Today was gray and not especially mild, so it was a good time to be cooped up inside and writing.
I arrived at Waves Coffee early, to find the private room empty. I seized the opportunity to get in early and was already writing away when the next person arrived. In all we ended up with seven once again, though Dave, suffering the ill effects of being ill, came in around 1:15 p.m. Sans laptop, he cracked open a package of new pens, cracked open a new notebook, then proceeded to write faster than I’ve ever seen someone write before. I have no idea what he was writing but it seemed he had pages within seconds. He was handwriting faster than I can type. It was kind of weird.
For today my loose plan was to write the second house party scene of Road Closed, which was only covered in a few brief paragraphs in the original draft. I tweaked it to be the same house as before, with the plan being the party would be a bust (as originally written) but that Christian would seek out and explore the “spooky-ass” basement, which he neglected to do on his first visit, due to his impressive drunkenness.
And indeed I wrote most of the scene, culminating in Kevin and Christian going into the basement. Then nothing much happened. I hinted vaguely at a few things–an old hammer covered with rust–or was it blood? But in the end, it all felt perfunctory and now I question the need for the expanded scene. This isn’t a bad thing, as it provides some clarity to the story, even if I end up chucking thousands of words as a result.
I had time to re-read most of the first house party scene I’d written a few weeks back and I’m pleased with how it holds up. I think there is something definitely in that house, I just haven’t quite figured it out yet.
Run 487 Average pace: 5:39/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 28:30
Weather: Overcast
Temp: 15ºC
Wind: light to moderate
BPM: 170
Stride: n/a
Weight: 166.4 pounds
Total distance to date: 3825 km
Devices/apps: Apple Watch, iPhone
Today’s run was paradoxically faster and slower.
It wasn’t really a paradox, though. While I was slower than my previous run–5:39/km vs. 5:36/km, I was running different terrain (lake vs. river trail). If you compare my last lake trail run, I was much faster–5:39/km vs. 5:51/km.
It was mild but overcast, with light wind and the threat of rain. Apart from a few light drops now and then, the rain held off (as I type this the cloud cover has thickened, the wind has picked up and a storm seems imminent). I think the conditions helped to speed me along, as did running the more straightforward north side of the lake.
The stupid cyclists didn’t show up until I was walking back after having just finished the run, a young man and woman. The guy had that smug look on his faces that says, “That’s right, I’m here on a bicycle and I know I shouldn’t be. What are you gonna do about it, haw haw?” If I was a rotten person I’d push them over as they rode past but instead I just silently wish for karma to do its thing, preferably in the form of flat tires, bent spokes or attacking geese.
Speaking of attacks, the bear signs have gone back up. I do not wish to see a bear while running.
I pushed a little on this run and my BPM reflects that, coming in at a rather high 170. I will have to ease up a bit next time, methinks. I also experienced a few moments of mild cramping, another good sign that I’m getting carried away.
Still, I was pleased by the effort. And also by the lack of bugs, puddles, and hurricanes.
I had a vacation day today but unlike most vacation days where you do fun things like take a trip somewhere interesting, relax on a beach or simply spend time shopping or sight-seeing, I went for two medical tests.
The vacation day was due to the tests being in different cities and different times of the day. The logistics simply weren’t manageable.
The first test in the morning was for blood sugar. I got to the lab early and got in early–yay! I opted to have the vampiric removal of blood done through my right arm this time and there was no bruising, unlike the last visit, so good there.
The next test was an ultrasound (I will always think of the ultrasound as being a PC sound card, which I had back when people actually bought sound cards for computers) at Richmond Hospital. I arrived mega-early because I have a highly-developed skill in getting lost inside hospitals. You don’t want to get lost in a hospital because they are largely unpleasant places, filled with the sick, the dying and the dead. They also smell funny.
After spending a half hour or so walking around the pond/park next door and carefully avoiding a couple of geese on the path (it is a verifiable scientific fact that geese are the nastiest birds in the world) I toodled over to the main entrance, went inside and studied the map, looking for the imaging area. Almost immediately a nice older man appeared and offered to assist me. He took me to the imaging area (which I probably could have found on my own since it was only steps down the hall and even my usual bumbling was unlikely to lead me astray), I was given a number (77, they were serving 74 when I arrived) and before too long I was ushered into the ultrasound room by Chris the technician. When I left it was 3:10 p.m., which was pretty nice, because the appointment had been for 3:45.
I was told to remove my pants and underwear but could leave everything else on. I opted to remove my shoes because they would have been awkward to pull the jeans over, anyway. I did keep my baseball cap on, though. I imagine I looked a little ridiculous. I was given two folded towels to place over my manly bits. Not because my manly bits are huge and require two towels, you apparently need one to go over and one to kind of go under.
Anyway, unlike my heart ultrasound where the jelly was not warm and I fairly leaped out of my skin every time the tech touched me with the magic ultrasound wand, the jelly this time was warm. I was especially appreciative, considering where the wand was going.
In all, it only took five minutes. I had to hold my breath a few times and near the end was asked to point to the unwelcome lump of something or other. Chris then made with the wand again. He asked if the size had changed recently. I said I wasn’t sure, though a few days ago it sort of seemed like it might be smaller, which would be a good thing.
He said my doctor would have the results in a few days, that he’d clean up the towels, then left.
I put my pants back on and also left. I successfully navigated back to my original starting point at the main entrance, to my delight and surprise, and headed out into an unusually warm and sunny afternoon, thinking how the whole experience was pretty benign as far as things that can happen in a hospital. I wonder what it would be like to go through the same thing while being horribly shy. Horrible, I guess.
In a little under two weeks, I’ll discuss the results of both tests with my doctor. Here’s hoping it’s good news but even if it’s not, I’ll deal with it and move on.
I’m good with not needing another ultrasound for awhile, though.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of shirts: with buttons and without buttons.
Putting on a shirt without buttons is easy, you just pull the shirt over your head, stick your arms in the sleeves and you’re done. This can be complicated by having a huge head and the shirt having a tiny neck but it is generally trouble-free.
Putting on a shirt with buttons is not much more difficult, especially if you’re not falling-down-the-stairs drunk. You stick your arms in the sleeves, then button the shirt to the desired level (or sometimes not at all depending on taste/whim/current state of alcohol consumption).
But there is a subcategory of shirts with buttons that is, you guessed it…bad design.
This is a shirt with buttons on the back instead of the front:
Observe how your elbows bend. They bend forward. This is because your hands are made to be used in front of your body. Now imagine you are buttoning up the shirt above. Your hands are twisted around into an awkward position. They are bending the wrong way. It is difficult, perhaps even painful.
Why would someone design a shirt with buttons on the back? To have a clean, button-free look on the front. But there is a solution for this already. It’s called not putting buttons on the shirt.
But what if the buttons are somehow deemed essential to the design? Put them on the front! But what if the designer finds buttons to be hideous and gross? They’re just as hideous and gross on the back, plus they look stupid there. But if the designer absolutely must have buttons and insists that they are ugly, just include a giraffe tie with every shirt to help hide them. Who doesn’t like giraffes?
Run 486 Average pace: 5:36/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 5.05 km
Time: 28:21
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 12ºC
Wind: light to moderate
BPM: 164
Stride: n/a
Weight: 166 pounds
Total distance to date: 3820 km
Devices/apps: Apple Watch, iPhone
I switched back to the Brunette River trail for the first midweek run and conditions were kind of blah. It was 12ºC but rain threatened so I wore a long-sleeved shirt. In the end, it didn’t rain so I would have been fine in a regular t-shirt but I wasn’t uncomfortable at all, so no harm done.
I modified my strategy for avoiding the big zig-zag at the end to reach 5 km (the end-to-end distance on the river trail is about 1.9 km, so to reach five km total I would normally go two full lengths then run back and forth over the last stretch to get that last 1+ km in). Today I spent an extra 10 minutes walking up to about the 1 km mark. I started there and just did two full lengths after, hit 5K and it was good.
The run went better than expected. I could feel a bit of a burn for the first stretch but never pushed so hard that I cramped up. Even so, I got a bit of a second wind partway though, something that hasn’t happened recently. I finished with an average pace of 5:36/km, my best effort so far this year and handily better than the 5:51/km slog of my previous run at Burnaby Lake.
The extra bonus: no bugs!
Overall I am pleased by today’s effort. The right heel did not present any issue during the run, though it is a slight bit tender tonight.
Run 485 Average pace: 5:51/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CW)
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 29:31
Weather: Cloudy, hazy sun
Temp: 17ºC
Wind: light
BPM: 165
Stride: n/a
Weight: 166.6 pounds
Total distance to date: 3815 km
Devices/apps: Apple Watch, iPhone
I returned to Burnaby Lake for the first time in awhile for today’s run and in theory, the conditions were much better than the last run. Instead of cool temperatures and incessant rain, it was cloudy but an incredibly mild 17ºC (which is actually a bit above the monthly average). In practise, it was in some ways worse.
For one, the much warmer conditions saw the sudden appearance of billions of bugs. I had barely started running when one flew into my eye. Several others landed on my glasses and other places. It was thoroughly annoying. Why do these things exist? Why I ask!
Also, the dramatic shift in temperature also contributed to my energy being sapped more readily. I was about a minute slower than the last run and the difference was noticeable early on. At times it felt like a slog. At other times it felt like a slog with lots of bugs.
Still, I persisted and managed a pokey but not jaw-droppingly awful pace of 5:51/km. Despite my right heel acting up in the past week for reasons unknown, it wasn’t a factor and was only a minimal nuisance intermittently on the walk back home.
Being pleasant and Easter Sunday, the trail was quite crowded but people were well-behaved, save for the one woman who suddenly zipped past me on a bike just as I was finishing my run. I shot darts at her with my eyes but she just kept going. I like to think she suffered two flat tires the moment she turned off the trail. Then her bike exploded, somehow. Stupid cyclist.
Overall, a plodding effort but I’m glad I made it out all the same.
As for the poop, when I got to the lake I found I had to pee. No problem, I could use the porta potty. A bigger concern was I also had to go #2. You know, poop. The porta potty was conspicuously filled with a large volume of liquid, almost as if someone had poured a bucket of water in it. Splashback was a legit concern. There was also no toilet paper.
I considered my options as my bowels rumbled in warning. All of them were not good. The nature house has washrooms but it was two km down the trail. Abandoning the run would still require travel over multiple km to find a loo. Being early spring, there wasn’t enough foliage to conceal me if I wanted to make like a bear in the woods. The last option was to simply go and forsake wiping. Yuck.
But I did it anyway because every alternative was worse.
I felt much better after, then the better feeling went away as I ran and plodded (see above).
The extended forecast is calling for rain or chance of rain every single day so my next run is probably going to be both cooler and damper. Yay (sort of).
I skipped the last writing group because it was held in the amenities room of an apartment building and I wasn’t really sure how it would turn out.
I returned for #11 this week, though, on an unusually pleasant Easter Sunday. Surprisingly, attendance was quite good, perhaps because we’re all too old to go on Easter egg hunts.
I didn’t have a specific goal coming in and was concerned I might end up faffing about for three hours but instead I quickly decided to focus on the opening chapter of Road Closed and tidied it up, removing a big chunk of exposition and smoothing out the introduction to Christian’s new life in a college town. I also began some tentative work on lining up the other earlier parts of the story but that’s still early enough along that I’m not sure where exactly that will go.
I’m basically deciding between a spooky house or spooky woods. Or maybe both.
Overall I was pleased with the work done and Road Closed is now officially my longest piece of fiction at nearly 63,000 words. I have no idea where it will end up by the time I’m done but around 100,000 seems reasonable. It’s like two NaNoWriMo novels smushed together!
Putting down “writer” as your occupation on forms. It’s practically legal.
Wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. Or does this make you a college professor? I can never remember.
Smoking a pipe (Harlan Ellison only)
Paying someone else to write stuff under your name. This is actually legal.
Building an amazing writing robot you can dictate your stories to
Buying a nice pen set, especially if they’re fountain pens. And using them too, I suppose. For writing, that is, not, say, stabbing people. Unless you later write about it.
Lists count as writing. Yes, they do.
[Write something here. Ta-da, you’re a writer! This is different than Step 1 somehow.]
Changing your legal name to A. Writer. This, as you may have surmised, is legal.
Author Rob Kirkpatrick was about the same age as I was in 1969, which means he was more likely to be eating crayons than dropping acid like so many of the people mentioned in this book. Despite this, one of the strengths of 1969: The Year Everything Changed is the authoritative voice Kirkpatrick uses, lending a “you are there” feel to many of the events that are recounted.
Dividing the book into the four seasons doesn’t really add much to the book, but having devoted sections on politics, entertainment, sports and major events helps color in what the U.S. was like nearly five decades ago.
There are the stunning achievements, like the July moon landing, but the year is marked more by strife–the ongoing Vietnam war that Nixon inherited, racial violence, student protests, the rise of groups like the Weather Underground that engaged in attacks aimed at the government. It was also a time of experimentation and the shedding of inhibitions–nudity was in and drug use was more openly embraced than it had ever been before. Woodstock is remembered fondly, though Kirkpatrick reminds us that it was marred by terrible weather and a surprising number of uninspired acts that limped through their sets. Woodstock shines in comparison to the concert at the Altamont Speedway that closes out the book, though. The Rolling Stones urged the crowd, mixing uneasily with Hells Angels, to settle down even as a man in the midst of it was stabbed to death, one of multiple deaths at the event.
Kirkpatrick also covers the grim parade of death led by the Manson family and the Zodiac killer, the bracing vitality of film as it covered adult subjects with a newfound frankness, whether it be Sam Peckinpah’s blood-spattered westerns or the X-rated seediness of Midnight Cowboy (as noted, an X-rating back then had more to do with violence and less with sexual content–the film later got re-rated to R). There’s also a great deal of sports coverage here, particularly focusing on baseball and the improbable rise of the New York Mets. For fans of the team or baseball in general, these sections are terrifically written, capturing the drama and politics of the sport. Still, the sports parts feel almost incongruous next to the nigh-endless violence that surrounds them.
The book ends with a brief look ahead to the 70s, rounding out how a lot of the newsmakers of 1969 fared in the coming years. Nixon had that whole “whoops, I taped that, didn’t I?” thing, NASA’s glory with the moon landing would end just a few years later and the hippie movement faded away, though many of its ideals would persist in some form through the 70s before crumbling away under the conspicuous consumption of the 80s.
1969 offers an intriguing slice of how different the U.S. was in the late 60s. While violent police action and the disturbing growth of their militarization rightfully makes headlines today, it is sobering to see how little has changed since 1969 when police raids were executed on flimsy or false premises and gun battles–with resultant fatalities–were all too common. The biggest difference back then is probably in how so many of the protesters and people agitating for change were also prone to violence. In an era recalled as one of peace and love, the late 60s were more often bloody.
While some subjects are touched on a bit too briefly–inevitable given that the book is an overview of so many major events– 1969 still gives a good feel for that era. I can’t say I’d have wanted to be an adult living in the U.S. in 1969 but it would certainly have been…interesting.
Recommended, albeit if you don’t enjoy sports a not-insignificant chunk of the book will be a wash.
Run 484 Average pace: 5:39/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 5.05 km
Time: 28:34
Weather: Heavy rain
Temp: 7ºC
Wind: light
BPM: 168
Stride: n/a
Weight: 166.2 pounds
Total distance to date: 3810 km
Devices/apps: Apple Watch, iPhone
After 18 days of not-running (I was using the unwelcome lump of something or other to justify the inactivity, then when I saw my doctor I forgot to ask if running was okay. Since the answer almost certainly would have been yes and since I’d obviously been running with the unwelcome lump but just not realizing it was there, I made the call to drag my butt outside once again).
Around 9 a.m. I eyeballed the conditions. A steady rain was coming down. I opted to wait to see if it would stop or at least ease up.
It did not.
Finally, shortly after noon, I got dressed and headed to the river trail under a dismal gray sky. Within a block I was quite wet.
But I would get wetter still.
I crossed North Road and proceeded along the short (roughly one block) stretch to the entrance to the river trail. Cars were flying down the hill from the north, as usual, and I observed that at certain points they would hit copious amounts of water on the pavement, causing the water to spray vigorously in the direction of the sidewalk. I made note of this and timed my movement to avoid getting splashed.
I got splashed anyway.
A bracing wall of water sprang from the road, tiger-like, and fell down my right side, soaking it thoroughly. At this point, I was already drenched from the rain so I shrugged it off and continued.
During the run, the sky began to brighten, which usually signals the storm easing up or even passing. This did not happen. It began to rain even harder, the brighter conditions simply improving the visibility of the rain.
It rained the entire run and on the walk back home. My running short and shorts are still a little damp almost 24 hours later.
But it was 7ºC and wind was minimal so it wasn’t too cold, a small but vital saving grace. I wasn’t burning up the trail but likewise, I never felt I was struggling to finish despite the time off since the last run.
In the end, this was a virtual duplicate of the last run. The time of the two runs was separated by a single second, the average pace likewise, though this time I was a smidgen faster at 5:39/km.
I experienced minimal soreness after, which is encouraging. I’ll try to stick to regular runs again as part of my 2017 HealthQuest.
The week looks depressingly wet. If April showers bring May flowers we’re gearing up for Day of the Triffids next month.
But overall, I’m glad I ran and am pleased that the results stayed the same as my last run.
Once again from Writing Exercises.co.uk, I present super short stories* based on a generated first sentence (or part of a sentence). The generated text is bold, my contributions are not.
First:
She stood out from the crowd because she was radioactive and two hundred feet tall.
Then:
She was carried along by the crowd of giant radioactive women that had suddenly appeared to lend support. They vanished as quickly as they had arrived, which still took a little while since they were gigantic. The aftershocks they caused persisted for several days.
Finally, and sadly:
He sat her down and held her close before telling her the terrible news: Although he loved her very much, when he stood to kiss her he could not close the 194-foot gap between them, even if he stood on his toes. All he could do was kiss some tiny section of her ankle and hug that weird bone that sticks out of the side of the ankle. What’s up with that bone, anyway? It’s kind of gross, really.
* stories that are super short, not short stories that are super
Today’s group was a robust group of seven (though no painting was attempted). This was all the more surprising given that it was a rare day, both mild and sunny. Early spring-like, even.
For some reason, the group was especially chatty today (not a problem as I can always don earbuds and type away to my terrible taste in music if I want to avoid distraction). We only had the room for two hours, after which we migrated to the main area of the shop. We shed one person and the remaining six pushed three tables together to reconvene. We actually got much quieter, possibly because the whine of machinery making fancy 750 calorie drinks made regular conversation that much more challenging.
I didn’t do a lot of writing, as expected, but busied myself nipping and tucking bits of Road Closed and finishing up organizing the chapters so I have a better feel for the overall story as it now stands. I’m going to have to make a few big decisions before I continue writing or else resign myself to a massive rewrite instead of a merely big one.
I also spent some time organizing a few of my other unfinished novels (ie. all of them), so while I didn’t bang out a lot of words I still came away feeling I’d made good use of the time.
