Peeking into the rock

My friend Hummah is here for New Year's and at the moment I am neglecting her to do my morning writing. I just finished the draft of chapter 12 -- which means that I am done with our fellow's actual childhood, and I have shuffled off the old tutors to go be a gay version of Bartok or maybe Dvorak and of I don't know who, respectively, which lays the groundwork for the fateful entrance of the new tutor who will be the catalyst for the destruction of our guy's delicate relationship with the young Duke his foster brother, and therefore for his being pressed into the Grand Army of the Empire Federation et cetera and plot will happen. I had to do a bit of research into wax cylinder recording this morning, and I am really glad I took the ten minutes to do it, as I discovered things I didn't know about the physicality of the recorder, and also discovered that that wavery sound that the cylinders put out is not due to the ravages of age but is inherent in the technology. So the music sounds a bit thin and eerie even when it is new.

So for New Year's Eve we went to the parade. Now raging grannies singing embarrassingly written parodies -- in fact I saw none of my WILPF friends (where were they? And shouldn't I just join WILPF and be active anyway?) and the parade was more Burning Man and less political demonstration this year. Except there was an "Occupy the New Year" contingent dressed in white (why?) carrying a white pup tent inscribed with the names of people who have died from homelessness and demanding legalization of the use of blankets and tents for street sleeping. Which I believe is the wrong direction, even though laws against sheltering yourself are brutal -- what we really need is a movement to demand cheap and free housing on a massive scale. We have a couple of really nice programs, and a couple of desperately awful ones, but there's just not enough cheap housing stock and too much empty office space.

Then we went to two friends' houses in sequence to say Happy New Year and eat too many rich treats. I drank a little champagne, not much, but apparently any amount of champagne is too much for me as I ended the night with a headache.

New Years' Day we filled in the last of the trenches Zac dug for his utilities, and we saw Hugo in 3D which I wasn't expecting (short review:3D is lot better than it used to be, the movie is heart-stoppingly beautiful to look at and great fun mostly but it has too many cheap tricks for ratcheting up the suspense and showcasing the 3D, and if you know anything about the earliest history of movies you will have a bunch of extra treats as you say aha! a lot. And also, the role of fantasy is nicely nuanced here). And after that we had a old-fashioned caifornio mexican dinner at the Acapulco, and came home to play scrabble. All of this is remrkable because I never do stuff like that. Today we intend to ride bikes downtown and to go to the beach. Tomorrow Hummah goes home to Lake County and I go back to work. Wednesday I see my physical therapist, and I better be more conscientious about my exercises because that's the whole reason I'm seeing him. I haven't been slacking off completely except the last two days. And I have been a lot better.

I have also decided to take out some older small trees and bushes (notably the moribund apricot and the never-satisfactory tree ceanothus -- in spite of its beautiful flowers -- and the mightily invasive flowering quince) and replace them with other things that are more manageable. Probably a new apricot in a different spot, a prune plum for Zac, and also move the fig and the tangerine into sunnier ground where they might prosper better, and possibly get a real quince. All of these will be true dwarfs and we will prune them till they have no ambitions to overtake the world.

Also, I am looking forward to riding my bike to work. Not including the Laurel Hill! I will walk my bike both ways forever, because I do not trust it.