Grumblings

I follow Sistas in Zion on Facebook. I'm not sure how to categorize them. They are faithful members of the Church, and before the pandemic, they would frequently appear at the joint venture between the Relief Society and Deseret Book which is known as Time Out for Women. I've attended that twice since it's been offered, but they were not presenters either time. They share their perspectives on what it's like to be a Black member of a church which began as various tints of White. As the decades pass, and membership around the world has grown, the complexion has become more varied and interesting. The culture is changing more slowly, as culture does. Thanks to the writing of these sisters, and the greater transparency about Church history, my perspective continues to broaden and deepen.

I read a post today in which one of the Sistas narrated her inner dialogue while reading the 23rd Psalm. Some of her questions are analogous to my own, and inspired my comment: "My late husband and I used to talk about the concept that we knowingly and intentionally chose each and every thing that we experience here on earth. I maintained then, and still maintain, that I would not have signed up for some of my experiences, nor would my children. When I was new in the faith, I believed that the universe ran like clockwork. If I obeyed A, then the blessings for that obedience would flow. Maybe not immediately, or where was the faith, but directly. I resisted the idea that randomness was a part of the plan, that the promised protections were intermittent and incremental rather than continuous. Oh dear. I feel a blog post coming on. Thank you for making me think."

This, dear readers, is that blog post. It may be one of several. Watching historical fiction or adaptations of Jane Austen's novels tends to make me think. From The Musketeers, an extremely loose (in multiple senses) adaptation of Dumas' novel, I've pondered why it should be treason for a queen to be intimate with someone other than her spouse and king, while the king was free to dally with or seduce anyone he chose, without it reflecting badly on him, much less be considered treasonous. Yes, it was important for the king to know that his son was a legitimate heir to the throne. And yes, actual history has been massively complicated by illegitimate sons who wanted to be the next king. What kept running through my mind was a phrase from the Book of Mormon about the descendants of the first Nephi: "pretended nobility."

The only nobility we mortals can claim devolves from the fact that we are literally the spiritual children of our Heavenly Parents.

Reading the annotated edition of Persuasion has opened my eyes to the cultural mores and ideals of that time. I am relieved to have arrived on earth when women have somewhat more freedom to act than in Regency times. During my lifetime, women have gained the right to take out loans without a man's signature on the instrument. Once we cleared the cloud on the deed, I was able to refinance the mortgage in my own name. This house is not entailed to Beloved's eldest son. I have an interesting, well-paying job in a traditionally female role. (And my life would be considerably different had I been born a male. I would be retired from some sort of profession. I might have been a CEO with a golden parachute. My 401K would be significantly fatter. My children would never have known hunger, nor neglect. They might still have their current physical and mental health challenges, but we would have had greater resources to deal with them. I would not have invested a significant amount of time, attention, and anxiety in the effort to protect myself, and my children, from sexual predators.)

On the other hand, I would not be sealed to Beloved. And I would much rather have served briefly as a Relief Society president, than several years in a bishopric or stake presidency, had the Lord been inclined to call me. With all the frustrations of an aging body and a misogynistic, racist, and materialistic society, I'm still glad to be a modern woman.

P.S. Sherry, you asked about my favorite Jane Austen adaptation. That would be the 1995 Sense and Sensibility, with Emma Thompson et al.

For this I put on a bra?

Theoretically, the plumber was coming today with the part to finish fixing my commode. Given what a mess North Texas was all last week, it's likely that he got stuck on another job or a fresh emergency. Does not change the fact that I have been shoehorned into a bra for the greater part of this day, and the girls are not happy about it.

I've finished reading Persuasion. The annotated version was highly edifying and a bit of a slog. I am, nevertheless, going to order annotated versions of as many other of her works as possible. I found myself getting impatient with the ending. In the Root/Hinds movie, they have a nice kiss on the street (which doesn't happen in the book), her father and sister are oblivious jerks when the good Captain comes to ask for her hand (they are better-mannered in the book), and we get to watch them literally sail off into their future together. That movie is my second-favorite Austen adaptation. I like it a vast deal better than the book.

I am now going to log off and finish watching Bramwell. I'd like to crawl through my phone and pinch the head off both the heroine (who is becoming sullen, whiny, and bitter) and her former fiance (who is revealing himself to be an opportunist of rapidly fading charm). I am delighted, however, with the autumnal romance of her father and the posh lady. I know from personal experience that autumn love is the sweetest of all.

I do rather wish that Beloved could pop in for an evening or two. I'm trying to be careful about the media I'm consuming and after eight years, I could do with a conjugal visit. He was enormously fun to kiss. I don't expect that to have changed since last we smooched.

As Kenny Chesney sings, everybody wanna go to heaven, nobody wanna go now.

Daruk, Daruk, Daruk, Daruk of Earl Earl Earl

Daruk is a character in The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Mel-Mel and Squishy came by tonight, properly masked and socially distanced, and brought us Christmas. Quick, take a look at him, then come right back. He reminds me so much of Beloved. Daruk and three of his cohorts came for Middlest and Fourthborn. I got a gorgeous red and white mug, which has been properly christened with cocoa and is now soaking in the sink, three bars of Godiva goodness (if I were still variations on the theme of blonde, we would be Goldilocks and the Three Two Bars), and a goats-milk lip balm which I will try out when I go to bed in a few minutes.

Work was amazing today. I worked six hours of overtime on Saturday to try to make up for the three days of weather-related inactivity, and I made an enormous amount of progress. Today I got my primary inbox whittled down to less than 30 items and both of my team-related mailboxes effectively managed and cleaned out. I also worked all of my ToDo's and all but two items of incoming mail. If I have another day like this tomorrow, I should have time to get a little ahead on my mandatory compliance activities.

I've discovered another wonderful BBC series on Amazon Prime: Bramwell, about a female doctor in Victorian England and all of the nonsense she has to put up with to get taken seriously and to provide healthcare for the poor. She's confronting her own class prejudices, dealing with her very conservative and very loving father, who is also a practicing physician, and learning what the workhouses and asylums were like. Jemma Redgrave is the star, and she's amazing.

Jane Austen is calling my name. Later, gators!

Adventures and "interesting times"

As you are no doubt aware, the US is experiencing severe winter weather. It is particularly hard on Texans. Our homes are built to endure heat, not arctic temperatures. Our power went out briefly about 3:00am on Monday morning and was restored 15 minutes later. I slept through that, waking a little before 8:00am on my own, as my clock radio was flashing because of the outage. We had power, but we had no internet. I could not get my router to fully reset. We lost power for good around 10:00am and started adding layers of clothing.

That night Middlest bundled up like a polar bear in his room, and when I awoke for a comfort break around 1:00am yesterday, I invited Fourthborn to join me in my room. We may or may not have slept. Around 3:00am, we were all most definitely awake, so Fourthborn and I sat up, and Middlest sat at the foot of the bed, and we talked until a little after 7:00am, when I texted our friends who had offered their home if we needed it.

We packed up and headed out. The roads were treacherous, but I grew up in Idaho and know how to drive on them. About half of the signal lights were out. Our friends fixed us scrambled eggs and pancakes. We thawed and visited and thawed some more. We were all masked, except to eat or hydrate. They've both had both of their vaccinations, and the three of us have each had our first. My kids crashed mid-afternoon in the guest bedroom and were still sawing logs when I went upstairs to an incredible fold-out bed a little after 9:00. Easiest way to catch you up from that point is to steal from various Facebook posts.

Post the First: In which your intrepid heroine missteps and executes an impressive back somersault down the stairs. (I crumpled into a neat little ball and rolled.) Nothing broken. Neck is fine. Scared the dickens out of my friends. Toes, right shoulder, and a couple of fingers are likely to be colorful in the morning. Heart rate is nearly back to normal. CPAP is plugged in. I'm [soon to be] dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep. Y'all, I'm *warm* and it's lovely. (This was about 9:30 last night.)

Post the Second: Pleased to report that I'm none the worse for wear after last night's "let's roll down the stairs" adventure. No visible bruising. Barely more than the normal amount of stiffness. Neck is a little more creaky than usual, but I attribute that to sleeping in a (blissfully comfortable) strange bed. Slept like a rock. At the urging of my kids and our hostess (who is a physician's assistant), I am reluctantly downing *an* ibuprofen. (One works as well for me as 2 or 3 work for many people.) And I might go take a nap. (This was about 10:30 this morning.)

Post the Third: We are home. We are safe. I was only able to drive Diana partway up the driveway, even with Middlest pushing, but she is not hanging out into the street or impeding sidewalk traffic. In the 45 minutes or so that we've been home, we've rebooted the furnace, the router, this computer, and the oven is preheating to bake a box of stuffed green peppers that we didn't take with us to [our friends']. When we walked in the door, the temperature was 55F. It was up to 56F when I checked a few minutes ago. In an update to last night's excitement, [our friend the PA] encouraged me to follow up with my doctor if my neck and shoulders continued to hurt (they were only slightly more tender when I awoke this morning, and two ibuprofen ~ yes, I took a second one an hour or two after taking the first ~ have worked their magic). Which I will, of course, if things start hurting. At this point, still no bruising. I responded: "Seriously, I feel as good or better than I have in weeks. Maybe I did a hard reboot of my body?" (Posted about 5:30 this evening.)

As of this writing, the temperature is now 59F. Which suggests that when we wake in the morning it will be our preferred 69F. We seem to be warming up at a little more than 1F per hour. I would insert degree marks, but my right monitor, where I park my Word and Excel documents, is not communicating with my CPU, and I'm not in the mood to troubleshoot. I did not take that possible nap while at our friends' today, so I might go to bed in an hour or so. Bonus: this house is all one level, so no chance of falling downstairs!

I'm a little miffed that at my next checkup, I will have to disclose last night's adventure. I hadn't had anything that could be considered a fall since my chair broke at work and tumped me on my derriere. I'm not quite sleepy, but I think I'll bum another ibuprofen from Middlest and watch an episode or two of The Musketeers. I'm in the mood for some mindless entertainment.

Night, y'all. Be careful out there.

Winter has swaggered down from the North.

There was a huge wreck in Fort Worth yesterday that made the national news. Several people have gone Home because of it. Snow is forecast for the near future, and we have our taps dripping slowly to avert burst pipes. I'm grateful and relieved to have had our groceries delivered before the roads got bad. I wouldn't want someone to get in a wreck, just to keep us fed.

A minor downside to working from home is that I won't get any snow days or ice days this winter unless a hailstone the size of a moped comes through the roof and lands in the hall between my boudoir and the living room. On the other hand, the chances of my falling hopelessly behind are minimal.

I'm nearly caught up on reading Persuasion. The annotated pages take as long or longer to read than the text which they accompany, and they chop the flow for me. However, I'm learning context and subtext that I would otherwise miss, so it's worth it.

I started watching the BBC's 2007 Sense and Sensibility last night and managed to add several rounds to the current baby sock while doing so. I much prefer Dan Stevens to Hugh Grant as Edward Ferrars. Or should I say, I vastly prefer him? In the second episode, he is chopping wood for Elinor's family in order to productively manage the anger he feels at his social predicament. He doesn't sulk. He doesn't swear or punch a hole in something. He does something useful to serve and bless the woman he loves but is honor-bound not to have. I find it noble and deliciously attractive. It's the sort of thing a man who holds and honors the Priesthood would do. Beloved certainly did.

I do miss that man. Not with the searing pain of the newly-bereaved. It's quiet, like breathing or my heartbeat. With each passing year the excitement to see him again brightens and sweetens. I wish every woman could experience this kind of love.

Good day at work + The Durrells

The overtime that I put in on Saturday helped me to get quite a few things accomplished. I did spend an hour and a quarter on the phone (my cellphone) with tech support because there was a push over the weekend, and I forgot to change my password on Friday or Saturday, and I was locked out. There's still one smallish glitch that it turns out didn't get resolved, but I have a workaround for that, and I'll try to get it fixed tomorrow after we return from getting vaccinated.

People who think the British have no sense of humor need to watch The Durrells. I've just finished the third season (what a cliffhanger!) and spent much of it snorting at snark or giggling like mad.

That's all you get today, my dears. I have a bowl of oatmeal calling my name, and I want to eat it while the phone charges so I can finish my studies, and I want to read a chapter or two of Jane Austen. And I also want to be in bed an hour ago. Ish.

Zola-ology

Tonight after work I finished watching the second season of The Paradise.  Screenplay by Andrew Davies, who also wrote Sanditon (which I also enjoyed), the 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice, Daniel Deronda (loved it, especially seeing Hugh Bonneville play a cad), 2008's Sense and Sensibility (which I am waiting to watch until during or after we read it in my book club),

Tonight I've had enough functional synapses to dive into the annotated Persuasion. Right now I'm waiting for the brownies to cool, and then I shall read some more. But I don't want to stay up too late, because ~

WE HAVE APPOINTMENTS FOR OUR COVID-19 VACCINATIONS ON TUESDAY!!!!!

~ and this article in Atlantic says that research suggests getting sufficient sleep in the days before getting the shot may minimize any side effects. We're getting the Moderna, which is presently known to be the drama queen of immunizations. SemperFi had to take the next day off after getting his, and he's in way better physical shape than I am. I've proactively arranged to take off Wednesday if necessary. Another article in Atlantic explains why it's a good thing if the body goes berserk after the second dose of vaccine.

The house smells heavenly. Time to divvy up the brownies and take one of my servings back to my room and my book. I'm working a little overtime tomorrow, to catch up my virtual desk after dealing with my literal desk all day yesterday. Eighty emails waiting for me when I logged on this morning. Eighty. Oye!

Hand sanitizer is the devil.

It burns us, precious. I will not show you a picture of my crabby, crinkly, exceedingly clean hands. Today it was my turn to go into the office (!!!) and deal with the paperwork that has crept, strolled, and/or flooded in, for my one-and-a-half dockets, while we have all been working from home. SemperFi has been mucking out the mail cubby any time he's needed to go into the office. Office Manager said during last week's quarantine check-in that my desk was buried. She was not wrong, but because it was SemperFi doing the burying, there were half a dozen or so neat stacks, all between four and six inches tall.

First item of business: print off my list of closed files. Second item of business: file as many documents as possible, either into their respective red ropes or into an A-Z sorter. Mystery documents into a small pile of their own, for further investigation. Then start pulling red ropes for closed files and chucking their contents into the top basket of a double-decker rolling cart. I decommissioned 44 files today and emptied 11 or so trial notebooks. This required two big trips to the shredder bins and a few quick dashes with handfuls of paper after I'd figured out the mystery documents.

My desk is now as orderly as SemperFi's. The A-Z sorter is filled with neatly clipped bundles of documents for open cases which were opened after mid-March. They do not have red ropes at this time, except for a couple where there were massive amounts of stuff, so I struck out the names on the labels and wrote in new ones. That'll do, pig, that'll do.

Dinner the First was two of the simplest cheese quesadillas: flour tortillas, folded in half around grated cheese, then nuked. Dinner the Second was a couple of hours later: really good oatmeal, nuked with dried cranberries and a fat spoonful of nut butter. Dessert has been a tallish mug of Mexican hot cocoa with a spritz of whipped cream. I am ready to brush my teeth, take my meds, and go to sleep.

I started reading my new annotated Persuasion. I do not have the brainpower for it until I get some sleep. Re-reading part of a chapter I'd read earlier this week, this time with footnotes, made me feel as if I were having a deep philosophical discussion with Hugh Nibley, whom the children's father and I fondly referred to as Brother Footnote.

I did manage to wash one load of laundry and get it into the dryer. And I am finished with adulting for the day.

Harrumph. Also, poohbah!

 

Thanks to the comments of several of my fellow Janeites in the reading group, I've ordered my first annotated copy. (Persuasion.) In theory, it will arrive day after tomorrow. I'm hoping it will reduce the amount of toggling between chapter and Google. Curiosity about "quarterly sessions" in Chapter Three led me to "assizes" and then to wondering how they might be related to, or different from, an American grand jury. (Did you know that the United States and Liberia are the only two countries who still use the grand jury system? I did not, until tonight.)

 

In other Austen-related news, I rented the forgettable "Modern Persuasion." Best thing about it was that the heroine's cat is named Wentworth. (Yes, I am praising with faint damns.) Although Bebe Neuwirth did a fine job as the modern equivalent of Lady Russell. She was both forthright and apologetic; so, not consistent with the character as written but far more palatable to my modern sensibilities.

 

There has been no knitting today. Yesterday I frogged the *maybe it was going to be a mitten*.

I'm not bored. But the Inspiration Fairy has decanted for Club Med. I am sitting here with an ice tea spoon in my mouth and an open jar of Nutella.

I enjoyed watching Dr. Thorne so much that I put several collections of Trollope's works on my shopping list. I've just downloaded The Barchester Chronicles to my Kindle after deleting the YA novel with the barn language. If y'all will excuse me, I'm going to retreat a couple of centuries and adjust my attitude.