2010 — 18 June: Friday
It's 01:34 and I'm rather sleepy. So, despite the rousing choral stuff (Handel's Dixit Dominus is just winding down) on BBC Radio 3 right now it's time for bed. G'night.
Ponderous pondering
Mortality after frailty? What's so great about that, heh? I've just watched an elderly gentleman shuffle gently up the road past my house, pause at the little junction to let a dollop of something fall from his mouth to the pavement, and then exit up the hill pursued by an equally elderly slow-motion drooping dog. He quite possibly does this every morning, though I'm not always up and running at the time. He was unburdened by a poop scoop, of course.
I've been trimming back Christa's vine (I suppose I should start calling it mine, since we each endowed the other with all our worldly goods half a lifetime ago). I noticed the killer water butt (which has been drained and inverted as a punishment since drowning the neighbour's beautiful cat Caspar) has now developed a crack across its (plastic) bottom rendering it useless. There's a certain irony, I feel, in putting a green bin into a green bin. Now I'm just hearing that weekly rubbish collections could be back on the cards. Having correctly predicted the monthly glass collection (for once) my little six-month stash of jars and bottles has all — regardless of colour — gone tinkling into the council's mobile maw.
It occurs to me (by no means for the first time) that as you grow older and frailer with your partner (should you be lucky enough and smart enough to have managed to find and keep one) so you each become automatically less able to care for the other. Where's the "intelligence" in that "design", unpray tell? I shall have some breakfast and another cuppa. At least the music on Radio 3 is cheery (it isn't always!). It's 08:46 and cooler and distinctly greyer than of late.
Murphy's Law
Having detoured (unsuccessfully) on his way here in hopes of picking up the MC350 water softener, the plumber was (of course!) phoned on arrival to say that it had just now been delivered, so after finishing his first cuppa, back he goes. He's also advised me to tell the vinyl / carpet fitters not to hammer in the stonking great staples that they used on my bedroom vinyl as some of the pipework (and, indeed, some of the wiring) is relatively close to the top of some of the joists. Time (09:35) for some breakfast.
To err is human...
... and all that. Were I in the vicinity of the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge (the one several thousand miles away) at 7 pm tonight (US East Coast time) I would be able to hear the author of this:
How does knowing why we get things wrong help us cope with that experience? For one thing, it means we must recognize that we can't eliminate mistakes from our lives. For another, it means we cannot assume that those who err are indolent, idiotic, or immoral — or that error can be addressed by ferreting out these imagined bad apples. If mistakes are an inevitable byproduct of intelligence, you cannot make a more reliable pilot, a better doctor, or a safer nuclear reactor operator by demonizing and shaming those who err.
In other words, fix the problem, not the blame. A philosophy I first explicitly met in Michael Crichton's "Rising Sun".
Deferred gratification
I do wonder sometimes if it's actually possible to go mad from a combination of worry and frustration? On the current worry side, I've no feedback on what's going on (or not) with dear Mama in hospital in the Midlands. And on the current frustration side I've no possibility of doing anything productive about putting my ravaged house back into any form of order or decorative repair while the plumbing upheavals continue for the next few days. Meanwhile, I still have to continue to contend with more mundane daily administrivia like feeding myself. And, oh joy, I even have a trip to the dentist to look forward to next week. Can Life get any better, I wonder? :-)
I surely hope so.
I shall cheer myself up with a picture of Christa (and me, rarely) with her then still pleasingly-new second (of three) Honda Civics in 1992 (this was the attractive but way underpowered J288GOR with the cunningly designed rainwater trap in the rear lights)...
As usual, I kept my friend Carol (then still in Florida) informed as we'd shortly be chauffering her around in the thing:
Me: We've ordered a Civic saloon, to be delivered just after we get back from Guernsey (Channel Island). A snip at just under £12,000 (gulp). (The last one I bought was £3,600 in September 1980 when my salary was about £9,000...)
Carol: Is that 12k in sterling?? Good grief, why not a Rolls?? Cars have gone astronomical here too, but that seems beyond the pale for basic transport (maybe it's not basic transport?).
Me: Why not a Rolls? Because a Rolls now tops £130K, that's one reason!! Other being our essential green-ness and a growing awareness that, in the UK at least, better roads get you literally nowhere fast as there are now over 22 million vehicles here (or something weird like less than 65 feet of open road on average). And the average speed across London is now lower than in Victoria's era.
Carol: Only kidding about the Rolls, but I am truly stunned by the £12K. (To say nothing of £130K, of course). I bought a minimum Toyota in 1978 for list (usually you can do better, but dealer had only one car left and I was not in a position to bargain), namely $3600. The Honda Civic was about $8800 at year-end 1984. Good thing you can keep a car 11 years!
Why does this conversation nearly 20 years ago (and observation since 1974 of the exchange rate decline between sterling and [originally] the German mark) convince me we've lived in rip-off Britain at our cost? When we were over in Florida in 1992 we were as stunned by the low prices there as Carol had been at the high price of cars in the UK. We'd also always been struck by the growing difference in prices between the UK and Germany, of course. And people talk about the economic miracle of the Thatcher years. Pah!
The store cupboard is a bit more full (well, it is now — though when I started this sentence I realised I hadn't actually unloaded the car). It's 14:50 and no longer getting a bit warmer and brighter out there. The piping is mostly in place for the water softener, and there's now a brand-new set of exit piping for the washing machine, the condensate from the boiler, and the flushed brine from the softener. What larks. [Pause] Nasty moment on first powering on the iMac1 as it gave me a white screen with a folder symbol containing a flashing question mark... and nothing else. Never seen that before. Power off/on sorted it, but I'm still not going to rush to load the latest OS X patches.
Later
The house is once again mine until Monday morning, when the destructive tornado is predicted to start on the cold water tank in the loft and the hot one (which I shall make sure is barely luke-warm by then) in the airing cupboard on the landing. Meanwhile, I wander abstractedly from one room to the next trying to visualise what I can and should do with each one in turn. In terms of decoration, furniture, and (if it's not too grand a word) purpose. It's an interesting challenge that I predict is going to be at times a wearisome journey of discovery, too. Not to mention expense. Where, I wonder, is that Reader's Digest book of home decorating and DIY that a certain someone made such good use of? Probably in carton #1 in the warehouse :-)
But I bet B&Q has some DIY pamphlets... It's 20:19 and I'm already surprisingly tired.