I’m sitting on my bedroom floor waiting for the washing machine to stop so I can get in my tiny little bathtub, the one that is so perfectly shaped like a wee beige cauldron that I am constantly tempted to throw in some onions, carrots, and potatoes and make a nice minestrone. I haven’t done it yet, although I have used some oversized tea bags (meant especially for baths, of course) a couple of times. And what’s to stop me from putting regular tea bags in there? Not Earl Grey or anything, because ew, but some nice Good Earth or Red Zinger or something. Same difference, right?
When I got home from work today I noodled around the house for an hour and then forced myself to go on a bike ride. I’m not enjoying biking lately. All of a sudden, the path I usually take around the lake is really, really hard. I haven’t done anything different from earlier in the summer, when I was so happy to be able to ride my bike every day, but all of a sudden it’s this big stinky chore. Perhaps this is because it’s getting suddenly, dramatically, colder in Seattle and because the wind always makes my ears hurt ridiculously. Sometimes I want to tell my ears to just suck it up and stop with the shooting pain so I can just get around the lake and go home, but my ears just won’t listen. It makes for sort of an uncomfortable ride. This evening I kept looking for some sort of switch on the bike handles that would make the bike go faster…the gas pedal, if you will. I was very disappointed, three or four times, to recall that my feet are the gas pedal.
I feel very much like a huge dork for not being able to handle biking a very easy three mile loop around a man made lake, especially when Seattle is full of earnest day-glo-clad bikers with their streamlined helmets and their special gloves and bike shorts and special clippy shoes, effortlessly pounding up nearly vertical hills and making my soft plushy self feel veerrrry inadequate. Seattle is pretty much generally full of very fit active people who love to hike and kayak and climb rocks and mountains. I, of course, am not one of those people. Perhaps I should have stayed in lovely San Bernadino County, California, where, as far as I could tell, people mostly liked to drive their cars to the outlet malls. What’s especially bad is that I think my brakes are a little bit broken and that means I’m going to have to take the bike in to Gregg’s and the last time I was there they sold me a wicker bike basket and I am afraid they will take neither me nor my purple helmet with stickers of Chinese food very seriously.
Freezing cold ears and inadequacy issues notwithstanding, I did get to see the following Green Lake sights:
* A very happy retriever-like dog retrieving a big piece of wood. Usually you don’t see dogs in the lake, although one time I did come along a mutt-type dog just sitting quietly by himself, submerged up to his neck and just taking it all in. I guess he was hot.
*Not only the guy with the Spanish Lessons vest who’s always there (Green Lake regulars, you know the one), but also a new vest-wearing person, whose vest said “Poems Of The Heart.” I am very curious to know what that entails. Does she spontaneously recite you some poetry, and if so, is it her own or other peoples’? Can you make requests? Does your request have to rhyme “burning” with “yearning”? Most importantly, is this a free service, these Poems Of The Heart, or is there a fee appended?
*Some guys all dressed in black, fencing.
*Many ducks, who are almost always there but make me happy every single time because I just love ducks. I’m not ready to wear ducks on my corduroy pants the way J. Crew seems to want you to this season…I know this because my house currently and mistakenly receives three identical copies of the catalog on a regular basis for reasons we have not yet ascertained…but I love them nonetheless.
In other news, I had roasted carrots and mac and cheese for dinner tonight; fortunately for everyone, I have not, repeat, have not misplaced my awesome vegetable peeler as I thought I had when the time for peeling the carrots came. I have a nice big stack of books by my bed to read. I’m not going to link them all because my bathwater’s running but they are, in no particular order: Human Amusements (that’s what I’m reading right now); The Natural History Of The Rich; How I Paid For College: A Novel Of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theater; Ophelia’s Fan; Across An Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden In The Shadow Of Convention And Time; Attraction; and Hard Line: Life And Death On The Mexican Border. Several of these books have “Advance Reading Copy, Not For Sale” on them and that makes me, for some reason, feel very cool.
Normally on a Monday night I’d be at bellydance class right now, sweating and furrowing my brow and thinking with longing of all the lovely skirts and cholis and bindis I’d like to acquire for outrageous sums of money, but my teacher is on vacation so it’s a not-for-sale book and the teapot/cannibal soup bathtub for me!