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Monday, October 04, 2004
snippety snippets, again (including an update on T)
Yesterday I bought fabric-softener sheets. I bought them at Costco, so they're in a two-pack, sealed in shrink-wrap, sitting on my dryer behind a closed door, and yet the smell of them has now completely pervaded my house. I am more than a little afraid to take the wrapping off, let alone actually -- egads -- open one of the boxes.
An update on poor T: He ended up going to the doctor today, because the pain in his jaw (which, I don't remember if I mentioned this yesterday and I'm too lazy to check, was really sore after his fall, even though he hit the back of his head, and it wouldn't close properly for a while, and won't again now) got worse and worse. The doctor thinks it may be dislocated, and sent him for an X-ray. In looking at the films, I think the doctor is wrong, but then, there's more than one reason (like, say, six or eight years of schooling) why I'm not the person who's paid a six-figure salary to read X-rays, and we'll know what the actual professional says probably tomorrow. Meanwhile T is on muscle relaxants (read: T is sleepy, and a little loopy) and is off work until at least Thursday. Good times.
With Daddy home, as usually happens, we got almost nothing at all done today. C did go to her first ballet lesson of the year, looking as cute as it is possible for a little five-year-old girl with positively enormous eyes wearing a pink leotard and pink tights to look, which is pretty darn cute. And she had a good time. LT spent a great deal of time playing Legos with Daddy. Tomorrow, even with him home, we're going to have to get back into our routine or the house will be unlivable by the end of the week, and the kids will have totally forgotten how to sit still at school and, you know, learn stuff.
I'm trying to read Mr. Darcy Takes A Wife, which is one of many sequels written to Pride and Prejudice. I will just say that Jane Austen rotates furiously in her grave every time anyone picks this book up off a shelf, and not just because it is full of really explicit sex scenes (complete with phrases like "torch of love" [yes, that means what you think it means] and "piercing a maidenhead" and "emit his seed". I swear I am not making this up). The author makes a very painful effort to use Austenian language, and fails utterly. In fact, she crashes and burns. And she is apparently about to write in an illegitimate son for Darcy. I do not plan on finishing this book. Isn't it great about books -- I've always thought this, since I was a little girl -- that the lives in them are just words on paper, smashed between covers, until we do that magical thing where our brains read the words and flesh out the stories in our imaginations, and then they are as real to us as the lives of real people whom we just happen to never see? I love that. And conversely, by not reading this book, I am effectively making its execrableness cease to exist in my own personal world. Bye-bye.
A final snippet: Our cats' collars have bells. As annoying as this sometimes is (say, when one of them is sleeping on our bed and decides to vigorously scratch her neck, at that awful moment which is ten minutes before the alarm goes off), we have left them on as a kind of protection for the quail families who live in the field next to our house. However, I frequently remind myself that the sound I'm hearing is just the cat's collar only after I have freaked out, thinking there was a dog in the house with its tags jingling. Sometimes my own mental vacuity astounds me.
