Pretender Archive, part II
07/04/04..........38509. Sunday, the Fourth of July, and no clouds, just that peculiar dimness to the sky that indicates something burning somewhere---the one bad thing about weather moving through in the mountains is dry lightning strikes, which sometimes touch off dry evergreen; and though I've heard no word of fires, I think there must be somewhere. Neither of us has felt very energetic, and we finally concluded that taking our headaches down to the riverfront to watch the fireworks probably isn't too bright. So we decided to sit at home for once and watch the fireworks from the balcony...
07/05/04.........39305. Well, even that plan fizzled---perhaps they angled the fireworks differently because of wind aloft or something: I'm told they were better than usual, but we couldn't see them from where we were. Waked late, got down to work, made a few major narrative decisions, erasing a bit, writing a bit: I now have a notionn where this goes---yes, dear readers, I'm often surprised by what happens, too. Outlines are only good for a roadmap, to be done and then put in a drawer while writing. And if you ask any half dozen writers, you'll get three of them who adhere to outlines and three that constantly vary. Myself, I vary even so far as to actually use an outline now and again; but mostly not---as in this one, where I'm using an outline, but only to map where I've been, not where I'm going: in other words, I build it as a record so I remember the names and places, not as a future guide. IT rained today, if only briefly---this helped clear the air. And we took back to the ice today, going slowly---no physical challenge, except to work on balance and Banichi's favorite word, finesse. I'm still battling the left foot problem---and reached a most curious solution. We skate in a rink fitted for hockey, and we can use the benches to make minor boot adjustments. So I go off the ice to fix the left boot lacings, which on this occasion I needed---when you walk about in the guards, the boot can loosen. The left snugged up nicely, and then I had a wicked notion, and didn't fix the right, which had, as aforesaid, loosened. I had begun to suspect that my left foot problem is at present more psychological than physiological---and going back out with the left foot perfect and snug and the right foot loose and wobbly had an astonishing effect. The brain instantly decided the left foot was reliable, the right foot was not, and I was able to maneuver on the left foot in double the glide length, double the turn length, instantly, with no other change. I skated the rest of the time in that condition, and intend to try it tomorrow with both laced up snugly. And since there was no baseball game on telly tonight, we decided to finish the evening playing music and trying to remember the melodies. We're doing quite well at it---you have to understand, most of our music isn't written out in notation---has only the chords, and we have over a thousand pages of it---which we're trimming down to the ones we actually play. But in ten years away, we've forgotten a few chords and we've mutated a few melodies. We're at least able to agree on a pitch, but Jane plays the nylon six-string and I play the steel-string 12, and our styles don't always merge. We are able to have fun at it, however, and it's a lot better exercise than sitting watching television.
Date: 07/06/04........40099. Work, work, work, but I'm getting somewhere: I've got a grip on the story now, and am beginning to look forward to getting at it. Still not a hundred percent physically, but feeling better. The temperatures are running in the 70's, delightful for July. I can say I had one of the best skates I've ever had, though slow, methodical, and very, very conscious that I'm going to have to go out on the ice in a contest this Saturday, which is going to be interesting. It's very basic stuff, Basic 2, to be precise: this means can we: glide on one foot; bubble backwards; slalom forwards; and stop. Stopping is not my strong suite. This requires making a V of your feet forward and shoving hard to the sides, and I don't tend to get enough edge involved to bring me to anything but a slow, grinding stop. If it's a real emergency I tend to spin into a turn and grab the wall. Obviously I've got to do better by Saturday, somehow. I don't know the protocols of this business---as, for instance, are we allowed to take a few strokes to get moving before we have to glide, or are we just supposed to start off from dead stop? We are going to have a lesson tomorrow, which we're very much looking forward to. We have learned new things and want to check out what we've picked up here and there against the way we're supposed to be doing things. I'm able to slalom backwards now, moderately, and am beginning to work on gliding backwards on one foot. My inside edges are pretty good---but my last lesson had me starting on the outside edge, and I can sort of do it, but I'm not sure what to do with it.
Date: 07/07/04.........40839. Feels good. Got a running start on the work and am doing a lot of thinking, too, on the bridge I want---the middle part of the book, where the start transits to the finish. I am now definitively in the middle, and it's been a difficult joint, from beginning to middle. I think I've finally nailed it. We were disappointed to learn our instructor has more errands than she can get done, so no lesson today. We just got on and practiced the necessities: rough ice today---senior hockey players had done it up from end to end, and there'd only been a light go-over with the Zamboni, so it felt like skating over cardboard and you couldn't get much glide. Pretty frustrating.
Date: 07/08/04......40839. The weather has stayed nice---read, ;in the 70's...and we're just staying home and working hard. This is the day off we have while they prep the rink for the competion. Trying to do a little clean-up, and next week is another tax deadline. Decided to put together a first-aid kit for the rink, and got a few essentials. I don't know if figure skating has more injuries than basketball, say, but it's got to be close, once you get beyond the tottering around the rink stage, and they tend to be nasty. You can cut your hand just picking up a pair of skates, if you brush the blades, and when feet fly loose in a fall or a collision, not a nice thing. Not to mention impacts. We tend to occupy the public-skate slot, where things move much faster, but we're going to get some ice time with the Big Guys this weekend, high velocity and half the time moving backwards. We don't want to inconvenience them, let alone collide with them, but we will be thinking about it.
Date: 07/09.......40839. First day of the Jo Williams Memorial competition, and we're erranding for our friend who's in the adult skate division, as well as one of the judges for some events. It draws skaters from all over the Northwest. And admission to view is free, if you're ever near one of these local events. Just walk in, sit down, and watch. Plus there are things to buy, and people to talk to---though most of them are moving at high velocity from locker room to ice to concessions. We've signed up for practice ice tomorrow morning, and the only time we could get is 6:45 to 7:15 AM Saturday morning. We don't ordinarily see the sun at that hour, but we'll try. More to the point, there's a public skate this evening, and several of us who are competing took advantage of that. We forgot one element, which is the turn-in-place from a dead stop---a 180 degree snap turn with a precise check at the end, and we had to practice that in a hurry. Got back home to urgent questions from the cats, like, where have you been and did you catch any food?
Date: 07/10/04........40839. Our day to compete. We were laying bets as to whether we'd make that practice ice, but we dragged ourselves out of bed, got skated up, and staggered onto the ice at 6:45 AM. They'd even groomed the edges of the rink, shaved them down so there isn't that accumulation of lumps next the boards. The best ice we've ever skated on. Practice went well enough, though we had to hug the boards and stay out of the way of the fast-moving skaters in center ice, who occasionally loop outward unexpectedly. We took the skates off for an hour, watched the competition, then went to skate up again and get organized. I may tell you, at this level, we wore our usual skating gear, no tutus---and we asked to wear our helmets, being our first competition, and while I'm pretty proof against nerves, you never know what will happen when you're under pressure. So we went to check in with the ice monitor and prepare for warm-up, which we're first told is at the Zamboni side of the rink, and then told we should be at the lobby end. This info changed by the minute, depending on who we asked. So the several of us in our division trekked back and forth, dutifully, each of us with information from a different source. Finally we're ready to enter, and the loudspeaker says, "Will the skaters take the ice?" and then "Where are the skaters?" Well, someone had just run up to tell us it had to be the Zamboni gate, so there we were hiking back again, with our boot laces gettting progressively loosened by walking on our blade-guards. Jane yelled back, the width of the rink: "We're up here! Nobody can make up their mind what gate we're supposed to be at!" And people all laughed. We got to our right end of the ice, we went on, and they graciously adjusted the clock so we could get our full warm-up in. By that time we were so amused it had taken away most of the butterflies, and our instructor had arrived to help us with last-minute details. Jane, lucky sod, got to go out first, but she really nailed the glide element, just caught the perfect balance and went the full width of the ice, for the first time ever. My turn, and I got so bemused by listeningtto the instructions from the very nice judge that I blew the very same element, just forgot to take the few strokes to get moving and had to content myself with the initial shove, which only gained me about 20 feet. I got through the rest without embarrassment. And I had told Jane from the beginning she'd beat me---which she did. We expected maybe a certificate or something, but they gave us nice engraved medals on red, white, and blue ribbon: she had a gold, and I had a silver, which pretty well had to be the result with only us there in our class---we were pretty well competing against the Book, but we didn't decline an element and we didn't fall down getting out of the gate, so we were pleased as can be to have our nice moment. I also won the prime raffle item, a coffee basket---Jane has no interest in the coffee, but she took keen interest when she found out it was raspberry syrup in the bottle. Meanwhile we had also agreed to put our friend "on the ice", which mostly means carrying all the articles they can't carry, making sure their props (a bouquet of tulips) are handy, that their water bottle, Kleenex, and most of all back-up music tape are there, and that they haven't walked onto the ice still wearing their blade-guards (good for a nasty fall). This proved particularly frenetic, since our friend (Sharon) was in two consecutive events requiring separate music, separate costumes, and separate hairdos, with a last-moment change in which the scheduled Zamboni run was cancelled and we had to get her there 15 minutes earlier than we'd thought. We ended up exhausted.. But we had a great time, exited with our medals and a raffle basket, went to supper, and came home to fall on our faces.
Date: 07/11/04............40839. We're still exhausted. That was a long day. I blush to say I haven't gotten any creative work done---just sort of moving items about the house, hoping it amounts to order. And haunted by the ever-due tax reports. This time it's the state ones, which I have to get to. I overslept, which is a lovely start to the day, and then couldn't get organized. For one thing, it's the allergy season here---the absolute worst, when the temperature rises, the wheat is ripening and being cut, with resultant mold, and the dry lightning (thunderstorms in which only electricity reaches the ground) creates forest fires. I haven't brains enough to work. Being gluttons for punishment, we took to the ice again---all these people had sworn they were coming, but nobody we knew showed up.
Date: 07/12/04.........40839. Embarrassingly, stalled out. I worked at working, made only negative progress, and ripped that up. I think it's the mold in the air, which lowers the general public IQ by 20 points. Just to prove it, we went back to the rink, got to practicing our backwards skating and---you guessed it. Perfect comedic moment, but it jammed Jane's shoulder very painfully. I was unhurt, well, except for a stiff neck. That teaches us to get cocky. We were just saying, well, maybe we could omit the helmets occasionally. We were really glad to have them in that moment. We're stalled out on the diet, feeling lousy, and headachy (before the impact) and generally have decided we have to eat at home to keep to our diet. Don't think of us as suffering: salmon is cheap up here, and blueberries are in season. We did take one resolution today: we're going to redo the kitchen floor---install that artificial wooden flooring, which can go right down on top of that wretched kitchen carpet, which can't be kept clean. We've just got to get some time to do it. But the place will look ever so much better when we do.
Date: 07/13/04...........40839. Well, with the best intention in the world, I still overslept, and had to scramble to get ready for the chiropractor, who had to straighten us out after the events of yesterday. He was amused to learn we'd actually competed. And we got back just in time to hit the rink---again, most of the people who competed still haven't shown up. But we saw a few of the regulars, and had a good skate, despite being a bit sore. I've got to get the taxes in---got to get the accounts up to date. I swear, I don't know where time goes. By the way, I should mention---if any of you who read this blog would like to buy a raffle ticket for 2 good seats for the 2007 Nationals (figure skating competition) in Spokane, the Lilac City Skating Club is holding a raffle. This is our national championship, our very best skaters. I'll append a link for you to buy a chance: I think it's ten dollars, but don't quote me, and the actual event tickets are about a thousand dollars for the pair if you try to go out and buy them on the internet. Odds naturally depend on the number of people who buy in, but it's a really great prize if you do win. It's only the admissions to the arena, understand: you have to pay your own meals, lodging, and travel. What it does get you is admission not only to all performances, but also all public practice sessions at the main venues, and if Skate America is any clue, the practices are as much if not more fun to watch than the performances---That link to buy a raffle ticket is westskate@msn.com.
Date: 07/14/04.........40389. It's getting positively embarrassing that I haven't made any progress. I'm absolutely frantic to get some clear-headed working time. This is the day we'd planned to crack on and get down to work---and I got no sleep at all last night, being unable to breathe, and being too hot, and too groggy to get up and take action on the problem. Finally I got up and took some Theraflu at 5 AM, which tends to knock me out, but it did make it possible to breathe; I did sleep two hours. Then I realized I had to get those confounded taxes done and that I had a hair appointment. While I was plowing through a two-week accumulation of mail and bills, our skating instructor called and said she could do a lesson today. So I scrambled to get the taxes done so I could make the hair appointment, while Jane kept counting down the time until I had to be out the front door. The Easy-file online option turned out to lock me out repeatedly, each of which meant a call to the state offices to get them to unlock my tax account, and that program never did work right: After 45 minutes, I did get the state system to accept the tax form, if not the payment. So I punched the pay by check option and ran to the hair salon, ,making it just in time. Jane regularlized accounts while I was gone---so much for our work day---and then we both had to scramble to get to the rink for our first lesson in a long time. I secured a laundry list of things I can work on, from a two-footed spin, to outside-edge slaloms, to a cautious 3-turn, meaning a one-foot reversal of direction; and a backwards crossover, meaning being very careful not to knock blades and break something. I'm a long way from doing any of these things without either going very slowly and keeping a hand to the rail, or having assistance---amazing how much help it is just to have a hand poised half an inch under yours, in case you start to tilt off balance---but the outside-edge thing and the spin aren't too far off. And I'm keeping the helmet on, let me assure you. I'm absolutely swearing that tomorrow I get up at the crack of dawn and get some major work done.
Date: 07/15/04...........42203. Finally...a clear-headed day and a night's sleep. Amazing what a relief it is to think---I tell you, the medical sciences don't pay enough attention to what happens when the air is full of allergens. People run red lights, take wrong turns, blunder into store displays with shopping carts and fail to think of the obvious when they're writing novels. It's not Mercury in retrograde, it's human brains overwhelmed with serotonin blitzout. The only problem was that I have to turn off the airconditioner in my room to turn the coffeemaker on, or it trips the breaker, and after making the afternoon cuppa, I forgot to turn the airconditioner back on. Jane's nrusing an epic blister on her instep which she got during the great Long Hike with the boots on, during the competition---it's on the verge of turning nasty, despite aloe and Epsom salts, but she decided to skate anyway, with a blister patch on...we're quite enthusiastic about having had our lesson, and having new things to practice. I did manage to get the outside edge slalom at least started---again, I'm pretty good on the right foot, not the left....and I can do the spin, if slowly. Backward crossover is going to take some work, and I'm sure I'm not perfect going forward either. I'm hoping to be much better before Tuesday next, when we have our next lesson. We're also on a program of not eating out, so we can keep to our diet---don't think of us suffering: it involves beef, chicken, and salmon, with a moderate low-carb veggie, and a dessert of fresh blueberries and whipped cream, which aren't innocent, but which are sort of nature's vitamin pill, and in season and cheap right now. We can lose weight on that, believe it or not. It's the Atkins business. But it means that I have to go scurrying home to cook in this weather. Which means I have to demonstrate some industry. But I've also gotten it down to a science: I can have dinner ready in 20 minutes flat, from scratch, given two microwaves (ours and the apartment's) the blender, and also the iron skillet, which can be heated up to high heat and greatly shorten cooking time---I fear I'm just an unregenerate campfire cook: I learned to cook on iron, tend to grab the skillet and lift it off the heat, never thinking just to turn the dial down---and I'm just not genteel enough for the Teflon age---I've never yet destroyed one of our fancy modern skillets, but I only use them for sauce-type dishes, grimly set the timer and resolve not to get impatient. If it's going to be grilled, it's the iron skillet, thank you, which can take anything the range can dish out, and with which I can employ my barbarian cooking style without fear of destroying a pan. So, a nice quiet supper and a dessert for a change. I may try to finagle a stop at Tomato Street tomorrow night, maybe, if it's as hot out as advertised. Tonight I'm a little on edge: the Mariners released one of my favorite players and are bringing up some new kids out of the minors, and I wanted to be home to see the game---and to hear the excuses from the team organization, which are going to take some persuasion, with me. I'm really sorry for the change, but the new guys did perform well, and we won. We'll see how this goes. Changes have to happen, but I'm not sure I'm behind this one---and not happy with the way it was done. And remember the breaker situation? By the time I got home, my room was a furnace---I'm on the west side of the building, and the heat buildup on a hot day can be really bad, during this few weeks that we have to keep the airconditioning going. I'm sitting here in the dark after 10pm trying to get it to cool down so I can sleep and not get a headache, and the airconditioning has been going since at least 6. Ysabel believes it's bedtime, and has launched a catly protest. But if I try to sleep in this heat, it's a sure miserable night, and even the walls heated up in the interval when the thing was off. The temperature is supposed to hit 98F tomorrow---entirely unacceptable, and a really good reason to head for the ice rink in the afternoon---but by Saturday it's supposed to moderate into the 80's and rain. We could really do with some real rain, I'll tell you...but in this season, the fear is that a thunderhead brings dry lightning, fires, and smoke. We'll see. The weather is supposed to stay in the 80's and damp for several days---if only. This is the only bad season in Spokane, and it's much better this year than last, when it set in for weeks of 90s. So far, knock on wood, we've only had a few days of 90 degree weather at a stretch.
Date: 07/16/04..................43030. Friday. The temperatures remain nasty, and the hills have a haze of smoke. Not good for breathing organisms, and we haven't opened our windows for days. I am getting some work done, but on days like today, an uphill struggle. They promise us rain, but in the way of weather in this season, the promises usually retreat like mirages, being put off one day and another and then evaporating into nothing at all. The rain was supposed to come tomorrow and now it's put off until Sunday. The temperatures were supposed to moderate tomorrow and now they say Sunday. When I lived in Oklahoma, the prevailing quote from Will Rogers was, "If you don't like the weather, just wait: it'll change." Up here, it's 'wait,' all right, as the event moves out of reach. Disgust. But the weather will turn eventually. Skated until there was just too much 'snow' on the ice to proceed: the hockey skaters churn it up, and when it got to the point a simple lazy glide turned into a near-fall because my skates just slowed up---fast---I decided it was too much like skating on sand. Most of the hockey-skaters are nice folk. But there's a problem with figure and hockey skaters sharing the ice for an hour and a half, because they (the hockey skaters) slide sideways and make little scrape-trails that cause our skates to slow unexpectedly. They also just created 'snow', or loose ice, and really nasty trenches that can seize a figure blade, carry it elsewhere, and cause a fall or hurt your ankle. Figure skaters aren't innocent either: a jumper takes out divots that aren't nice to hit for any skater, and when we do fast crossovers we can dig a groove that matches anything the hockey folk can do. So there is a perpetual though usually courteous conflict. We're mutually dangerous to each other, though ironically the sort of ice we favor tends to give hockey skaters a bit of a problem...we like it glassy and pristine. They seem to want slush. So did we two, when we were first starting out, because it damps motion, but now we work much better when the surface resembles glass. And the once-cursed Zamboni is now our dear friend.//Trying to keep this blog organized, by the way, I've generally not paragraphed, because my program insists on skipping a line between paragraphs, and this log, which runs the length of the creation of a the current novel, would stretch on forever. But I realize some of the transitions are bizarre, so I'm going to institute the habit of using the diag-slash when changing topic. I hope this will help make things more sensible. // We came home to watch the newly reorganized Mariners attempt Cleveland, and it was gruesome, really painful to watch. Enough said on that score, which involved a record number of home runs from the opposition. I can only hope that we have now hit the pits and that the only place to go from here is up.
Date: 07/17/04....................42303. Saturday. And a little backwards progress---actually I got in over a thousand words, but I wiped out a few, too. It's officially moving now, thank goodness.// Another hot day---the promised rain is stalled off. //The diet is making a little progress since I've been cooking at home. And, no, we didn't end up going out to eat, which is why our weight was actually down. We tried those carb-blocker pills---forget it. All they do is encourage you to eat what you shouldn't in the first place. They afford a little protection from carb rebound, which is what makes you hungry a few hours after you've eaten something carb-heavy. In point of fact, they don't prevent your absorbing a helping of garlic bread, not at all. I've been scarfing down a latte or two---usually two---at the rink, which is really pushing it, and we've been having blueberries with whipped cream for desserts, and I've been wondering if I can really get away with the lattes or the whipped cream, but I think the garlic bread is more likely my real sin, which I commit only when I'm at Tomato Street. I'm no kid, and I figure a little extra calcium is a good thing---though, knock on wood, when I had a bone density test run, I tested out at half my actual age, for which I am very grateful.// Improving my day, too, the Mariners improved considerably in the evening game---but it's pretty wild and wooly, the new guys making a few new-guy mistakes, or just getting caught by surprise, which means there's no predicting what will happen at any given moment. There's a lot of promise there. And I hope the trades are done. I'm a Boone, on my great-grandmother's Carolina's side, yes, fairly closely related to Daniel. I was named after my great-grandmother, and fairly naturally my favorite Mariner player is Bret Boone, a Gold Glover who looks so like my father's younger pictures it's downright spooky. I never bought any player-number wear, except during the recent trade rumors, when I decided to make a statement, and support a few-degrees-removed cousin, when there's trade talks. So I have my Boone shirt. And I'm glad to see the team picking themselves up after the low spot last night, and I hope they keep the roster steady for the rest of the season...give the new arrangement a chance.// I've decided to up the font size in this blog, incidentally, which I hope will improve legibility. I'm tired of trying to see whether I put a period in or not, and it finally dawned on me that some of my readers might be having the same problem. So my apologies for not having done it sooner.
Date: 07/18/04.....................43299. Sunday. A quiet morning and afternoon...and an actual sprinkle of rain. The temperatures are much moderated, and I'm feeling better. The Mariners are improving. The world is brighter. The afternoon skate was a mess---birthday parties on ice should be supervised, and this wasn't. One of the hazards parents don't reckon in sending their kids out onto the ice is that skates are sharp---and figure skates that aren't rentals are far, far sharper. And when kids acting like lunatics want to fall down and skid on purpose right in front of fast-moving figure skaters just for giggles, they're the ones in danger. Fortunately Jane was able to stop. Let me inform you, you can pass your finger down the rental blades and get the notion they're safe and blunt. You can slice your finger on high quality figure blades, the same as on a razor edge. I have an open cut on my hand, just from picking up a friend's skates a couple of days ago and letting my finger accidentally brush the blade. The rink is no place to be skylarking around at people's feet, risking injury to both parties. What are the parents thinking?
Date: 07/19/04.....................43821. Monday. I'm erasing and writing, just about equally. The weather has stayed moderate, to my delight, but there's something in the air that has my eyes watering. There's one sound that really gets to me, which is the high-velocity noise of fans. I think I acquired this opinion during my days in the classroom, where, in Oklahoma heat, we had no airconditioning, and some crazed architect thought that glass brick over the windows would let in more natural light---a fine theory, in Wisconsin. In Oklahoma, it produces an oven-like effect, and if your windows don't face west, you don't get any breeze, and if they do, you bake from the sun. Horrid design for a building. And the fans were everywhere, and just trying to make your voice carry---in a foreign language, yet---above that racket, hour after hour, is sort of like trying to lecture from front to back of a jet plane. Plus if you lay down a piece of paper without a weight on it, it riffles and then sails off. You go home wilted from the heat and too exhausted to talk. And from March until November of every years, those cursed fans roared away. Well, not having central air here, either, we have fans---ceiling fans, standing fans, and the noisy fans of these rollabout airconditioners, in addition to the small one mounted in the wall. And when the temperature rises, all the fans go on, day and night. One of the things I really enjoy, consequently, is silence---just pure, wind-sighing-through-pines silence. Birds-singing silence. Snow-falling-on-snow silence. And it's so nice to be able to turn the fans off for a few hours and let my brain stop vibrating.//The Mariners beat the Red Sox, which was a real reversal of recent fortunes. There may be hope.//And skating went much better on this non-weekend day: I worked so hard I pulled a charley horse in my leg, which forced me off the ice. It hurt like blazes for a couple of hours, until heat had gotten it relaxed and it went away.
Date: 07/20/04..................43821. Tuesday. We thought we had a skating lesson today, but we were wrong about the date. We did turn up at the rink during club skating hours, which we've never done, and bought punch cards for sessions, so we can manage on days like Thursday, when the public skate is cancelled in favor of a club testing session---and went out to share the ice with the competition skaters, which is a whole different sort of watchfulness than sharing it with junior hockey kids. We try to be courteous and alert---since we move rather more slowly than people doing double axels---but the ice is much better groomed and much faster, too, which lets us practice our edges with far less struggle. We decided that the competition had had a salutory effect, because rather than inch ahead with some half-baked learning this, that, and the other trick, we were forced to go back and perfect basics, things that were easy for us, but that deserved better practice. This made us return to first principles and get things right. So we have the notion we may actually practice toward tests, at our own rate.//We came home, settled in, hoping to work, carrying the adrenaline charge of the morning, and then just as we were starting, the lodge called---we'd said we'd donate two nice chairs to the lodge auction, and they had finally gotten two men and a truck to come after them. And after we'd gotten the two huge chairs down three flights of stairs and tried to get back to work, it wasn't happening. So in spite of the fact we'd had a fair workout this morning, we decided to go back to the rink for the public skate. Remembering the kink I'll pulled yesterday, which was on inside edge, I decided not to press that exercise too hard, but I did get in a really good hour and a half.// We came home and collapsed, pretty well. I was disappointed, however, to figure that I've got to cut the two lattes that usually punctuate my workout---just too many carbs, considered with the whipped cream dessert. I'm going to have to go over to iced tea.
Date: 07/21/04.................44390. Wednesday. A little work, a little housecleaning. It's sure a nice thing to have those two huge chairs out of the living room. The place looks more civilized now. And still no progress on the weight, though I gave up one of my two lattes. Disgusting. I skated hard yesterday, pretty well non-stop, for two and a half hours yesterday, and didn't lose an ounce. But patience, patience. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that reaction to dietary change isn't necessarily instant. We were going to take measurements for the kitchen floor, but didn't get around to that. The writing is going about as fast as it can go, which is still kind of slow---gathering moss, I call this stage---just letting things sit and organically compose themselves around the idea. I know now where I'm going. This is good. //And the Mariners have started winning.
Date: 07/22/04................44502. Thursday. Up with the sun to try to get work started early, and to get some progress made. I'm beginning to feel like it's all over the crest of the hill now, and should start sliding freely soon. And to improve my mood, I'm down half a pound, the lowest I've been in over ten years.//We went to the morning club skate again today, because the afternoon public skate is cancelled for testing, and I had another revelatory moment. I've still been battling to get the same stability on the left that I have on the right, and noted that I'm actually better on the outside edge on my left foot (the bad one) than on my right, which is ordinarily the more stable. And I kept trying to press the glide on the left foot, having minimal success, and constantly losing momentum, which means bad balance. This told me, once I began working on the problem continually, that the two feet weren't the same, so I tried finding the balance on the left, and then rigidly locking that position, and thinking about it. What I discovered was interesting. The stable right foot had tension on the inside tendons of the knee for the outside edge, but for the inside edge, tension on the outside tendons of the knee and on the kneecap. Hmmn, say I. Thanks to early injuries, dating back to when I was ten, I've tended to protect certain of the knee ligaments on the left, not that they're not strong, but that they were once injured. So I tried applying the same tension to the left knee, using the same balance of tendons, and huzzah! perfect balance on the left, like a 75 percent increase in glide distance instantly, and no more torquing about trying to hold the balance: with the knee bent and the pressure applied to the right ligaments, no problem. It's the old mechanical principle: if you want the same result on the right as the left, analyze, analyze, analyze. Equal action to identical systems should produce identical results. And I wasn't doing the same, not with the feet, this time, but with the knees. I was incredibly pleased with myself, and hated to leave the ice, but I had worked so hard, I didn't want another charley horse.//Off to the grocery, to get food for supper, then home to work a bit, and cook dinner, and watch the baseball game, in which, incredibly, we won the second game against one of the division leaders. This is looking up, indeed.
Date: 07/23/04...........44590. Friday. The weather continues hot and nasty, around 95 F, plus there are forest fires somewhere to the west of us, I think in the Cascade Range, and the air is not fit to breathe. If we go outside our eyes water steadily. This is the downside of life in the piney woods---fire is nature's renewal system, but it's hell on the sinuses. We don't open the windows, we minimize our time outside, and I can't believe we've agreed to do the skating club car wash tomorrow. We took two sessions on the ice, since it was so nasty at home---our eyes still water, and we can't see where we're going, but an ice rink is a lovely place to spend a summer afternoon.
Date: 07/24/04...........44590. Saturday. I had in my head I was going to get some work done today, being quite forgetful about the car wash, but Jane kept me honest, and we went out to scrub cars in 98 F heat...that's 37 C, for those of you who use that scale. After two hours I had had enough of standing on my head scrubbing (being also among the tallest---most of the club is in their early teens---I tended also to wash the roofs) and set out to hold signs on the road and try to bring in customers. In Washington you can't charge for washing cars, but you can ask for a donation for the favor, and if the people are nice, they base it on how much work you had to do. People kept bringing in Ford Explorers, one chap brought in an RV, and I hope they donated mightily to those kids, on a day of 98 degree weather. Well, my stint on the road, in jeans and a Mariner cap, tended to bring in pickup trucks. The young ladies in the swim suits brought in sedans and sports cars. We were amused. We were also courting heat stroke, counting we also had a local ball game to go to. So we went home, cooled off under the air conditioning, and set out again for the ball park, the Spokane Indians playing the team from Vancouver. We had our hot dogs, but we only lasted two innings before the heat even in the shade grew absolutely unbearable. Jane had already had a headache, and a sunburn on a patch of her back she forgot to oil down for the morning car wash, and I knew we could hem and haw around for an hour about whether we could last it out until both of us were absolutely too baked to know when to say yes. So I suggested with emphatic firmness that we were going to make ourselves sick, Jane agreed her headache was worse, not better, and the air was still nasty. So we went home to watch the Mariners on telly, instead, with ice packs and ice water to try to get our body temperature back down to normal. It dawns upon us that we've spent our summer in the ice arena, and are completely unacclimated to this kind of heat. I'm very glad we didn't try to tough it out. Besides, our team lost.
Date: 07/25/04..........46223. Sunday. We were cheated of our rain, the air staying perfectly nasty. We're still suffering from the effects of way too much heat. I think I get it worse than I would because of my youth in the south, where I'd get way overheated way often, even having the sense to stay in the shade, because I grew up B.C.A.---before central airconditioning---before any airconditioning, until I was about ten . I think repeated heat prostration lingers with you. Either that or I am just plain heat-intolerant from the git-go, which is perfectly possible. The camp nurse used to grab me out of girls' camp activities and make me lie down for an hour and more in a dark tin-roofed medical facility where there wasn't a breeze, while everyone else was out having fun---funny, she never jerked me off lawn-mowing detail, or perhaps my memory fails me. She was undoubtedly right---a kid with a face gone from ruddy to purple around the edges is probably a kid that ought to get out of the sun and be quiet for a while, but my solution for the affliction was to go soak my hat in the creek---we got them at military surplus, those white Navy numbers---and with the hat and maybe a neckerchief soaked, I'd carry on, slightly sodden, but a lot cooler. And probably if I'd listened to the camp nurse I'd tolerate heat better than I do today. So I plunged into that car wash experience yesterday with all the confidence of a southerner in the generally-cooler north---hey, I should be used to this. I can take it better than you northerners. Bad mistake. Fortunately Jane is of the same cold-loving persuasion, so we get along. I just cringe when the weatherman gushes over our nice summer weather. Nice! he says, when you can't breathe the air. I was still feeling the heat exhaustion from yesterday when we took to the rink---my legs kept shaking under me, not a good situation, and I quit the ice a little early.
Date: 07/26/04...........46223. Monday, and instead of work, we decided we had to move our chiropractic appointment to today because of an appointment tomorrow morning conflicts with it. So the chiropractor's assistant said we should come in today, which threw us into an instant rush, because it's a two hour drive. We took our skating medals with us to show-and-tell, since our chiropractor is in no small part responsible for getting us two couch potatoes into shape to do athletics. He was duly impressed. And I got a real view of what's been in the air. Our drive to the chiropractor takes us through the heart of the Palouse, which is an incredible fenceless expanse of very high hills covered, in this season, in ripe wheat. They're harvesting, and I take back my request for rain for the next week: there's nothing worse than a heavy rain at harvest, well, unless it's a hailstorm...and livelihoods depend on it. And when those combines roll, what results is a hazy brown cloud that gets up into the air and does a real number on anyone with allergies to wheat dust. We have forest fires to our west, and all around us, wheat fields being harvested, and by the time we got back, my eyes were a luminous and nasty red. That brown sky, which lasts a week or so, is one of the prices we pay for living in this most-of-the-time picture postcard of a countryside; and I will say the Palouse is beautiful---it changes in every season. If you want a landscape that looks like Tolkein's universe, try Washington---the rolling fields patched in brown of tilled fields alternating with gold ripe grain and green patches of still-growing stuff, or all whites and blues in the winter; and when you get over to the passes on a foggy day, you get the misty mountains for sure, black snowy crags rising up out of cloud and rain.// We got back from the drive with our eyes just horrid, and mine worst, and we decided to go on to the rink, which we knew at least would be cool and relatively shut away from the pervading dust and smoke. Had a good time---was able to help an amazing kid who went from 'never-done-this' to finding her feet, and then a turning edge, being able to cut half a circle and being able to wiggle a few inches backward all in one hour. Amazing balance and no shortage of nerve. I hope this kid finds a good teacher and stays with it---she's a natural for what's taken me months of work. Sigh.//Baseball was a complete meltdown. We get a little break and then our leading pitcher strains his arm. It's the team's luck this year.//
Date: 07/27/04.............46209. Tuesday---more erasing than going forward. I'm feeling a little inundated---in my front hall I have, literally, a stack of boxes higher than my head from people wanting signatures and other must-do's, and I'm slowly working my way through while the daily mail delivers others. Seems like the Sorceror's Apprentice---the more I try, the higher it gets. Please understand if I've promised you anything and it's late. Just can't quite keep up.
Date: 07/28/04...........46209. Wednesday, and one of those days. We'd arranged to have two skating lessons this week and due to scheduling difficulties they both ended up on the same day, which meant we literally rushed from one to the other, and we are exhausted. And we discovered a place that sells skate gear, which means in this case skating outfits. Jane found several---her diet has done wonders, and she looks great in hers. I tried on one and decided I have thirty more pounds to go.// Some of you have asked what we're doing, dietwise: and typical, for the day, is: as much black, unsweetened coffee as I can drink---I know, I know, it's not recommended, but you don't want to meet me without caffeine. Jane drinks water or Sobe Lean or Arizona No-Carb, which is allowable on Atkins. Breakfast and lunch: an Atkins diet bar...chocolate peanut butter is my favorite, with coconut close behind. Afternoon exercise. Jane drinks iced tea; I have an iced latte with real milk; and more black coffee. Dinner: steak or fish or chicken, broccoli or cauliflower, with cheese; blueberries with real whipped cream. And a piece of no-sugar chocolate if no blueberries. If we're out on the town, maybe a glass or two of wine, or Scotch, which is better than wine; if it's a hamburger, only eat half the bun; no fries, no soft drinks---even diet: stick to iced tea or coffee. Take the Atkins nutritional supplements faithfully: you have to have them. It's been good for over thirty pounds apiece, and we've eaten pretty well what we want, once we've established that French fries and their kin aren't anywhere on the horizon.//The tower of boxes still looms. I have two done, out of eight.//And adding to my delight, a visit to a .gov site turned up one of those malicious little delights, the search engine that invokes itself and won't go away---it has kiboshed the button that enables you to select your own search engine. If anyone can tell me the backdoor method for restoring defaults on IE search, since the front door has been jammed by this pest, I'd like to hear it. I've searched everywhere for the trigger, and can't find it. Regedit didn't help me because I'm not sure what I'm looking for...update: Thank you, my friends---I've got the nasty thing out.
Date: 07/29/04...........46209. Thursday, and we are absolutely exhausted. I want some time to work, but I've still got that stack of boxes in the hall that's taller than I am, plus all the boxes we took out of storage to cull, and it's just driving me crazy. It's hot, it's nasty, the smoke is non-stop, and I can't work when I'm in mid-allergy attack with my eyes watering so I can't see.
Date: 07/30/04...........46209. Friday. Off to the rink early and I pulled a silly turn and ended up sitting down on the ice, just, plop! sitting down, no bruises except to the ego. We're leaving town in this smoke---going off to Seattle to see if the air is better over there. But just as we're ready to leave, literally with purses gathered up, and snatching a last moment snack, Jane popped a crown off, and we had to stop and try to get it fixed. The dentist is off today, until Monday, no less, and the helpful person at the desk informs us drugstores carry a temporary glue for this problem. We go get some. It's a failure, won't stick at all, and comes off again on the road. So we stop at Ritzville, and get another variety, which actually works. We buy several extra packets, since I am not an optimist in this project. Our plan is, since the Mariners are out of town, to get hot dogs and view the game on Jane's brother's telly. Which is a success. But the cap comes off again. We decide to stay another day, however. I really, really hoped I'd get some work done, but the fires are fierce---when we were just past Ellensburg on I-90, there's a steady stream of helicopters coming off the local lake fighting the Cle Elum fire, and we did get a good view of the process. The cats were outraged---kept trying to tell us that we were driving into danger. They didn't calm down until we were out of the fire zone. The bad news is that the smoke has made it onto this side of the Cascades, so there's no relief.
Date: 07/31/04.............46209. Saturday. Couldn't sleep, got up and had decaff coffee---this is not a good situation. I didn't get caffeine until after 9, which is very hard on the system, let me tell you. And I discovered that when I'd picked up my skates to put on the soakers, the antimoisture guards, I'd set them down on my lap, and the blade had sliced a perfectly new pair of corduroys. Brand new. Just took the tags off, and now with a hole in them. Tried to work today, and have my computer along, but my eyes just poured, and there was no joy at all. And the vid game I'd traded Jane for won't run on my computer, which makes a horrid sound in its CD drive when it tries. We repeated the baseball supper, and discovered that we not only are low-carb, we're low salt. We ate so much sodium in those hot dogs that it made us both sick. This is not optimum.
Date: 08/01/04............46209. Sunday. Headed home, and Jane's crown's come off again, but fortunately it isn't hurting. The Cle Elum fire looks as if it's out, which is good news. The sky is blue again, and they're promising us rain next week in Spokane. What we have to face is a general cleanup---got to get those boxes out of the living room. And the taxes are due. and the accounts.
Date: 08/02/04...........46209. Monday. I absolutely can't work in this chaos. The books are stacked higher than my head, literally, boxes wanting signature, and I have those done. Had two batches in. Please, please, guys, if you send me something to sign, keep it to a 20 pound maximum per box. I can't lift those monsters, I hurt my back doing it, carrying them down three flights of stairs, yet. I got those done, got the credit card entry done, got the taxes ready for the month---then discovered I'd forgotten to mail some. Panic. Fortunately it's not past deadline. We didn't do anything but freight books and clothes boxes about and get Jane to the dentist, plus clean up the place and do the long-postponed laundry---when I'm out of tees, it's getting desperate. Jane got her dental work done, and picked up the mysterious packages that came while we were gone. They're---guess what?---five more boxes of books to be signed, down in the car, that we didn't have the strength to carry up here. I'm calling a moratorium on this, please, friends. It's 90 degrees out there and it's three flights, and UPS refused to come pick them up---we had to carry the last batch down at risk of our knees. I swear, tomorrow, with a cold front moving in, I'm going for our skating lesson, and then I'm pulling the lid on and not coming out again until I get some forward progress on this book, which I have left at a deliciously good moment, and really want to get on.
Date: 08/03/04..........48030. Tuesday. Well, we got our cool front, but instead of the lovely rainstorm we'd hoped for, we got a wall of dust that made us look like the deep Sahara. The whole Palouse must have gotten airborne, grain dust, dirt, sand, volcanic ash (there are whole layers of it in the landscape) and anything light enough to take off in a 40 mph gale. But we did get the books mailed, the house cleaned (except for the dust) and got some actual writing done. Except now Jane, who's having a week, apparently has been bitten by a Hobo spider---one of the few nasty venomous creatures the Northwest harbors. The symptoms are a nasty bruise (check), a hard center (check) leading to aches (moderate), a headache (when in these dustridden days have we not had a headache?) and hallucinations (not check, thank goodness.) Based on my own experience with the Brown Recluse, it is possible to have a light reaction---except my first encounter, which put me in a wheelchair for a week or so. Later bites hurt, but didn't produce the reaction, partly because I went for treatment. The question was whether to go for treatment for this, which Jane resists, because she doesn't want steroids---I'm dubious, but unless this is the hallucinatory bit, and she can tell me from the cat, which is our test, she seems lucid and actually not suffering much, except the nasty fist-sized bruised red spot. We decided to go skating anyway, since we had a lesson, and we had a good time---she insists getting her blood moving helped; I still don't know. But it was a good skate. The part I'm working on now is arms---arm position, arm motion---let me tell you, the motions you see skaters make has a lot to do with what direction they're going. Swing your arm forcefully, and you'll turn, wildly. What I have to do to improve my stability is make sure arm position is coordinated with the direction I want to go, which centers your weight over your feet and helps a lot. We're learning moving turns, double and single-footed, crossover (the eternally imperfect crossovers) and we're attempting the bunny hop, which is funny. One of our advanced friends informs us this is actually a low-flying non-turning axel, but we look on it as a piece of logistics. You plant one toe-pick, bringing you to an abrupt stop on one toe, hop onto the other toe, unsticking foot #1, and then glide on the first foot while you unstick your #2 foot from the ice, and hope not to fall forward or backward in the process. The little kids skitter about doing this effortlessly, but they're only three feet from the ice surface if they fall and they have only 70 pounds to loft into the air at max. I have, ahem! a bit more than 70 pounds to launch, and center on landing, more to the point. I'm twice as tall, and a lean out of true involves much more moving mass. It's the mass that gets you, take it from me. It takes a certain amount of nerve, this leaving the ice surface, sort of like jumping out of a perfectly good plane---hey, I'm stable, I have my feet under me---why leap into the air and risk not being stable? This also applies to moving turns, which require you while skating forward to give a hellishly strong hip-swivel, the very last thing you want to do under ordinary circumstances---and end up hurtling backwards. Being the least bit off center starting the whip-about turn means still unstable when you come out headed backwards. I can say I'm about as stable one-footed as two-, but that's not saying much. So we settle in this evening to see whether Jane turns all purple from her spider bite, which she hasn't done yet. We had tickets to the class A all-star game, but gave them to the lodge, since with Jane's spider bite and everything else we didn't think sunburn would be a good thing.
Date: 08/04/04............48393. Wednesday. Finally, the cooldown. The air no longer has that blast-furnace heat, and the brain is beginning to work. I've been trying to get the accounts in order, which I should have done four days ago, but I only now have a brain. Jane's spider bite has become a large purplish-red bruise, which looks different than your average bruise, but is showing no sign of necrosis (tissue death) so she seems to have dodged the bullet. Seems there is a small epidemic of this sort of bite, which no one has yet attributed definitely to any particular creature. The Hobo Spider is the logical suspect, but it's supposed to be worse than this. If any other nasty creature has gotten imported in from Seattle shipping, we can only imagine.//The usual turn at the rink. A lesson, which gives me things to practice. We're keeping ourselves to that wonderful northwestern menu, the Bear's Diet: salmon and blueberries, both friendly to our diet. And I've dropped another pound, bringing me lighter than I've been since the 1980's. Hurrah!
Date: 08/05/04...........48502. Thursday. Rain, rain and a daytime temperature of 59 degrees. It's wonderful. It's really been a hard rain, for Spokane, a grey rain, and streamers of fog going up on the hills, among the pines. I love it! //Work is moving, still not as fast as I'd wish, and now my computer is acting up, flashing an amber battery light. So I have to order a new battery. I'm lusting after a new computer, because mine has gotten cranky, but I can't replace what I have without outlaying a considerable chunk of change, and all I have to do to make this one viable is figure out why it's hanging and crashing at every opportunity---and the batteries are going to cost me 300.00. I work exclusively on a laptop, having decided that sitting at a desk is not good for the back; and this is itself a bit more expensive. I'd love to get one of the lighter ones---mine is about 8 pounds---but I just discovered to my utter disgust that Dell is not putting the Trackpoint on the lighter models---oh, no, you have to go to the expensive end to get that. And I detest computer mice and detest touchpads, both of which require you to reach off-center and back again and re-home, which takes just one more neuron than I have to spare when I'm in the heat of composition. I require the Trackpoint and I require a screen I can read, with a hard drive that doesn't require housekeeping to keep it viable---yes, my friends, I do play computer games, and use them to recover mentally from a work session, while my hindbrain works on a problem. (Try telling that excuse to your spouse!) So whatever I use has to be games-friendly, but not high-end; and it has to have a Trackpoint, end report. And it just costs too much. Plus I have to invest in the batteries come what may---even if I get another computer, this one will become a travel-beast. I really want the Dell XPS. But can't justify it.
Date: 08/06/04..........48502. Friday, and Jane got the notion to go to the early ice session, which we did, but they changed the times on us, and we were 15 minutes late, plus they didn't run the Zamboni between sessions and it wasn't the pristine surface we'd gone there early to get. We were disgusted. But they were off-schedule because they were doing contest rehearsals after us, and several people we know were going to perform their full routines, so we stayed to watch and cheer on our friends---I caught a diet bar from my locker and a cup of coffee...and here's one of the big differences in our lives, my friends: a year ago, if our routine got that disrupted, we'd have gone out to eat, broken our diet, eaten way too much, and had a drink or two; now it's a cup of black coffee and a diet bar because I'm in a hurry, and I don't feel at all deprived. The bar was enough. And we ran home, I did accounts for a couple of hours, and came back again to get our second lesson of the week. We're taking from two people, which is interesting, and gives us two different ways of looking at things---our second coach is very insistent on finesse: knees, knees, knees. But the Zamboni had had a problem, and the ice was brutal, like corrugated cardboard, very difficult, very tiring. We ended up going out to Tomato Street with a friend who takes from the same coach, and yes, I just broke my resolution, but---but, we split the entree, and it was enough.// I also ordered my batteries, 300.00; and decided to dump the 'hibernate' function out of my system, which has improved its behavior markedly. 'Standby' works quite nicely, and it isn't hanging on lid-close, which was its prior problem. Sigh. I do want that other system, but now I don't think I can justify it, granted the amber-light problem is just a battery failure.
Date: 08/07/04..........49033. Saturday. I thought I was going to rise early and get some work done, but after the rain cometh the mold spores, and I had just a touch too much wine yesterday evening. Bad combination. But I worked on the accounts, and that's all ready to mail. We were supposed to go over to the skating club car wash and help and didn't: we were still too exhausted from yesterday, and my legs, I swear, are fevered from the workout I had yesterday: Advil is our friend. We were also supposed to go to the ball game, and had promised tickets to our downstairs neighbor, but she didn't show and we didn't have the energy to go to that, either, plus we're not sure we're going to go to the Sunday public skate: Jane's got a blister from walking 300 feet in her guards---this doesn't happen to me, but it gets her every time, it seems; and for the rest, I'm not worth shooting today. Back to the Bear's Diet tonight, and that will improve my health and my mood. I know I blew my new weight level. I'm not even going to look at the scale until I'm sure I've gotten back to where I was. No more celebrations for a few weeks. I'd really like to get my weight down four more pounds by my birthday, which is a month away. I think I can do that---not that we're suffering on this diet of salmon. I'll tell you, Durkee's Chicken and Fish spice, scattered liberally over a piece of salmon to be sauteed in virgin olive oil is a really nice concoction, and produces a nice, crusty finish. A small helping of vegetable, and our fresh blueberries and cream, and we're set, nicer than your average restaurant. For those of you who don't know how to cook salmon, get a center filet, which will be boneless, no skin, coat in the aforementioned spice, heat olive oil in skillet very hot, then after putting fish in, reduce heat to mid-range, cook uncovered for, oh, about 15 minutes or less on one side, 5 on the other---assuming your filet is less than an inch thick. You may want a spatter-screen over the skillet, as it will throw spatter. When it 'flakes' at the application of a fork, it's done. Avoid really thick filets: they're hard to cook, and on this item, you don't want a rare center. And if you can find a source of really good salmon, the 1 x 3 x 5 filets make a great dinner item for a lot of people, because it cooks so fast. And with that and a green vegetable you are set. Clean up is completely minimal. Enjoy!
Date: 08/08/04..............49709. Sunday. A long, mostly working day, thank goodness. The temperatures are starting up again, aimed at 90s by week's end. Ugh. We did decide to go to the rink, had a decent skate, and I'm still doing penance for the Friday night dinner. I think the real answer is giving up my iced lattes at the rink: two lattes, totaling about a glass of milk, aren't on the diet, and those have probably got to go, no matter how much I enjoy them. I'm also nearly out of my favorite-favorite coffee: Starbuck's had light roast Ethiopian for a summer offering, and silly me only bought a pound of it. Naturally it's now disappeared off the shelves. I did find an online source, one that also offers the green coffee beans, which you can roast yourself in an iron skillet (the things have no end of uses) and I might try that, if Jane doesn't kill me over the smell---she's not a coffee drinker: in fact, is allergic to coffee, which I found out by slipping a tiny bit into a recipe---it was not a happy event, emphatically. So I'm a little hesitant to roast coffee in the house: she puts up with enough in the fact that my coffee apparatus pretty well takes over the wet bar. But my other-favorite coffee, Dutch Brothers, is in good supply, so I am far from tragic. Not to mention tea being available at the rink. We're spoiled, I tell you. But I do wish I'd bought more of the Ethiopian.
Date: 08/09/04.............49709. Monday. Got up and realized we have a chiropractic appointment, which means a mad dash to get dressed, get to that, and get back to Spokane, leaving us only a little time before the skate hours. So I had a go at the vid game that has frustrated me for three weeks (Railroad Tycoon, the Dilemma Down Under scenario) and nailed it, for some reason. Go figure. I did have some information from the chiropractor, who informs me that the curve I have in my backbone is permanent, which might answer why I have trouble doing some side maneuvers, which require a body twist to the left; but I don't accept the permanency. This is the first time I've ever had reason to want to twist in that direction, thank you, rather like my cousin, who didn't talk until he had something to say (and is now a preacher)---and if I do it more and more every day, who knows how far I can push it? No gain without trying; and sure enough, I got mad and worked for an hour and a half on the crossover in that direction, and began to gain flex and stability, proving I can do it---not enough to compete for the Olympics, but enough to get around a corner going that direction. Who knows? When I write, I can freeze in a chair in an ungodly bad posture, sometimes canted badly, sometimes twisted, for hours on end---some of my workstation chairs were real beasts, and formed horrid habits, which is why I now use a laptop. If it is partly imbalance in muscle, I can change that part of it, if I keep after it. I may have the chiropractor retake his x-rays in another year, and see if there is a difference.
Date: 08/10/04...........50109. Tuesday. Can't figure what hit me. I was feeling pretty good when we headed out to the rink, but we stopped on the way at a shop to try to get me one of those skating outfits---it was way too soon on the diet, shall we say? Nothing fit. I hate trying on clothes above all other shopping tasks, and this wasn't trying on clothes, it was wrestling---you have to step into those things from the top and haul against the elastic. What fit wasn't cut right. What was cut right didn't fit. I gave up, and we headed on to the rink---at which I just faded. My legs kept shaking under me. The ice was great, but I hit one of those grooves the hockey folk cut---I was on a one-foot glide---it wrenched me sideways and nearly threw me, and after that, the shakes set in, not fright, just exhaustion. Jane suspected I'd forgotten lunch; I flat can't remember. We keep a couple of diet bars in the locker, but that didn't solve the problem. I was just done in, and hot, sweaty hot. If I can't remember if I ate, I probably didn't take my vitamins and supplements, either, and as hard as we work, that's a must. Either that or I've caught a bug of some sort. I feel weak as a kitten, and don't want to do much.//One of my favorite Mariners, Edgar Martinez, has announced retirement---and tonight his first at bat, he hit a home run. That was a glorious, only-in-fiction moment. The whole team came alive and won the game, in an otherwise disastrous season.//And I still feel as if I've been steamrollered. I have two lessons tomorrow. I hope I've got my legs under me.//But the writing is starting to roll. This is good. It goes like that; you can't make the story move at all, and then it seems to crest a hump and slide along under its own momentum. You have to do your absolute best writing on the informational parts, the setup, so that what has to be there for the sake of logic is not dull. Writing the action bits is a piece of cake.
Date: 08/11/04...........50109. Wednesday. Feeling better, after dosing myself with every mineral variety in the medicine cabinet. And due to a scheduling crunch, we ended up with both our lessons on the same day---two different instructors. Started the day on perfect club ice, which stays perfect, because only a handful of figure skaters are on it. The Zamboni had tried to catch fire yesterday: today they brought the other one over, and are fixing the first one's wiring. And it was lovely. I did some concentrated work on the outside edge in lesson one; came home, rested, back again for lesson 2, and this was a revelation: remember, above, when I said I'd fixed the leftside problems with my foot, then my knee, and I predicted the next fix had to be the hip---half-joking? Well, it was the hip, all right, but the other side. I'd had no trouble on the right, because I'd instinctively done what I needed to to get my balance, but on the left, I wasn't commiting myself properly---I needed to lift the right hip to get balance fully onto the left foot. Bingo. I was instantly up, balanced, and nearly able to complete a full circle to the outside. Amazing what instruction can do. Both instructors are important to us, one for just getting the knack, the other for the finesse, and I now have a small routine to do: moving two-footed turn 180 degrees to a backward slalom stroke, then a moving two-footed turn forward and stroke. When I can do this all the way around the rink, I'll be immensely pleased. There are so many things to remember. Bend the knee, straighten the off leg, straighten the elbows, pull the shoulderblades down---boy, does it work the muscles.
Date: 08/12/04..........51898. Thursday. And a very nice day at the start, as you can see by the word count. But the heat is up into the mid-nineties, and by afternoon, I was beginning to feel off---just absolutely cranky and quarrelsome to begin with, starting with the fact I'd love to be able to go down to the shop and buy a skating outfit for the lessons (useful, because it lets the instructor see what your knees are doing) and absolutely nothing I liked would fit. Not even on the internet. Tall people have an added problem in this sport, because most skaters are not tall, and my, ahem! weight isn't optimum, which takes up what little fabric there might be for my height. Meaning, I really need to drop another 20 pounds, and can't fit the really neat outfit I found. So, thoroughly annoyed, I finally found two modestly dark and conservative items that may work. Jane naturally picked up on my mood and tried to cheer me up, but I was just ... annoyed and unpleasant and gloomy. Then we went off to the rink, and I had a pretty good day, until the rink lights blew out and left us all in the dark on the ice---still enough light to see by, from the lobby, but at this point my feet already hurt and I decided not to risk my knees by hitting some pit in the ice in the dark. Jane kept skating until they got the lights back on. And I sort of wish I'd stayed, which probably would have helped my mood, but I'd laced up wrong, and that left foot was in serious pain, which doesn't help the rehab I've been trying to do on it. //Afterward we needed to go over to the lodge for a 'special meeting' which turned out not to be what we thought it was, and not to involve us, so after half a wasted hour we left and went shopping at Fred Myers---at which point the whole day exploded, over silly little things: the unattended meat counter (2 trips the width of the superstore on a sore foot to try to buy fish, and still nobody there), the line at the checkout counter, in which a supervisor slammed a 'closed' sign onto the belt behind the groceries of the person in front of me, in spite of the fact I'd been in line for 3 minutes and there was nobody behind me; the second checkout counter, in which I found a manager, complained, and got an 'it's not my department.' By this time I was really, really mad, and Jane, for which I had to apologize, had intended to go home and get a scene written, but she ended up spending her energy trying to improve my mood---you can't write in an emotional atmosphere, and I pretty well fixed her evening of work with my little tizzy. It wasn't fair to her, didn't help me, and over all, measured against the problems of the universe, it's pretty minor stuff that I was upset over. When we walked into the apartment, and it was like an oven, since we'd forgotten and left the airconditioner off when we left---I first announced there wouldn't be supper until it was cooler, then got some common sense, simply went into the bath, took an ice water shower to cool off, literally, and felt much better. I owed Jane a thorough apology at this point, and am resolved not to carry this mood over to Friday. I cooked the fish I did have in the fridge, and it was perfectly lovely, but Jane still didn't get her work done, and that's my fault.
Date: 08/13/04.........52399. Friday the Thirteenth. Well, the temperature is still awful, but my mood is better, and looking back, yesterday was ridiculous. I got a bit done, spent a great deal of time trying to clean up my computer---seems I mistook that I have a 40 gig disk: it's really a 20---how memory does paint things nicer than they are---and I decided I had better clean the junk up. Well, I started with the 'temp internet files,' which amounted to 8500 items, roughly, and which no command would erase...must've exceeded some cache size limit, or the capacity of my 'erase' command. I finally went in with brogan mechanics, yep, old Dr. Brogan---(for the younger readers, that means 'kick it and see if it works'...) and went in via Explorer and started deleting by fives and tens, increasing the size of the 'delete' batch as I went. It took me an hour, but I cleaned it out, tossed off 'Pharoah''s data files, tossed off 'Patrician' and 'Caesar III' and everything else I could lay hands on, resorting to an outright delete where I couldn't get an 'uninstall' to work, then used 'System Mechanic' to go back in and clean up the loose ends in the registry and elsewhere. It was so bad the drive looked like lace during the 'defrag' operation; I ran two separate defrag programs several times, getting it all optimized, then took a bottle of eyeglass cleaner and took after the physical dirt, including the fragile laptop screen, which brightened markedly---seems it had a film of grime. Shall we say it rejuvenated the machine marvelously? I may have solved my problems. A total, including game data, uninstall of 'Railroad Tycoon' and then a reinstall produced game play without the crash, and this is my bench test---it's a demanding game, and if the computer stands up to it, it's not too badly ailing. The new battery is a plus. I know my methods aren't orthodox---using Explorer to delete a game isn't good, but when it's stuck sideways in the machine's throat and refuses to uninstall, hey, this former DOS-user has no fear. Windows has made so many users scared to death to do anything with their machines---I've talked to people who'd rather buy a new computer when it gets too full of errors. Now, I'd really love that new Dell gaming monster laptop, but it doesn't look as if I'm going to need it. I even popped the key-caps off and cleaned Ysabel-fur from around the trackpoint mouse, which helped a lot, too. Getting the long-bar keycaps back on is a bit of a challenge, and for God's sake, don't take them all off at once! One at a time is the way to proceed with that operation, but a fine brush, alcohol or eyeglass cleaner, that works---and also, please, don't do it with the machine running! But at very worst case, you know, you can always create a bootable CD, one with System files on it, and give the command "Format C," which will take your machine down to idiocy in which nothing works. To restore its intelligence, insert bootable CD, start up, load Windows (a lengthy process for which, yes, take all the Standard options if you're a novice at this), then reload all your programs, and you're back in business. I used to take my old DOS machine down once or twice a year just on general principles, to arrange the contents more to my liking; and I was a little worried about whether my manufacturer's disks gave me the bootability I needed, but Dell? No problem.//And during one lengthy defrag, we went off to the rink, where I proceeded to skate myself into exhaustion. I've picked up speed, stability, and I'm now working both legs equally, which means I'm twice as tired. This is only to the good. And in my glum mood of last entry, I forgot to mention what skating outfit I did order: it'll be long-sleeved, hunter green. Matches the lovely mustard yellow skateboard helmet I wear, but not as bad a color combination as, say, pink. Did I mention I got back down to my best weight today? The Bear's Diet is particularly good at that.
Date: 08/14/04...........54302. Saturday. No skate today, but I resolved on a 'clean sweep' afternoon. When I was a kid, I had a cleaning method in which I just grabbed everything that wasn't where it needed to be and piled it in the floor, then sat down and sorted it into stacks or took bits where they needed to be, and it still works. I now have a 'laundry' pile, and an 'I no longer need that' pile, and things look better already, though several more passes will improve things further. I may invade the living room on the same plan. The computer is working well, except for one key that's being a little sticky and will need a rework, and in general, if the weather would just improve and cool down, life would be good.
Date: 08/15/04...........54390. Sunday. The promised thunderstorms were dry ones and started fires, which have my eyes watering furiously. The whole horizon is brown with smoke---what, you ask, is a dry thunderstorm? It's one in which the rain evaporates on its way down through dry air and only the lightning reaches the ground, usually in the mountains, which are wooded, and themselves tinder-dry. You get the picture. The air just saps all strength and brightness out of the day. We did go for a skate---but Jane started having allergy which affected her ears (not good for balance), my eyes were literally pouring tears, dripping onto my shirt, and,meanwhile, it being a Sunday, the rink had acquired that creature worse than Skating Mothers, that dreaded she-entity akin to the Stage Mother: no, today, dear readers, we have the dreaded Hockey Fathers, who are so overwhelmed with having fun with their kids that they egg them on to violate every rule of direction and behavior on the list posted by the skate rental window, and smile benignly when another skater has to veer to avoid their darlings. Public Skate, which had several first-timers on the ice today, is no time or place to be doing races or body-checks.We left 40 minutes early---I was faring well enough, despite the two moving hazards, but Jane was having a rotten time with her balance.//The computer is continuing to work well, so I guess I've done myself out of that beautiful new Dell, for at least another year. I got this one, an Inspiron 8000, back in 2001, and it's quite a good machine, updated bios, still on WinME, but the Dell version of ME is pretty stable, and I know its quirks. I have the newest Windows, but haven't gotten around to installing it, which I hate to do in mid-novel, for understandable reasons, I think.//Watched a bit of the Olympics, and it's nice to catch up on athletes and sports we haven't seen for the last number of years---though I like the winter games better than the summer. I can recommend a truly odd movie: Men with Brooms, which for small-town sports culture, is a riot...and just a good human story.//Here's hoping that this next week moderates temperatures a bit: mid-August always gives us our bad weather: either we leave the airconditioners on non-stop and wrap up in the morning as if it were winter, or we turn them off for a few hours, the heat gets ahead of them, and we swelter through the evening with ice packs. One thing we can't do right now is open the windows: we have lovely 60 degree air out there at night, but it's full of smoke, and we just can't breathe that without allergy doing us in. There's a little wiggle-room in the forecast that could let temperatures moderate. And we hope they get the fires out soon: we have 6 of them to our west.
Date: 08/16/04.............54299. Monday. A little erasing as well as forward progress. It's chill in the mornings and numbingly hot by 5pm. But the weather service forecast discussion is beginning to talk about monsoonal flow (which brings water up from the southern coast) and fall patterns. Music to my ears. We've mostly been working hard and doing nothing whatever of interest else, except our skating run, which in this case was the last before they shut our rink for a week to public and club skate, in favor of the hockey school. We do have another rink in town, and we figure to try that out tomorrow. Watching the Olympics in the evening---quite a men's competition in the gymnastics. And sportsmanship, thank you. In an uncivil world, it's the best public reason for spectator sports to exist.//Re the computer, Jane and I had a discussion that my readers might be interested to investigate: the problem with the overstuffed cache hit Jane, too, both of us since we downloaded the latest Internet Explorer patch. She's on XP, I'm on ME, and it got us both: forced us to hand-delete the temporary internet files (search 'temp' in your Search function in the Start menu, and go into it via your ordinary Windows Explorer (not to be confused with Internet Explorer)----this, to prevent our machines being utterly overwhelmed by the stored internet images and other files (we use the internet heavily). I think there's a bug in the MS download that prevents the ordinary housekeeping deletion from working properly.
Date: 08/17/04.............54299. Tuesday. Well, we decided to take our first trip over to the other Spokane rink, and this is a drive clear across town; we got there, negotiated the protocols for getting time on club ice, (the Inland Northwest FSC), ---everyone was very nice---and we discovered we've become notorious since the Jo Williams competition: people over there knew us, on what grounds I'm not sure, but two women competing in the Basics is probably pretty unusual. The rink is smaller by a ten of feet or so, and all the boundary boards are miniature---where I'm used to them chest high, they were too low to use for an arm rest. In your home rink, too, the ice has certain spots you learn to look out for, the usual roughness at the Zamboni gate, the spots where skaters tend to stop and converse, which makes rough spots, the spots where the ice rises or falls slightly, due to unevenness in the floor, which means places where you skate hard and places where you lay back a little so as not to accelerate too fast for the turn...and the usual jump spots, where there are divots. At home ice, you know the other skaters' routines, so you don't wander into their path when they're setting up for a jump, either. Here, everything was new and different, different routines going on the ice, different bad spots, a startling dip in the ice at one point, and down-dropped edges you could drop or skid a blade into, as opposed to the Eagles' safe smooth transition to walls. Plus there were lots of little bumps, which really give your legs a workout---and that other bit of excitement which Eagles doesn't have nearly enough of, male figure skaters---the guys, besides being generally in great shape and worth looking at, bring a whole different dimension: they even sound different on the ice, generally crunching their way along the turns like a locomotive coming up behind you, and landing jumps that really take out a divot: and there were holes about the size and depth of a paperback novel out there. When there's a guy on the ice, you really tend to watch out for his landing-zones. Drop a skate into one of those pits, for excitement. I couldn't believe, however, that I was getting tired after 45 minutes of our hour; but so was Jane. Confirming our opinion, two of LCFSC's best skaters had come over, too, and they were tired, which tells you the ice was uncommon hard going, even for young folk with far more skill than we have. We got home and just collapsed, both of us, face down in the bean dip for a couple of hours, which I haven't done in a very long time. I'd planned to toss off a one-hour practice and go home and get some work done, but I just collapsed in general pain and exhaustion. The INFSC people must be in great condition. I was in that much pain, I think because the ice frequently (like every few feet) chattered under the blades, and the rate at which muscles have to respond accelerates as well; plus just the repeated shocks to the joints. I put two Bengay pain patches on places I won't describe and still hurt so bad I had to take heavy doses of Advil. I think we may lay out tomorrow, just to rest our battered joints...and do the work we should have done today.
Date: 08/18/04................54820. Wednesday. Work and cleaning. Jane was just too sore to confront skating on an unfamiliar rink today. We figure to lay out a couple of days and let the aches go away. The Planet Ice rink has no club skate today, which means we'd be on unfamiliar ice with the hockey players. The mind wants to go, but the body says it's going to be a difficulty. Mostly just work and work.
Date: 08/19/04................55392. Thursday. Still recuperating, working along. I suddenly realize it's account-time again. It always seems to be account-time. It's actually a few days past, for the bills, so I'd better get on it. I did get a reminder from a reader that the blog is loading very slowly due to its size, so I am going to split it. This is a very nervous-making operation, since I use Frontpage, which acts as if you're working directly onto the web, though it is actually FTP. Suffice it to say, it's a good idea to make haste very slowly when you're slicing up long files with Frontpage, and to constantly crosscheck your work with your browser, to make sure you're erasing the right thing and posting the right thing.//I bought myself a video game and discovered to my disgust that one, The Political Machine, is too information-heavy for my computer. It crashes. A lot. If you have a big enough memory, it is entertaining. I also got Railroad Tycoon III, which is a little disconcerting: much harder to manipulate than II: I'd hoped for a good game with new scenarios, and what I got is high-level graphics that make the control interface very cranky if you don't use a mouse. I can still do it, but the jury is still out. Games have gone nuts on graphics, when they could, by me, succeed quite nicely by bringing out a lot more scenarios much more quickly.
Date: 08/20/04.................55990. Friday. A lot of time spent trying to get my computer to behave. After having two games fail (a good indicator that something is amiss) and realizing I really do have the speed to come within RTIII's requirements, I decided to reload it and look for patches. What I found was within the program itself, a very nice (better than some for-sale programs I've found) troubleshooter for sound and video problems. I used it to investigate how my computer was behaving in the video department, downloaded yet one more new driver for the video, which is an Nvidia, and a good video source, and supports its products; and I adjusted some settings. Improvement. Big improvement, an encouraging improvement. I kicked 'hibernate' out as an option, went over to 'standby' as the default, got the machine to behave better on closing the lid, and what with the thorough cleaning and scrubbing of the screen, the keyboard, the chassis, and the internal purge of data-debris, it's running a lot better. My searches turned up various facts: being a PIII makes this a 'better on 98 or ME' kind of machine, and indeed, if purged of chaff, it's still pretty tough. Games are the best investment in system-stability, if you pick good ones: they don't run well if there are problems in the system---they're a mine canary in that regard, and frequently provide help or even, in the case of RTIII, little routines to help you improve your machine. You can, if you never play games, plug along for years doing one function on a machine, but if you also visit the internet, (as I assume my readers are doing), you're accumulating chaff that won't necessarily go away---chaff that one day can overwhelm other functions. I think there is a major bug in the IE5 update that doesn't allow the necessary purges of old temp files, and this is like cutting off your garbage service---ultimately the rising tide of chaff clogs everything: my manual purge really, really helped. Not to mention frequent running of the optimization utility.
Date: 08/21/04............55990. Saturday. I decided the visual clutter in my room is getting to me. Jane wanted to go to a fabric store, and while I was there, I picked out some sheer, filmy white and green tropical print meant for draperies and got enough to hang from ceiling to floor over a hundred-inch expanse. In an apartment where all the walls are unremitting vanilla (magnolia, to my UK readers), I think it's a refreshing change. A friend of mine had burlap for a wall covering, which enabled him to hang pictures and move them around without showing the nail-holes in the wall. In this case, I can hang the sheer fabric flat on the wall and treat it as wallpaper, even installing shelves right over it. I'm going to live with it a while before I figure which wall it's going on, but it's a good way to get color into a room you can't paint, and I think I've reached my limit of vanilla. You can hang pictures on the wall just as if it were wallpaper or paint, and if you have a bad wall, it can camoflage the imperfections, or the feature that's driving you crazy. It's also cheaper than wallpaper, and when it gets dirty, wash it and rehang. I did some basic cleaning, down to the baseboards, which makes the place feel better---again, using the 'clear and rearrange' method, of just moving everything into a pile, washing what can be washed, taking other things to their proper place, and creating a clean, pristine area in one alcove before moving on to the next zone. Amazing how dust accumulates in this region, and how much brighter things look when washed. That hunter green rug in the bath wasn't getting old: it was dusty, and it now has the jewel color I liked when I bought it. Just subtle changes, but cheerful. Needless to say I didn't get too much done otherwise; but the mental change wrought is very positive. Today was, they promise us, the last of the heat for the summer: the week ahead should be cool, damp, and rainy, and after the smoke of forest fires hanging like a pall over the view, this will come very welcome.
Date: 08/22/04..............56389. Sunday. This book isn't working as fast as I'd wish, but I'm making steady progress. Sometimes there's just a lot of thinking. And Jane walked into my room this morning to report her computer had given an electronic snap and quit working, just as it had before. She got it running again, got the file down, I used the housenet to swipe her entire working folder onto my computer, and then her computer decided to go on working---go figure. I think Toshiba owes her a new computer: she has a policy, and this thing has been repaired before for the same problem, to no avail, not to mention its other problems. That was our excitement for the morning.//I decided to get one more panel of the fabric, and did, making 150 inches of wall space with a filmy, tropical leaf motif that moves in the breeze. I think it's rather refreshing. I need, however, to get some light dowel or curtain rod to make a neat edge for the top.//And it rained last night! The weather has shifted toward fall: we were in the mid-90's, and now it's dropped to the mid sixties, and it feels so good, and the air is clean. The firefighters are about to beat the fires to the west of us, and the sky is a wonderful clear blue in between the rain clouds. We can breathe again.//We went to the rink for the first time since last Monday (Tuesday was at Planet Ice) and the weather change there had produced a dripping condensation everywhere: brush a rink wall, and your sleeve is dripping wet. But they were kind enough to do a new Zamboni run before the public skate, and we had good ice. I just for some reason didn't have a full hour and a half in me today---I'd forgotten my ankle band (which I use not because of an ankle weakness, but because it compresses a metatarsal weakness) and my left foot hurt; and I just ran out of steam after an hour, though Jane continued to skate. In my own defense, I'm working on stroking, speed, and crossovers, plus two-footed turns, which is more strenuous than edge-work, and I think I flat wore myself out.//And on the way home, I was feeling sorry for myself at the thought of cooking supper, when Jane asked, "Are you all right?" I answered immediately, "No," and dived into the turn lane in front of our favorite restaurant. She laughed, and we had a good supper out of one entree, not to mention the garlic bread---my greatest sin, not to mention the salad, either. I'm going to pay for it on the scales tomorrow, but it was a welcome change, and we didn't have to clean the kitchen.
Date: 08/23/04..............56389. Monday. Still rainy and cool and wonderful. Of course I paid for yesterday on the scales---up half a pound; but not too bad. Today we had a chiropractic appointment, which I did need: that ache that accumulates between the shoulders needed it. And this is, of course, the day that we stop at Cougar Country, which is a wonderful college-area hamburger stand for our every-two-weeks brush with sin and carbs. Huckleberries are in season, and they do a huckleberry-peanut butter shake which is to die for. Hamburger with half the bun, no fries, and our small-sized shake. We made it back in time to go to the rink, which was enveloped in haze all about the glass barriers above the boards, and with a kind of a mist overhanging the ice. Had a really good skate, able to negotiate a third of a circle on the outside edge, on either foot, which is a great improvement in balance. Watched the absolutely crazed Olympic gymnastics (mens') and are amazed: clearly strange scoring isn't limited to figure skating. I do feel sorry for the athletes.// Postscript: And at about midnight, Jane invaded my room to tell me she'd successfully gotten her malfunctioning computer to find a previous Restore point. This is very good news. This solves the instability: it doesn't address the electric pop and snap it's emitted on two occasions. I still think Toshiba should give her another computer.
Date: 08/24/04.............56389. Tuesday. Up at 4am, because our two cats decided to have a noisy dispute in my room...lucky me; and after that I couldn't really get back to sleep, because I ordinarily don't get up until 8am, but I have a medical exam at 8:15 today---right? This has been set up for weeks; it's hard to get in for an appointment; and I daren't really go back to sleep. So I drag myself out of bed at 7:30, get down to the clinic for what should be the doctor's first appointment of the day---which is why I asked for this slot. Three other people show up and get in ahead of me. Sigh. So finally the nurse calls my name, she immediately asks, would you believe, about the cat bite? Now, when I called to set up the appointment in July, they'd asked about the March cat bite. Once before that, when I'd called sometime in June about an allergy prescription, they'd asked was it a follow-up to the cat bite? Now here we are in late August and they're still convinced this appointment is about the March cat bite, which they'd refused to treat in the first place, which was why I ended up with an IV in the emergency clinic downstairs for two days back in March. I informed them no, this was supposed to be a regular exam, and if it was about the cat bite, I'd have died of Pasturella in early March, because they'd sent me away. They assured me they'd immediately expunge the cat bite from my records---(they'd said this in June and July) but no, this couldn't be an annual exam because the doctor only saw regular illness cases between eight and nine o'clock. Well, what do you think I wanted the appointment for, since I'm not sick? Of course---the effin' cat bite. So I had a fairly useless appointment, got set up for another, an actual exam, sometime in January, and if they tell me about a cat bite then, there'll be newspaper headlines about a madwoman at a Spokane clinic. I missed my entire morning for this absurd and expensive affair, got home and collapsed and slept, and blew the whole day. I'd moved our figure skating lesson because of this appointment, but we went to the rink anyhow for the public skate, where we had one of those great joys, a teenaged hockey wanna-be in partial gear who learned how to skate fast but never learned to stop except by hitting the boards or skidding on his knees the width of the rink---this, in a public skate with 5 year old first-timers on the ice and several of us figure skaters trying to do finesse patterns. Jane warned him off, another figure skater physically took a puck away from him---an absolute no-no in a public skate. The hockey skaters on the ice at the public skate were complaining about his recklessness, which says something. I was ready to light into him next, but he took a hard fall and finally calmed down a bit. A major case of "What are they thinking?" I did make an experiment, substituting thin, stretchy sports tape for the foot wrap, and I think this may work out well: it's lighter, doesn't stuff my boot, supports better, and if I get the tension right, this has possibilities.
Date: 08/25/04.............56403. Wednesday. Ever have one of those days when the moment you start to make progress, the phone rings? I don't talk on the phone, except to keep in touch with family. I don't converse on the phone. I don't tend to get phone calls. But every time I started a sentence, the phone went off, everyone from family to the pharmacy. Five calls. Absolutely incredible. And ever since the weather turned cold, I just want to hibernate---can't wake up easily in the morning. The good news is that I'm sleeping at night. But I got frustratingly little work done---you can only start a scene so many times before you begin to lose your focus. // And meanwhile, Jane disjointed her toe, an early morning collision with a doorstop. She's done it before, and can reseat it---but it was pretty bad, and it hurts a lot. And in spite of the broken toe, we did have a skating lesson: the word for the day was 'arm position'. My balance is good enough I can slop about with my arms in any old position and not fall down, but I'm taking lessons from a precision expert, who doesn't intend for her students to slop about the ice. And she's right. When she repositions an arm or a shoulder, funny thing, my balance becomes incredibly stable even on the outside edges. We're doing a sort of figure eight, which is change of feet and edges, and doing that maneuver with precision is all arm movement. Try standing on the outside of one foot and putting one arm out front, one back, shoulders aligned with your foot, and then canting your off hip up and throwing both your shoulders back. Do this near a wall, in case. It's counter-instinctive: you don't want to do it. But it is the way, as our instructor informs us, the Russians get their pretty outside edges. Jane calls it terrifying. It's a lot like the position a fencer assumes, give or take the canted hip and the outside edge. //Just to make things interesting, they're waterproofing the apron of the other rink, meanwhile, and the fumes are horrid, even with the outside doors wide open. The fumes get into the rink we're using and affects the ears, and balance, not a good thing. They assure us this is the last coat. I certainly hope so.//I've also decided to try that Cortislim stuff---as per the TV commercials. We'll see if it works to get me off this weight plateau.
Date: 08/26/04...............56904. Thursday. Trying to get the house clean...and the cool weather has been wonderful. I've still got so many things piled up to do---not to mention the imminent taxes and all of that. The only way I stay sane for writing and keep my head clear is to procrastinate certain things, not even thinking about them, but that means I wake up to a crunch imminent, and it is, now. Plus this next week is my birthday---I've been so busy it's been a very small item on the horizon. The good news is I was down a pound, a new low. That's encouraging.//Went to the rink for the skating lesson we'd had to postpone from Tuesday because of the doctor's appointment, and very little speed, but a whole lot of finesse work.//Then off to the hair salon, to become civilized for another month---a good haircut this time. That's nice.// Then we decided to go back to the rink to practice all the advice from our two instructors. We worked out for another hour or so, and finally my bad foot gave out---Jane's broken one held up fine. I'm going to have to investigate her padding-method.//Home again, and an evening watching the Olympics.
Date: 08/27/04..............57392. Friday. Well, the weight loss was too good to be true: up half a pound. But this kind of fluctuation is minor. Just both of us are up, and we can't figure how we sinned yesterday, given we worked out twice for a total of two and a half hours. The good news is the new haircut stands up to the helmet pretty well.//The weather has warmed (well, to the high seventies), the sky has cleared, and the ragweed has bloomed. Both of us are wiping our eyes and sneezing. We've reluctantly sealed up the apartment again and turned on the air conditioning, not because of the temperatures, but because of that nasty weed. With this kind of encouragement, however, the rain and the warm spell, it may give a burst of bloom and be done with it, the whole species: that would suit me.//I was so tired, today, that I failed to put out anything to defrost for supper after skating; and we went out to Tomato Street, which will really do for my weight in the morning. The good news is that at our worst, we each ate one entree and ordered a second bread basket. At our moderate phase, we ate half the entree and that much bread. Now we're quite satisfied, even a little overstuffed, sharing one entree and eating half one serving of bread. So even in our 'bad' moments, we're much better than previously, and that's slowly adding up---or subtracting, as the case may be. The wonderful thing is that we've been on this diet for months, are still losing, and take our minor carbohydrate lapses as a treat, then get right back on good behavior, which is a lot better than we've been able to do on low fat, (lost nothing) or vegetables (lasted a month) or even pasta (lost nothing). One of the nice things is that if we really go crazy for want of a dessert, fresh berries and whipped cream made with Splenda is always a very happy option. Stay tuned on the Cortislim. It'll take a bit to give it a fair trial.
Date: 08/28/04............58309. Saturday. Clear sky, a few wisps of cloud to the north, but not that hot. And my weight is up another whole pound. But deservedly so. And only a pound, and it was fun. I needed a break from the diet, and most of all from cooking---I do the lion's share of the household cooking and shopping for food, and some days I just don't feel inspired by anything in the refrigerator. Today, besides writing, we wrestled with accounts. Jane's justly chiding me about not opening mail from the bank---and of course we need to see to the accounts much more frequently than we do: balancing checkbooks is not our favorite thing, sort of reckoning with how bad we've been. We're both still suffering from ragweed---Jane's eyes are pouring, her nose is stuffy, and she's not in her best mood. I'm using Flonase, and besides, after seven years of allergy shots, I'm proof against some things that we encountered in Oklahoma: I suppose the effect of those is still holding. I'd love to fling my window wide and enjoy the breeze on a moderate night and morning, but Jane just chokes on the pollen, and that's not good. So we go on using the airconditioning.//Roast for supper---I save this dish for Saturdays, which are an at-home, low-key day. Stick it in the oven, forgetaboutit, and supper happens, if your appetite can endure the aroma starting an hour before dinner. It's also minimal cleanup, which is good. Totally within the diet, even better. //And the evening is spent watching the Olympics. Note: the Mariners won their doubleheader against Kansas City. This is an improvement on their record.//Meanwhile the book is beginning to show signs of gathering speed, and speed would be very welcome. I'm only an entire month behind schedule, and only about half finished. You haven't seen me yet during one of those stretches where writing comes easily. This isn't it. But it will come. One of the best cues to this is that I'm beginning to think about it all the time: impossible to make any progress when the story is Teflon and the mind slides off it on every approach. Now we're beginning to get traction, and I'm starting to think about it several times an hour even when I'm not at the keyboard. This is the way it ought to be.//I forgot to mention the totally ridiculous accident I had on Thursday. Would you believe I fell on my thumbnail? How does one fall on one's thumb, you ask? Well, I was skating along talking to our young instructor, forgot I was on an outside edge at the time, and missed my balance as I turned my head and just fell over sideways---I don't even remember hitting the ice, except that I landed on my left thumbnail, end-on, and produced the most remarkable bruise, all on the tip of the nail. It's quite painful, andit bent the nail in half. But the nail itself may never even break: it was that high up. So I'm still nursing that silly mistake---which is a great nuisance when trying to cook. Seems I put my thumb into more dishes than I'd have thought, and keeping the Bandaid out of the soup is not easy. The good news is, I hit absolutely nothing else. Go figure. Sometimes you wish there were instant replay, out of mere curiosity.
Date: 08/29/04............58929. Sunday. Too darned hot. It's back to summer again. Writing, clean-up, a little erasing of scenes now invalid...some bits I wish I could have kept, but if they aren't in the story, they aren't there. Someone asked how one organizes a chapter---and since I just reached a chapter-end, let me explain: chapters are miniature novels, with a few significant differences. First of all, they need to come frequently enough to afford a reader a convenient gulp of information. Second, unlike a novel, they ought to start and end on a high note of interest...you want the reader to go on reading, or at least to be reluctant to put the book down and turn out the lights. They're between 5000 and 10000 words, about like a short story, though some writers favor much shorter ones, 2000 to 5000---which is particularly appropriate for young readers. You want a problem, a setting, a resolution leading to the next problem---a resolution that isn't quite the answer. That's why you have a following chapter, eh? That's the short course on chapters, for those of you trying your own hand. No big mystery, just a set of rhythms like a heartbeat within the book, rise and fall, rise and fall, but always the intimation of the next beat...//We went skating----two young skateboarders were attempting their moves on the ice, like doublefooted jumps, without quite being able to stand up; they were asking me about helmets, and I was advising them to bring their skateboarding helmets, when one leaned too far forward on his skates and fell, quite a nasty crack on the chin, just standing still. I felt very bad for him, and hope they didn't have to take stitches. Myself, I'm working hard on edges, and most of all on hand position. I'd been skating hockey fashion, with the arm swinging. Our instructor put the kibosh on that: steady, quiet arms in exactly the right position to maintain balance---and that takes some muscle-memory, which has to be trained in. The good news is that the arms are slimming down and the muscle is building, just from that kind of exercise. The way my legs will stay overheated for hours after getting off the ice---well, now it's the arms, and the pesky back side of the arm in particular---that spot that's just so hard to exercise without overbuilding. This is promising. But I still haven't lost any weight.
Date: 08/30/04...........58929. Monday. Still too hot. And we had to rush off to the rink for a lesson, which went pretty well, though our instructor spent the lion's share of time with Jane, who's working on a very difficult item. Remember when you learned to float on your back in the swimming pool, and they assured you you'd stay up and float if you just threw your head and shoulders back? Kind of counter-instinctive, but correct. Well, what Jane is working on is the same thing in vertical, on ice, while gliding on one foot: her balance needs to be canted toward the 'empty' side, the one without a second foot to catch you if you bobble; and she needs to fling her shoulders into that proposition---into empty air behind her---with faith that physics and motion will keep her from falling backward. It's a very scary thing. I can do it for, oh, about a foot or so.//We went after groceries and prescriptions, then collapsed for thirty minutes before going back to the rink for the afternoon skate---having decided that not one creative thing was going to get done today: if I miss my morning writing slot, it's hard, nigh on impossible, to get up steam for later in the day. And I did miss that slot. The good news is that the rink is about to cycle over to winter schedule, next week, and this will be the last of the crowded ice with young kids every which way. The rink will go to a noon public skate, which lets us get some work done in the mornings, and then go to the rink, which, more good news, won't have the aspiring hockey players on it, because they'll be in school. Club ice will be late in the afternoon, to catch the school-aged skaters. LIfe will become more sedate.//Oh, and the good news: I hit the lowest weight I've been in decades, and this morning I fit into a size 12 stretch Gloria Vanderbilt---which, considering I was wearing men's 46 waist jeans this last October (I stand five foot seven) is quite a nice thing. I won't go too much below a size 12, even if I lose the 40 more pounds I want to lose---it's the height thing. The smallest size I ever wore was a 10, back when I was downright skinny, so thin it hurt to sit in a chair---this, after grad school finals. I don't want to go that low. So I have achieved part of my goal---not in all brands, and only in stretch jeans, but hey, it's not stretching that much, and I'm not through yet. The sad part of this I'm having to get rid of all my collection of Mariner shirts---some were XL, most were L, and I'm headed for M. Some of these are very hard to part with, but, "I'll just have to go to a game and get my size M, now," she says, not shedding any tears.
Date: 08/31/04..........59203. Tuesday.....a little progress, and the day before my birthday, but the day we'd settled on as the best to hold a little celebration at the Tomato Street bar, gathering up two of our friends from the rink. A good time was had by all---I indulged, shall we say, and had a spoonful of free brownie with whipped cream which the Street provided for the occasion---shared amongst four, it wasn't too sinful. I had lovely cards, and Jane gave me a prezzie for the occasion--- Now, you have to understand that my peculiar totem at the rink is a flying pig: as in, "When pigs fly..." I'll do the quad lutz. Second fact: a soaker is what you put on your blades for storage as opposed to walking about. The hard-surfaced guards are for walking. A soaker is a stretchy bit of foam and velour to sop up extra water and prevent rust. Well, they do make animal-headed soakers. And Jane had gotten the pig ones and added little wings, to the delight of all attending. And silly me, I exited holding the bag with the prezzie, which I hadn't come in with, and left my purse on the chair. Fortunately our waitress tucked it safely away, so we'll get it tomorrow. I'm inclined to remember, numerically, the number of items I brought into a place, and if I get one extra, I'm likely to exit still with the same number, and leave something. But it was a great evening, and the purse is safe, and I love the pigs.
Date: 09/01/04...........59872. Wednesday. My birthday. And yes, we went skating. Weight, after last night? Up a pound. I got a little work done, then indulged myself and played a video game for an hour---we'd done our celebrating, but we did go back to Tomato Street, not only to collect the purse, but to have supper. We also got a call from Lynn Abbey, down in Florida, in the projected target zone of Hurricane Frances---we're worried about her, but she's battening down. She's hoping the power stays on, to keep the roof pumps going, but she's been through Oklahoma tornadoes and is weather savvy---unlike some snowbirds that move into hurricane territory without a clue. At least her region is one of the zones they're sending evacuees to, which means the experts think this is better than other places. They say the storm is the size of Texas. From Lynn: "El Paso should reach us Saturday night, and we'll see Dallas by noon the next day, with Houston by evening..." We're hoping her roof holds out. I tell you, tornadoes are something you can kind of eyeball and figure, and you stay prepared for them in the sense of always knowing what the weather is doing; but they're at most a few hours and then they're through, with the odds fairly well in your favor that it will hit empty country. You don't really need much in the way of survival supplies, because if it hits you it will probably miss the grocery store and vice versa. Hurricanes, once they're coming toward you, don't give you much in the way of odds: the biggest tornado is a mile wide with winds up to 300mph and maybe a couple of inches of rain, with hail. The hurricane out there in the Caribbean is about 85 miles wide at the core with winds of 145mph: more diffuse, but far, far wetter, like 10 to 20 inches falling from the sky if it slows down in your vicinity---truly a couple of the planet's great spectacles, but neither one something you'd like to go out and see in action. Keep fingers crossed for Florida in general. Charley was enough.//Then---then, my birthday present, and the night. One of my prezzies---understand, my futon, while solid and in good shape, is a bit on the hard side, and has the fold-mark right where your back would like a little support. So I'd asked for one of those 'feather' toppers, which comes now in a non-allergy form. Let me tell you, it's great. Like sleeping on a large, well-channeled feather pillow, with back support. Unfortunately I failed to account for Her Furry Grace Ysabel, who suddenly, at bedtime, realized that a major change had happened to my bed. So did the Black Prince, who deserted Jane's room to come and investigate the newly poofy bed, which Ysabel---already distraught with Change, that most uncatly of things---was obliged to defend. This went on for hours, with caterwauls (Efanor sings,) Ysabel tramping about in possession of the new and dubious territory, and frequently requiring demonstrations at the scratching post---("I can scratch on your post, yes, I can!" "Well, I'll do it last---take that! Nyaah!" "Yowl!" "Thump!" And back onto the bed.) I still don't know what fell over so noisily at 3am. Finally, at 8 am, Ysabel settled down, but she's still gingerly walking on the poofy surface---sure, I think, that a cat could vanish into it.
Date: 09/02/04..........59933. Thursday. Work, work, erase and write...not much in the way of news. We're of course paying the price for the Tomato Street visit---my weight is up. What could I expect? And I worked on signing the books that are in boxes too heavy to get up the stairs---I got nearly done, but the wind picked up. And just as Jane began making progress on her book, the main computer hit a spate of blue screens.
Date: 09/03/04.........59920. Friday. Making progress backwards. I decided that we've just had too much clutter around here, and Jane is so downhearted about the computer, which she's really better at than I am, that I decided to take on the housecleaning solo, by my own methods, which is to start with one corner of a room and to spend several days working my way across it, getting every last speck of dust and every item that's out of place. I reclaimed about 200 square feet for civilization, clean enough for a white-glove visit, which included the cat-ahem-accommodation, the sewing table, and some of the house plants. It's really made the place much nicer. Jane meanwhile has taken on the computer, determined to make Norton work, which it is currently refusing to do, insisting there are files in use. I offer no advice: Norton and I have old history, and I've found more ways to mess that program up than you'd believe.//We're keeping an eye on Hurricane Frances, with concerns for Lynn. Nothing we can do from here except keep that computer alive so we can get a message from her.//I finally got the last of the boxes signed, but there was something in one that cut my fingertip quite badly---I was dripping blood all over the parking lot---so whoever gets those books probably gets bloodstains. Regrets for that. And I still can't figure what cut my finger. But I did get the last of them. And wouldn't you know, the finger I sliced is the one I use for the touchpoint pointing device on the computer. Mortally wounded, I tell you! Hors de combat! But now we can get these boxes mailed as soon as we can get a post office run organized.//
Date: 09/04/04........60390. Saturday. Late enough in the day to do the update, I suppose.// Ysabel is still dubious about the bed, but I note her sleeping in the middle of it, at the moment,which may betoken a quieter night than the last. I've had a pretty productive day, what with the writing, Jane battling the computer --- running Norton from disk seems to have helped--- and I swore the files it couldn't deal with were its own! But Jane's probably right and they're native Windows files: she's right more than I am with the computer, and that's why she takes over when it screws up. I've made another 50 square feet of progress, but I haven't wanted to disturb Jane's concentration on the misbehaving computer, so I've kept it quiet.//And I've been policing my own computer, figuring out why it's slowing down: WinME is evidently bad at recovering unused memory, and certain programs can slow operations down considerably, so I've been trying to tinker with a memory reclaiming software. And I have 256k of memory, which is less than I'd like, by about half, but all that this machine can support, by all that I can figure. So far nothing has blown up or blue-screened.// Kind of a windy, cool day, which is ever so nice.//My weight still hasn't settled down to its low-water mark again, but we're working zealously on our diet and mostly being good. The sliced finger is incredibly sore, to be such a piddling cut. I feel it every time I move the mouse. But at least those boxes are finally done. And I did get the end of month tax items done.// The hurricane is closing in on Lynn's place, meanwhile, and it isn't moving fast enough. There's going to be a lot of rain. I hope she's battened down safely.
Date: 09/05/04.......60802. Sunday. Well, I finally bit on the MP3 player business: I don't like music downloading, since songs are intellectual property, and I won't do freebies, but Real Harmony offers a per-instance, per track paid download that's compatible with my little player (an I-Rock). I decided to look up some of my old favorites, and I bought about 20 songs, which will satisfy me for months, since they're precisely the ones I like (ranging from Tom Jones "Delilah" to "Convoy", "Ghost Riders" and "Bad," not to mention "Pipeline.") What they all have in common is that they're fit for the rink, and their volume will blot out the car commercials from the bubblegum radio station the rink favors. To my own drummer, I. When quizzed I usually say I don't like music, which saves time, but what I really don't like is buying an album: there's always one dog on it that makes it impossible for me to enjoy the album---rather than not liking music, I'd be more truthful to say I react strongly to music I don't like, or I try to tune it out, and I react very happily to music that I do like. And while I have no rhythm whatsoever, and do not enjoy trying to dance, I can be badly thrown by a piece that's out of rhythm with what I'm trying to do. I'd say mostly my music is pretty self-involved, pretty microfocussed, and pretty much in the hindbrain all at once, with loud bass, few vocals, and lots of volume. But being able to buy things track at a time is a very good thing, since my "I adore-it's" for a given album is usually one or two. Now my dark secret is out: my musical taste runs from "Please, Mr. Custer" to "Thriller." And I got the cranky little recorder to work: it's far more machine than I wanted, but it was cheap, compared to the IPods, and uses a drag and drop interface with the online music service, so I can't screw that up too badly. I accidentally put it on "hold", accidentally turned it into an fm radio, recorded the wrong kind of files on it, cleared those off, and managed to get my music on it and get it turned on---the instructions for turning the player 'on' come on page 57 of the instructions, under "Advanced Operations." There is something wrong with this picture.// My own guitar playing is on hold pending healing of the afflicted finger, which is on my fingering hand. Sigh. // Meanwhile I found a very nice screensaver at Nexus.com, a thing called "plasma", which is just colored lights. And meanwhile, too, Jane has managed to get the main computer fixed. Hurrah! Also on the computer front, I decided to double my RAM for this machine, which is 256 and falling behind most modern applications, which, if they're memory-sloppy, eat up my available RAM and slow my machine way down. I loaded up Belarc Adviser (which will tell you what your system is like and even what's been done to it and what's loaded), [available as a free download at belarc.com] and then I went to Crucial.com for memory prices. I have the slots, and the memory's cheaper than the ongoing aggravation, so I've ordered entirely new memory, for a total of 512. This should put me in a better mood and jazz up my aging computer for another year or so. For those of you who think about performing this operation on your own laptop or desktop, it's really a piece of cake [she says recklessly] and Crucial will include instructions on how to install it. The only thing I would advise is that you back up completely!, clear your work space, never use a hammer to get anything into or out of place, and read your instructions top to bottom before starting. Also, look up "installing laptop memory" on Yahoo---you can get some online instruction with photos of how it's done.//We're still worried about Lynn: her district is pretty well smack in the path, and we hope her roof holds up. No word yet. And TS Ivan is now Hurricane Ivan, headed on pretty much the same track as Frances. FOOTNOTE: We did get a call through to Lynn, and she says outside of being in the dark with no power, she and her cat came through it fine. She said she's opened a window to get a little air movement, and otherwise, it's hot and incredibly humid. They're hoping for an overcast day tomorrow, because if the sun comes out on all that water, they're going to be in a steam bath.
Date: 09/06/04.........60830. Monday. One of those days. It turned off a little warm, I didn't sleep well, and I haven't been worth a thing all day. It's Labor Day, which in past years I spent at the World Conventions, but it's just gotten harder and crazier for a writer to attend. I wish everyone well who is there, but the logistics are just too hard for us, with family obligations to make cross country trips at least twice a year. I just can't do it.//I don't know where the rest of the day went, except I spent a significant struggle trying to get my hard disk defragged.//We did go down to the Riverpark to the Pig Out in the Park festival, (the regional restaurant festival) hoping a) not to yield to temptation with all the food smells and b) that there'd be significant numbers of booths for pretty things---it's the bazaar aspect we were after. But we exited not having bought anything, and having gotten just a little overheated in the sun. We went to the downtown mall to have a look in the local shops, just to see what's there for fall---two women who've lost beaucoup weight are interested---and we were dismayed to find out that it's not fall colors, it's funeral colors. I mean, I have a few Goth outfits myself, if I put things together, but I wanted coppers and bronzes and reds and oranges, maybe some forest greens, and it's all cement gray and black and muted rose and muted purple with gray. Grim, grim, grim. We went to another shop. More dark gray. I felt depressed just looking at it. For this, I diet? No way. No sale. I'll buy white and use packets of Rit Dye, if I have to. We thought about going to a movie, but didn't see one we wanted, and finally went to a mall restaurant and saved me the necessity of cooking this evening, which pretty well sums up Labor Day---except we'd counted on going to the rink tomorrow, only to discover that the public skate doesn't start until Wednesday. Sigh. But they're gearing up to start the fall schedule, which will bring the second rink back into operation, which we look forward to.
Date: 09/07/04.......60943. Tuesday. Well, off to the chiropractor, and back again, a lengthy drive reading Patrick O'Brian's Treason's Harbor, which keeps us from temper at the idiots who pass us in the hills at 60 (the limit) and then drive at 58....and one idiot who is now deaf in one ear, who passed us on a hill, where we and an opposing car both had to brake to save this fellow the consequences of crazily attempting to pass a truck freighting a water tank. A two lane road requires special driving skills, especially in the hills, and it's a very dangerous road. One hopes that fellow is thinking about what he did.// Meanwhile, weight is holding steady, weather is just a shade too warm for comfort, and we did find out that, while there's no public skating today, the club has ice. We decided to go have a crack at said club ice, which had just been gone over by some very large fellows, who may have been our professional hockey players. They certainly chewed up the ice. The Zamboni then dry-scraped the ice and resurfaced in a second pass, and the ice still looked (and felt) like a moonscape, despite this double pass. We gave it a try, nonetheless, and we can say we didn't fall down, and I can say we certainly would have a few months ago. So that's an improvement. The club's expert skaters were out there, going so fast that they blew right over the deep wrinkles, landing doubles without breaking anything---truly amazing. This led me to think if I were to go really fast the ice might smooth out---but then I could get blitzed by one of the fast-movers. So I kept it quiet, and just practiced edges on this wrinkly surface. Meanwhile they're starting the process of icing the number two rink, which is interesting: the cooling pipes are charged up and running, and the place has been hosed down, just acquiring a little initial frost in the high spots. When they get level ice, on go the emblems. We'll be interested to see how it looks tomorrow. //So having not broken our necks, we're just takin