Greetings from That's Entertainment

Quick post because I just got off Zoom with my friends! Paul had to go to a work event in Leominster at lunchtime today, so I did my chores in the morning and went with him so I could go to Walmart next door. (I got three pairs of leggings, a blue dress, and a blouse on sale for $9, plus some foodstuffs.) It was a gorgeous day to walk, too. 

My afternoon wasn't exciting, and we spent the early part of the evening watching part of the disastrous Red Sox game against the Yankees, then the start of the NFL draft before I got on Thursday night chat. Here are some photos from the fabulous That's Entertainment, "New England's Pop Culture Emporium" in Worcester (there's also one in Fitchburg):

Poem for Wednesday and Issaquah Alps

Lines for Winter 

By Mark Strand

for Ros Krauss 

Tell yourself

as it gets cold and gray falls from the air

that you will go on

walking, hearing

the same tune no matter where

you find yourself—

inside the dome of dark

or under the cracking white

of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going. And you will be able

for once to lie down under the small fire

of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot

go on or turn back

and you find yourself

where you will be at the end,

tell yourself

in that final flowing of cold through your limbs

that you love what you are.

-------- 

We got measurable snow overnight! Only a couple of inches, and it was mostly melted by the afternoon, but we had pretty white iced trees to look at all morning while I was on chat with my high school friends. Then we had lunch and I watched the first half of Deadpool and Wolverine with Kristen, so my usual fun social Wednesday with very little accomplished! 

Discovery for the day after failure, because I asked my Facebook friends: I can't take off my wedding manicure without something stronger than acetone! Who knew! It's been a quiet evening involving some laundry, the episode of Ghosts we missed on Thursday, and a couple of second season House stories. Here's how the Issaquah Alps looked on Sunday, with a clear snow line:

Greetings from Green Lake

Wednesday was my birthday, a very nice if low-key one. I spent the early part of the day as I usually do on Wednesdays: talking to Linda, Hildy, and Kay on Google Meet, eating bagels for lunch with Paul, watching movies with Kristen (the second half of The Marvels and first half of Frost Fight), then a walk to the park. 

We drove downtown to meet Daniel, chat with my parents and Adam, and eat dinner at Thai Ocean. We got raspberry chocolate cake at the PCC on the way back to Daniel's house, where we ate it. Now we're back at home watching The Sticky while I try to catch up on Facebook messages, many of which arrived late because of an outage!

Poem for Tuesday and Kilfenora Cathedral

Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949 

By Paul Durcan 

Leaving behind us the alien, foreign city of Dublin

My father drove through the night in an old Ford Anglia,

His five-year-old son in the seat beside him,

The rexine seat of red leatherette,

And a yellow moon peered in through the windscreen.

'Daddy, Daddy,' I cried, 'Pass out the moon,'

But no matter how hard he drove he could not pass out the moon.

Each town we passed through was another milestone

And their names were magic passwords into eternity:

Kilcock, Kinnegad, Strokestown, Elphin,

Tarmonbarry, Tulsk, Ballaghaderreen, Ballavarry;

Now we were in Mayo and the next stop was Turlough,

The village of Turlough in the heartland of Mayo,

And my father's mother's house, all oil-lamps and women,

And my bedroom over the public bar below,

And in the morning cattle-cries and cock-crows:

Life's seemingly seamless garment gorgeously rent

By their screeches and bellowings. And in the evenings

I walked with my father in the high grass down by the river

Talking with him – an unheard-of thing in the city.

But home was not home and the moon could be no more outflanked

Than the daylight nightmare of Dublin city:

Back down along the canal we chugged into the city

And each lock-gate tolled our mutual doom;

And railings and palings and asphalt and traffic-lights,

And blocks after blocks of so-called 'new' tenements –

Thousands of crosses of loneliness planted

In the narrowing grave of the life of the father;

In the wide, wide cemetery of the boy's childhood.

-------- 

We had rain all day Tuesday, so I spent it indoors finishing my Ireland Shutterfly books and doing some laundry and other chores. My Voyager group was missing two people, so we skipped watching an episode (we're up to a two-parter anyway) and just chatted for an hour and a half about election depression and entertaining distractions. 

Cheryl, Paul and I watched Deadpool and Wolverine together and it was just as great as the first time, maybe better because I was aware of cameos -- human and "20th Century Fox graveyard" -- to keep an eye out for. Then we watched the 2003 Daredevil because it's one of the few Marvel movies we'd never seen. 

Here are some photos from Kilfenora Cathedral in the Burren, founded in the 6th century, containing three high crosses, a Gothic sedilia, and the tomb of Neptune Blood, whose nephew tried to steal the British crown jewels in 1671. The transept's oak ceiling decayed, so it has a glass roof to protect what remains of the interior architecture:

Greetings from Salem

Quickie from Oregon with Paul and Cheryl, with whom I got to see lots of awesome things today including Mount St. Helens! Thomas Dambo's Portland-area troll at the Nordic Northwest campus! Dinner at Mod Pizza! Deadpool and Wolverine (which is satisfying in every way, hilarious, lots of awesome cameos, tons of Hugh and Ryan)! Tomorrow, the Renaissance faire!

Poem for Wednesday and Mountain Squirrel

The Ground Squirrel 

By Paul Hamilton Hayne 

Bless us, and save us! What's here?

Pop!

At a bound,

A tiny brown creature, grotesque in his grace,

Is sitting before us, and washing his face

With his little fat paws overlapping;

Where does he hail from? Where?

Why, there,

Underground,

From a nook just as cosy,

And tranquil, and dozy,

As e'er wooed to Sybarite napping

(But none ever caught him a-napping).

"Don't you see his soft burrow so quaint, lad! and queer?"

Gone! like the flash of a gun!

This oddest of chaps,

Mercurial,

Disappears

Head and ears!

Then, sly as a fox,

Swift as Jack in his box,

Pops up boldly again!

What does he mean by this frisking about,

Now up and now down, and now in and now out,

And all done quicker than winking?

What does it mean? Why, 'tis plain, fun!

Only fun! or, perhaps,

The pert little rascal's been drinking?

There's a cider press yonder all day on the run!

Capture him! no, we won't do it,

Or, be sure in due time we would rue it!

Such a piece of perpetual motion,

Full of bother

And pother,

Would make paralytic old Bridget

A fidget.

So you see (to my notion),

Better leave our downy

Diminutive browny

Alone near his "diggings";

Ever free to pursue,

Rush round, and renew

His loved vaulting

Unhalting,

His whirling,

And curling,

And twirling,

And swirling,

And his ways, on the whole,

So unsteady!

'Pon my soul,

Having gazed

Quite amazed,

On each wonderful antic

And summersault frantic,

For just a bare minute,

My head, it feels whizzing;

My eyesight's grown dizzy;

And both legs, unstable

As a ghost's tipping table,

Seem waltzing, already!

Capture him! no, we won't do it,

Or in less than no time, how we'd rue it!

-------- 

Much of my Wednesday involved complications getting my new phone, around chatting with two of my high school friends in the morning and watching the first half of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania with Kristen in the afternoon. For about the dozenth time since we've lived here, UPS had all our information and phone number to deliver an expedited package yet decided to report it undeliverable rather than, you know, contact us to tell us they couldn't find our apartment; I ran out and chased down the truck, whose driver at first denied that he had the package, then went in the back and found it. 

Most of my late afternoon and evening involved setting up the new phone, which required calling Verizon for activation and listening to multiple sales pitches as well as waiting for programs and data to transfer and getting rid of apps that don't work on the newer Galaxy models. The good news is that since they didn't have a replacement S22, they sent me the S24, so I have a much newer phone with a camera that gets ranked better. Now we're watching Deadpool 2 now so we'll be ready for Deadpool and Wolverine in two days. We got to watch this hungry ground squirrel on top of Crystal Mountain:

Greetings from Bellevue Botanical Garden

Monday was my 34th wedding anniversary, so after a quiet early day of laundry and my semiannual full computer backup, we went out to walk at the Bellevue Botanical Garden. There are a few azaleas still blooming in the Japanese garden, but the majority of flowers are in the perennial border garden, where we also saw a bunny, several birds, and lots of bees. We also took the ravine trail over the suspension bridge and walked through the meadow and water garden. 

From there we drove to Redmond Town Center, where we visited the Utopia gemstone store in its new location before going to dinner at Thai Ginger. Then we came home and watched the rest of My Lady Jane, which is only slightly more historically outrageous than The Tudors and much more female-powered -- good sense of humor, lovely scenery and costumes, and if it's strange to have changelings instead of Protestants as Bloody Mary's victims, it's an interesting metaphor.

Poem for Thursday and Canal in Spring

Happiness
By Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.

                    It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

 -------- 

I had a really nice long call at lunchtime with my high school friends, one of whom is dealing with a family situation that people in my family have some expertise about, so after two and a half hours on Zoom and then actually eating lunch, I then got to talk to my sister quite a bit, plus I had some Freecycle and Marketplace pickups so I got a tiny bit of the clutter out of the house. It rained all day, so I did not go looking at scenery, though I did admire damp flowers and do a couple of long distance Pokemon raids. 

We watched The Masked Singer, which was highly complimentary to the unmasked, followed by The New Mutants, which I thought was better than its reviews, though the whitewashing of two major characters is disturbing. It doesn't contribute anything major to the X-Men mythology but I like how it explored its particular corner and characters. We put on the White Sox-Cleveland game while it was still a perfect game, which didn't last but even a no-hitter is exciting to watch! From the C&O Canal last weekend: