So now there are two hedgehog houses, one for eating and one for sleeping quarters. Sleeping hedgehogs. Whatever.
But the houses are in the backyard, which is safely separated from the street by some steps and a fence, and has lots of hiding places, while the hedgehogs are in the flowerbed in front, which is separated from the street by just a fence and a sidewalk, but does offer optimal hiding places as said flowerbed consists of a couple climbing roses and otherwise a massive thicket of helianthus ("Caution: May Spread" the label on the trays of young plants said, when I bought them a couple years ago). Hedgehogs live in a burrow in the midst of the thickest part of the thicket. First there were three babies we saw when we lured them out with food, then last time only two, so we were thinking, maybe move them into the backyard when we can catch all of them at the same time, so's they don't wander out into the street and get squarshed or over next door and get eaten by the German Shepherd who barks all the time and was barking last night, my wife said, as if he'd a mouthful of quills.
The mother meanwhile commutes regularly between their burrow and the backyard where she chills in the eating house. They saw her fall off a ladder two days ago on her way to the backyard so they made me make a ramp for her, long slat of wood onto which I nailed leftover asphalt roofing for the non-skid effect.
Then, though, last night I get ready to go somewhere... oh yeah, to this party to pick up Beta, and there was the biggest of the babies, a male I guess, trying to figure out how to get under the gate to run out to the street and get squarshed. And we saw another one too so we decided to implement the relocation plan, and my wife gave me some gloves (to avoid getting my scent onto the babies in case mother hedgehogs abandon babies with human scent on them, who knows?) and I moved him - he rolled up into a ball and I put him in the hay in the sleeping house. Then I moved his slightly smaller sibling. Then my wife said she heard another one rustling about in the helianthus (this was at 9.45 at night and nearly dark, but for a bit of light from a distant streetlight) and I found it, and then a fourth one we hadn't known about, much smaller than the others: the Usual Runt. As light, curled up there in my gloved hands, as a pinecone.
So now there are four young hedgehogs balled up in the straw in the sleeping house. I put a dish of food in there with them, to incline them to stay. Later that night I removed it again, as my wife feared it would attract rats. It was empty by then and although dark something was still in the house because it growled at me as hedgehogs do (sort of a hiss, with some abrupt motion as hedgehogs when threatened either curl up into a ball or make a little jumping motion to poke you with their quills). So something was in there, maybe the mother had found them. I moved the ramp so it would be harder for the young to wander into the street.
I checked again this morning, briefly so as not to harass them too much, and hedgehogs were in there. Could have been the mother snuggling with them, but it was hard to say where one began and the other ended, just a mass of quills there down in the straw.
On Saturday, ran in a race with Beta. "Only 2.4 km," I was told; then, at the last minute: "Oh, yeah, and it's all uphill...". But I survived, and even passed several people: a few fat, short-legged little kids, and some teenagers carrying a sofa (which had it's own starting number) as they ran, and a guy roughly my age.
At the finish line someone gave me a bottle of some water product. Water with extra oxygen.
Sunday I made another hedgehog house, because we discovered a nest of them in our front flower bed. Mother hedgehog and three young ones.
Note to hedgehogs: you're cute, your little beady eyes are cute and the soft hair on your tummies is, but your feces are as uncute as the feces of any other animal. Please stop shitting half-way up the walls of your hedgehog house, please.
Cause, guess who it turns out has to clean them off?
Also on Sunday, I scooped more water out of the giant wading pool, my nemisis. Saturday we decided it looked a little rickety, and wouldn't it suck if it collapsed when we filled it and it all drained into our cellar, next to which it stands, also there's a little hole in the lining; although I glued the hole you never know so on Saturday I bought a duplicate and spent Sunday scooping water out and will soon dismantle this one, level the ground perfectly and put up the new one. So when my niece and nephew come in two weeks, they can tear it apart.
Welcome to our quiz, ¿Quien es más macho?
Our contestants today (as usual I won't reveal who's who to ensure your objectivity):
¡Yo soy más macho!
If you answered #2, you win. Yo soy más macho porque the meaning of life is más macho and maybe I don't know what it is, but I bet it has more to do with eating ice cream with girls on a warm summer evening than it does with forcing yourself to run around when you're obviously not enjoying it.
Somewhere in my heart I nurtured the hope that Bush and his cronies could someday have to answer for their crimes, until I read this.
Boy, after Saddam Hussein is turned over to the new, democratic Iraqi government, wouldn't that suck if he were rehabilitated and elected president?
Also, I have a question, since I do not have a television and have only read about the event: when "President" Bush II made his "Mission Accomplished" appearance on that aircraft carrier a year ago, he climbed out of that airplane, right? Was he represented as actually having piloted it himself, or was it clear that he was merely a passenger? Because his security guys wouldn't really let him actually fly an airplane, would they?
The week before last, on Sunday, in downtown Vienna, on the Graben, down a few doors from Demel's coffeehouse/restaurant, a woman I was talking to hiked her skirt up to show me a large bruise on her thigh. She showed me others on her arm, etc. They were from luggage and furniture. She bruises easily, she told me, so doctor visits are sometimes awkward because she has to convince them she is not in an abusive relationship.
The next day, another woman told me she bruised easily and showed me one on her hip, from a computer table.
It made me wonder whether I had developed some new variety of charisma. Or whether this was a result of using deodorant (normally I am reluctant to use such products as they make my armpits itch. But this one I have now is quite pleasant, much to everyone's probable relief).
The next day, though, my poor wife gave herself a large knot over the left eye when she tried to run through the bathroom door to see what time it was in case she was late, and the door swang shut and she hit it edge-on. Turns out she has a concussion and needs bed rest.
That was a week ago today. Last night, we were sitting out on the terrace enjoying the evening. Talking about how she needs to go in for some sort of a scan as an old whiplash injury of hers seems to be acting up, when a small green peach, hard as a stone and about the size of a full-sized apricot and traveling very fast, hit her in the right cheekbone just under her eye. She felt lucky, because it missed her glasses.
I expected her to have a black eye today, but she looked okay. Still, though. Poor woman.
We explained to the boys playing in the neighbor's backyard (their grandsons) what had happened, but they just shrugged and blamed the neighbor girl. So my wife called their grandmother and explained, and the grandmother went out into the backyard and bitched at them.
The cello class at the music school is having a recital tonight. My teacher encouraged me to participate, so I said okay. Sometimes it's good to do something you rather wouldn't just for a little variety.
I plan to play a piece by some French composer, a duet for piano and cello.
I had exactly one practice with the woman who'll be playing the piano - she's a teacher at the school and often accompanies students when they play, and is good at covering up their mistakes, adapting to their accidental changes in tempo, etc. I asked her how my intonation was, and she said "fine, and it's a dissonant piece anyway." So I guess if I make any mistakes, it could possibly sound as if they were intentional. Half the time when I play it, I do fine. So there's a 50:50 chance it will go well, and even if it doesn't, there's a 50:50 chance no one will notice.
She does, however, play the piece twice as fast as I am used to playing it. Over the weekend I practiced with a metronome set pretty fast, and did okay, so I'll probably be fine.
This is my first recital in 38 years, I think. Last time was Mrs. Baird's (or whatever her name was - she was about 100 years old at the time, if I remember, so that'd make her 138 now, probably still patiently teaching kids their scales in her little house in town with the blue hydrangeas around the porch).
A year or two ago I accompanied a recorder ensemble at their recital. It was uncomfortable. I developed a sort of tunnel vision so narrow I could barely see my notes, and when we were finished all I wanted was to get the hell out of there.
Gamma had a visitor Saturday morning, a little boy she knows from nursery school. We will call him A. He is a husky little blond guy into normal boy things such as swords and suspending himself by the armpits between two chairs (his arms hooked over the chair arms) and simultaneously making running motions with his legs, which apparently gives him a little stimulation. I think this because his parents find it embarassing when he does it in front of company, not because I've tried it yet.
We were in the back yard and the little perv climbed the fence to peek through the slats at the neighbor lady hanging laundry behind her house. "A., dude, get off that fence, it's more ornamental than anything, you'll knock it down," I said to him in English. He seemed a little surprised. "I don't speak English," he said, in German.
I knew that. I was just saying something while I decided what to really say to him, because I figured I shouldn't say the first thing that had occurred to me, which was, "dude, get into the house, the view's much better from our library window."
Later, he, Gamma and I waited in the car at the train station to pick up Beta on her way home from school. He was checking out all the girls. "Here come the girls," he said. "There's four right now. None of them's Beta, though," he said.
"Don't you just love the warm weather, when they put on their summer dresses," I felt like saying.
"There's some more," he said.
It reminded me of when I was five, and our first trip to Hawaii, which I looked forward to because of, dude, stewardesses and bikinis.
They say history repeats itself, like what does it think we are deaf or something, first as a romantic comedy and then as an action movie I think.
I remember trying to debate kids when I was in junior high, stupid twats who thought Nixon was the man. Today Beta came home and told me about an exchange student who visited her school today. He was a nice kid from Louisiana, she said, until they got onto the subject of the current tenant of the White House (note for readers from the future: that means George W. Bush, hard to imagine isn't it).
The poor boy had been indoctrinated, (probably by his dad while trapped in the car with him on the way to school every morning) because he spouted all the blah-blah liberating the Iraqis this and cutting taxes that. Beta gave him his money's worth (not that I'd ever brag about my kids). So she went all deficit/warpresident?AWOL/etc on his ass. I don't understand the people currently calling themselves "Conservatives" in the US (who BigTimePatriot compares to the Vichy French). They're not conservative at all, they're among the most radical people I know.
There was more I wanted to say about this but it's late and I have to get to bed; sometimes, I wanted to say, sometimes I fear I get a black-and-white view of politics, living outside the country like this, jumping to conclusions with a minimum of news. Then I think, what people get from the media in the States isn't always news either, it's attitude, or spin, or simple propaganda. This phenomena isn't limited to the States, you'll get it anywhere in different degrees; the shit-to-news ratio probably varies in relation to the level of totalitarianism in the country, I'd think. Like, North Korea: not much news. Sweden, Ireland and other nice countries like that: mostly news. US, somewhere in the middle, moving gradually towards the totalitarian end of the spectrum since the end of the Cold War, thanks Ronnie for driving that bulldozer and personally tearing down the wall. Or was it a concentration camp he liberated, I mix those up.
Is love. Love is all you need.
And maybe a smoke, or a nice cold drink.
PS that reminds me, if any of you have a good mojito recipe, please leave it in the comments: this is the summer Beta learns to mix a mojito.
Lost: one mojo
Certain places trigger certain memories or trains of thought, have you ever noticed that?
Like the toilet here at work. The third or fourth time I was sitting on it yesterday, I remembered something I was told recently about sugar alcohols, such as the artificial sweetener sorbitol. And that led to another memory, of a conversation I'd had that morning in the car on my way to work.
After the bird I was dispatched to take pictures of someone dancing somewhere, traditional ethnic dancing, costumes etc and as I crouched down in front of the crowd with the horribly slow office digital camera (has a delay of over a second when you take a picture, so I have a lot of shots of the dancer's back etc) a little South American girl about three years old came up to me and leaned right up against me like we were old buddies and watched the dancer on TV, through the video display viewfinder of my camera, following her around with her finger and eventually smearing the display with whatever she had for lunch.
Very, very cute. So cute I didn't even tell her the tragic story of the unfortunate little girl:
There was a bird in the vestibule at work this morning. A wee brownish thing. The vestibule is basically made of glass, and it was trying every possiblity except for the open door. It hid under a rack in the far corner when I entered. I herded it over towards the door, but instead it flew clear into the other corner on the other side. I went over there and it hid under some art. I crouched down and reached for it, getting cobwebs all over my hand since the art here is apparently not dusted a lot. It went deeper into the cobwebs. I just about had it at one point, but when I touched it, it chirped and flew away, straight out the door this time.
The guy at the reception desk was giving me the look you'd give someone who'd just done what I had just done if you couldn't see the bird from where you sat at the reception desk.
"There was a bird in the vestibule," I explained.
"Big bird or small bird?"
Like there's going to be a fucking crane in the vestibule?
Swans?
"Small," I said.
AKA the Bybee Memo.
What I've really been wondering about lately is how the Abu Ghraib crimes will affect costumes this coming Halloween.
After returning from a hike yesterday I abandoned my family (at least, that's the way they seemed to see it) and drove into Vienna to meet someone I will call R.
My girls seem to be getting used to me meeting bloggers by now, but they still have to explain it to their grandparents.
I got to St. Stephen's Cathedral on time, didn't see R. anywhere, so I went into the subway station to use the restroom. There were several other men already lined up at the urinals. One fat man appeared to be doing a no-hands pee, with both hands in his pants pockets. Another was giving his johnson a great deal of shaking. A third was watching me pretty closely. Many restroom sinks in Austria now have these electric-eye things that turn on the water when you hold your hands underneath. These did not, which I figured out within sixty seconds. The hot-air hand-dryers, however, did have an electric eye function.
As I exited the restroom I saw R. walking by, looking just as she described herself to me on the telephone
So I followed her until she was outside the station, in front of the cathedral.
When people visit me in Vienna, I don't show them around so much as I wander around with them. R seemed impressed by all the Starbucks Vienna now boasts. She turns out to be a very good visitor, since she doesn't mind wandering around Vienna, and is good at filling in the empty spots in conversation.
When I got tired of walking around, we went to the Hawelka coffee house, where Mrs. Hawelka, who could be 90 or could be 100 is still running around chatting with guests. We talked about various things. Upon learning that I've never heard Ann Coulter speak, R. did an Ann Coulter impression that gave me a panic attack.
Holding up my end of the conversation, I told R. all about my kids.
Then we walked around some more. Occasionally I would interrupt whatever she was saying to point out some object of interest:
How do you pronounce "cabal" anyway? We were talking about Bush etc and I noticed too late that I do not know how that word is pronounced. Back when I left the country, you know, that word wasn't commonly used in conversation. I have only read it, never heard it. Is it like "cable" or like "caballe" or something else?
I wandered us back to the subway station. I mentioned I had to use one of the restrooms. Coming from New York, R. found it quaint that subway restrooms in Vienna were still used primarily as restrooms. "Well, one guy was really looking me over last time I was in there," I said. I decided not to mention the fat guy with both hands in his pockets.
Then I went home. "How was your girl from the Internet," my wife asked me. "Twenty-seven," I said. "Young enough to be your daughter," she said. "Theoretically," I said.
Put a dish of catfood into the hotel last night. When we checked this morning, the food was gone, except for the aspic. This tells me it was not a cat, as the aspic is the first thing the cats eat. It may have been a rat, not sure how they feel about aspic, though, I would imagine they eat everything. So it was probably a hedgehog. Anyone know if they like aspic?
So it was satisfying this morning to discover that I can talk sports with my daughter now too.
One last thing. Visited the violinmaker from whom I rent my cello. On Saturday. He wasn't at his shop, having forgotten our appointment, but he came when we called him. He had sold the one cello he wanted to show me, but had a second one. I would really have liked to hear the other one, which he said had a "dominant" sound. I wouldn't have bought it, probably, not only because I don't have the money, but also because it had been repaired and was now an old cello with a new neck, which for some reason reduces the value, here at least. But the other cello he showed me had a much nicer sound than my old cello (it is a cheapish German cello, instead of a cheap Chinese-made cello...). And when he put a different set of strings on it, it sounded even better, so now I'm renting that. It makes a big difference.
Pick out a new bow, he said. He gave me four to compare. I sawed away. "What, exactly, are the criteria by which I should be picking out a bow," I asked him.
He said Springiness. And some bows had a dead spot in the middle someplace when you played a long note. So I played this song I'm supposed to play later this month at the class recital, which has a few long notes, and listened. One bow finally seemed somehow better than the others, although what do I know? He chuckled when I told him which one I'd picked out; it was the most expensive one.
It took a while, but not too long, for Gamma to realize that the shop in the cellar is one place where I'm the boss, and she shouldn't put sawdust into the bucket of sand, and can't complain in a diva-like tone about the mess I'm making with my jigsaw, etc. She adapted quickly and turned into a good little helper, not complaining when her lip was accidentally bloodied on a board; sticking around to hold wood as I sawed it instead of running away covering her ears against the noise.
I'm not sure, though, whether the house is the right size. I think I have a book of plans somewhere.
Anyway. I get a kick out of building stuff for animals, it seems. They're not so picky if you can't saw a straight line with your jigsaw and don't have a circular saw...
That Waris Dirie is one fine-looking person, wow. I mean it. Wonder if she can mix a mojito.
Gah, I'm out of gum...
I've been thinking about that race my wife and daughter ran in. There is a long post I could put here, but I think I'll keep it to myself, to the extent that I am able to do that. I will list a few of the highlights, though, for me, in no particular order:
Some people I'm related to ran in a 5k race in Vienna today together with 9000 other women and Gamma and I watched and cheered them on. Weather was perfect, overcast and cool and windless and Gamma got to jump around in an inflated castle with other little kids and I saw this beautiful woman sitting in the VIP area who I thought looked a lot like Waris Dirie, only better looking and when we got home someone told me that Waris Dirie had been at the race, and I was all like, Well, I saw someone even better-looking.
Also, Ronald Reagan was still alive?
Otherwise known (starting now) as "solar rectum syndrome". I was reading this article somewhere, see, about some woman with a little kid, otherwise known as a "baby" and she mentioned that she tried to... not to make it behave, as you can't make a baby behave, but tried to time said baby's feeding times and sleep patterns to her restaurant visits, such that said "baby" would not disrupt the dining experience of other diners. And she mentioned that other mothers -- especially, in her view, mothers having their first kids over forty (mothers' age, not kids' -- my mother has her first kid over forty right now, as I was her first kid and am now over forty; what I mean is that these mothers this woman was referring to are over forty when they have their first kid) (this woman felt okay in saying this as she herself was over forty, with a little "baby" but had other kids much earlier) and she said these other women seemed to believe that the sun shone out their children's asses and they as a result found it cute when these little kids ran around stealing other people's forks etc. And she tried to avoid being irritating in that way.
It made me wonder whether the sun really shone out my own kids' asses, as I had always believed, or whether I suffered from SRS and just thought it did.
I suppose both are possible - ones kids can be genuinely exceptional and the parent can still be less than objective.
This occurred to me just now because I caught myself about to type something describing Gamma banging on the piano as sort of Johnny B. Goode decomposed in an elevator by John Cale.
On the other hand, she stood me in front of the piano yesterday and told me which note each key was, and she's never had a lesson.
A Volkswagen Touran was in front of me in traffic this morning. It is a sort of van. If there were a compact version of that, wouldn't "Tourette" be a great name for it?
After midnight, summer, I'm sixteen or seventeen which would make it ehm 1975 or so. Everyone else in the house is asleep and I'm in bed listening to my dad's radio down low, some local FM station out of Portland. This time of night Alan Watts is on.
This radio, if you turn on the little light by holding down the small white button, you can see the station it's tuned to, but it wears down the batteries faster. This is the only station worth listening to, though, so I didn't use the light much. Later, in 1976 or 1977 they'll be the first ones to play the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.
Right now, Alan Watts and Zen and stuff. He tells a story about a master and a disciple walking around and they see a guy with an elephant, and the student asks the master, So if this is all Maya then that elephant is illusion too? And the master says, yeah but... and the disciple to prove his faith in his teacher lies himself down in front of the animal and asks the elephant guy to make it step on him, which it does, and he is crushed. Guess I should have explained to him that he's also illusion, the guru says.
Imagine another man, years later, now in fact, or yesterday to be precise, squatting down inside a gigantic wading pool so that those outside the pool cannot see him. And he is scooping water into a bucket and dumping the bucket into the yard, totally concentrated on this action, living in the moment. And he doesn't exactly reach enlightenment in this instant, but he does think, This must be a lot like what Zen must be like. And he thinks, You know, Zen retreats are for pussies. This is on his mind because he just heard from someone about someone else who'd spent 7 years in a Zen monastery in Korea.
He thinks, any path to enlightenment is as good as any other path, because only the enlightenment counts. Whether you shave your head and let some guy hit you in the shoulders with a long bamboo rod and meditate or whether you have kids and pets and mortgages and bills and lessons and a large wading pool that fills with awful filth during the winter and must be laboriously cleaned out in the summer, the precise path does not matter as all lead to enlightenment, and none do.
He thinks further, if anything, the Suburban Path to enlightement is superior, since attaining Enlightenment, if it involves anything more than simply attaining enlightenment, likely involves letting go of desires and frustrations and attachments, and what has more of those than this life? Consider this pool I am currently squatting down inside, not for the first time this weekend, but the second, he thinks. First I make my wife promise, if she wants a pool she has to clean it out herself, but then she has something else urgent to do and who woulda thought, here I am scooping black gunk into three buckets, then lifting them out of the pool, then climbing out of the pool on this rickety ladder made of tubular aluminum, then dumping the buckets into the yard, then climbing back in and repeating the process. Then after that is completed and the pool is emptied and scrubbed (and here he admits to himself that his wife did the scrubbing while he did the scooping and dumping) it is filled with fresh water. And once it is full, he thinks, once it is full and only then, we noticed the little hole in the very bottom, through which water was leaking out and very, very slowly flooding the cellar, so he pumped out all the water, cubic meter after cubic meter of expensive clean drinking water, and climbed back in and scooped a second time, this time helped by his wife. If I could let go of that, he thinks, I would be enlightened maybe.
Or waking up on a morning with a hangover and realizing far too late that a seven year old girl with a brand new piano can mean only one thing: 8 solid hours of improvisation.
Or the hedgehog that visited. He thinks of the wonder he felt himself at watching it, and the look of wonder in his daughter's face when she said, That's my first hedgehog ever. And he realizes then that, yes, the last ones they had he released up in the woods far from the streets on the very day she was born.
Or the sound bites this Path provides him, such as his kid saying, I have a piano in one ear and a hedgehog in the other.
He wonders if enlightenment would be worth giving all this up for. When he finishes scooping, he pulls a few weeds.
