Today I got to visit the source of my drinking water, Bull Run Lake.
Month: August 2016
Swimming
Today’s commute graffiti: kidlit-relevant! Commute graffiti usually goes on Twitter, but it was cutting the photo off.
I’ve had swimming on the brain. On Wednesday, I swam across the Willamette River downtown, with Sanguinity and a few co-workers and about 250 other people. It was fun! (Link is to a short FaceBook video.) I took it slow, and have much work to do if I ever want to join the River Huggers’ regular morning swims across and back.
I’ve never been one to follow Olympic swimming much, but like the rest of the internet I’m loving Fu Yuanhui. The tizzy over her mentioning her period reminded me of In Lane Three, Alex Archer , a 1987 New Zealand YA novel about a young swimmer working her way towards the Rome (1960) Olympics. The “but can she swim with her period?!” bit is almost all I remember– and I’m pretty sure I didn’t read the whole series. Trip to the university library on my lunch break today.
State of the Running
My bottle of D-Limonene has a very Alice label. Also, it’s sold by “Blubonic Industries.”
I decided I like the feeling of getting better and better, however slowly. So I will train to run the Mt. Hood 50 50-miler again in 2018, and this time come in under the cutoff of 13 hours with early start. I’m aiming at the 50k for 2017. And no knee pain in training, I am done with that. Which means lots of walking mileage.
Of course, no sooner did I decide all that, than I caught a cold that wiped me out for a week. And Wednesday I flaked on my long run, I don’t know, it was chilly when I went to get dressed or something. So THIS week I’m still at Week One, Actually Execute The Baseline Mileage I Supposedly Have.
Since I’d blown last week’s plan anyway, I took the opportunity to try out Zombies Run, which has been sitting on my phone for awhile. I set out while the intro was playing, and then it stopped. Nothing. I went, “hunh, oh well,” dug the phone out of its case, and put on my audiobook instead. But after a couple of minutes, zombies kicked in again! I guess they really meant it about interspersing the story with my playlist, and since I don’t have any playlists…. Fortunately my audiobook at the moment is Daniel Jose Older’s Shadowshaper, so it all fit together pretty well.
Throwback Thursday: Public Domain Edition
Oh my god, I have to deal with The Phone Company this month. (For the second time, our ISP is getting out of the residential DSL business. And Google Fiber is dragging its heels on coming to Portland. So… I will finally have to communicate directly with one or the other of the Two Horrible Companies that can keep us on the internet.)
Happily, I can escape into some very cool posts on old kidlit, from before The Phone Company even existed.
- Allison Parker looks at Sara Crewe vs. A Little Princess, in the context of that maxim about “show, don’t tell.” I had a paperback Sara Crewe as a child and had no idea it was an earlier, shorter work than A Little Princess. My Sara Crewe was severe and waspish–like Mary Lennox–and I could never understand why people went on about the other girls at the school, whom I could barely remember. A year or two ago, when Hilary McKay’s sequel Wishing for Tomorrow came out, I finally figured out what had happened, and read A Little Princess for real.
- WOW, these posts on Little Women! Lara Langer Cohen on Jo’s anger and love. Sarah Blackwood & Sarah Mesle: No One Likes Meg. How often do you get to read thoughts on Meg?! And I found the comments on Stephanie Foote’s post about Beth as Ghost curiously affecting. And why is Jo’s writing treated so differently from Amy‘s art? Amy’s my girl and I’ve thought about her a lot, so that post didn’t strike me quite as hard as it might have. But what. a. set.
- And finally, I just today started watching Project Green Gables. It’s a Lizzie Bennett Diaries-inspired vlog version of Anne of Green Gables, made by Laura Eklund Nhaga and friends in Helsinki. (The production is in English.) Nhaga is black and plays Anne, which puts Anne’s angst over her hair in a whole new light. I like it so far!