Began re-reading James Herriot's Cat Stories, on the sunny front balcony with a sugary cuppa Prince of Wales tea; and when the tea was done, finished re-reading Cat Stories in the sun with a jar of Duo Penotti hazelnut~vanilla spread and a spoon. Because there's nothing in the house to eat.
Must go grocery shopping, or hope to survive off the remaining La Paila Dulce de Leche caramel spread. There's a lovely little grocery import shop down the road that sells marzipan, poppyseed paste and filbert mousse, all in easy-squirt tubes...
Mind you, there's a still honey bear in the pantry, and a box of blackstrap molasses in the fridge... Now I just need more James Herriot, and Bob's~yer~Uncle, everything's all right with the world.
Motes preserved by layers of memory, almost a decade later:
With the back tip of a spoon handle, I chivied irritating flecks of grounds out from the sugar~silted dregs of my coffee.
He polished off his balsamic~anointed oysters & vinegar~steeped fries, and artlessly sucked the salt~sour off his fingers to round out the meal, ingenuously apologising for such a base lack of etiquette.
To sit out on the terrace we'd had to wipe the table and chairs dry; the air had smelt brackish. Now, the sun had just set, and nacreous clouds gently scudded against the breeze into the maw of a night sky.
The formality of a first date had been shucked away; and baroqueness of conversation had dissolved into idly chatting about the other people we'd dated.
I had come off badly by comparison, in terms of sheer quantity of stories to tell. My date was a people~person; I am a people~pauper.
Outgoing & affable, charming & witty, he thought nothing of diving bare~chested into the sea of humanity to hunt for pearls.
I'm a thin~skinned, ascetic~humoured, vinegar~faced fishwife; so I muck about on the shore looking for the interesting bits of shell that have washed up, allowing The Drink to wet only my feet.
So we played the get~to~know~you game of what do you have in your pockets? And as he held my secondhand leather coat, he ran his palm over the nubs where buttons were missing, and brushed the worn enamel buttons left dangling by threads; and he asked why.
And I explained that, when it comes to buttons, while I can look at them and physically see them, I don't in fact actually see them because they simply don't register as a problem. And if I don't see a problem with something, it doesn't occur to me how other people might.
"Ah! well," said he, "well, there we are, then."
"I'm like that with my relationships when things start to go wrong. I can see the threads unraveling; but I just can't be bothered to fix it."
He plunked a sugar cube into his cola & we listened to it foam; the sound grew into mizzles of rain, each short~lived; in~between each mizzle, the faint smell of a burnt-out match.
White noise dropped to a meditative lull; the darkness took on a moon~splashed sheen, a magistery of pearl.
And I thought: how interesting an interpretation. I didn't think that was quite what I meant.
A rather interesting bit of shell, that one.
Go ahead, ask me about the weather.
~ ~ ~
This morning, blue~grey rainclouds were crouched like gargoyles, sitting low & towering high; sunshine, feigning twilight, had snuck in at the horizon; dandelion parachutes swirled, mimicking flakes of snow as prey apes predator.
By noon, the clouds had broken and scattered, and the sun was itself again; a few dandelion seed tufts had remained aloft, hovering and wafting like impossibly exotic, charmed & strange minuscule albino hummingbirds.
Later, the clouds closed ranks; light was slowly sucked out of the room as the day prematurely waned. Once buoyant downy pappi now trundled & sidled along the ground like tumbleweeds, forshadowing trouble for some Liliputian wrangler in a snail-sized ghost town.
The escargot herd was restless, on the verge of bolting, as the rustlers crept ever forward.
... brought to you by The Woods Next Door
A rather large chartreuse~yellow & burnt~toast~brown stripey SNAIL (Cepaea Nemoralis?) bravely clings to the outside of the kitchen window at the office.
As a co-worker said, Like a large aquarium, but turned inside~out.
No, I heard myself say, the garden store down the street doesn't have the kind of dirt I want.
No, not the black topsoil (with organic sheep's manure added), not the special blend for hanging pots & containers (with peat moss & vermiculite added), not the kind for growing roses (Ph balanced, pre-fertilized with rooting compound, & augmented with slow-release crevette~based compost), and not the kind for growing African Violets (unknown composition, available at the Dollar Store).
No, I just want the kind that's dehydrated and vacuum~packed so as to fit more dirt per cubic inch, thus saving me the hassle of buying two at a time, and providing me with more bang for my bag.
The kind of dirt you'd find at either Wal-Mart or Ikea.
Only, at Ikea, it would be called Smuts.
~ ~ ~
Contrary to the expression, dirt is not cheap. The cost of dirt is up from last year, and the several bags I've purchased have shown an unpredictable weekly variance in price, much like gas at the pumps. I'm beginning to suspect the price of soil is linked to the fortunes of real estate market.
...which brings me to the odd thought: Where does that dirt come from?
Do they strip~mine it from somewhere? Is it a by~product of the construction & mining industries? Do we cart it in from other, less fortunate countries whose unscrupulous governments are selling the dirt out from under their citizen's collective feet?
Somewhere, is there a nascent dawn a~blushing over vast fields where the air is heavy with the musky scent of moist sweet earth, as humongous oak~barrel~brown compost piles steam off the dew to a transient golden haze, organic matter breaking down into dirt at their thermogenetic cores?
Bulwer~Lytton, eat your heart out.
~ ~ ~
Dirt farmer, according to the dictionary definition, means a farmer who earns his living by farming his own land especially without the help of hired hands or tenants.
During the 1930's Dust Bowl catastrophe, the term dirt farmer was given a wry edge, as some joked that dirt was their major crop.
~ ~ ~
Imagine, if vast fields of compost heaps were possible (straw~capped & sacking~secured, of course, to prevent bits of matter from blowing off like chaff). Dirt farming, in a literal sense, could be a marvelous 21st century vocation. While others would use dirt to grow plant matter, the Dirt Farmer would use plant matter to grow good, fresh, nutritious, wholesome dirt.
It would bring a new meaning to having a brown thumb.
And, if the price of dirt is any indication, it might be quite a profitable cottage industry.
~ ~ ~
My mum always said that she wasn't gifted with a green thumb, but that she learned everything she knows by trial and error; and that she's made enough mistakes to get by.
In addition to making her own soap, knitting her own woolens, putting up her own preserves, and composting before it was fasionable, my mum also mixes up her own dirt.
She starts with soil from the backyard, and sterilizes it by cooking it on the stove (and let me tell you, burnt dirt smells sharp).
After it has cooled, she fortifies it with a proportion of nutrient~rich newborn dirt from the heart of the compost pile.
Because roots need space, peat moss is included to decrease the density of the mix so the dirt does not compact; peat moss also gives the added benefit of retaining moisture. Vermiculite is added to further lighten the weight.
My Mum has very happy plants.
~ ~ ~
Did people of my Mum's generation complain when dirt became commodified, in the same way that people nowadays complain about the commodification of water?
In both cases, I suppose what you're paying for is the labour & materials involved in making it hostile~bacteria~free, and amenable to one's mineral needs.
But, compared to water, dirt is relatively much easier to create from "scratch". And it's easy to mix your own special blends. The hard part is finding room for the composter. And suffering the smell of scorched earth...
~ ~ ~
My needs are satisfied, for the time being, by generic cheap dirt.
But if I ever have the room for a composter... I'll be brewing my own dirt the way vintners brew wines.
Ah... chateau la terre '03 ... do I detect the aroma of banana peels, carrot scrapings and coffee grounds? And the fragile note of egg shells? ...yeeeees ...a very good blend, a memorable year.
Surreal moment: I just glanced up to see, through my window, passing by on the street, a truck; on the side of that truck, two words.
The words? Urban Myth.
Il n'apporte pas d'haute couture
Ou dépêche mode de la Cote d'Azure;
Instead, as every young boy knows,
It brings the Emperor his Clothes.
I've been on a bit of an ersatz zen koan kick lately (probably from *finally* having seen The Matrix.)
So I want to post this raw snippet of thought before I move onto other themes and it becomes an irrelevant non-sequitur. It's incomplete & likely flawed; but I hope to follow up on it someday when I feel I've got a better grasp on the tools to carve an angel out of this rock.
This snippet was inspired by a proximity of posts: one, a post regarding N.I.; & then the other, a post regarding enlightenment.
And then there was this article I came across while googling for koans.
I'm not sure that I entirely approve of the article itself. Due to its placement next to articles entitled "This is a Just War" and "Fighting Terrorism is Moral", it appears to me to have an unspoken slant towards justifying violence by using the argument, look, even Buddhists approve! ~~ which, I think, is an attempt to bend the principles of non~violence like a spoon. There is no Ahimsa...
But it was the title that had drawn my attention.
"the terror koan"
Because of that title, I had expected the article would discuss how cyclical violence is like a koan ~ not about whether Buddha would have approved of killing under certain circumstances.
Deriving peace from out of cycle of violence, and deriving enlightenment from a koan share the same dilemma of "you can't get there from here". A question of ethics, however, is not a koan ~ at least, not the way most western religions approach questions of ethics (or, at the very least, not the way my religion classes in Catholic school taught questions of ethics ~ very much based on logic, apart from the bits on ineffability).
And, for some reason known only to my Id, I'd also assumed that the article was going to be an exploration on how this related to the situation in N.I. ~ possibly because I've heard claim from several sources (though always tongue~in~cheek) that the joke "If you think you know what's going on, then you don't understand the problem" was coined in N.I. to describe the socio-political situation there. Though technically not fitting the definition of a koan, the joke does share with the koan the notion of paradox, and the inherent premise that one must question one's premises.
It seems ironically appropriate that the conundrum of how to reach a point of non-violence from out of a frame of reference of cyclical violence should be compared to a koan, when certain schools of Buddhism contain the paradox of being a non-violent philosophy that occasionally advocates violence, or the threat thereof, as a technique for reaching enlightenment.
::
~ as if This Everything is so infinitely diverse, a paradox is the only way to explain it succinctly ~
::
~~ a paradox is infinity in a nutshell ~~
As a child, as a teenager, as a young adult, I have often said, I will never:
~ ~ ~
Doing something you said you would never do can be a liberating experience, and an indication of maturity & open~mindedness; or it can be an exercise in self~denial, and an indication of submissiveness & weak personal boundaries.
I suppose it's a matter of self-knowledge and perspective.
~ ~ ~
My list included things like, own a spice rack ~ surely, a red flag that I had sold out of the apartment-dwelling nomadic counterculture and bought into the house-owning sedentary bourgeoisie...
...um ...that is what a spice rack signifies, isn't it? No matter how fine it is.
~ ~ ~
I have also said, I will never have a garden full of inedible plants. Plants must be edible or otherwise functional, or else they are useless frippery & a waste of effort.
So. Last weekend: I'm scrounging through the seed racks that have been depleted by gardeners more prompt about their spring planting than I. Dearth of choice necessitated a change of expectations.
And somehow ~ I don't know how it happened ~ in the space of five minutes, I was transformed from being a person who would never plant anything as kitschy as a night~blooming garden to being a person who was excited about the prospect of having a night~blooming garden for the first time.
I'm even going so far as to shuffle around plants already planted and seeds already sown in order to accomodate the new garden order. Plants and seeds generally don't like being asked to give up their seat; so it's a bit of a risk to take for something that, up until last week, I said I would never do.
Part of it can be attributed to a gift I was given ~ a mixed package of seeds, now planted by my front door. Most of the seeds were unfamiliar to me, so I researched them. Some were edible, some were medicinal; and one, I discovered, belonged to a family of plants called Night~Scented Stocks.
What's the point of cultivating flowers that bloom at night? I thought. Why have a garden that you'll sleep through the better part of?
And this percolated through my grey matter until last week, when I was standing in front of the ravaged rack of seeds, searching for gardening ideas.
In our temperate zone (5B) no~one can guarantee that summers will be hot; so it is still inexplicable to me how my mind seized upon and justified a night garden as a lovely place to spend those summer evenings when it's too uncomfortable to stay in the house and too pleasant not to lounge outside.
Frankly, I mystify me. And that's probably the way it's going to stay.
~ ~ ~
If, later this summer, you pass by my place in the evening, you might discern the scents of: Moonflower; Four O'Clock; Evening Primrose; & Night Scented Stocks.
~~~
Postscript: Incidentally, I also once said I will never blog...
When you seek it, you cannot find it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Zen Proverb
::
A Handful of God
... a misread title, seen out of the corner of my eye whilst browsing amongst books.
'Twould be a lovely title for a poem, or a book, if only I wrote poems, or books.
Also misread:
Every Day Is A God.
Perhaps I ought to keep a list entitled Misreadings; it would be interesting to interpret these as Freudian slips of perception.
::
{Penetralia mentis} Supposing:
separated from oneself
by nuances of existence is
an inner world unbreachable
by self~willed self~knowledge;
{Glimmers of inklings} Perhaps:
it is glimpsed only obliquely/peripherally
via chance reflections that glance 'round real & ir/rational corners like periscopes,
via unbidden phantom smells,
via an aftertaste of dreams upon waking;
{Worlds of possibility} Maybe:
games of chance
might be construed as
a metaphor for desiring
those metaphysical insights & events that can only
happen by acciden
t;
...doubt this would hold up in a court of law; but it would save me a snail-mail stamp:
I hereby declare this to be my idea, I lay claim to it, no-one else can have it, I came up with it first, if you steal it I will sue.
There. That ought to bring the world to its knees.
If ever have the opportunity to incorporate myself as a business entity, my company shall be made manifest as:
Gambol & Frolic
I've looked; no-one else seems to have it.
Perhaps I ought to change the name of my blog to Gambol & Frolic just to drive the point home...
...though, in the end, I suppose it would mean being constantly confused with being a toy & game company... or a sheep co-operative... or a dance troupe... amongst other things...
Gambol & Frolic Co.
Gambol & Frolic Corp.
Gambol & Frolic, Inc.
Gambol & Frolic, LLC
Gambol & Frolic, Ltd.
and my favourite,
Gambol & Frolic, ULC
I just love the idea of being able to introduce myself as:
Mousehat: Edgar Mousehat, Gambol & Frolic.
My card:
Gambol & Frolic, Unlimited
Edgar Mousehat, Sole Proprietor
I've got the name; now what the hell will I do for a living?
Next door to the office is a wooded lot...
or , We're all here, 'cause we're not all there.
::
::
Q. What does the Zen Master say to the hot dog vendor?
A. Make me one with everything.
::
::
How old am I now? How long did it take me to finally clue in? I finally get the joke -- not like an enlightened monk might get it, but now I have an inkling why this is supposed to be funny:
::
Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.
::
What is the purpose of Life? Why are we here?
::
... to get to The Other Side.
::
It's absurd.
::
Life's absurd.
::
::
So laugh.
::
::
"Life is the flight of a bird that swoops out of the darkness of night into the great fire-lit hall of a castle, until finally he finds a window, then out into the darkness again.
The first darkness is birth, the second is death, and in between -- only for a few moments, and handful of years -- the warmth, the sound of voices, the shadows cast by the fire."
~~ Frederick Beuchner, The Magnificent Defeat
::
Life is a road, crossed by a chicken.
~~ Egdar Mousehat, Koan~Operated Satori, or, Put In Your Two Cents and Watch the Penny Drop
::
::
::
They say language is mostly contextural.
You just asked me either for a whale*, or a broom**.
I'm going with broom.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
*balleine
**balai
"... there's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed."
If empathy is something one must make a concerted effort to feel, then is it genuine?
Other people, having better instincts for human empathy, would, upon reading this article, think of the welfare of the people involved; or ponder the ramifications; or question the truth of the article.
I, on the other hand, must admit my first thought was: what, are all the good code names taken?
Second thoughts are for second guessing oneself; and so normally a second thought ought to steer one into morally calmer waters where one can reflect upon one's inital reactions, and upon how that in turn reflects upon oneself. And then one can choose an ethical, and more empathetic, course of thought.
My second thought was: ...because, evidently, nobody at MI5 would have been able to spell "Sabatier".
I'm not trying to be sarcastic about the depth of seriousness of the situation; I'm commenting on my emotional shallowness: I'm appalled at myself, because, intellectually, I know I ought to be.
It is, as they say, a dirty little war with many dirty little secrets. And I'm appalled. Because I know I ought to be.
Perhaps I oughtn't to feel guilty for not being empathetic; but, then again, I don't, really. It doesn't involve me, so I'm not involved.
So why does this feel unresolved?
I haven't been to church in ages, and my wardrobe reflects that.
So there was a quandry about what to wear for the baptism.
~
Warning: interminably long post ahead.
If you *must* continue... then go away. Get a coffee. Come back. And make yourself comfortable.
I'm not kidding.
~
Boyfriend was photographing the christening as a favour to his cousin whose newborn daughter was the star of the show; I was happily tagging along as auxilliary shutter~bug.
Though I enjoy photography immensely, I am not in any way a professional. So I was apprehensive about being there.
Normally I would bow out of a situation where my discomfort level is high ~ but I so much wanted to be there taking pictures that I was determined to go through with it.
To ease my discomfort, I wanted to blend into the background. The right outfit was essential: it would be my cloak of invisibility/chameleon skin/psychological armour/security blanket.
So I *had* to find something non-descript & appropriate to wear in church.
Now, in my tradition, one does not wear black to a baptism. One does not reveal shoulders, knees, or cleavage of any kind in church. One does not wear flashy clothing, and one definitely does not wear anything resembling evening wear. But heaven forfend one should wear anything scruffy.
My entire wardrobe would have been completely unacceptable.
I dragged Boyfriend with me to go shopping. Boyfriend has excellent taste, and a good eye for flattering clothing with classic and lasting appeal.
All I wanted was a dress. That was all I wanted.
Boyfriend tactfully tried to suggest a two piece ensemble, but I was stubborn.
Two malls I dragged the poor dear patient man through, from the high-end retail outlets to the bargain basements. There was not a single dress to be found in my age range that could qualify as church wear.
Plenty of summery spaghetti~strap dresses, shimmery cocktail dresses, gaily-patterned peasant dresses, boldy-coloured look-at-me dresses, but nothing one could wear into church without being awarded a scarlet letter.
Exasperated, we'd show each other the offenders & ask: Church, yes/no?
Florid~flowery~flimsy~flowy~frilly thang: Church?
1980's~revival pale~khaki diagonally~structured creation with mesh/grommets/zippers/shoelacing & side~train: Church?
Tube~top floor~length black~lace number: Church! I said. ~Yes, Boyfriend said, but Church of What?
Why did it surprise me to discover that church isn't uppermost in the minds of fashion designers and executive stock purchasers? I could have saved us a few hours, two frayed tempers and four sore feet.
So I wore one of the suits I have for the office. Hemline's above the knee, but it's oyster~coloured & fairly respectable.
~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~
We got to church early and found that appointments for christenings are tightly booked. They had stacked up babies for baptism like air traffic controllers stack planes for landing.
There was a group ahead and a group after our group, and it took a few minutes to sort out whose people were whose.
And nearly everybody's in black. Tasteful black, tacky black, spare black, spangley black.
They're your relatives, I hissed, feeling like twat in oyster, you should have known what they would wear.
He shrugged. In addition to allowing me to drag him through two malls the day before, he'd also voluntarily gone out of his way that morning to pick me up two pairs of nylons. He knew he'd already held up his end.
{Later he was to claim that this was not "traditional black" i.e., what is worn to church by spinsters & widows, but "transitional black" i.e., what is worn to church when going somewhere fancy afterwards; neither of these are in the same class as "normal black" i.e., what I have in my wardrobe, so I still would have felt out of place.}
So during the baptism before ours, we surreptitiously nodded towards offenders, whispering to each other: Church?
~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~
Stupidity is its own reward.
It wasn't until just before our baptism began that I realized a little forethought, a little planning, a little attention would have gone a long way toward making me feel more secure. A little black dress only goes so far.
First of all, the ceremony was unfamiliar to me.
In my tradition, christening is simple sacrement. In Boyfriend's tradition, christening is a stage~managed event involving costume~changes, promenading, hoisting on high of babies and other venerated objects, floor~spitting, holy~book~kissing, dunking, oiling and a hair~cut.
If you're trying to document the event for posterity, there are a lot of important points to cover. The baptism before ours had provided a wonderful opportunity to take notes. And I blew it. I spent it looking at what everybody else was wearing. And now I was going to have to wing it as it went along.
Secondly, I had opted to use a camera that was unfamiliar to me.
It was a professional~quality digital {*drool*} belonging to Boyfriend which he originally planned to use as a subsidiary camera; at the last minute he'd decided to leave it behind, so I asked if I might take it in place of my regular digital. He obligingly set it on Idiot~Proof, and off we went.
But even set on Idiot~Proof, a professional~quality digital is more complicated and sensitive than a normal digital. If you're trying to catch moments as they happen ~ moments that pass only once and will never happen again ~ then you ought to know the capabilities of your camera inside out. And now I was going to have to learn on the fly.
Thirdly, behaving and thinking as a professional photographer was unfamiliar to me.
I didn't dare tell people to look at me and smile please, or, can you stand not there but over there please, or, step aside please, or, can you move that please. At what point is snapping a picture desireable, and when is it being intrusive? I was suddenly painfully aware just how much my normal photography depends on still life or unsuspecting participants.
Classic example: At the reception, the parents and baby posed for pictures in front of the pink&white baptismal cake. By that time the sun was very low in the sky, and it cut a hot spot across their faces and the white frosting. Five minutes after we'd finished taking pictures, the sun had sunk past the buildings and left us bathed in diffuse golden glow of nascent twilight. I could've kicked myself.
If I'd just had the brains to think to wait five minutes, and the balls to tell the frazzled parents to wait five minutes, we'd've all had some damn nice pictures.
That one goes in the chalk~it~up~to~experience box, along with the sun~melted wax & salt~water~soaked feathers.
~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~
I actually had a private fit of nerves akin to stage fright before the event began.
Boyfriend said, Just keep snapping pictures.
I think I took about 240. I think, when we looked at them afterwards, that about five of them were good.
~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~
About halfway through the service it occurred to me that I hadn't seen boyfriend changing rolls of film.
Nightmares have moments like these; wild irrational moments when it suddenly clicks that you're up the creek without so much as a deflated waterwing, because the jampot is on the floor and therefore they're going to confiscate your house and send you to Peru in a paper airplane made out of a calendar which has dates circled on it for appointments that you've missed and now your mother hates you so you'll never get out of Peru because she's the only one who would've helped you get out and now you're screwed because you can't do anything about it and yet everyone's looking at you like you're still expected to fix it. And then you find you're onstage and can't remember your lines.
This illogical and terrifying thought seized me: somehow he was unable to change film, and the responsibility for documenting this once~in~a~lifetime never~to~be~repeated event to the satisfaction of first~time parents rested solely on me.
erg...
whimper, curl up in a ball
~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~
I asked him about it later; he said yes, he did change film during the ceremony, and yes, he missed an opportunity; but when we downloaded the digital at home, it turned out I'd captured the shot.
score...
~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~ { & } ~
Technically, I had no official responsibilities other than as back~up camera to someone who was good enough at his job that he didn't really require back~up.
But if I had to do this again, I would:
> ask to visit the church at least a week before, so as to to makes notes on the layout, the lighting, and the progession of events in the sacrement.
> ask to visit with the parents so as to discuss their expectations. What specific shots they might want of the service and the family? When are photographs permissible and not permissible?
> ask to borrow the camera so as to understand what it will & won't do.
~
And I would wear black.
~
& } > ~ * ~ < { &
Some small soft thing was gently bounced off the bridge of my nose this morning, and it woke me up.
Opened my eyes to see a catnip mouse resting two inches from my face.
Just past the catnip mouse sat La Mamacita Grande.
mrow?
[breakfast?]
Six Impossible Wake-Up Calls Before Breakfast.
The cats have many techniques for waking me up in the morning when they want to be fed...
...from the violent (pouncing on the full bladder, or attacking exposed feet) ~
...to the subtle (licking the eyelids/nostrils, or nonchalantly walking back & forth & up & down over & over again & again across the body like fumble-footed four-legged fanatical geishas) ~
...to the persistent (placing a well-judged paw, slowly extruding the claws, and then enexorably pulling as slowly & smoothly as an hydraulic piston ~ done everywhere, but most effective when done to the bottom lip).
I eventually learn to sleep through all of them, and so they're forever forced to change their tactics {I ought to keep track of all of 'em, and write a treatise: 101 ways to rouse your caregiver for an earlier breakfast}.
Lately it's been: *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? *poke* are you up yet? I'm HUNGRY.
So being pelted in the face with a catnip mouse was actually a refreshingly pleasant wake~up call.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It reminded me of the tool-based IQ experiments through which chimps are assessed. I've always thought La Mamacita Grande was very smart but too shy to show it; call me doting & dotty, but I think the fact she used a tool to wake me up reveals a rather sophisticated thought process.
We had another birthday in the office; and for once we managed to get the cakes snuck in without the victim's knowledge, and ~ bonus ~ got everybody into the kitchen at more or less the same time.
And then we couldn't light the candles.
Out of the several dozens of people who work here, nobody had matches or lighters. All the smokers were either out sick, out on vacation, or had ~ gasp ~ recently quit (smoking, that is).
We ran like mad around the building, asking each other for possible whereabouts of firelighting devices, scrabbling amongst the forgotten oddments in culs-de-sac of desk drawers, and collaring & shaking down suspected smokers, to no avail.
It was proposed the engineers use the tools and knowledge at their disposal to come up with a prototype. I cast an eye over the bits & bobs strewn around the eng'g dep't & thought, all this technology, and we can't make fire.
Someone finally remembered they had matches in the emergency kit of their car. Candles were lit, and, three seconds and a birthday wish later, blown out.
If only we had an old-fasioned "In Case Of Fire..." glass case which contained an extinguisher*... I would now gladly pay the money to create next to it a smaller glass case containing a dog-eared matchbook, with a sign that read "In Case Of Birthday Cake..."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
* The word for "extinguisher" in French is extincteur which I took to mean "exterminator" the first time I heard it.
So now extincteur always puts the same image and phrase running over & over in my head. Framed in a doorway: a bearded man wearing dark glasses and a nondescript (yet significantly bulky) tweed coat with the collar turned up, carrying two battered briefcases. Je suis Victor, he says, l'extincteur.
Well, that's free-association for you.
