A Pulse! (signs of life from planet Anno)

Wild winds racing across the fields, kicking up anything not firmly rooted to the ground: dried weeds, tree fences we just tacked into the ground until we could get around to nailing them down more securely, the occasional bucket inadvertently left in the garden. Winter is coming, and the temperature is dropping fast!

Sustaining us against the seasonal changes: homemade cinnamon rolls (from The Breadmaker's Apprentice), a rich buttery dough brightened with a subtle touch of lemon zest (or lemon extract), not too sweet, perfectly gooey, completely lovely. And completely worth the effort of starting at 5:30 a.m. to have the scent of cinnamon and coffee warming the chilled corners of the house (right, M?).

My father continues to improve and will probably move out of skilled nursing sometime this weekend. The experience has aged him considerably, though, and it seems unlikely that he will recover the same level of mobility and independence he enjoyed just weeks ago. Even though I'm glad he'll be returning home to my mother, I sure wish they were still living nearby where I could more easily check in on both of them.

Currently reading: She's Come Undone, finding it just about as good as I did the first time around. Next up: Loving Frank (Nancy Horan).

Currently thinking about (more than you could possibly imagine): the sum of the interior angles of polygons, and its relationship to the sum of the exterior angles. Fascinating stuff (really!), and mysterious, too.

Just right for a spooky night...
Happy Halloween!

Sunday Scribblings: Junk

Just returned from a week at the hospital bedside of my father who is now in stable condition and more comfortably situated in a skilled nursing facility much closer to my mother. This is good news, and we are all much relieved.

Overall, it's been a rocky couple of weeks around here, beginning with the failure of my anti-lock braking system, continuing on to the brutal felling of our mailbox (just one of those things that seems to happen in rural areas), and culminating in a late night phone call about my father's health that sent us barreling southward in our other vehicle, which, as it turned out, was also blighted by a tire that kept losing air.

As for us, we are safely home now, though, and happy to be here: even the cheesecake I had baked just before we left still tasted fresh, as if it had been happy to wait for us. This is also good news.

The bad news is this: between Geometry and aging parents and the perils of m's junior year, there are times when writing seems to have no part in my life. No time, no inclination, no interest, no heart-aching yearning, no desire. Pretty well kills any possibility of words making their way onto paper. Nonetheless, I catch myself noticing writing moments, storing them up perhaps, like junk in the attic, hoping that someday they might be useful.

So here they are, dusty relics of the last few weeks:

--Sitting at a window table at a campus cafe: a young couple walked by, hand in hand, the woman obviously distracted, looking in the window, swiveling her head in search of ... what? friends? predators? a better possibility? The young man with her suddenly tugging her hand, a clear signal: I'm here. Damnit. Here.

--At the same location: a group of professors/consultants talking very seriously -- all double chins, scowls, and earnest arrogance; if they had beards, they would have been talking into them -- are interrupted by a young woman (student?) and the entire tenor of the group changes: smiles, laughter, beaming faces. She leaves, and all seriousness resumes.

--My dad, in a moment of apparent lucidity, suddenly asking my brother about the pistons for our Pinto, a car we had more than 30 years ago: "What size were they?"

--Another hospital/dad moment: mustering all the indignant outrage possible to a 79-year-old man in a hospital gown: "Who are you?" he demanded of the two physical/occupational therapists who had arrived to help him begin to walk again, "Am I paying for this?" That's my dad, ever cost-conscious: was one sure sign he was feeling better.

--Wandering through Jungle Jim's -- the only grocery store I know of that is also a tourist attraction, groups of them carted around on safari trucks -- rooting for comfort food, enjoying various strange encounters: the giant stuffed lion dressed like Elvis, strumming a guitar and growling "Love Me Tender..." the Campbell's Soup can swinging on a monkey bar, chatting to customers, occasionally bursting into song, "Mmmm mmm good/ Mmmm mmm good/ That's what Campbell's Soup is/ Mmmm mm good." Also, as m. said: his lips moved.

And that's all for now: nothing but junk.

Sunday Scribblings

Tuesday Teaser: A Book Meme

Just saw this over at Oh's place, and immediately thought: wow, here's something even I can do!

It's Teaser Tuesdays, a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Everyone's invited to play along! Here are the rules:

Grab your current read

Open to a random page

Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

So, without further ado, here's mine:

"You put cyanide on that ore, the silver leaps out of it," he would say. "I have enough cyanide there to kill Cincinnati."

--Annals of the Former World, Book 1: Basin and Range (John McPhee)

Pretty lively stuff for a book about geology...