Getting Things Done

Yesterday I basically finished Jenny's Persian Puzzle/horse quilt top.

It's not a neat job; the white fabric is flimsy and stretched in all directions, and I had to cut a corner from an extra block to piece one corner of the center block. I think I'll use high-loft batting, and only quilt around the design and on the sashing and border(s), if I add any.

Later in the day, Ramey and I went to the used-furniture store downtown, where I found a treasure.

I had in mind using it for a telephone table, but maybe it'll just sit there in the corner by the telephone.

The color I've chosen for the roof shingles is called "Driftwood." It matches the bricks of the house. Steve the Roofer said replacing the roof will only take "2-3 days." So I guess they can start this-coming week, and maybe be done within the month of June.

Jed has had his kitchen remodeled, granite countertops, travertine floor, teal-colored cabinets, the whole shooting-match. I've got to get over to 'Lanta and inspect it.

If I remodeled my kitchen, everything that takes paint would be painted white, with black cabinet-and-drawer pulls. Soapstone counters, black tile floor, black appliances, white table and black chairs. A multicolored glass tile backsplash behind the cooktop or range. Paint the chandelier black. Get those multicolored Fiesta dishes back when Jed gets new dishes.

Black and white and jewel colors for the kitchen. Pink and green for the dining room. Red and green for the living room. That's about as far as my imagination goes. No brown and orange.

Cruising for a Fight

The checkout counter was bare, but an enormous young woman, in most of a pair of shorts and a little shirt, was waiting for the clerk to get through helping a customer load his basket. When I approached to unload my cart, the EYW backed up against my cart, so I pulled back into the aisle. When she moved forward, I started to unload again, but she ran up against my cart and started peering at a display over my left shoulder, so I backed away up into the aisle. I kept backing up, because she kept pushing at a box on top of the display, and it looked like it would fall on me or my cart.

When the clerk turned around to the register, the EYW turned around, but still blocked the lane while she talked at the clerk. Then she finally bought a pack of chewing gum or something and walked away, but when I pushed my cart up and started to unload, she ran back and pushed against the cart and leaned over the counter and laughed and talked at the clerk.

I mentally saw myself doing what I really wanted to do, and wondered what the outcome would be if I were brash enough to pick up my wine bottle and give her one upside the head. The adventures of getting out of the house. Stifling violent impulses. Remembering old Betty J-----t and other pugnacious fat females who liked nothing better than to pick a fight with an old woman or a little kid.

The incident reminded me of a story W.C. Fields told about picking a fight with a fat woman in a bar. He and his buddy almost got the best of her, but she finally grabbed a beer bottle and broke it and cut them both up pretty bad before the cops arrived.

I dreamed Mo was a 1935 Packard.

I dreamed Jed was driving the big black car that's in my Big Baby book, and he stopped and told me to get in the back seat. The seats were enormous. I leaned on the back of Jed's seat to talk to him, and the upholstery was so plush it tickled my face. Then I woke up, and Mo was on my chest with his back against my face.

So today I made it to TKC once again and had my head CAT scanned. After I walked from the parking deck to Internal Med. and then up 28 stairs to Radiology, I had to sit down and rest before I could talk. Looks like I need to go back on all those vitamins and supplements. I guess more hair will fall out, and I won't feel "normal," but I was probably in better physical shape when I was taking all that stuff. But I'm not going to swallow another pill until the doc says to. He hasn't called me about my blood work yet.

Nothing Brown Can Stay

Nothing Brown Can Stay, by J.R. Cage


My room's first brown was taupe,
The hue of sand and rope.
At first it made me smile,
But only for a while.
Then taupe faded to tan.
So monkey sank to man.
So I'll paint it white or gray.
Nothing brown can stay.

Trip to TKC

I went to my clinic appointment this morning because I keep coughing. Dr. G. beat on my face and found a sore spot over my sinuses, and got me set up for a CT scan on Thursday of this week. Then I went to the lab and had 4 vials of blood drawn. Onae called me just now and said I'm scheduled for a mammogram on June 22. Also in the offing is a bone-density scan, and something else, I forget what. So I guess today's visit counts for my 6-month "wellness" exam, since they scheduled another one for November 22. Isn't that Thanksgiving Day? No, the 22nd is the Tuesday before T'giving. There's always something to look forward to.

The poetry reading group meets tonight at the Arts Council. The writing theme is "future tense," and we're supposed to bring a favorite poem to read, one written by someone other than ourselves.
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(9:28 p.m.) A poem I read at the group meeting:

Future Tense

I shall means that I plan to,
If nothing interferes;
I will means I'm determined,
In spite of fears and tears.

You shall means you must obey me--
I'll beat you if you don't!
But he or she most likely will,
Even if you won't.

I may if fortune favors
And all the signs are right;
And if  you ask me nicely,
Who knows, my dear? I might.
            (By JRC, 5/23/11)

The "other poet's" poem that I read was "All in green went my love riding" by e.e. cummings.

Make Quilts, Write Poems

The meeting went well. Only Ramey, Emily and Frank attended, and Ramey had to leave early for her play practice. But we had a right merry time. We're all pretty doggone good poets, at least at heart. I'm borrowing a leaf from Joe W.: From now on, what I do is make quilts and write poems. And read books, although Walt Whitman would grumble at "living on the ghosts in books."

Right now I'm reading James Flexner's biography of George Washington. That gentleman was more complex than I've always thought, much more of a creative personality than the schoolbooks have painted. He practically had to reinvent warfare for this continent as it was in its primeval state. The last thing the colonists wanted to do was fight. It appears that the last thing Washington wanted to think about was leading an army or a country. But when you've got the alligators in front of you and the crocodiles behind--!

Oops!

I was thinking I had invited the poetry critique group to meet here on Sunday the 29th. But however, an email yesterday from one of the group members reminded me that the meeting is set for Sunday the 22nd--the day after tomorrow! We always meet on the fourth Sunday, and I forgot that May has five Sundays this year. So besides helping the tow guy load the Lincoln onto his truck, what I've done today is clean up the porches and a couple of rooms that were easiest because I halfway cleaned them last week. Tomorrow I've got to get the whole thing spiffed up and do a little shopping besides. Someday maybe I'll rest.

A Very Good Book

Friday at book club, I picked up The Scapegoat out of the boxes of donated books. It had been many years since I read this book, and remembered thinking it was pretty good. So yesterday I read it again, and liked it better than Rebecca or any of her other books. I think duMaurier was one of the best novelists of the twentieth century. Or any other century, for that matter.

The Scapegoat is about a lonely Englishman who, trying not to think about suicide, contemplates going into a monastery. He accidentally meets a no-account French count who looks exactly like himself, and gets tricked into changing places with the count. I love mistaken-identity and identical-twin stories. Mary Stuart wrote one but I don't remember the title, maybe The Ivy Tree. And of course there's Dumas' The Corsican Brothers, and The Man in the Iron Mask which I haven't read but have only seen the movie. I like The Scapegoat better than others of this type that I've read, because the Englishman has no close friends or family and hardly knows the meaning of the word love. Then he gets thrown into the middle of a really messed-up French family and falls head-over-heels in love with the whole bunch.

Oh--Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey is one of the best doppelganger books; I guess I like it even better than The Scapegoat. Dickens had Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, and Joseph Conrad The Secret Sharer. Even old Dostoevsky wrote one, but I haven't read it. And probably never will.

A good movie on this theme, I think the title is "Dave," stars Kevin Kline as a stand-in for a U.S. president. And probably the creepiest story of this kind is The Picture of Dorian Gray.
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Jed will be here tomorrow and Wednesday and will be working in Birmingham. Also tomorrow, they're coming to take the Lincoln away. I hope Jed gets here before "they" do, to help me get the trunk open and cleaned out.

Start Over With Master and Commander?

Today I finished the last of the Jack Aubrey books, Blue At the Mizzen. I think they could as accurately be called the Stephen Maturin books. In the penultimate volume, The Hundred Days, Napoleon was put down, and Stephen lost his wife and never said a word about her more--the incomparable Diana Villiers ignored Jack's warning about her reckless driving and eclipsed herself. Maybe Stephen was, while grieved, also a bit relieved. At any rate, scarcely a whole book later, he proposes to a widow. Jack is awarded his blue flag of the admiralty, and everybody is rich and more or less mollified.

I wouldn't pick out any one book of the Aubrey series and say it's the best book I've ever read; but the whole bunch of them made one of the notable reading experiences of my life. The Bible was better. Otherwise. . .

I've been sort of wandering around, lonesome and at loose ends, since Big Baby is truly done. Now it's even worse, with all the Aubrey books finished. Yesterday I had a lot of business to keep me busy--pay bills, get insurance on the Tracker, I forget what-all. Tomorrow I'll probably get the Lincoln towed out of the garage and donated. Friday is book club day, and I'm about halfway through the book, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.

TGI Sunday

Yesterday I made another trip to Wal Mart and came home in the foulest of foul moods, with a crick in my neck from trying to read the overhead signs. Then I slept off and on until nearly ten o'clock this morning. I think what I need to do is never to buy food at Wal Mart. I can find most everything else pretty easily, with no more than an hour of searching. But groceries--I make a resolution not to go there any more for food, unless I just see something I want/need in passing by the produce department.

The reason I was grocery-shopping, anyway, is that I had to buy funace filters, curtain rods, and other stuff. By the time I found those, it seemed I would save time by picking up what food items I needed. Bad guess.

Our Wal Mart wastes so much space with flowers and seasonal displays, jewelry, baked goods, racks of candy and greeting cards--and the aisles are so narrow you have to negotiate space for a buggy. They need about twice the space for the goods they've got--which are hardly ever the right brands, providing you can find the category you're looking for. And if the store was twice as big, I'd never go there, period.

That's my Wal Mart speech for the month. Or for good, I hope.

Today was somebody's birthday. Douglas's, I think.

Hopefully

I've like a fool volunteered to  host the critique group here on the last Sunday this month. Yesterday I wrote myself a plan to get the house dolled up before that date. So today I started working on it, and I'm already 2-3 days behind.

The picture (from Country Living) is just a simple color- and fabric- suggestion to me, when I start to make a cover for my cat-clawed sofa. I've probably got enough muslin to make the whole thing, and then make covers for all my throw-pillows out of all the red prints I can scrape up. Wish I could get a room or two painted this month. I don't know why it's so important to get it all done for the meeting, because there'll only be 4-5 attendees, if any. But it's an incentive to get some spring cleaning done.
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Approximately the last half of "My Fair Lady" was on TCM, and I made the mistake of standing there looking at it for a minute, which stretched on until the end. There'll never be another Rex Harrison, another Stanley Holloway, and I'm sorry for that. And I've never cared all that much for musical comedy, or any other kind of screen comedy. But this movie is incomparable, even in its faulty restored condition.
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I had an email from Jack yesterday. He said he's doing all right, that he and his boss had been riding around viewing all the storm destruction.

Blackadder!

On the Front of My Monitor

Aggravations--or challenges: (1) There's a limb on top of my house. I can get ahold of it, but it won't come loose. Tracy is across the street, working on Charlotte's lot, so if I can get his attention, I'll see if he'll deal with it.

(2) Trying to print out my manuscript, I put in a new cartridge. Now it says "cartridge missing or undetected," and won't print except off of the Tricolor.

(3)  I have to go for my annual checkup tomorrow. Decided I'd just turn myself off till it's over, but I'm hungry, and I didn't want to eat much until they draw my blood. Don't want Dr. G. talking about statins again.

Other than those little pesky points, I'm okay.

Will It Ever Be Done?

I've added quite a bit to the novel, and this morning I was almost ready to print a proof copy, but then I seemed to hear Mary Loggins say, "Phil, I'm afraid of them old Ku Klux."

I just have not got the stamina to get the KKK in gear because Mary and Philip have harbored the draft dodger. With all the subsequent changes I'd have to make in the manuscript. And the trauma to poor old Philip. A really big mess this time that Mary has got him into. If I decide to do it. Maybe I can save it for another book. I'm tired of this one.
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Pat called a few minutes ago and said their electricity is off again. They only had it on for a few hours.

Betty Jo hasn't called me back, so I guess she hasn't been able to get in touch with Sandra. There are so many missing from Tuscaloosa, it's terrible.