hooray for the heating

Sunset the night before the storm.
The white spot is a half moon... >

3:27 pm, Friday 9 December, she walks out of the Wired Puppy with a grin on her face, holding the regular post-walkies treat: Medium Mocha, No Whipped Cream (Note Initial Caps For Emphasis). She's just been talking to the barista-person about weather, because today in Provincetown it is the thing to talk about. It feels like she's heard a hurricane is supposed to behave... rainy stormy weather with trees bowing down under the strain of it, followed by a lull. And a big dirty sky hanging over the east end of town meanwhile, just biding its time. She doesn't have to wait long.

Here's a picture of the rainbow that appeared in 'the lull'

Halfway up the half-mile between the post office (some of you are getting postcards soon!!) and Wired Puppy, the rain starts. She loves it. As she passes the mouths of alley ways the wind nearly bowls her over. She giggles out loud and hangs on to her hat and clutches the plastic bag with padded postbags in it tightly to her chest. What fun!

And then she gets to the Wired Puppy and has the Weather Conversation. Her hurricane idea is dismissed peremptorily. What is apparently going on, says the barista is that there's a storm coming in this direction (he sticks his arm out) and there's another storm coming from over here (he crosses his first arm with the second arm) and then there's a bit where the two meet--that's the lull we just had, he says confidently. Makes about as much sense to her as a hurricane, so she nods and they have a little extra chat about the length of the days. They are short. At 3:27 it's nearly over... just over half an hour to go before the sun dips over the horizon.

The lights dim.

She leaves, waving. As she crosses the street, clutching not only the plastic bag with padded postpaks, but also a coffee, the snow starts. It stings exposed skin. What she doesn't know is taht the wind is travelling at somewhere between 35 and 60 miles per hour. That's the mile that is 1.62 kilometres in length. As they say in this blessed country... 'Do the math'

So she walks up Dyer Street (her normal route) and by the time she's half way up the street, she's squealing. Half delight, half (a little bit) scared. oooooohhhhh... the wind is blowing, the snow is stinging, she can hardly put one foot in front of the other. Visibility: approx. not a lot.

Up the stairs to her little pad. Notes screen door has been blown almost off its hinges... opens main door. Goes in side. Warm little pad. Dark little pad. Pulls the light cord. Dark little pad.

Power's off. Remember the lights dimming?

The wind howls and it gets darker. Snow is blown so hard against her front windows that she can't see the street and must look out the side windows. She lights candles and puts Robyn's crocheted rug over her knees. Reads by two candles and remembers what it felt like without power in the bush as a kid. Feels the room getting colder.

The phones work so she checks weather.com (gotta love the lappy with a charged battery!!) The wind is supposed to abate by midnight-ish (it did!). It is supposed to get down to -1 C and Saturday is supposed to be a sunny 3 degrees celcius (39 F). Walkies in store for us, methinks!

At 4:16, the power came back on, and it's now 5:53. She's sitting up in bed writing (well she actually ducked out to the kitchen to top up the coffee cup so that's why I thought I'd give you a quick update.

She loves heating. She loves electricity. She loves life. Billie Holiday is playing in her earphones. It's Saturday 10 December, and all is well in Provincetown.

That final picture is Snug Cottage across the road... looking pretty in the snow.

scatology

ha ha ha ha! I nearly fell out of my sock laughing when she came home from walking to the GU. A seagull shat on her. All across the front of her jacket, right across to the front of her jeans. The gulls are big here! They do big doo-doo.

Interesting fact: seagull kaka looks like milk and smells like dead fish.

Walkies!

Lots of photos in this posting. She got busy with the camera -- as did I, although I didn't do a terribly good job as you can see if you scroll down a bit.


Walking to the Beech Forest she decided to go the long way and cut through the graveyard.

Some of the headstones are heart-wrenching. So many small children died in the late 1800s. No explanations, just these sad little date ranges of 2 years, 4 years... So many of them too. It made us really think about how much things have changed in a couple of hundred years when you can have kids in our countries now and be pretty sure they'll make it.

Great view of the Provincetown Monument (with headstones) Look at that blue sky with fluffy bits. Dontcha love it!!!

[by the way, as I type this, the wind is fairly howling outside the apartment and I am snuggled up in a blanky, with the laptop on my lap keeping me extra warm. So the weather may have turned, maybe.]


Here's me hanging around on the sign at the beginning of the bike trail we walked along today. She walked from home to the Beech Forest (via Chach and eggs benedict). This is the beginning of the Beech Forest trail.

Hi ho, hi ho, a walking we will go... no wait. That's what dwarves sing, isn't it. Not gnomes. I was never properly socialised, you see. I was brung up by humans, and spent my adolescence in a tomato patch, so whaddya expect. Don't judge me. I can't help being stiff and ceramic.


Oh, oh, oh, I nearly forgot. Then we found these cool mushrooms. They grow right out of the sand.

I tried to see how the hydraulics work. As you can see here, I was taking it very seriously, getting right down on the ground and investigating the underside of the funghi in question... to no avail.

Whatever mechanism they employ here, it's clearly quite intricate and cleverly disguised.



Here's what red leaves look like.


Here's what Miriam looks like when I move the camera away before the shutter has finished clicking.



Here are Miriam's eyes. Noice crows feet, girl.

Proof

Just in case you didn't believe she's been writing, here's photographic evidence. There's a restaurant on Shankpainter Road called Chach. They have good food, and the peeps are noice as well. Good Eggs Benedict, passable coffee... (for all the Provincetown residents reading this, that was an attempt at irony, or more precisely a joke!! :-))

It's a terrible dilemma when just days away from what locals say is definitely, absolutely probably going to be snow... when she has some serious writing to get into and when the days keep ticking away... that the sun shines. She just has to go out in it! Believe me, when it does start to snow, she'll be holed up in that apartment, just dashing out to dance naked in the snowflakes from time to time... (for all the Provincetown residents reading this, she'll only do it in the dark and only for seconds at a time)

But look how good she is!!! She took me, her manuscript and a pen that works (the gal can really think sometimes...) and she edited pages 33 to 52 before heading off on the big walk (see next entry for details)

Look at the sunshine in this photo. It was so deliciously warm on the table in the corner she chose to sit at. As you can see, I couldn't resist and stretched out for a nap. Mmmmm.

din-dins!

A house is just not a home until you've had friends over for dinner, or so she says. Oh, she forgot to put the flash on the camera. Ooops.

That's Chris on the left and me in the middle and then Jim on the right.

They were quite good company. We laughed, we cried... we solved the world's problems. Global warming, endangered species. Solved. But we forgot to write it down before we went to sleep, so now that's all been wasted!


On the menu? Chicken marinated in yoghurt, lemon juice, cumin and turmeric. Cous cous with roasted capsicum and fresh coriander. Roasted parsnips, carrots and aubergine. Followed by Raspberry cream cheesecake. yuuuummm. So now the apartment has been 'christened'.

And here I am in Jim's pocket. They think my hands look like boobs. Not a nice thing to say, really.

Rainy day...

Rain on the roof this morning - it's such a great sound. After writing in the morning, she went for a walk in one of the breaks in the weather. Of course the break didn't last and we got soaked... but hey, she loves walking in the rain. She thinks it's one of the best things to do after a few hours of writing.


First, she had a bite to eat at the Squealing Pig. Here's me helping her out with her glass of wine.










Derek is the bartender. He was doing a bit of a spring cleaning - wiping down the shelves and the bottles. (dreadful shot -- sorry Derek!)

We went down to the breakwater.

< Here's a shot of me looking longingly out along it. It's getting colder and wetter here now and I'm not sure when she's going to make it out along the breakwater to the Long Point lighthouse -- but hopefully she's going to do it soon!



< GU
And then, she went to the GU (Grand Union Supermarket) to get some supplies and the rain really started. By the time she'd walked home with a full backpack she was completely soaking, but you know, it was great. A hot shower and a pair of snuggly tracksuit pants and a fuzzy jumper and a cup of tea later and she was just about the happiest gal in Provincetown.

I had written him a letter...

Here's a kangaroo we saw in Bradford Street. Eeek!


She's being quite good and writing her novel every day, but at this time of year there are so many things to do during the evening - people to see, food to eat, laughs to be had. She goes out at night a bit. She doesn't always take me but she tells me about it afterwards...

The Mews, a quality restaurant here in town, has open mic nights on Mondays and she went along with Zoe, just for a laugh. Earlier in the week, she'd said something about wanting to maybe do something... read a poem, whatever... but in the end she couldn't find one of her own poems that she could bear reading out loud to an audience, so she opted for the one piece she's known by heart since she was small -- A.B. (Banjo) Paterson's Clancy of the Overflow. What some of you may not know about Miriam is that she has a bit of an on-going love affair with the bush and some of its older colonial mythologies. The bush ballads, the stories of Henry Lawson... all that stuff. And having lived in the bush as a kid, she developed a sense for it. She has what has come into common parlance as 'a strong sense of place' in relation to the less inhabited parts of her native country. In an environment such as Provincetown Massachussets it's easy to understand why the known image of Australians might be a bit clichéd or painted with broad brushstrokes. The Australia that Miriam loves and embraces when she touches down from trips away or gets homesick on foreign shores does include Crocodile Dundee, Steve Irwin, Secret Life of Us and Porpoise Spit but that's not all there is. It's too big, to complex, to put into words, but it suddenly struck her that Clancy of the Overflow might be a way to shine a light on another facet of what it means to her to be Australian.

So Zoe shared her open mic slot... welcoming Miriam and making her feel grand. Then, lights in her eyes and a stammer in her voice, Miriam launched into this... one of her favourite pieces of verse. And guess what? They loved it :-)

I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just on spec, addressed as follows, “Clancy, of The Overflow”.

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar)
’Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
“Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.”
. . . . .
In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving “down the Cooper” where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.
. . . . .
I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

And I somehow rather fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal—
But I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy, of The Overflow.

Cheers, m'dears :-)

gym / jim -- spelled differently for a reason

Pic: signing in at the gym for a day pass...

I knew there was a reason she chose to study linguistics. It's so the subtle things like differences in spelling and meaning can't get past her any more. Let me give you an example of how useful the last semester has been for her. Jim's place - a few minutes' walk down Bradford Street. Great food, great company, a widescreen TV and various on-demand movies and other programs. Gym - a longer walk in the other direction with no food, nobody to talk to and very small TVs on brackets high up the wall, with captioning so she can see the dialogue as she sweats. And yet, both words sound the same. Homophones, they call 'em. Gym, Jim. Life's funny, isn't it. That's gotta be worth the fees she paid at Melbourne Uni last semester.

Pic: in the girls' locker room at the gym :-)

Well, as you can see I am sweating the small stuff. That's just my way.

She went out last night. Her friend Zoe Lewis was playing at the Vixen, a club in town. So Miriam went to the Squealing Pig first, for a glass of wine and a bite to eat. Mackenzie (mentioned in previous blogs) was there (some things never change...) and it was great to see him. Derek was there too, behind the bar, just where she left him. Remember the Squealing Pig was where she took the shot of me last year. It was a hangout of hers, a place that she could go and eat without having to cook... So after a glass of wine, a nibble of chicken and a good read of Mackenzie's TV guide she toddled across the street to the Vixen. She didn't bring her handbag last night - she wanted to feel free or some rubbish. So I was in the pocket. Everything was a bit muffled through the woolly material but Zoe sounded great as usual. An intimate crowd listened to Zoe play and sing some of her songs. I like her song Eyelashes alot, and that was the one Miriam and I walked in on. Here's a link to Zoe's website if you want to take a look. www.zoelewis.com

After the gig, Zoe's friend Sharon, from New York taught Miriam how to play Ms Pacman. She (Miriam) is really really bad at it but did manage to get some points by about her third game. Sharon is a great player and was actually straining her shoulder with the joystick. I may have to try and talk Miriam into hanging out at the Vixen and learn to play the game better for next time she gets the chance to complete. I mean it's really embarassing to be sitting in her pocket and listening to her lose and lose. She squeals when she loses. Ye gods. I'm blaming it on the wine of course. It's always the wine with her.

The embarassment did not stop there. We all went to a place called Enzos, across the road from Bubbalas. A great little underground grotto-ish place with a fireplace and nice people. She had a glass from a great bottle of Sangiovese wine, a few more nibbles and lots of conversations. I was really enjoying myself just hanging in the pocket (!) and then she met an author named Michael. He seemed nice. We started talking about the writing process and then of course she thought she'd ask him what his surname is "in case she'd seen his work somewhere". Well, it was only Michael Bloody Cunningham (author of, among other things, The Hours). She blushed. I could feel it from the pocket but hopefully the light was dim enough down there in the grotto that nobody could see her face changing colour! She decided to play it cool and say "hmm. Yes, I think I may have seen your work around." Gotta love the girl under pressure.

Tonight we're going to Jane's house. Jane lives in a street called Aunt Sukey Way. Miriam loves the name of that street!

I'm going to put the camera near the front door now so she can't bloody leave it behind - you'll get pictures next time.

Strappy frock one day -- woolly sox the next

Ye gods. I'd forgotten how cold it can get here. I thnk she actually wanted to put me on the porch of the apartment that she's staying in, but thankfully she's had a re-think. After all, I mean really. My paint could crack off out there!

And those of you who may or may not have been reading previous blogs, from last time she was here, will be desperate to know about the sock situation. Did she or did she not (for example) transport me here 'dans une chausette'? Not as fancy as it sounds unless you have a thing for socks. Yes, yes and yes. She did. This time it was one of her old terra cotta coloured items, with a hole in the toe. Having colour made me feel upgraded... but the hole kept me in my place. Seemed like every x-ray machine we went through between Melbourne airport and Provincetown I put the wind up the security person. I'd get into the machine and the belt would stop, then reverse a little, forwards a bit, back again... and finally I'd be sent through to the otherside. I'm not sure exactly what it was about me that gets them worried. But I figure it was either me or the house keys and my guess is that they see house keys in handbags all the time.

Pic (left) The view from the porch.
Anway... back to Provincetown. She arrived on Thanksgiving morning and was picked up by Jim, who took us back to his place for coffee and bagel. And thus began the eating. Home to our apartment for a nap, then back to Jim's house for the proper Thanksgiving. Turkey with sausage stuffing, yams, asparagus, turnip, potato, carrots and cranberry relish made from cranberries picked in one of the cranberry bogs down on Seashore Park Road. Apparently the bogs are knee-deep in mush at the moment - it's been a wet autumn. Hopefully it will dry out a bit and she can go and do a bit of cranberry picking - keeps her out of my hair long enough that I can upload a blog. She's here to write which means she hogs the laptop a bit and uploading updates may have to be carefully scheduled. You should hear her go on about it. "I've got a novel to finish." Whatever.

Meanwhile, she took a walk this morning, down Commercial Street, which is where the action here is. Today was what's known in the USA as 'black Friday' -- the day that will ensure any business is in the black!! I thought it might have something to do with bushfires or stock market crashes but that's just me being negative. Town was full of post-Thanksgiving shoppers, but we do not have a Walmart or Target or any department stores here so the really serious shoppers were absent :-) Being a small town, it's easy to run into people in town and she managed to do that, lots of hugs and smiles all around. The big find of today was a coffee shop that was not yet open last time she was here. Wired Puppy, on Commercial Street just down the road from our apartment. It sells coffee from 6:30 am to 7:30 pm every day. The coffee is good (espresso machine, not drip filter) and it is also a free wireless spot. Oh happy day. That means she now gets to take the laptop down there and write emails and stuff. Another scheduling glitch. Do I sound grumpy?

And that's it from me, for now. I'll update again when she gives me a chance to have a turn the keyboard.

Now, here are a couple more pictures.

Me, on my head, upside down with happiness to be out of the sock and handbag. In the room at the Airport Hilton in Boston.

And the view from the kitchen window. Looks warmer than it is. That speckly stuff on the window is ice.

Christo's Gates in Central Park

So she was walking through Central Park, enjoying the whole experience of being in New York, and the Christo thing that's going on there at the moment with the Gates, of yellow / orange fabric and all, and a spiffy New Yorker (at least he sounded like one) in a suit approached her and said "Tell me what you think. It's ridiculous isn't it. Honestly, it is, you think so, don't you. All these people dying all over the world, and what's the point of this. The money it cost... when you think about all that's going on ..." holding out his hand towards her, imitating holding a microphone to her face.

Well, she was in fine form, and had been formulating some thoughts about the general air of depression, anxiety and struggle that she was sensing in New York... while also aware that maybe she was creating it since things had been a bit depressing, anxious and also a struggle since she'd arrived in the USA for this trip... So she said "Well, maybe it's just an opportunity to look at the world differently. The installation didn't actually cost the city or the taxpayer anything. And the colour is so warm and happy. Maybe we can look at this and re-think the way the world feels for just a minute. "

The guy wrenched his invisible microphone away faster than a speeding very fast thing. But the words made sense to her! She let me out to have a look at the gates, and honestly, I loved them. Made me feel quite skittish and frivolous! People everywhere... orange flags. It was all good.






And here's a link to more information. http://www.nyc.gov/html/thegates/

New York, New York

She had to go to New York. At the last minute, suddenly aware of how much she had to achieve before this weekend, with the Yard Sale and all, she hesitated and nearly decided to be sensible. After all, the person she was supposed to be meeting there could no longer go... perhaps she should just save her dollars and stay in Provincetown and get everything labelled and sorted ready for the bargainfest on the weekend.

Nah.

She's like that sometimes. A total hedonist, interested only in having fun. But you already know that, right!

So she gets in her car with the Nebraska plates and heads off down Route 6, off the Cape then down various interstates and to New York. As she approached, the weather that had started off cloudy became rainy. Then the rain turned to ice and visibility was down to approximately 5.08 cm (i.e. two inches!). Ahhh, the universals of human existence. Universal truth number 674 - all human beings in charge of vehicles turn into complete morons in the wet. Except Miriam, of course whose driving skills were developed and honed along the ruts of keyline ploughed paddocks in the wilds of East Gippsland.

But seriously folks, it took about seven hours to get to JFK airport, which is ridiculous. And she swears she also left her new(ish) sunglasses in the bloody car - something she discovered when the sun came out the next day. Bugger!

The car rental company had a pet limo driver who turned up to take Miriam into the city and to her hotel. Meanwhile, I was... wait for it... can you guess... I was... IN THE SOCK! But she took me out to take this picture and as you can see, nearly blinded me with the flash. In the photo below, the attractive looking blob with the pointy green hat is me. Life with Miriam. Let me tell you. Never a dull moment. The taxi driver was cute. Ali. Pakistani. They chatted away, chat chat chat about everything from being a moslem to not being a moslem, from Australia to America and back again. They laughed. The cried... well no actually there were no tears. But a great time was had by all. Then she paid him and it was all over. Ahh New York. "New York," said Ali, "never sleeps. And that really gets to me. It drives me crazy, you know?"

on the one day she has to drive...

Normally she can get away with staying at home, except for a teensy little motoring for a couple of miles or less. To be honest, most of the appointments she has to keep here she could walk to, and sometimes does. However, today she had made arrangements to go to Dennis. In this instance, the name of a town, no matter how much it may sound like the name of a bloke. It's the silver-plated stuff you see. She doesn't think it's worth an awful lot, but then again, what would she know. She's taken out the bits that mean something and has a wooden box full of platters and bowls that Robyn used to use to hand out peanuts and suchlike at gallery openings. And one item that nobody can tell her the use for. This (it is about 5 cm high and has no holes except the top opening. Ink well? (one expert already asked says not) It's a mystery!):

Nobody here knows what it is, even the gal down in the town who sells silverplated items and seems to know her stuff. So Miriam is going to take it to Dennis for an opinion on what it is, or actually, she's taking it to Bob, the guy who owns the auction house in Dennis. And she's taking the rest of the stuff to Dennis, or as we said, to Bob, so that he can give her an approximate value for her to put on her inventory that she is preparing for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in her official capacity as executrix. She has her fingers crossed that he makes her an offer, or at least lets her sell it on consignment at the next auction. She doesn't want to bring the stuff home again!

And there's snow. So she's got to sweep her porch and the path. Then walk carefully over to the car (it's in the photo below, aaaaaaaall the way over a car park that looks suddenly very big!!) And then start the car, brush teh snow off. When the car is warm, she will reverse it back over this way and put the silverplate in the trunk and drive off for her exciting adventure! She may need another cup of coffee before leaving.




The main roads will have been salted (not really enough snow to plough, or 'plow' as they say here!) It's pretty. I do admit that. She loves it though. In fact, if you could see her now, she's grinning like an idiot. She can stand for hours in it feeling the little sharp snow crystals hitting her face. I found me a couple of two inch nails in the basement last night. I'm going to knit me a scarf. Humph! I miss the Higgs Boson terribly.

sunny day!

What a gorgeous day today. I made her take me out. She wanted to sit and read and write all day, but -- you should have seen it here!! There's a particular pale blue that winter skies get over here. It's almost silvery. No clouds today.

So we went to the gym. And guess where I was, the whole time. Yes. In the sock.

Then we went into town. We ran into Myra, the next door neighbour. Myra has a shop in town. MG Leather. We sat on the steps on the sun. Myra's the one who took the photo of Miriam holding me on the steps. It was so warm in the sun... about ten degrees above freezing!!! Wow!

MG Leather sells leather pants and vests. Also chaps, and leather underpants. And some adult toys. I'd never been in a shop like that. So Miriam let me out to take a look around. Those dildos look way too big for what I though you used dildos for. I took a fairly close look, as you can see.

I'm still puzzled. It's quite a relief not to have to deal with those sorts of - ahem - issues. Being ceramic and all. But at least today I made a couple of new friends. Mackenzie is the guy holding me up. He also lives next door - he's Myra's roomate.


I met this other guy too. Plastic, I think he said he was made of. Hmm. Not my type really but I figured I should be polite and play the game with the chain and the lumpy trousers. I started to wish I could get back in the sock. Really.

Finally, we left. Miriam got peckish and decided to stop in at the Squealing Pig. It's a place she used to hang out a bit in November. They're nice there. They remembered her. They do a really good split pea soup - and it was on the menu today. So she had a cup of that. I checked it out. Smelt really good! And yes, that is a cup of coffee behind her cup of soup. I guess she's just accepted that coffee is her writing drug. She can't give it up right now...

Then home, via the hardware store where she bought a big bag of birdseed. there are two bird feeders out in the back yard, and we thought it might be nice to attract some birds. But first, we had to dig a path out to the feeders through a couple of feet of snow. I helped.

And here's me having swing on the feeder. Wheeee!!

In case you were wondering about Bif... here's what the lazy sod has been doing for the past three days. Sleeping on a ceramic horse. Sheesh!

does Art live here?

Well, she's not sure if Art lives here, but she's making a big list of all the pictures in the condo, and (with help) assigning an estimated value to each, getting ready to auction them. So it's been pretty boring around here. For me, anyway.

All the pieces need to be cleaned. Here's what she does. She gets a bucket of warm water and after putting her rubber gloves on, she dips a sponge in it then squeezes out as much water as possible. Then she carefully wipes the back of the picture and the frame. If there's glass on the front of the picture, she wipes it down as well. Then she takes a wad of paper towel. Sprays the glass cleaner on it and carefully wipes all the smoke stains off the glass. The stains make the paper towel a nice brown color. Jim, an art expert in town and an associate of Robyn's has been helping Miriam with the art inventory. Here's a picture of him and me and a sculpture of three voluptuous bottoms that Miriam has taken rather a liking to.



We went out later and saw the attorney. Miriam is now officially the executor of the will, with a piece of paper to prove it. Yaaay! The attorney's name is Robin. She hasn't met me yet. I had to stay in the sock. Probably a good thing. Robin has a dog called Toblerone. And yes, it is dark brown and a bit nutty. Some large panting breed. Uggh. The sort of enthusiasm that could just lick the paint off a ceramic bloke with a pointy hat!

sunset on the snowy beach

Can it be true? Yep, that's me down there on the snowy sand, checking that it's real. Cold, wet snow my friends. No doubt about it.



Once we'd got over that, we looked up at the sky and here's what we saw. Wow.

escape...

You'd do the same if she kept putting YOU in a sock...

supermarket update...

The supermarket here is called the Grand Union. Or the GU. Or the Grand Onion. Or sometimes the A&P, which is the brand of supermarket it was before it was a Grand Union. January and February are so quiet here, that the supermarked becomes a meeting place.

Conversation overheard yesterday:
"Why, hello sweetie, you're still wearing the same jacket. I saw you here in that jacket last week!"
"Well, I just got it out again today, you know. It seemed like a cord jacket sort of a day. [yes, it was a cord jacket, funnily enough. I took note of the wind direction, temperature and humidity etc outside later so that I know what a cord jacket type of a day looks like in the future]. So what have you been doing today?"
"Watching television. And you?"
"Watching television. It was driving me crazy so I thought I'd come here and get out of the house for a bit."

Even Miriam, who has only been here a handful of times, runs into people she knows or recognises while cruising the aisles. It's rather pleasant actually. You browse and put things in the basket, then stop and chat with someone and move on to more browsing. Here's my new friend Nancy-Ann, holding me in front of a Mulan DVD display (for some reason). Miriam's known her for a few years and ran into her today near the checkouts. Sorry about the blur - Miriam was talking and photographing at the same time. Imagine.


Each week there are specials and coupons... people sit in their warm houses and cut out coupons for a few cents' discount on this product or that, and then go and purchase that product - and enjoy a social life at the same time! There's an air of gleeful excitement around a shopper with a handful of coupons, waiting for the items to be scanned so that they can thrust the coupons at the checkout chick / bloke and watch dollars and cents come off the final bill.

It's something Miriam definitely needs to work on, I think. She's never been much of a coupon shopper, but you know what they say... when in Rome... I found some scissors in the drawer yesterday. Figured I might help her out and do the coupon thing when she's upstairs cleaning walls tomorrow. Might be a nice surprise for her.

Aside: She had me in the sock yesterday so I wouldn't get chipped by the keys in her handbag (Sheesh!) and I heard her talking to someone about quilting. Do you know, they say 'a scissors' here? As in "I got myself a scissors and I cut myself a coupon". I tell you what, I could feel Miriam twitch through the bag. She was just holding herself in -- admirable self-control. Later, on the way home, she said to me. "Noam, how did that happen? Don't they know that scissors is a plural? Do you hear them say 'an underpants'? I had to admit I had never heard an American say 'an underpants'. "So," said a very agitated Miriam, "why do they say 'a scissors'?" I had no answer of course, so we lapsed into an uncomfortable silence for the rest of the way home. At least she'd had the manners to take me out of the sock before talking to me this time. I think I'll log on later when she's not looking and check that site http://www.worldwidewords.org for an answer to the scissors question.

So yesterday, there was a good special on cocoa. It was $1.99 for a fairly sizeable tin. We saw a few of them at various cash registers. Miriam's getting one tomorrow. It will be an outing.
The other supermarket phenomenon here is the cash register conversation. Individuals working the cash registers actually act like people instead of automatons. Interesting. Miriam nearly fell off her elbow yesterday when she heard the checkout chick say to the customer ahead of me "Wow, alot of junk food today!" The customer's response? "Well, it was all on special." Good point.

Arrival etc.

Of course she was re-packing at the last minute. Col turned up ten minutes early to take her to the airport, and she was still tidying the house up ready for the house-sitters! But anyway we only left ten minutes late – and in the end we all made it, and soon Miriam and Bif and I were winging our way to the US in a Boeing 747-400 with individual television screens and an entertainment system that had to be rebooted three times after take-off from Sydney before it would work. Not that I could watch anything, of course. She had put me inside a sock in her computer bag, and shoved the bag into the overhead bin. While up there Bif and I got to know each other, had a bit of a chat. He's filled with polystyrene balls and I'm made of ceramic. I think we both agreed it was great to compare notes; you know, get another perspective.
Here's a picture of us at the kitchen table in the condo in Provincetown. Bif is the bovine. Not sure about the gender, and from what I can gather, there's no udder and no pizzle. So I'm none the wiser, really!



Anyway, Bif can be handy when I want to see out the back door.


I'm Noam by the way. I used to hang out under the tomatoes in the garden at Kew. Talking to the Higgs Boson and the snails. Oh happy days.

We're all a bit weary. Melbourne, Sydney, Los Angeles, New York. Then on the air train to station C Federation Gardens, into a rental car and on the road. She ended up with mid-size car instead of the compact one she could afford... Nancy, the lady at the counter was a bit lacking in the eyesight department or maybe she gave us the upgrade on purpose. She peered out into the parking lot and said "Take the car in bay 21" Which we did. When we got out there, Del, who seemed to be doing a bit of everything around the National Car Rental office said "That's not the compact car you ordered, that's a mid-size." After a couple of dozen hours of travel, mid-size and compact look pretty much the same to us, I'm afraid. They both drive on roads that lead to beds, for example. But when Miriam said to Del "Just point me to the one I'm supposed to be in then," he said not to worry. "I'll just tell 'em there was something wrong with the other one." OK then. For those who care, we have a Pontiac Grand Am thingy. Gold. With Nebraska plates (I kid you not!)

We had directions to get onto route I-95 (I stands for Interstate) and all went well. Then her highness got hungry, so we stopped at a diner in a town called Fairfield. Sherwood's diner. Owned by some Greeks, who sounded just like Australian Greeks! Is there some sort of accent packing order? If you start with Greek, then learn English, the accent stays Greek, no matter where you learn English? If you start with Tagalog then learn English, the accent sounds American, no matter where you learned English? The menu was full of wonderful things that did not involve fries. Yaay!

Here's a picture of me with the spanakopita and me having a rest on her birthday scarf while she finished her dinner.



Miriam had coffee, despite her vow not to drink the foul stuff. She figured she needed it to stay awake (and guess what, it worked... even hours later, she said, when she really did want to get to sleep) A bit of Greek salad and a wedge of spanakopita and she was getting sleepy so we toddled off 13 minutes up the road to the Fairfield Inn, which had been recommended by the waiter at the diner. Well, it was a place to sleep. And that's all I'll say about that. Snow and ice crunched underfoot as we walked from the car. The wind bit. There's a smell about snowy winter – it’s like the smell that comes out of the back end of a laser printer, only cold. Don't believe me? Well, it's true, I tell you. The air is dryer, too. It makes your nostrils crack and Miriam's nose has been bleeding since she landed. Sickening. She should get some nostrils like mine. You don't see me getting a blood nose, do you?

Fairfield Inn.

Miriam couldn't settle. The heater was noisy, the air was dry, her nose was giving her jip and the water from the tap tasted chloriney, but she just couldn't be stuffed enough to go down and buy any. So she held her breath and drank the tap water anyway. Some calls. And emails. Dead laptop battery (the cord that plugs into a US socket is in Provincetown). TV. Water. Toss. Turn. TV. More water. Look out window. TV. Toss. Turn. Sleep at 3:00 am, determined to get up and be on the road at 8:00 – just in case she needed to shovel her way into the condo. Phone rang at 6:00. "Hello?" Ye gods. "I'll call you later." straight back to sleep. She left the hotel at 9:30. Bugger.

Easy driving. Stopped at a food place called 'Friendlys' on the way. It wasn't particularly. Miriam had an omelette. She didn't even take me out of my sock. On the road again, to Hyannis and got a coat at Kmart, plus checked out mobile phone options. Decided not to get one just yet. Next week. Maybe.
Then onto Provincetown. Here's a pic of the first glimpse she got of the town, from Route 6 just past Truro.


And here we are. The condo looks like this this morning. Pretty, eh!

I'll get Miriam to take more shots today...
N xx