A geisha and an ermine

I finished listening to Memoirs of a geisha on the way to work this morning. Whew! 14 CD's. I love the way I'm always years behind in getting to the books everyone else is raving about. Anyway, it's quite a thing, that book. Long, detailed, not exactly action-packed, but interesting. I'm not sure I understand why there was such a fuss made over it--I can't imagine reading it, page after page, without doing something else at the same time. Although maybe it would have been better that way, since my mind kept wandering while I was listening to it, and if I'd been focusing on the printed page it might have made me concentrate more. Anyway, I'm glad I listened to it and I did enjoy it. Geisha Shmeisha. I'm mildly interested in seeing the film now.

Dinner with Ken last night. I made an effort to get there early, since I got home at a decent hour (5:10) and got my fire going, the dogs and fish fed, firewood in for the night, etc. When I pulled in there was an ermine in his wood pile. They are really weasels, ermine is just a fancy name for them. They turn white in the winter, with just the tip of their tails being black. There are two kinds, the large one and the small one. This was the large one. It was beautiful. Tess saw it and watched it really intently from the car as it bounded across the space between the wood pile and the cabin behind Ken's house. Pretty thing but they really give me the willies. We had a weasel/ermine that killed some of our chickens, years ago. Made two holes in the necks and sucked blood. YUCK. I had one at this house that used to come up on my deck, stand on its hind legs and look into my living room. It was the small kind and it was really cute. It would bound along my stone wall as I walked down my driveway, clutching my neck.

When I walked into Ken's, he had the table set and I could smell dinner cooking. "I'm cooking tonight," he announced with great pride. "It's your night off." That was great, but he runs dinner like a military operation. I just sat down to enjoy my drink and have a little visit when he announced that dinner was ready. Nothing like sipping your cocktail while you eat your potatoes. He cooked roast beef, which he does not know how to cook, but he sure tries, time after time. He cooks it way past done for roast beef and way under done for pot roast, so it's just tough. This had good flavor, though, and he was really pleased. We had potatoes and gravy (canned), which were good. The vegetable stumped him, though, so he decided on canned tomatoes. This is something my grandfather used to have too. Cold canned tomatoes. If you haven't had this, don't. He likes this so we have it from time to time. Just whole canned tomatoes in a little dish, floating there in their sauce. yummmm. I can do it, but when he finished off the gravy with a spoon, slurping it and sucking it down I had to turn away. ugh. All in all it was a wonderful meal and he was incredibly and rightfully proud. He kept joking "Now don't get used to this!" He even did the dishes while I read the paper. What a sweetheart.

It was Ken's birthday (92nd) on Sunday and I cooked a duck for Sunday dinner. This meant I spent a few hours making parts of my house presentable. I knew Bill would want to see my bedroom, since I had told him about moving the bed downstairs. It wasn't bad but I haven't finished moving the tchachkes out of there yet, or dusting where the tv was. Anyway, the duck was good but I've concluded that I'm not that crazy about duck. I made delicious fried radishes, which I really like (you have to cook them until they start to carmelize to get the really good flavor). You slice them into little rounds and fry them in butter & olive oil. They're really good, like any root vegetable. Anyway, Ann, our friend from Baltimore had flown up for the weekend so it was pretty festive. We had a good time and I took lots of drugs so my knee didn't bother me much. Saturday I felt sort of lousy and spent the day lying down, doing only a little cleaning. I spent 5 hours Sunday morning cleaning and cooking, but at a nice even pace, taking breaks now and then. It worked out well. It was a beautiful sunny day, the sort of day that makes it wonderful to be in my living room, looking out through those huge windows, watching the mountains and the birds. Lots of birds.

Monday we went to Upper Jay to barcode their books using dumb barcodes, taking laptops with us so we could do data entry for each books. It was great, mindless work and I loved it. There were four of us and we had these older women being the runners for us, bringing stacks of books to us and taking them away when we were done. We sat at a big table in the middle of the non-fiction and typed away. I love doing that sort of thing. They fed us a nice vegetarian lunch--a really good lentil salad, spinach salad and a corn casserole. It was a good day.

I got scolded by my boss for the first time yesterday. I was supposed to have written a thank you note for a bunch of crappy poetry books that were sent to us by a local publisher, and I hadn't done it because I didn't have any cards to use. She got tired of asking if I'd done it so she called me into her office: "You'd better close the door." uh-oh. She reamed me out pretty mildly, I went to the fancy store and spent $15 on a box of nice cards, gave her half of them so she can write notes to people too, got her an expensive piece of chocolate, wrote the note, posted what she wanted me to post on the listserv and now she's proud of me again. Not a big deal, inevitable because I don't do things she asks me to do when she asks me to do them. Old Director used to forget what she asked us to do so I could get away with it. oops, not any more.

And now there's spring in the air, definitely. You can smell it, you can feel it. The snow is melting in that special pattern that spring sun makes. It's been sunny all week, and the spring sun is totally different from the winter sun. We gain 3 minutes of daylight each day--in 5 days that's 15 minutes! Pretty cool. Supposed to RAIN today. Let's hear it for rain. Into the 40's, close to 50 this weekend. I'm off to Rhode Island to celebrate my mother's 80th birthday. She does not want to be 80. She really does not want to be 80. She wants no party. Mark and I will take her out to dinner, to this wonderful restaurant that is our collective favorite (Shelter Harbor Inn). It's a fantastic restaurant but not on the water. It's in a big old house. Mark and I are paying. We've only been there twice before in all these years. Can you tell I'm looking forward to this? Anyway Mark called me at work the other day, which scared the shit out of me (he knew it did, the first thing he said was that everything was all right) to give me the list of things she wants for her birthday. That was great, since I didn't really have much in mind, just a new purse to replace the one my dog ruined at Christmas. She wants a back brush to wash her back with in the shower. A small covered casserole. A Foley food mill. A white azalea. A couple of other things like that. A woman of simple needs. I got the purse and a new tablecloth at TJ Maxx the other day.

So life is good, spring is coming. I think it will be early this year, but I'm a fool. At any rate, we won't have a long string of subzero days again, and even if it snows it won't stay on the ground for eons. May is 6 weeks away. Can this really be true? I feel that way every March. Did I really survive another winter?