Oh no a whole week
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Has a whole week gone by since I've updated? Uh, yes. Has anything interesting happened? Long about last Thursday I went over to Arlene's school at lunchtime to help clean up her room for the summer. We had lunch in the library with journaler Michael Rawdon's mother. I guess Michael is the only journaler I've met in person, and that was long before he was a journaler.
Both Arlene and I have been feeling crummy with a sore throat and cough for about a week, so we were very quiet over the weekend. Except for all the noise of coughing, of course.
Besides Blue Highways I've been reading Basin and Ridge and in the contrast of them am developing more of a sense of what people mean by a writer's voice. McPhee's writing impresses me as though he is declaiming something from up on a stage without a microphone and making sure he can be heard at the back of the hall -- but I'm sitting in the front row. He's great at strong short sentences. Me, I have to go back and edit out mass quantities of "and"s from my entries. My sentences go on and on until I go back and cut them down to size.
And other than that? Language study. Tapes, a book, carving stamps of an alphabet I'm trying to learn.
Today I went in to Harvard Square to the travel agency where we had got our tickets to Russia and home from Finland last year. It was a beautiful rainy day -- we haven't had any rain in several weeks and desperately needed it, so the change was welcome, as long as you didn't have to be outside when it was coming down the hardest -- and all the brick crosswalks were glistening clean. (See, there you are. A sentence a mile long, with quantities of conjunctions that need to be excised. I'm leaving it just so you can see what I'm like before I edit myself). I spent most of the time at the travel agency and in bookstores, not looking around so I could describe the scene. Besides, much as I was happy to be walking in the rain, I had my head down. It's really hard to keep your head up in the rain without an umbrella.
There seems to be a gap in the Lonely Planet coverage just where I want to go. Wordsworth didn't have anything helpful. Even the Globe Corner bookstore, specializing in maps and travel books, couldn't find a travel guide for me, though a clerk in a gray T-shirt with a butch haircut and two rings in her ear looked really hard. She even called another branch to see if they had any of the out-of-stock titles that showed on her computer. (See, indoors I had my head up and I could see things) Fortunately I have a CD-ROM travel guide. Unfortunately I can't take it along.
Millie and Joel were here for a quick trip to help David and Rachael move into their new apartment (first of the month, lease starts, you know the drill.) Even though I wasn't positive the rain had stopped, I fired up the grill and cooked some hot dogs, an eggplant, and some veal ribs. It was really Joel's using a grill at the house we rented on Cape Cod about this time last summer that got me started grilling. The ribs weren't really done when I first took them off the fire. I put them back and left them too long so got a little charred, but either people were polite or liked them anyway.
And I haven't been updating. Sorry...
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