We've been having these glorious skies at night. As always, there's just something about the light this time of year, periods when it's so red and strange before it goes. Storms blow through, and then in their wake, an intense clarity.
I got up early this morning, having gone to bed quite early last night, but even so, it seems dark outside now. I think we're getting more rain. I'm supposed to go to the dentist at 10 and had planned to walk, but we'll see how that goes. At any rate, it's supposed to be not too hot (albeit with 96% humidity).
So I'm going to drink my coffee, doodle around, eat my breakfast, take Dora for some kind of walk, then off to get my teeth cleaned and inspected. But now it's raining for real. I don't mind this at all. I like rain. I don't mind being out in it; I love being inside, drinking my coffee, while it falls outside. Even when it thunders, as it's doing right now. No wonder things look dark out there.
I'm not dressed yet --- still lazing over coffee and waking my mind up (which is generally when and why I start writing these diary entries) --- but thinking I'll wear Fiona today. After a few days of feeling that I didn't know what I wanted (though everything I've worn has been great, and I haven't had a lot of decision angst), it's nice to wake up thinking, Yes, this. I'd like to try her with my new Bandi pocket belt, for one thing, especially since I'll be out and about. I really want to try to go to Confession this afternoon, since I haven't been in rather a long time, and Fiona is a good dress to wear into church.
And then tonight is pub night, so. I see I wore her last Thursday, too, with my newly redyed green leggings, but nobody is really taking notes. I was there in Sierra Tuesday, anyway, so that was a palate-cleanser for the bartenders, for which I'm sure they thank me. Undoubtedly what I'm wearing keeps them awake at night. Even now they're texting each other, taking bets: what dress is she going to wear? Or not.
We actually had kind of a funny experience with a new bartender --- they call themselves beertenders, but I just can't --- the other night. Our standard practice is to get half-pints of whatever (really, it's the 10-ounce glasses, so a little more than half a pint), to which my husband refers, in the English way, as a half.
So at the bar Tuesday night, he asked the new girl for a half of Baltic Porter and a half of something called the Immortal Viking, a not-bad IPA which I was drinking (because they haven't made any more of the Kölsch I really like in the summer, have run out of the "International Ale" I was drinking in June and July, and haven't put their excellent Oktoberfest on tap yet). She handed him two glasses of what looked like a really dark beer. "A half of porter and a half of the Viking?" he said. Yes, she said, that was half-porter, half-Viking.
So we had kind of a hoppy black-and-blonde type of thing, and it wasn't bad, though I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to ask for it again. I did remind my husband that when he uses these standard English (i.e., British) terms for things, it's probably not realistic to expect people in Lincoln County, North Carolina, to know what they mean. People here aren't stupid, but they haven't all spent four years saying wheelie bin, either.
Relatedly, I read some dumb-ish article on the internet yesterday about a brouhaha --- and I'm not even sure who, exactly, is having this brouhaha --- over the "correct" versus the "rude" way to pay for drinks. Do you pay for the drink when you buy it, or do you open a tab and close out at the end of the evening? Which is "correct?" Which is "rude?" The answer, of course, is that it depends.
I had already figured out, because it's really difficult not to, that Americans are outliers in running bar tabs. In England, you pay for the drink when you buy it. Typically, if you're with friends, you buy the whole table a round, then somebody else gets the next round, and so on --- but you close out that round right then. You don't run a tab. That is normal. In Norway, the bartender in the neighborhood bar our Air BnB host sent us to looked at my husband funny when he asked to open a tab. He did it, because Norwegians are nothing if not polite. But I could see that he thought it was a strange request.
Anyway, some American apparently had been going on about how "Gen Z" --- but as it turns out, "Gen Z" in this context meant "young foreigners" --- had no manners, because its people close out their tab with every drink. It was unclear to me whether a bartender was complaining about this, which I could sort of see, since everyone pays with a card, and you have to do the whole card-payment thing every time, which might get old, especially for someone used to another modus operandi. Meanwhile, the young foreigners, in this case English people and/or Americans who had lived in England for some time, said, "Who wants to leave their credit card open at the bar all night long?" There seemed to be no resolution to any of this, except for everyone to go, "Fancy other countries having other customs. You learn something new every day," and then to buy another round and relax. But that is not how things work on the internet.
I wish I knew something more interesting than this. I have been continuing to read Adam Nicolson's The Making of Poetry, and we're hot and heavy into Wordsworth's first experiments in what would become The Prelude, but I keep having to go back and reread passages to orient myself. It's winter 1797-98 in the Quantocks, but I have to retrace older conversations and notebook entries to figure out, again, what I'm supposed to know as I read the next bit. Nicolson's prose is beautiful, its own work of art, and as he writes about the bitter winter weather in those hills --- he spent a winter in a farmhouse there, to try to feel what Wordsworth and Coleridge had been feeling, all those winters ago in the same place --- I keep thinking (because I'm also reading it in bites) of The Peregrine, which is similarly striking in its evocations of landscape and weather, in language startlingly original and apt.
An hour later, and it's still raining. Nobody else is up, which makes me loath to go in and get dressed, disturbing my husband, who went to bed a lot later than I did last night and probably got up at some point to sit on the porch. It's raining harder and harder, with more and more thunder. I really hope nobody is counting on taking my car to work today, because I think I'm counting on it to take me to the dentist. My great preference, always, is to walk. It's just the other side of the courthouse square, ten minutes away on foot. But not, if I have a choice, in this weather. Rain coming down in sheets. Dora might not get much of an outing, either, but then she won't want to set foot outside, even to do the necessary.
When rain is visible in a photograph, you know it's raining. These are all drops falling down from our overflowing gutter, which is why they show up so well. But really, it's like that. Just huge rain, and the trees blowing.
Wind is even harder than rain to capture photographically, but I assure you, those trees out there are blowing. I worry about that maple sometimes, but I hope, since the two houses break the wind from north and south, it would fall one way or the other into the yard, and not on either of the houses.
I keep thinking it can't possibly rain any harder, but as soon as I think that, it does rain harder. The front-yard grass is nice and green, thanks to all the rain so far, and now it's getting another nice dose. My husband has been very invested in that grass, which is one of the early, preparatory stages of retirement, I think. Steve next door retired and bought a ride-on mower, which now seems to be his primary form of entertainment, and so I worry. At least we're not doing Chem-Lawn, or anyhing like that. The Bermuda has simply grown, and it's gradually crowded out all the rattier grasses, though we still have a lot of clover early in the season --- a good thing, in our united view. We want the pollinators. We do not want the sterile suburban monoculture, which is fortunate, because that's about the last thing we have going on here. What we really have going on is a lot of chaos, and I probably need to do something about it before the next growing season, but it's been too hot, and anyway, now it's raining, so I guess I'm off the hook for garden maintenance today.
Ah, maybe the rain is slacking up some? At any rate, it's now 8:45, so I think I am justified in making the little disturbance of getting dressed. Nobody stayed up that late. And if Dora is going to put her nose outside at all before I have to leave, then I'd better get on with it a little.
Wearing (but I might really need to change shoes because of the wet):
As predicted, Fiona with my Bandi belt and Birk Balis --- but it's still raining, so I will probably change into some Xero sandals as soon as I'm finished writing this.
Some shots from various angles, just because I like to know how things look:
Hair pulled back because it's raining and I can't be bothered otherwise. I've never really worn this dress with a belt --- I've experimented but never liked the look that much --- until now. I love this Bandi belt, which will hold my phone, lip balm, and credit card while I'm at the dentist, without my having to keep up with a handbag. It's a little bulkier with things in it, obviously, but far less bulky than the blue belt pack I was wearing yesterday. And it's really just cute. I do want another for the winter, in a darker, less summery print --- though I'll hold off buying it for a while yet.
Meanwhile, I'll enjoy my dose of brightness in my dress today, and be glad of the sleeves in the dentist's air conditioning.
LATER:
Back home, walked the dog 3.76 miles, since the rain had stopped, pecked away a little at a new poem, and am now feeling deflated, because having to do one thing swallows up the whole day's energy, even when the one thing doesn't take that long. But it was fine, teeth are basically fine, and my hygienist loved my Bandi pocket belt --- she saw me put my phone back in it and was wowed that it wasn't just a belt.
So I was wast--- I mean, spending time in the Wool& Facebook group, as one does, and the buzz today is about year anniversaries in nothing but wool, and consecutive days wearing wool. That was what I'd set out to do this year but found that I wanted to wear other things, too, chiefly my Pact cotton dress.
Now, though, I am considering . . . if I do add another dress to my stable for the winter (and I am really, really casting looks of longing at that forthcoming burgundy Fiona), then I will resell the Pact dress. I just will. I'm still kind of liking the idea of multiples of 3 as a principle for my closet --- to have 9 dresses, I'd have to move one out to move one in. If I did that, then I might really start counting, in 2024, my consecutive days in wool, because that would be the entirety of my core wardrobe.
But this is all conjecture, and I do have better things to do, if only I can make myself do them.
PS: This is tempting. Oh so tempting . . . But you know what I would really love is a Pine Fiona (though this will have an elastic waist, and might well wind up looking like a v-neck, longer-sleeved Fiona).
It occurs to me that one might buy a teal Fiona, since they're marked down, and dye her with Dharma Spruce dye, as I did my Sierra . . . or I could just take myself off to Confession and stop thinking about dresses for a while. Because in fact I am buying nothing at this moment, and have no decision to make, and really just need to change the channel, because this show starts to get a little boring.
EVENING UPDATE:
Lovely pub night, Cuban sandwiches. Walked a total of . . . uh . . . 6.66 miles today, so maybe I should go walk a little more. (OK, seriously, I jogged in place holding my phone so that it would flick over to 6.67, because apparently I am disturbed by that number even when there's a decimal point in the middle of it). On our last spin around the neighborhood, Dora disturbed a cicada on the sidewalk, which detonated with a loud metallic noise --- some canine levitation ensued.
Speaking of canines, one of the bartenders had his German Shepherd with him tonight behind the bar (they don't serve food, so this is fine). A woman at the bar said, "Aw, what kind of dog is that?"
Bartender: He's a German Shepherd.
Woman: Yeah, but what kind of dog is he?
I mean . . . he's the dog kind? Ma'am?