Chez Louise

5K Baby!!

2008-07-06T19:15:20-04:00

It's been a month since I started jogging, and today, I actually ran 5K continuously, i.e., with no walking breaks. It took 39 minutes, which is geriatrically slow, but that's 39 minutes of continuous running! Actually that in itself is another first. I don't think I've ever run for 39 minutes straight before in my entire life. I actually felt surprisingly good for most of it. I had a giant stitch in my side for the last 10 minutes or so of that, but I'm quite proud of myself for pushing through it and making it to the 5k mark.

I can hardly believe it, actually! I can now lay to rest the notion I developed as an 11-year-old that 3K was the max I could do, and that it takes half an hour and a lot of pain to go that distance. And to think that a month ago, it was all I could do to run a whole minute before I would need to stop and take a 2-minute walking break.

So 2 birds with one stone today. My first 5k, and my longest-ever continuous run, at 39 minutes. Yay!!!

I thought it was going to take two months to get to this point, but it only took one. This PR should also be quite easy to beat with a bit more practice. (Can you believe that the really good runners can do a 5K twice as fast?) Anyway, now it's time to set a new goal. I think a far-off goal would be to complete the Torshavn Marathon in 2009 (don't ask why Torshavn, of all places, bit of a long story), but I'm pretty sure I need an in-between goal, so I'll have to think about that for a bit. Off the top of my head, I would like to run a sub-30 minute 5K, and I would also like to start thinking about a 10K somehow, but I'm not sure about the timeframe.

In the meantime, I'm going to spend the day being proud of myself for getting my sedentary, allergic-to-running self this far, and for proving to myself that I can overcome limits I put on myself if I just get myself into a new "I can do it" frame of mind.

Woohoo! Time to take on the world!

Top 100 Books

2008-07-01T19:46:16-04:00

So I got this from my friend's blog...

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

[Louise: I had to add another category, i.e., books I have partially read, but have not finished or have only read in parts; I've put these in square brackets.]

Wait, added another markup: (M) if I've seen a movie adaptation. I also didn't bother to mark books I hadn't heard of with "??", since there would be a lot of them!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (M)
2 [The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien] (M)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (M)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (M)
6 [The Bible]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Golden Compass
Subtle Knife
Amber Spyglass

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (M)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (M)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 [Middlemarch - George Eliot]
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen (M)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (um, doesn't #36 belong within #33??)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (M)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (M)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 [Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas]

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (M)

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 [Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (M)

So, I'm doing slightly better than average; 8 books! There are a lot of interesting books in this list, but I don't think I'll ever have enough time to make it through them all. Not that I'd really want to, anyway. There are some I have no intention of ever reading.

It was fun to go through this list though!

Day 1 of Running

2008-06-07T12:46:55-04:00

Well, I bit the bullet and decided to try to get into the habit of running. I've tried this before and failed, so I don't know if this will work better, but we'll see!

Running has never actually been a forte of mine at any point in my life. In grades 5 and 6 I went to an elementary school where gym class was actually a mass 3k run every other day. I used to really hate these runs, and regardless of whether it was September after a summer off, or June after a whole year of doing these runs, I never seemed to feel a difference. I was always dragging my sorry butt along the course, gasping for air, wishing I could just walk it, and wishing I could be anywhere else but there.

Then came high school where things didn't improve. I have memories of being so exhausted my bones felt hollow, never quite being able to keep up with even the non-varsity kids, always dreading gym class. I was soooooo happy when I got old enough that gym class wasn't mandatory anymore. It took a long time to reverse the "thank God I don't ever have to do another exercise again" mentality!

Now I dance, and I like Irish dance, but it really drains me and I wish I had the endurance for it. I always come out of there thinking, wow, I need to get in better shape. Sometimes, when training for a competition, I'd be in 2 dance classes a week, and even then, I could feel a difference in fitness level. However, dance class is an expensive way to get exercise, so I don't want to load up too much on that. Also, I have a bad habit of taking up activities which require a lot of specialized practice (i.e., learning routines/steps/music/etc).

Enter running. All I really need to do is force myself to put one foot in front of the other on a regular basis. No need for intense brainpower, memorization, or expensive classes. And since it's cardio which is basically killing me in dance class at the moment, it seemed like a good solution.

Except, of course, for the fact that I don't really like real-life running! In dreams sometimes I dream that I can run and not feel tired, and it feels great. I wish that's what happened when I got out and ran today, but it was quite a different story. I decided to do a run/walk type of thing to work up to running continuously, and while a lot of people claim that you get into a running zone and time flies by, I found that the half hour I was out there felt like an eternity. It was also really hard, and my technique is probably really crappy because I feel almost immediately that I'm about to get shin splints. I also don't have proper running shoes, which I need to get ASAP if I'm to avoid incapacitating myself within a week.

I think about how much I struggled just to walk & run for half an hour this morning, and yet there are people who complete marathons, which is totally unfathomable to me at this point. On the other hand, it means there's a whole lot of room for improvement and for things to get better, so maybe (just maybe) it's possible I'll clear this "running really sucks" zone and get into the "feel good" zone people keep talking about, and actually accomplish something like hitting a particular milestone. I don't think I've ever run 5k in my whole life, so I'll make that my first goal (after being able to run 30 min in a row!)

So at the moment, I feel really worn out physically, probably am a bit dehydrated (got to learn to manage that better in the future), but mentally I'm really psyched that I actually managed to get my butt out of bed and go for a run. Now all I have do is do it more than once! :-)

Running Away with the Circus...

2008-05-25T23:12:30-04:00

Well, one more weekend is biting the dust as bedtime approaches, and it's back to work tomorrow. These past couple of weeks have been quite intense at work, and as a result, I've been experiencing some strange form of creative whiplash this weekend. Actually, now would be a good time to take a week of holiday, to continue my little explosion of "other-than-work"-ness ideas that I got going in the mere two days of the weekend.

It all began with a song that got stuck in my head not too long ago. I heard it on the radio on the station that doesn't announce what the songs are, so I got up out of bed after hearing it and wrote a couple of (hopefully) key lyrics on my white board so that I could google it later and find out what song that was. I had the words "balame per te" on my whiteboard for a couple of weeks and today I decided to google them, which resulted in more or less nothing useful. Then it hit me that I have heard this song before, and somewhere out of my subconscious popped the words "Cirque du Soleil". Eventually I just went to find all Cirque du Soleil lyrics and looked for a song that might be a good candidate. Sure enough, there it was: "Ballare" was the name of the song that had been stuck in my head. I wanted to buy it on iTunes, but before I did, I thought I would see if I could find the song on YouTube so I could listen to the whole thing, rather than the 30-second clip they give on iTunes.

As it turns out, on YouTube, you can see the spectacular aerial pas de deux which goes with this song, from the show Dralion. This is the song I had in mind, but when I saw the pas de deux, my jaw was pretty much in my lap the whole time. I thought about how incredibly cool it would be to be part of something so spectacular, and next thing I knew, I was looking up how people get hired into the Cirque du Soleil.

Now of course, I wouldn't ever try auditioning as these guys for a couple of key reasons:

Fear of heights, falling, and in general, having only the grip of two sweaty hands standing between me and certain death (or at least maiming) on a stage 60 feet below

Lack of physical aptitude. I've never EVER been able to do the splits, have never had much upper body strength, and last time I did a somersault in the air, it was over the handlebars of a bike and ended in a very ungraceful thud into the gravel.

BUT, say I practiced cello 5 hours a day for the next God-knows-how-long, maybe I could audition as a musician, and wouldn't that be cool! Except for the fact that I don't have 5 minutes a day to practice (details, details), what a great plan! Or, better yet, take my singing out of the shower and audition as a singer. Oh, the drama! And herein was born the plan to run away with the Cirque du Soleil.

Now of course, this is a completely unsensible plan, but how cool to dream of something exciting, where I didn't need 40 pages of documentation to make even the slightest change to something... ah, the freedom!

So that was the culmination of a weekend which otherwise involved the following:

Discovery that the tree in our front yard which I thought was an ash tree is actually a honey locust. Who knew there was a tree and an insect with the same name?

Researched the types of seaweed that would have been available to the characters in my novel, and discovered that seaweed can be burned and the resulting "kelp" can be used in glassmaking - a convenient tidbit of information which plays right into my plot.

Trying to choose a water fountain feature for my parents' backyard. I think we'll just have to come to terms with the fact that we'll never agree, and I'll just let my parents decide what they're going to put in there.

Looked into whether able-bodied people are able to join a wheelchair basketball team. This was a lark almost as big as the Cirque du Soleil thing, since as I mentioned I'm not strong in the upper body, and I suck royally at basketball on my own two feet; a wheelchair won't help things.

Went for a big long walk on Saturday night which I thought to myself, I should try to work up to running this sometime. I thought it was my "big achievement" run, but when I mapped it out on MapMyRun.com, it turned out only to be a measly 6K. Wow. I don't know how people routinely run 10K or more. The farthest I have ever run in my entire life is 4K, and I remember thinking I was about to die. But something in the back of my mind is telling me I should get into the habit of running. All I have to do is actually DO it.

Worked on the plot of my 3 Day Novel for 2008. Hopefully this will work out!

Anyway, that's what happens when my imagination gets too much time to run wild - I end up dreaming up all sorts of crazy things, and next thing you know, I'm trying to figure out how to go from being a mechanical engineer to a circus musician. Yikes! Maybe it's a good thing tomorrow is a work day.

Literary Books and the Wandering Mind

2008-05-10T10:53:04-04:00

I'm about 50 pages into Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which has been in my to-read pile for at least a year now. It's one of the books that looks interesting in terms of the overall concept of the story. In general, I'm not a fan of literary novels, nor am I a fan of Canadian Literary novels. So far, this is the only book of Atwood's that I've even been remotely interested in reading.

The Handmaid's Tale, like many literary novels, is so far kind of devoid of plot. The 50 pages have been describing routine life in the Republic of Gilead and in this one Handmaid's life. It's an eye-opening environment worth describing, but the whole thing is spent describing this environment and mundane daily life rather than actually doing something. So far the plot consists of this handmaid going shopping for eggs and meat, looking around her room, and walking down the street. I hope something interesting happens soon!

In these 50 pages though, I've come to realize what it is I don't really like about literary novels. They try to make too much of my (the reader's) thought process explicit. We all know about bad novels with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, or the ones that treat the reader like an idiot by explaining the dead obvious. These are the ones containing passages like, "Kayla was backed into a corner by the machete-wielding madman, who smiled like the cheshire cat beneath his black mask. She shook like a leaf and screamed. She was really really scared." Obviously (or, Hopefully) novels like this will never sit on the bookshelf of timeless classics. To me, many literary novels are a less obvious but equally potent version of this.

As I read The Handmaid's Tale, I realize that Margaret Atwood can get away with something pretty plotless so far because she's allowing us into the Handmaid's mind, and the Handmaid is toying with random observations, snippets of thought, and out-of-the-blue comparisons in her mind. For example, the Handmaid walks past a wall where there are bodies on display, hanged. The Handmaid comments about the unoccupied hooks on the wall, "The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside-down and sideways." What's good about the whole passage where the Handmaid is observing the bodies on the wall is that it really shows how emotionless her reaction to them is. She observes how things look and makes visual connections only; she represses emotional connections. But the whole novel is like this; making random connections. This is often how my own mind operates too: I'll see or hear something, and make weird connections to other things in my mind, unusual comparisons, etc. My problem with literary novels, then, is that the author is trying to do this, and my mind would normally also be doing this, so they interfere with each other. I guess it's kind of like doing chest compressions on someone who is already living; you can interfere with the heart's natural function. When I read a novel that is constantly making the connections my wandering mind normally would, it interferes with the smooth running of my mind and it gets irritating.

I suppose those people who are not bothered by this problem, and who love this sort of literature, fall into one of two categories:
1. They can focus so intently on the novel that they can reign in the wandering mind.
2. They just don't make any connections on their own; they have to wait for authors to do it for them.

Anyway, I'm going to try to make it through The Handmaid's Tale because I am fascinated by the context, even though my semi-conscious "back of mind" is having a rough go of things!

Cool New Book...

2008-04-27T10:14:31-04:00

I just finished reading the book Spunk & Bite, by Arthur Plotnik. Spunk & Bite takes its name from the Strunk & White Elements of Style book, which I have not read, but which is supposed to be one of the bibles for writers looking to know how to write properly. Anyway, Spunk & Bite is basically about how rules can (and possibly should) be bent to create interesting writing. Overall I didn't think the book was the greatest, but there was one memorable chapter called "Magic in the Names of Things", which tells about finding just the right word for the things in your writing, rather than something like, "the thingamabob that does such-and-such".

I'm so excited now, because after reading that chapter, I've discovered that books like the Random House Webster's Word Menu exist, and is apparently a glossary of all sorts of interesting words. I also discovered what a thesaurus really is.

Yes, you heard that right! I actually thought I owned a proper thesaurus, but as it turns out, the book I had was called the 21st Century Synonym and Antonym Finder which is not quite the same thing. In that book, you look up a word, and it has alphabetized lists of synonyms and antonyms below it. In a thesaurus like Roget's Thesaurus, ideas are mapped out in tree-like structures at the beginning, and once you find the idea that's close to, or related to, what you want to express, then you go find the topic number and there it gives synonyms and related words, organized by flavour. How cool!

So yesterday I was at a second hand store and spotted a nice copy of Roget's Thesaurus for $1, so now I'm the proud owner of a proper thesaurus. I'm so pumped! Now I'm truly on the way to being a proper writer. :-) Or, at least, I'm taking a step in the right direction!

Step 2: Stop dilly-dallying and start writing again.

Luck o' the Irish!

2008-03-16T20:19:07-04:00

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, and consequently I spent the entire afternoon at a dress rehearsal for a big dance show our school is doing to celebrate the occasion tomorrow. That was OK, except there was a lot of 'hurry up and wait' happening, and it's actually a lot trickier trying to stay lined up where we're supposed to be when we're in the middle of dancing. I'm sure the show will be fine anyway though, especially since there are a lot of the really showy girls who will be participating.

It's an interesting experience to be part of this, but on the other hand, I'm going to be really glad when it's all over and I can go to bed at a reasonable time on Wednesday nights, rather than stay up for a dance rehearsal that goes til 10 pm. A friend of mine recently sent me a list of tips for getting a good night's sleep, and one of the tips was to avoid exercising in the 3 to 4 hours before you go to bed. So I guess 10 pm doesn't quite fit in that category. Oh well. I'm looking forward to having some sleep time back!

Yesterday was actually a really good day for that - I've had a cough and a cold all week and have been dragging myself out of bed to get to work at the usual times, even though I felt zombie-like. Saturday was the first day I got to sleep in, and I stayed in bed until almost 11 am. It was bliss! It was my lucky day too, apparently, since I then went to the library, and on the shelves of used books for sale, I found The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin, a book I've been wanting to buy for a while because it is so relevant to the novel I'm writing. It was in perfect condition (but minus its dustjacket), hardcover, for $2. I was originally going to buy a copy off eBay, but that would have been around $15 for an OK-condition copy. I'm glad I took the time to scour the racks at the library yesterday! I also spotted a book on Wildflowers of Great Britain and Europe, which was neat, since my story is set in the Faroes, so I bought that for another $2. I also found a book on Shakers of Pleasant Hill and one on healthy(-ier) cookie recipes that minimize use of refined sugars and bleached flour, and a lot of the recipes looked good, so I bought that. I can't wait to try some of those recipes! So all in all, I feel like I hit the jackpot at the library.

So now all I have to do is continue synthesizing that information and get going on finishing that novel I started. I started re-reading it last weekend. It's not the greatest by any stretch of the imagination, and needs a lot of editing, but it didn't make me cringe anywhere near as much as re-reading my work normally does, so maybe this one actually has potential! Basically I just need to be able to "see" where this plot is going a little bit better, and I hope that will get me out of my rut. Here's to finishing the novel this year!!

Musical Musings

2008-02-18T10:59:09-05:00

Last weekend we had a concert with the orchestra I play with, and I think it went pretty well, all things considered. Some of the music was appropriate for the skill level of this orchestra, but at least one of the pieces, the Pines of Rome (by Respighi), shouldn't really have been selected in the first place. The Pines of Rome is one of those pieces that is quite beautiful if it's in tune. However, intonation is not the forte of this orchestra. Especially not in the cello section. To make things worse, for the third movement of this piece, the many of the string sections are split into 4 groups (within each group of Violin I, Violin II, Viola, Cello, and Bass) that each play different things. Ideally, this requires everyone to be able to hold their own in the section, but this is not really the case for the cellos. In my section, the people are great, but many of them just don't have much orchestra experience, and also, the piece is just too difficult for their level. All this to say, I was worried about the Pines of Rome.

It actually turned out OK from my perspective: no major disasters, no having to stop and start over, the conductor didn't have to yell out rehearsal numbers, and nobody in the audience fell of their chairs in fits of horror. However, I got comments at the end that the concert was a bit... um... well one person said boring... the other said something about how it was an "intellectual" or "thinking" kind of concert, rather than a sit-back-and-relax kind of concert. Oh well. We tried. It wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and a lot of the places that were supposed to sound kinda spooky, sounded kinda spooky for an entirely different reason from the one the composer had intended. But I was just happy that it actually sounded better than it had in rehearsal!

My favourite part of Pines of Rome is that the last movement involves 4 trumpets and 2 trombones who are offstage (in this case, standing at the back of the church behind the people), and towards the end, when the piece is picking up volume and going for the big blaring brass ending, the backstage players start to play as well. When they first started, it was quite funny to see the startled reaction of the crowd and everyone turning around to see where that came from. That reaction was worth it all by itself!

I also got to do a bit of a solo in another piece we did, the first suite of Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances. The third movement of that is a Villanella (I've never met a villanella I didn't like), which involves, for once, a nice lyrical cello solo. It's the sort of thing I'm actually good at. I did my best, and it wasn't perfect (my bow hit my stand at one point), but it was reasonably good. After the concert one guy, who plays in the orchestra I played in last year, said, wow, I didn't realize you were that good! It was in tune and warm-sounding and everything! I'll take it as a compliment, but it makes me wonder what he thought of me before this concert, if he thought I was principal cellist of an orchestra without actually being able to sound good...!

So overall I think it went well. Now I'm already starting the practicing on the new repertoire for the next concert. It's mainly dance music, which I like, and a lot of it has Spanish influences, which I also like.

The downside to all this orchestra stuff is that my brain won't leave me alone. I'm now constantly in the state where I'll have some tune or other stuck in my head, and the only way to get it out of my head is to get something else stuck in there instead. I'm beginning to wonder if I have some sort of obsessive or addictive personality. It's probably good that I don't have a taste for alcohol, or I'd be in trouble!

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of 3 Day Novel

2008-01-19T17:35:44-05:00

Last year, I did the 3-Day Novel challenge, which was to write a novel in the space of 3 days, i.e., the Labour Day weekend. It was an interesting experience - a lot of writing, a lot of Breton crackers, and not much common sense. There were plot holes though which a Mack truck could drive; there were cardboard characters and contrived situations, worse dialogue, and once it was all over, it was a rough manuscript. However, it was *a* manuscript, and I actually made it from the beginning to the end of the plot! In other words, the whole skeleton of a novel was there, and can now be worked on, if I so choose. Of course, I didn't win, but since I didn't expect to, it's all good.

2008 is set up to be very different from 2007. I'm trying to follow my New Year's resolutions, and trying to get rid of things that don't do much for me, that I don't need, or that stand in the way to where I want to go in my life. Thinking about contests like 3-Day Novel, I figured it was fun, and I'm glad I did it last year, but that I'd rather take 2008 to work on writing I already had, rather than to spend 3 days (and $50) trying to pull a plot out of nowhere into a shabby manuscript I don't really need at the moment. It all made sense. It was a simple decision. No 3-Day Novel for 2008.

It's amazing what final decisions will do to your brain. A short while later that same day, a plot popped into my head, and wouldn't leave. It said to me, "I am the ghost of your 2008 3-Day Novel"... and has been developing ever since! I may just have to do 3-Day Novel this year, just so that the plot doesn't drive me bananas while I ignore it.

The idea is simple: a small gingerbread house in a sea of McMansions owned by yuppies. It's not supposed to be a serious plot, and the more I can make people laugh, the better. (Contrast this to my two NaNoWriMo novels and my last 3-Day Novel, which are part of an epic adventure/fantasy/romance featuring lots of battles and death).

Today I went to the Book Market (a used bookstore) and came back with 84 cents' worth of magazines - a glossy copy of the premiere issue of American Dream Homes, and a copy of Distinguished Home Plans from 2001. Both of these feature some really grand, over-the-top, hotel-lobby-of-the-Waldorf-Astoria type stuff. I find most of the home plans butt ugly, and it's great! 84 cents and I have all sorts of architectural fodder for my novel. Money well-spent, in my opinion! So 3-Day Novel 2008, here I come!!

Sword Skills, Day 1

2008-01-09T22:31:29-05:00

Just before Christmas, I had the bright idea of signing up for a recreational class in sword handling, held at the local university. Today was the first day of it, and I was kind of nervous going into it, not knowing what to expect, not knowing anyone in the class (my attempts to drag my friends into it have failed...).

As it turns out, the class was great - I really enjoyed it. I am hoping this will help strengthen my upper body which is pretty weak right now, and this seemed more fun than pumping iron (though probably not as effective).

We all bought our bokken wooden swords from the instructor before the class started. Basically they're curved wooden swords about 3 feet long, made of what looks like oak. However, they're mass-produced, and came with warning stickers on them. The sticker says (and keep in mind, this sticker is fastened to a wooden sword):

This product is sold for use in HIGH RISK activities. [Blah blah blah terms and conditions blah blah blah consult physician before starting training blah blah blah] Injuries, including paralysis and death can occur when using this product.

I thought that was hilarious. Um, if you're training with a sword and need to read a label to realize you could hurt or kill someone with it, you shouldn't be training with a sword...

Anyway, it was a fun class! I'm glad I signed up! I'd love to practice even, but I'm afraid I don't think I can swing this sword anywhere in the house without breaking something or punching a hole in the ceiling. I'll have to work the logisitics of this one!