Adventures

I had adventures last night. I started by getting home from work late, because the finances were all tangled up. Somebody entered something as negative instead of positive and it messed it up good and proper.

So I dashed home, made dinner for Daddy and me because Mom and Em were in Albuquerque, and then went up to Bible study. This is the girls' Bible study, led by Sophie, not to be confused with the mixed Bible study at the Gac's. After it was over, Sophie goes, "I have to make the cakes for Abby's wedding on Saturday. Wanna help? You can spend the night." So I did.

I didn't actually touch the cakes. I cut out parchment paper. I find it ironic that, having this very week decided cake-baking and cutting with scissors were not my gifts, I then proceed to stay up till three-thirty helping bake cakes and cut with scissors!

And for a girls' Bible study, there sure were a lot of guys around. Last time I went, several brothers, her dad, and a random other boy all walked into the room where we were--the cellar--you have to work to get to their cellar--and all got kicked out. Last night most of her brothers were gone, but the remaining one had just gotten his wisdom teeth out, so when I arrived he was lying on the couch in the other end of the room, completely out of it. Pretty soon he got up, all perky, wandered around without his shirt on, demanded steak, tried to get Jack Daniels for painkiller and Sophie made him take his prescribed medication, drove himself to the store, got food, and invited hordes of guys over. It was something else.

Sophie's aunt, a drama coach and aspiring playwright, also turned up. She wandered in and out of the kitchen dramatically and loudly, discussing the play she's currently directing and trying to figure out how to make it funny. The lines, apparently, are kind of hopeless, so I tried to rummage through my Macbeth thoughts and asked if there were any funny actions they could do. It didn't sound like it. She decided she'd have to rely on props and considered and rejected alien antennae and medieval dress.

Also in the middle of cake-baking, I sat and read aloud an article from Home & Garden magazine about barbecuing symbolizing our desire to break through the thin crust of civilization to our primitive roots. (I mixed my metaphor, but he didn't.) It was, actually, astoundingly good New Historicism criticism. Thoroughly wrong, of course, but he was well-acquainted with Claude Levi-Strauss and also referenced Freud. It was even well-written. But of all the remarkable things to find in a normal magazine--!

So then the guys watched a crude German cartoon and the girls watched Guys and Dolls. I'd never seen it before, but it was splendid fun watching the original of that song Edie did for the talent show--the one about getting sick from not enough romance. :-) I like Edie better. But that's natural. Around three-thirty I crashed on the couch Sophie's brother had vacated.

This morning we had coffee problems worthy of Chincoteague. First, the grinder messed up--it was probably my fault--and Sophie spent about 40 minutes knocking the stray beans out of its innards so it would grind again. Then the coffee pot had issues. I think it was clogged or something, and at one point it was set to self-clean. We finally got enough really strong coffee out of it for Sophie to make frappuccinos!

Then I went to church, to Sonic for a round of cokes for my family doing something at church, to church again, to the gas station, home to feed the cats and grab my very overdue library books, to the post office and library, home to check messages and make sandwiches and arrange to go see Lady in the Water tomorrow night after the wedding, back up to church to deliver the sandwiches, to the theater to buy tickets--Sophie's sister gave them to me free, which was so nice of her--and then I got back and discovered a postcard from KCP and a package from Kay!

So I've now been home for about three hours out of the last 32. And I have wonderful friends. I miss you guys, but home is not looking entirely bleak these days, either. :-)

Life and whatnot

Doings
--wedding shower
--church ladies' coffeehouse and poetry night
--ten pages of Macbeth scrapbook, including a rather clever two-page spread involving red banners like the Macbeth's
--work
--Mom's birthday, and cake-baking therefor

Thoughts
--I need to become better at foreign languages.
--I love warm, sunny mornings on which I can roll down the windows as I drive to work.
--I love rainy afternoons too.
--Baking cakes is not my spiritual gift. Nor is cutting straight lines with scissors.

The Andsaca story...

Is done.

Is not "done," exactly, in the sense that I want to publish it. But the project as for DRW, is done.

I owe you all a long newsy blog post, having neglected you so much in order to work on it. I actually have two or three in the files. I wrote 'em when I meant to be working on it but wasn't and wasn't near an internet connection.

But they're sort of out of date and I don't feel like posting them. In fact, I'm tired. But I'm really glad it's done.

Talk to you in the morning. :-)

Meet the intrepid Peabody

My sister got her new car!

It's a '98 Intrepid, in beautiful condition, named Peabody after the intrepid Victorian Egyptologist.

She's been looking forward to this day a long, long time. She's wanted a car for years, and now she has one. :-)

She and Dad test-drove it Saturday, called to buy in Sunday, and learned it had already been sold. But then today Dad got a call that the other buyer's check bounced, so we could have it after all.

And here it is!

Life is just a bowl of cherries

Yesterday at church someone invited us to go to her house and pick cherries because they couldn't use them all. So after the church picnic, Mom and I did. We spent about 15 minutes and got more cherries than our family can use, either. They turned out to be really good cherries. :-)

So we took them home, washed them, and invited a few people over for games. We fed them guacamole, coffee, and cherries: oh happiness!

The game of choice, you'll be fascinated to know, was apples to apples. Some of the best choices: Forlorn--giant squid; neglected--Emily Dickinson; cold--my dreams; delicate--bagpipes. :-) I lost good and proper. Ah well. After about two and a half hours of this, we got bored and moved into the living room, where Em and I dredged out our two acoustic and one electric guitars, and had a bit of a jam session. I forgot how much I enjoy live music, especially from good musicians, which I am now more motivated to become.

We still have a lot of cherries.

Superman

Emily and I saw Superman Returns tonight. It just didn't do it for me. Probably part of my trouble was that I never really saw any Superman before.

I knew Lex Luthor was the bad guy, but I wasn't really convinced. And this movie didn't convince me he was nasty until about half an hour in, by which time I rather liked him. He made classical references. He was educated. He looked like Dr. Vanderpoel and even had Vanderpoelian mannerisms. He was daring, thorough, and decisive. He listened to symphonies and opera and had a good sound system. There was some conversation, that was supposed to prove he was nasty, but it was all talk until he and his henchmen started beating Superman around on the island in the most unimaginative manner possible. With kryptonite, of course.

And in that same half hour, Superman spectacularly failed to gain my sympathy. He was cute. Really cute. He was ridiculously strong and capable. He made flashy rescues: a plane including Lois Lane saved from crashing, snatching people out of midair, stopping gigantic globes from squashing his editor: and he had several annoying scenes consisting entirely of basking in crowds' adulation. His main trouble was winning the heart of Lois Lane, who now had another good man--a live-in boyfriend, but a very solid guy. (Richard proved himself a good egg over and over. Lois doesn't deserve either him or Superman, though she is sweet and remarkably pretty.)

Superman's mother isn't as cool as Spiderman's Aunt May. Granted, it would be really hard to do. Superman's editor isn't as outrageous as Spiderman's, either.

The moral of the story didn't really make sense to me. They repeated the phrase, "The father becomes the son and the son becomes the father" several times in a significant way, but I'm not sure what they meant. Em was explaining it to me. I guess it has something to do with the old movies, but l didn't see them. "With great power comes great responsibility" is blunt, but at least it makes sense.

One thing I found rather interesting was the smoking theme. Superman exhorts Lois not to smoke, and Lex Luthor does smoke. On Lois' last "what do I do now??" moment, she pulls out a cigarette and then decides not to light it. I'm glad smoking is painted negatively, because it really is bad stewardship of oneself, but--it's so heavy-handed, and I just wonder at their priorities. There are such a lot of worse vices than smoking.

Upon consideration, I think the movie suffered from pacing and characterization problems. It would have been better if there had been more characterization through action early on, and if there hadn't been so much denouement. Not much really happened after the dramatic final battle.

There were good moments. Superman's friend, Jimmy I think his name is, is a uniformly good minor character. He's funny. :-) Richard, as I mentioned, is a good guy. The son is okay, though I wish he had more superhero moments. The opening credits were utterly Star Wars, theme, wonky font, spacey background, and all.

In my opinion, the best line of the movie was "We had some trouble downstairs. Brutus is dead. He was hit by a piano." Although, "These pictures are great. They're iconic. They were taken by a twelve-year-old with a camera phone" comes close.

So...yeah. I enjoyed Superman, but I didn't think it was as good as Spiderman. I actually liked X-Men 3 better, too. I say this, fully expecting at least half of you to disagree with me passionately. :-)

Thoughts of varying depth and clarity

The moon is just an all-around cool thing. Tonight as I came out of Starbucks it was about halfway from zenith in the west, a perfect bright little crescent. Earlier in the summer I slept with my shade open a crack. I woke about one in the morning with the full moon shining right on my face. I don't think I've ever slept in a puddle of moonlight before. I hope it happens again.

It is good when one spends one's time either working, playing, or resting. Most happy activities seem to fall into one of those categories: or more. (Like worship. I think the philosophers were rather silly to wrestle with whether duty or pleasure is more meritorious. Equating work with what one ought to do, and play with what one wants to do, what's really best is when your duty becomes your pleasure: when the will of your Father becomes your will, too. We are commanded to worship, but we worship better when we want to. Worship seems to partake of work and play and rest. To be sure, there is honor in fighting to do right despite what one wants, but you fight to make all of you want what part of you wants. If no part of you wanted, even indirectly, you wouldn't fight.) What is not good is doing nothing without resting: boredom, which is tellingly near "restlessness."

I like the way light comes in bigger lights and little lights. Sunlight is awfully good, and so are fluorescent lights and skylights and big fixtures that flood one's entire area with brightness, but there's something about candles, little 25-watt lamps, the moon, stars, and twinkly Christmas lights, too.

Rain is an ambiguous symbol. Usually it connotes depressingness, like "raining on my parade," but when one lives in a dry and weary land where there is no water, one rejoices at it. While I was at work today it rained. And we rejoiced. This evening the air in the valley was clear, washed by the rain, and the mesas glowed and the distant mountains gleamed blue, blue, rarest blue.

Taos to Espanola

I wrote this Sunday afternoon, but only just now posted it.

The highway winds through a deep canyon only wide enough for itself and the river. To the left, a hill rises steeply so I can barely see sky before the top of my window blocks it out. Streams of green-lichened gray rocks tumble down the steep slopes, with tall dead forked bushes between short green chamisa and shorter yellow grass.

I have driven this road before. I have driven it in the winter night, exhausted from a debate tournament, with my sister asleep in the backseat but a (rare) 2nd place award for policy my lap. I have driven it on other nights, discussing with a boy—who was it? I cannot remember him now—but we picked out constellations for one another and speculated whether Lepus, the Rabbit, was that one in the west, just above the hill. It probably wasn't. I have driven it in the Atkins' big blue suburban in the late afternoon, on that trip we took to Elitch Gardens in Denver. We played Mao all the way back and made a rule that whenever you played a three, you had to ask, “Are those rafters in the river?” And every time, I forgot it was a rule and looked at the river. It flows just beyond the guard rail, sometimes hidden, sometimes barely visible over it. Today the river runs full, but it is still difficult to see over the guard rail.

We rise out of the canyon and into another one. It opens up a bit; now on the left is a sign for a vineyard. “Does it have samples?” asks Mom. “There's a tasting room,” I say. But we are past it. A new little hospital, pretty adobe with wooden columns and sage trim, appears, in the middle of a tiny town, all ramshackle art galleries and houses with degenerate machinery in the yard and amateur coffee houses. The number of java cafes along this road amazes me. A town might not even have a post office, but it could have a coffee shop. Oh that I had world enough and time to stop at them.

The town passes and a farming valley appears on the other side of the river. The green patchwork of fields and houses, sandwiched between brown juniper-spotted hills, takes away my breath. It is so vibrant, such a reminder of what the desert could be if we only had water.

We're nearly to Espanola. The pearly clouds are sprinkling on us. The valley is now quite wide; the eastern Sangre de Cristos are nearly hidden behind the clouds, with yellow plain stretching away toward them, interrupted by power lines and casino billboards, and to the west a narrow line of green leafballs marks the Rio Grande. Beyond it rich brown mesas fade into bluer and bluer Jemez mountains, ending in the clouds showering rain. Houses appear, first few and far away, then clustering closer to each other and the road, with wooden or cinder-block or chain-link fences and green trees. We are at the town.

A drive north

My family decided to head up to Denver today. It was a lovely day for driving. There were a few cumulus clouds, so we hoped for rain, but it never did where we were. Haze from forest fires made a brown layer; as you looked into the distance, you could see the line where clear air began.

In a desolate, arid plain on the border of Colorado and New Mexico, there were odd white volcanic-looking rocks, set up in lines and circles on either side of the road. An occasional dolman jutted up. It looked like the druids came to New Mexico and gotten bored. About half an hour south we had passed a commune or development or something called “Dragonwycke Ranch.” I wonder if the dragonwyckers had been setting up rocks. Oh that the sacred-circle people would worship Someone worthwhile.

In Antonito, just over the Colorado border, we stopped at a tiny “Tourist Center.” It was in a modular building that turned out to be bigger inside than outside. On the left were bathrooms, a TV blasting the weather channel, a table covered with maps, a stand of brochures, a vat of coffee, and a stuffed bear almost as tall as I am, entitled: “DO NOT PET THE BEAR (more than once).” On the right was a museum kind of like the antiquities museum in Cairo of the 1880s, as Amelia Peabody described it, full and unexpected: old newspapers, bits of machinery, booklets informing me in red and blue ink that it was my patriotic duty to write to the troops, Mexican iron pyrite, crystals, other rocks, pins saying “ALF FOR PRESIDENT,” antique housewares, and a large wooden sign for the Antonito Buddhist Temple, complete with its address, all jumbled together on full shelves and in glass cases, somewhat grouped by thing but with hardly any labels. Against the front wall was a painted educational mural of the type beloved by national parks, with stuffed mountain goats behind a little fence. A nice, talkative lady asked us about our trip and where we were from and where we were going and what we meant to do when we got there. She recommended the water park; she said her son-in-law worked there. The tourist center was very clean, but extraordinarily random. It would be fun to stop there again.

Then we headed up to Alamosa for lunch. There we stopped at Mrs. Rivera's Restaurant; it was in the Triple A guide. The building was not terribly prepossessing sitting as it did across from an ugly Exxon-Mobil structure, next to a noisy railroad, and being very plain outside. Inside it was dark with yellow-overlaid lights like Tomasita's in Santa Fe, and decorated with festive paper chains and ads for Corona and Cuervo. The bathroom, of all randomnesses, was decorated with artificial greenery and pictures by John William Waterhouse, which had been torn from a calendar: Ophelia by her lake, and Arthurian and classical illustrations, all of young women with firm chins. We had three different waitpersons who stopped by our table to make sure we'd been taken care of. The tea and enchiladas were so incredibly good, I decided I was in my happy place.

We continued north. Emily used the binoculars for bugspotting, and actually made bug points that way. She got way too many bug points, in my opinion. She ended with 45 1/2 today, to my 10.

We passed through the tiny town of Mosca and thoroughly discussed the Latin and Spanish meanings of the name. It sported a dead hotel called “Sand Dunes Motel,” and sure enough, I looked east and saw the Great Sand Dunes against their mountains. I have many fond memories of the Great Sand Dunes. If you go at just the right season, the creek will still be running so you can make sand castles, but the snowmelt will have warmed enough not to give you frostbite. When I was very little, we went camping there with our church and some of my friends and I threw rocks in the air, and one of the boys hit himself on the head with one and cut open his scalp so his mother had to run him to the hospital.

But we only saw the Dunes off to the east. We kept heading north. By this time, the desolate brown of the southlands had given way to actual greenery. We wound up into the mountains. Streams and rivers ran along the side of the road, and ponds began appearing in green meadows, and we found a lake where there was no lake on the map. Dad showed us a place where he hunted rubies with his geology class in high school. We went up and down mountain passes, through pine forests and broad meadows. I can't do it any better justice than to say the mountains were New Mexican and the fields like Virginia, and water ran everywhere. Snow still slept on the highest peaks, showing white above the tree line. Houses were tucked back in valleys and snuggled on hillsides.

Roadcuts towered two hundred feet high, some in their multicolored and upturned-layered and jagged glory, red and gold and black and brown and raspberry, some covered with metal netting to keep bits from falling onto the highway, and one actually bricked up with stones like a fireplace, in levels like a rice terrace. I don't think all roadcuts ought to be civilized like that; while I'm all about dominion over nature, there's something honorable about leaving a foe its dignity; but that particular bricking was pretty cool too.

It was a beautiful drive.

The longest day

Happy summer, y'all! I meant to post this the other day, but this is as soon as I could get to it. June 21st, as you are probably aware, was the longest day of the year. There were points when it felt like it, too. I had quite the series of adventures.

The day got off to a complicated start when, just as Dad and I were heading out the door, Dad got a splinter and we lost the truck key. So we both got there late.

A man came in to have his teeth done. That was fine, but then he wanted to pay with a credit card he didn't actually have with him. He called his wife to ask for the number, but she wasn't available either. He finally decided to pay with a different credit card and the credit card printer ran out of paper. I couldn't find the refills. I went and got Rebecca (dental assistant, same-church-goer, and homeschool friend of mine). She couldn't find the refills either. I went and got Dr. Matthews. He found the refills, and then the phone rang. So I answered the phone and the dentist refilled the credit card machine, and I finished the phone conversation and consulted the instructions on how to reprint the receipt. It worked! So I got the poor man out of the office and happily it was almost lunchtime. So I escaped too and Dad came and got me and we went to the bank and then the picnic table outside the library to eat.

Rebecca discovered that we (mostly me, but I had help) had submitted her insurance claim wrong for the previous day and then done something to that day's procedure, which was also entered wrong, so that I couldn't even delete it and start over.

Mrs. Matthews came in to do financial stuff and showed us a package that had just arrived. It was full of flashing light-up toothbrushes that she'd ordered at the convention a week or two ago.

The entire afternoon was full of random things like that. We lost a chart—how we could lose it, I couldn't fathom, because we're very careful about not losing them and the man had just been in to see us, and furthermore it's a tiny office and there's really nowhere it could go. It finally turned up. I'd filed it by putting “Ma” before “Mc,” when it turned out that the rest of the Ma's were after the Mc's. Apparently this is accepted dental filing procedure. Mrs. Mathews said we didn't have to follow accepted dental filing procedure because it caused problems. Yes!

The phone kept ringing. The waiting room was much fuller than usual, because all the patients brought friends and relations. The to-be-filed pile of files piled frighteningly.

That was also the day the entire office went to Santa Fe for a good-bye dinner for Lori, whom I'm replacing. Reservations at Olive Garden were for six. So the entire office congregated around five, just as all craziness had about spilled loose. A fire truck sirened past in the middle of this, but I didn't think anything of it; I was busy enough. Lori solved three or four tangles, Mrs. Matthews did some of the end-of-day stuff that I couldn't get right (it went perfectly smoothly Tuesday and Thursday), and we discovered Angelina (the other dental assistant) had told her husband to meet her in Los Alamos at six. Whoops. So we piled into the Matthews' suburban and went out on the town.

We got as far as DP road and discovered a traffic jam, the likes of which are but rarely found in Los Alamos. We suspected the fire truck was probably headed to the scene of the accident, which explained the traffic jam. We were running late. So the dentist did some exciting driving and we turned ourselves around and tried to go down the truck route instead. We got caught in more traffic. We didn't have a cell number for the lady whom we were going to collect at the Y, either, so we couldn't even let her know why we were late.

The left turn signal at Diamond and the truck route, for some odd reason, was set so that only about three cars could get through per cycle. So we waited, and advanced three car-lengths, and waited, and advanced three car-lengths, and finally we were second in line. Yes! The signal finally turned, and the car in front of us—didn't. So we honked. And honked. And the car behind us honked. They sat there! It finally got going just as the light turned yellow, and we saw a bicyclist laughing.

We finally got to the White Rock Y at about ten to six and picked up the other hygenist. Angelina and her husband made it to Olive Garden before us.

Angelina, I would like to state, has an evil sense of humor. She's Iranian, and while her English is fluent, her first language is definitely Farsi. We had a very good dinner, and then it was time for dessert. Rebecca and I split a berry thing, and Angelina tried to say she didn't want dessert. Her husband got them a big chocolate and cream cake thing. Angelina took one look at it and started trying to give part of it away. “I'll take a bite,” said I. Little did I know. Angelina sliced off a third of her cake and tried to give it to me. “That's not a bite, that's a hunk!” I said. Somebody laughed and told me to define my terms, and Angelina grinned and went, “I do not speak the English well.” Yeah, whatever! But it was really good cake.

On the drive home Rebecca told a story about back when she started working and didn't realize Angelina was a patient. In thoroughly Derridean fashion, Angelina's real name is not Angelina. Her nickname is Ferishte, which is at least pronounceable, but both her first and last names legally are these long jawbreakers, and her jawbreaker names are what got into the computer. So Angelina made Rebecca go out and try to call this patient who turned out to be her. Well, I guess when you're in a foreign country you might as well get some fun out of it!

I finally made it home at about nine o'clock. It was just about dusk on the longest day.