Light and Momentary

Still on the road

Stella and I were going to make a speedy trip: out on Sunday, back on Monday. But Becky said, "It's such a long way to drive to stay for such a short time. What if you stay over on Monday night too?" So here we are. Becky rearranged her workday on short notice to free up some time, and we've had the nicest day. We drank coffee on the deck in the cool of the morning. We persuaded the slightly standoffish cat to be a little friendlier. We walked around a nearby lake in the afternoon, the two of us and our teenaged daughters, and stopped for ice cream afterward. We toasted marshmallows around the fire this evening and laughed uproariously.

Tomorrow we will head back to Gladlyville, and I will need to get my syllabi and course website finalized for the course that starts on Monday. It's been a lovely little slice of vacation time here, though. Becky and I exchange dozens of texts a day and talk on the phone regularly, but there's just no substitute for in-person time. I am soaking it up.

From the road, briefly

Stella and I had an uneventful trip, my favorite kind, in which we listened to a lot (a lot a lot) of Taylor Swift.

Tonight we saw Becky's firstborn performing in outdoor Shakespeare. We were sitting together on a picnic blanket on the ground and the woman in front of us said, "Watch out for that snake." Yes, friends, it was a SNAKE, watching Shakespeare right next to my own personal feet. He seemed pretty curious about the playgoers -- he slithered over to the person beside us and curled up right next to him -- as in, inches away from him -- flicking his tongue in and out curiously. "Sir," we said, "sir, there's a snake right next to you." 

"Oh," he said blandly, much as if I had told him there was a Beetle next to him (of the Volkswagen variety, not the scarabaeid sort).

I was kind of proud of myself for not flinging myself bodily away from the snake or shrieking disruptively, but that guy was astonishingly chill about having a snake in his personal space.

I watched the last scene while standing up in the back, creating an anti-snake force field by the power of my mind.

 

Summer fun

Tomorrow I’m waking up early and taking Stella to see my dear friend Becky and her family. We’ll report in from the road. 

Hard Times, come again no more

I finished Hard Times today. I'm glad I reread it; I'd still put it in the bottom tier of Dickens novels. 

I think my favorite thing about Dickens is his ability to spin up a complicated plot and tie up the loose ends in improbable but generally agreeable ways. Do I find the plot of Our Mutual Friend plausible? Absolutely not. Do I love it anyway? Yes, I do.

Hard Times offers a smaller canvas, and the ending feels hasty and forced to me. Dickens is the king of the useful coincidence, but the discovery of the missing person is just a leetle too much for me. I might be more tolerant if it contained more likable or amusing characters.

We have now AMDRAL-ed our way through 11 of the 14 completed Dickens novels. The three remaining are all doorstop-sized: Barnaby Rudge, Dombey & Son, and The Old Curiosity Shop. If you have a vote for next May, let me know.

Deceivers, the deceived, agency, helplessness

As I've been reading Hard Times I've been observing the relationship between Louisa and James Harthouse with some dissatisfaction. Dashing deceivers are a thing for Dickens (and in plenty of other 19th-century fiction), but I was musing to myself about the contrast between Louisa and Lydia Bennet. Lydia seems to me to have more agency. Is it a terrible idea to elope with Wickham? Obviously. Is it a freely chosen terrible idea? I think so. Louisa, though, seems to be on a descending escalator rather than a staircase -- not so much choosing her own path as being pulled along it.

So I was already grumbling to myself about female Dickens characters at the moment of crisis for Louisa. You should skip the last sentence in this paragraph if you haven't finished Part Two yet, but what does she do? (Here, I will turn the text yellow because it is an unexpected development. Just highlight it with your mouse if you want to read it.) She throws herself helplessly at the feet of a different man, that's what.

Harrumph, I say. Harrumph!

Same song, different verse

It is better to finish the race at the back of the pack than to sit on the couch and wish you were faster. I have been telling myself this for years. But wow, do I struggle to believe it's really true.

I have been dithering about this August triathlon idea. The one near Joe's new city has a lake swim, and my feelings about lake swims are well documented. There's also an August sprint triathlon about an hour from me with a pool swim, but neither Joe nor my college roommate will be at that one.

Despite the dithering, I've completed (or approximated) the first two workouts in Matt Fitzgerald's basic triathlon training plan. Today was the first time I'd gone for a swim since my June 2021 triathlon, and I would rate the workout as a solid Not Dreadful. Pete asked me to climb with him this evening, and I agreed. I am recording a few modest accomplishments from the climbing session:

1. I finished my first outdoor route of the year, even though topping out is so scary that I always think about climbing down instead. (Topping out = climbing over the edge of the big artificial boulder to the pathway in the middle, so you can walk back down to your starting point.) 
2. I fell off the overhang-y part of the outdoor boulder while attempting a move that was too hard for me. My tendency is to announce that I can't do the move, which is only sometimes true. I don't like falling backwards to the ground, but I lived to tell the tale.
3. I climbed a top-rope slab route for the first time in years. Slab routes are the opposite of overhang -- they tilt a little bit away from the climber. They tend to be reachy and balance-y, and I used to say emphatically that I didn't even want to try them. But I saw one tonight that looked like it might be fun, and Pete offered to belay me. And what do you know? It was totally fun.

There is a friendly little group of middle-aged-lady back-of-the-packers here in town, and I know that if I start showing up to events again they will be welcoming. Telling myself that I need to be in better shape before I can go back is unnecessary and unproductive. And yet-- I keep telling myself that I need to be in better shape before I go back.

The feet with a mind of their own

Does anyone remember when there was a snake living in my sage plant two years ago? I blogged about the morning that something deep inside my brain heard its rustle and propelled me in the opposite direction, and only afterward did I say to myself, "Oh, yes, that was a snake."

Last night I was walking Sandy after dark and a similar thing happened: a snake had draped itself in sigmoid curves across the sidewalk. Sandy didn't even notice it until we were almost on top of it, but I found myself unexpectedly in the street. That same reptile-fearing thing in my primitive brain recognized the shape and whisked me off the sidewalk before I even articulated the thought "that is a snake."

Thankfully there were no cars nearby (and, unlike the last time, no college students to wonder why I was hurling myself violently into the road). It's intriguing to me that my unconscious pattern-recognition system is so tuned in to those particular sights and sounds, and that it has the capacity to move me briskly and involuntarily to a different spot. 

Undecided

One of my college roommates is doing an August triathlon not far from Joe's new city, and I am thinking about registering for it. I am still undecided, though.

Triathlon training is a non-trivial commitment, and I am way out of that groove. Since I started lifting in 2021, I have struggled to be consistent with endurance training. It's one of those self-perpetuating cycles: I don't run very much because I'm in bad running shape, which means I remain in bad running shape. I am discontented with my level of aerobic fitness, and also daunted by the prospect of addressing it in a consistent and systematic way.

This is objectively silly. I think I will be much happier in August if I commit to doing the thing -- showing up for the workouts and rebuilding the fitness -- than if I flail around in anticipatory distress. It is true that the runs will be hot and sweaty; it is true that I will need to adjust my priorities to fit in triathlon training.

I'm not quite ready to pull the trigger. You can probably see me standing on the edge of the pool, worried that it will be too cold if I jump in.

The Manta Ray Shawl

Kate Davies is hosting a summer knitting community: a mystery knit-along, a series of book discussions, and a bunch of new pattern releases, all with a Margery Allingham theme. I had never heard of Margery Allingham, but I am a fan of Golden Age detective fiction and I do love a good summer MKAL. So I jumped in.

I've read and enjoyed the first two books and KD's essays on the books. I made a hat for Joe's girlfriend from one of the new patterns. (There's an announcement tucked into that last sentence: Joe's girlfriend has been deemed knit-worthy.) But I am fretting a bit about my yarn selections for the MKAL shawl. 

Mostly I think it will be fine. I'm making a big stripy diamond in colors I like. Stella thinks it looks pleasingly like a stingray.

As always, the devil is in the details. I was instructed to choose five colors. I was supposed to have a hundred grams each of a light color, a dark color, and a pop color, and 75 grams each of two medium colors that would play nicely with the others.

I chose a pretty aqua for my light color and a deep deep blue-green for my dark color. It probably looks black in the picture, but imagine if navy blue and the deepest forest green had a baby. That's my dark color. I chose a vivid lime green for my pop color. For the medium toned colors I chose a pretty mossy grassy green and a skein of self-striping sock yarn in blues and greens. 

But two things are niggling at me. One is the yarn quantities, which I did exactly backward: I have 100g of the medium colors, and <100g of all three of the dominant colors. Before I cast on I thought to myself, "Oh, I only used a little of my dark color in the Princess Bride shawl. It will be fine." Now I am tearing through it an alarming rate. I knew that I had used a little of the lime green color in my pandemic hat, but I only remembered today that I had used the aqua as the contrast color in Alex's Space Invaders socks. 

This seems like a setup for an un-fun game of yarn chicken later in the summer.

The second niggly thing is that there is a whole lot of lime green. I read "pop color" and thought "occasional accent," but no-- there's a reason I was instructed to acquire >400 yards of it. I am not wild about big blocks of lime green, but big blocks of lime green are about to happen.

Well, that's how it goes, I guess: you buy the MKAL ticket, you take the MKAL ride.

June 1

I think approximately 12 minutes have elapsed since May 31, 2002, but somehow the baby who was born that day is now a college graduate with a fancy new job in a fun city. He came home after finals for a couple of weeks. Yesterday we celebrated his birthday and today he drove off to his empty new apartment.

I asked his girlfriend how she was doing, since they will be dating long-distance. "It's hard to be the one who gets left behind," I said, nodding appreciatively at my own wisdom. And then when he pulled out of the driveway, all of my cheerful enthusiasm evaporated and I started to cry. It IS hard to be the one who gets left behind, my friends; it really is. 

This morning I slumped around feeling sad about how these children keep growing up and leaving me, but this afternoon I went to the climbing gym with Pete and braved the longest routes for the first time in a while. I am out of practice with the mental component of climbing high, but the physical piece of it felt great -- I found myself thinking the very same thoughts I blogged about in this old post. I came home and did some therapeutic gardening, yanking out lily of the valley until I had a colossal heap of it and crescents of dirt under every fingernail. I have been gardening up a storm since the spring semester ended, and I have decreed that the front beds are going to be spare and spacious for a while.

Although it's June now I have not yet finished Hard Times. More than once now, while AMDRALing my way through a Dickens novel, I have discovered that I didn't give it a fair shake the first time I read it. I'm so glad I reread Our Mutual Friend and Martin Chuzzlewit, because I enjoyed them much more the second time through. I'm still waiting for that particular flavor of magic to strike in Hard Times; no dice so far. Nicole the Victorian lit professor and occasional commenter is a Hard Times fan, so perhaps she'll chime in at some point.

This month I will have two weeks in which I am mostly though not entirely off, and two weeks in which I'll be teaching. I'm teaching a long summer class this time around; it will stretch all through July and the beginning of August. We shall see how that schedule works out.

Goals for the month:

1. Blog daily
2. Exercise daily, defining exercise broadly
3. Track produce consumption and see how it feels
4. Write (for work) 4 days a week
5. Finish Hard Times and most of my next Trollope novel