High Holy Mass of Contradictions

Garden update:

Volunteer sunflower (we think) is about four feet high.

I finally got impatient and picked the one carrot that actually grew -- it was too teeny to even eat. Oh, well. I'll have to tell the little boy who planted it that I messed up and picked it too soon.

The cauliflower is flowering -- it never made a head of cauliflower, but the flowers are beautiful.

There's a big, fat blossom on one of the zucchini plants, and tons of buds on all of them. I think zucchini will be successful.

There are 20 or so flowers on the tomato plant.

There are 20 or so strawberries, in varying stages of ripeness, and I finally harvested our first strawberry -- that is, the first one that didn't get eaten by slugs the second it started to turn red. It only took three years to get that one strawberry! :-)

Let's see, what else? Oh, yes, the bean plant looks like it's doing fine. I may plant a couple more hills of zucchini, though, if that's going to be the real thriver in this garden.

Oh! And the apple tree has hundreds of lovely apples on it. In a couple months, I'm thinking we'll have a lot of pie and strudel around here.

Five enormous helpings of taco salad will go a long way toward clearing out a fridge. Taco salad is bulky, and everything that goes in it is refrigerated.

I know what this means.

PALAK PANEER.

I have a fairly severe case of IBS. It's kept in check with a healthy diet and good stress management. For the past 8 years, I've been very fortunate and have had only minor flare ups. I've mentioned more than once being worried about having to use the bathroom while running and I've gotten some good tips. (thank you!) Today I ran 9 miles, my longest run to date and since I finished, my intestines have been cramping and I've been to the toilet 6-8 times in 3 hours. My diet hasn't changed. I felt comfortable running... Is this normal for running when you have stomach/intestinal troubles? 

trixtah! (Assuming I've got that pesky dateline thing right, and if not, well, happy belated birthday!)

I've been scheduling my rest day to coincide with a hard day of work, or the day of a deadline.  The idea would be that I can use the extra time to be better prepared (I also usually get very little sleep on this day - maybe 3-4 hours).  However, maybe this isn't the best idea...I'm usually stressed out all day, from not excercising/having assignments/presentations due.  I've really noticed it because I'm trying to clean up my eating habbits and this is the day I CAN"T handle.  I'm definetly a stress eater and I get snappy - my roommate, the dog....  Perhaps I should run anyways, even if I don't feel like I should take time away from studying/preparing.  I guess another idea would be to rest the day before and just do a short run on my packed days.

Any ideas?

For those of you that have weekly deadlines: how do you handle this?  Also, any thoughts about sleep deprivation.  I'm currently getting about 6 hours a night and usually do ok, but for these deadlines, when I have more work and get less sleep, I feel like everything just culminates (sp?) and I turn into someone else completely.

What makes you feel better: running in the morning - start the day fresh or the evening - and get everything 'out'?

Mountain view turns away fireworks visitors with expensive-looking cameras.

Greetings, runners! Please tell us about your past training week and upcoming goals

**This is a weekly thread maintained by myself, posted every weekend. Runners of all ages and abilities are encouraged to use it to document their training and goals. Feedback is also encouraged, which helps keep a sense of community - thanks!

Today I completed my longest run ever, a 9 miler. WOOHOO! It took about 1h 28m to completed, including having to stop and walk across some busy streets (there have been numerous runners and bikers hit in my area). I'm not working on pace, just finishing. How often should I drink on the longer runs? At what distance to I need to begin eating shots or gu while I run? I felt fine, other than some leg fatigue near then end (which could be due to the 3 miler I did yesterday combined with 45 minutes of pilates and an hour of Zumba). What signals does your body give that it's time to fuel it. Next week is a 10 miler...not sure if I should try some shots or not...

At 0700 this morning, my nephew toddled over to the couch where I was sleeping and stuck his finger up my nose.

I guess that means no sleeping in.

The whole fam is together this weekend, and it's very nice so far. Would be nicer if my AC on my car didn't *die* (driving over an hour in Florida in the summer with no AC? No good). My father, being the Taurus accountant that he is, insisted on taking my car to Sears.

They called him back and said that the reason the AC is not working is due to some breakdown in a large part of the car system (yet ANOTHER belt) and eventually it could cause the whole car to stall on me.

The quoted price to fix it is around $700 US.

After some wailing and gnashing of teeth, Dad and brother-in-law and I went to go car shopping. My car is 7 years old with a lot of miles on it and has only about $800 more to go on the payments. I wanted to see if there was a better deal in getting a newer used car.

Dammit I hate car shopping. Everyone lies to each other and they *know* they're doing it, and we all *know* that we know we're doing it, and it's societally accepted!

I told them (3 dealers) what I could possibly afford and they're supposed to call me back today. It's either do a new car or plop $700 on my credit card to fix my current on, pay it off, see and hope it will last another year so I can save up for a downpayment on a Toyota or tank or HORSE AND CHARIOT or something that doesn't *break*.

But for consolation, there was birthday cake last night. Mmm, cake.

Wish me luck.

For those of y'all playing at home, I've made it to NC safe and sound.

And this morning? I'm going to go be undocumented kitchen staff for the Flying Burrito.

It must be love. ;)

• 08:12 Making the inaugural batch of Perfect Oatmeal in the new pan. #
• 20:29 @amanders You know today is Saturday, right? #

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I watched it on Youtube.


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The past two days have been full of house things. I'm starting to sound like a broken record. We took a pilgrimage to Ikea, and didn't manage to lose each other at all, which is amazing. We bought a twin bed frame, reading chair and stool/table to go with it, large mirror for over the fireplace, and some odds and ends. Craigslist supplied us with a couple of mattresses. Upstairs, we created a curtained doorway for the walk-in closet (it used to just be an empty doorway, which I prefer), stained various wood things, changed out the toilet seat that I had stained with hair dye, built the twin bed for the upstairs bedroom, and shampooed the carpets. Downstairs, we converted den into bedroom (by moving the futon down to the den and making it bedlike), converted the basement into the tv room, stained some wood that needed updating, rehung foyer closet doors, painted the stairway walls on the way to the basement, and hung a mirror over the fireplace. I'm ready for someone to tell me that I can be done, but the only way that'll happen is if we get an offer on the house.

Though I've spent the last few years in Boston, I'm returning to my Midwestern roots this fall for the Lakefront marathon in Milwaukee, WI on October 5th. I actually grew up along the course, but it's been years since I've run in Wisconsin and I've never raced there. Is anyone else training for Milwaukee? (Or, more specifically, have any experience with the course?) I'm admittedly excited to have my parents as a cheering section for the first time.

This icon needed to be made.

Source.

I think Creative Commons allows for this kind of thing, but if somebody here thinks not, let me know. I respect xkcd and its creator.

Part of my mind immediately goes to something like "I wish I had a great creation I could point to as my important contribution to the world." I don't have one. Part of me feels like a failure because I don't.

On the other hand, I have set up my life so that I contribute in a bunch of little ways on a regular basis to the part of the world immediately around me—my family, friends, partners, community, political activism, homeless animals, work. Those contributions don't get noticed in the world at large, but I do get ongoing pleasure and satisfaction out of contributing in that way, and I seem to strongly want to have that sort of ongoing satisfaction.

So I guess those little contributions would count as the good stuff I've done.

(via <lj user=serenejournal>)

Except it ends up more like compote, because of the marinating.

This time:

Fuji apple, chopped
Bosc pear, chopped
bing cherries, halved and pitted
black seedless grapes
banana, sliced
confectioner's sugar
lime juice

Eat right away, but also make enough to marinate some overnight. Spoon over ice cream.

I just signed up for my first "real" race, a 4 miler in Central Park on July 19! I actually did do a very casual walk/run when I first started running out in California in 2005 (and I was 80 lbs heavier). I think my time was very pokey like 15 minute mile, and now I'm running like an 11 minute mile, so I'm sure to top that personal best!

This will be the first time I'm running with a chip!!

I've been running for fun and fitness so I'm happy I finally nailed a goal down! Now I just have to be ok with running pokily with the fast people!

Any other New Yorkers doing that race?

Lived an authentic, compassionate life.

It has become fashionable, especially among female novelists, to exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry's rigorous standards of precision and polish. Edna O'Brien is one of the writers who do this, but Annie Proulx is better known, thanks in large part to her best seller The Shipping News (1993). In 1999 Proulx wrapped up the acknowledgments in a short-story anthology titled Close Range by thanking her children, in characteristic prose, "for putting up with my strangled, work-driven ways."

That's right: "strangled, work-driven ways." Work-driven is fine, of course, except for its note of self-approval, but strangled ways makes no sense on any level. Besides, how can anything, no matter how abstract, be strangled and work-driven at the same time? Maybe the author was referring to something along the lines of a nightly smackdown with the Muse, but only she knows for sure. Luckily for Proulx, many readers today expect literary language to be so remote from normal speech as to be routinely incomprehensible. "Strangled ways," they murmur to themselves in baffled admiration. "Now who but a Writer would think of that!"

The short stories in Close Range are full of this kind of writing. "The Half-Skinned Steer" (which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, in November of 1997), starts with this sentence:

In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns.

Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart. Proulx seems to have intended a unified conceit, but unfurling, or spreading out, as of a flag or an umbrella, clashes disastrously with the images of thread that follow. (Maybe "unraveling" didn't sound fancy enough.) A life is unfurled, a hustler is wound tight, a year is spooled out, and still the metaphors continue, with kicked down—which might work in less crowded surroundings, though I doubt it—and hinge, which is cute if you've never seen a hinge or a map of the Big Horns. And this is just the first sentence!

-- B.R. Meyers, "A Reader's Manifesto", The Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2007.



( The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden, by Catherynne Valente. Spoilers below. )

( The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Spoilers below. )

( Air, by Geoff Ryman; massive, massive spoilers. )

Other books: Bellwether by Connie Willis (funny, quick read - basically Passage without all the death stuff) and Villette by Charlotte Bronte. I was so pissed at the end of that one. Argh! Anyone want to make me feel better about it?