Flat Quirks and a Mutant Camellia

The hideous camellia has a weird, sort of mutant knot of flowers hanging from one of its branches. This is not the time of year for the camellia to bloom. It has no other blossoms. I wonder what triggered these flowers to go for it at this dark, insectless time of year?

I had a crazy day at work yesterday. I had to cover a couple of stacks of new books -- it seemed like 100 volumes, but about 25 is probably a more reasonable estimate. Many of them were novels-in-verse that are going to be used for Middle School classes today, so there was no time to waste. Do you ever read novels-in-verse? In other words, works of fiction that are written in a poetic style but follow a plot? They're not my favorite thing but they're big right now, particularly among books for young people. The cynic in me thinks they're popular because in this era of fragmented attention spans they can be read rather quickly.

Anyway...I also had to inventory the books for those classes and put them on a spreadsheet (my favorite thing!) and today we'll have to manage checking them out. It will be slightly more complicated than checking out normal books but the reasons for that are uninteresting even to me so never mind.

Plus, of course, all my regular daily duties including lots of re-shelving. When I write it all out it doesn't sound like much. Am I being whiny? Maybe.

I also received an unexpected and thoughtful letter from a blog reader, responding to one of my recent posts. I was so surprised that this person took the trouble not only to write me, but to write three pages, print them out and snail-mail them. It shows their level of passion about the subject at hand. Never mind the details but I will write them back once I've had a chance to compose my thoughts.

The other night I was closing our bedroom drapes, as I always do, and clipping them closed with the clothespin that always dangles from one of them. We've done this every night for more than a decade because otherwise the drapes gape open slightly. It made me laugh at the persistence of this silly problem, and I got to thinking about the other quirks of living where we do.

There's our bedroom door, which will not stand open unless propped by some object. We use a pot that I made in pottery class about a quarter-century ago. It fits perfectly into that little space between the carpet edge and the door and holds it just right.

And there's the door to "the hole," the closet underneath the stairs going up to the flat owned by the Russians. It sticks because of repeated paint jobs, and it has a ridiculously small knob -- so small that it's impossible to grip, making it impossible to open the door. So we keep a bread knife handy on an adjacent table, to trip the latch and get the door open.

There are other issues -- the bathroom door that won't fully close because it doesn't fit the frame, and won't fully open because there's a radiator in the way; the sink that's too small to be truly usable.

I suppose every house has little oddities like these -- too minor to repair, but not optimally functional?