On Saturday, I talked to the music director of the church needing a trumpet for Easter. I asked if he would consider sending me copies of the music in advance, and he said that wouldn’t be a problem.
As for attire, he said his church is extremely casual, with people wearing everything from blue jeans to suits, and very diverse, with homeless people down the pew from rich people, so it sounds like no clothes shopping will be required for this occasion—good news all around.
Later that day I had my mouthpiece extracted from my trumpet at Union Music and did a spot of mattress shopping at McRoskey, culminating in a down payment that would be enough to adopt thirty-four cats from the SPCA (and that’s just one end of the mattress), but then, what would I do with such a large fleet of cats?
A certain Midwest commenter says that if their mattress wore out, they would go straight to the thrift store and snap up the first semen- and booze-stained (those exact words may not have been used) pallet they spied, and they would do so with a light heart and peace of mind because they would posthaste encase it in a plastic protective cover.
However, I believe this same commenter and her gentleman companion own a house, a car, nine or ten computers, a big TV, central air conditioning and a badminton set with one still-usable racquet, all of which I have eschewed, in my high-minded way. Instead, I shall have a McRoskey mattress, full size, in case the nurse needs somewhere to set down the extra bedpan when I’m expiring; by all accounts, this mattress may last that long.
When I first received the telephone answering machine my parents sent me, their old one, the volume control worked perfectly, but it soon—within five minutes—got stuck on the loudest setting, blaring messages to all points. Passing Radio Shack the other day, I remembered that I had gotten my favorite phone there and went in to look at the phones.
They didn’t have any appealing phones, but they did have a little-bitty house brand digital answering machine with a 60-minute total recording time, for about $30, whose volume control goes all the way to silent and which is quite clear-sounding, both my announcement and the messages left by callers.
I asked my mother if she wanted me to send her old answering machine back and she said, “No! That’s the beauty part.” And thus concludes the search for an answering machine, happily.
Tom was away at a second qualifying brevet for Paris-Brest-Paris last weekend, so I spent Saturday evening trumpeting and puttering about. The first brevet was one hundred miles long, I believe he said, and a group of people did it on single-gear bikes, meaning they could not downshift to get up the hills! I very much admire their determination and athleticism, but that seems like a great way to guarantee double knee replacements later in life. This most recent brevet was 300 km, or about 186 miles.
I heard Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer on the National Public Radio show Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! on Saturday, which was kind of neat. The host said he was the first Supreme Court justice to appear on a radio quiz show, and would probably be the last.
They asked him three questions, one each about David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Ozzy Osbourne. He got all three wrong. One of the panel members consoled him, though he didn’t seem at all chagrined, by saying something like, “This is one of those shows where failing is a mark of distinction. I now feel even more confident about your ability to defend the Constitution knowing you didn’t know the answers to these questions.”
She had a point there. What would it mean if he knew every little thing about Iggy Pop, including that he once ate nothing but sausages for an entire year?
The host asked Justice Breyer, “Do you like to be treated formally or like a regular guy. Do you say, ‘I don my robe one voluminous head-hole at a time like anyone else’?”
And, to assuage the concern of the panelist with OCD, the host asked if he has to maintain his robe with adhesive tape or other lint-removal device. Apparently it’s synthetic and doesn’t attract lint.
On Sunday, I made, from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, Turkish Spinach and Lentil Soup, which was extremely good—I wish I’d doubled the recipe and frozen some for later—and Transylvanian Eggplant Casserole, which is so-so; it seems to be mostly rice.
I finished Mary Karr’s wonderful book The Liars’ Club and had a satisfying drippy cry over it, ditto when I copied down my favorite paragraph so I could read it again after the book is back at the library. I am going to request her next memoir, Cherry, very soon. She is working on a third: Lit.
No comments:
Post a Comment