they must need bears

Good run this morning, or at least the first half was good, and the second half was acceptable. The uphill mile out in13:35, and I started running half a block early because I had the opportunity to jaywalk, due to traffic patterns. I got a late start today because I slept in until 8 (I've gotten addicted to Thursday night homicide documentaries on the Murder Channel. There's one pair of cops whose names I really need to steal and use in something.) but it's rainy, so though it was humid, it wasn't too hot.

The mile out was mostly easy and comfortable--I didn't even really notice I was running until the last eighth, and only the last tenth--coincidentally, some of the steepest uphill--was hard. While I was flopped down on the stone steps at the park entrance to gasp like a landed fish and listen to my heart thump, a nice Yankee in a pickup truck pulled over to shout and see if I was okay. (I said, "Yes, thank you for asking!") Nice guy; I'm glad he didn't actually discover a body on his way to work today.

Then I walked the half-mile around the park in 8:22, stretched out, and did intervals home, because either my allergies were acting up or my cardiopulmonary fitness was inadequate to the task (I was wheezing and coughing.) Because I only ran about half the distance, the trip back took 14:58.

I'm going to blame it on allergies, because I did well on the way out, and my entire neighborhood is fragrant of lilacs and pungent with marigolds currently. (I'm particularly enamored of a the dusty-purple-and-green four-color Victorian (It's not a Queen Anne: it's the other less fussy kind, without all the gingerbread) on the corner, about whose foundations some genius has planted lilacs and deep, deep purple irises that pick up all the colors of the paint and trim.

My left shoulder is still unhappy, which interferes with the climbing and archery both (I was having one of my best shooting nights ever last night, but my arm tired really quickly), but the left big toe which has been bothering me was very well behaved today. It was present, but not painful, and I'm calling that a win.

Last night, there were bats in the twilight. I like bats.

164.9 miles to Lothlorien.

According to the high-tech bathroom scale this morning, I am 239 lbs (17 stone 1 pound, because for some unknown reason it freaked out and gives me my weights in British now, and I can't make it go back). I've actually gained about twenty pounds (I was at about 15.13 last October, and I peaked up to 17.7, but some of that was bloooatttt.) since I started climbing (I'm a mesomorph, and I put on muscle like nobody's business given half a chance. Unfortunately, I'm also Ukrainian and have had a couple of bouts with crash weight loss due to major illness, and my body is very adamant about hanging onto those energy reserves In Case of Famine.) I'm still wearing the same jeans size I was in November, however, and if anything they're a little looser, and I think some of the fluff is starting to come off now finally. Which would be nice, because it's really not helping me on the overhangs. 

For those of you playing along at home, by the way, I'm around a size sixteen currently. (I have the bone structure of a plowhorse and ginormous tits, and start to look awkwardly thin and feel frail if I drop below 160 or so. If I'm in muscle, I should weigh around 175. So yes, of course, all the sports I love are the ones where it pays to be light and quick and strong for your size. Go figure.)

Now, I'm going to shower and make tea and toast myself a bagel and spend the rest of the day working on Seven for a Secret, because I have eaten my live frog and have no other plans, and nothing worse is likely to happen all day.

I've been awake since four AM, because the house across the street is burning down. (ETA: the reporter and the refugees are on my front lawn in that live shot.)

Actually, at this point, I have to say, the house across the street was burning down, as the good offices of the West Hartford Fire Department have arrested this development in progress. (This is, yes, what I pay my taxes for.) And it doesn't appear, from the vantage of my front windows, that anyone was injured. However, it was pretty darn spectacular for a bit there, with flames through the third story and firefighters scrambling around chainsawing holes in the roof of a hundred-year-old three-family.

This is the house with the extremely annoying and loud deterrent system, which tends to announce BURGLARY! BURGLARY! BURGLARY! in stentorian tones every time a cat crosses the yard. Which is why I missed the first five minutes of fun, because I thought it was just the usual late-night loudness. But then I heard the sirens--we're just around the corner from the fire department--and realized I should probably get up and put my pants on and close the windows.

And comfort the cat, who does not like chainsaws.

And now I am trying to decide whether it would be more productive to go for a walk, go back to bed, or try to get some work done, since it appears the apocalypse has been averted for the time being. I think coffee, a hot shower, and work are winning, because while I am still sleepy I'm not actually all that tired, and the sun is coming up, and I think it would annoy the nice firefighters less if I didn't traipse through where they are trying to work today.

Also, there's that toe I'm supposed to be going easy on. And the cat says her feet are cold, and can I please sit down so she can put them on me?

As a reminder, if anybody in the Midwest wants to come see me, I will be at WisCon the weekend after this one coming up, and I will be the Guest of Honor at Duckon (Chicago) and Fourth Street Fantasy (Minneapolis) in the middle weeks of June. I am moved to mention this because Fourth Street has just moved their pre-reg deadline back to May 31. truepenny will be my date for both cons, so you can rely on the full magnificence of the Mole And Bear Show in all its questionable glory.

Fourth Street is looking suspiciously as though it will be an unofficial Shadow Unit convention, as the whole crew except stillsostrange will be there, and WisCon will have me, truepenny, and stillsostrange. (But no coffeeem or shetterly.)

Someday we will all be in the same place at the same time, and there may be a singularity.

tammy212 has just said a number of honest and powerful things about women of color and the current state of feminism. They're things that need to be heard, and I agree with them.

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Last night on the way to climbing, I nearly hit a wild turkey on Route 17 in Portland. It ran across the road well in front of me, but because my visual recognition sensors insisted on recognizing the silhouette of snaky neck, darting head, long powerful legs ending in heavy claws, tapered body, and stiff, pointed tail as Velociraptor, I disbelieved and--for something like three fourths of a second, failed to hit the brake.

I'm used to seeing photos of turkeys displaying, or (in person) turkeys in flight. Those do not trigger my brain's pattern-matcher to say DINOSAUR! quite so strongly as this did.

I still managed to dodge it, in part because it quickly realized its peril and flew out of the way (wings spread, it no longer was so obviously a feathered dinosaur), but still. Quite the experience.

Apparently, with balanced neurochemistry comes also LJ-spamming. Sorry 'bout that.

Good running day today: Made the (uphill) mile out in 16:04 including a pause for street-crossing, and jogged the whole thing except the first two blocks. Walked a half mile around the park in 8:56 (taking my time), stretched for five minutes, and ran the (downhill) mile back in 13:31. I had to drop to a walk for a tenth of a mile breather on the way back, but I made it up at the end, so I still ran 9/10 of the mile, and actually hit a pretty good spot of competence for about a block at the end there. A tenth of a mile of feeling pretty good! That's not to be scoffed at!

It was raining steadily on the way out, broken sun through the overcast on the way back. The dogwoods are in full bloom and the lilacs are starting--didn't those used to be May/June flowers?

Running in the rain is so much easier and nicer than running when it's sunny out. This will improve as the trees along my route leaf out, but for the time being, I need to get out earlier in the morning, dammit.

After Sunday's climbing (sent a 5.4 that was actually more like twenty-five feet of 5.6 and then twenty-five feet of 5.4; flamed out spectacularly fifteen or twenty feet up a 5.7+, flamed out less spectacularly maybe 25 feet up on a 5.6 with a chimney, due to the fact that my toes hurt so much I couldn't put weight on them any more) I came home and slept from 10 pm to 8:30 the next morning, which is unheard of for me.

So I couldn't fall asleep until 1 or 2 last night, and though I did wake up at six this morning, but since I had had a triggery night of hypervigilance and kept waking up every time anybody in the entire apartment building got a drink of water, I decided to pull the cat over my head and go back to sleep for another two hours.

Somebody from Massachusetts recently had a rather spectacular single-car accident where I enter the park. I can tell he was from Massachusetts, because he left his license plate behind. Sadly, he also shattered an old granite curb and took out two or three of the old Victorian neighborhood's beautiful slate paving blocks, which means the broken ones will be replaced with cement eventually. Entropy makes me sad.

Climbing last night was less than spectacular. I managed two 5.6s on the slab (one of them, the last, with a lot of pathetic flail at the top) and a 5.6 on the wall, and quit after that because my tennis elbow (which, in true me fashion, I gave myself while wielding a sledgehammer on my 35th birthday, go me) was acting up. Climbing two days in a row? Still brutal. (You should see the bruises on my knees from wedging my leg into that chimney on Sunday.)

Today's work is varied. I need to finish the final or nearly-final draft of "Overkill," get started on the new Secrit Projekt (tentatively titled, "The Red in the Sky is Our Blood") the opening paragraph of which came to me on my run, do laundry, blurb two things, pay a credit card bill, join the Ragged Mountain Foundation, file some tax paperwork, call my lawyer, email my agent, and make bread. Maybe I will try cvillette's pretzel bread recipe, though I have to buy butter if I am going to do that.

Full day. I guess that means I should get started, huh?

I missed pixel-stained technopeasant wretch day (observed). However, since you can find a great deal of my work online for free here at my webpage, and of course there's the Shadow Unit project, in all its guiltware glory, which is not just me but also Amanda Downum, Sarah Monette, Emma Bull, and Will Shetterly!

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So I managed my first 5.7 without a single fall yesterday. I'm pretty proud of myself. It was on the slab wall, but I did it. Also, my endurance is improving--I can keep coming back at something now after I've failed it repeatedly, so I got a second 5.7. (I've sent this one before, but I did it much better this time. Though with several rests, and a bunch of falls at the crux.) I need to go back and try that pink 5.7 again (the first one I ever got, which I still can't do without rests and a couple of falls) and also the blue route I haven't quite got, even though I think I know how to do it. Knowing and being able, alas, are not always the same thing. (Also, there's a black 5.7 that I couldn't doo before because the overhang kicked my ass, but I'm stronger now, so I want to try it again. It's not a technically difficult route: the rating is mostly for RAAAAAAAAAAR!, and my RAAAAAAAAAAR! is improving.)

But there's a 5.8 Alisa wants me to try Monday, so it's possible the other hard wall I'm working on will wait until Wednesday. I am scared of the 5.8. It has an overhang and the entire top half is smearing up a wall where the only handholds are this crack you have to lay back on.

La.

There may be climbing outdoors on Sunday. That would be fun.

(Apparently, I have accidentally started something of a climbing renaissance among my writer friends, which I think is pretty cool. We are the buff chicks of SFF. Also, the new face thereof.)

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Spring lasted a week this year, and I was in Michigan for it. The plum tree under my bedroom window is in full bloom, and violets and dandelions and tulips are all over the place. The Bradford pears are nearly over; the magnolias are already dropping blossoms. A mulberry along my running route is putting out first leaves, and the lilacs have heavy clusters of buds. I'm going to have to start running earlier, because it's already too hot by 8.

3.5 miles Tuesday (I only ran about 1.5 of those and walked the rest) and 2 miles today (ran 1 mile, walked 1. My lungs do not like the pollen and humdidity. Foolish lungs.) 204.9 miles to Lothlorien.

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Meanwhile, I am reading "Endgames" and working on "Overkill," and working on the page proofs for All the Windwracked Stars. So there is actual professional work-related progress going on, which is a nice thing. Then after that a novelette for a Secrit Projekt (I promise I will tell you all about it as soon as I can) and a novella for Subterranean. And then maybe I will have gotten enough distance on Chill to come back to it with some Mad Skillsh and make it a Book That Works.

Other work that awaits me in the next year--rewriting By the Mountain Bound and One-Eyed Jack & the Suicide King, and then rewriting The Sea thy Mistress.

I'm having a very hard time seeing anything positive in my writing currently, which is frustrating and hard. Mostly, it all feels quite banal and amateurish to me. Flaccid, even. Where is the muscular prose of yore? Where is my ability to characterize obliquely and well? I feel confident when editing other people's work, but of my own all I can say is Dreadful! Dreadful! DREADFUL!

It's hard to write when you can't see what's working anymore. It gets in the way of that "carve off everything that doesn't look like an elephant" thing when the elephant is no longer visible to your inner eye.

There's one spot on 84 westbound in Tolland where, if you hit the ridge at just the right time of day, you come around a curve and all the white birches on the north side of the road are limned in copper, and the blue ridges to the west march on in misty tiers to the spill of sunset behind them.

Today was one of the days when I hit it right.

I love this state.

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In other news, "Ballistic" is live. Enjoy!

On the way to the climbing gym tonight, I saw an enormous bird circling over the Connecticut River. It wasn't a red-tailed hawk or a turkey vulture, our two common large raptors. It was larger than the first, and didn't fly with a rowing motion, nor did it sail on stiff wings held like as shallow V, like the second. It was dark in color, and its wingbeats were dexterous, grasping, like the graceful beckoning of fingers.

I think it was a juvenile bald eagle.

:-)

a new Chinese delivery place just dropped off a menu.

One of the lunch specials?

Ecollop frito w/ plantanos. $4.75.

If you don't like seafood, you can get fried chicken gizzard. If you don't like plantains, you can have fried rice instead.

Or french fries.

Well, I just signed my name approximately five hundred times, and managed to resist drawing any little bunny ears on the pre-existing signatures of greygirlbeast, liviallewellyn, or Mike Resnick.

Oh, the glamour.

Remaining tasks for the week:

Do laundry
Go to the gym 3x
Go to the bank, the post office, and the UPS store
Pack for WisCon
The usual guitar and math practice
Archery
Mom's birthday (observed)

And I have decided that it is time to start working on All the Windwracked Stars tonight, because I cannot stand my sluglike self another minute.

Gotta justify my existence somehow, right?

elfshot and I went geocaching today. We found one cache, failed to locate another, and observed a red-tailed hawk sitting in a telephone pole downslope from a trail, at eye level and about fifteen feet away. He sat there and preened and fluffed and watched us back for a good ten minutes.

ETA: And as promised, a pic:

Today is the 100th anniversary of Katharine Hepburn's birth.

So, reports of flooding or incipient flooding throughout the state, the rivers already high, and another three days of rain and possible snow forecast.

Gives "swamp yankee"* a whole new meaning, doesn't it?

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*New Englanders divide themselves into two groups: swamp yankees** (Southern New Englanders) and hill yankees (Northern New Englanders). That is to say, when we can get the hill yankees to admit that swamp yankees exist at all.***

**In the rest of the world, a Yankee is somebody from the USA. In the USA, a Yankee is somebody from north of the Mason-Dixon line (what George Carlin calls the Manson-Nixon line). In the North, a Yankee is somebody from the Northeast. In the Northeast, a Yankee is somebody from the six New England states: Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

In the six New England states, a yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.****

***But they can bite me, because we have Mark Twain in our corner.********

****Apple pie.****** With a slice of sharp white cheddar.*****

*****Pronounced ch'duh.

******Or sometimes peach or strawberry rhubarb. But that's cheating, and you don't get cheese with that.

*******Because we think it's funny to adopt ditties that the brits made up to mock us as self-identifiers, yes. Yankees are also deeply ironical.

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And now that tea is made, I really need to settle in and get some work done.

cristalia posted the chat transcript this time: This way for Ikea in the 25th century!

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This week in history: post rider Israel Bissell's 1775 ride from Watertown, Massachusetts to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to warn of the advent of war.

Through the propaganda of that Longfellow er, fellow, history recollects the other guy, the silversmith who rode from Boston to Cambridge for a total of 19 miles in company of William Dawes, but Bissell, a Connecticut native, rode 345 miles in a little over four days, provided with fresh horses along the way.

Connecticut, aptly, named a bridge after him.

So I was walking home from the grocery store under a heavy pack, and the mist was blowing everywhere, and there was just enough rain that my glasses were opaque within three steps of cleaning them. So I just gave up and hung them from my collar, and navigated without them.

Now, for this to make sense, you have to understand that I've worn glasses since first grade. I'm at 7.5 diopters in one eue and 8.25 in the other. I am blind blind blind. I wear my glasses in the swimming pool.

It went much better than I would have expected. In part because all I was trying to do was walk and watch for cars, and in part because it was grey and blurry and misty anyway.

And anyway, as I'm trying to see through my opaque glasses, and later on navigate without them, the writerbrain taps me on the sleeve and says:

So this is what cataracts are like.

and

You know, they had a crude surgery in India to cure cataracts, but the long term result was total blindness

Mm. Yup. Story there.

Chris Dodd is running for president.

You could do worse.

There's a protocol.

As you're on your way home from the grocery store at the bottom of the hill in the early morning on the day after Christmas, with your black canvas bag of egg noodles and raisins and borwn sugar and broccolini slung over your shoulder, you will pass other pedestrians headed in the opposite direction. At first, you will pretend to ignore the approaching pedestrian. You will look past him or her. You will occasionally glance at your feet, as if they might have gone somewhere while you were distracted by thoughts of the cinnamon rolls that you're planning on making when you get home. You will turn your head to watch the flight of a passing bird.

But at the last moment, when between three and five steps separate you from the other, you will flick your eyes sideways. At this precise moment, if you have timed it properly, you will meet their gaze, because the other person will have done the same thing. You will smile faintly. He will nod once. You will both say "morning," softly, and with a pleasant inflection. If you get it to come out simultaneously, a conspiratorial wink is allowed, as a form of celebration.

You will pass, and continue on your way.

You will go home and climb the stairs and open the windows on the cool gray morning, a peculiar St. Stephen's Day morning for New England, indeed, because it wasn't so long ago that you would have frozen to death if you did anything that dumb.

And you'll make cinnamon rolls and croissants, and listen to music, and think about what else you need to do today.

(This is how you say good morning to a Yankee.)

Showered, shove, schlepped down to my polling place to do the dirty deed.

It's a beautiful clear cool November morning, a little high haze, yellow leaves in drifts.

After nearly missing the door (my new voting place is St. John's Episcopalian Church, and a Joe Lieberman supporter was standing in such a way that I could not see the walkway) I wended inside and was confronted with a Big Long Line. Apparently, they were sent one wrong voting machine, which had to be replaced, and then the remaining two jammed. (My precinct in Connecticut still uses the big clunky old lever and curtain machines. KERCHUNK! Which, I might add, work reliably. No wonder the state is slowly replacing them.)

Anyway, they trundled in new machines (to sounds of loud applause) and then I had to go get my address sorted out, as they had me at the wrong street address.

But all ended well.

The woman behind me brought her two toddlers with her to vote, as my mother used to bring me. I told her, and she grinned.

I tossed my Gubernatorial vote to the green party candidate, because I actually favor Jodi Rell, but she's going to win anyway and I didn't want to vote for a Republican this year. And we support third parties.

Now I must finish this novel, which is, among other things, about the fall of a monarchy of sorts.
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