Off the Cliff

A weekend of dramatic! black and grey and white clouds that, oddly, produced nothing, not even a cold front. Yes, is measurably cooler than in some forgotten Before (last weekend, maybe?) but is still muggy humid. Will take humidex of 29 over the real thing, whatever.

Someone on the FFL talking about cats and dogs and how he isn't a dog person. I thought I wasn't either: cats all the way even if I only ever owned one myself. My mother wouldn't let us have pets, saying-- probably with justification-- that she'd wind up taking care of it. But I suspect that she, like her twin sister, was ailurophobic, and if we'd wanted a dog we might have had one. We didn't,  of course. Once I moved away from home, everybody had cats: they were part of the furniture; and nobody had dogs because you can'thave them in apartments. Couldn't understand Peter Wimsey going on about how, umm, unheimlich cats were, like bells and mirrors. 'Doesn't do to think too much about them.' Cats are as domestic as a dinner plate and Sayers was on crack.

Yes well. It's been a decade or more since I had to do with a cat of any sort, bar the Local Playwright's moggy who used to sit on my front porch chair when I had a front porch chair,  and who was certainly not sociable. Have discovered that I'm slightly allergic myself and lord knows my breathing is compromised enough by a gas stove. The neighbourhood cats of yesteryear are now all kept indoors except rare exceptions like Barton (Old Deuteronomy) Cat, and everybody got dogs during lockdown. And now, when I pass the occasional cat, I find myself agreeing with Lord Peter,  though it pains me to do so. Yes, there's something off about cats. Maybe it's the same as birds. I *know* that thing used to be a dinosaur and I don't like it. St. Francis can have them. And while I doubt my DNA encodes any memory of sabertooths, I don't feel comfortable with them either.

(Possibly, just possibly, I believe dogs are naturally well-meaning but dumb, and any aberrations are down to human mistreatment, while cats are naturally intelligent and their motives inscrutable. This in spite of having known any number of dumb as rocks ginger males.)

Putting -ai in the search bar doesn't get rid of AI results. Putting a swear word in does, though the results lean heavily to reddit.

My bribe from DoFo has not yet arrived and the gov't webpage which previously told me it was in the queue now rejects the last four digits of my SIN. Or maybe my postal code. Whatever, it won't tell me the status of my bribe.

Being in the middle of a trade war evidently means I must now keep my glasses in my coat pocket when I shop in order to check provenance. I believe I bought produce from Türkiye today, which is not preferable to the USA on any front except the not-USA one.

Snow yesterday was probably freezing rain to judge by the state of the sidewalks up the street. Many households salted, including me; many did not, including my northern neighbour. Some of it melted in the above freezing temps today, and will turn into glare ice as the cold front moves in overnight. In earlier times the yoyo temperatures of February happened at the end of the month, but not anymore.

As always when reading Christie, I'm confounded by her definitions of 'old and moribund' as well as 'so long ago no one can remember.' Doddering oldsters of 65, and eighteen years being 'time that the memory of man runneth not.' This undoddering septuagenarian retains a perfectly clear memory of 2006 and rather wishes she didn't. I might cut some slack for British people growing up in the first half of the last century with its doubtless lamentable diet and habits, that might render you old at 60. But eighteen years, *especially* if you're older, is last month, at a stretch.

Then again, there's those memes of how everyone in the 50s looked so much older than their twenty-some actual ages. It's been explained by the fact that everyone smoked, which will certainly do it to you.

But while we're at it, I'm also kerblonxed at books labelled 'historical fiction' and set in... the 70s. I suppose the kneejerk definition of hist.fic is 'anything before I was born' but still. In the 70s, I wouldn't have called anything set in the 1920s historical fiction. History was Back Then, before the costumes and mores all changed. When it was truly another country, not this one in unfortunate clothing.

Warm weather doldrums. I should sweep up the linden's caterpillar-like seedlings before it rains and turns them to mush, but there's no rain forecast until maybe Monday. Instead I went out to the yuppie mommy coffe shop which now has one or two outdoor tables. Father and small son were sitting at one with tea and what looked like yoplait yoghurts, small person-sized. They went indoors to get a spoon, leaving their drinks and yoghurt on the table. Up comes yuppie mommy and *her* mommy and settle themselves at the table. Stark insensibility. Father and son come back and politely move their stuff to the uncomfortable Cape Cod chairs. Do Mommy mère et grandmère express any concern at all? They do not. Back when I was sitting the Magnificent Helen and her sister, I often wondered at the people her parents knew- academics and professionals all- and how one could begin to have a conversation with any of them. They simply didn't register as people to me, which I thought a failing on my part. Now I'm not so sure.

However, went down to the BoM to get small bills and found my account again swollen to unexpected sums. Some federal tax credit came in at well over what I'm used to; I wonder what happened to convince the Feds of my sudden poverty? But anyway I took out a wad of cash and distributed largesse to my regs: and the musician turns out to be Persian and ran through the names of the various stringed instruments for me, from his own two-string dutar up to six-stringed guitars. Then came home and bought a standing fan online because we're into that season and my bedroom fan will not stay together. Found a place that sells Holmes fans and hope it's as excellent as the one that died. Hope also that it's as easy to assemble because the Lasko fan I got last year was a bitch, however genki it may be in the breeze department. Lasko fans come with remotes and programs and displays and I don't want any of those. Equally I want a fan that makes white noise: none of your 'whisper quiets' for me. I sleep on the street side of my house. 

Thin snow falling all day but not sticking to the ground. Yesterday looked out the back window at the snow covered roofs, smelled the sweet tang of  wood smoke, thought how very December this March scene looked. But because the snow, whenever it fell- Friday, I guess, two weeks in a row- had disappeared from the sidewalks, out I went with my walker both days. Shopping, of course. Necessities, or what the mind conceives of as such: duck paté, pickled onions, rye bread, and then up to the wine store for a bottle of Chardonnay. Today over to the Palmerston greengrocers for raspberries, and a fried chicken sandwich at Mary Brown's (home grown Canuck Maritimes, infinitely preferable to KFC or Popeye's.) Moving does, yes, keep things limber(er) so must go on doing it. The left knee is beyond hope now, and odd things will tighten up elsewhere, but never the same things two days running, which I suppose is progress.

Beaver on through Palimpsest, getting the same odd oogies as I got from Edmund White's autobiography. You can't call it name dropping when the Names are actually people Vidal knew, and at least I can keep them straight because (unlike White) they're people I know of too. But the whole thing has a distinctly lowering effect. I'd prefer to keep on with When the Angels Left the Old Country, but that's tablet reading and my tablets keep runnjng out of charge. Yes, it would help if I read my ebooks on them instead of scrolling through Bored Panda for hours, which is what I do after I've been walking.

Yesterday was Pratchett's eight year yahrzeit and today is the third anniversary of our entry into the new world order. At least it's become familiar now, and has lost the bright strangeness of those first months. But with me the straitened Covid world is also inseparable from my straitened crippled world, even if three years ago I was much more able-bodied than I am now. I have to remind myself that I had the same lower back issues for years before anything blew up: always had to stretch out before getting on my bike, always had the same tightness in the hips. I just wonder if that's ever going away.

Sotheby's, or is it Christie's, is having a sale of woodblock prints. English prices are double what's being asked over here. The same Hasui I own is valued at £1000-2000 and might bid higher. This is nice should I ever want to sell through an English auction house, supposing I knew how, but disastrous for estate valuation purposes. Better gift them in good time.

The Colonnade in Toronto was an innovative piece of architecture when it first opened in the 60s. It was also on the walking route from my highschool to home so I spent a lot of time in its little shops, discovering a brave new world. The stretch of Bloor St it sits on is now a wall of condos and is also the beginning of Mink Mile. Tiffany, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Prada, Dior, and on and on. Fifth Avenue wannabe. Even in the oughties there were smaller stores there, but not any more. And all are equally gone from inside the Colonnade itself- the Paper Place, the Florentine Shop, the little theatre, even the Japan Society from later years. In the ground floor store that was once an upscale chocolatier is now a boutique that sells cashmere clothing. I might even think of buying some of their pieces but I'm sure they cost in the hundreds, and no one who sweats as I do should wear cashmere.

But it was to an upscale Lebanese restaurant in the Colonnade that petronia took me to dinner this evening. Reviews said the service was slow and it certainly was: our meal lasted three hours. Slow dining may be well enough for Europeans but Toronto bustles. Still it was amazingly good, especially the shish kebab (when it arrived, after two requests). I'm not much of a meat eater these days but the beef and lamb and chicken were all tender and filling. Lived up to the prices. We sat at the outdoor balcony overlooking the muted hum of Bloor St, the evening was unwontedly mild, and they had heat lamps as well. Much more congenial than the inside which was packed, musty (a neat trick with the amount of floor space), and LOUD, with the din of conversation vying with the music volume turned up to maximum. Out on the balcony one could even converse easily and converse is what we did. Haven't done that since last March ie the last time petronia was here. The days when I had a social life now seem as long ago as the days when I used to buy things at the little shops in the Colonnade.

I was never one for webcomics but I seem to have fallen for Questionable Content. Only I just realized that its large cast of characters and their complicated relationships- that I still haven't got straight onaccounta coming in at ep 200 or whatever-- feels exactly the same as the entries I read on my FFL or on various people's networks. Both are pixels on a screen involving people I (mostly) don't know, unless I've been reading them long enough to have a rough idea of who they are. Sometimes I'm reminded of that Jemisin story where people can only email each other but when the protag meets an actual person (I forget how) she disappears from the online universe. My universe has been virtually all-virtual for two and a half years now and I think it's messing with my thinking.

Meanwhile I have Michael Innes' first, Death at the President's Lodging, which I would never have suspected was about a university because I didn't think English universities *had* presidents. I wonder if Pratchett had this in mind when he wrote the early Unseen University where professors advance through murder. Even if not, it's unpleasantly reminiscent of the university gossip that reached even us undergrads back in the day: departmental feuds both inter and intra, back-biting and infighting and kimochi warui-ness all round. I could never have been an academic- too lazy, for one thing- but I begin to see in retrospect what was wrong with all my acquaintances who were or wanted to be. They might have been decent enough people to start with-- back in high school, maybe-- but departmental politics warped them very early on.

So I shall persevere with this, but on the whole I prefer Appleby in a country house setting.

Apropos of yesterday's furor, I wish I had made a note of the passage in one of the early Rivers of London novels where Peter remarks of black women's hair, that you do not touch it under any circumstances without permission, not if you're friends, not if you're sleeping together, not even if you're married. The same could be said about talking about it.

Otherwise very much not my circus, not my monkeys.

Because I come from the Before Times I have all sorts of stationery dating from the 70s and 80s or even before. It's usually envelopes, because I was most prolix in my letter-writing days. A lot if it is from France which makes, or made, lovely writing paper with a linen finish, and envelopes with patterned lining to match, and some of it I know was scented as well. Memory says my mother brought it back from her trips abroad, but memory is lying as usual, because she only went on one visit to Europe without us, in 1967, and I had this paper earlier than that.

In any case, I have a box of envelopes that I use for the tips I give to delivery people- restaurants and groceries and the like. I've been doing this for sixteen months now at the rate of once or twice a week, and you'd think I'd be reaching the bottom of the stash by now. But there always seems to be more, though eventually I'll have to use the elegant ones. But I see they still make the Florentine pattern I bought when I was 14:
https://www.nostalgicimpressions.com/Italian-Florentine-Stationery-Collection-s/189.htm

Hell, they still make sealing wax, and boy does that take me back.
https://www.lecritoireparis.com/en/23-sealing-wax

As ever, a crossword clue took me to Keats Ode to a Nightingale, which I'd somehow managed never to read even as I see it quoted all over the Victorian literary landscape. Then I wondered just what was so melodiously wonderful about nightingales, given how unmusical birds are in general. Googled and listened to a few videos of same. Nightingales sound like a clockwork something winding down. Keats must have been eating some high quality opium to get from that to 'full-throated ease.'

Never did care for birds much, actually. Even before I learned they were shrunk dinosaurs I felt there was something unheimlich about them.

Discover quite by accident (ie reading the instructions in the patients' manual) that one of the exercises I've been happily doing for months  (pulling bent leg back towards body while lying down) if done slightly differently (using a theraband to pull knee at a sharper angle than I can manage alone, thus to the point of pain) actually loosens the knee up wonderfully. Thus I was able to walk a whole two blocks today without spasms, something I haven't done since last year at least.

This is useful, because Covid cases are now over 1000 a day, first time ever, and even if hospitals stay open for elective surgery, I'm not sure I want to chance three days there and two weeks in a facility. Like, I'm sure the pandemic has nursing staff being a leetle more careful than usual, and doubtless the rehab places will be half empty as well, but. I never underestimate humans' capacity for doublethink, especially among people who work long shifts, and I saw how doctors in hospitals handled SARS back in '03 ie lightheartedly ignoring thir own rules, and I am not reassured.

Meanwhile the world is October brocade- old gold, rust, deep burgundy, yellow-green- under grey clouds with the smell of woodsmoke on the wind. Best time of year ever.

 Tomorrow is a holiday, even in these unusual times, so I had to go get my prescription  from Loblaws today. If I hadn't been crippled I'd have checked to see if there were frosted 40 watt bulbs in something less glarey than the 'daylight' ones I got last time. There are no incandescents to be had these days but maybe they make soft light halogens? Otherwise I have no quarrel with halogens or LEDs, which god knows are cooler in the summer, but the light is do ugly.

This week is looking to be a mad whirl of sociability, in that the electricians come Thursday, Friday I have an appointment to get the new Zen Cho from Bakka, and Saturday I have an appointment to get my library book. Life under lockdown: even if the province is in stage two opening, there's still no one to talk to.

Forecast is for 30C weather  right through the middle of July. Hurray for window AC and summer duvets, and the pleasant float in pleasant coolness every morning. The rest of the day is a loss, but at least there's the float. (Hadn't realized just how heavy the feather duvet is, and how it hurts my knee to kick it around as I roll to my other side during the night. Also its damnable tendency to fold up so that after I'm on my other side it somehow becomes triangular, and I flail in vain with my owie elbows looking for the fourth corner.

Being on the second floor when a skunk blows in the side alley is bad, but nothing like being in the basement. I thought it might actually have got into the house. Clearly even my new windows leak air, and let air in.

Cannabis oil has worked once, done nothing the second time, and put me to sleep every time thereafter, is why I was out from 5 to 7 this evening.

Have done little these hols either because things are closed or it hurts too much to move and reading in the bedroom, though it leaves me hurtier, doesn't actually hurt while I'm doing it. Eeyore-like I think that even if my knee stops hurting, even if half the leg pain is from knee stiffness, I still have these damned elbows and shoulders (one reason I haven't been posting here.) Then I think, more cheerfully, that things will stop hurting from time to time, for no reason, and I'll at least have no-elbow no-knee-pain days in future.

I seem to have done a fantastic amount of laundry, though. Always another bag full by the time I've sorted the present one(s).

One thing I did do was sort a huge bag of papers from the basement, exposed when the guys took a pile of junk from one corner. These were mostly manila envelopes with cuttings from the mid-60s that spoke to my romantic heart. I can say now My god the hairstyles, heavens the fashions, and dear lord the interior design- broadloom does not belong in bathrooms, guys- but one thing the 60s did well was upscale advertising, and these were mostly that. I couldn't keep any of it because the mold smell was all though the stuff but it was an interesting trip to the past. There were a couple of childhood and adolescent scrapbooks, one of cringingly historical bits from the 18 months I spent in a separate (ie public but Catholic) school that encompassed things like Confirmation and Grade 8 graduation and the usual 2nd gen Irish Catholic ethos that- well, less said the better. More happily were my ballet scrapbooks from 1965, one devoted to Nureyev after he stepped in to dance for Erik Bruhn at short notice, another devoted to Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet, which was, though I didn't know it, my first fannish Stout Cortez experience- 'can such beauty be?!' I'm going to keep that one even with the smell, because it still makes me happy.

And oddly enough, because I have no memory of keeping them at all and I can't imagine my mother did, there was an envelope of my childhood art, from the time I was still writing my E's backwards. Most of the subjects were religious because done in (convent) school and looking nothing like what I used to draw in later childhood.

Kefir is lovely stuff, or rather, the flavoured kefir I drink is lovely stuff, thick and creamy and more satisfying than yoghurt. Decided to make overnight oats with it, only plain this time. Oh dear, oh dear. Maybe it's the difference in brand- an impeccable organic one, mind- but it's sour and runny and tastes like the worst salty yoghurt. Have emptied half a tin of coconut milk on the oat mixture in hopes of saving the batch. Responsible consumerism insists I must finish this kefir rather than dumping it, so I hope the coconut does the trick.

I've had this opioid cough syrup for at least two years, and while I'm happy it stops the racking cough and got me out of jury duty, I'm not at all fond of the fuzz and light-headedness it causes. Can't see why anyone would get addicted to the stuff. Took it midweek, now that the bronchial tickle has started again, and half an hour later gradually became aware of a great sense of well-being, causeless for anything I could see. Could it be my cough syrup? It's rather annoying than otherwise, because I don't need further incentive to take something my doctor is so antsy about in the first place, and that I very much need when things get worse than they are now.

I was raised to change my sheets every two weeks, but such cleanliness went by the board long ago. I rely on my sense of smell to tell me when sheets and pillowcases need washing. And of course, since ten months ofthe year I sleep in pyjama equivalents and with my head covered, the bedding can go for a month or more before I notice anything. (The terrycloth sheets I use to wrap my shoulders and arms in do get washed more regularly, though I can't figure why they smell more than the pillowcases do, seeing as I breathe into both.) But this summer is this summer, and I'm back to fortnightly or oftener changes, and very pleasant it is too.

Towels I now change weekly, though it seems an extravagence. But there's no longer heat blowing from the vents to dry them within minutes, as in winter. I am assured that even if the towels don't smell, they're crawling with bacteria. Well, and fine, say I. Bacteria promotes the immune system. But I also don't dry out in the heat from the vents as I brush my teeth post-shower, which in winter means I often need only the slightest of patdowns, so weekly it is.

Bought expensive(ish) Joe Fresh reading glasses at Loblaws just to see what difference they made, if any. Not really. But it's been so long since I wore glasses-glasses (40 years) that I've forgotten a basic skill: or possibly, never had it to start with.

How do you get your glasses clean and keep them clean?

I have a spray from the optician's that never gets the oil around the frames clean. Soap? Dish detergent? Paper towels or dedicated rag? It seems dust and oil are everywhere and attach themselves automatically, and it's beginning to drive me batty.

Our garbage pickups alternate: recycle one week, garbage and (in season) garden waste the other. Food waste every week, fortunately, because not everyone freezes their nama gomi like I do. The garden pickup days are the best, because the trucks do that first and then come by, usually in the afternoon, for the garbage garbage. I'm not only not a morning person ('put garbage out before 7 a.m.' are you joking?), I'm also not one for stomping back downstairs to do it late at night either. Especially since the raccoons will get into ordinary garbage if there's anything vaguely edible there, like the papers from muffins, and the bins don't have locks. You take chances putting garbage out at night.

So a week ago I was drowsing in bed early when I heard the crash chunk of the garbage truck's metal jaws, presumably munching the garden waste. But then there was a repeated rumble rumble clank rumble that doesn't go with paper garden bags at all. Startled, I sat up and checked my phone. No, 9:05: I hadn't somehow slept until 11:30 or 12. But rumble rumble clank rumble: they were emptying garbage bins, and I hadn't put mine out. And the garden waste? That truck was coming up the street just behind. Chiz curses. So afortnight's worth of garbage is still in the bin, with a rock on top to discourage varmints.

Meanwhile, this week is recycle, and as my bin is only half full I didn't put it out. But I had a clear plastic garbage bag of weeded manga to go. They want you to place such bookbags for recycle on top of your bin. Put in on my brother's instead, so as not to confuse it with the three bags of shredded paper next to it. (Lawyers generate a lot of paper, esp. if they weed their files regularly.) Also it was going to rain last night and books are easier recycled if not sodden from moisture building up inside the bags.

This morning I'm leaving for acupuncture and dodging thunder showers as I go. The trucks aren't coming at any 9 a.m. this week: sidewalk is still blocked by three foot square, four foot high bins, all firmly closed. Except... the bag is gone from my bro's bin. And no, it hasn't fallen among the shredded paper bags. Who could have taken it? You can't flog Japanese books at our 2nd hand stores. Well, someone is in for some interesting BL reading, I guess, as well as the '3 Kingdoms Furries In Spaaaaace' of Ginga Sengoku Gun'yūden Rai aka THUNDER JET. Good luck to them.

It's very nice that Lush has a million and one present packages, but why doesn't it have gift certificates? I can't use 90% of their products, given my oversensitive nose, and I'd rather not give products blind that may affect the recipient the same way.

One thing that puzzles me in Agatha Christie- aside from the people who are moribund at 70- is the attitude of quite middle aged people that fifteen years ago was the ancient past: no one can remember what happened fifteen, eighteen, twenty years ago, and half the people who were there then have died, and one certainly can't consult records from that far back. Well, seventeen years ago I was that generation's definition of firmly middle-aged, and I can remember myriad details not just about 9/11, but about the previous August and the following October and you name it. Like the denizens of Christie's small towns, I haven't moved around since then, and most of the people I knew then I still know now, in spite of the transient population of my clients-as-it-were. So I wonder at people's lack of memory in Christie's novels.

I note this because yesterday and today were 9/11 weather, sunny and blue and warm and dry. It may not stay that way, but for now, here we are as we were.

Years begin to lose their flavour. 2017 made no impression on me at all, not even weather-wise. They say it rained all spring and most of the summer, and I noted it at the time- that the forecast was always calling for rain- but I remember no deluges like the unforgettably wet summer of 2008 or even the steadily drizzling June of 2015. I have to remind myself that I had the upper hallway tiled and the flat roof repaired, because the memory of it happening has gone. Roofs aren't something one thinks about ordinarily, but I walk along that hallway every day and as far as I'm concerned, it looks the way it always has.

I read 100 books last year, more or less, but none sticks in the mid the way 2016's reading challenge did. Mostly they were forgettable books, and I dropped the TBR challenge some time in the spring. Even the rat infestation of October and November fades: was surprised at getting an email from the exterminators saying they'd be around mid-January for a checkup. Oh, right- that was three months ago, in another life. (Well, that's the effect of snow, actually: it catapults me into another universe entirely.)

The one thing different this year is that I finally lost weight, after asserting for two years that my body simply wouldn't any more. Would like to lose more, obviously, but I've gone as far as I can with no starch in the evening. Now I must restrict intake the rest of the time; or, if my knees will be cooperative, see what walking can do. I'm in the last month before cortisone shot, which is when the cortisone effects wear off, and I've been twinging these last few days, alas.

Oh, and my house is also marginally cleaner than last year. I am in love with the edging tool on the vacuum, which lets me clean crevices and lampshades and curtains without sending dust flying, and while I'm doing that I also vacuum the floors. A kind of satisfaction there, at any rate.

Someone on a friends' friends feed was musing about horror:

"Horror can stop working as horror if the reader has a sufficiently different cultural background from the author, because what horrified the author may be mundane to the reader. Alternatively, what the author accepts as good and right may horrify the reader in ways the author never intended. This can happen over time as well as across borders.
...
And then there's H.P. Lovecraft, who wanders freely between cosmic horror of "man was not the first, and won't be the last being to rule the Earth, and they will return when the stars are right", the existential horror of losing your identity to undeath, body-theft, gender-change, or species-change; and the racist's abject horror that Those People live in his neighborhood, possibly even right next door!."

At which two things ran through my mind:

1. I do not get the cosmic horror of not being either the first nor last to rule the earth- supposing there's an earth left for those older beings to rule once we've done with it- nor do I get the horror involved in 'and they don't care about us!' News for thee, bunny: viruses don't either, and they're already here.

2. Many people amongst my neighbours to the south of us this year are registering abject horror that H.P. Lovecraft is living in their neighbourhood, possibly right next door to them, and so they should.
( Memeage )

But a very large golden moon is rising out of the trees out my back window.

Another triumph: I still have oddments from the family house in my basement, unused and unsorted since 1988. Yesterday I put one box of rusted metal this and thats- wrenches, screwdrivers, a desk lamp on a bracket- out on the front lawn, hoping someone might pick it over and remove the usables. Instead they walked off with the whole shebang. Maybe I can get rid of those three coffee tins of old nails now?

* In fact it's neither. Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the autumn equinox, and is Oct 5 this year. Hunter's Moon is the first full moon after that one, which is in November. There's no name for an early September great big moon.

It was still light when I left acupuncture at 7:30 but it was dusk when I got to Fiesta Farms at 8, and full dark when I left it at 8:30. I put on my head light (it's affixed to a band that goes round the head, supposedly for handymen) and the bike's tail light to go home. And home was dark. In winter I keep the fluorescent kitchen counter light on all day, so there's light in the house when I come home. Haven't done that since May. And now I must start doing it again.

The porch light itself doesn't give much light, and anyway, the headband headlight illuminates the door quite satisfactorily, thank you.

It's a snow sky out there but of course it's not snowing, or even raining. That's just the cherries two doors down and the late-burgeoning trees in this cold May. Still it makes me feel all cozy, even cozier than in the real snow of real winter, because there's no problem with getting places. And trees filling up the sky all round are cozier than the stark emptiness of winter trees.

(In these grey skies I see glimpses of the cold iron May of '96, just back from Japan, or '89, just arrived in Japan, or Ursuline days in my serge uniform when the maples and lindens dropped yellow seedlings into the sand box in the yard and the lilacs overwhelmed with their smell.)

Temps will go above 20 next week and we'll be in a different world, so I make the most of the false-winter now; now that the Autumn Preview is a thing of the past, and March the mirror month of November is never guaranteed.

I much prefer March Easters to April. March has a chance of feeling like November- dry grey, cold, invigorating. April Easters follow an invariable pattern: unseasonably warm, unsettled, thunderous, with sun too bright when it breaks through the clouds and air too stifling when it doesn't. Mother of headaches, of which I have one building now. But the wind is blowing a cold front towards us and tomorrow may be better.

Easter weekend is uncomfortable anyway. What's supposed to be the joyous climax to the Christian saga has very little joy to it, to my mind. After you've waded through the tsuris of Good Friday (which as a cradle Catholic I used to do, spurred on by the morbid masochism of Irish Catholicism in its pre-Vatican 2 days) there's little consolation in an empty tomb and chocolate easter eggs so sweet you feel your teeth dissolve. Christmas is all happy anticipation crowned by happy event, plus presents and turkey. Easter is penitence for 40 days followed by indigestible lamb and said chocolate. Also easter eggs, which were overly-boiled with iron rims around the yolk.

My Greek co-worker unintentionally summed it up in her account of their traditional Easter dinner. 'After forty days of no meat and a week of no dairy either, suddenly you spend the whole day gorging on a roast lamb and your body just--' There's a special Greek word for the stomach cramps and diarrhea that follows this regimen.

Anyway, as a corrective, Cohen's Elegy.

Do not look for him
In brittle mountain streams:
They are too cold for any god;
And do not examine the angry rivers
For shreds of his soft body
Or turn the shore stones for his blood;
But in the warm salt ocean
He is descending through cliffs
Of slow green water
And the hovering coloured fish
Kiss his snow-bruised body
And build their secret nests
In his fluttering winding-sheet.

I mean, for all I know it *is* about Orpheus, but who cares?