PearlOyster of Bloom

When I was on vacation, I used to make all kinds of good resolutions about what I would do when I got home and took up normal life again. Now I know better. Which is a good thing, because today wasn't the best re-entry of normal day. I took Madame out. The Sparrowhawk got a handicapped tag for the car. In a way, this is another step on the road to ultimate defeat, but it's good to have. He doesn't use it all the time, but there are times when it is helpful, and I've been looking forward to using it to make trips with Madame easier. Getting her to and from the cafe wears me out more than hiking a few miles over the sand dunes. Today when I arrived, she wasn't ready, because she had remembered that she needed some way to pay for things. She lost her wallet some time ago, so she no longer has a bank card (or a driver's license!). A few weeks ago, she also mislaid her checkbook. She invited me to help her look for it again. Wonder of wonders, I opened a drawer in her kitchenette, and there it was. I'm not sure this was actually a wise idea, but it's too late now. She'll probably lose it again anyway. At the store, she didn't know where she had put it. I pointed out that it was in the pocket of her walker. "How did you know that?" she said, amazed. She seems to feel that there is some kind of conspiracy afoot when others know things that she doesn't. "I saw you put it there," was the obvious answer--but I think she was still surprised.

There were a number of things I wanted to do when I got home, but I couldn't. A feeling of total exhaustion gradually snuck up on me. Eventually I just went and lay down while the Sparrowhawk went to gym. And I'm about to do so again. But not before observing that "Can You Forgive Her?"--our current read-aloud, by Anthony Trollope--never seems to get any less tiresome. Holy cow, the Vavasor family are some of the most disagreeable people ever. It helps that the Sparrowhawk has taken to summarizing and paraphrasing parts of it. At one point he has Alice, in one of her interminable letters to her treacherous cousin Kate, say "Stop pimping your brother to me!" That really sums up large parts of the novel. As for Kate's execrable brother, George, someone should just push this guy off a bridge and put us all out of his misery. The author seems to think, mistakenly, that George is interesting, but the mere fact of being bad through and through doesn't make a person interesting, and there is not one redeeming quality in George's wretched little body. I was hoping he would fall of his horse and do himself an injury in the hunting chapter, but no such luck. Instead he just kind of cheated at hunting in order to sell his horse to someone for a profit. This is a novel in which Trollope almost, at times, strays into Thackeray territory.