Enemy vanquished

 I have been hunted --- in my own home --- for three days. By a mosquito. It buzzes my ear at night trying to fall asleep, or when I am on the toilet. I have resorted to wearing socks and a hoodie (long sleeves and pants are assumed) so that my only exposed surfaces are my face and hands, where I am most likely to detect a blood-thieving incursion.

At last, after several hunts where my enemy escaped into a busy visual background, this evening I successfully slapped it out of the air and squashed it. Sweet relief! The security of protecting my own hard-earned blood in my own home.

Vampires ask for permission to enter your home and add a sexy cultural vibe to their blood-sucking. Mosquitos are much less polite. 0 stars, future mosquitos are equally uninvited chez moi.

This post's theme word is sanguinolency (n), "addiction to bloodshed." The torment of endless itches and swollen skin bumps has driven me to sanguinolency for hematophages.

Cobwebs

I went outside and discovered a spider had built an extensive web across the rear entrance of my house, spanning the door, deck, and stairs. This is some sort of arachnoid commentary on human self-quarantine and it struck me as both sticky and humorous. (Zeugma!)

This venture into the horrible humidity was made in order to chip away at emptying my office, which I'm not-really-using, for sabbatical so that someone else can not-really-use it. (Everything is wonderful, the world is totally fine, don't look too closely.) My two most neglected plants stubbornly hang on in what is surely the most arid, frigid, inhospitable summer that southern Pennsylvania can artificially offer to indoor plant life. An enterprising indoor spider, hoping in vain to capture prey in the abandoned, sealed, locked building, had constructed a foolishly hopeful web from the ceiling down to the desk chair, completely blocking off the shelves and the keyboard. This struck me as sticky and a silly emerging theme.

Are spiders everywhere just constantly walling in everything, and only the entropy of weather and large fauna keeps pathways clear?

Given the prevalence of webs, the visible black cloud of mosquitos that chased me from my car back into my house seemed incongruous. YES, I had to pass through a partially-reconstructed deck-spanning web to reenter the house. NO, it did not appear to dissuade the accursed vampiric horrors. Please, can we get some mosquito-eating bats to colonize my block?

This post's theme word is durance (n), "confinement or restraint by force; imprisonment." In this grimdark modern fairytale, the protagonist is self-quarantined at home and entirely encased in cobwebs and loneliness so thick that the quarantine becomes permanent; "Dream Durance" is rated NC-17 for psychic damage inflicted on readers and anyone attempting to engage in concurrent political discourse.

One-person projects

It seems to be a season to do one-person projects. Naturally, I have chosen to move a fainting sofa through my house and down some stairs.

It was ... challenging. As a one-person project, it encouraged me to be creative about tool usage, problem-solving, and how not to crush myself to a paste beneath a sofa on my staircase.

This post's theme word is inquiline (adj), "an animal living in the nest, burrow, or home of another." Tired of quarantining alone in your home? Cultivate an inquiline pet!

Bunny zone

Frequently spotted on the block are an unnumbered collection of bunnies. These are not just my neighbors, but also my non-tax-paying non-consensual garden trimmers.

 There are certainly at least two of them at the full size:

Additionally, there is at least one (but likely many) tiny bunbun, waffeting around in the yard and being frightened of things like "local residents watering flowers" and "door opening noise".

Given the local paucity of hawks, I suspect that the bunbuns are numerous, though I do not suspect them in The Matter of The Blueberry Thief.

This post's theme word is cynophobia (n), "fear of dogs." The itty-bitty bunny-wunnies exhibited cynophobia, having not yet learned the lesson of dog leashes and recalcitrant suburban humans.

Blueberries

I am a notorious blueberry-lover. 'Twas with great anticipation that I received the housewarming gift of someone planting blueberry bushes for me, just outside my window.

One plant even came with a blueberry, already there!

... unfortunately, this blueberry only survived two days in the yard. I checked on it lovingly each morning and evening, keeping in touch with its gradually blue-ing hue; then it mysteriously vanished. According to leads and the berry investigator, local birds are the leading suspect.

A very close inspection this evening revealed that the bush is trying again with a second berry.

This berry will be closely guarded, from its current green state to its future and fully-ripe state. I already have a plan to encase it in mesh to protect from bird incursions.

I note that the plural in the title of this blog post is, in fact, accurate: there have been two berries. A third will be just as welcome!


This post's theme word is fabian (adj), "avoiding direct confrontation; cautious; delaying." The fabian approach to berry-harvesting requires protection against impatient berry-eating competitors.

New neighbor

I have a new neighbor. Can you spot them in this picture?

They were nibbling on something in the lawn, but I am not yet familiar with all the plantings so I had no objection. My guess is that any dogs visiting Camp Lila over the summer will strongly react to the neighbor, possibly encouraging the neighbor to relocate.

This post's theme word is Struwwelpeter (n), "a person with long, thick, disheveled hair." Quoth Flopsy to Mopsy and Cottontail, "Have thee spotted our Struwwelpeter blue-haired new neighbor?"

Leave-taking

An era comes to a close with the end of the month. It's weird to experience a life event with the full awareness that, in the mythology of my life, it is significant. It feels like graduation. It feels like being a character in a novel. It puts me a bit on edge (what if a climactic supermonster is about to invade the city?) with a countercurrent of calm (ah, at last my life momentarily makes narrative sense).

I am anticipatorily sad, for in the future I will miss the view and the light and the fresh bread and the sphere-induced jump-start on the day (relative to North Americans) and many, many other things.

The neighborhood has been lovely.

The bakery is magnificent. I had a farewell croissant this morning.

But this is not a sunset on the most interesting, exciting period of my life so far. Because my life becomes ever more interesting and exciting as I progress!

This is, however, a sunset on the Seine, under the Pont des Arts, with the Louvre across the river and a glorious cloudbank illuminating everything like a Renaissance painting.

This post's theme word is attorn, "to turn over rent, goods, etc. to another," or "to agree to be a tenant of a new landlord of the same property." I do not attorn, I simply move.

Parisian winter, hot and cold

Let's take a moment to appreciate Parisian winter. It is mid-January, and currently raining. Paris is warm and tropical --- compare with the northeast habitable parts of North America, where winter certainly goes below freezing, and includes snow, blizzards, scraping ice off the car, shoveling the driveway, bundling up outside. This comparative heat has the side effect that Parisian residences are not properly insulated for cold weather. Those beautiful, wide-swinging windows have no storms, and are often just a single pane of glass.

The consequence? Paris winter feels cold.

Especially in my poverty garret, with no apartment to insulate me above, the heat escapes with a ferocity that can be felt on the skin: stand still, and the window side of your body will be noticeably colder. The thermometer registers 50-55F (10-12C) as the resting temperature, which is a little too cold to be really comfortable. The available heating option is electric, which is (1) not very efficient, and (2) expensive. Combine these with (3) it takes about 3 hours to heat up, and only 1 hour to lose the heat, and the result is what a positive attitude might term "a quaint return to historical realities". I read about radiant heating. I sometimes wear a hat indoors.

I have used insulating tape to firmly close the gaps around the window frames, and block the most egregious and palpable wind-whistling suspects. But there's only so much this stopgap measure can gain me. The walls are cold, about which I can't really do anything. I can see how thin they are, there's no air buffer in there, or any real insulation. They keep birds out.

This past week the temperature has dropped below freezing, unusual for Paris. I am thankful for whatever heat is being radiated through the walls and floor from my neighbors, and kept me this handful of degrees above the outdoor temperature. Cooking helps heat up the tiny space, too, as does simply inhabiting it. By far the cheapest way to heat the space is to purchase chemical energy stored in digestion-accessible calories, eat it, and generate the heat using my body.

But inhabiting the space has other side-effects. It adds both heat and humidity to the air, and when the temperature drops outside, this forms condensation.

Morning condensation.

I awake, I steel myself to emerge from my sleeping cocoon, and I squeegee my sleeping breath off the windows. This is Paris in January. Subjectively I am experiencing more cold than I ever did in North America. I remember fondly the days when I lived in a city which had a legal mandate for the minimum winter temperature landlords must provide. One day I'll look back on the bread and cheese paradise of my current life, and be nostalgic for window-squeegeeing.

This post's theme word is nesh, "afraid of the cold." Uninsulated attics are not for the nesh.

Basil!

There is now a cluster of local basil available for Local Basil Emergencies as well as Local Basil Intake Quotas (LBE/LBIQ). Huzzah!

Further updates as the news unfolds!


This post's theme word is sybarite, "a person devoted to luxury and pleasure." There is a sybaritic garden on my balcony!

Phantom sock

A bland, mildly amusing, G-rated personal anecdote follows, ideally suited to a vanity blog like this one.

Several weeks ago, I lost a sock somewhere in my tiny apartment. Impossibly. I searched everywhere and couldn't find it. "Everywhere" includes moving all the furniture around to look underneath and behind; sorting through all clean and dirty laundry, unpacking and repacking all shelves. Checking jacket pockets. Rolling up the carpet to look underneath.

No sock was to be found.

No one entered or left the apartment during the period the sock was lost. My initial hypothesis was that the sock-stealing elves, frustrated by my laundromat vigilance, had made a risky foray up to my apartment for their denied booty (James Bond-style, scaling the building with suction cups).

Then tonight I found the second sock while shifting my wet laundry into the dryer. My modified hypothesis is that the sock got staticked and rolled up inside some other laundry. I was happy to be reunited with my prodigal sock, and I consigned it to the dryer secure in the knowledge that this sock would soon be cosy, dry, and reunited with its partner.

This sock is a renegade.

I have now folded, and re-folded, all of the laundry. The Prodigal Sock has not returned. It's not stuck to something. It's not still in the laundromat. It baulked at the prospect of reunion, and has made itself even scarcer than before.

Oh where, oh where could my sock have gone? Oh where, oh where could it be?

Further updates as the situation unfolds. (Hopefully the laundry won't. I've folded it twice now.)


This post's theme word is tmesis, "stuffing a word into the middle of another word." I un-fucking-believably lost the wily sock again.

Apartment dream

I dreamed last night that C. and I were two personalities in the same body, Tyler Durden-style, alternately waking while the other slept.

In another part of the dream, E. was renting a new apartment in [the place E. lives] for us to live in together. I gave A. my keys and moved out without packing up any of my plates or bowls or tools from the kitchen. My new apartment was on the second floor of a 3-story house; the landlord lived on the first and third floors. Typical dream logic.

I arrived and looked for my room. E. and K. were sleeping in the two big bedrooms. In an auxiliary room was M. (also sleeping), and then there was the kitchen. I was lost for where to put myself. The apartment had stairways -- it was just the second floor of a house, recall -- but we the tenants were supposed to just ignore the open stairways that led to the first and third floors. And the landlord had build like a stair/ladder to skip over the second floor in this epic stairwell. That we were just supposed to ignore, as if it were a wall and not a huge open stairwell leading into someone else's life.

I have no explanation or context for this dream. Whatever.


This post's theme word is corniche, "a coastal road, especially one cut into the side of a cliff." The stairwell was a surreal corniche of plywood and wrought iron.

A. is my hero

We recently had lease negotiations with the landlord. I noticed that he was paying more heed to A.'s comments than to my own... even though we had agreed beforehand on what to say and were reading from the same set of notes. It was apparently subtle; A. did not notice. Nonetheless, in the interests of optimally negotiating, I let A. do most of the talking.

This turned out quite well.

For use of his testicle-granted Man Voice in negotiations with the landlord, A. is hereby awarded a Zinc Star of Honor.


This post's theme word: novation, "the replacing of an obligation, a contract, or a party to an agreement with a new one."

New apartment

It's okay. The search was long and tiring. It's bigger than the old place, and quieter. A bit cold. The oven is broken. The water pressure and heat leave things to be desired. And I seem to be allergic either to the dirt the former tenants left behind, or the cleaning products we used to remove it. I'm getting moved in, getting used to the longer walk to work.


This post's theme word: columbarium, "a vault with niches for storing urns" or "a dovecote or pigeon house."

Apartment irks

Finally! Today the heat came on for the first time this winter, and I awoke with a painfully dry nose in a too-warm room. Equally uncomfortable was my roommate, whose bedroom heat is still broken/off/misconfigured. The temperature difference between our rooms can be felt on the skin.

To make "the heat is working!" an even more bittersweet semi-victory, we continue to have no hot water. On Monday some aspect of our formerly-fully-functional hot water system was replaced, and it has not yet heated and delivered water to our faucets since. Grr.


This post's theme word: rachmanism, "the exploitation and intimidation of tenants by landlords." I don't feel so much exploited as abused, avoided, and neglected. I miss being able to feel my hands after I wash dishes.

Bookshelf

Last week I cleaned up my room and reorganized my bookshelf. I love order and tidiness.
This post's theme word: cadastral, "Of or relating to a map or survey showing property lines, boundaries, etc."

Socks

I like them. I also like clean laundry. And curiously-composed photographs.
This post's theme word: adactylous, "having no fingers or toes." Adactylous people require special socks, I imagine.

Tattoo of drums from the other room

Overheard from two rooms away: "It's official! R. is no longer listed as single!"

This is how we transmit news: either at the speed of light over a world-spanning interconnected series of tubes, or by shouting across the apartment.


This post's theme word: canard, "an unfounded rumor." Yes, it means "duck" in French, but it also means "hoax;" in Old French, caner means "to quack."

Dishes!

Just overheard from the next room: "Ok. Dishes. Ow. What?!"

This post's theme word: hyaloid, "transparent; glassy."

No light propitious shone

I awoke from overheating 30 minutes before my alarm, to the dulcet tones of Crazy Lady swearing through the wall and the heartening sight of ample snow falling on the pre-dawn street. William Cowper's "The Castaway" was running through my head, but I could only remember the first and last stanzas, so I'm printing it out to memorize at the gym this morning.


This post's theme word: logy, "lethargic, groggy."

A. is standing

It's such a big event that she requested I blog it.


This post's theme word: obamulate, "to walk about." She's doing that now.