Valentine’s

Abel has cabin fever now. He points at the stroller, squawks, climbs onto my chest, and beats it. Soon, Abel, soon.

Like his brothers before him, he attacks my face and snatches at my glasses when I put them on at night. His little nails must have cut inside my eyelid. When I fold it back I find the scab. It has been chafing my eyeball.

Happy Valentine’s (this time, on the day itself). No celebration for Karin & me tonight. We’ll go out later this week.

I did put on Sleepless in Seattle for the family. There aren’t a lot of Valentine’s Day movies. I’ve seen these others:

My Bloody Valentine and the excellent Picnic at Hanging Rock – two for the horror aisle;

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind;

and:

Some Like It Hot.

Irrespective of overall merit or demerit, only Sleepless preserves the spirit of, and does justice to, the holiday. (I’ve not seen An Affair to Remember.)

Happy birthday to my long-dead Great Grandad Valentine, my father’s mother’s father.

February’s poem

It’s by Yeats:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

After the Super Bowl, Samuel wanted to listen to Taylor Swift.

Taylor: “She wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts …”

Samuel: “I wear t-shirts. And underwear.”

Yes, he does.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin & I spent our Valentine’s outing (yesterday) getting haircuts and eating at Hacienda. Most years, we eat in the mall food court, so this was a step up.

Wheel, Jeopardy!, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days played on TV in the restaurant.

I really love Karin.

Beethoven at bedtime

Our flimsiest bookcase is in the bedroom. Should Mishawaka’s earth shake at night, I’ll be pummelled by the novels of Dorothy Sayers. Some of them – The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night – are rather large.

(Josephine Tey’s books also are on the highest shelf.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Less bulky but also forceful is Beethoven at Bedtime, which Karin & I play to lull Samuel to sleep. On a good night, he’ll lose consciousness by the third track, “Piano Concerto No. 5 in E Flat Major” (which I know from Picnic at Hanging Rock).

This evening, however, he protests through most of the album. Karin turns on the “mood” light. I know that trick, too, protests Samuel, and he bleats all the louder.

And then something appears hilarious to him. He laughs and laughs.

Finally, he sleeps to Joe Baker’s Sound of Summer Rain.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I continue to apply for work (usually after Samuel has gone to sleep). My current effort is directed toward a college in Nevada. The campus has three regular faculty and twenty adjunct lecturers. Onsite teaching is done after hours in a high school building. I would be delighted to get this job.

Why the twerp Griezmann isn’t succeeding at F.C. Barcelona

This article points out what should have been obvious before Griezmann moved for €120 million from Atlético de Madrid. Griezmann is accustomed to playing directly behind another striker. At Barcelona, Messi is the only striker who is permitted to consistently drop behind another striker.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Tonight, Karin & I celebrated three and a half years of marriage. We went to a burrito restaurant. We silently ate and admired our sleeping baby.

As November winds down, Karin dreads her return to her regular work schedule.

The good news is, I’m improving at giving Samuel the bottle.

Contrary to mystical prognostication, the missing copy of Picnic at Hanging Rock has been found (by Karin).

More parenting

My library copy of Picnic at Hanging Rock has gone missing. I’ve searched everywhere. There is no trace of the book. The plot of Picnic at Hanging Rock is happening to Picnic at Hanging Rock.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Nicknames of Samuel:

• Sammie (or Sammy?)
• Sam
• Little Roasted Chicken
• Porkchop
• Lambchop
• Lambie Boy
• Little Lamb
• Little Laah (after his noise)
• Lambwood

The boy is increasingly comfortable by himself, in the day, awake. This bodes well.

At night, inevitably and almost immediately upon waking, he cries.

Today I fed him his first bottle. He didn’t take to it much. We are practicing for when Karin returns to her job.

Still waiting

Our little son, whose name will be Hamish Macbeth (not really), refuses to come out of his mother.

The doctor says that if he hasn’t been born by Monday, we’ll make a “birthing plan.”

There’s little else to report. I finished reading Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan:

It was a slow burn, but the last pages were – as kids these days like to say – fire.

(Its cinematic adaptation, released in 2018, isn’t well regarded.)

Next, to read another boarding school classic: Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. Copies have become readily available due to the popularity of the new miniseries. I’ve only seen the movie of 1975. It’s one of my favorites.

I-15; Bryce Canyon; Hatch; Orderville; Zion

Here’s our first photo of Salt Lake City, taken near to the airport (we’d just gotten our rental car):

We headed southward on I-15. As she drove, Karin marveled at the scenery. First we passed snow-capped mountains which loomed over suburban sprawl (office parks; strip malls; gun shops; for-profit universities). Before long, the constructed things gave way to lush, green valleys with creeks and cattle in them. The mountains turned redder and smaller.

After some two hundred miles, we left the interstate and turned eastward, in the direction of Bryce Canyon National Park. The going was slower, and the hills rested nearer to the road.

Then came tourist town after tourist town, motel after motel. Bryce Canyon itself was swarming with tourists, many of them from such places as the Netherlands and Japan. Nearly all of these svelte persons were wearing hiking gear. With them, we rode shuttle buses to the vistas.

Proof that we were at Bryce Canyon:

Proof that we were at Bryce Canyon together:

(Karin thinks this picture is very funny.)

Worn out from riding the shuttle buses, we drove to the little town of Hatch, where we’d reserved our motel room. At first we had trouble finding the motel. We drove up and down what seemed to be Hatch’s only street. Karin pulled into a gas station to collect her wits.

I looked across the street. “That building is our motel,” I said.

This, too, was very funny to Karin. She laughed and laughed.

“It’ll be a fine motel,” I said.

Later, when we dined at the steakhouse there, we decided that it was a fine motel.

The next morning I made sure to photograph the motel:

And the carpet in our room:

Which I wouldn’t mind installing in my own house some day.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The route between the town of Hatch and Zion National Park was perhaps the loveliest route of the whole trip. Much of it seemed to be permanently clouded over.

We stopped in the town of Orderville to buy supplies, and I picked up a free Spanish translation of the Book of Mormon. “It should be easier to read this version than to read the English version,” I told myself (Joseph Smith was no great prose stylist). The phrase And it came to pass mercifully was rendered in Spanish sometimes as Y sucedió, sometimes as Y ocurrió.

Also available: translations into Dutch, into Italian, into what may have been Bengali.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Zion is a park for fatties. You can go through all of it in a car. (From what I could tell, there were more cars inside of Zion than anywhere else in Utah.) At Zion you needn’t pretend to be an outdoorsman: lots of people dress in regular clothes.

Karin & I performed a single hike, which wasn’t terribly strenuous. It took us to this vista:

Again, here’s proof that we were there together:

Much of the park resembled the scenery in Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Next blog entry: our return to Salt Lake City. But by the time I publish it we’ll have arrived back in South Bend.