At Work Upstairs

1. Geese overhead in the early morning

2. Noticing the geese because one blanket doesn’t do the job anymore.

I have to try to make some of these marble mice–I know I have a couple of bags of marbles in the basement because I am a good auntie.

The pattern comes from toymaker.com which I saw at Escaping the Cubicle Nation. Yes it’s been that kind of day. Perhaps not haiku-whine worthy but still a day better forgotten.

Heather

Finally the heat wave has broken and my brain is less mushy.

We’re odd folk here. We’re still sans central air conditioning–mostly on principle. We have a portable air condition but we rarely use it.

So how do you survive a heat wave when you have to work upstairs during standard business hours in a house built nearly a century ago.

1. Prepare to complain a lot. The more creative the complaint, the better.

2. Make sure you have a thermometer since it will introduce a note of reason into the complaints.

3. Refresh your memory about why you’ve decided to forgo central air-conditioning.

4. Open all windows and doors once the outside and inside are the same temperature. Try not to despair as this magic moment drifts later and later into the night.

5. Despite warning on box fan, stuff it in window and run it at tornado level. The gentle summer breeze level and the gale level will do nothing for you.

6. Run the fan until you go to sleep, cursing your inability to fall asleep with the fan running.

7. First thing in the morning, run the fan just until that moment that the fanned-in air starts to smell like the roof tiles, then close all windows and blinds.

8. Run the fan in the upstairs office to create the illusion of a cool breeze.

9. Complain. Especially about the dull selection of appropriate liquids.

10. When desperate run the portable air conditioner. Try to ignore its jet engine decibel levels.

11. Spring for movie tickets. Hide out in the library. Move slowly in the grocery store.

12. Wait. And complain. And remember why you’re forgoing central air conditioning.

No particular explanation for this round of radio silence. Day to day life trundles on.

• After seven or eight increasingly annoyed phone calls and emails and one short conversation with the paper carrier, I’ve gotten rid of the wodges of flyers that are delivered to the house each week. This means we should be able to put the paper recycle bin out once a month or less if the paper gets shredded into the compost. And the regular garbage will go out every two weeks. And the bottles, tin cans, and plastic, every two weeks. This means that we’ve reduced the already small amount of garbage we set out by about a half.

• It looks like it’ll be warm enough to plant the vegetable garden this weekend–a late start given last week’s near freezing temperatures. The plan is lots of tomatoes and basil, some peas and beans, and maybe some salad greens. I’d like to try to grow some sort of squash but the squirrels in the neighbourhood love the blossoms and all I’ll get is lots and lots of leaves and vines.

• I’ve passed another prime number birthday, quietly as usual. Followed by a weekend full of relatives young, old, and middling. You can amuse some people with garden twine and chalk. Other people need beer or tea.

• And lastly I’ve started up the scholarly editing project I’ve been dragging around with me for years. I pecked away at it fairly steadily a year or more ago and set it aside. Working on it is always tough for all kinds of reasons but mostly because of my ambiguous status in relationship to the academic world the editing project fits into. I’m long past graduate school, the academic job market, and adjunct labour. And I’m not quite that near mythical creature: the “independent scholar”. The project pulls me back from time to time when my drive to finish what I start is strong. And the project pushes me away from time to time when the task starts to seem enormous and the pleasure of figuring things our and making connections is pushed aside by old grief.

It’s definitely an odd feeling. Odd but familar. I’ve been getting it since I was eight with my first pair of charmless, dorky black plastic glasses (you’d recognize them–their cousins are walking around on a lot of faces these days). I’ve been struggling with nausea and eyestrain for months. A month passed as I figured out the problem was my eyes. Another month before I could get into my eye doctor’s. And it’ll probably be another month by the time that my brand new progressives with their bizarre prescription arrive from Japan.

I never believe my eye doctor when she tells me it’s not that odd to have one eye more than -4, and the other more than -10 not to mention the borderline weird optics needed to make the eyes focus together. Nope never believe her. I’ve seen the scrambling and mad catalogue flipping that happens when I go to buy the glasses and I’ve heard the apologetic totaling up of ferocious cost of the lens alone. And this time the oddness of the prescription was confirmed by the estimate that it would take at least three weeks to get the glasses.

I was unduly excited to get a call this afternoon to tell me that the glasses were in. I ducked out of work early. And was disappointed: my day to day glasses are still on the slow boat from Japan. My reading glasses (a totally self-indulgent luxury) were ready. I’m now officially one of those people who are always looking for a set of glasses. The new reading glasses, which work surprisingly well on my computer screen, are perched on my nose. And the ones I used to only take off in bed or in the shower are sitting around here somewhere. I’ll find them in a minute; right now I just want to sit and admire the new clarity of print.

On Friday afternoon I had formulated some ambitious weekend plans designed to boot some projects and my comfy-chair-loving self into action. Alas, it was raining when my lazy-brain first woke up and instead of getting up and dashing about the city, I went back to sleep, The rest of the day has followed much the same rain-fearing, sloth-loving pattern. Lots of cups of tea and coffee, some pie, lots of blog reading, and some thinking about a research project that is slowly resurrecting itself.

The problem with this research/editing project is that it is easily discouraged. I’ll be happily working away at it for two or three hours, slogging through the editing or thinking about the work needed to pull together a decent introductory essay, and then, wham. My nastiest familiar pops up singing the “you’re no longer an academic so any brainy plans you have are crap” song. I wish that thing would just shut up and go away. And once it starts singing its nasty song, all the other creeps hidden in my brain start to chirp in with their merry songs: “It was all your fault” ; “Just who do you think you are”; “Making ideas is for idiots. Where’s the money in all this”; and most popular of all “Stop now before you make a fool of yourself.” You’d think that I’d have learned how to evict those buggers by now.

What do with the rest of the weekend. I should be able sneak some research past the singing creeps. And maybe some editing. And if I’m particularly persistent maybe even draw up a reasonable research plan, even if I’ll never be a full-time academic again.

Despite the near-blisters on the bottom of my poor feet, we’ve had a good day so far with a combination of naps, reading, and expeditions. Absolutely no useful activities to be seen.

We bussed and hiked to a spiffier version of our neighbourhood. The comic book store was visited–it amuses me to see how sheepish he is and how curious I am. He cam away with two more Bones added to the collection. This time I bought nothing, though I am still enamoured of my last purchase there: Monkey vs Robot.

We passed by the yarn store and the music stores and ended up in a used bookstore. I came away with Teddy Roosevelt’s Conservation of Women and Chlldren (how could I pass that title up) and Stevie Smith’s The Holiday.

Then on to another bookstore, our telos really, where I over-indulged in obscure Maritime ephemera. I now own copies of the The Geology of North Mountain, Gipsy SImon Smith’s Adventures of a Rolling Stone, The Londonderry Heirs, Cape Breton Castaways, and the history of the Knox Church of Brookfield. Ephemera all. Relicts of Franklyn Hick’s library.

All followed by a good enough lunch and beer, Girl Guide cookies, and another long walk.

So far a good day. Though why I had to have all these odd little books is beyond me.

Well. By a combination of fluke and willfulness, I have a week off. And no elaborate plans to go with the time.

There could be some spring cleaning but the snow in our yard works against that whole spring-feeling. Maybe I’ll haul some useable discards to the Sally Ann.

There’ll be some random bird watching as I try to make sure they don’t nest in the porch nooks. They and their eggs would just be getting comfy and we’d need to move them in order to paint and we’ve already put the painting off a year because of nesting birds.

There could be some idle museum going, especially if it doesn’t rain cause long expeditions on foot in cold spring rain are stiff and dank.

There could be some book-obcessing though there’ll be fretting over the clash between the wanting to own stack and stacks of Maritime ephemera and the knowing that there is a limit to bookshelf space and budget.

There could be some bad craft days cause I have lots of glue and foamies and pipe-cleaners and paint and found objects. And there are small children I can mail the craft-atrocities to.

There could be aimless staring into space. Or into books.

But, help me, there better not be endless watching of awful daytime tv or anxious wandering through stores or worrying over one more list of things I could be doing.

• I’ve been totally distracted by a series of computer migrations. More work than I thought it would be but then again I’m always optimistic when distracted by a something shiny, something not made bleary with day-to-day work and compromises.
• Spending time with someone I knew well twenty-five years ago had proven both unsettling and interesting. It’s provoked lots of thought and useful comparisons as well as the usual anxieties about self-presentation.
• I am totally enamoured of Kinkless GTD. At my paid gig, I’m stuck with PCs and Microsoft which is a drag.
• The snow banks outside the house bate away–slowly. I’m sick of staring at grey, gritty snow.
• Sara Waters must get weary of having all her reviews identify her as “lesbian novelist”. Maybe it’s time to start calling her “historical novelist” or, save us, “realist novelist”. Night Watch was a fascinating read, partly because of the way the story is told (back to front) and partly because of the content (women’s war experiences in London during heavy bombing and the consequences in the years following the war). I need to sit and think about why this was a so much better book than Baldwin’s Tiger Claw.
• Now it’s time to shut things down and go to bed and read some Rose Macaulay who always makes me stop and wonder about the meaning of words.

A collection of to-dos, some small, some middling

• a short post about The Birth House
• expedition to purchase a birthday gift
• read When We Were Orphans
• make stock from the remains of the chicken I’m roasting today
• drop off some items at St. Vinnie’s
• pick up some books at the library
• mail long overdue (like six or seven months) genealogical records to cousin
• expedition to buy good balsamic vinegar
• prepare income taxes
• put in thirty miles or more on the bike
• do something fun that’s not reading-related