I can do that!

[redbird]

Kevin emailed a last-minute reminder of the NYRSF work weekend late last night; I read it this morning. He was running late, I was running late, our plans synched for him to drive me up to Pleasantville. Mostly we sat on the porch, read and marked manuscripts, and talked some.

At one point, David (Hartwell, of the Pleasantville Hartwells) said he needed a volunteer to help carry groceries in from the car. "That's me!" After all, I've been developing mighty thews, and all those muscles may as well be put to good use.

I also volunteered to tend the grill, since Kathryn (Cramer, of the Analog Cramers) didn't feel up to it, being in late pregnancy. Not something I've done much of, but how hard can it be? Not very. The burgers came out on the rare side, but that's because Kathryn urged me to pull them off relatively quickly.

At the end of dinner, Peter (scion of the Pleasantville and Analog clans, aged 5) went over to David with a book, which he wanted read to him. The book, in Spanish, was called "Donde viven los monstruos?" David doesn't know Spanish. Neither does Kathryn. "I can do that!" So we sat on a beanbag and I read to Peter about how the green monster lives in a green house, and the red monster lives in a red house, and the polka-dot monster lives in a polka-dot house, and the invisible monster lives in an invisible house (nice picture on that one). "Pero el monstruo anaranjado vive baja de mi cama." I asked Peter "Do you know what that means?" No, he didn't: "But the orange monster lives under my bed!" That was the end of the book, and I then tried to find out why I was reading in Spanish to a child who doesn't know Spanish. It may indeed be useful for language learning--though in that case I hope my accent doesn't scar him for life--but why did he want to be read to in Spanish?

Then Kevin drove me to the Pleasantville railroad station, which belied its name with a definite smell of skunk. The train came, I settled into a window seat, the conductor wandered by a couple of times but said nothing about tickets. (There's no ticket office at Pleasantville, so people buy tickets on the train.) At White Plains (last stop before 125th) quite a few people got on. Someone sat next to me and asked if I knew the fare to [mumble]. "Sorry, no." I didn't even know the fare from Pleasantville. As the conductor came closer, I wondered what would happen if I sat there and looked inconspicuous. Would the conductor ask me to pay, if I said nothing? The woman next to me asked how to get to somewhere or other, and discovered that she was on the wrong train, and would have to get off at 125th and ride back north. And then the conductor went on. I got off at 125th (easier, for Inwood, than Grand Central), took the M103 to the A, and am now wondering whether I should go down to Grand Central, buy a one-way ticket to Pleasantville, and throw it away, in the interests of balanced books.

And I don't get to run off and visit bluejo (of the Montreal Jos) next week, for complex reasons to do with cattitude's passport renewal and our desire to stick together right now.

[The odd identifiers are borrowed from serenejournal (of the San Diego Serenes).]

Comments

[redbird]

You just noticed? *grin*