Tag: me

Sorting the letters.

Along with the journals, the letters from the first two years of college were recovered.  They are all a jumble and I’m sorting them.  I have another tub of letters which I went though a few years ago, so I hope to get everything in neat piles of people.  It’s been fun to see what I can find.  They are especially nostalgic because after my first two years of college I got an email account. Though the letters still arrived, it wasn’t with the same frequency.  All of that early electronic communication has been lost and I mourn it.  That makes these letters all the more wonderful to read now.

KRPS schedule in 1994

Just in case you need to know what I was listening to my first two years of college.  Friend Sue and I especially enjoyed the Bob and Bill show.  That’s the first time I can remember a radio show giving an email address to write to, along with the regular postal service address.  We also loved the Radio Reader, though Friend Sue got to listen to him more than I did as she was always doing something in the Art building, whereas my hours were spent in the library.

Exercise goal for April.

I get a goodly amount of exercise, but I would like to do better.  My goal for April will be to average 60 minutes of exercise over six days.  I’ve just tallied up my exercise for the 12 weeks since January 6, and I averaged 45 minutes per day.  So I have a good foundation built.  Exercise can be anything but will most likely be the following things I do:  walking, jog/walk, Pilates, exercise class.  The only thing I’m not counting is restorative yoga, which I love, and is very good for me, but I cannot in good conscious call exercise.  I don’t have to complete 60 minutes all at once, can break the sessions and scatter them through the day.

I’ll check in at the end of every week.

Week of March 31
I did 370 minutes of exercise over seven days, but since I’ve decided to divide 370 by six and not seven, I made my goal.

Week of April 7
380 minutes over six days.  Goal achieved!  Also, I walked home from work for the first time.  It took 85 minutes.  Which is not really that long, in the grand scheme of things.  I might think about doing this more often.

Week of April 14
365 over six days.  I took Easter off.

Week of April 21
Despite the fact I did no exercise on three days, I still clocked 360 minutes this week.  This makes me think that 360/week is a reasonable number to shoot for on a regular basis.

Week of April 28
Although this week I only did 165 minutes over four days.  I did run a 5k on Saturday though, which meant I skipped my walk to the gym and the gym which meant 80 minutes of usually automatic exercise I did not obtain. Not such a great finish to the experiment, but still successful enough that I will continue to strive for 360 minutes of exercise per week.

Picture from long time ago.

This is E.F. and myself sitting in downtown Amherst in November of 1997.  I had traveled back to Amherst for Thanksgiving, or perhaps a fall visit.  The two of us had been roommates the previous summer.  Excellent mid-90s details include the red point-and-shoot camera held by EF, her short hair the fact that she’s smoking.  I am not smoking in this photo, but I’m guessing I have either just finished a cigarette or am about to have one.  I’m wearing my dad’s army pants, left over from the national guard, a spanking new pair of Doc Martens, my green sweater, which once upon a time belonged to Sara’s Great Aunt Hazel.  I’m also wearing the coat that kept me warm through many a freezing cold New England Winter.  On my hand is a ring that I gave myself, so as to be engaged to me and not any guys.  The backpack carries my things for the weekend.  I will take the Peter Pan bus back to Boston to work my first post-college job as a receptionist.  It is a job that is boring and lonely and I travel an hour each way to get to there.  I am lonely, and this weekend has been a very good one.

The first two years of college journals.

For a few weeks, I thought they were gone forever, but they were tucked away in my Aunt’s basement, behind sacks of romance novels.  They were great to read.

And I think the cigarette manufacturers wasted their advertising dollars on me.  Apparently, they just needed to get the boys I liked to smoke.

From 22 January, 1995. Sunday.
I smoked my last cigarette for the weekend.  I can still taste the tar and nicotine on the back of my throat and on my teeth.  It tastes like the kisses of K.–or so long ago the kisses of T.  I became addicted to smoking this summer when I sat in truck stops and Shari’s late at night with TM and K and breathed in the smell of the pipe, or sat on the front porch of the house sittin’ house and smelled the smoke from the Lucky Strikes.  I guess now I ‘m the only one around to smoke, so I do and remember the kisses.

Back to the early twentieth century

I spent a year without a watch, figuring I would be like everyone else and just use my phone to tell me the time.  But you know what?  Sometimes I just want to know the time by flicking my wrist toward me and glancing down rather than rummaging around for my phone, finding the “on” button and pushing it.  There’s no way to do that in a non-obvious manner.  So welcome back Wenger watch!

What I’ve been up to: collecting rewards and making bread.

I feel like I haven’t been taking very many pictures of late.  Although I’ve written over 475 posts for this blog alone this year, so perhaps a short break is in order.  But here’s what I’ve been up to, aside from reading, writing, watching movies and blogging.

I didn’t realize I had backer rewards coming, but here they are.
 

I made some bread.  It’s from Laurel’s Kitchen Break Book, which is the best book to pick up if you are thinking of taking up whole-grain bread baking in the new year.  This is the milk bread recipe and made two very nice loves.  The book itself teachers you step-by-step what to do to create excellent all-whole-wheat flour bread.  Most “whole wheat” recipes use a bit of whole wheat and a goodly amount of All-Purpose Flour.

Bread making is a good skill to have if you want to save money and control your ingredients.  It’s also kind of magical.  This started as two cups of milk, a quarter cup of honey, some yeast, flour and salt.  A bit of mixing (with a mixer) and a few hours of rising and deflating and shaping and there is delicious bread waiting for me to eat.

Two tips should you embark on the bread journey:
1) Buy some vital wheat gluten (Bob’s Red Mill carries this product) and add 1 tablespoon per cup of flour.  It makes all the difference.
2) If you don’t have a warm place for rising (our house is mostly pretty cold) turn the oven to 170 and when it comes to temperature, set the timer for 10 minutes.  Then shut off the oven.  The heating turns the oven from a cold cave to a warm environment and if you turn on the light to the oven the temperature will be maintained.

How’s it goin’?

As you may recall, I’ve taken a break from writing essays so I can focus on writing 500 words per day in November and December of the novel I am working on.  Here’s an update on my progress.

I’ve missed two days.  One was Thanksgiving, which had me going from 6:15 in the morning to 9:30 at night.  In all that activity, I completely forgot to write. I woke up suddenly at 11:30 the night of Thanksgiving, was stricken by breaking my streak, and then decided to stay in bed instead of hauling myself out to bang out 500 words.  The other day was a game night we hosted.  I miscalculated just how long the gaming would go on.  It was a very long and hard day, and by the time it was 11:15 and I had the choice of writing or bed, I chose bed.  In general, it has been no trouble to find the time to write, though Fridays and weekends are more difficult because my time is not as scheduled as on the other days of the week.  I’ve had a few sessions of cranking out the words and then going straight to bed because of this.

I’ve done a good job of meeting my words written per day goal of 500 words.  Only one day did I write exactly 500 words, every other day I wrote, I exceeded the goal, including one day where I wrote 3400 words.  I was suspicious of that outlier, but I went back and double checked and indeed, I churned that day.
By far my usual practice is to write 500-599 words.  I did so on 21 days.  The next most common is 600 words, happening on 6 days and then 700 words (5) days.  From there we step down to 1 to 2 occurrences.
All that writing is adding up.  When I set my goal of 500 words per day, I accepted the fact that I would “only” have 48,000 words by December 31.  This was seen as lesser achievement because in order to “win” National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) you need to write 50,000 words between November 1 and  November 31.  I was beginning with a bank of 17,000 words and taking two months and still coming up short.  But I’m happy to report that exceeded my original writing goal on December 11 and I crossed over the 50,000 word mark on December 13.  
Overall, I’m quite pleased with my progress.  The book is still fun to write, I’m chugging along and the rest of my life hasn’t been thrown out of control.  Plus I get to make nerdy Excel charts as explanation.  Win-win.

Home

From a series in the Oregonian about US 26:

“This is where the rubber hits the road.  This to me is what eastern Oregon is all about.  This is where you can picture pioneers slogging through the desert, running low on water and wondering how much longer it will take.  This is a very lonely section of the road before arriving in Vale close to the Idaho border.”  Thomas Boyd.

Or, as I call it:  home.

Reading.


Tonight was my reading.  I meant to take a picture at the bar with my story leaning up against my cocktail and the dark atmosphere really setting the stage.  But I forgot.  I was nervous and then I was busy listening to the others (I went second) and then I was talking with my friends that came out and then I was talking with the other people in my class and before you knew it, I was home and instead of a dark, atmospheric photo, you got a picture of my Sunday paper and my reading.  But you already read it earlier in the week.

Things to note about this experience:  I loved it.  It was very fun to get up in front of people and read something I wrote.  I practiced a lot and thought throughout my many practice sessions, “there is absolutely nothing I can cut from this.”  Then when reading I left out entire sentences, thinking, “yep, that doesn’t actually need to be said.”  It was very interesting to observe that going down.  The lights meant I couldn’t see anyone while I read.  That was unfortunate, as I would have loved to see some expressions.  But I could hear a bit of laughter in parts, so that was cool.