unnecessary.

Have been indulging in retail therapy of the online variety. The last three Rainy Willow manga are coming from Japan, sweet reminder of another and arguably better time. Then last night I stumbled on KateNepveu's post about embroidery sets. Incapable of learning embroidery from books, I've long been looking for another beginner's embroidery set of the kind I had ten years ago and never found again. But here's a woman in France who does pretty patterns and can send you whole kits, complete with wooden hoops (not plastic likemy present ones.) So a set of those is on the way, and maybe I'll learn at last how chainstitch and plain stitch are supposed to work.

She lives in the beautifully named region of Mauzé-sur-le-Mignon in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. I'd never heard of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, not surprisingly, since it didn't exist before 2014. Takes in a huge chunk of the s-w, from Poitiers down to Bayonne, taking in my old stamping grounds of Pau. Being unable to remember where Vieux Aquitaine had been, I googled and discovered this lovely piece of background:

The region's interim name Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-Charentes was a hyphenated placename, known as ALPC, created by hyphenating the merged regions' names – Aquitaine, Limousin and Poitou-Charentes – in alphabetical order.

In June 2016, a working group headed by historian Anne-Marie Cocula , a former vice president of Aquitaine, proposed the name "Nouvelle Aquitaine". The decision came after the popular favorite, "Aquitaine", faced resistance by regional politicians from Limousin and Poitou-Charentes. The other popular favorite, "Grande Aquitaine," was rejected for its connotation with a feeling of superiority. Alain Rousset, president of the region, concurred with the working group's conclusion, reaffirming that he considered the acronym "ALPC" no choice at all. For those deploring the loss of "Limousin" and "Poitou-Charentes", he noted that the predecessor region of Aquitaine subsumed the identities of the Périgord or the Pays Basque, which did not disappear during its 40 years of operation.

"The other popular favorite, "Grande Aquitaine," was rejected for its connotation with a feeling of superiority." Oh dear, oh dear.

My mother regularly gave me books for birthdays and Christmas and they were regularly books I enjoyed. Besides odd Louisa May Alcotts (Jack and Jill, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom) there were odd L.M. Montgomeries. Of course I had Anne of Green Gables, but none of the later Anne books- though my sister the TV child, who didn't read much, somehow wound up with Rilla of Ingleside. But the two I had, and reread to the point of memorization, were Jane of Lantern Hill and Mistress Pat. The latter was second in a series, the first of which I didn't get round to reading until two or three years ago. The lack of background didn't stop me liking the sequel, though. I think it was largely because Pat's reaction to places and houses was very much like mine, even if couched in higher-flown language than I would ever use, and with a degree of anthropomorphism I would never apply to any house at all. (Houses may have a feel, but they never have *feelings*.)

Probably I should have read that first book, which suggests a degree of pathology to Pat's dislike of change that's a bit toned down in the second book. Hating it when old trees fall down feels natural to me; having fits and cows when your father shaves off his moustache is a touch much.

I've no idea what happened to those good quality hardback children's books. Since not a few of them made it to here, I can only assume I ditched the others at some point or other, possibly even before we moved out of Bedford where most of them lived. But I found a copy of Mistress Pat in some front lawn library or wee free, and at a loose end on Sunday, read it in a sitting.

I'd have thought both Jane and Pat impervious to the Suck Fairy, as Anne was not. Ha. Not Pat, for sure. It's not the tweeness of language this time, as it was in the Anne books, but the sheer passive-aggressive Mr. Woodhouse nature of Pat's insistence that absolutely nothing be altered on the farm, and her languishing and dumps when unavoidable changes happened. Dear lord, what a horror of a character. And alas for the insight of maturity.

Ah, lovely window AC. How your cold air restores sanity to my life. Not that it's that hot: the humidex may be over 30 but the temps aren't. However the lows are not comfortable sleeping lows, so I shall be self-indulgent in my old age.

Tree guy came today to see about reducing the shade canopy on my front lawn. I mean, I like that curtain of green between me and the neighbours, but let's face it, the ironwood's lower branches have spread past a joke. Also they've shoved the birch tree out, so one of the birch's trifurcates leans at a precarious angle into the street above the parked cars. Had I my druthers, that westernmost portion would all come down, leaving the remaining two trunks upright. Alas, trees planted by the city are city trees, and the city is cracking down HARD on the companies that are allowed to trim them. This is because several of the companies that are actually licensed to care for city trees were being egregiously fraudulent: like the one a few years back that told Prof of Islamic Studies they needed to trim his modest magnolia, and then snipped off a foot of branch, end work order. So now all cutting work gets inspected and major alterations must be approved in advance.

Though god knows, I keep seeing what look like healthy trees being taken out, most recently and disastrously outside my coffeeshop, where the maple across the street used to provide flickering shade for the patio and the front section, which are now exposed to the pitiless morning burn. True, I always sit at the back because even with the maple, the glare at the front was too much for my cataracts. But the light quality has all changed and it makes me sad.

I'm reasonably sure that Cohen and Masters will give me far more sun than I want at the front of my house, though they're not proposing anything as drastic as the chop they did on the cherry tree four years back. And as the cherry has rebounded from that, so I fancy will the ironwood.

1. Went sockless in sandals today. Sandals kept falling off feet which is odd, because these are the sandals I wear sockless in the mornings when I get breakfast, and they certainly don't fall off my feet then. Maybe feet shrink through the day?

2. FFL comes up with a lovely recipe for something called Eton mess, which is whip cream, sugar soaked strawberries, and broken meringue. Contains a recipe for meringues as well. But 'bake for 90 minutes to 2 hours'? That's an awfully long time.

3. Erranded along the unholy mess that is Bloor St these days. Unholy because construction at ex-Honest Ed's is a 12 hours a day, six days a week affair (running waaaay behind schedule is my guess) that has closed a lane on Bathurst and that spreads either mud or dust depending on weather. It hasn't rained in three days, so it's Sahara sandstorm dust. And then they're replacing Bloor's sewer pipes on the other side of Bathurst, so Bloor is also down to two lanes. However, I found a lightweight jackety thing (pure rayon, probably) that covers most of my arms, to shield me from the hot hot sun at work. The hapi coats of yesteryear are too thick and don't cover my forearms. Wish I could find more lightwight long-sleeved cotton shirts, because those work best.

4. Because it's now humid and I sweat in humidity and I can't get rid of that year-round smell in one underarm (but only one) even with carbolic soap and rubbing alcohol, I broke down and tried deodorant again. Organic only, because commercial makes me sweat more and smells vile. But! The no perfume brand is sticky and, well, has a smell. The Ombra roll-on is perfumed. And the organic aloe vera one is sticky *and* so highly scented it gave me a headache. I mean, being a super smeller means I don't have Alzheimers, which is a blessing, but it does have its drawbacks.

5. Washed flannel duvet at the laundromat and flannel pillowcases here. Out with the warm, in with the cotton. Summer.