Words are inadequate

It's been a busy month.

Of relevance to this post: after THREE MONTHS I finally have a new kitchen/hallway tiled floor, at no monetary cost to me. When the previous owners put in the new floor they didn't put in any transitions, and there's no way to get matching laminate five years later, so the budget called for basically replacing the whole floor. For the same (probably less) money, and way less hassle to me, I got them to replace the half-ruined entryway and kitchen floor in tile. It looks nice, and it supposedly raises resale value.

I also found out a couple of weeks ago that they managed to lose my dishwasher. I am not entirely sure how this happened, but whatever. They finally got me a new one on Monday. Which is good because that was the re-re-rescheduled photoshoot for putting the condo on the market. I believe it should be listed today or tomorrow. With any luck I will soon have enough money that I can withdraw it in rolls of loonies and build myself a coinroll cabin. Like a log cabin, but less insulative.

Now that the condo is on the market I'm starting to think about where I'm gonna be living. My current "plan" (if something this vague can be called a plan) is to find a house up north near Erin and a cheap room in Vancouver, and be down in Van one week a month. Unclear as to whether this will /save/ me any money over living in Van but it's unlikely to be any more expensive.

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Last night Erin and I went and looked at a number of houses. Most of them were in town, kind of generic houses, in varying states of disrepair. There's one or two that might work out.

And then there's this gorgeous house. I'm not sure how long the link will be live; the realtor said she's taking it off the market today. Apparently the owner was looking to sell and move someplace else... and "someplace else" sold last week to someone else.

It has two major negatives, which are significant enough to keep me from buying it. First, it's about a ten-minute drive from town, and hence a half-hour drive from Erin's place. Second, and more importantly, the driveway is long, narrow, and uphill, and there's not enough room at the top of it to turn around unless you're driving a Smart. This is an annoyance for April through October, and a severe problem for snow-covered November through March. (There are two minor negatives, those being "the kitchen" and "the main bathroom," that can be solved by throwing money at them.)

But, gods. The view over the lake. The light, the ... openness? of the main floor. The nestled-into-the-forest-ness of it. I'm having almost the same reaction to this house that I had to one of the houses Erin and I looked at for her last spring: it feels like Pop Shackelford's house. I think that's a combination of one-storey (or at least looks-like-one-storey) and set-into-the-woods.

It feels like the perfect house for me. Only not for me as I exist but for a me three years in the future, or me at slightly oblique angles to who I am or where I am right now. And yet I want so badly to settle into that house and never leave it, make it mine and stay there for the next fifty years.

Oh well. Something like it will turn up again.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written in another language.... You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

--Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

Martin Gardner, RIP. Pop's copies of (some of) Gardner's collected Mathematical Games columns from Scientific American made math fun, although I never associated them with "math" as a discipline. (What do you mean, I could make that into a vocation?) And Annotated Alice is an absolute classic, and you are seriously missing out if you've not read it.

Last week was my gaming group's annual week-long beach trip. It's starting to feel a bit more, I don't know, like a normal thing to do. Like I can go and just relax, and not worry so much about being surrounded by people.

( It was fun. )

Work is very much not the beach. Even if they let me go barefoot most of the time.

And here I expected it to be clouded over tonight. But I wandered out anyway just to see . . . and it's clear as anything out there. Just a couple of stars for ambience, and the moon a thumbnail sliver below a round red shadow.

The red surprises me, I'm used to the darker blue one sees in photos. But it's definitely reddish-brown here, as though the moon's devouring a tasty round brownie.

At what must have been Xmas 1982 or '83, we were in Arkansas (so, my first or second Xmas after Germany, and thus my first or second stateside Xmas that I can recall) during a lunar eclipse. Pop had just gotten a really nice camera and tripod that year, and he stayed up to take photos of the eclipse. I, on the other hand, was sent to bed because six-year-olds simply don't stay up that late. (It was going to be around one in the morning, I think.) I didn't see the photos for another year or so, but they turned out quite nicely. I imagine someone's got them stashed away somewhere. Mom, probably, or maybe Susan.

Four and a half years ago I got to watch the last lunar eclipse as I was coming back to Blacksburg, to start making a mess of a summer. The moon shone brightly enough, even with the shadow, to be seen through the fog over 460. There's probably a metaphor in there, but I was too shadowed myself to see it.

I think there's an eclipse of the earth scheduled during tomorrow's corporate meeting.

A joyous (edit: late) Sunreturn to you all, and a reminder that axial tilt is the reason for the season.

Dennis Hartley, who occasionally posts movie reviews at Digby's place, reminded me of the best Christmas movie ever. "Well. What family doesn't have its little problems?" Next year I shall begin a Tradition of watching it in the company of cool people. (The rest of this holiday season being rather full already.)

The awesomest thing I got this Xmas I didn't actually get at all. My parents gave me a smallish box with some rocks inside it ("to give it some weight"), and also a short note. The note said that they've taken Pop's old clock (now mine) into a clock repair shop, in order to have its innards ripped out and replaced with functional ones. Apparently when the clock was made the mechanism was delicate enough that it needed to be sitting Perfectly Level, or else. And, well, it wasn't, for many years.

I suspect that when they fix it they'll actually fix it, and thus remove the coolest aspect of the clock. On the fifteen, thirty, and forty-five minutes it plays one, two, and three bars of Westminster Chimes. On the hour it plays all four bars and then supposedly chimes the hour. My earliest memories of this clock involve it chiming one extra time each hour. Sometime in the late eighties Gram and Pop took it to a repair shop and had it "fixed" so it would chime correctly. Eleven times out of twelve, anyway. At one o'clock it would chime thirteen times.

I got Dad the llama movie, so we watched that after lunch. It's an anomaly among Disney films: there's only one musical number (the opening credits), the kids have two parents, and there's a great deal of actually witty banter. "Why do we even have that lever?" "I really hope this doesn't come back to haunt me later." The whole "Don't tell me. Waterfall dead ahead" conversation. David Spade is bloody annoying but other than that it's a great deal of fun.

Pop died earlier this afternoon.

I expect I'll be going out of town tomorrow. It may be a bit later than Friday before results are posted. Keep 'em coming.

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.
--UKL, "The Creation of Éa"

To live til you die
Is to live long enough.
--Lao-tzu, Tao te Ching (UKL, trans.)