Adventures at the Boston Public Library

I had to use the bathroom at the Boston Public Library today.  It was rather like one of those normal sort of weird dreams you have in which you suddenly realize even though it is a dream YOU ARE ACTUALLY PEEING!!! and it turns into a nightmare that you jerk yourself awake from and rush to the bathroom hoping you haven't actually wet the bed.  It was just like that except I didn't wake up and I was (as far as I know) actually sitting on the toilet and not just dreaming it.

It had the makings of a very nice bathroom but smelled horribly of old urine and had poo crusted onto the seats.  Also, all of the handles of things were sticky.

I also found out today that the "Main Entrance" of the BPL is not the imposing facade with granite steps and sculpture facing Copley Square.  The "Main Entrance" is actually a mundane and pedestrian wall of glass doors on Boylston Street.  Disappointing.

I was criticized by the Book Delivery people for having full bibliographic information on my request.  That actually made me more sad than the bathrooms or the entrance.

I also had to duck quickly behind a column to avoid the gaze of Mr. Bobble-hat, one of our public patrons who was escorted from the law library due to having a false ID.  It turned out later that he was a nude model for the art department.  I have no pictures of him in his bobble-hat so you can be spared the horrible image that the idea of him posing nude inflicts on your inner eyes.

My weekend with the little giant

On Friday afternoon, after the Big Bad Bean left to teach all weekend, the Bumble Bean stuck a small letter "t" to the television screen.  When asked why, he said, "Tee, tah, tah, tah, tee.  The Great Gonzo" and then would giggle quite dramatically.  Over the weekend, it was added to and became "tov" then "tovel" then "towel" then "to sit" all having something to do with the Great Gonzo.  Who can say?

Then the String Bean's girlfriend came for a very brief visit.  He decided to make her a romantic dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches and fruit punch.  He used a table cloth and candles and everything.  he even asked for parsley sprigs to adorn the plates.  I directed him the luxurious growth outside.  he first brought two sad sprigs of cold damaged moss rose.  Then he brought two sprigs of some kind of weed.  So I took pity and went out with him to pick parsley.

Mind you, this is the kid who just completed an outdoor survival weekend course.  I guess it's a good thing they brought their food.

Saturday was the Pumpkin Party.  We went to the park across from the Bean Blossom's house.  Then we went to the party.  Early.  We left the party after an hour.  Early.  We went back to the park.  We went back to the party.  We went back to the park.  We finally went home.

Sunday was the street festival.  The Bumble Bean refused to leave the house.  We played in the bedroom for three hours.  We finally left the house.  Late.  We finally made it to the street festival.  Late.  The festival was a wasteland of empty street.  We left the street festival.  We lost the otter.  Most of Sunday should probably be forgotten.

When I got to bed, the Bumble Bean whumpled over for huggle snuggles almost immediately.  He snuggled so hard I almost fell out of bed.  When he woke up he was his usual silly, sweet self and I really did not want to go to work.

Ribs bruised, belly sore

Not really, but it feels like someone has been pummelling me in the upper belly region.  I guess I had an upper ab workout Friday night.

I wasn't feeling particularly great but took the Bumble Bean to the Therapy Pool at the Malden YMCA since it has a ramp so you can walk in.  One of my goals for the winter is to get the Bumble Bean over his fear of water on his face and hopefully start him on actually swimming.  I suspect he will take to it like a fish once he gets started. 

So we got there and it took 25 minutes to get through the registration process.  He was very good and patient and only reminded me every 30 seconds or so that there was water on the other side of the glass and that we were going on a swimming adventure.  Once we finally got in, of course, he wouldn't go near the water.  So I had to be over-the-top silly to coax him in the water.  When he finally consented to go in, we did everything and kept doing everything for an hour and a half.  He kicked around while I held him, he waded up to his chin, he jumped off all of the walls to test the various depths (I caught him of course which is why my belly hurts.)  There was a little girl there who was six years old and came up to the Bean's shoulder.

Out of charity with the 4 legged fiends

I just stepped in a pile of cat vomit.

Yesterday I took the Ding Kitty to the vet because she has been grooming her hair away.  I was imagining that she had swallowed a string and it was tangling and tying up her intestines and causing her to rot slowly from the inside.  The discomfort of this was causing her to lick away the hair from the outside. 

It turns out she has fleas (which means that Berg has fleas) which means she will probably develop tapeworms (which means that Berg will develop tape worms).  She was overdue for her rabies and distemper shots (which means that Berg is overdue for his rabies and distemper shots).

So, $500 later, I step in a pile of cat vomit.

Miscellanea: my daughter

This is a category because one of the people who reads this blog has already taken the tag heading "This Life."  I always thought it would be fun to give Miscellanea as a middle name to a daughter of mine.  Perhaps we are all lucky I never had a girl child.  Perhaps I will name a fish Miscellanea. 

Really though, the reason my miscellaneous posts about life and other random things is called "Miscellanea: my daughter" is because I thought "miscellaneous" was too boring and ordinary.  There really is no great, deep meaning here.  I might make up a great reason, given enough time, but at its inception, I simply couldn't stand the mundane-ness (mundanity?) of it.

Artemis Winter at play

Artemis Winter’s favorite thing to do with his time was to cross the street, walk around the corner and go into the Dragon Park.  The park was not actually named the Dragon Park since it was dedicated to a war veteran, but Artemis Winter’s mother had named it the Dragon Park and that name stuck. 

The park ran next to the train tracks or perhaps the tracks ran next to park, but either way it was a great place to watch trains and race trains and make train noises.  It also had lots of grass.  Most parks in the city had only bark mulch or gravel or concrete, but the park nearest his house had lots of grass to run on and roll in and finger comb and pretend to eat.  The grass invited many other interesting things that the other parks did not tempt to them, most especially soccer players of all ages and cultures.  Since Artemis Winter rarely spoke it was especially fun to be permitted to join in rambunctious, confusing play in which no one expected to understand anyone else but everyone was running around and tripping over a variety of games and children and dogs and things.

However, to cross the street, Artemis had to hold an adult hand attached to an adult body so he could only go to the Dragon Park when there was an available adult to accompany him.

His second favorite thing to do, therefore, was to play in his own backyard.  Behind his sprawling house was a sprawling garden which contained one magnolia tree, a lilac hedge that had over grown an entire corner, a hammock, a couple of flower patches, a small pool and an old cast iron, claw foot bath tub.  When Artemis Winter’s parents had first moved in, before he was born, the corner not taken up by the lilac hedge was taken over by a forest of mile-a-minute grass supporting an intricate network of some sort of alien cucumber vines.  These cucumber vines in turn freaked out Lulu to the extent that she pulled it all out and burned it at midwinter.  For years thereafter she couldn’t figure out what to put in place of the freaky space cucumbers so it was left as a bare-ish patch of earth that Artemis Winter used for mud pies, mud clouds, mud balls, etc…  Materials mined from this area played a large part in his outdoor bath tub play which then resulted in an even more comprehensive indoor bath tub play-time.

On horrible weather days, when his parents would not permit him out of doors, Artemis Winter would play with his toys.  He would start by picking out a group of them and play with just those for hours on end.

Often his play centered around his doll house made in the style of a tree house.  A great deal of this play was based on his experience of the various boarders who lived in other parts of the house. 


There was the couple who were slightly unhinged and yelled at each other a great deal, though not in an angry way, they were just loud.  They left notes for each other on the door into their rooms which Artemis Winter found very fascinating.  He represented them in his play as two people and a frog who rarely had spoken conversations.  It is unclear if this was because Artemis Winter himself did not speak much or because the normal conversations they had didn’t leave an impression on him.  It is even more unclear where the frog came in. 

In his play, these people would do acrobatics, have food fights and leave each other notes.  The female person (sometimes represented by a wooden girl doll and sometimes by a half chewed Pretty Pony Artemis Winter found in a storm drain) would leave notes only for the male person.  She may have been pretending the frog didn’t live there or perhaps she hoped it would leave or maybe she didn’t think it could read; quite possibly she was a little insane.  Perhaps she didn’t leave notes for the frog because it didn’t use the bathroom (it lived exclusively in the dining room and kitchen even though it had a handsome bedroom of its own in the tree house) and most of the notes she left for the male person concerned the fact that she had clogged the toilet and he should consequently not come home but go somewhere else to use the potty.  The female person’s name was Gladys.

Mind you, during this period of his life, Artemis Winter was still in diapers.  He had given the whole potty training thing a try and decided he wanted no part of it.

The male person’s name was Max and he was represented exclusively by a tube of Beaudriard’s Butt Paste that Artemis Winter had picked out on one of his shopping adventures with Lulu.  Max would huddle with the frog and they would pass a slate back and forth with messages- written, erased, replied to, erased- so quickly that no one but the two of  them could tell what they were conversing about, not even Artemis Winter.  When pressed for more details, Artemis Winter would suggest that it was private and it was rude to pry.

Meanwhile, Max’s notes to Gladys were often reminders about grocery lists and things to not forget.  Sometimes he would write scraps of lovely verse to things like her right eyebrow, her bunion or the smudge on her cheek.  However, since she quickly covered these with a deluge of strong warnings about the potty it is doubtful that she ever read them.

The frog was either unnamed or refused to share his name, and Artemis Winter, being a sensitive boy, didn’t like to crowd him.  Other than his unknowable and transient words with Max, the frog left no notes.  However, from time to time, at no regular interval, he would go into some sort of frenzy and tear the whole tree house to pieces.  After such a frenzy Artemis Winter could count on him sleeping for a whole week.

While the frog slept, Gladys and Max would disappear from doll house tree house play and be replaced with an enormous man, both tall and wide, who had a continuous litany of, “sorry, so sorry, pardon me, excuse me, oops, so sorry…” and who had been named The Apol-o-giant by Artemis Winter.  The Apol-o-giant was usually represented by his anatomically correct boy doll (named Titus by the manufacturer) who would randomly knock over all the furniture and eventually trip hugely over the whole tree house doll house at which point Artemis Winter would fall over himself and giggle until he couldn’t breathe anymore.  That was usually it for the Apol-o-giant, though sometimes Artemis Winter would take him swimming in the real kitchen sink and make an Apol-o-giant mess.

At some point after being stuck inside, Artemis Winter would stop playing with his toys and go through the house systematically, one room at a time, and remove everything from its proper place and spread it all evenly across the floor.  Then he would go to bed.

Potty training adventures

The Bumble Bean is now really interested in potty training.  Specifically, the potty training DVD I picked up as sort of a joke.  It has really catchy tunes like, "You've got to wipe, wipe, wipe your bottom, after going poo" and "scrub the bottom, scrub in between, scrub the top and get them really clean" which get stuck in your head and repeat endlessly during meetings at work. 

He has taken up the practice of carrying his potty chair about from room to room and putting his anatomically correct male doll, Titus, in the potty when he is not actively playing with him.  He has also started lifting his shirt to show you his belly, then dropping his pants to show you his knees.  We assume that this is going along with the song about how you know when you need to go, "it may feel like a push or a squeeze, just below your belly, just above your knees, it's your body's way..."

He is now tummy surfing on the back of the couch with his potty chair asking for hugs so I will go. Toodles.

Library Celebrity

I was told today that I am a Library Celebrity.  I wonder what that means?  Is that a good thing?  I think immediately of the Inquirer and Star which I know only through grocery checkout lines but I become wary.  I wonder what he meant?  I have an appointment with him tomorrow at  noon.  I'm going to ask.

How Artemis Winter overcame his fear of dogs

Artemis Winter always liked pigs.  Before he was born, his mother got him a pig named Hana Buta (that's Japanese for Flower Pig) with petal-like ears and black velvet feet and a curly squishy tail.  What he always liked about pigs was their wrinkly, grippy noses and snorty, grunty sounds, their blissful scratching and wallowing, their general spotty-bristliness, and their silly, curly tails on their huge round bottoms.  He was quite fond of cows as well for their spottiness and big slobbery noses.  He didn't like donkeys at all, with their indifference and creaky door sounds.  Sheep were OK in his book because, while they are dumb and vacant and urinate in a passive-aggressive, uselessly defiant sort of way, most of his experience of them was with baby sheep who still had their tails, all wiggly and shaky like white fuzzy worms.  He felt that he could put up with a lot of stupid for white fuzzy worms-like wiggly tails.

Birds of all sorts were fascinating to Artemis Winter.  Including chickens.  Despite their very apparent stupidity, he liked the way they walked and nestled and quietly scolded the whole world, at least the tiny part they understood of it, and he somehow tapped into their dinosaur heritage.  He wouldn't roar at them in person, but he would at pictures of them.  Artemis was usually a very sensitive boy and didn't like to scare things that couldn't take it.  He liked to hunker down and walk with them, make their little noises back at them and flap his elbows just gently since neither they nor he could fly.

Cats, of course, he liked and had spent some time as their apprentice thinking that he would like to be a cat when he grew up.  Of dogs he was unsure at first.  He liked their floppy, sloppy tongues and their utter disregard of personal space or rules of etiquette.  He liked to bark at them since, unlike chickens, it didn't seem to scare them and they tended to respond in kind.  Unfortunately, all possibility for his communion with dogs, for the next several years at least, was ruined in one fell swoop.

His mother, in an unfortunate charitable moment, volunteered to take care of a friend's dog for a few days.  It was a small dog, well behaved in a completely self-obsessed sort of way, and utterly hairless.  It was in fact a hairless dog.  Though predominantly black, you could tell by its legs and its snout that it was a white dog with black spots, one very big spot covered its entire back and most of its head. 

The first time Artemis Winter saw the dog (her name was Fluffy like the marshmallow stuff), she was playing fake-ferociously with her favorite ball: throwing it up in the air, dropping it, pretending she couldn't quite get it, and snurffling a good deal.  Artemis Winter gazed at her for several minutes with an expression of mounting horror on his face.  Finally, he turned to his mother and was moved to ask in disbelieving and undisguised dismay, "Pig?"  To which his mom replied, "No, Artemis, she's a dog.  Her name is Fluffy.  She is named after Marshmallow Fluff."  At which Artemis Winter began to bark at her in a hopeless and unending manner.

For several years thereafter, Artemis Winter would bark at pigs and run away from dogs as if they were particularly evil creatures.  He became confused in other ways too, most notably that he would meow at dinosaurs and insist that they were cats.

Now, Artemis Winter's parents responded to his fear of dogs in two very different ways.  His father, who was a famous sword master, would threaten to kill the dogs as their owners were about to let them off their leashes.  They were actually supposed to be on leashes at all times and there were orders posted to this effect throughout the city.  Artemis Winter's mom on the other hand would hold him and point out to him how small most of the dogs were, how they were barely bigger than cats and not even as smart.  At least, that is what she would do with small dogs off their leashes.  If a large dog was off his leash and came running up to jump at them she would turn it upside down, hold it that way on the ground and flick its nose if it showed any signs of objecting to such treatment.  You can imagine that dog owners who used the parks around Artemis Winter's house tended to know him and take evasive action.

One cold fall day, when he was between  four and five years old, Artemis Winter was visiting his friend Clementine Gaia Leila Moonshine Saghirah who lived in a much more rural area.  As they always did when visiting, both families went to a glorious park nearby.  It had big fields of short grass to run and roll on, it had wooded areas to dodge and trip in and it had a broad, shallow, slow-moving river.  Naturally this made it a great place for dogs as well as children.

As Clementine Gaia Leila Moonshine Saghirah and Artemis Winter were playing an elaborate game of chase, tickle, tumble, cavort, a huge dog decided that his life would be a dessert unless he knocked over a little girl and snurffled her all over.  The children were in sight of their parents but not in easy reach, so when Clementine Gaia Leila Moonshine Saghirah was knocked over there was not a readily available adult to handle the situation.  Realizing this, an important change took place in Artemis Winter.  His fear of dogs put down its head and hid and his knight-in-shining-armor self woke up and exploded.  He tackled  the dog from the side, flung it onto its back, held it down by the throat, knelt on its chest and leaning over it, bite it firmly on the nose.

Lulu, finally catching up to the all of the action, was laughing so hard she was quacking.  But after that, Artemis Winter was never afraid of dogs again.  And he stopped barking at pigs.

The Cat Apprentice

This will probably end up being a book written by Artemis Winter.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was born.  I don't remember it very well for it was very long ago.  I am four now.

All my life I have lived in a house full of stairs and mysteries.  There are lots of places to go that just end and lots of places that are just there to go through.  Outside the house is a world of sidewalks and curbings, long narrow rivers and puddles... lots of puddles.  I am a great destroyer of puddles.

I live with 2 cats who teach me things (sometimes I teach them things) and a Mommy and a Daddy.  The Mommy and Daddy belong to me.  They love me and take care of me.  I belong to the cats.  I love them and learn from from them; I keep them entertained.  They are teaching me the "way."

The way to always be in the way.  The way to be unhelpful.  The way to suddenly change direction and dart across some one's path.  The way to stand in a pile of sweepings.  The way to come between someone and their book.  I am learning well.  I am a cat apprentice.  Soon I will learn to take on dogs.

What the cats don't know, the thing that is my secret power: I am a great Destroyer of Puddles.

Tomorrow I will be a dinosaur and his side-kick the smoky-voiced cow.

The End

I wonder if he meant this?

I'm reading The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss and overall I would say that he is a complete prick.  That may be overly harsh and judgemental, but this is my blog so I can be.  One of the things that he is suggesting is that you only check your email twice a day and that you put up an auto response telling people that this is your practice.  In his book, he suggests that you send a message to timothy@brainquicken.com for a great example of one of these messages.  I just did and in return I got a permanent failure message.  From reading his book, this could be something that he meant or something he carelessly overlooked.  Hmm.

This writing thing

Transcribed from a notebook dated Thursday, September 23rd
Since I've started writing again I become oddly discontent and restless when I haven't written for a while.  The Scarlet Runner Bean made (as usual) a very astute and acute point when she said that not having time to think to process life and write the processing down leaves you feeling hollow and itchy inside.

So I can't sleep unless I get this down.  I'll have to enter it at some other time sine the Bumble Bean is restless.

We went to the playground by the Library today.  While we were there 2 different preschool groups came and went. 

The first group consisted of 18-20 kids and 4 young women.  The women looked happy.  They were engaged with the children, referring to them ans "my friend."  As in, "M friend Ben is having some alone time. Why don't you see if my friend Ezra wants to play with you?"  The children were happy and silly and reasonably exuberant.  If they became too exuberant, like taking off their shoes or climbing the slide, they got a time out.  The time outs were published across the playground, as in "My friend Elijah would rather have a time out than put his shoe on."

The second group consisted of 10-12 kids and 3 prematurely middle aged women.  The women looked as if they had seen what life had to offer them and it was nothing so they just had to keep busy with the drudgery until they died.  The children walked.  They did not play on the slides.  They were restricted to one end of the playground where they could play with bark mulch in baskets and bowls brought for that purpose, or they could draw on the concrete with sidewalk chalk.  They were not allowed to write on the chain link fence with the chalk.  While I was observing, that was the only prohibition I heard.

The Bumble bean was sufficiently freaked out by the second crew that we had to go swing instead.

Life is good

Not to say that there isn't room for improvement.  The Bumble Bean got up at 4:30 this morning which means I did too.  Then he wanted to go back to bed, seemingly just to be more comfortable as he wiggled his way through the next hour and a half.  Now we seem to be up for the day and he is playing a very silly game with the Ding-kitty which includes dancing a string, throwing it, trying to get her to bring it back to him while she thinks he's trying to pet her and occasionally interjecting, "Oh, my toes!"

Yesterday, the Apol-i-giant made his first appearance.  The Bumble Bean quickly corrected him into the not very interesting apologize, but we are keeping him alive.  He may make his way into the Martini Manuscript except that I am out of vodka.  Maybe I'll switch to gin martinis.

Meanwhile, the exceptionally pitiful Berg-kitty is sitting in a ball on the puzzles looking forlorn.  I'd feel worse about it if he wasn't such a drooling, vomiting, non-grooming fur ball.  I think I will make him a three-eyed catnip fish.