Fairfield County Sport

I haven't posted in ages. Part of the reason is a busy summer and part of the reason is an even busier fall. We are currently fully absorbed in the Fairfield County sport: remodeling. In the summer we traveled like everyone else here and that was hectic enough. But remodeling redefines busy. After two years of drawing up plans, changing them, postponing them, we finally decided to bite the bullet this fall. So, I spent a month or so looking for suitable rentals for us. K. only wanted veto power over shortlisted houses so I did the hunting and the gathering this time. First shock: the few offerings. Second shock: a familiar one, sticker-. Third shock: moving out with infant and kindergartener. Oh-My-God! Anyway, we are in a cottage by the beach now, trying to adjust to a new neighborhood. But the construction goes full speed ahead at the old place. Today. they took away the old heating oil tank. It was underground and really old. But thank God, it didn't leak so we should be fine, inspection wise. Will post updates.

Snow yet again

The third winter storm in about ten days! Lots of snow but most of it came down during the night and the roads cleared pretty quickly in the morning. Our snow plow guy cleaned up our drive quite nicely and the city cleared the street soon after and then everything looked pretty normal but for the sombre grey skies, hanging low with cloud. During the day, I made some quick trips around the world via the internet, while baby napped and pre-schooler went on a play date at the neighbors. So, for today I've decided that I'm glad I'm not Lebanese living in Lebanon. Or a young schoolgirl trying to get on with life - or whatever they call life - in northern Iraq (thanks for all the Middle East blog links, Zeyad). Or a South Asian worker in any of the Gulf states. For that matter, I'm also glad I'm not a relative of Denis Rader and especially thankful that I didn't live next door to him in the 1970s and '80s. OK, back to the diapers- and-wipes job.

What do you do for company when you are not an extrovert? Why, retreat into the world of books of course. Here are people who will talk to you when you need company, will go away when you're tired of them and will engage you in intellectual discourse when your brain needs exercizing. For some reason, I am fascinated with the period 1900-1960 and most of my English reading consists of forgotten bestsellers, British and American, from those years. Does anyone still read Nigel Eldridge's The Colonel's Son? It's about the author's childhood in interwar India (1919-39). Or Julian Maclaren-Ross's books? Books like these evoke an era of bad plumbing and uncertain electric supply, when modern amenities were still not taken for granted. I think I relate to them so much because this was what small-town India was like in the 1970s and 1980s (perhaps even today?). Also, books like Eldridge's (although not Maclaren-Ross) were often available in dusty libraries in the small towns where I grew up, as were books by Daphne du Maurier and Laura Lee Hope, all probably left behind by the departing British. In the days before the Internet, these were my only window into the western world. Little did I know till I studied history that these tales, so outdated, such markers of a world of racial inequalities, were stories of a world being transformed. Still, their nostalgic appeal remains for me even though I recognize all the limitations of the authors' latent and blatant prejudices. I choose to read them as narratives of a time before central airconditioning and central heating. Every time I hear our sixty year old boiler make groaning noises in the wintry nights of southwestern Connecticut, I remember...cold nights in unheated houses in Punjab and John Masters.

Snow is coming, snow is coming, right now a distant gray-whiteness on the horizon. But we are not alone. Right now, Washington DC is hunkering down and other areas will follow suit. Far away, in California, six days of rain has made people's lives miserable. Further away, in India, the air force and army is having to drop supplies for snowed-in people in Kashmir. 40 feet of snow in some places! First, the tsunami and now the rain and the snow. Stay warm and dry, everyone.