Spanglemonkey

I Can Only Say that I Know Everyone Has Been There At One Time Or Another, Though It Is Not a Place I Am Proud Of

Endless dishes! Good lord!

I managed to arrange the plants outside. Nice. Birdfeeders, table and chairs, and all the rest of the stuff crammed into the shed.

Isn't it fucking amazing how all that garage stuff now fits into an 8' X 10' shed! I am all self-righteous. I have been working really, really hard this last month or so.

Can I quickly say that I'm fed up to here with some people. Is there really a need to be completely stressed and angry all the time? GAH. I'm not sure how to handle it. Not very good at conflict, I'm afraid. How to pry without criticizing. Or perhaps some criticism is in order? Is there anyone who is good at this stuff? I suppose not.

I remind myself that one's first housebuying experience is way up there on the Life Stressors list. And everyone enacts his or her stressing in different ways. Me, I'm up for a large bowl of chocolate ice cream at this juncture.

I'm probably not the easiest person to live with, either. Though I try to be fair, I really do. Today I yelled so long and loud at Eliz that my throat hurt afterwards. I'm rather ashamed of it, which is probably why I didn't immediately blog it, but oh my god it was one of the moments in which you know with certainty the depths of your own homicidal rage. I was absolutely livid. The whole thing escalated over the course of an hour or so of Eliz freaking and everyone else freaking in response, until it came to a head with me standing mid-floor with veins standing out of my neck.

Anyway. I'm impressed with how pitch black our backyard becomes at night. No streetlight for some distance, so I can imagine that we are in some kind of mountain cabin... ahhh...

Someone Remind Me How To Rest

It's hard work being me right now. It's not like I can ever sit, or stop. There's always something more that is quite urgent. At the moment, for instance, I could either install the curtains over the closet (just now I removed the mirror doors), or I could go through the stuff still in the driveway and put it inside, or I could work on the backyard which has not been touched (and replant the plants from the old house, which very much needs to be done) or I could put the linen closet away, or the bathroom stuff, or I could work on the kids' rooms which haven't been done yet or my own clothes, which are still in two big boxes. Also the refrigerator is delivered at 9:30 tomorrow morning, which means that we need to remove the cabinet above the current refrigerator in preparation for the larger one coming

puff puff

I think I'll do the backyard and then perhaps lounge around on the outdoor furniture. Yes. That'll happen.

Advice for Librarians on the Road

Spoke to my mother on the phone about our upcoming trip (next tuesday! yay!) to Coastanua, where I plan to do NOTHING. We discussed the best way to travel and found, once again, that we have the same idea of what is fun while one finds oneself Abroad. I will here include a short list.

1. Bed at 9 pm, up at around 7.
2. Museums and bookstores.
3. Planning the next meal while eating this one.
4. Spending a lot of time saying absolutely nothing.

And here's what's truly not fun while traveling.

1. Amusement parks.
2. Seeing everything possible.
3. Nightclubs.
4. Talking nonstop.

Classification System SPGL

I'm arranging my books which is quite satisfying. I'm making little jokes of proximity with them, like putting "Against Architecture" next to "The Architecture Project Pack" and the Prison Notebooks next to the Thief's Journal and May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude. It's hard to know where to place the Anarchist Cookbook, because it really has some strong mojo to cancel something out. I'm thinking of putting it on the shelf next to all the "Home Networking for Dummies!" kind of books. Some anarchy in their midst might take off some of that shallow swagger. Much pleasure, you can see. The feminism section is next to Learn Korean! and Bird by Bird.

I want to get back to writing Trace and the Clocks, my YA critique of the Bush administration. I liked that book. It was the first one, when I figured out I could write Long Things, even before my parenting book. Thinking of the part with the old man in the library, the one who the girls wake up after hundreds of years. That library, like the one in Name of the Rose. Some of us have that dream of the Perfect Library. You know who you are if you have it too.

A Great Place to Film a Vampire Movie

For some reason I wake up early in this house, though I feel just fine. I like coming out into the living room all by myself, flanked by cats, bustling briefly in the kitchen in the dim light. Mine mine mine! Mine mine mine! So acquisative I am! It's all about control. I can do anything I want to. I could level the house and start over. That would be really stupid, but I could. I could!

Speaking of which, I'm thinking of painting the cupboards. Perhaps purple and green? Or should we implicate orange into the scheme as well? Definitely going for the Tertiary Colors.

Manny's search for the Perfect Screen Door took him to Home Despot last night, where he was gone for a very long time. My phone rang and his frustrated sickly voice on the other end announced "I have found NOTHING I came for. I HATE this place."

I could have said "I told you so" but instead I will blog it. This is my picture of dorian gray, after all.

Home Despot is the seventh navel of hell. Manny insists that we must go there since now we are homeowners and somehow it is required of us, but really. Not only will we die when the Big One Hits and the pallets of shrink-wrapped home improvement items start to plummet and bounce in the aisles around us, but there's something about the Home Despot trademark orange color that sends me immediately into a rage.

Is it true that snails were brought to California by the French?

Because We Are Social Animals

Sophie and I took a very short walk over to Huwes School playground, site of the arson fire a few years ago in the playground where the famous football player from Atherton contributed huge amounts of money to restore everything. And wow, the playground is really nice. I remember seeing pictures of him helping out in the making of it and it's all landscaped and shady with huge trees. NIce!

I read two Carson McCuller's stories and remembered how much I like her writing. It's plain and yet it gets so much across. Hm. Very character oriented. Simple circumstances wherein people interact simply but somehow evocative nevertheless. I wonder where that effect comes from? Something signals that you are in a representative place, that the story has some inner logic that will reveal itself. I think it is the connecting sentences between paragraphs, like "And that's before I knew what was going to happen, which was IMPORTANT..." which sets up momentum toward some event.

So pleasant in the afternoon breeze while Sophie cavorted around. A very busy place. I like Deadwood for its busy quality. Always people to see, hanging out and doing stuff. It's so strange to be in uncrowded places, like Manny's mom out in Chicago. Her suburb is completely dead most of the time. Everyone commutes somewhere else. The parks are abandoned and slow. There is definitely a trade-off for living in a place where housing is cheap. LIfe is quite boring. Here we may live in an anthill, but at least we have company.

Now to Flock and Feather the Front Walkway!

Manny left me off at the new house while he went to pick up the girls (what a luxury!) and I promptly went to sleep. Dreamed quite briefly of the recycling yard over at the dump, which is fantasmagorical in its scale and ferocity. Trucks file past constantly and there we are in our tiny car next to mounds of Stuff, all categorized (Hardback Books vs. Mixed Paper, Polystyrene a.k.a. styrofoam, computers, other electronics, oil drums the size of vans) so I'm sure my paws and ears were twitching as I dreamed.

Woke to a new world. Me, alone, in this house. Wow! I love it. I showered (also a luxury these days, when showers seem hard to come by somehow) and even sorted through some clothes briefly. I washed my glasses. I looked at the computer which beckoned seductively from its new perch next to the Big Windows. Complete!

I plan to do a bit more in the kitchen, and then move on to putting clothes in drawers. Also must put the plants I dug out from the old place into the dirt over here. Ceremonially and with great aplomb. I conquer this small plot of land in the name of Spanglemonkia! Let it be known!

Al. Most. Done.

Almost done over there! Dang! I can't wait to never go back! And I was all worried about saying goodbye to the house. Sheesh. Enough already! Time to be HERE.

Ep is helping us move the plants. All we have to do is haul away the garbage and voila. Out. OUT!

The Fun Part of Manic is the Manic Part

It's interesting hitching your wagon to a place like Deadwood, and this morning as I walked across the park behind Sophie's scootering back I felt stabs of civic pride. It was as though the city was greeting me with a series of Trials, or a series of Representations, like I was walking through the DWC (the abbreviation for Dead Wood City) Stations o' the Cross. This Is Your Life in DWC. First, across the busy street all awhoosh with large working trucks (plumbers, contractors, all on their first coffee break already, as this city gets up early and works hard until midafternoon) and then across the first parking lot to the Rec Center, where the blonde woman who picks up trash and cleans bathrooms greeted me with a peppy ""mornin!"

Passing along the path by the baseball fields, where I saw the other mom who bikes her son to Sophie's school ("'mornin!") and then the pair of older women all behatted and wearing windbreakers, laughing with each other, ("mornin!" "mornin!") and the trash men were gungling along with their large containers and smiling hugely ("mornin!")

You get my drift. Everyone was unaccountably cheerful despite the new gang graffiti along the wall, which will no doubt be erased by the minions of the park sometime today (DWC X4th is our Gang Local Union) and if they had united in some kind of song and dance routine it would not have been at all surprising. In fact by the time we were walking up the final sidewalk Sophie and I were swinging our arms and singing rather loudly together:

FROM THE ASHES OF DISASTER GROW THE ROSES OF SUCCESS!

Which she punctuated with the backing singers saying "Those ROSY ROSES!" at the appropriate moments.

Milton Sleeps Where the Sun Shines

Word of the Day for Friday April 29, 2005

   extol \ik-STOHL\, transitive verb:
   To praise highly; to glorify; to [1]exalt.