Controlling the Vertical and the Horizontal

Whew. After days and days and days of unpacking, cleaning, and reshelving the books, the newly repainted North Bedroom is finally presentable. The shelving is not perfect, and I imagine that I will be making slight alterations in how the sections are working.

On one physical level, the only way to get (most) all of the books onto the main shelves was to switch from vertical shelving to horizontal stacking. I’m not sure how functional horizontal stacks will be for a semi-regularly referenced library. It works best when there are many books by a particular author or in a subject matter. It also means that the larger books, which may or may not be the books I’m more likely to consult, form the base of the stacks—consulting them will be like that magic trick where one pulls a tablecloth out from underneath a set of dishes. Hey Presto!

The fiction paperbacks have, alas, been double-shelved on some separate modular shelves. I am going to see if I can purchase some additional planks and brackets and increase the linear shelf space.

There’s no rest for the wicked, however. Now that the books (and the banker’s boxes they were stored in) have been put away, I have to move onto restoring the bedroom closets, which will involve finding brackets for the very long closet rod and installing them before I can transport the costume and prop department lurking in the North Bedroom and Main Hall closet into the new bedroom closet.

It also means figuring out where some other objects are going to live. There were a number of tchotchkes interspersed throughout the books and I’m resisting the urge to return them to the shelves. The chief of these is my Writers of the Future award from 2006, which inspires the joke about the person who goes to a costume party as a Gifted Child, and when asked “What are you supposed to be?”, replies, “Oh, I was supposed to be so many things.” Mark has already moved the trophy, which is a sharp prism of about seven pounds of acrylic, from one end of the modular fiction shelves to another end, where it will be less likely to kill me when The Big One hits and the trophy does a Sword of Damocles impression.

Unfortunately, I can’t make the closet in our new bedroom behave like a TARDIS, and there simply isn’t room for the Old Burridge Chest of Drawers and Portable Stonehenge and my clothes. And my Doctor Who Scarf. And the giant, wool, double-breasted Pegasus Ranger army greatcoat. And my necklaces, talismans, and amulets. And the crowns (plural). Or the file cabinet of critiqued manuscripts.

Or the banner with a full length Cicely Mary Barker Cornflower Fairy on it. I like it because it reminds me of my Anglophile Aunt Margot, and because I like cornflowers; and the over-the-top pose of the young male fairy with his hands to his cheeks and one leg bent up screams, “OMG! You want to go to the fancy dress ball with me?!” Whether it’s Too Much Old Lady or Too Much Twee I can’t say—but it’s so “Too Much” that it’s funny. I’m not sure why Mark hates it and calls it scary. Okay, we did hang it up behind the door of the bedroom just before The Child's temporary return between college academic terms in a decor move that Mark calls "weaponized;" so there may be a residual Grandma-Jumpscare element involved.

Mark also does not care for the large, sixty-year old, touristy temple rubbing of a bunch of bright blue Hindu women playing instruments. I’m sure my parents purchased it on their travels overseas when they were sophisticated almost-thirty-year-old Americans in 1962. It used to be a central image in the downtown house I lived in before I was seven—I thought the figures were pointy-eared extraterrestrial ?women? wearing space (or diving) helmets, with alien devices; avatars of celestial mystery casting a spell; or possibly space sea-monkeys having a party. What I took for either a lap-sized crystal ball or else some sort of space communication device in one woman’s lap in real life is actually a tambour, seen drum-head on. The air-tubes connecting their helmets to the geometric space suits that I saw as a kindergartener are actually chunky necklaces draped strategically over bare, spherical breasts. Perhaps it is Kama-Sutra-adjacent. I suppose I find it compelling and oddly comforting in a “the party’s still going” kind of way; Mark thinks it’s poorly executed.

Finally, there’s the small bronze unicorn bust on a pink marble plinth. I bought it when I first moved to Eugene to live with Mark. It’s fine art that doesn’t look like a bunch of scrap metal and gears glued together, nor does it look like a twee citizen of the Glass Menagerie. Nor is it Eugene Hemp Macrame with Driftwood and Beads. I’ve always thought it might be fun to make the piece a gnomon for a sundial board, but mostly it’s lived here and there in the house in the shelves or by the Portable Stonehenge or on the mantle or the dining room table. Apparently Mark doesn’t like it (and never has)… not because it’s nauseatingly cute, but, I think because a gay man owning a cast bronze unicorn bust is fence-sitting in the way a gay man owning a scaled-down replica of Michelangelo’s David or a reproduction of a sexy, Pre-Raphaelite Saint Sebastian isn’t. Also, being just the head and neck, the unicorn is slightly reminiscent of “The Godfather.” (“Nice bookshelves. Shame if something happened to them.”)

When I get a little overwhelmed, I go into the North Bedroom and look at the main, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves: vertical shelving tidily interspersed with horizontal stacks. Dusted. Clean. Accessible and not double-stacked. The hardback novels; the Arthuriana next to the Dion Fortune next to the Ronald Hutton; the gay history running into the gay spirituality; the divination section just beneath the poetry section; the astronomy section and the folklore section and the gardening and herbal section—and along the entire length of the main shelf is the art and the history and the art-history running from the Paleolithic to the Egyptian to the Greek, Roman, and Islamic; to the European Mediaeval and Renaissance; spanning to the Pre-Raphaelites, Escher, Mucha, and the Impressionists; ending with Barbie and Art Deco and New York Gargoyles.

I suppose the books spanning time and space are as close to the TARDIS as I’m going to get.

When The House Feels Empty

Mark has been away helping his mother and family for the last few days.

It always strikes me how our small little house feels so empty when he’s gone. The cats and dog help to fill the space, and The Child (and his cologne) is back from school, so it’s not like I’m completely isolated. The honeymoon period where I can do things that would annoy Mark is over—there comes a moment when you realize that you can only enjoy so many Marvel, Disney, or Pixar Movies (which Mark could live happily without viewing) that you can watch and only so much electronica or Mediaeval Eastern European music (which drives Mark crazy) that you can listen to because it doesn’t make up for the fact that your man is in another state. And the New York Times games aren’t as fun because Mark’s not there for us to play them together.

When he comes back, we’ll decorate the house for the holidays. This will involve moving large pieces of furniture and pulling out the seasonal table cloths and decorating the house with extra lights. 

And digging out the Christmas music that we can all tolerate.

Weekend Update

Went to the gym Friday.  I went a little early, so it was a little bit more crowded.  Managed to do the regular routine, with Roman Chair curls.

Saturday, after much anxious checking and re-checking of e-mail, I learned that I'd sold a story!  I had been indulging in a bit of pre-rejection reject-o-mancy, because my memory of selling to this market before is that they contact folks a few days ahead of the sale -- so when I got the message with its "thank you for submitting your story" opening, I was certain that it was a rejection and had to re-read it several times to be sure I'd read it correctly.  More news when it's published in mid-October.

Saturday was also paint scraping day.  Last week we had a ton of rain in a half hour, which resulted in some leaks in our garage.  Right now it's raining pretty hard -- although not as hard as last week -- and our roof seems to be waterproof.  My theory is that roofing gravel got stuck up against the side of the house and some loose siding, which created a mini dam and allowed the inundation of water to work its way over the roof flashing.

Mark, who stays on top of these sorts of things, whereas I would wonder why suddenly the house has half-rotted away, decreed we had to scrape, re-caulk, prime, and re-paint that particular side of the house.  So we did.  Okay, I'm such an arctic flower that by the time 11:30AM rolled around and the sun had burnt off the morning haze, I was dying from the heat of the roofing.  So Mark did the majority of the work (mostly scraping).

Sunday, the forecast rains appeared, which postponed our priming and painting.  So we did other things, like laundry.  I finally hung a string of LEDs along the bookshelf.  I don't know why I didn't do it sooner, because it looks fairly nice, and provides a gentle night-light glow for bed-time.

Decade in Review: 2006

June 2006.  On the solstice, Mark and I signed a zillion papers and became the owners of a new house.  We probably bought at the hight of the housing bubble.

Our realtor was great; she put up with me pretending to be a drunk undergraduate and shrieking "I am soooo drunk" as an illustration of why we didn't want to live in the Student Hell part of town; and put up with Mark asking during one open house, "So, is this where they hide the bodies?"


June 27 2006.  I lead a Wicca 101 ritual as a Sunday presentation at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Eugene.  The presentation was a brief lecture on the stations of the sun, followed by a Tree of Life meditation and a Spiral Dance.  It went really well, and everyone seemed friendly and enthusiastic.  It was so refreshing to find a "Neo-Pagan Church" that wasn't a collection of (in my harsher moments) "flakey, superstitious refugees from Math and Science."

I was very excited to be at UUCE, and I was hoping for rabbinical discussions of the Spirit of Life as experienced through rituals of the four elements.   In the months that followed, I had high hopes for an active Covenant of UU Pagans, actively, ardently, and jubilantly exploring the Seventh Principle (Respect for the Interdependent Web of All Existence of Which We Are a Part) with the tools of the Sixth Source (spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions) tempered with those of the Fifth Source (the guidance of reason and the results of science).


September 2006.  After lots of painting and scraping and cleaning, with lots of help from my dad, we moved into the new house.  About this time I crenelated what I thought was the front boxwood, but was in fact, the front azalea.  Mark was horrified and the azalea has only recovered in about 2013.  I've been banned from pruning or trimming in the garden ever since.

Against Mark's advice, I set up a green gazing globe in the back yard.  We'd had the gazing globe in our old place's front yard and I loved it:  it was an axis mundi for me.    It lasted about a month before The Child grabbed its base as I was picking him up.  Let's just say the whole event was like a Greek play by Euripides.

Saturday

Early morning writing has not been happening. I don't have the flu, but I've been fighting off a sore throat and I've been extra tired lately. I almost got up to write this morning, but given how tired I'm feeling now, I'm glad I didn't.

Today we've took everything out of our bedroom for a deep cleaning. I'm always surprised by how much dust collects underneath our bed and the chest of drawers. Between the bookshelves in the room and our closet, I was reminded of when I used to live at Arcosanti in a eight by eight by eight cube. It looked a little like the scene of a hyper-spacial accident between a laundry truck and a book mobile.

The day has been foggy and grey. As I was walking outside, I had a new appreciation for my glasses. A hill rising a few blocks away faded out as it rose up into the underside of a cloud. Pine trees nearer were darker and sharper than ones a little farther up and away. The scene was made for practicing watercolor washes to indicate distance.

On the down side, when I was in a museum for the first time with my glasses, I became very aware that they have a narrow portal centered in my field of vision where objects have crisp outlines and that objects in my peripheral vision lean toward this portal of clarity. Normally I don't notice it, but in a gallery of picture frames the artwork ripples around whatever I'm pointing my nose at.

I'll have to hoard my contact lenses for when we go to art galleries.

Domesticity

Today was a deep-cleaning day.

Actually, it's been a deep-cleaning few days.

Domesticity began Thursday night, when Mark and I planted a magnolia tree. Okay, Mark did about 90% of the digging and I helped move the tree from the back of his truck and into the back yard. We're pretty pleased with the tree, which is evergreen, and which should provide some extra privacy between our breakfast nook and the backdoor neighbor's house.

When I haven't been gardening (or writing), I've been cleaning up my office. My office is a closet. Literally. I moved my grandfathers old oak desk out of the closet, and it made a big difference. I suppose when I get around to replacing the ancient Windows98 desktop and its mondo CTR, I'll have even more space. I suppose that I should retire the machine, but I have a ton of old Illustrator files on it that wont run on any of my other machines. Oh well, it's there and available, and I am looking forward to more writing sessions actually in my office.

Sunday was cleaning day. We cleaned the kitchen, the bathroom, and the living room. Well, okay; Mark did most of the work while I moved things around. And did dishes. And vacuume out the fireplace (we only light candles in it, so I don't know how it got so dirty).

And then it was time to cook. I started the rice. Just as I'd turned the burner on, I got a phone call from a friend. We were discussing the logistics of next our next visit. As I gazed across our clean living room, I became aware of a layer of haze floating about four feet off the ground. It was like the fog was trying to come into the house. I excused myself from the phone conversation for a moment, walked into the smoke-filled kitchen. A white plume rose from the cast iron pan filled with boiling bacon grease on the front burner (note to self, RR and RF mean two different thing).


I picked up the pan. It was still smoldering, so I naively blew on it to try to stop the smoke.

With a foom and a whoosh, the bacon grease burst into flame.

 I laughed, because it was kind of funny, and took the flaming pan outside.

Eventually, I did get back to my phone call.

Winter Shadows

We thought this photo-collage would be instructive and demonstrate the power of the sun. The border between the snow and the lawn moss shows where the sun shines when it passes through the local meridian.

In about a month, around the Spring Equinox, the snow shadow would bisect the block circle around the cherry tree.

If the snow had fallen on the Winter Solstice, there would be no green in this collage.... well, maybe some from the sunlight reflecting off of our house.

By the time Summer Solstice rolls around, the sun will shine on the entire yard, except where the back fence casts its shadow.

Gasp! Frederic Edwin Church

Mark just pointed me to Church's home, Olana. I went to the web site. "Hey!" I said, "How come his stenciled stars looked Imperial instead of Country Cute?"

Then Mark used his campy Henry Higgins voice to read from one of his art books, Robert Hughes' "American Visions, the Epic History of Art in America," quoting Mr Church:

"A feudal castle which I am building under the modest name of dwelling house, absorbs all my time and attention. I am obliged to watch it so closely, for having undertaken to get my architecture from Persia where I have never been, nor any of my friends either, I am obliged to imagine Persian architecture, then embody it on paper and explain it to a lot of mechanics whose ideal of architecture is wrapped up in felicitous recollections of a successful brick schoolhouse or meeting house or jail."

And I knew that I had found, if not a past life, then at least a soul-mate. Mark added that Mr. Church was "poisoned by the heavy-metal colors he preferred, cadmiums and arsenic-based greens."

I did a quick internet search and came up with an elevation sketch of Olana. "Hey!" I said, "That's the castle on Rigel VII from the Star Trek pilot!"

Then I saw one of the rooms, the Court Hall: bronze cranes with curving necks standing on turtle-dragons, peacocks, elaborate tile mosaics, sumptuous curtains. "We must go there," I said, speaking as if from the depths of a prophetic dream.

"And that's just a staircase," Mark said.

Little Boxes

Today I'm fatigued.

Which is crazy, because I could have sworn I got enough sleep last night. Maybe today's fatigue is a reaction to air-borne dust, hay, nasty bathroom cleaners, and too much Pepsi.

This Saturday's big adventure was detoxing various parts of the house. Sunday's big adventure was... cleaning the garage. Sort of. I suppose "beginning to make a dent in the stuff" would be the most accurate description. Even after about six hours.

When we moved four years ago, especially at the end, I went a little crazy putting things into boxes and then the boxes ended up in our attic. Some of the boxes had really cool things in them, which turned cleaning out the garage into a kind of treasure hunt (I found more little tins, masks, and ocarinas than one would expect). But some of the boxes are -- to my chagrin -- crammed full of the sorts of records and letters that my Uber-Organized Mother puts into folders by month, and then transfers into new folders by year. So, I have a lot of (bluntly) trash with a few important documents mixed in to keep things exciting. Which I need to sort.

It's so bad that Mark has suggested burning things; this is the same person who is usually insisting that I be twenty-five feet away from the house with anything that even mildly approaches a spark or flame (let alone anything that makes an artsy flame, like, say, isopropyl alcohol).

Needless to say, I'm going to have my hands busy for the next few weeks.

Random News

On the dream front:

Nothing much to report other than they've been too sexual for me to comfortably write about on my blog. Okay, and on occasion I've woken up wondering, not exactly "What was I dreaming?" so much as "Why did I dream that?" I prefer the dreams of sexual tension to be about rising water and overflowing swimming pools. Although now that I think about it, I suppose being in a production of MacBeth on a floating slab of rock in the middle of an indoor moat might count.


On the writing front:

I've been using Scrivener to trim down the short story I've been working on. I've got a plot, and ... I have a feeling the story as it is plotted will receive critiques like "too slow," "not enough action," and "I get the feeling that characters were working toward something, but I couldn't figure out what it was."


On the house front:

It's that time of year when I want to do things to the house. Like rip off the roof and add a second story, or install a greenhouse along the (long) south side of the house. The latest house longing is to replace our outside patio cover with one that will actually be rainproof and extend the concrete patio about three feet south and west. Oh, right, and install that labyrinth I designed eighteen months ago.

Ah well, at least I have propagated some rose canes from the pruning I did earlier.