The Grey Smoke Twins

The grey-smoke twins are rewriting their script. Quokka no longer rears up with paws on the cupboard, meowing, trying to help me dish out his dinner more quickly, and Aquila is content to be cajoled and sometimes carried in to dinner.

The new blocking has been evident for a while; the doctor confirmed that Quokka’s kidneys were probably failing. The bigger, darker of the twins showed less coordination in the catbox…a previously fastidious if uncovered practice. Now he spends much time playing the Sphynx in one of his two box-lids. In fact, the most Quokka says is a heavy purr while I stroke him. I carried him off to the back room to sit in the arm chair the other day, held him in my lap, talked to him and petted him. Further lap sessions were curtailed by Quokka, who insisted on being put down on the floor, where he wobbled gamely back to his box lid, or sat tummy to floor on the cool tiles.

Under the old book, the twins both joined us when we went up to bed. Quokka took his place on the bathroom rug. Aquila waited outside the bedroom door until Phil came up, then climbed the graduated boxes and chest to the bed itself, where she took her command post on the MIT sweatshirt square in Phil’s footspace. After a week of Quokka staying downstairs at night, he surprised me two mornings ago, lolling on the bathroom rug again.

But lately, Quokka has drowsed in his box lid, happy to have dinner brought to him, though not so interested really in the water or the milk. Though his tummy is full, his spine bony, and his spare haunches showing his bright white undercoat, he goes at his wet food with purpose. Aquila finishes it up for him, and I refill the plate…we don’t dole out the food in measured portions anymore…and give him a new bowl of water.

Aquila, friskier mainly in comparison, curls up on Herman the pillow in the back room or sits on the step looking out into the back yard.

But vocal Quokka has not said a word in a while, and I miss his voice.

Word

Redolent,

meaning

and import

drench

every syllable,

chewed off

and

spat

or unctuously

caressing the mouth.

ritornello

nag

chorus

argument

Dripping

situations,

stinking of sweat,

muscling its meaning,

stringing my

tendencies

along,

resembling something

mother said,

once.

I hold my tongue,

evoke my father’s,

sister’s.

Pendulant,

words

hang

in

my

breath.

I turn, expecting

them to

be there,

lip-synching

my thoughts

to

you.

Slowly, Very Slowly

If I have to reduce my household at the rate I have been doing the last several months, the household will have grown 5-fold at the end of the period. We have taken Jenn her bicycle and gave a drawing table to Molly McK, but gosh, we still have a house full.

Phil is in the back room, mending the webbing on the wing chair.

That chair started out as brown fuzzy horsehair. Mom had it reupholstered in a white and floral nylon in the 60s. Then I got it slipcovered in cotton in the 80s. I suppose it is time for another covering, but I'll just trim the threads where the cats have shredded it, and carry on. It's pretty comfortable when the webbing holds. Not when it doesn't.

Had a modicum of (mostly pro bono) work today; back to the packing tomorrow.

And then there were audio books

A great joy while driving long distances (besides the great feel for the country that you get by moving through it) is listening to audio books. We seem to have quite a collection, many of which we have listened to multiple times.

We highly recommend them.

Back on the job

Job? We don't need no stinkin' job...

I've discovered (isn't Google wonderful) a share-ware program for cataloging CDs: collectorz.com

The program is a  (free for few features, some $ for more, more $ for still more) download, and does not live on-line like LibraryThing. I suppose since there was such a brouhaha about 'file-sharing' that is a good thing...less temptation.

I suppose I am more than half-way through, and I was lucky enough to find duplicates that Charles adopted, so the 'pure' collection is (mostly) going to be stripped of dupes.

Open the program | push the button to log disks | pop a CD in the drive | the program reads the code number off the disk and pops the CD tray out | insert another disk, etc.

When you have a good stack done...keep it down to 10 or fewer to make it easier to correct discrepancies...push the "search" button. The program goes out and retrieves title, cover art, track lists and times, etc., etc. for each CD...if it can find it. If it can't find it, you can enter it manually by editing the record after you have saved the list to your database. That's why I suggest being conservative about the number you do at once; you'll have to research which entry stands for which disk, and it's easier with a light load or a short stack.

There is a 'comments' type field into which I can enter the box number the CD is packed into, much as I did with books. Many many fit into one box, though, so it won't be quite so critical. As the list is being built, you can specify genre (making them up if you want more than they come up with), so re-shelving at the other end will also be pretty straightforward.

Goodwill Sorting

We've gone through all the linens and towels and made a couple of boxes for Goodwill. I hope they take pillows!

Next, on to catalog the things we will be giving to the church sale.

In the course of the project, we found some ratty-looking fabric pieces that turn out to be old bean sacks! They have faintly-visible printing that extols their virtues as "seamless". I guess they are a leftover from the Great Depression. I was going to cut them up as dish towels, but now I will find some better use for them.

Paint and shine

Phil has finished fixing the ceiling in the yellow bedroom. It all looks gorgeous, and we moved Grammy Grammer's sleigh bed, my childhood maple desk, and Mom's antique chest of drawers in, to furnish it. The sleigh bed had been occupying the post office, so it's nice to gain more packing space in there, too.

Phil and I also moved the tall chest with the mirror into the front bedroom (the blue room), and that room is looking more settled. As things move around, we get closer and closer to actual packing of our own stuff.

Happily, we had company Friday night: Dawn, David, and Jon came through on their way further north. So we had nicely furnished space for them to sleep in.

So we move steadily onward. (Who knew we had so many sheets?! Some MUST have been from Mom's stash.)

Done with the commercial videos

Finally, we have finished looking at the commercially-made videos and dvds. Put many in the "church sale" box; kept some.

Now we must dig into the tapes Mom made. Some will be interesting; some will not. All appear to be taped off TV, but the proto-Tivo ones can be recycled.

Update: one of the tapes (labelled "8-mm") is a VHS shot while Jack M and Mumma watched films of (among other subjects?) the boys's trip around the US in 1966. Because of the method of re-recording, there are delightful comments from both Jack and Mumma on the tape.

How nice to see that box truck backing into the d'way

Sold a load of furniture last week; enough to furnish a small apartment. I think we owe them a couple of pieces, still, but they also took all our tropical plants. As Ren says, maybe the plants would have been happier in Texas. But I wasn't interested in finding out how to pack and ship; we can grow more.

Video Glut

We've seen these movies in the last week: For the Boys, Crooklyn (first 1/2 hour), Alice, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, The Mirror Has Two Faces, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, An Ideal Husband, and The Indian in the Cupboard. All go into the "give away" box.

Not the first time for most of them; PDEtheD was a first.  1960 seems so long ago!

Best: Indian. All (except Crooklyn) worth watching. We felt that Crooklyn sang true, dialog-wise, but did not appear to have a plot. Which makes it difficult as escapist video.

I'm not telling how many more we had rejected out of hand, having remembered them vividly, or kept out of hand, ditto. THEN, we will be on to the home-recorded vids; probably we'll fast-forward through most of them.

Music Mashup

Started "final boxing" the Music today...sheet music in Box 1; band music (and some piano) in Box 2; Vocal sheet music in Box 3. Or something like that. Feels good to be this far, but there are still bends in the road before we see Mount Joy.

Antique velvet

This afternoon, I delved into some pretty-much-destroyed boxes that had been caught under a roof leak in Mom's attic years ago. They still contained their treasures: burgundy velvet, black velvet, and so on. I immediately ditched the leatherette and pieces of leather, which were too far removed from their origin that they were not even interesting. There are some small harnesses, which appear to be dog harnesses. I also ditched the metal zippers that had been harvested from garments long ago. There were two new zippers (using the term "new" advisedly; they were still in their original packages), which I kept, as well as a dandy descriptive sheet that showed where to use the new "slide fasteners" in garments.

I especially like the patterns. The packages look much as Simplicity, etc., patterns do now. The charm is in the markings: "Virginia, Spring '44" and "checked 12 '44; 15 pieces, all here". The pictures on the envelopes are simply priceless. So I'll go through them more thoroughly at my leisure, assuming I get some leisure some time in the next 25 years.

Phil is generously allowing me to keep fabric remnants from my mother's projects...I recognize some of the fabric. I'm keeping ALL of the fabric that must have belonged to my grandmothers. Too cool to dispose of right now...it all evokes the poetic in me. Perhaps it's false nostalgia, perforce, because I wasn't there..., but I think it's my inner magpie, fascinated by the novelty of a connection between life a hundred years ago  and life now. Actual, physical life, that is, or the remnants thereof.

Thank you, Minnie and Irene and VIC (Ginny to all of us...). God rest you merry.

Treasure Hunt Continues

This week, we have come across original drawings that *I* had never seen before done by Phil at RISD. There's nothing in the world like drawings IN PENCIL and ON YELLOW TRACING PAPER!

Sure takes me back.