I think I learned something new about spiders today, something that may be obvious to other people or not. It wasn't to me. For days we were told to expect rain, but until today, it really didn't come down here. Today made up for it, and it rained in sheets, for hours. Naturally, I went out and took some pictures of Carlotta's web, glistening with raindrops. She and Mr Carlotta were both hanging the same way. They were clinging to the web with only their top legs (...I'm going to say hind legs?), and dangling with their two front sets of legs straight down, with tiny raindrops shedding from them. I have never really studied spiders during rainstorms, but now I'm so curious whether they all do this, all the time, so they don't get soaked in rain. The only other web I'm really following is the tiny orb weaver over top of my front walk, but she is disc-shaped, so I don't know that her rain pose will be similar. After the rain, I went out and watched Carlotta refresh several rows of her web, calmly and methodically, completely unfazed by her handicap. The way she compensated for the missing leg was cool. It sort of reminded me of the way I used to switch which hand held the crochet hook as I went back and forth across projects when I was a kid.
There are a lot of new activities I keep wanting to try, but so far I have been stopping myself from picking up anything new while I have so many unfinished projects around the house. For weeks I have been telling myself that it was the day to re-tackle the carpentry project I dropped in anger when I kept failing to get the drill bit properly tightened while I made holes for pocket screws. Today I finished the last few boards, and put together the upper half of the frame I'm building, before sitting on the floor in uncomfortable positions wore me out. I had only promised myself I'd spend ten minutes at the task, so getting an hour or so was a victory. But it also means a big setback in the progress I've been making with physical therapy. Or at least, it means I can properly describe to Bones exactly what it is that causes me strain, and what I want to get out of all of these visits. It will probably mean I have to do the exercises a lot longer than the referral calls for. The game goes on forever...
I rediscovered an old friend today. While I was upstairs, trying to make progress on that carpentry project, I played random songs from the week's worth of music loaded on my old Model T desktop computer. Early in the rotation was today's inspirational song, The Game Pieces. It's bouncy and lilting and very fun to listen to. I knew immediately that it was my song for the night. But I thought that for the wrong reasons, or at least for very superficial ones. Most nights, even with songs I know well, I Google the lyrics, just to be sure I'm saying what I want to say, or not implying something more than I'm prepared for, as well as to be sure that I have the title and artist exactly right. I looked and looked for the lyrics for The Game Pieces, with no success. One one page, there was a video that claimed it was associated with my song, but when I started it, it was a two-hour long Fairport Convention concert. I sighed, and left it playing while I watched television, hoping it would at least get around to the song, so I could re-hear it before I started writing. It ended up being the second song they played, with an explanatory intro. I listened to the intro three times, looked up the subject on Wikipedia, and listened to the song twice through. By the time I was done, I realized that ten or twelve years ago, when we got this particular album, I had really listened to this song closely, totally got it, and then over the years I forgot it existed. The writer and singer (Chris Leslie) said that he was inspired by a set of chess pieces in an Edinburgh museum that came from the Isle of Lewis. He said he thought the king and queen, the way they were carved, looked "fed up." Weary of being played, they decided to play the players, and the song told their story from their loss by the bay of Lewis, through theft and murder, then discovery in the mud, before they landed in their eventual museum home. The pieces were self-aware with long memories. I have enjoyed rediscovering this story, wondering how carefully I must have listened to this album to have such a strong attraction to this song buried in the deep files of my mind. It was even better to dig into the deeper story. And now I want one of the replica sets of chess pieces. They're adorable.
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