Last night Eleanor put herself to bed, as she's been doing lately, without informing me or needing to be told to turn her light off. (It's summer, after all.) I knocked and went into her room a moment after I'd heard her shut her door -- otherwise I make her keep it open for air circulation -- and said, "What? You don't need any huggy-huggy-kissy time-for-bed huggy any more? You think you're too old for this?"
Eleanor allowed as how she was, in fact, too old for this.
I said, well, we have to do this one last time, then, and we have to do it right; so I gave her a big bear hug and some obnoxious smoochy kisses, and I snuggled up on the bed and gave her some more obnoxious smoochy kisses and said, "How does it go? Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite!" Then I said, well, you know, if you decide that this shouldn't have been the last time, then let me know, but otherwise that's it, and I won't bother you at bedtime any more.
And that's how Eleanor outgrew getting tucked in at night.
This morning after dropping Eleanor off at camp, I bought a 12-pint flat of blueberries from the supermarket, because I noticed yesterday that the price had bottomed out on this season's local (Jersey) blueberries. The cashier seemed really irritated that I was buying an entire flat rather than just a few pints. I don't know what her problem was. She grumbled about having to pick one of the pints out of the flat to scan the barcode, and then she muttered that she couldn't fit the flat in a plastic bag for me to take. I smiled -- as I'd been doing through the whole transaction -- and said it wasn't a problem since I was walking only a few blocks, and I didn't mind.
A third of the blueberries ended up as jam before noon. I'll do another batch tomorrow, which will make for a total of some dozen half-pints of blueberry jam. It sounds like a lot, except that I didn't do strawberries this year because local strawberries weren't up to snuff for jam or preserves. Not flavorful enough. But the blueberries turned out really well, with a very slight sour bite to them; and besides I'll need to take a jar or two up to Nova Scotia when we see family later in August.
I used up the last of the tall 12-ounce jars in today's batch, and they toppled in the canner again. I don't like dealing with toppling things in big pots of simmering water, so I'm glad that I'm through with those crazy jars this season. Tomorrow will be all half-pint jars.
I'm seeing a fella. It's nice.
Went to see Robert Bresson's Pickpocket a few nights ago. I'm, uh, trying to figure out why it's a seminal film. I get the comparison to Crime and Punishment, of course, but I'm not convinced there should be a favorable comparison there. Clearly I'm not getting what Bresson was doing. I should see more of his œuvre so that I can dig his themes better. 'Cause it's the ideas and themes that he's emphasizing, when he gives us characters with generic names (Michel, Jacques, Jeanne) and non-actors reciting their lines dully. The elaborate pickpocketing sequence at the train station was delicately choreographed and carefully filmed, focusing on the thieves' hands and the victims' property, further drawing attention to the subject matter of the film (pickpocketing: can it or its perpetrator ever be justified?) rather than to the actors. But other than that sequence, Pickpocket seemed longer than its 75 minutes. I dunno. Maybe the film has aged badly, or maybe I've lost my capacity to sit through challenging art and I need more razzmatazz to hold my attention.