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| 6:50 |
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| 6:52 |
An apt poem to start your day:
Springtime, 1998
Our upstate April
is cold and gray.
Nevertheless
yesterday I found
up in our old
woods on the littered
ground dogtooth violets
standing around
and blooming
wisely. And by the edge
of the Bo’s road at the far
side of the meadow
where the limestone ledge
crops out our wild
cherry trees
were making a great fountain
of white gossamer.
Joe-Anne went
and snipped a few small boughs
and made a beautiful
arrangement
in the kitchen window
where I sit now
surrounded.
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It's now 7:20 and I have been up for almost an hour, listening to a program on the radio called How Not To Be Wrong. It's an interview with a University of Wisconsin mathematics professor named Jordan Ellenberg, an expert on statistics and how to interpret them. He is often difficult to understand especially this early in the morning but the bottom line is that we too often accept something is true when if we thought about it more carefully, it isn't. His mantra: improbability happens . He suggests a reasonable prior belief about a result from an experiment often gets in the way of truth. We should state our belief at the beginning and modify it during experiment. Got it? Not sure I do. In the real world, for example, we approve a cancer drug if there's only a one in twenty chance that it does not work. We accept, then, that the drug works, but the world is messy, full of all kinds of discrepancies and we shouldn't think that any drug trial is foolproof. Enough!
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| 6:52 |
The lake seems to have a haze at the moment, a result of the bright sunshine, the fact that I cannot even look out the window without blinking because of its brightness. When I went outside to take the morning photograph, bird songs filled the air, geese were honking, ducks quacking, as if they too sense that spring has actually arrived. The weather forecast for the week suggests (notice the word choice) the highs will be in the 60's all week. At the moment, I am not sure what the day will bring? Working in the yard? Washing the windows? A hike through Long Point? Our first kayaking of the year? Or all or none of the above.
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| Geese Gone A Courtin |
Yesterday, in retrospect, is like a blur. Not sure what we did other than recover from our week of painting or carousing, not sure which. But we were both very tired, did not want to do much, so that's what happened. I blew off yoga, preferring to stay on my couch, drinking coffee, enjoying a long, leisurely morning.
It, however, was interrupted when Evie designated the back bedroom our task for the day; we were going to make it tidy. So we took the closet apart, laid everything out on the bed, took the books off the shelves, and decided what to keep, what to give away, what to throw away. And we did it in an hour, perhaps a little more. I still have to go through my vertical files, following the theory of Tidying Up, throwing away most of the paper because almost anything nowadays can be found online. For example, I threw away at least twenty years of my income taxes forms, keeping only the past three years. Of course, I might get a letter from the IRS tomorrow asking about my 2011 form: 'improbablity happens.' Anyways, by the time I headed to the transfer station with eight empty paint cans and lots of trash, the room was tidy, vacuumed, and dusted, ready for guests.
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| Yellowing Finch Fighting Over Seeds |
The rest of the afternoon we spent watching some of the Masters, some junk TV, occasionally doing something productive. Evie, for example, made our dinner, one of my favorites called Tas Kebab, basically a simple stew of braised meat, then allspice, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, onion, garlic, and tomato paste are added. It's then slow cooked in the oven for two hours. Thus, dinner was done by 3:30. While I was watching Jordan Spieth tear up Augusta, Evie was exploring our upstairs attic, going through our stacks of blankets, quilts, and comforters and discovered two king size quilts, both of which look good in either of our two large bedrooms. Cool because we were looking at quilts from L. L. Bean and they were at least two hundred bucks a piece. I think I like the one's from the attic.
For some reason, neither of us went outside, didn't even a take a walk. although I did go out to close up the garage and could not resist spending 15 minutes picking up twigs and branches, now that the snow has melted, filling a garbage can. About 7:00, Evie prepared brussel sprouts, mashed some potatoes and we had our tas kebab. She mounded the mashed potatoes in a bowl, made a dip, added the rich meat and gravy, surrounded it with brussel sprouts, and we had a great dinner, hearkening me back to an Istanbul lokanti or restaurant.
We finally got around to watching the much admired film, FOXCATCHER (spoiler alert), featuring Steve Carell in a very different role, that of John DuPont, the crazy, billionaire son of the DuPont chemical fortune. It's a film based on fact. DuPont, shaped by his feelings of inferiority, a result of his domineering mother, attempts to make a name for himself, to impress his mother, by gathering Olympic quality wrestlers, training them, hoping to be called the 'coach and mentor' of Olympic champions. Because of his troubling upbringing, things obviously do not go well. He knows little about wrestling, expects the wrestlers to kowtow to him and his ways, and when confronted with any problem, he buys his way out or loses control. To get a team, he basically buys the wrestlers (the Schultz brothers, both former Olympic champions), offering them cash if they come and train at his estate, Foxcatcher. Ultimately, his wrestlers fail at the Seoul Olympics and return without a Gold Metal. He blames the losses on the wrestling coach he has hired, drives to his home on the estate and shoots him in front of his wife, a shock to the viewer unless you paid attention to his love of guns, tanks, and machine guns. And he's not only a gun nut, but a crazy one, and used to getting his way.
The film was not fun to watch because we rarely sympathized with DuPont, knew he was troubled, that things would not end well for the Dave and Mark Schultz. Steve Carell, however, was amazing as John DuPont and I rarely if ever thought of him as Michael on The Office. Afterwards, we watched the DVR-ed end of the Masters until 10:15, when the coverage stopped because I only added an hour to my taping, much to the delight of Evie because I rarely extend programming enough and did not get to see the 18th hole.
I went up to read and am alternating between two new novels, Richard Price's WHITES, a crime novel, and Elene Ferrante's MY BRILLIANT FRIEND, the first of a series of four novels about girls/women growing up in Italy. Both are pretty good so far, very different of course which makes it fun to go back and forth.
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