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Posts Tagged ‘personal’

moving in, still

Moving into our new place is proving to be more of an uphill battle than I had anticipated. I just realized that this is the first time I’ve actually moved in two people at once, the me-and-kniedzw unit; I moved into the previous Castle N about five months before he did, so that one was done in two major stages. The difference of magnitude might account for some of the slowness.

Definitely London accounts for some of it, too. We spent two weeks moving our stuff; that ended a week before I left, but the last several days of that week went to trip preparation. Then I was gone for a week and a half. Then I came back and was mostly useless for a few days. Two weeks, two and a half, more or less down the drain as far as moving in was concerned. The result is that there are still boxes unpacked, objects without a home.

But we’re getting there, mostly by dint of me tackling stuff in easy stages rather than trying to finish it all at once. I’ve hung at least two objets d’art a day for the last several days, sometimes more; it turns out we have a lot more than I realized. (With the footnote that “objets d’art” in this case means both pictures and swords.) Plus several pictures that I will be getting framed in the near future, that we’ve never actually hung before. The house is starting to look civilized, though it isn’t totally there yet.

But between that, re-reading the Harry Potter series in prep for the last one, re-reading the Lymond Chronicles for my book-blogging (which, yes, I’m behind on), and researching and writing Midnight Never Come . . . that pretty much eats every day. It isn’t a bad life, as such things go, but at times it feels like a very slow-moving one, with not as much in the way of dramatic progress as I would like.

*koffkoff*

Anent a conversation with kniedzw last night, today I decided to run a mile.

I’ve been doing cardio workouts since the end of January, but that has involved running on an elliptical machine. It’s easier on my joints, which is always appreciated, and the machine tells me interesting things like my heart rate and how many calories I’ve burned. Working out on that, I’ve often done two, two and a half miles, maybe a little more. But that doesn’t translate directly when running on a track, so I decided to see what happens when I run a mile there.

I don’t like it, is what happens.

That was a miserable experience. Jarring and a little painful at first; soon I was breathing much harder than usual (I’m still coughing a bit now), and I became desperately thirsty (having left my water bottle next to the track entrance, since I would splash it all over myself if I tried to drink while running). By the last of my five laps, I was feeling sick to my stomach. I kept myself going through an alternating pattern of carrot and stick: “Come on, you wimp. When you pass that post, you’ll be seventy percent of the way done. It’s only a mile; a mile is nothing. One more lap! Dude, you suck. Your characters are so much harder than you are.” (Yes, I really did goad myself on with that. Mirage, I decided, was entirely an unfair comparison, so I told myself Deven could kick my ass, which is true.)

The last time I ran a timed mile would have been in seventh or eighth grade, i.e. the last time I was forced to do it for P.E. I don’t remember what the fitness standard was for a girl of my age — it might have been as high as fifteen minutes for a mile, or as low as twelve; something in that range — but whatever it was, I scraped through at something like four seconds under the time limit.

So I can say with confidence that I have now run the fastest mile of my life, at a spectacular (<– sarcasm) 10:39.

I’m not going to make a habit of doing that. I may, however, use it as an occasional litmus test of my fitness. Maybe try again in a few months and see if I can do it in less than ten. (kniedzw, for the record, has me thoroughly beat; he does an eight and a half-minute mile. Some of that difference is his length of leg, but not all, by any means.) I know now that I can actually run a mile, for values of “run” including “jog;” back in junior high I know I walked at least part of that time. The next step (hah) will be to see if I can do it a bit more quickly.

But not any time soon. Because that wasn’t fun.

Adventures in Moving, or, the Trials and Tribulations of My Left Hand

Not dead. Feel remarkably like it, though.

It seems to be inevitable that a move will be accompanied by various small injuries (hopefully no big ones). Along with the usual collection of bruises I always get, I managed to damage my left hand three, count ’em, three times in one day.

First injury: Revenge of the Futon. While I was dismantling a mostly-broken futon frame, the skin on the heel of my hand got badly pinched when a piece of the frame shifted suddenly and yanked a big flat-headed screw back up against the metal, with a bit of me in between. (If the bruise ends up as interesting as I think it might, I’ll post pictures. So far, it’s made a good start.) To be fair, this one may have happened because I had just called the frame a series of exceedingly vulgar names out of my frustration at its broken-ness. It was headed to the dumpster anyway . . . but it got its vengeance on the way out.

Second injury: Ghosts from Beyond the Wall. While I was maneuvering a big set of metal shelving up the basement stairs, one of the upright bars slammed into the edge of a step, with (you guessed it) a bit of me in between. This time, it was the middle finger of my left hand. This one may have happened because my partner in moving the shelving was a former employee/manager of Beyond the Wall, a now-defunct local poster store from which I got the shelving when it shut down. She made her hatred of that shelving quite clear, and I guess since it had no middle finger with which to flip her off, it went after mine.

Third injury: Just When You Thought You Were Safe. With all the furniture moving done, we went for Chinese buffet (not great, but perfect when what you really want is to shovel food endlessly down your gullet). They had just brought out a brand-new tureen of egg drop soup, and in trying to maneuver the long-handled ladle under the plastic buffet cover without dropping my bowl into the tureen, I spilled burning-heat-of-the-sun hot soup over the index and middle fingers of my left hand. That felt great on the middle one, let me tell you.

But all the furniture is here now (and “here” now means the new place, instead of the old one). There’s still a fair bit of stuff not moved, but I’ve unpacked probably about 80% of the books, and we have an internet connection, and life is good.

Or it would be, if my legs would stop cramping up every time I sit down for more than sixty seconds.

three months in

I don’t always exhibit this kind of good sense, but I’ve excused myself from going to the gym this week on account of the move. Next week is still open to debate, and I’ll be out of the country for a week later this month, so May is going to wreak havoc with my usual schedule.

But it seems like a good time to post about what progress I’ve made in the three months or so since I started working out at the gym.

Mid-February, my numbers looked like this:

  • Bench press: 2 x 12-15, 12 lbs.
  • Shoulder press: 2 x 15, 12 lbs.
  • Row: 2 x 15, 5 lbs.
  • Lat pulldown: 2 x 15, 30 lbs.
  • Back hyperextensions: 2 x 12, no weight.
  • Crunches: 2 x 15, no weight.

Here’s what I’m doing now:

  • Bench press: 2 x 12, 15 lbs.
  • Shoulder press: 2 x 12, 15 lbs.
  • Row: 2 x 15, 12.5 lbs.
  • Upright row: 2 x 15, 12 lbs.
  • Lat pulldown: 2 x 15, 45 lbs.
  • Modified pulldown: 2 x 15, 45 lbs.
  • Back hyperextensions: 2 x 12, no weight.
  • Crunches: 2 x 15, no weight.
  • Peggy spins: 32 cts. each side, 9 lbs.

As you can see, I’ve added a couple of things, substantially upped my weight on a couple of things, minorly upped my weight on a few more, and changed nothing whatsoever about the back extensions and crunches. Can you tell my core muscles are weak?

I’m also doing 30 min. or so of cardio on the elliptical twice a week, with interval training instead on Saturdays. And I’m stretching: I can put myself on the floor again in the side splits (provided I approach it slowly), though on a good day I’m still four or five inches from the wall, which means we are not in walkover territory yet. Oddly, my front splits are making slower progress than the sides are, which I would not have predicted.

It is progress. I am not G.I. Jane-era Demi Moore yet; I cannot do a one-armed pushup like she’s doing in my icon. I may never be there. But at least I can take some small satisfaction in watching my numbers go up.

mood music

It is possible to gauge my level of energy for moving (or packing, or house-cleaning, or similar tasks) by the music I’m using to keep myself going.

Today, we’ve gotten to Finsternis.

At this rate, I don’t know what I’ll do come Saturday.

The problem with packing up all our books to move is that now, when I’m near the end and really tired and just want to sit down and take a breather while I read for bit, the only books still out seem to be on Elizabethan espionage, and I can’t brain enough for those right now.

But then I remembered that I’d also left my Harry Potter books out, and all was well.

heh

I guess the all-knowing internets agree with something I’ve suspected for a while: according to the website for The Golden Compass (the movie) and its “Meet Your Daemon” feature, my daemon is an ocelot.

I was just talking about that at ICFA — not in daemon terms, precisely, but in personality terms. And the all-knowing internets agree.

I should get an ocelot icon. I’ve got various cat icons, but one is for dance, one is for when I want to claw someone’s face off, and this one’s for the cuteness factor. I don’t have a good “generic feline” one. Anybody want to make me an ocelot icon?

I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes

I must issue public thanks to my boy: this morning he delayed me a minute or two in leaving for class, and as a result, I was still at home when the doorbell rang and the FedEx man delivered my Shiny! New! Laptop!

Since one of the first things I’ll be doing with it is carrying it off to London for use in researching my Elizabethan fairy fantasy, I think it only appropriate that the computer be known as Puck.

Let’s just hope that doesn’t encourage it to play tricks on me.

(For the curious, Puck is a Sony VAIO SZ-440. It weighs just a hair over four pounds, and is lovely and sleek, though I’m having to learn to navigate Vista, which is a little annoying.)

I would adore this weather, were it not for three things: 1) the hail may have damaged my car, 2) the hail nearly damaged me, and 3) tomorrow the temperature is dropping straight into the pits of hell.

Norse hell. The frozen one. (Because hell, apparently, is like home.)

the awesomeness of friends

I have several things I’ve been meaning to post about, and lucky me, they share a theme: how awesome my friends are.

Let’s take them in chronological order, shall we?

First up: khet_tcheba. Some time ago, she created the mask you can see in my LARPing icon, plus a mask for kniedzw, because I wanted something very particular for the White Court game and suspected she would have the costuming-fu to create it for me (and then my boy jumped on the bandwagon, too). The results were spectacular. So, like a bad person, I e-mail her a month or so ago and ask whether she can make me a fore-and-aft bicorn for the Regency LARP, ’cause the only ones I can find for sale online cost several hundred dollars (I can only assume they’re vintage pieces, not replicas). The photo of me from the game doesn’t show it all that well, but keep an eye out for an upcoming post with links to other people’s pics and you’ll get a better idea. (The thing is freaking ridiculous, but the fault for that lies with history, not Khet.) So the Swan Tower Millinery Award goes to her, for adventures in felting.

Second: tooth_and_claw. Back when I was running Memento, she made a number of awesome sketches for the game, and I commissioned from her a portrait of Invidiana. I ended up getting two: a headshot and a full-length portrait. So if you want to have an idea of what the fae queen in Midnight Never Come looks like, there you go. (I’m hoping she’ll end up on the cover, but I have next to no control over that; all I can do is suggest it to my editor.) The Swan Tower Illustration Award goes to her — as if she hadn’t already earned it with the Memento cast painting.

Third: unforth. I have a hardcover copy of Doppelganger! Y’see, she’s a librarian, and she knows how to bind books. A while back she mentioned that she was looking for suggested rebinding projects. Until she delivered it into my hands, I had no idea she’d decided to make her first project a hardcover rebinding of my very own novel, complete with a wrap-around paper cover replicating the front, spine, and back of the original. Unless there’s somebody else out there with her skills and deranged enthusiasm, this will probably be the only hardcover edition there ever is — certainly the only hardcover of the first edition. For her, the Swan Tower Bookbinding Award.

So there you have it: I have awesome friends. Seriously, you all (not just those three) have a stunning array of knowledges and skills, and if I occasionally get depressed that there are a million and one things I’ll never learn to do, I cheer up when I remember that I might know people who do. Keep up the random hobbies, folks; they make me proud to know you.

today

Today, I think I shall set aside research for Midnight Never Come (partly because the next thing on my plate is More Than I Ever Wanted to Know About Elizabethan London, Vols. 1 and 2 — oh, wait, misread the title, that would be John Stow’s A Survey of London, Vols. 1 and 2), and let myself loll around with Patrick O’Brian instead. I can only watch Master and Commander so many times in a limited span, and I’ve gone through all the Hornblower movies; since I don’t need to be sewing at the same time anymore, it’s time for a book.

And things like laundry, maybe. But not until later.

I think I need a day just to relax.

hello, spring

I do not think it’s possible for me to overstate how wonderful an effect warmer weather and sunlight have on my mood. I’ve got lots of things I need to do today, sure, but I’m relaxed. I’m in good humour. I’m sitting around in my summer PJs; how can I not be happy?

I think part of the process of growing up is learning how I operate, and allowing for it. Like, when I wake up I need fifteen minutes or so of low-key websurfing or the like before I try to do much of anything, and I shouldn’t eat for a while after that. When I go to a con, it will take me half a day, give or take, to turn on the switch in my head that says “Social!,” and before that goes on, I’ll be a little bit awkward. When it’s February, I should not expect to get anything substantial done, because winter saps my will to live around then. As long as I understand these things, I get by just fine.

So I’ve got an eyeball-high stack of things to do (several of them hangovers from February; see above about inability to do anything during that month), but that’s okay. Going outside to run errands doesn’t mean wrapping a scarf around my neck and finding gloves and a hat, so errand-running becomes a more pleasant thing to do. And when I’m done with that, I’ll deal with e-mails, or revise a story that needs to go out today, or maybe work on my costume for the upcoming Regency game, or whatever, and it will all be good.

Because I’m in a good mood.

snarl.

Exercising today was kind of a bust.

Strength training: this went fine. A woman already had the hand-weight I use for one exercise, so I made myself step up to the next one. Had to lower my reps a bit, but other than that I was fine. So that’s an achievement.

Cardio: things started going wrong. The balls of my feet hurt for some reason, from the moment I stepped onto the elliptical. Not hurt badly, but enough that I quit a third of the way into my usual workout. Grrr.

Stretching: now, I’ve stretched for flexibility before. I know how it works. If I stretch two days after the previous session, it will hurt. I understand this. But there’s hurting, and there’s today, when my muscles told me in no uncertain terms where to shove it. Quit this one partway through, too, and when I got up the soreness took too long to go away.

Is some planet in retrograde that has to do with physical fitness? Because it sure felt like it.

Screw it. I’m going to eat girl scout cookies and forget about health for a day.