Power outage

This evening as Jonathan was leaving to pick me up at work, a neighborhood tree fell over and would have squashed him and Olwen if two or three convenient power lines hadn't caught it. Naturally, they started sparking and glowing odd incandescent colors. This was quite the experience for Jonathan, who had just come out of a final.

Happily someone called 911, and by the time he and I made it back, police had blocked off the road and switched off the power... to our entire development. This meant no more risk of sudden electrified tree torches; also, alas, no more electric burners or microwaves.

It would have been inconvenient, but I adore power outages, especially when my husband hasn't just been squashed. We lit a couple candles and the oil lamp, and had a delightful picnic supper. We went outside and could actually see stars. In the city! Real stars! And afterward, we packed up our computers and went to hang out at the library. Here, they have heat and light and internet.

I was going to spend the evening doing something, possibly feeling guilty about not running around like crazy cleaning and getting things ready. But I think God sent me a free evening. What a shame! I have to go hang out at the library and catch up on correspondence and magazines!

I'm also grateful that Jonathan, as he put it, didn't have a "truncated existence." :-)

I blame the cultural experience

Some days are just weird. Today is among them.

I attribute this weirdness to last night, when I stayed up till midnight watching Breakfast at Tiffany's. I'm glad I watched it, but it was a cultural experience, and therefore slightly disturbing. That knocked my sleep schedule all out of order, and this morning I woke up right in the middle of a dream, which didn't want to release me to the land of the waking.

I had fun picking an outfit; I finally went with a variant of my "I-am-an-artiste!" ensemble, which was inspired by--I kid you not--an ad for laminate floors out of a magazine. I don't have the shoes to really carry it off like I wanted, but I think it'll muddle along with chocolate ballet flats. And enough bronze bangles and long earrings for an obscure rani. And--just for kicks and giggles--I did my hair in a braid instead of up, like I've worn for work for about the last fifteen weeks running.

I finally make it out of the house, and discover when I get to work that I went off and left my breakfast in the microwave. And I didn't have my morning tea at all, so I had my morning tea at work instead of my morning coffee.

Shirley agrees today is weird, but I don't know why. I'll ask for details later. :-)

Even the weather is acting up. It was a lovely clear morning, blue as blue, with just a few low-lying strands of mist hugging our mountains. Only, upon inspection, the mist was actually nasty brown smoke from our controlled burn which is going to turn into three controlled burns this weekend. There's fire, and then there's fire, and this fire has been going for two or three weeks. It can go away now, in my opinion.

I think I need coffee. Maybe coffee will normalize things.

Burning the olive branch

I do adore wood fires. It pleases my soul when it's a gorgeous day out and we have one of our own trees to cut down and turn into nice neat piles of wood to feed said wood fire in our own fireplace. (Juniper is really beautiful wood: it has a red heart, like cedar.)

And it also pleases my soul that, in the course of chopping our own tree, we found a massive olive branch in our yard. When I say "branch," you should visualize something akin to half a tree. The county workers must have left it as a peace offering to atone for destroying our curb, sidewalk, and driveway.

We chopped it up too, and intend to burn it. :-D

Happy Guy Fawkes' Day!

Lord Peter planned to celebrate it by proposing to Harriet Vane.

Rumor has it that Shakespeare referenced it in Macbeth. (Maggie came across this theory when we were putting it on.)

That same rumor connects it with Milton having Satan try and blow up Heaven with gunpowder: a moment of Paradise Lost I'd never been able to sympathize with. I, like Lewis, always felt that Milton's angels have too much armor. Demons have no business with anything so mundane as gunpowder, honestly. But if it had the implications of conspiracy-treachery-and-terrorism, that might be an excuse for him (Milton).

Further rumor has it that it's a major plot point in V for Vendetta, but I can't promise anything, not having seen it. (Yet.)

It's actually a rather peculiar holiday, one memorializing a foiled attempt on the part of one Guy Fawkes and his 12 closest buddies to blow up Parliament with King James in it. The motive cited was to do something about the King's oppressive anti-Catholic policies; at any rate, it had rather the opposite effect, and made England more enthusiastically anti-Catholic.

This holiday is properly celebrated by burning things, preferably images of Guy Fawkes. (What do you do with gunpowder conspirators? BURN THEM!) There was some connection, apparently, in the British mind between Jesuits and witchcraft, so burning was...doubly appropriate.

Speaking of burning, the OED word-of-the-day claims that the etymology for "bonfire" really is "bone-fire," and they used to burn piles of animal bones, or heretics, or whatever. Much as I like bonfires, I greatly prefer them when they aren't burning people.

Further firewood adventures

Today Mom and I went out to split some firewood. Lilly the cat felt the need to come out with us.

“Let's try to split this one.” We each take a swing at a giant log, and miss entirely. The next time it goes in way off to one side and sticks. We yank it out and try again. This time it lands pretty much in the middle. We keep going until we've got a crack all across the top. Then we start banging the hatchet in with a hammer. Lilly complains at the noise. The log kind of cracks. We go to pull it out. It won't pull out.

I lean my foot against it and Mom wiggles the handle. The entire log falls over. She lifts up the handle, log and all, and bangs it on the nearby concrete two or three times. It doesn't crack, depressingly. I stand on the log and wave the handle up and down, and the log rocks gently up and down too. Lilly paces up and down the fence. I end up riding the log-and-axe kind of like a stick horse. Mom goes in and gets the camera, and just about the time she gets it turned on, out creaks the axe.

So we wedge it a bit further down the crack and hammer some more. It gets stuck again. I stand on the log and Mom wiggles that handle. It eventually comes out. We flip the log over and try to crack the other end.

Mom: “I think it won't split because of this.” She gestures at a sticky-out branch disrupting the wood fibers.
Me: “Oh, sure we can split it!”
We chop and hammer.
Mom: “This must be physics. Or geometry.”
Me: “I think it's math plus muscle, and we're out on both those!”

About this time we decide we need a boy. With all due respect to Gabi and Megan, our girl power just wasn't getting the firewood split. Unfortunately, there were no boys handy, nor men either.

So we went through the gate, past the lilacs and Tex's grave, and got some long but thin branches off the woodpile. We balanced them across two of the unsplittable logs and bunged away. They chopped into fireplace-lengths very obediently. Mom found a mid-size log and split it most admirably while I dragged a few more. One of them turned out to be a former 2x4, nicely weathered, and it looked like it needed to have "To the Beach" painted on it and hung in the entryway, so I put that chunk somewhere we wouldn't accidentally burn it.

We decided the woodpile was entirely big enough, and came in and built a fire. Then we collapsed in our respective chairs.

Lilly said, “My, wasn't that enjoyable?”

Fire and shopping

It's a Sunday evening, and a juniper-wood fire crackles away softly in the fireplace. Two tongues of flame rise from the cinders, and red-glowing sticks—wood no longer, only ashes that have not yet collapsed--lie crazily in relief against the blackened bricks.

I'm drinking a cup of coffee. The beans were from “Trader Giotto's,” as the ricotta packages say. Coffee reminds me of HRC, soon going to Italy, and of the spaghetti lunch fundraiser I'm decorating for in a mere two weeks.

We went to Santa Fe this afternoon for lunch, printer ink, and fabric to decorate with. I found a vaguely Italianate red-and-yellow calico on the clearance rack, but it turned out to be misfiled and not on sale at all, so I settled for eighteen yards of cappuccino-colored muslin. I'm going to drape it above the serving hatch and as curtains over the windows. Mom has a giant piece of heavy blue, red, and mustard upholstery cloth, which ought not be cut, that I think I'll hang over the end wall. That room is so vast and bare and cinder-block-ey. The big fabric can be an arras. Polonius, beware.

The fire is being ornery tonight. For some reason, the logs and sticks refuse to land where I want them, but hang off the grate or perch at acute and slippery angles instead of the nice, neat latitude-and-longitude layers that hold still and burn in place until crumbling to ashes.

The sticks really do glow. There's no other word to describe it. For a moment there, half a dozen of them were sticking up and glowing solidly, making patterns in the dark fireplace like Ent-fingers or tree branches against the sky. It was a little eerie, the sort of thing that would have been appropriate under the witches' cauldron in IV.1.

Or perhaps I've just walked down too many aisles of Halloween decorations. They're highly in evidence. In fact, at the Mexican restaurant where I had lunch yesterday, the Grim Reaper (rather taller and more inflatable than I had ever imagined him) stood guard over the cash register, his ragged sleeve creating a canopy for the girl at the cash register to peer through.

Probably most people who get into the whole Halloween thing don't mean anything particularly spiritual or devilish by it. But I have my doubts about it. It can't be good for a culture to be saturated, even for a season, with all that is most ugly and fearful.

The fire has died down. There are hardly any flames at all, just a dull red under-glow.

It can't improve the soul to make your living manufacturing giant rats, plastic tombstones, glow-in-the-dark jack o'lantern stickers, and suchlike. The Reformers and Dorothy Sayers talked a lot about the value of work, but “the only Christian work is good work well done.” It may be work, and presumably people make money doing it, but—is it worth doing? Is anyone truly better off because they can buy a bloody amputated limb? There are probably legitimate times and reasons to buy such things—like dramas—but I wonder. Can you really be motivated to do your work well if your work is creating ugliness for its own sake?

And the worst of it is, these Halloween aisles have a strange attraction and make the Christmas aisles next door look tame. For some reason, I want to walk by the fake ghouls and gremlins. What on earth for? I guess if I, who love the One who takes out the real ghouls, am attracted, I don't have to wonder why others are too.

I suspect we'd be rather less enthusiastic about putting an imitation disintegrating human corpse on our front doorstep if we had to walk by real dead humans, like the crucified slaves along the highway after Spartacus' rebellion; we'd like it even less if we'd known and loved those humans. But at the same time we decorate for Halloween, our prisoners are executed cleanly (or not executed, as the case may be, no matter what their offense) and our cemeteries are tucked away in back corners, where we do not walk through them on our way to church every week. We have such short memories. But the image of God is still in people, though twisted and uglified by the fall, and I do not willingly celebrate the corruption of the body.

Once I think about it, of course, the Incarnation is much more radical than mere human death. It was through Easter that Halloween was done away, and through Christmas that Easter was made possible. “On that beautiful, scandalous night...” Humans ought to die. God made us upright, but we have sought out many devices. Yet He who knew no sin became sin on our behalf, and the sting of death, which is sin, has been removed. Blessed be His name! As I was talking about today with Lisa, when sin is dealt with, the devil can't really hurt us any more.

The wood at odd jaggedy angles has burned away, and I put a central piece of the juniper trunk on the fire, straight across. It still has branches sticking out all round that caught brightly. I added a few more sticks parallel to and right across it. It's burning well.

For our God is a consuming fire.

Of forests that move

They say Tolkien had Ents because Shakespeare didn’t. Macbeth was told, "fear not, till Birnam wood/Do come to Dunsinane; and now a wood/Comes toward Dunsinane." A moving forest! So anyone reasonable would presume from context; so Tolkien presumed. But it was only Malcolm and Siward carrying branches. How dull.

Ents, however: Ents shepherd trees, and their woods do walk. In one night trees of Fangorn came before Helm’s Deep. They destroyed the Orcs and in another night were gone back to their place. That were a forest to make a mortal tremble properly.

In the last two days I have seen a forest move. The air was full of tree-matter, so muddying the sky that one could hardly see the Sangre de Cristos just across the valley. The sun shone orange through the smoke as it did during the great fire five years ago. When Dad and I drove up to work, we thought there was another fire in the Jemez; but it was in reality the forests of Arizona, north of Phoenix, which were caught up by the flames and sent flying five hundred miles, over deserts and mountains and state lines, to sit in the Rio Grande valley. A Jinn could do no greater wonder.

Fire, flood, and plague

Someone set a controlled burn the other day up in the Valle Grande, and news reports said it was thinking of getting out of hand. Those of us who remember May 2000 are a trifle sensitive about "controlled burns," particularly ones set in warm Mays, but this one was almost a week ago, and we haven't seen smoke or flame, so I think it's okay now.

On the opposite end of the disaster spectrum, snow in the mountains was melting so profligately that there were flood warnings out.

However, the last few days have been chilly. This is good for both fire and flood prevention. :-)

And, just to round things out, there have been reports of the plague in Los Alamos, so we bought the cat a flea collar. She doesn't like it, even though it's her very own color of purple. Soror held her down while I fastened it. (What female heart despises gold? What Cat's averse to fish? --"Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes")

So God has been good. We have neither burned, flooded, or died of plague.

Good blessings

It has been a good Christmas.

To start with, soror mea and I are HOME. New Mexico is beautiful! The sky is so clear that even in town and with a full moon, you can still see some stars. Virginia has many virtues, but its night sky is not among them. Stars and moons are part of the right ordering of the universe, and oh, I love them.

To continue with, the cats forgave us for going away to school and are decently cuddly. We had a fire in the fireplace twice before heading over the Rio Grande and through the prairie to Grandfather's house for Christmas Day: we meant to head over on the 23rd, but it snowed, so we held off till Christmas Eve.

I'm enjoying ill health on break and not during the school year. I have upgraded to orange juice and shopping, so life is improving. :-)

I've been getting to read and watch movies--or do nothing whatever, as I please. Early on in the break I finished Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. I want a "Stickler" pin! That's a grammar stickler, for those of you unfortunate enough not to have read her, and watch out: I'm seriously tempted to turn into a grammar vigilante! ::evil chuckle:: Now, where's that permanent marker...?

And between food and presents--dude, am I blessed.