Late nights and early mornings
I got to bed at 4 am last . . . er, this morning. No, not because I had just found the cure for cancer and was nailing down the specifics so I wouldn’t have forgotten them when I got up (later) in the morning*. No, not because I was writing my first symphony/opera/string quartet** and am on fire with inspiration***. No, not because some little green women landed their flying saucer in my garden† and we were solving the problems of the universe over cider†† and Green & Black’s.
Hiccups.
I had hiccups for about three hours last night. I’m a twitchy, spastic sort of person, so I get hiccups like I get charleyhorses†††and those tics in the muscles around your eyes when you haven’t had enough sleep‡. No big deal. Usually. Last night they just wouldn’t go away again. I know there are unfortunate people who have hiccups for days‡‡ but this hasn’t happened to me (yet) and I can’t sleep when I’m going YELP every ten seconds or so.
So I’m very short of sleep, and having had a reasonable bash at PEGASUS‡‡‡ earlier, this evening I am demonstrating No Discernable Brainwave Activity.
Plus I spent another couple of hours in the garden this afternoon. I finally planted the rose hedge–all four of it. And you never saw anything so irrepressibly burgeoning as Tipsy Imperial Concubine and Mutabilis when I had untangled them from their friends and the original mailing sack that I had simply filled up with compost and put in a pot as a heeling-in substitute. I’ve known there were eager little leaves poking out of the top of the bag, and the interstices of the hedge–and in some cases producing flower buds§–because it’s spent too much time indoors with the Aga this winter, but I haven’t known whose leaves they were.§§ This is my first trial at Tipsy, and perhaps if she’s kept well wrapped up she’s actually quite vigorous§§§, but Mutabilis and I have a long fraught history, and I’m hoping this unseemly early proliferation means I’ve finally got another one like the one that finally took (off) at the old house and was about eight foot square the last time I drove past the wall she still leans over. Mind you, I don’t particularly want an eight foot square rose in this garden–Souvenir de la Malmaison looks like becoming one of those, and have I mentioned recently that I seem to have pushing fifty roses in this scrap of ground? No wonder I think of gardening as dangerous. Although that may also have something to do with my tendency to line both sides of the hellhound courtyard fence with pots that I then have to STEP over carrying OTHER pots–but Mutabilis, in my experience, tends to be either eight inches tall and sulky or the Thing That Ate Schenectady. Sigh.
Anyway. I have to go to bed early because Sunday morning is my one morning a week I have to get up early and I have some serious sleep debt to pay off if I want to make it to the top of that tower ladder tomorrow and not embarrass myself when/if I get there.
So I will leave you with a link, which makes a lot more sense than I am, tonight.
I don’t think she’s a member of the forum–or if she is I don’t know her user name–but Zille has emailed me before, and we’ve had a little conversation¤ about the tricky issue of how to recognise Obama’s mixed heritage gracefully. So she knew that when her friend Midori sent her this link, I’d be interested too. I was. Hurrah. I knew there had to be someone out there who would say it better than I’ve been fumblingly trying to say it: and someone, furthermore, who is seeing it from the inside.
I just heard a wonderful commentary on Obama’s bi-racial-ness that I thought you’d appreciate. It was sent to me by a friend who said: “As a hybrid myself I’ve been more than mildly irked that President Obama’s been identified by the media as being black or African American. Same goes for Tiger Woods. Folks don’t realize that casual comments negate our multi-culti pride and reminds us, painfully, that mixed doesn’t seem to count for much. It was good to hear this.”
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R902230737
Yessssssss.
* * *
* Middle Aged Brain manifests even in daydreams
** Definitely not a string quartet, despite there being all kinds of tiresome snobby people who say that composing string quartets divides the composer sheep from the goats. Well, mooo.
*** No, that would be PEGASUS, and very frelling annoying it is too. I’m in the second draft, you pain in the neck! STOP PRODUCING MORE NEW STUFF!
† No! Wait! Be careful! Not on the rose bush! Can’t you just kind of hover mid air the way UFOs do in the movies?
†† http://www.westons-cider.co.uk/acatalog/copy_of_Organic_Cider__12x500ml_.html
With reference to the conversation that has been going on on the forum about American vs. British cider. British cider is alcoholic–you drink it like you’d drink beer–and those links may be a little twitchy because they’ll want you to promise you’re over 18 before they let you in. But Weston and Dunkerton are the two I drink–although Dunkerton’s perry, which is cider made of pears, may be my favourite. I discovered British cider on my first tourist trip over here as an adult and it was a Revelation. A revelation right up there with clotted cream–but with the additional advantage that I can still consume cider. But good clotted cream is relatively easy to come by; cider varies as much as beer does, which is to say there’s the divine and there’s the swill.
††† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charley_horse second definition: this is one of those words that I grew up using, and everyone around me always seemed to know it, even though my father was in the Navy so I was forever finding myself somewhere else than the last time I said anything to anybody. And then I went out into the world on my own and suddenly everybody was saying what? when I said charleyhorse. Very first half of twentieth century I guess. Maybe early exposure to the internet immunises you against charleyhorses and no one needs the word any more.
‡ Who, me? I get at least mmmph and three quarters hours every night! Usually!
‡‡ Or even years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiccups Sixty eight years! Big eeek. There are periodically stories about some poor wretch or other having had hiccups for months or (fewer) years and I always wonder, in my low vulgar way, what it does for their, you know, love life. I suppose you could be kinky for hiccups.
‡‡‡ Arrrrrrgh. See previous footnote.
§ Stop that
§§ Yes, I should be able to identify one sort of leaves from another, but teas and chinas are quite similar, and three of the four of the hedge are a tea and two chinas.
§§§ Tea and china roses, but particularly teas, have a nasty habit of being borderline tender, but Tipsy–a tea–is notorious for needing bedsocks if the temperature dips below 40°F or so and needing serious positive warmth if she’s going to flower properly.
¤ Little being the crucial word here. I don’t have time for email either.
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