annmeeker

That's taken from the dock

From a recent column by Andrew Tobias:

In that last regard it might be noted that universal health insurance frees individuals to switch jobs, start businesses, take chances. It enhances liberty.

Another way of looking at it.

Getting in shape when one has been woefully round all one's life is difficult, even if age isn't a fact. So I have to set up challenges along the way. Things like marathons and half-marathons (even if I am just walking them). It's too easy to fall into the laziness trap, the I-have-to-work-don't-bother-me pit. Setting up marathons is a way of reminding myself to keep working at it; well, that and the fact that once I pay my entry fees, I'm too stubborn (read, cheap) to not go and get the free t-shirt. And getting the shirt without exercising is simply not done. So, I sign up. It seems to be working.

We have three coming up, and I've dragged my loyal and long-suffering spouse Elliott into each and every one of them. He hasn't been kicking and screaming, so I guess he needs the structure too. We've got the Jacksonville Marine Corps Half-Marathon in early October, the Thunder Road Half-Marathon in Charlotte in December (that's the one the scares me), and the ING Atlanta Half-Marathon one in (duh!) Atlanta in March. I carefully picked out ones that had 3-1/2 and 4-hour time limits, but then my friend Kitty decided we could do a 3-hour one (curse her) and now I'm having to work at getting my time up. It doesn't sound like much, to go from 15-minute miles to 13.74-minute miles, but I've gone that fast only once in my life (Baltimore marathon, October 2007) and then it was only on the first half of the marathon (we won't even talk about the time on the second half). And that was before I pulled a hamstring and twisted my knee. So I'd pretty much given up on trying to go that fast again.

Then came chi walking and its promise of injury-free walking. I'm gullible, and even more so when friends try it (thank you, Chuck C!) and give it a thumbs-up. So now I'm signed up as well for a chi walking workshop in Charlotte.

All this is by way of warning my neighbors that if you see me walking to the mailboxes wiggling my hips like a bowl full of hot soup that can't be spilled, thrusting my elbows into the air in front of me, and breathing through my nose--that is, looking like a waddling penguin with a head cold--I assure you, there is a reason for it.

The first time I did a marathon--the Goofy Challenge in Orlando, FL--I was 54, out of shape, and didn't quite finish fast enough to get the certificate. But the high I got when I finished--that "I can do anything! Go me!" feeling--was addictive and the finisher's medal will have to be pulled from my fingers when I'm dead. I need that feeling again. So Thunder Road, here I come. Thank you, Kitty, Elliott, and Chuck. Without you guys, I'd be wallowing in laziness again.

Which sounds really good right now, at 8:30 on a Sunday morning. Maybe I'll have another cup of coffee before I venture outdoors. I do have my walking shoes on, that's got to count for something.

Five days without Internet. Well, four and a half. That was the downside.

The upside was that I got my book synopsis done (still subject to change) and a chapter and a half written. I feel back on track. I missed the Internet for the quick check of things I wanted to add, but I learned to just write things like [[ADD SAINTS DAY IN JULY]] sort of thing.

The other downside was 573 pieces of email of which 41 were all I really needed. Thankfully, Elliott's junk filter took out about 300 of them. Still, I find it incredible that these emails actually bring in money.

But an upside was that we watched "writing" movies in the evening. We were aiming for both Capote and Infamous in one night, but that was too much so we spread it out over two. It was interesting how we liked different things about each of them, but in the end I much preferred Infamous--even tho Capote got all the hype. And Tonia had insights as to how both movies ended up coming out at the same time and covering the same material.

Anyway, it was a great five day writers' retreat. I'd be there still, but everybody else had conflicts and left yesterday afternoon--and writing in solitude is a lot different when there's nobody else in the house. I drew on my internal inspiration for as long as I could, but then gave in to needing voices, people, and something to draw me outside myself. That, and a huge house at night when you're all by yourself is downright spooky!

I turned in my most recent book to the editors early today, and now I'm free--free!--until Monday, May 4. I'll be back in Durham, NC at a writers' retreat/girlfriend week, catching up with old friends for most of the time. It's a real vacation for me, and I am soooo looking forward to it.

My goal is to finish two chapters of my book and get a complete synopsis done--one that makes sense this time.

Elliott will join me next Saturday, a week from now. He'll fly up and leave the plane for its annual, and we'll drive back here to Georgia together. We're thinking about a Flag Day party/bash at our house for all and sundry, so we'll spend the 7-hour drive plotting and planning.

Then I'll be back to work here on two books: Six Virtues of an Educated Person and a Historical Dictionary of Animation and Cartoons. I'll finish just in time to head back to Durham for the Grueling Chuck Norris Triathlon of Doom, which means I need to start training for that, like, last week.

In the meantime, Margie introduced us to Dead Like Me, so we've been watching episodes of that interspersed with Six Feet Under. We must be in a very morbid frame of mind.

Anyway, I'll be offline for most of the week. Cell phone coverage is minimal too.

And the best news is, no deer or armadillos! I don't even want to think about the damage one of them could inflict some night. The chicken wire surrounding it should keep the armadillos out, and the little bags of green are citrus-scented and are supposed to keep deer out. I'm counting on the dogs barking, but maybe the citrus will slow the deer down just a tad so that the dogs can sniff 'em out. I like deer--everywhere but in my garden.
In the box on the right are onions, elephant garlic, baby's breath, peppers and eggplant. The box on the left is Margie's flower garden (I'll turn her into a gardener yet, heh heh!), and there are peas in the pots in the center. I'm particularly proud of those--the peas were part of my weekly CSA box and sprouted all by themselves in the refrigerator before I had a chance to eat them. I figure once they start to vine I can move them to the chicken-wire fence. And in the distance are zucchini and summer squash, and off the your very left distance are tomatoes. What you can't see are the lettuces (six varieties), radishes, carrots, tomatillos, beans, and who knows what else? Me, that's who. Beets, celery (hasn't sprouted yet--not sure if it will), broccoli, cucumber, and more onions. And several flowers just to give it color.

Fractals and Multifractals in Marine Ecology is gone...and not a moment too soon. While the book and the text was actually interesting, renumbering several hundred figures, equations, tables, and boxes took a fair amount of time and concentration.

Now on to Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media beyond Borders. It's an edited book, with 14 chapters by 14 different individuals, so my main job is to make things consistent. But it's also fascinating, in an international sociological sort of way. A bit too much of the socio-speak (I mean, really, "lived experience"? as opposed to what one experiences after death? What other kind of experience is there? But I've learned to let it be. Though I can't let "impacted" go when it means affected or influenced, I just can't. I know language is a fluid thing, but I'm just not ready yet. There's a line in there somewhere, vague as it is.)

About a month ago, I built a bunch of 2x2, 3x3, and 4x4 boxes for my garden--nothing difficult, as the lumber yard sawed the 1x6s for me, so all I had to do was nail four equal-length boards together to make something more or less square. Figured even I could handle that. I had a guy come out and bush-hog the ground and clear off some dead trees from a 20x25' area. Here's what it looks like on the other side of the driveway (I forgot to take a "before" picture of the garden side, but both sides of the driveway were pretty much the same, but the side I picked had a greater chance of sunshine because the hangar was there):
Then about two weeks ago, I planted a couple of baby cucumber plants in my garden, along with onions, zucchini, and crookneck squash in a couple of the boxes (see www.squarefootgardening.com for an idea of the way it works) and see Elliott's LJ post for a picture of me sitting inside one of the boxes. I knew it was early, and I was willing to lose them to frost, but I got a couple of milk cartons for night-time protection just in case the temperatures dropped. Images of abundant greenery flowed through my brain.
The very next morning--less than 18 hours after I planted them, someone had eaten my baby cucumbers and dug up all my onions (they were in the same 2x2 box). Grrrrr! I assumed it was deer who had eaten the cucumbers, as just that morning I had seen three very healthy deer in the lot next door. No scurvy on these deer, with all that vitamin C in their systems! So I watered what was left (apparently even deer don't like squash), and while I'm there, Rascal comes over and starts pawing through my onion box.
Rascal is a recent stray that has adopted the folks next door (the side opposite the one with the deer). We're not all that close together, so it's not as claustrophobic as it sounds, but we are aware of what goes on nearby. Rascal is a four-month-old or so black lab. I yelled at Rascal and he slunk away, but now I'm determined to put up a fence (it didn't help when I stepped in some other dog stuff). Unfortunately, I'd exhausted my carpentry skills by building the boxes.
I mentioned my dilemma to Bunny, a fearless neighbor. We'd both had a significant amount of wine, and I was heading off to Durham the next day, but Bunny declared that we could do it. By the time I came back, she had even figured out how to do it with just 2x4's and 1x4s--which aren't so heavy the two of us can't lift them.
We started when I got back. I learned how to nail properly (don't hang onto the top of the hammer, you get more ooomph if you hold the bottom of the handle), how to pour concrete (don't breathe the dust whatever you do), how to use a post hole digger (not bad in this sandy soil till we got to the very last post which was over a tree stump), etc. I managed to break the wheelbarrow (okay, it rusted through when I "dropped" an 80-lb. bag of concrete into it (sorry, Elliott--it still works if it's something light. And it's only 20 years old or so...)

And this is our result. Not bad for a couple of far-side-of-30 women (far side of 50? me? nah). The next step is to build the gates and put the chicken wire around it on the inside, both to keep critters out and to use as a trellis for the tomatoes and cucumbers. That's this weekend's job. I want to put the chicken wire in about 8" into the ground to keep the moles out too. I'm suddenly very possessive about my garden. These are MY veggies. Mine. Mine. Get your mitts off unless I say so--which, if it produces the way the guy at Square Foot Gardening says, I'll share with anybody with fewer than four legs.
So come on down. Please.

Official title: Grey Game Theory and Its Applications in Economic Decision-Making.
The book is written (based on the first chapter) by experts in China. Given that their knowledge of English is far superior to mine in Chinese, it reads as if someone had simply run the text through a computerized translation program--the words are all spelled correctly, but the syntax is extremely awkward. So awkward, I'm not sure what they're saying. Which leads to a copyeditor's dilemma (much like the prisoner's dilemma program they're discussing in chapter 1): Do I make the changes and risk introducing an error that may never be discovered? Or do I leave it unclear, hoping that it makes sense to those people who understand game theory?
Or do I go out and play in the garden? Yesterday I planted zucchini, crookneck squash, onions, and cucumbers. Tomorrow, they're forecasting damaging hail and severe winds, and Monday it will get down to 30. I knew better, I really did. But it was warm and sunny and the transplants were begging me to be removed from their pots.
On the other hand, I could just go out and get some soil additives today for the boxes I haven't yet planted. Yep, that's a plan.

My next book to edit is...drumroll, please...Historical Dictionary of Greece.

The books are coming faster. I'm not sure if there's a cycle in the publishing industry to meet deadlines at the beginning of the year, or if I'm getting faster. Or maybe the books are shorter because the average attention span equals that of an armadillo? (Actually, that's probably too insulting to armadillos--it must have taken quite some time to dig up our yard last night. And the raccoons had fun in the trash. Living in the marshes does have its hazards. And don't get me started on the septic tank that overflowed again today. But I'm digressing.)

And the next book after that is already assigned, so I've got enough to keep me busy for more than a month. It's Quantum Dynamics: Applications in Biological and Materials Systems, but the interesting thing is that it will be on paper. Paper! I haven't done paper edits for almost ten years now. I'll have to brush up on all the squiggles and underlining. I used to do them while the kids were busy--during dance lessons or whatever. It would give me something to do without feeling antsy. Now that both kids have licenses--hurray!--and are almost independent, I don't have the "wait" time I used to. And the space it requires....guess I'll have to take over the dining room table, since my desk has gotten smaller (or my pile of stuff on it bigger!).

But first, food.