Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

We just watched the very first episode of The Electric Company. Fargo North, Decoder; Love of Chair; punctuation; the different pronunciations of 'g' (well, two of them: g as in gum and as in gym), special effects that look both psychedelic and very 1970s and which cattitude says came from a machine that ate most of their budget, Rita Moreno and Bill Cosby; crank calls on a phone that rang in Cosby's ice cream cart. Also a silly intro of people saying "hello" in lots of different ways, the sort of thing that you might do at the beginning of the first episode. And an animated 2001 pastiche, introducing "oo" as in boo ⇒ boom ⇒ bloom.

The DVD has four more episodes (not 2 through 5, but something like 26, 58, 342 and 798 (the label looks like 79B, but that seems unlikely)), which we'll watch later.

I'd had a long day, Cattitude is taking good care of me, and eel sushi followed by silly television helped. So did julian_tiger, who purred when it was needed most.

Sometimes it is very cool the way my friendships are connected, and one friend mentions a memory that carries with it the thought of other friends, not because they were in that moment but because without them, we wouldn't have been.

I'm being elliptical lately--for reasons that seem good to me--but I'll unpack this one: elisem said some extremely cool things about me (and, being Elise, did so in a way that I am not at all inclined to describe as flattering). Her mention of the shore is a specific physical shore: the Gower, in Wales, and we wouldn't have been there if not for papersky (all my Welsh memories connect to her, and I may never visit Wales again) and rysmiel.

And now I'm remembering other bits of that week: not just the time in Hay--books and ice cream and Shakespeare's Tam Lin and the paths we couldn't follow because of the foot-and-mouth outbreak-- but weeding the badly overgrown back garden (which connects to Elise no longer being allergic to bees) and nibbling ripe berries as I cut back the brambles.

But my time-binding is weak enough that I'm not sure whether the skylark was on that visit to the Gower, or the other, the first time I visited Swansea. I think the castle was a different trip. The castle in Swansea, I mean--I'm sure Cardiff Castle was, but Cardiff Castle is a folly, a weird Victorian re-creation that we didn't pay the extra to go inside, whereas the ruins in Swansea have fallen down gently, with grass growing in the roofless rooms, and a great impulse to decide who gets which room and what we'd do with that bit there. The old watermill/museum visit was that week with Elise and Juan there, which I know because Elise bought scraps of brightly colored fabric to combine with the yarn she'd spun (from wool that I, and she, had gathered on a hillside) and make a doll for zorinth.

I don't exactly miss Swansea. The Gower a little, maybe. But it wasn't the landscape, pleasant though sea-cliffs and watching the tide and the sheep wandering loose were. It was being there with Papersky, whose home it was: walks back up from the duck pond past a house where she knew the resident dog, and the buses, and the shop around the corner for bread in the morning. Montreal is different, and in many ways more my kind of place--but they're both important to me for who lives there, for having family to see and hold.