New Hampshire weekend

Sweet B is still using her Bushbaby Mini pack when she’s out for a walk. A minor issue has developed: she now prefers to hold her own leash.

What she really loves are what in our family are called “monkey jumps,” here with mom, dad, and Jasper the Wonderdog.

But under all circumstances, she remains supercool.

Clearly, she’s inherited this characteristic from her maternal grandfather.

Cutting edge

Well, I broke another one.

While I was nannying sweet B for those six months, I managed to do in most of the dozen wine glasses H and A got as a wedding gift. I don’t know why...I’d never been especially noted as a nemisis of stemmed glassware. But here I am today, smashing the second of the dozen I bought them to replace the first batch.

This time, though, I took myself out, too, slicing my hands while stupidly groping at the already shattered glass in one of those “no, no, not again” moments. So I spent a chunk of my 39th wedding anniversary at Concord Critical Care and came out looking like this:

Elegant, and so romantic.

A really interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times about archiving digital material, featuring Salmon Rushdie and Emory University, my niece R’s alma mater. “...archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.”

Well worth a read.

The ongoing wonderfulness of iChat

There was a crew of us here tonight to enjoy an especially engaging sweet B: grandparents, great-grandfather, and great-godparents (if that isn’t a thing, it should be). She called each of us by name, modeled her new shoes, demonstrated her growing vocabulary, instructed her dada in pasta-making, essayed Opposites, drank milk from her mama’s glass, and demonstrated how to stretch an elastic cord while holding one end in your teeth, a skill that can’t be practiced too often.

Some of us will get to see her (and her mama and dada) next weekend, but for now, thank goodness for iChat!

Hints of spring and pleasant running

I had my first nice-weather shuffle of the year yesterday. It will get cold and snowy again before spring really arrives, but we’re all beginning to get that annual feeling that winter will, finally, eventually, one of these days, not too many weeks from now, play itself out.

I broke out these new shoes to mark the occasion. They’re an old an unexciting model of workhorse training flat, but possessing a Fred Astaire-like sense of grace and style, I accessorized them with the fluorescent yellow LockLaces. Elegant, I’m sure you’ll agree.

I also tried a new pair of shorts, which I actually bought for their little pockets—meant for the GU or similar energy-boosting goodies carried by trail runners, but perfect for a shuffling old man’s specs and emergency flares. An unlooked-for feature is a sort of boxer liner rather than a brief. This is supposedly to reduce chafing, always a good thing, but they seem to do at the price of making you feel that your knickers are in a twist. Not necessarily a great trade-off. My form is unattractive enough already.

Finally, I plunged for the lighter shoes mentioned in the post linked above—the red ones. But their lesser heel-lift has left my left achilles arching its eyebrow in that Gallic way tendons have, and I’ve set them aside at least until I’m better stretched out and the weather is truly hot. They may turn out to be permanently aspirational. Or do you think they might just need yellow laces?

Burrito memories

Earl “Fatha” Hines’ long version of Don’t Get Around Much Anymore just came around on an iTunes playlist, and it reminded me of hearing it last year via Heartland Radio as I prepared black bean burritos to H and A’s recipe. Cooking in their apartment kitchen reminded me of being 25...not a bad feeling, and probably why I remember the whole thing.


As a sometimes member of the Hot 5/Hot 7, Hines was the pianist on Louis Armstrong’s transcendent 1928 version of King Oliver’s West End Blues, (rather than Louis’s wife of the time, Lil Hardin, whose remarkably unswinging work couldn’t have helped create a nearly perfect masterpiece).


 I love another, somewhat less well-known masterpiece the two collaborated on, Muggles.



Hines wrote and performed a top-ten hit, Black and Tan Burrito Fantasy, in 1938.

Not really.

Chuffed and rectified

There’s a brief passage in Patrick O’Brian’s Wine Dark Sea , in which Jack Aubrey’s “ill-faced, ill-tempered, atrabilious, shrewish” steward, Preserved Killick, decides to add a little something extra to the drops he’s applying to his captain’s wounded eye. “Why,” he says, “everybody knows Gregory’s Patent Liquid, sir: it rectifies the humours.”

I myself have needed my humours rectified for a few weeks now. I go into these little funks once in a while, always in the winter. Scrabbling to get out feels like trying to open a door without a handle, breaking off fingernails in frantic attempts to pull the thing open along its edges. This isn’t real depression—nowhere near as painful or desperate—just a sort of all-function hibernation. I can’t read as much, I can’t return phone calls, I can’t make any headway on my writing or editing, I’m a useless lump in a group. Then something happens and I’m okay. I remember years ago finding myself laughing uproariously at a table full of friends, and I was back.

I think this very kind post by Alan Sloman may serve me as a modern version of Gregory’s Patent Liquid. It came along at just the right time. I have a bunch of mostly British outdoor blogs on my Google Reader, and although I haven’t been checking them as regularly as usual, I had a look yesterday, saw Alan’s, and was chuffed. Chuffed is good, clearly related to rectified.

So, Alan (and commentors Martin, Des, and Baz), my humours thank you and I thank you.