A grand day out

Spring Break came and went. Mainly I spent it on the couch, thinking about my diet. (My goal is to fit into a particular suit by David’s wedding-time.)

I lost five lbs.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

After this morning’s work shift, I treated myself to a stroll along my old haunts: westward on Mishawaka Ave.; northwestward, next to the river; to and fro, down-town. Then, for the first time, I went into the DoubleTree Hotel. In the lobby I browsed the well-stocked bookshelves. I detected no thematic pattern to the books: spine color (white, gray, black, or blue) appeared to be the sole criterion for inclusion.

I wandered over to the hotel’s enormous, empty atrium. There I bought a Starbucks drink and sat and read. Light flowed down from the high glass ceiling; heating machinery distantly hummed. Cozy in my armchair, I was happy.

The Queen of Crime, pt. 741

Stephen, desiring another blog entry, suggests that I rank the books of Agatha Christie from best to worst. What follows is a grading of the novels, the plot-linked story collections (asterisked), and The Big Four (in which four longish stories are glued together into one narrative).

GRADE: A
Cards on the Table
The Clocks
Partners in Crime*
The Moving Finger
The Seven Dials Mystery
Parker Pyne Investigates*
The Mysterious Mr. Quin*
At Bertram’s Hotel
Endless Night
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
And Then There Were None

GRADE: A-MINUS
The Pale Horse
Cat Among the Pigeons
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Hickory Dickory Dock
The Body in the Library
Peril at End House
Appointment with Death
Ordeal By Innocence
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead
The Labours of Hercules*
Hallowe’en Party
The Secret Adversary
Lord Edgware Dies
The A.B.C. Murders
Poirot Investigates*

GRADE: B-PLUS
The Murder at the Vicarage
Murder in Mesopotamia
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Three Act Tragedy
The Hollow
Dead Man’s Folly
Sad Cypress
N or M?

GRADE: B
Crooked House
Sparkling Cyanide
Towards Zero
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Thirteen Problems*
Third Girl
They Came to Baghdad
A Murder Is Announced
Murder Is Easy

GRADE: B-MINUS
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Nemesis
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Destination Unknown
Taken at the Flood
Five Little Pigs
The Sittaford Mystery
The Secret of Chimneys
A Caribbean Mystery

GRADE: C
The Man in the Brown Suit
The Big Four
A Pocket Full of Rye
They Do It With Mirrors
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
Murder on the Orient Express
The Murder on the Links
Death in the Clouds

GRADE: D
Passenger to Frankfurt
Elephants Can Remember
Postern of Fate
Curtain

I haven’t read all of 4.50 from Paddington, Death Comes as the End, Death on the Nile, Dumb Witness, Evil Under the Sun, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, or Sleeping Murder. The best of these, I suspect, are Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun.

I haven’t read any of the “Mary Westmacott” romance novels, either. They’re supposed to be rather good. And I haven’t read the autobiography, Come, Tell Me How You Live.

The game against Australia

At halftime, having fallen behind 0–3, having failed to maintain possession of the ball — having played horribly — we Ecuadorians were calm.

Some of us were chipper. Segundo Castillo walked off embracing Australia’s Tim Cahill, his Everton ex-teammate.

Coach Rueda decided he’d experimented enough. For the next period, he restored four of his regulars to the field.

Suddenly, Australia seemed very poor.

Final score: Ecuador 4, Australia 3. Also, Énner Valencia missed a tap-in. Also, we were refused some penalty kicks. (The bashful ref already had awarded one to each team.) The winning goal was by our super-sub, Old Man Méndez.

At IUSB this morning, jersey-wearers strutted. I greeted some of them in Spanish. They looked at me like, “What the hell.”

Overstimulated

Tuesdays, my shifts go from 9:00 to 11:00 in the a.m. and then from 6:00 to 8:00 at night. In between: a long lunch, somewhere distant. (An effortful walk does me good.)

Today, though, I only got as far as the IUSB cafeteria, what with needing to quickly rid myself of jitters from breakfast (I’d drunk too much syrup and coffee). Therefore, after lunch I had an extra hour to kill in the library. I was restless. I was able to read just ten or twenty pages before I had to get up to browse the stacks. There’s that Tim O’Brien book I’ve been curious about. There’s another Anne Lamott book to wallow in.

But I figured, what I check out I’ll have to carry home, and hardbacks are heavy. So I put them back.

As it happened, though, Martin offered to drive me home because of the windchill. When we arrived at the house, Mary had the fire going, and Bianca was all snuggly. … Point is, I could have painlessly brought home those books.

Stephen and I have agreed to read Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall, one chapter per day, beginning tomorrow (the prologue counts as a chapter). We invite you to read it with us.

Melting

Most definitely not snowed in; but the last two nights, walking has been perilous due to the ice. There are too few English terms for the different slicknesses I’ve encountered.

Today, though, we’ve had lightning flashes and thick rain. The snow mounds — formerly tall as houses, hard as marble — are greatly reduced.

(Will corpses be revealed, I wonder?)

If we’re lucky, the water won’t refreeze; the air will remain warm until the fluid has all trickled away. Meanwhile our yard is a slushy swamp, impassable in canvas shoes.

The male Sabby has sent me this beautiful thing.

The female has been nagging at me to continue applying, belatedly, for health insurance:

two Facebook messages;
one text message;
one email;
one e-card;
one postcard.

It’s so touching, I almost hate to do it.