Feels like home

A friend invited us to go berry picking at the Mackintosh farm this morning. It was downright chilly - only about sixty-five, which is ridiculous for late July, and it was wonderful. Hurray for the polar vortex. (It DID come back in the summer when we would appreciate it!) Meg and I actually had more fun in the veggie patch than with the blackberries: the berries were fine, but on the other side we found zucchini and eggplant and peppers in their natural habitat. Meg especially got a kick out of picking peppers. 

The zucchini plants at the farm had both ripe fruit and blossoms on the same plant, which I thought was so strange. We have two zucchini plants out back, both of which are blooming, so
I figured I might as well check them. And we had a huge zucchini - six inches long and nearly as thick. It looked like a watermelon. Cool.

The zucchini that looks like a watermelon

I finally worked up the courage to take the girls out back to our deck. The poison ivy has been poisoned (well, once) and was lying low, and since I washed our little dumpster the wasps haven't been around, so out we went. Also, I couldn't waste that 70-degree weather. I knocked the spiderwebs down and we picnicked for dinner and kicked a ball around afterwards.

It's so nice to play outside. It makes it feel like home. Also, what makes this house feel like home: Sayers books by the bed, Wodehouse books in the bathroom, and library books on every flat surface in every room where Jonathan has been, like a trail of bread crumbs. I love it.

And threw him down the stairs

There's a scene in Busman's Honeymoon where Peter and Harriet are speculating as to where old Noakes had actually been hit in the head, since he subsequently got up and fell down the stairs. Peter starts quoting the way he does, "Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber," and then hurriedly backs off - "No, no, not in my lady's chamber."

I never quite understood why he was in such a hurry to backtrack, besides obviously preferring their bedroom not be the scene of the crime. But then last night I was reciting the full nursery rhyme.

Goosey, goosey, gander, whither dost thou wander?
Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber.
There I met an old man who wouldn't say his prayers,
I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs.

The goose was in my lady's chamber when he met the old man. Well, Noakes was pretty much the old man who wouldn't say his prayers, and someone definitely sent him down the stairs. Peter had stumbled into a quote more applicable than he meant, and that was why he was so anxious to dissociate it from their story.

I just love figuring out Sayers references.

Oh no! Not the aspidistra!

I'm vaguely considering improving my aim. Usually I can chuck something across the room and get it more or less in the trash can, but that's twice now in two days I've royally missed (with an audience). Yesterday it was an apple core, which should have gone in the scraps bowl but actually hit the floorboards, and just now a taco wrapper, which landed in Nellie the schefflera. To which Jonathan said in a voice of doom: "You've blasphemed the aspidistra."

Dun-dun-DUN!

Yes, Eureka, there is a real meaning of Christmas

I finally read Thrones, Dominations, the unfinished Sayers book the Jill Paton Walsh took in hand and completed a few years ago. It wasn't as good as a pure Sayers, but it was better than some of the mysteries I've been reading lately. She didn't so much ruin our beloved characters as flatten them out: everybody's characterization got less nuanced and more sledgehammer-like. The Duke of Denver and Lady Helen came off worst of all, although Peter became so sensitive as to be slightly henpecked (Peter!! Henpecked by Harriet??). She tried really hard to keep Sayers' contemporary attitudes and worldview, but a modern apparently just can't. Not on marriage: not on class. A pity. Also, the solution to the mystery was kind of perverted, so I wouldn't recommend it for young readers.

The long-awaited Eureka Christmas episode came out this week! Spoilers! It was called "O Little Town," and I think they'd been watching Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, because Taggart, in a life-long pursuit of Santa, has developed a shrinker-ray for presents that shrinks Eureka! Oh noes! So Jack and Taggart figure out how to take Dr. Drummer's (guest star) magic energy snowball thing and throw it at the EMP shield and reverse the shrinkage.

There were some genuinely funny moments, but I don't think the writers of this episode ever watched Eureka. Taggart's thing is hunting with big guns, right? And Jack is a huge baseball fan, right? So when the time comes for them to go up in the sleigh (I am not making this up), throw the snowball at the shield, and shoot it, what do the writers do but assign Jack to the gun and Taggart to the pitching. Huh? But then, the writing on Eureka this whole season has been lazy. They did get a bunch of new writers on, I know. The dialogue isn't that funny, the plots aren't particularly scientific, and the characters randomly do things totally out of character. Too bad. Also, I really wish they'd hurry up and get Jo and Zane sorted out, or at least advance their story somehow. That's the most interesting subplot at this point, now that the parallel world is more or less at an equilibrium. Sigh.

It's also a pity that Eureka is such a metaphysically empty world. It really is. They do a whole Christmas episode, leaving out even the vaguest hint of Christianity (of course), and this is what we wind up with:
- Christmas isn't about being with your blood family, but being with those you're with (and hopefully love) - Jack's, Jo's, and the nameless snowed-in kids' subplots.
- Everybody makes their own Christmas magic. Allison's subplot was she tries so hard to make things wonderful for her kids, because her parents were straight-up scientists and she never got a present from Santa.
- Growing up doesn't mean you have to stop believing in magic and eating candy canes (at least, so Dr. Drummer/Santa tells Jo).
- Science doesn't work on Santa. You can't capture him and study him, but he'll be back next year - Taggart's subplot.
-Fruitcake has like a million calories, especially when it's shrunk so a whole fruitcake is in one bite.

Seriously? That's the best meaning of Christmas you've got? They know science isn't enough, and there's a better myth, if you like. Imagine a world where a happy God invented people and parsley and astrophysics because He wanted to, and because having them was better and awesomer than not. Then imagine people messed it up. Then, imagine God Himself was born as a human person, to live here for thirty years, be murdered, but be so intensely full of life that He swallowed up death. And, if you want to, you can join this God, and He will swap your death for His life, and your depressingness for His happiness. Incidentally, this means you can investigate this world - i.e. do science - all you like and only learn more about this God because it tells you what He's like. Science has meaning; life has meaning; language even has meaning. Altogether a more satisfactory state of affairs.

Eureka ignores God, and in their metaphysical flailings they've lost science too. We get to wish for Santa and eat candy canes? Seriously? I really miss the scientific plots. Come to the light side. We have cookies! And a philosophical foundation for them!

Found

"Next, and with deep humility, [my apologies] to Balliol College - not only for having saddled it with so wayward an alumnus as Peter Wimsey, but also for my monstrous impertinence in having erected Shrewsbury College upon its spacious and sacred cricket-ground."


"There was a new porter at the St. Cross lodge, who heard Harriet's name unmoved and checked it off upon a list. She handed him her bag, took her car round to a garage in Mansfield Lane*... *For the purposes of this book, Mansfield Lane is deemed to run from Mansfield Road to St. Cross Road, behind Shrewsbury College and somewhere about the junction between the Balliol and Merton Cricket grounds as they stand at present."

Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, from the "Author's Note" and page 5.


View Larger Map

Dorothy Sayers would put in a footnote about her changes to the Oxford map. I have always rather wondered about Mansfield Road and St. Cross Road, so for all you readers who have also wondered, Google Maps knew.