I mentioned a couple of posts back about being surprised by how high the top of my iliac crest was—nearly as high as my navel.
As chance would have it—not such an unlikely chance, with the date approaching All Hallows Eve—I happened upon a depiction of a skeleton outside a local shop. And look! That poor guy’s iliac crest comes no higher than his coccyx!
I present this image purely in an effort to spread the blame around. My ignorance of pelvic configuration is an ignorance deeply rooted in inaccurate depictions in popular culture.
I told this story to one friend who was baffled that I was so misled by these sorts of images. “Just look at any bikini model,” he said. “You can plainly see how the top of the iliac crest is nearly as high as the navel.” (Which is true—search for bikini model at wikimedia commons and see for yourself.)
The topic under discussion shifted at that point to optimal waist-to-hip ratios, after which it started getting strange. But all that is beside the point: Is it any surprise, in a world where plastic Halloween decorations cheap enough to leave out on a public bench are this inaccurate, that I might be confused about this particular aspect of anatomy? No, I say. It is not.
Jackie and I have gotten back to our very long walks.
Last Saturday we went to Lake of the Woods and cobbled together their 5-mile prairie trail and their 3.3-mile bike path (together with a couple of jaunts down maintenance roads) into an 11-mile hike. (My goal had been “more than 10 miles.”)
It was great.
The prairie was full of these bluebird houses that had been occupied by tree swallows.
The tree swallows daunted me briefly; I don’t remember having seen the species before (although I must have). I spent the whole prairie phase of our walk staring at them, thinking “They’re not bluebirds. They’re not indigo buntings. They’re not purple martins,” over and over again.
I’m sure they weren’t the only interesting species I saw, but they’re the only one that comes to mind now, a week later.
We parked near the Museum of the Grand Prairie, and ate our snack in the botanical garden, which brought to mind the day Steven and I bicycled to Lake of the Woods, which I’d remembered as last year, but which turns out to have been in 2011.
I’d earlier gotten a picture of Jackie and me at the picnic table where we’d later have our snack. I like to think of it as a modern reinterpretation of the Victorian portrait.
Yesterday we did a longer hike. My goal this time was “more than 15 miles,” and we each hit it, although we separated around mile 13, after swinging by the Student Union in time for me to attend my Esperanto meeting. Jackie went on home after drinking some iced coffee. I stayed to speak some Esperanto, then walked on through the water amenities, downtown Champaign, and West Side Park.
Along the way we passed the university’s Agronomy building. We’d passed it a year ago, and I’d neglected to get a picture of the name over the door, and very much regretted it ever since. So this time I made a point of pausing for a photo-op:
I like the harvest iconography on each side of the name. Very handsome.
To do the whole 33.5 miles during daylight, we’re going to have to set a pretty good pace.
Last summer we did okay when we didn’t have to spend too much time fiddling with things. (It’s surprising how many things need to be fiddled with on a long walk—socks, boot laces, packs and their contents, water bottles and the refilling thereof, intersections both with and without pedestrian walk signals. The list is all but endless, and on more than one hike it seemed like something needed to be fiddled with on virtually every mile, such that we’d get home and look at our speed and remember, “Oh, yes. That mile was slow because we stopped to get a snack, and that mile was slow we had to reapply suntan lotion, and that mile was slow because we stopped to use the restroom. . . .”) When we didn’t stop to fiddle with something, we often finished a mile in not much over 18 minutes, even late in a hike. However, even when we hustled right along, we never broke 18 minutes all summer long.
Last week we did do a sub-18 minute mile, and when we started out yesterday, our first mile came in under 18 minutes again. We were pleased with ourselves and decided to pick up the pace a bit more, and managed to beat our time for the second mile, and then again for the third. By then we were all warmed up and covering a stretch of the route where there was almost no interaction with traffic, so we decided to push the pace a bit more, and managed to do a sub-17 minute mile, which is pretty darned fast walking.
Here’s the Endomondo track of my version of the walk (Jackie’s is the same until we separated along about mile 13):
Up to now, we’ve pushed the distance rather quickly, since we’re just recovering distance that we were doing easily enough last summer. Our next walk, which will be around 20 miles, will be a new “longest walk ever” for each of us. After that, we’ll want to do perhaps 25 miles in late May and then the same (perhaps slightly more) in early June. I think that’s as long of a training walk as we’ll need to do. The whole point is to make 33.5 miles a special effort, something that would be undermined by doing the whole distance in training.
In particular, I’ve reached the point where the action in the novel lines up with action in the failed short story that the novel draws from.
The short story failed because I simply couldn’t cram in all the setup needed, a problem easily solved in novel form—the setup occurs naturally in the body of the novel. As I wrote, I kept in mind the various bits that I needed to set up, and have been making sure to cover them as I went along.
With that done, I’d imagined I’d just about be able to copy whole scenes from the short story into the novel manuscript. Except, that turns out not to work. I tried it this morning, growing my story by about 1600 words, only a couple hundred of which were newly written prose.
Part of what’s in these scenes are the failed attempts to provide the setup. Since that setup is now provided (in full scenes of their own, earlier in the manuscript), I need to remove those attempts from these later scenes.
That turns out to be harder than I’d expected. The text I’m working on is near-final draft stuff. I had previously polished every paragraph, every sentence. Everything is all hooked together as smoothly as I could mange. Some things can be removed by just deleting a paragraph, but other things require a complete re-writing. Plus, a lot of things shouldn’t be removed entirely. Rather, the failed attempts to set something up should be replaced with a little call-back to the setup—a little memory-jogger that reminds the reader of what happened many pages ago, so that when it becomes significant, they say, “Oh, yeah. I remember that.”
The upshot is that I have another six thousand words or so ready to go in—but I now see that adding those words will be as hard as writing them would have been. Maybe harder.
After adding three scenes by copying and editing, I’m now thinking that it might be better to just write fresh scenes. (In fact, thinking about the amount of editing that remains to be done on the scenes I added this morning, that’s really starting to seem like a good idea. I’ll try it that way tomorrow.)
As I’ve been writing, Jackie has been working in her media—spinning and weaving mostly. She wove two silk scarves in the past weeks, and spend much of the past couple of days winding a warp for her next weaving project.
Here’s Jackie with the warp, chained up for storage or transportation, but ready to be threaded onto the loom:
I headed out to play some Ingress this afternoon, only to be forced back before I even reached my first portal. I suffered from near-catastrophic boot failure.
Both boots had developed a crack in the sole and mid-sole, right at the ball of the foot.
It’s possible that the crack had been there a while—it wasn’t noticeable as long as I was walking on cleared sidewalks. But as soon as I started walking through snow, it failed badly: Snow started accumulating in the crack, forcing it wider, and forcing my toes to bend backwards. Once I returned to dry pavement, a few steps knocked most of the snow out, allowing my toes to straighten out again.
The crack didn’t immediately let water in, so I actually considered continuing. But a few seconds of contemplating total boot failure at a point where returning home would require walking a mile through slushy snow, I just turned around and headed home.
Happily, these are my old, summer boots. I only got them out today because my winter hiking boots had gotten wet on each of several outings in a row, and I thought it would be best to let them dry completely, and then reapply their waterproof coating before wearing them out in the weather again.
Sometime in the next few months I’ll have to buy new summer boots. I’m okay with that—these boots were not quite as satisfactory as my previous pair of summer hiking boots. Good to get a chance to get a pair that are better. (My winter boots, on the other hand, have been very satisfactory indeed.)
All the writers who taught at my Clarion did readings at the Archives Book Shop, a local bookstore in East Lansing. To advertise the readings, the Clarion office folks printed up a poster with the names and dates. And, as one of our little perks, we each got a copy signed by all the writers (and by our special guest editor).
I’ve had this poster for more than 10 years now. I always meant to get it framed so I could hang it up, but it was one of many things that I kept not getting around to. But for some reason, this past week it suddenly seemed to be the thing to get around to next, so I did. I measured the poster, went to a local shop that sells ready-made frames in standard sizes, and picked up a frame the right size. It was just what I wanted (simple, black, wood frame), but instead of a proper hanging wire, had some crappy metal bracket for hanging the picture, so I also had to buy a kit with some screw eyes and picture hanging wire, but that was cheap.
It still took a couple of days to get it all put together—picture in frame, screw eyes in frame, wire strung between screw eyes—but now it’s done.
I’m pretty pleased. Maybe having it up will help inspire me to keep at my fiction.
Click through for a picture big enough to read all the details.
Jackie and I decided to celebrate the snow with a walk around Kaufman Lake park—a walk that yielded more wildlife than usual. (There are larger versions of all these pictures except the one of the coyote, which is already full-size.)
This spot is just 5 minutes walk from our apartment, part of the Greenbelt Bikeway, but on the other side of the Copper Slough from Kaufman Lake.
From there, we crossed the bridge to the ring road around Kaufman Lake.
After crossing, we turned right and did a circuit of the lake. The only picture I didn’t take and regretted was one right there. The road around the lake is not really narrow—there’s room for 8 or 10 people to walk side-by-side—but in that spot, with the brush that lines the sides of the path in the summer having been cut back, exposing the steep slopes down to the lake on the left and the slough on the right, it looked really narrow.
We saw a lot of wildlife on this walk. There was a great blue heron on the lake that I spotted from a distance, and then saw take off as we approached. A kingfisher landed on a tree just across the slough, then took off and flew down the length of the slough, giving its distinctive chattering call.
Best of all, though, we saw a coyote! The first one I’ve seen since we moved from Philo. (Not that they were common around Philo either.)
You can just see the coyote there where Jackie is looking, above and just to the left of the center of the frame. It was really too far away to photograph with my little camera, but here’s the best shot of the coyote that I got:
That was probably the peak of the walk, but we were only halfway around the lake at that point. We proceeded around.
I got a couple of pictures looking back across the lake. Here’s one with Jackie:
And here’s one taken later, looking back toward the bridge through some snowy branches:
At the point where the ring road reaches the south end of the park and curves east and then back north, there’s a little picnic area. I thought it was funny to see it buried in snow:
Just before we got back to the bridge and headed home, we passed the two fishing piers near the boathouse, and I got this picture of the sign which, if I remember correct, has the daily fish catch limits:
Again, I thought it was funny covered with snow.
As we approached home, I let Jackie walk in front of me, so I could throw a snowball at her. She seemed quite outraged that I’d do something so nefarious. And I can see that it would be a surprise. I’m not sure I’ve ever thrown a snowball at her before. If I did, it was probably 20 years ago. In any case, far too long.
I started having odd troubles with the theme I’d been using for this website, so I thought I’d look into alternatives.
I tried quite a few, most of which had one problem or another. Among the things that made me reject themes today:
Header image was completely integrated into the design, so it couldn’t be changed.
There was no way to show the full text of each post on the front page.
Post titles were forced to all-uppercase.
A full third of the page was dedicated to showing a featured image for each post, except my posts often don’t have a featured image—in which case the theme showed a dumb icon instead.
This theme isn’t perfect either. In particular, when I use an image in a post and mark it as the featured image, it appears twice, which is usually not what I mean to have happen, but I’ll experiment for a bit and see how I like it.
Intended as a placeholder, the header image is a photo I took of plaster casts made of the Elgin Marbles. (The casts, on display at the Spurlock Museum, were made before the ill-fated cleaning attempt that so seriously damaged the originals. Scholars come from far and wide to study our plaster casts.) Now that it’s up there, I kinda like it. I may just leave it like that.
It’s hard to decide when to harvest flax. If you harvest early enough to get the finest fiber, you get no seeds. If you harvest late enough to get seeds to plant next year, you get coarse fibers.
The books suggest various compromises. One suggested 30 days after the peak of flowering, if you mostly care about fiber, and two weeks later if you mostly care about seeds.
We decided to harvest half of our plants today. We think it’s early enough to get good fiber. Indeed, some of the plants are still in flower. But there are plenty of seed pods that look like they’ll be full of seeds.
Depending on how things go, we’ll harvest the other half in a week or two. That may get us some more or better seeds. At least as important to me, it adds a bit of redundancy—if something goes wrong with the processing of this batch, we’ll have another batch that won’t suffer the same fate.
Jackie has suggested that we not try to save seeds to plant, but rather eat the seeds we get. (I assume she means to grind them up to use as flax-seed meal, which we do buy at the store and put in bread and such. Even if every seed pod turns out to be full to bursting with seeds, we’re only going to get a few tablespoons of flax-seed meal, but that’d be enough for several loaves.)
The first step to turn flax into linen, after growing the plants and harvesting them, is to dry them. The books suggest that you tie the stalks into bundles, then arrange the bundles into loose stacks for drying.
Jackie and I went for a hike at Forest Glen today.
There was a Spinners and Weavers Guild event there, and our plan was to go early, go for a hike that would take 4 or maybe 5 hours, and then get back in time for a late lunch and a couple hours at the event.
Turns out, our timetable was a bit optimistic.
For one thing, having failed to get all packed up the night before, we left an hour later than we’d intended. Plus, getting to the venue took a bit longer than we’d planned. So, instead of starting our hike around 8:00 AM, we didn’t hit the trail until about 9:15. On top of that, our hike ended up taking a full 6 hours, instead of the 4–5 we’d planned.
Our socializing after ended up being with just the last 6 or so die-hard spinners.
Jackie climbing a ridge.
Still, it was a great hike. Unlike our urban walks, Forest Glen is non-flat.
It’s kind of hard to see in that picture (click through for a larger version), but Jackie is there right in the middle, hiking up the side of the ridge.
There’s not a huge amount of elevation change, but the trail makes good use of what there is. According to Endomondo, we stayed between 407 and 644 feet above sea level, and yet we managed a total ascent of 1330 feet and a total descent of 1287 feet.
There’s quite a bit of wildlife in and around Forest Glen. In trips past we’ve seen owls, several kinds of woodpeckers, turkeys, vultures, pheasants, and deer. We saw several of those this trip as well, but we also saw something that was common when I was a boy, but has been quite rare in my experience for more than twenty years: a box turtle.
Box turtle just off the path at Forest Glen.
Apparently the Forest Glen box turtle population has been at some risk—a few years ago, tens of box turtles were found dead, all in the same area. They’ve done quite a bit of research on what happened without a definitive result, but the best guess is that some infectious disease took them, possibly passed to many individuals when a large number of turtles were caught and then held together for a local charity event that included a turtle race.
Apparently the local organizers have agreed to drop the turtle race, as a way to protect the turtles. (The race had been held for 49 years without incident, but so many dead turtles all at once was a strong sign that there was a problem.)
A great hike, albeit a bit tiring, and some very pleasant (albeit a bit brief) socializing after. Here’s the details on Endomondo:
If you’re familiar with Forest Glen, it might look as though we hiked the backpacking trail, but we didn’t—because that would have been against the rules, which require that you register a week in advance and pay a fee. Instead, what we did is scout several segments (well, all the segments) of the backpacking trail in advance of some future hike. Before trying this trail with a backpack full of camping gear, we thought it would best to know just how rugged it was and how hard it was to follow the markings. (And it’s good that we did. Our urban walking has not quite conditioned us adequately to manage this trail safely with camping gear. We’d have almost certainly made it, but several spots would have been tough—maybe even dangerous—if we’d been carrying heavy packs. Also, we did miss one turn. By the time we’d backtracked and gotten back on the trail, we’d added a good half a mile to our total distance.)
My sore calf never hurt throughout the hike, although I could just perceive the injured spot as slightly tight, slightly tender on some of the more aggressive downhill bits of the hike.
Tomorrow will be a rest day. If today’s activities don’t produce any soreness, maybe I’ll try a short run on Monday.
As chance would have it—not such an unlikely chance, with the date approaching All Hallows Eve—I happened upon a depiction of a skeleton outside a local shop. And look! That poor guy’s iliac crest comes no higher than his coccyx!
