Adventures in the Pointless Forest

You want me to title these things?

Steve is out of town, visiting the nice people who pay him to go tippy-tap at his computer all day. I thought for sure that today would be abysmal as a result, but in fact I was so resigned to that certainty that it was entirely lovely instead. Tomorrow we'll just have to try harder. 

As predicted, the charm of eating off the floor wore off rapidly in the face of rampaging, food-fisted baby. So for the moment we are dining at an end table, because we have one.

The whole arrangement is at about knee height, and Jane is very pleased to put her feet on the table at any moment when she is not actively engaged in eating.

Full sized plates are not possible, as you see. At larger meals we pull up a couple of footstools to hold the serving dishes. All is whisked away between times to allow us to appreciate the calm blue ocean of space, and also so there can be an end table where one is expected.

Note to prospective dinner guests: a somewhat more humane camping table will be arriving soon.

In the meantime, Jane has composed an interpretive dance to convey the poignancy and humor of her odd-tabled state.

Featuring Dean Stockwell as Al.

I joined a new professional society in the course of registering for that conference in Boston. The benefits of membership, as with many academic societies, include not only a substantial debit to one's bank account, but also a subscription to the journals published under the society's auspices.

And so, not long before the conference, the May/June issue of Subject Area arrived in a tidy envelope, a slightly odd issue to kick off with in mid-July, you might think, but I believe it is actually the most recent one.

In any event, two days later another envelope arrived containing the most recent issue of Topics in Subject, the review journal. This was followed the next day by a new envelope with the April issue of Subject Area inside, to which I was apparently retroactively entitled, although my membership did begin in May. Then I went to Boston.

When I returned, there was another envelope waiting for me! This contained two more back issues of Subject Area: March and January/February. Today, of course, I received a new issue of TiS. 

I hope and expect that I will continue to plunge ever further backwards in time, until I get the September 1878 Proceedings of the Royal Society, while TiS proceeds to ever more obscure special issues.

• Topics in Subject: The Effects of Bananas.
• Topics in Subject: Evolutionary Approaches to Flugelhorns.
• Topics in Subject: Oona Chaplin.

Steve suggests that I am more likely to discover that I must put right what once went wrong, hoping against hope someday to make the leap to a present-day journal.

In either case, thank god we got rid of all that furniture.

A giant piece of nothing.

Hello, Sunday evening Internet. We have just been helping a friend move in -- well, Steve has been doing that, while I have been helping Jane walk up and down and up and down and up and down the stairs, and making something not too complicated to eat. Each according to his abilities.

While we were at it, we seized the opportunity to foist off our dining room table and a sofa, both of which I have been dying to get out of the house so that we might have room for (among other things) a larger, more rectangular table. Then we might have more than one person over at once without creating the dinner-time equivalent of a clown car, as we did for the very occasion of the table's last night in our house.

We do not yet have this larger table, of course (where would we have put it?) so suddenly we have a giant piece of nothing instead. It's quite nice, this bare expanse, skirted by our tableless chairs like so many party guests reluctant to go out on the dance floor. So broad and unblemished by furniture, so easy to keep clean! I am charmed.

I may be less charmed when it takes our new table weeks to arrive and there is nowhere to put things and we have eaten dozens of picnics in our own home and my in-laws arrive for their long-since-scheduled visit and have to eat off the coffee table. Maybe by then one of the more adventuresome chairs will have approached another chair and asked it if it wants to do the electric slide.