The wall/muscle/gravity puzzle

They have cut down the trees outside my apartment -- three fully grown trees, a pine and two oaks. I have gone from an eyrie in the leaves to a SW exposure overlooking a parking lot. I'm going to start crying again if I don't find distract myself.

By the time my mom, the Goren of dominoes, leaves, I expect I'll be down to pennies per smackdown.

Apart from that, we have prowled through bookshops, Asian and Inuit galleries, and the Teacup (radcliffe, the sweet guy behind the counter said hi, but I can't remember his name!). We had Mexican for dinner. I showed her the gym, and the wall I fell off. She worked on needlepoint; I tried to make a sock monster but only managed to create an abomination unfit for Christian eyes. Then she skunked me, five out of five.

The sweet thing: Mom and the people at the Teacup were exchanging tea arcana, when the pretty girl with the Commonwealth accent asked if we were mother and daughter. Yeah, we said. "You look exactly the same!" she said. Yeah, we do, we said. "It's lovely," she said. It's all in the inflection: I think what she meant was who we were, our clearly nontraditional relationship.

weaselmom, we were parked in the Seahawks parking lot this morning and I pointed out your building. So we were thinking of you, as well.

I was late picking her up, but she is here! I am so pleased. We were driving up the Viaduct when the sun broke through for a moment: the calm water of the Sound full of boats and ships. Mom was talking about something or other, and then there was a little hitch in her voice and she said, "The Bremerton ferry!" She and my dad lived in Bremerton for a year before I was born, so the ferry is part of her life and her past. The shadow of delight in her voice made me want to hug her. I hope I can talk her into taking a ride this weekend.

Dinner at Kaosamai -- lots of Thai food -- and then a bit of catching up. She's two hours off, so she's in bed right now. I'll be following soonish. Tomorrow: Chinese antiques, Inuit art, Elliot Bay books. Hurrah!

1. While we were talking, I walked up 40 flights of stairs and carried on an intelligible conversation throughout, without getting out of breath.
   
   
2. Mom gets here in two days, and is already planning on Indian, "good Chinese," and Beecher's Flagship Cheddar. "And shopping, lots of shopping." And pedicures. With my mom. How classically, unprecedentedly girly is that?
   
   
3. She told me that she almost didn't recognize me the last time I met her at the airport, because, "You've grown so extremely pretty." My mom said that!

I feel like I'm getting the teenage years with her I never had the first time around. I am a lucky, lucky girl.

::off to glow some::

I feel weirdly happy by this, all bustle and do-gooderness.

In other news, I don't really have any other news.

Yes, yes I could be. Still, I am tired enough to be waiting not-very-patiently until it's late enough to sleep wothout popping awake at 3am.

So I did climb yesterday as Ryan suggested: taped the three last fingers on my right hand together, and then clicked into the autobelay and hammered on easy routes for 45 minutes. Taping my hand like that seemed to short-circuit my skills. I lost not just the use of my hand and fingers independently to adjust my balance or my position on the wall, but also my ability to think through a route, either on the ground looking up, or as I moved. I was really there for endurance, so I climbed a route (or faked one), dropped to the ground, waited fifteen seconds, and then did it again.

But after ten or fifteen minutes of this, I found the two routes I was climbing started to engrain themselves into my body. I think a lot about setting and resetting physical and other engrams: I could feel the changes in my muscle memory, and somewhere inside my brain, as these long, complex engrams established themselves. It will interesting to see if I can identify that feeling again, and maybe work out a way to access it on demand.

I was dripping with sweat when I left. Not much pain yesterday and a little aching today, but I think I won't go to the gym again until Thursday.

I have a story in the July Asimov's, called "26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss." Though I haven't seen a copy yet, this morning I found an email in my inbox from someone telling me he loved the story. This of course made my day.

Has anyone seen it? What about in the racks somewhere? I need more than the half-dozen I'll get from Sheila.

I use LJ to stay in touch with people, listening to you and in turn telling you what I'm doing. It's how I store my memories to pull out and turn over in my mind, like pretty stones in a box. I think things through here. And it's a practice, a casual discipline, to work with words (even unimportant words) and jump them through hoops.

But lately not so much. A happy life may not be all the same, but like happy families, it doesn't always make for great storytelling.

( Here's the stuff I haven't gotten around to talking about, or talking about much. )

pegkerr is starting a community dedicated to soulcollaging, and I am helping as a co-maintainer. I don't like the name, but SoulCollage is actually cool: you create oversized cards based on archetypes and important spiritual and personal connections in your life, and they can be beautiful and resonant.

For more information, the book is SoulCollage: An Intuitive Collage Process for Individuals and Groups. Or check out the community; we'll be posting more as time goes by.

I haven't been able to climb for a couple of weeks now -- since I wrote about everything clicking. I strained the joints of three fingers on my right hand that night and I decided to take a week off, no hardship since I was going to the Nebulas anyway. But a week later they weren't better, and now, two weeks later, they're barely better, so no climbing for at least a few more days, and possibly a week or two more. I have all this excess energy because of not climbing, and I have been channeling some of it into crunches.

The thing about the physical life is that I at least can be insatiable, as insatiable as any overeater. I climb and I walk and I run up stairs, lots of stairs. I do crunches on the floor of my office. And I could do more, would do more, though I'm not kayaking yet because I don't have a neoprene suit. I can see how people become addicted, not just to the endorphins or to the person who looks back at me in the mirror, but to movement itself, my atoms hopping around like drops of water on a hot griddle.

I can't wait to go climbing.

In other news, here, have a bullet list.

• I forgot to buy catfood for Tatsuko! She's moaning softly to herself from misery or perhaps asthma.
  
  
• I thought I was done with all the medical bills from November but, look! $500 more, all at once.
  
  
• I want to submit a climbing essay somewhere, but I'm having trouble identifying a market. Most sports or climbing mags aren't interested in anything as cerebral as what I'm doing. I could go for Atlantic, what the hell, but that's certainly a waste of time. Creative Nonfiction seems to be the best place for me, but it doesn't pay especially well. Any ideas, O Hive Mind? I already prowled through Writer's Market.
  
  
• They're fixing up my apartment building, and at the moment that means they're scraping the woodwork outside my apartment windows, and then putting primer on it all. The wood is fiddley, board and batten. It's been taking forever, and forever seems to start at 7am most days.
  
  
• I have a cupcake on my kitchen counter. eta: Not any more.

Even if we remove the boots and climbing shoes from the count, I have more pairs of shoes than I have jeans, pants, skirts, kilts, sweats, yoga pants and pajama bottoms. Combined.

By a factor of 2.

I had such a wonderful time at the Nebulas. Austin's a charming town, though I know I barely scratched the surface -- poppers and guac at the Iron Cactus; BBQ at a corrugated-metal shack on a deserted road in Manchaca; the capital and the grounds. So much I didn't see -- no bats, no music on the street (it was usually raining at night), no campus. It had a lot of Lawrence's breeziness.

Everyone at the con was great. I felt as though I knew about half the people there, often personally, though there were plenty of people I knew only from their journals. I LOVED meeting you all! --And remeeting those of you I never get so see very often.

I'm home now, really tired, with an ominous sore throat and sneeze. Joe and Gay Haldeman do this what seems like every single week. They must have the constitutions of mules. I don't go anywhere until the end of June, and right this moment I feel as though I still won't be recovered by then.

So far this is my favorite photo from the con, of me talking to mckitterick. I think we look like an indy duo on the release of our first CD. eta: Per todfox, any ideas for the band name? eta2: I have decided, per the thread, that it should be Food Of My People.



It was taken by Keith Stokes, and is part of the MidAmerica Fan Photo Archives. Lots more pictures from the Nebulas are here.

There are a couple of other pictures from the weekend that I really like, and I'll post links to them as I find them.

Oh, and Michael Chabon? Hot.

I'm ready for Austin, packed and boarding-pass'd and magazined. I am travelling with the sort of velvet dress that doesn't pack at all well, so I am going to throw myself on the mercy of the attendants, carry it on in a dry cleaner's bag, and hope they have somewhere to hang it. Eek! I hope hope hope it travels all right. Last dress reference, I promise.

I am going to be offline until Sunday or even Monday. If you're going to be at the Nebs, say hi. Otherwise, don't do anything that requires hitting me up for bail.

( And there's a bit of it. )

There is not a day I have climbed yet that I was not afraid, a little or a lot. The bad days are the ones when the fear makes me back down, not because it's the right thing to do (because sometimes it is) but because it's the easy thing. On the good days, there's fear and there's courage and a lot of hard, satisfying work as I negotiate between them.

The great days, the days to mark with a white stone -- and yesterday was one of those -- are the ones when the fear and doubt transmute directly into courage, like lead into gold.

It is snowing again.

(In other news, Neb ensemble is worked out. One more thing is needed, and I'm done.)

( Leavenworth last weekend; but be warned that this part is full of jargon. For my reference mostly, and as a cautionary tale for other climbers. )

Then I had two good days at the gym last week-- and oh yeah, I top-roped a 5.11! Where the hell did that come from? Harder than hell and I fell a goodly amount, but I did it, no beta.

My hands have been understandably feeling a little overworked so I didn't expect to go in at all this weekend. Best intentions forgotten: this evening I got a call from Dave K, who was at the gym if I wanted to work on stuff. I scrambled into my clothes and pelted over.

And, oh, it was great. He's an amazing climber and, I think, an excellent teacher. He asked about projects, so I showed him two routes I've been pushing at, both V-4s. I haven't been able to get past the crux of one of them, an upward slide against the wall with a single handhold -- all about balance and strong knees. I have the balance but I don't have the nerve to trust my knees, or quite enough strength. And I just couldn't get it, even after working on it, even with him. But he gave me some good advice. I really do climb like a boy, all forearms and shoulders; working from straighter arms will be more energy efficient.

And then I worked on this long traverse-y V-4 that I love and know I will never finish (not before they take it down, which I think is next week). It's been a project for me for a couple of weeks now. I've been able to do the first half of it, but never gotten past a specific move. And I worked on it with him, and he helped me see what I was doing.

And I got the move! I got it so well that I could repeat it a number of times, and every time it got solider and made more sense. I was even able to make two moves farther along the route. And when I did the part I had already finished, that felt smooth and elegant, too.

That's why I do this: for the moments I get it right and I get it, I get it, my body understands what it needs to do, it's not faking it or guessing or hoping, it just knows. That move that I figured out tonight: Dave showed me how he did it twice, and after that it was all me.

I haven't thought much about the wall/muscle/gravity problem lately. Maybe it's time to go back to that. wpadmirer, sending you that essay has gotten me thinking again. Thank you.

...in case you want to explore the nuances. Yes, it's time for Food Of My People.

MELKEGRØTMilk
flour
salt

Boil the milk. Make a thickening of flour and a little cold milk. Stir in the boiling milk. If not thick enough, add flour very carefully with one hand, stirring vigorously with the other, until the grøt is of the right consistency. Add salt to taste at last. serve with sugar, cinnamon, and butter.

Ed: Have some milk. If it's not thick enough, add flour.



SURMELKSGRØT1 quart fresh milk
1 quart sour milk
1 3/4 cups flour
salt

Make a thickening of the flour and the sour milk. Beat this into the boiling sweet milk. Boil five minutes. Salt.

Ed: Mixing it up here.



BUTTERMILK SOUP1 quart buttermilk
4 tablespoonfuls sugar
2 yolks of egg
1/2 pint of cream

Stir yolks of egg and sugar together until white, whip up cream and add. Pour cold buttermilk into the cream, and serve. Serves 4.

Ed: The classic cold-buttermilk-and-raw-egg dish.



SMORGRØT1 cup plus 2 tablespoons butter
4 cups flour
3 cups boiling water
2 teaspoons salt

Melt the butter. Add the flour. Mix with the boiling water. Cook five minutes. Add salt. When adding flour, it is necessary to add it slowly and to stir vigorously.

Ed: Wait, there's no milk in this one. It's water soup.



FLØIELSGRØT1/2 pound butter
2 cups flour
hot milk

Melt the butter but do not let it brown. Stir in the flour. Add boiling milk little by little, stirring vigorously, until of the right consistency. Add pinch of salt. Serve with sugar, cinnamon, and butter. Milk makes the ideal accompanying beverage.

Ed: See, now they're just fucking with us.