Off the Cliff

Age is upon me. Last night I did what my s-i-l so often complains happens to her: sank into a pleasant post-Christmas dinner alcoholic sleep at 11 and woke, irrevocably, at 1 am. Usually I then sink back into the flannel-covered arms of Morpheus, but not last night. Looked at the dark, did exercises in bed, changed bedrooms, looked at the dark some more, turned on light and read Lies Sleeping until I began yawning, turned off light and slept to 10. And then turned over and slept another two hours. So the day was a quarter gone by the time I got up.

I'd taken prophylactics against the usual fallout from excessive wine, but my system still didn't want to eat much. Crackers and Brie and a hard boiled egg were my brunch and tea. However, I'd bought a mini-turducken that had been thawing in the fridge the requisite 2-3 days so I had to cook that up. Mini turducken is stuffed with Italian sausage which is the second reason (price is the first) I shall never buy another. I am left with a fair quantity of Meat- and pretty dry meat at that- which might go well minced with celery and ginger and bok choy. Stuffing birds one into the other is simply not the best way to cook said birds.
( Oh, it's Wednesday again )

My copy of The Mortal Word arrived today, five and half weeks instead of the usual five and a half days after it was mailed. Am much relieved; the PO has been known to generate spontaneous black holes.

Otherwise we stagger through the last eight working days till Christmas. It is not I who am working ten hour shifts without breaks, presumably voluntary; and I hope those who are have a lovely ten day break. God knows they deserve it.
( Can I even remember what I've read? )

After this morning's snowflurries melted in the grateful sun. Wind strong but still, the sight of blue sky counts for much. Am still exhausted after only a few hours' work, which may be age or cold or the psychic fallout of extremely unhappy knees. Occurred to me that paradoxically, joints hurt less when I was living on muscle relaxants and maybe I should try them again, but all that accomplished yesterday, when I wasn't working, was a nap mid-afternoon.
( Memeage )

Slippery slushy and unpleasant, but may melt by tomorrow.

Knees grind and back hurts but core strengthening seems to have done some good since last year.

Had to do childcare for a meeting, or otherwise I'd have been home by the time the snow started.

Goldenhand has alternating chapters and in my current fuzz I can't keep track of two story lines. Maybe I should just read each line consecutively.

FB RoL community reminds me that Peter wanted to be an architect, which Watsonianly explains why all the clear as mud descriptions of various buildings and housing estates. Doylist me still thinks it's just Aaronovitch having a hard-on for architecture. Since I'm as architecture-onchi as can be imagined, especially anything recent (my criterion is always 'does it work?' and the answer 90% of the time is 'no way, mate') this is decidedly a bug, not a feature.

Gave in and Googled The English Patient, which saves me having to read it. Evidently the book is different from the film, but still is all about People Being Stupid because of their great passions. That's a pet hate of mine onaccounta not believing in great passions in the first place. It's like saying that you had to do something because you were stoned out of your gourd. That's not a reason, let alone an excuse, let alone an admirable excuse, for destructive behaviour.

And my suspicions of Ondaatje's women seem to have been justified. From a Goodreads review:

I’m going to venture out of my normal review style here, and instead do a Q & A with Hana (the, erm... MC, maybe?!)

Me: *puzzled stare* Moving on: Why do you seem to have a pseudo-sexual relationship with all the men in this book, despite the fact that one is purporting to be "like an Uncle" and another is entirely bedridden??

Hana: Well, I am a woman surrounded by men, need I say more?? *shoulder shrug*

Say no more.

I suppose healing takes energy; or maybe allergies drain it. But I seem capable of two hours' usefulness a day and not much more. However, since one hour today was devoted to cleaning out and rebagging several inches of sodden and misplaced garbage from the dilapidated wooden bins at work, I am content. Didn't get it all, especially the stuff that's so casually tossed *behind* the bins, because I can't reach and bend that far or pull out the plastic bins in the way. But I got enough, before it freezes in place, and that's what I was aiming for.

Also Plague has thinned the kiddy ranks at work so I don't even feel the necessity to go in and be a body on Horrible Thursday tomorrow. (Horrible because it's granola for snack day and the clean-up for that requires much more than the half hour allotted to it by people who have never done clean-up.) Unless Plague hits one of the staff as well...
( And in my enforced idleness: reading Wednesday )

I like to read, yes, but this is the second weekend I've spent indoors reading while reprising the last act of La Traviata, and it's getting old. Although I suppose if I wander into Old City Hall in a week's time, hacking, sneezing, strangling and weeping the way I have been this last week, they'll send me back home pronto.

And I did finish Sabriel in a day, which I've intended to reread for years and of which I remembered absolutely nothing from 2003. So there's that.

My mother had an unparalleled genius for losing things in her bed, or rather, in her half of the bed. Cigarette packs, library books, spoons, newspapers... I may have done her one better last night. Was sleeping, woke up to cough, nightguard flew out of my mouth and landed on the floor, Buggrit said I and went back to sleep. This morning I looked for it on the floor. Not there. Looked under the overhang of the futon platform drawers and the unclosing bottom drawer of the Ikea chest. Not there. Pulled chests of drawers out from the wall, releasing dust bunnies, which vacuumed, but no nightguard. Pulled platform drawers out, ditto ditto and ditto. Shoved Ikea chest to the wall, pulled heavy cumbersome platform into middle of room, peered at other side that sits next to wall. Nowt.

Ah well, thought I, there goes the surplus cash I'd thought to spend on a stove. Sighed, dragged futon higher on platform because it had worked its way down last time I flipped it, checked to see how it lined up with the top edge: and there on the floor at the head of the bed was my nightguard. Futons, so inert when you want them to move, so movable when you want them to stay put. Then shoved everything back where it belongs with my poor poor elbows and wrists, turned on air purifier, and took heavy dose antihistamine because dust bunnies in October are simple overkill.

However: room is now vacuumed and dusted and I have my nightguard back.
( Reading Thursday )

I know that it doesn't matter how much sleep I get, if I have to be up before I want to be I'm a zombie the rest of the day. Yesterday's dentist appointment wasn't too bad, being at 10:30, and I took a codeine for the aches which saw me practically dozing off in the chair. But today's 6:30 waking, even with a full ativan and bed at 10 and sleep in the cool sheets of the front room, saw me in extreme blur through the middle of the day. Not helped by cocktail and wine at dinner. Am currently quite removed from reality.

Though last night- the izakaya near me advertises 3 oz martinis, and I had two of those plus some very good gyoza, and wasn't even remotely as tiddly as one guaranteed 2 oz martini left me tonight. So I'm sadly afraid that the local izakaya lies in its teeth, in spite of the gyoza and the close-captioned Japanese yakuza movies. Sad.
( Belated reading meme )

It helps to look at your bookcases occasionally, especially in rooms one doesn't ordinarily read in where the flotsam ends up. And so I am happily reunited with my childhood copy of The Divine Comedy, the one with the Doré engravings. (Well, not actually *mine*- it was my parents'. But the one I read in childhood, yes.)

I don't know how good the translation is, but I've bounced off both the Ciardi and the Pinsky, both in verse form, so a nice unrhymed version might work better.

And aside from that, if it's so bleeding cold, why are there still mosquitoes in my house and why are they still biting me?,

We survived the 70-80 kmh (45-50 mph) gale without losing power, go us. I did walk the bike to Fiesta in the working-up-to-a-gale high winds in order to get bread and raspberries, and let said winds blow me back. Very dusty by the newly landscaping corner lot. Downpour later on must have settled the dust, temps went from 31 to 24, and are now headed to a seasonable 8C overnight: though possibly another cold front may blow through before that happens.

Fell asleep last night round about 7 or 8 with lens in and light on. Single glass of wine doesn't usually have that effect on me. Pulled myself back down to sleep whenever I came to the surface in order not to have a troublesome three or four hours of wakefulness, because these days it might have turned into 'irrevocably awake from 1 a.m. to 9.' Instead I was up finally at 6 something, did my exercises, and got to the coffee shop before 8 when the pastry was still warm, and still being brought up from the kitchen, and the place was empty. Dispiritingly, it starts to fill precisely at 8 when I shall never again be awake to repeat today's performance.

Reading Hurston's observations of 1930s Haiti is also depressing. Should skip that section and go back to the voudoun chapters, but my completist conscience won't permit. The voudoun section has its own blinkety-blink passages, like the one where a master is being interred and the title passed on to his successor. Hurston has no problem with the bit where the dead master is asked if he agrees to the succession and the corpse sits up and nods, but she's totally kerblonxed by an overwhelming sense of evil that attacks the assembly a few moments later, source unknown. 'American readers may not credit this'- the sense of evil- but are expected not to turn a hair at corpses that sit up. Yes, I've read similar things about Tibetan lamas as described by Americans, but enh- you expect that sort of thing from Buddhists.

A week from the solstice and the sun sets at 7:30. Melancholy. Though it took me 60 years to start disliking the early dark; in my heedless fully-sighted youth I biked up and down and east and west after dark without a qualm.

My window AC is in the right hand dormer window, so the cold air blows down the hallway and drops down the stairwell- hurray for physics!- and renders my downstairs blessedly cool when I come into it from the unseasonable Florentine-related mug. (Every time I see that name I think it's about the city, and it never is. Also how did English ever manage to turn Firenze into Florence? That's even more tone-deaf than most of our transcriptions.

The Indian Gardener's Son's house is only fitfully occupied and the grass of the front lawn is lush and rank and a good foot high (30.5 cm). Only, this evening as I passed, someone who looks very much like the Indian Gardener himself was out mowing it, while a young man who is very definitely not the Indian Gardener's Son raked it all up. And I thought, really they should have used sheep, only sheep shit as well. And aren't allowed in the city.

My current reading is Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring, Hurston's Tell My Horse, and (compulsively since last night) Ng's Under the Pendulum Sun. Without getting into actual horror, three more oogey-making books I'm not likely ever to read together again. Sun is the oogiest by far, possibly because the language reads ever-so-slightly off to me. 'Bored from'? I put this down to Ng being from Hong Kong, which may also be why her Fae also feel just that little bit out of true from the British tradition-- the later one, Lud-in-the-Mist and Jonathan Strange. Of course, taking them from a profoundly Christian and missionary pov *is* a departure. Few people who write Victorians seem to consider religion at all, but for a large number of people then it *mattered*.

Comment on a DW friend's post introduces me to a book called Fluent Forever, which contains the clever idea of using visual flash cards and making eg 'le chat' a picture of a cat on fire because all masc nouns are on fire, while feminine ones are ice or what you will. This would work perfectly for French, whose genders I can never remember though I know the nouns pretty well. I hesitate to buy the book itself on account of it being akin to buying grammars and then never reading them, but I'm intrigued.

Mind, a hanzi book from a decade ago had a mnemonic for remembering the tones as well as the meanings of the chracters, but I never found it workable. Really I should get back to my Japanese and once again get kanji and vocab into order. Though I wonder if FF has tips for Japanese and Chinese as well.

Reading has been more Christies: Murder on the Links, Five Little Pigs (where I'd in fact forgotten whodunnit), and Sleeping Murder, Miss Marple's last but not, fortunately, because she dies in it. Witches Abroad for fun.

Still reading Zora Neale Hurston's experiences with Haitian voudoun, interrupted by stomach-churning accounts of Haitian revolution. Taking Rainy Willow 16 very slowly. Have also one volume of Dinotopia, which is charming but simple-minded.

I was very chuffed to get An Unkindness of Ghosts on my ereader at last, only to discover it's SF set on a generation ship whose society is modelled, as far as I can see, on the atrocious plantation one of the Old South. Better go back to Nalo Hopkinson because Hurston's Haiti was enough for me, thanks.

Grey, overcast, cool, with stray whiffs of wood smoke on the evening air. Jacket weather. Still humid, so that joints continue to twinge. Another day of this and then we return to our regularly scheduled hot, muggy, thunderous and humid summer for at least another week. Or more, if some storm mass doesn't move out of the way.

I so want autumn to come.

Phone has been giving me messages about battery over-heating, turn off at once. Phone is not long for this world. 'Mine's at least as good as done/ And I must get a London another one.'
( Brief reading Thursday )

Got to work and back without being drenched in monsoon rain. Otherwise, day was all monsoon rain with intermissions. Final monsoon rain happened as a brilliant sun was shining.

Three of my summer pants are ripped at the seams. One is mendable; the other two not, though since they're twenty and fifteen years old respectively, they've had good innings. But if only they'd lasted another month...

The Ghost Bride caters to ang moh far more than Zen Cho does. This has the effect of making Zen Cho feel more authentic than The Ghost Bride which is of course not fair at all. But my copy has a purple 'Heather's Picks' stamp actually printed into the cover, which strikes me as both telling (it's like an Oprah fave) and excessive (because Heather Reisman is not Oprah, thank you very much.)

Jeanette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun.

Of course, the cover is purple, not black and gold, is why I never trust my memory.

There are many advantages to baths over showers- loosening of muscles, ease of washing feet, ease of shaving legs, general well-being from lying in water up to one's neck. One more advantage for me is that it gives me an opportunity to brush my teeth. Of course, I could do it in the half hour I save when having a shower, but then I don't want to. Whereas running a bath requires me to be in the bathroom to monitor depth and temperature, with nothing else to do. So yeah, I can then pick and floss and electric brush for two minutes, with no feeling of time wasted.

(Monitoring depth and temp is needed because I can't actually get into a bath of my preferred hotness. Evidently blood never reaches my feet because they're ice cubes always, and never more so than when dipping into a hot bath. So it has to be merely warm to start, and not too deep, so that I can fill it up with hot water once I'm in.)
( Memeage )

The moment I think ends tomorrow with a humidex of 31, but one takes what one can get, even if it feels a little odd without fans on in every room and the window AC at night. Having been hot and dry for the better part of a month, the weather is now wet and stormy, which makes accomplishment a tad difficult. *Maybe* Monday I'll get up to the Special Shoe Store amid Eglinton's chaos and see if they have wide-fitting running shoes. Or get all the cloth recycling down to Dufferin and College. After that, it's rain all week.

The ins and outs of e-readers are beyond this techno-peasant: whether a book is Kobe platform or Kindle platform or if there's a platform that will read Kobe/ Kindle books (I doubt it) or what. This is what keeps me from buying e-books of authors I might otherwise like to support who only publish in e-format. However, there's my tablet's Libby app that lets me read e-books from the library, and that is why I'm reading, or in some cases re-reading, Zen Cho, starting with Spirits Abroad. I read some of these stories online but they seem to have been edited since then, or rewritten for the book. For sure I don't remember the disquieting gastronomic details in The House of Aunts, and I think I would have.

Otherwise I'd be continuing with Poirots, but After the Funeral is impossible in e-book (too many names all at once: I need to flip back) and when I started Poirot Investigates, the first thing I get is (doubtless deliberately overdone) Orientalism and precious jewels that were once an idol's eyes etc. And right after is 'It was delivered by a Chinaman!' and 'I got them from a Chink.' The latter may be Christie saying something about the American speaker, but the former is Christie being of her generation. So I shall stick to Zen Cho for the moment, possibly alternating with Pratchett, partly because Cho makes for interesting dreams if read before bedtime and partly because my tablet doesn't travel.

Clearly I've read too much Christie because I spotted the murderer in the latest one at once. Not the duplicitous, mercenary, womanizing, Thoroughly Bad Lot, of course. It was the diffident well-behaved young man, the one who *didn't* at once tell the heroine that Bess you is my woman now, which is what a proper man would do. 'The moment I saw you I knew you were mine' is a line that turns up rather too often in Christie's work. I suppose she thought that sort of thing would sell? I suppose that sort of thing did sell?

But if we're doing autre temps, autre moeurs, a 1938 review of Poirot's Christmas stated that "the business of the appalling shriek will probably make no mystery for the average reader". Oh yes it will. I'm still not sure what the solution of that is, when what was evidently common knowledge 80 years ago has completely vanished.

Will also disagree with the contemporary TLS reviewer who avers that "Poirot in his retirement is becoming too much of a colourless expert. One feels a nostalgic longing for the days when he baited his 'good friend' and butt, Hastings, when he spoke malaprop English and astonished strangers by his intellectual arrogance." I'm reading a Hastings mystery now and lord, the man is a stick.

Sat on my side bedroom reading glasses and broke them. They were the good reading glasses ie they fit and were (once) sturdy. The front bedroom and study glasses are neither, and I've gnawed on their arms a bit. (cough) Do not want to import the downstairs glasses because I know I'll take my backpack glasses out at some point to read instructions and then forget to put them back. Also the kitchen reading glasses seem to have vanished somewhere.

Must find a dollar store that has as good reading glasses as the one that closed. And buy another kitchen wall clock because this one eats batteries at the rate of one every three months.

All these Miss Marples, especially the later ones, make for dispiriting reading as she becomes older and more achy and rheumatic and can't walk up hills anymore. In a world where old is 70 ('well he was 72, his death was to be expected') and 80 is Methusalistic. Yes, times have changed, but *I* am achy and rheumatic and can't walk up hills anymore.

The expert last week listed, as he must, all the possible side-effects of knee operations, starting with 'you'll lose sensation just below your knee' to 'we might have to amputate.' The killer, however, is his saying that a replacement might ease the IT band but will not help the piriformis or hip flexors at all. Well, those are what's crippling me at the moment, so we've postponed everything another six months after which I'll have a hip xray to see what's happening there.

A brief respite from hammer heat and soupy humidity: oh lovely highs, not lows, of 24C; oh lovely window fans, not window ACs which grow a little wheezy after being on 48 hours straight. A day or two of breezy blue and white, and then back to our regularly scheduled summer. Yesterday, called in for an hour so a replacement could go home and get his pain meds, had me out in the hammer-heat of the playground, suffering light-headedness and nausea. Hope I need not do that again soon.

No point in doing reading reports. Have read another bunch of Christies, most recently The Body in the Library whose solution makes no sense to me in retrospect, ten hours later. Umm- Crooked House, Peril at End House, Three Act Tragedy, Mrs. McGinty's Dead, Dead Man's Folly, from what I remember of this last week.

Wednesday's massage loosened me up even more and the results stayed through today. It was also $15 cheaper than the weekend, but next week sees me at home Wednesday having my ducts cleaned, as Tuesday sees me up at Godawful o'clock for an appointment with the knee specialist. Still, maybe something will open. Or maybe I'll just ghost my assembly-line physiotherapist who's been quite happy to treat my piriformis for eight months without worrying at my lack of progress, and who never informed me that I had low back pain last year; it took Sabina to tell me what it was and what the cure for it is.

It's not yet too hot to use the study and the study's computer, but I already have the hot weather Don'wannas. Me for the side bedroom's fan and yet more Agatha Christies. A chacun son goût: an invalid friend spends her days happily watching nature documentaries, whose fascination I cannot understand at all. She, par contre, said 'I read a mystery once and then couldn't understand why I'd done it.'

Though it's odd that reading about murder should have become such a commonplace and unremarkable pastime. 150 years ago the idea would have been considered batshit. When *did* that change anyway? Was it Holmes who made it respectable?

I will note that things keep turning up on the floor that should not, by any means short of an earthquake, have landed on the floor. I hope I haven't developed a poltergeist.

Bicycling about the Annex and looking at the massive trees still lying about after being uprooted a week ago is a sobering sight. Most of them are thick-trunked things, replete with leaves, and all of them are rotten inside. Makes one wonder about the local four-storeys high flora.

The cherries are ripe and the raccoons are back. One was splayed, uncomfortably I would have thought, on the ridge of the neighbours' garage this evening. I wondered if it was ailing, and hoped it wouldn't die where it was. But no, it was just waiting for the rest of the family to show up.

Google's tablets give you suggested new stories. Wish they'd get with the program and realize that I don't want to read anything about sports, or anything to do with Meghan Markle *or* Princess Diana, or the weather in Edmonton or the newest Android phone and especially not an article first published in Lord Almost's National Post. (Lord Almost is Conrad Black and there's a long story about the soubriquet which I won't bore you with.)
( The usual memeage )

All those Christies I copped last week for a buck apiece turn out to be Miss Marples, except for a single late Tommy and Tuppence. Mind, I chose titles whose plots I couldn't immediately remember, which may be why there are no Poirots. But still...

Open mic at many neighbourhood venues today. There was one instance of some kind of Andean flute, very pleasant, but the rest were the usual off-key nasal C&W or LOUD amplified cacophanous rock. The latter in the laneway behind the house, necessitating closing windows. Why does no one sing ballads or folk anymore, or even the harmonious rock of my youth?

...as that grand melancholic Dr. Johnson said. I am solitary, so I pulled me out of my weekend funk and decided to go vote. I've never seen this number of advanced polls availaable before: I had my choice of three locales, all open from 10 to 8, ten days before the election itself. Are they anticipating a mass turnout? With Donald Trump Light running for premier, better believe it.

Anyway, as I had library books to return, I opted for the Native Canadian Cenre on Spadina, a hop skip and jump from the Spadina library. Housed in an Edwadian mansion, it has oak floors and stairs and is much nicer than the abandoned cafe at Davenport and Avenue Rd that was my other close choice. What I hadn't figured on was that the poll would be on the second floor in the large meeting room. It's already two sets of stairs to get into the building, then interior stairs that turn twice to get to the second floor, then three stairs up along the corridor itself. Them Edwardians did like their bitsy-pieceys; or liked their servants to trot about the bitsy-pieceys, whichever.

The joke about me being solitary is this: as I was tooling down to Bloor, I passed Gabbly's father pushing him in his stroller. 'Trying to get him to sleep so I can unload the car,' he said wanly. This is about the right time for G's nap, and if he's in a daycare stroller he falls asleep and stays that way, but today he was in weekend mode, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and gabbling away cheerfully as is his wont when he isn't screeching inconsolably. I left them to it. Then as I was rounding the parkette I ran into the Twins en famille, parents, older bro, and large dog. Twin A and older bro had white faces from that very effective, very natural, but virtually unspreadable sunscreen. Twin B did not. I can't tell the twins apart unless they're wearing their daycare shoes (and neither can anyone else, pretty much) but I have my ideas which one Twin B was, because one of them is natural resister and one isn't. And then, at the poll itself, one of the scrutineers was a mother from twenty years back or more. So a far more social morning than I'd expected.

This last weekend of May was, as expected, hot, though cooler today than it will be tomorrow. Is also Doors Open, and as expected, I gave the whole thing a miss and not just because of low back tsuris. There's a lot of refurbished factories on display this time round, repurposed as art studios and film makers' labs and things I'm not much interested in. I'm happy to see the inside of houses, but architecture qua architecture is very much not my forte.

So I washed the flannel sheets and did a white wash and ploughed grimly throuh some more of All is Fair to get it out of the way finally; then tossed a coin. One more chore to justify my existence. Vacuum downstairs? Wash kitchen floor? Trim hedge? I trimmed the hedge, as being longer overdue than the others- though the others, being overdue, annoy me more. I should be chuffed that I could heft the electric clippers without shoulders and/ or elbows complaining loudly, as in the past, or even back complaining about the bend and pick up part. Maybe the core strengthening is happening after all. I expect to hurt a lot tomorrow, but I have acupuncture in the evening, so perhaps all will be well.

And then in a kind of 'I don't see me doing this' fashion, I vacuumed the front hallway, which at least disposed of all that rock salt that got tracked in six weeks ago during the ice storm. Yes, I meant that about overdue.