Here is what has been going on since the last time I wrote something:
- Riding my bike as much as I want, finally, since I don’t have some stupid sinus infection anymore. E and I are going to go ride around the Olympic Peninsula in three weeks, and my main concern is my lack of good bike shorts and sports bras. It’s nice that I’m not worried about my fitness, but I don’t know how I got away with having this little gear for so long.
- Went to Yellowstone with my parents. It was amazing. I don’t even know where to start.
- The cat has cancer on his face. The tumor is slowly growing, and has been for a number of months. He mostly doesn’t seem to care about it, but nobody has any idea how long that’s going to last.
- We’ve also been trying to sell our place because we want to move back to Capitol Hill. Lots of people have come to look; nobody wants to buy yet.
- I made some popsicles this week, because, you know, summer.
- I got promoted at work and now I am leading a big team. That’s been an adjustment.
- I’m still learning Turkish. I am slightly less awful at it every week.
- Small ongoing side projects: reading all the books in English in the house that I haven’t read before because they’re Eldan’s; paring down my stuff so I don’t have to move it; balcony gardening instead of P-Patch gardening; mending clothes that have holes in them; eating jam; drawing more; getting through my enormous photo-editing backlog.
I just read an article in a week-old print edition of the Economist about how the increased demand for rhinoceros horn as a cure-all has increased the rate of poaching rhinoceros to the extent that more are poached each year than are born.
It outlines the stiff penalties for poachers that they’re caught, and also explains that rhinoceros horn is made of keratin, the same stuff that hair and fingernails are made of.
What I would now like to know is why these poachers aren’t just grinding up their fingernail clippings and selling them. It would be much easier, and much less illegal.
Thursdays are tiring.
I ride the giant bike to work, ride it home, eat dinner in half an hour because Eldan is gracious enough to put something in the crockpot, throw my violin on the bike, ride to orchestra, play for 2 and a half hours, and then ride home.
It’s awesome, but it turns both my brain and body to mush. Maybe it’s more like chess boxing than biathlon.
At work, our reading group is covering Writing Secure Code. Chapter 10 starts like this:
If someone you didn’t know came to your door and offered you something to eat, would you eat it? No, of course you wouldn’t.
The thing is, I’d probably actually eat it.
I have pretty much had a sinus infection since September (remember how I was supposed to ride my bike to Bellingham and wanted to take a nap under a picnic table instead?). It is just now going away in earnest.
In the past three days, I’ve biked 29 miles (two rides of 14ish miles each, which is the most I’ve done since sometime in October, I’d guess), and today I went skiing. Aside from feeling really good, I was also much more confident on skis than I had expected myself to be. It was a bluebird day at Stevens Pass and I had a really, really nice time.
Over the course of the past week, I’ve been waking up every day and saying “Wow, I feel so much better today!” It’s terrifying doing that for seven days in a row, because it makes me sit up and realize just how bad I had been feeling. It’s also a wonderful experience.
I’m leaving for London on Friday night and I’ll be there for two weeks though, so it will be interesting to see how that goes with respect to not getting sick (ugh airplane) and my overall fitness level.
