Bloggery - Highlights - Archives

October License Plate Report

October 31, 2009 - View Single Entry

Zilch.

September License Plate Report

September 30, 2009 - View Single Entry

Tennessee and Montana, in that order, bringing the YTD total to 42.

& Mary

September 18, 2009 - View Single Entry

Mary Travers passed on Wednesday, the 16th. Another voice stilled, I thought, and then I thought, No, that voice, like so many other voices, is ringing in my memory, moving me forward, and will be till the day I die.

My life has the most amazing soundtrack. Starting, more or less, with the Civil War songs I learned from my maternal grandmother (who belonged to the Daughters of the Confederacy as well as the DAR) and from the records of Tennessee Ernie Ford, moving on to the Beatles (the first LP I ever bought, age 13, was Introducing the Beatles) and all the glorious pop, rock, and political music of the mid and late 1960s, which could be heard, believe it or not, on AM radio. The Stones, the Beatles, the Airplane, Simon & Garfunkel . . . My family was nowhere close to musical, but I met Joan Baez, Tom Lehrer, and the Kingston Trio through my father's records. (I swiped his copy of Joan's first album when I left for college. I've still got it.)

I'm nearly certain that I was listening to Peter, Paul & Mary while still in high school. "Blowin' in the Wind." "Puff, the Magic Dragon." "When the Ship Comes In." "Leaving on a Jet Plane" was a huge hit my freshman year at Georgetown U., and everybody got weepy singing along as they prepared to leave for Thanksgiving or Christmas with the family. It was less of a hit with me, though I liked it well enough. I liked political and poetic songs much more than sappy love songs. If it hadn't been for Peter, Paul & Mary, along with Joan Baez and the Byrds, I wouldn't have appreciated the genius of Bob Dylan's songwriting. I couldn't stand to listen to him sing. Can still barely tolerate his '60s voice. But the songs, the songs . . . !

Another thing about Mary Travers: her range was about the same as mine. I could sing along without going into falsetto or breaking in the middle. Altos rule! (Tu solus altissimus = "only you altos are great.") Sing along with Joan Baez? You jest.

She's gone, but what a life. What a life, what a life! And only 14 years older than I am, which means she was only 14 years older than I when she sang in concerts and made recordings and generally helped inspire me to keep on keeping on.

There's lots of wonderful stuff about Mary out there. Start with what her singing buddies Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey wrote. Then browse through the guestbook. Nothing is wasted. Carry it on.

Shelved

September 16, 2009 - View Single Entry

I don't subscribe to many magazines, and I'm not self-deluded enough to keep infinite back issues in the belief that I'll get to them "one of these days," but the avalanche on top of Travvy's crate did include almost three years' worth of Poets & Writers (a bimonthly), two years' worth of Ms. (quarterly), a few off our backs and scattered issues of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which the University of Pennsylvania sends me bimonthly because I'm an alumna. I decided to hold on to all but the old Gazettes at least long enough to see if they pleased me enough to justify the space they occupied. First, however, I had to find some space for them to occupy that wasn't on top of Travvy's crate.

The obvious choice was the shelves at the head of my bed. The drawback was that these hadn't been straightened up in quite a while -- not as long as the kitchen floor had gone unswabbed but still long enough for the less-read books and the less-used shelves to have accumulated a certain telltale fuzziness. This turned out to be a two-morning job.

My studio apartment is divided into two parts, one a little bigger than the other. The smaller "half" includes the kitchen and has a pebbly linoleum floor. The bedroom/office half is wall-to-wall carpeted in utilitarian blue-gray. Straddling half the dividing line between the two is a built-in set of shelves about six feet high. An assortment of tchotchkes occupy the top shelf -- a blue-eyed Siberian husky stuffed toy, a rearing wooden horse, a small Jordanian flag, two ceramic goblets, a brown Wedgwood pitcher my grandmother gave me, and so on. It gets pretty fuzzy up there because I can't see the top of it unless I stand on my bed, so that's where I started yesterday.

The next two shelves are accessible from both kitchen -- they're right over the sink -- and bed. On one side they're lined with kitchen stuff: cookbooks; big jars of flour, white, whole wheat, and rye; quart-size Mason jars of white beans, black beans, garbanzos, lentils, walnuts, and other staples; half my oversize collection of mugs (the other half is in a cupboard), and some empty jars and infrequently used bowls. The bedroom side is mostly a photo gallery of my journey from feminist bookstore worker to born-again horsegirl, with a few useful items -- a reading light, and a box of green Kleenex that Travvy chewed the end off when he was in his insatiable chewing stage. The lower of these two shelves is exactly nose level for a large dog standing on my bed. I lost an old pair of glasses before I finally figured this out. My boombox remote and my kazoo survived but are scarred with teeth marks. I finished those two shelves yesterday.

This morning I did the lower, bedside bookshelves. This involves some maneuvering because the bed is a snug fit with no room to walk around it, and besides the ceiling follows the pitch of the roof. So I'd lie on the bed with my trusty vacuum at my side and pre-dust, dust, and rearrange the books, some of which, of course, I'd either thought I'd lost or forgotten I owned. The magazines that formerly sat on Travvy's crate are now stacked neatly on the shelves. All the books are standing upright. I can actually see the little alarm clock if I look over my right shoulder.

Over my left shoulder yesterday was a paper slide creeping out from behind my deskside chair. It's gone. True, there's a swirl of newspapers, folders, photographs, receipts, and miscellaneous papers on my bed waiting to be clipped, sorted, and/or filed, and at least one of the piles on top of Travvy's crate is not (not, not, not!) going to stay there. Progress, however, has most certainly been made.

I'm no one's idea of a clean freak, but now I'm eyeing the other neglected corners of my apartment. Morgana's keyboard, for instance. If a keyboard this grungy belonged to anyone else, I would hesitate to type on it for fear of getting cooties. Most of us are born inoculated against our own grunge, or we develop immunity PDQ as soon as we start having to clean up after ourselves. We know where our own grunge came from and believe that most of it is harmless. Most of us are not willing to extend the same tolerance to other people's.

Enough, however, is enough. "Moderation in all things" certainly includes cleaning. Some people make a respectable living cleaning houses, but just about no one gets paid to clean her own apartment. Rather than take on my computer desk, I am about to resume cleaning up the manuscript I'm working on. I get paid for that.

Floored

September 14, 2009 - View Single Entry

I've been meaning for quite some time -- you don't really want to know how long -- to swab my kitchen floor. This accounts for at least a third of the floor space in my studio apartment, and Travvy's crate occupies about 20 percent of it. Travvy's crate was my excuse for not swabbing the kitchen floor, but the crate itself wasn't the real reason. The crate, though (like Travvy) large, folds up easily once you've removed the floor tray, the horse blanket folded up on top of the floor, and the food dish and assorted bones and chew toys that have accumulated on top of the blanket. The big problem was the stuff that has accumulated on top of the crate. The top of the crate looked as if a two-drawer file cabinet and a floor-to-ceiling magazine rack from the public library had emptied themselves just overhead. This was my real reason for not swabbing the floor in -- like I said, you don't really want to know how long it's been since I last mopped my kitchen floor.

In order to take Travvy's crate to the shows this past weekend, I had to clear off the top. Saturday morning I carefully moved pile after pile of magazines, newspapers, Mud of the Place promotional materials, income tax folders, and assorted mail to my bed. For some people this might be a trick to get them to actually sort and go through the stuff before bedtime, but I am not one of those people. At bedtime I moved the piles to a space on the floor where I wouldn't trip over them. Sitting in my desk chair, which I am right now, I can look over my left shoulder and see it all peering out from behind the small easy chair that serves as my deskside reference book holder, phone caddy, and convenient place to toss clothes that aren't dirty enough for the laundry hamper or clean enough to put away.

This morning dawned sunny and dry. I gazed at the vacant space usually occupied by Travvy's crate (which was folded neatly out on the deck), ignored the pile of stuff reposing beside the easy chair, and decided to swab the kitchen floor.

It took pretty much all morning. I shook out the little oval rag rug that lies under the crate and the big matching circular one in the kitchen proper. I moved my boots and Travvy's water dish outside and washed the mats they sit on. I moved boxes and magazine rack into the bedroom/office area -- Travvy had to hurdle them to get onto and off of my bed, which confirms my belief that he's got aptitude for agility. I dusted and then I vacuumed and then I swabbed the floor. While waiting for it to dry, I gathered information and wrote a sports/news story about the weekend's events for the two local papers, then -- having realized shortly after noon that all of us participants are residents of West Tisbury -- I wrote a short item for the West Tisbury town news columns (each paper has one).

By then it was early afternoon. The floor was mostly dry. Travvy and I went for a walk. When we got back, I put everything back in its place and set Travvy's crate up. Now I'm gazing appreciatively at its vacant top. The paper cascade is still lurking on the floor behind my left shoulder. The next step is to find better places to put most of it. This will involve some serious dusting of shelves -- shelves that need pre-dusting with a vacuum cleaner before I wave either a featherduster or a dust rag in their direction.

Tomorrow. I'll start on that tomorrow.