2001-05-07 - 5:03 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Something to Talk About", Bonnie Raitt

So when I'm not in a mood to write, should I struggle on with it and put out what feels like a boring, disjointed entry, or not write?

My preference is the former, although I'm never pleased with the results. Usually waiting for the urge to write means I never will. Whereas if I just start writing, usually I get back into something resmbling a groove and enjoy it. Same thing with exercising, and work.

So anyway, here's my attempt to get back into it.

(I wrote this on Friday morning.)

Well, here's my version of dinner with Michelle:

First, she is clearly reading my journal carefully and is very observant. :) She noticed, first thing, "You're wearing your fun pants!"

She made suggestions on what to order -- I had specifically requested Vietnamese since I'd never had it before -- and told me what to do with all the stuff they put on our table. I was a little overwhelmed by it all. It was good stuff, with lots of fresh herbs as garnish. I took most of it home and made Poindexter taste it. He wanted to take the one dish (marinated chicken and rice noodles) to work for his lunch, but there wasn't enough of it to fill him up so I got it.

I had a great time talking with her -- it was an opportunity to sort of flesh out the impression I had of her from reading the journal and get more details. She was pretty much exactly as I had expected, which was a little surprising. Sometimes people can be very different than you imagine they will be. It was just like talking to her on IM, but much better and in-depth. As it is, I completely lost track of the time and had to ask Michelle to call Poindexter to tell him I'd be late.

I did make her try out my car. The 30-year-old Volkswagen, with no power brakes, no power steering. I should have told her that the brakes require a little actual work on your part, but I am so used to it, I had forgotten. I don't even notice the difference between the VW and the POS, which does have power everything.

She did just fine, and I was not scared. :) I learned how to drive stick on this car, myself. It's hard to get the hang of the foot coordination when starting in first gear, and there's nothing you can do but practice until your feet learn it, because you can't intellectually tell your feet what to do. It's something you have to feel. And in spite of the shuddering and hopping about, it's not gonna hurt the car to stall a few times. By the end she was moving into first incredibly smoothly.

As she said when we were leaving, "This is all part of your plan to get me to buy a New Beetle, isn't it?" Yes! Yes it is! :)

At one point she drove onto a street that turned out to be a weird kind of cul-de-sac/private drive. We stopped in front of a house that had the biggest azalea bush I've ever seen, in full bloom. I gaped in awe. It was easily over six feet high and probably twice as wide, and very full and covered with blooms. There's definitely something to be said for taking a wrong turn. I've a mind to go back there and get a picture of it in daylight.

Speaking of flowers, there's a bunch of nearly-dead white lilacs on my desk.

Boo hoo. :(

Mom gave me a bunch -- they were in full bloom in NJ this weekend -- and somewhere halfway home they started wilting. At this point they're turning brown.

I should probably just throw them away, because looking at them depresses me, but they still smell pretty good.

Sigh.

Over the weekend, at Mom's house, I had the lilacs in a vase by the bed, and I was insanely happy with the whiffs I'd get as I was falling asleep and waking up. Did I mention that I love lilacs?

I really am quite the smell freak. Other people sniff something once and say "oh, nice" and that's it. Me, I stand there sniffing and sniffing until I get lightheaded. I was sniffing Mom's baby basil plants (she gave me some transplants to take home, too) and standing over Brent's pan on the stove with olive oil and garlic in it and sniffing, sniffing, sniffing.

My dad told me that he had switched blood-pressure medications, and his sense of smell came back (he'd thought it was permanently gone). I was ecstatically happy for him, probably more so than he is for himself.

On the way up to NJ, riding in the rented van, I had a sudden urge to stare at people that we were passing on the left.

Unfortunately, if I do this, I start to crack up. Two women were driving by, and I did my best Snoopy-as-vulture impression. The driver looked up at me, appeared confused and said something to her friend, and then started to wave at me uncertainly. I dropped the vulture look, smiled and waved, but not before she started drifting out of her lane, which made me re-think the whole activity and behave myself.

We pulled on ahead, and after a moment of quiet:

Evelynne: She probably thinks I'm retarded.
Poindexter: [laughing] I was just gonna say.

Not five minutes later the two women pulled ahead, waving frantically with big smiles on their faces. That only reinforces the theory, really. But I waved back, and it made me very happy, and I waved at a few more people until we got stuck on I-895 due to two-way traffic in the tunnel. Argh.

The waving thing. I used to do this a lot as a kid on long car trips. Not the vulture staring -- that was inspired by my lofty perch in the van, which was higher even than SUVs -- but waving at fellow motorists and passengers. Most people are really happy to wave back, and I never get tired of it.

Occasionally there are people who just stare bankly at me, and never wave. I wonder what they're thinking. Are they too cool to wave? Do they think I'm up to no good?

The REASON we were up in NJ -- seeing the parents and Brent and Stacey was sort of incidental -- was to move some pieces of furniture from my grandparents' house to ours. Specifically, my grandmother's dresser (bureau), a hope chest, and a china cabinet.

I had told my mother it would take us about an hour to load the rented van, and she didn't believe me. Probably because I am pathetically incapable of packing efficiently or quickly. Mom likes to remind me of how she'd show up to pick me up at the end of the school year in college and I'd barely be half packed.

But there was no packing to do in this case, and Poindexter and I can usually work smoothly together (I try to ignore my bossy instincts and just take direction from him), so it took an hour and five minutes. That included me browsing through Grammom's cookbooks and watering Pop-Pop's azaleas (they were probably a lost cause, though, since they had pathetic buds where the rest of the neighborhood's bushes were in full bloom).

There's something very weird about taking your grandparents' stuff when they're not there. Or being in their house when they're not. Even though I know they're not ever coming back to it. And that thought, in itself, is depressing. To see the home they took such pride in, in which I spent so many enjoyable visits, and know that it's all over. All I've got left are memories of my grandmother laughing and my grandfather fussing over us handing out drinks and snacks.

The memories are so vivid, though. Especially since I identified so much with this set of grandparents -- intellectually we are very similar. They were/are questioners. Where my mom's parents tended to be "that's the way it is" kind of people, my dad's parents are more of the "well, what are the other ways?" types. My grandmother, in particular, was curious about other religions, other cultures, and was interested in bridging gaps amongst them. My grandfather, before he got sick, used to show up at my parents' house with articles clipped from the New York Times and we'd have animated discussions about them around the kitchen table. Not so unlike me yammering about Jonah Goldberg's columns or something Kevin blogged, huh?

Anyway.

We even managed to get all the furniture up the stairs last night. The dresser and hope chest had to go up three flights, and the stairs are the kind that turn 180 degrees on a landing halfway up, so you actually have 6 short flights. And on two landings, the landing is split so that one piece is a step up from the other. I don't know what brilliant architect thought that was a cool idea. The landing leading to the loft bedroom is flat, as one might expect.

It was exhausting. I have spindly arms and had to work out ways to use my legs to push. We each were injured, as well. Poindexter was gouged by a pointy corner and I banged my shins due to a bad idea on my part as to how to carry the dresser -- it resulted in trapping my ankles between the dresser and the step. I have a welt on each shin today. Ugh.

We rewarded ourselves for all our hard work with dinner at Tempo, which we affectionately refer to as "the gas station", which the building was originally. Structurally it still looks like one -- you eat in what used to be the garage bays, and the ceilings are very high. But instead of garage doors and tools they have floor-to-ceiling windows and watercolor paintings now.

It was lovely. My selections were off the seasonal menu: I had spinach ravioli as an appetizer, and mahi-mahi sprinkled with ground filberts (hazelnuts) with an orange/dark rum sauce (wow! different). Poindexter had salad, two-bean and pasta soup, and angel-hair pasta with a tomato-basil sauce. It's a great little restaurant, one that would do well in DC or Old Town, but they've elected to stay right where they are, to keep the big parking lot and keep their prices low. I appreciate this, because it means I can eat there more often.

Poindexter and I are in a tizzy, since my digital camera arrives today and the projector arrives tomorrow. Technology heaven. I shall be able to bore you with close-ups of my flowers in addition to nattering on about them, and perhaps entertain you with photos of me brushing my teeth and reading.

I could take a hairy-leg picture for my drop-by hairy-woman visitors, but I might scare away the regular visitors, and I don't want to do that.

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