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Jan. 28th, 2023
It's Saturday.
Jan. 28th, 2023 01:40 pmI've got a window open a few inches for the kitties, and earlier had it open a lot, plus the sliding glass door open on the other side of the house, to get what another Lisa was calling, last night, a "shock" of fresh air through the place. That Lisa is from Germany, and I'd been asking her whether, in accordance with what I've heard about Germans, she wants windows open even in winter. (She does.) She ended up telling me a pretty fun story (from a place they'd recently moved to in southern England, right across from a high school) about her locked-out-in-a-shortshort-negligee self being very happy she'd won an argument with the husband she'd "seduced" the night before to have a window cracked, and how she and her new neighbors---with whom she bonded over that early morning mishap---used it to get her back inside, when hubby was off to his day gig hours away. And she also gave me a gift, via all the window talk, of not feeling guilty today about letting the heat out, to make the kitty cats happy and get fresh air in this place.
I saw her last night at my second social event of the evening, a big birthday gathering at a nearby venue called Venue. I arrived after the dinner part & got to eat a piece of birthday cake and talk to a bunch of familiar folks some of whom I'm quite fond of. That was after our trivia team once again blew away the competition at the library trivia event. Next time if we have as many folks we are probably going to split into two teams, which might be nice, as we've pretty much become the (ewww) NY Yankees of local library trivia.
That gang felt pretty companionable last night, too, relatively. And our host seemed to be in a good place. He's a fascinating fellow. I suppose most trivia contests can't help but pick up the spirit of the host/writer, and though he as a public-facing shield of sorts, his spirit decidedly comes out.
The family down the street, whose younger of two kids is now walking, has gone back inside after playing in the snow for a long while. Dead Bert's widow just went across the street to check her mailbox, sauntering with her hands clasped behind her back, and with her fur-edged hood up. I haven't washed the outside of these windows in a few seasons, and I can tell. Didn't think I cared about that, or that it made much difference, until I had some landlords in Baltimore who were mostly terrible but oddly (maybe cuz they were contracted for their own place?) paid for window washers every year to clean the windows of the 6 apartments in that old house (in which I was, and then we were, on the left half of the first floor). And lo! It makes a difference.
Plus then of course I had the experience of the magnetically sexy window washers doing the insides and outsides of the windows at my office. With their professional window cleaner belts and holsters and their flat butts and their slow methodical competency, having climbed up on the sills and using multiple muscles slowly and competently. And shocking me at what an animal of desire and rapt attention their merely doing their jobs would turn me into.
Yeah, so there it wasn't so much that the windows were clean later. Windows schmindows.
It's kinda nice to realize the day is already underway that I haven't got any plans for today. Not even any checklist-type goals, other than feeding the cats and me and scooping the litter box. And caffeinating me, which is already done. And the morning recovery meeting, which is also already done, and was a really good one.
There is that sink full of dirty dishes, combined with my having time to cook myself something today that involves turning on the oven, which'll be extra nice now that the "shock" of cold air has come through.
My one-time gf has asked whether we might meet in the middle between Cincy & here when she's next spending a coupla months down there. I was looking a cabins online, and lesbian non-bar things in Columbus, which I've never explored much (but had the zip code that by far received the most copies of off our backs, back when I was a volunteer deliverer of issues in 21218).
Hey, off our backs is on/at JSTOR. That's kinda cool. Like it's a full-on news journal, not an ephemeral subcultural newspaper/rag remembered as much for On Our Backs having called itself that to make fun of and position themselves in opposition to the idea that off our backs was supposedly anti-sex (cuzza publishing some anti-porn folks, and generally being second-wavers, though I don't think we called it the second wave yet, then) (or anyhow I didn't hear that designation for many years thence).
Somebody this morning was talking about loneliness, and the beneficial side(s) of it, which got me thinking of "solitude", and then of May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, which I think now I wasn't ready for when I tried to read it some decades back. Maybe I am now. In any case it's an idea of solitude that no doubt comes to mind in the literary world less quickly/often than the epic magic-realist Hundred Years thereof of García Márquez.
Ooh, looking up where those accents go reminded me: it's the last day of the Duolingo week, and I'm in the finals in the Diamond League, so to stay in the top 10 I'd better go do some more Spanish lessons. Not that I'm learning my accents there. They let you get away with never using any accents, and I've run with that laziness. So I now will check the accents again to say: adiós! hasta luego!
I saw her last night at my second social event of the evening, a big birthday gathering at a nearby venue called Venue. I arrived after the dinner part & got to eat a piece of birthday cake and talk to a bunch of familiar folks some of whom I'm quite fond of. That was after our trivia team once again blew away the competition at the library trivia event. Next time if we have as many folks we are probably going to split into two teams, which might be nice, as we've pretty much become the (ewww) NY Yankees of local library trivia.
That gang felt pretty companionable last night, too, relatively. And our host seemed to be in a good place. He's a fascinating fellow. I suppose most trivia contests can't help but pick up the spirit of the host/writer, and though he as a public-facing shield of sorts, his spirit decidedly comes out.
The family down the street, whose younger of two kids is now walking, has gone back inside after playing in the snow for a long while. Dead Bert's widow just went across the street to check her mailbox, sauntering with her hands clasped behind her back, and with her fur-edged hood up. I haven't washed the outside of these windows in a few seasons, and I can tell. Didn't think I cared about that, or that it made much difference, until I had some landlords in Baltimore who were mostly terrible but oddly (maybe cuz they were contracted for their own place?) paid for window washers every year to clean the windows of the 6 apartments in that old house (in which I was, and then we were, on the left half of the first floor). And lo! It makes a difference.
Plus then of course I had the experience of the magnetically sexy window washers doing the insides and outsides of the windows at my office. With their professional window cleaner belts and holsters and their flat butts and their slow methodical competency, having climbed up on the sills and using multiple muscles slowly and competently. And shocking me at what an animal of desire and rapt attention their merely doing their jobs would turn me into.
Yeah, so there it wasn't so much that the windows were clean later. Windows schmindows.
It's kinda nice to realize the day is already underway that I haven't got any plans for today. Not even any checklist-type goals, other than feeding the cats and me and scooping the litter box. And caffeinating me, which is already done. And the morning recovery meeting, which is also already done, and was a really good one.
There is that sink full of dirty dishes, combined with my having time to cook myself something today that involves turning on the oven, which'll be extra nice now that the "shock" of cold air has come through.
My one-time gf has asked whether we might meet in the middle between Cincy & here when she's next spending a coupla months down there. I was looking a cabins online, and lesbian non-bar things in Columbus, which I've never explored much (but had the zip code that by far received the most copies of off our backs, back when I was a volunteer deliverer of issues in 21218).
Hey, off our backs is on/at JSTOR. That's kinda cool. Like it's a full-on news journal, not an ephemeral subcultural newspaper/rag remembered as much for On Our Backs having called itself that to make fun of and position themselves in opposition to the idea that off our backs was supposedly anti-sex (cuzza publishing some anti-porn folks, and generally being second-wavers, though I don't think we called it the second wave yet, then) (or anyhow I didn't hear that designation for many years thence).
Somebody this morning was talking about loneliness, and the beneficial side(s) of it, which got me thinking of "solitude", and then of May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, which I think now I wasn't ready for when I tried to read it some decades back. Maybe I am now. In any case it's an idea of solitude that no doubt comes to mind in the literary world less quickly/often than the epic magic-realist Hundred Years thereof of García Márquez.
Ooh, looking up where those accents go reminded me: it's the last day of the Duolingo week, and I'm in the finals in the Diamond League, so to stay in the top 10 I'd better go do some more Spanish lessons. Not that I'm learning my accents there. They let you get away with never using any accents, and I've run with that laziness. So I now will check the accents again to say: adiós! hasta luego!
I totally forgot to mention the guitar, which was what I came "here" to write about. Last night I learned the chords for the JoJo song "When She Kisses Me". Can't quite play the quick-changing ones at speed, but at least I have 'em all lined up in my head.
:D
:D