Peeking into the rock

Apparently six weeks off the bike has changed the way I sit on it. It's very uncomfortable! It's a regular bike, with normal low handles and a medium seat, and on the trainer it's tilted downwards a bit: and my arms hate holding me up and my butt hates sitting like that. So I only spin the pecdals for a few minutes at a time, enough to feel it but not enough to be difficult. Last evening my leg was too swollen/stiff to turn 360 degrees, so I just pistoned back and forth for a while, which is probably why this morning I could go round and round as long as I could stand to sit on the bike (which is not long, yet). That and inordinate amounts of icing. I hope to be actually riding the other bike around town pretty soon. That would be super.

If the trainer was designed differently, I'd be putting the Barcelona bike on it. It's one of those upright bikes, and the seat is wider. But I can't make the Barcelona fit on the trainer, because the rear hub is designed so differently.

Moving my base of operations upstairs means that for excample I have descended and re-ascended my stairs four times today already (an average of once an hour). I am doing most upstairs as close to normal steps as I can, but still coddling myself going down (partly because those stairs are steep and I don't feel completely stable on the downslope yet). Between the tiny bouts of cycling and the upstairs walking, I can see a significant difference already when I do quad sets.

Also, the ravenous hunger has returned. Maybe it left because I was taking it too easy? At this point I am telling the ravenous hunger to stuff it though because I think it is lying. I am eating sufficient food, not restricting calories, but ravenous hunger's position is that I should Eat All the Food All the Time and Especially Right Now, and I call shenanigans on that.

Oh, reading: Last time at the library I got out two books about tree folklore both of which turned out to be boring and stupid when I got them home, Dark Mondays by Kage Baker which is horrorish stories and a couple of novelas, some of which seem to be set in not-quite-Pismo Beach; Archetype by M.D. Waters; and The Solar Queen by Andre Norton. I liked some of the stories in the Baker, though I just skipped most of the lighthouse story and the last two novellas because they didn't interest me. I thoguht the Pismo Beach-ish stories were more interesting than any of the others, though the waxworks one was pretty interesting too.

I don't know whether I liked Archetype but I did finish it in one reading. It belongs in the same family as The Handmaid's Tale and Silver Metal Lover, if you can see those in the same family. Apparently there's another book which continues the story. I'm afraid what starts out as a kind of political noir future with a nicely complex layering of identities might turn into a Mad Scientist story in the second part.

Also, downstairs, I opened an old edition of Voltaire and started reading one of his less well known stories, Zadig. I can't say that it's unjust for it to be lesser-known. It's just sort of smug.

My most recent sewing project--to use my successful little sleeveless top pattern to draft a little top with sleeves--hit a snag: the sleeves I drafted are too small and the adjustments I made to the armscye are too much. I have enough cloth to cut out new sleeves, and I can grade the armscye bigger, but I've lost momentum and I'm letting it be for a couple of days.

Finally, Jacey just retweeted from Mancunicon that the rooms have just about sold out. This worries me because I can't be sure I can go until quite close to the time. So unless there's other hotels close enough and cheap enough, I might miss my opportunity again. Though the UK is small--maybe I can pop over from Loughborough for a single day (this is how I did Baycon this year). I have no idea what transportation is really like though. Every time I'm daydreaming about visiting Frank and Hana and I try to do a search on buses and trains in the UK I get confused and overwhelmed.

So I suppose I have demonstrated that I do in fact think about something other than my knee!

Thursday six in the morning I leave for the hospital. I'm trying to get the house nice and clean so it will be easy to navigate when I get back. I have borrowed a walker from my sister-in-law, which her mother no longer uses, and I hope to ditch it soon after the surgery.

I've had to stop taking my anti-inflammatory medicine for the time being so that I will have less potential for bleeding. I guess I'm grateful for the natural experiment: yes, I do need it. No, the osteoarthritis is not my ownly problem. There is something in my leg muscles that is kept at bay by meloxicam, and after four days of not having it I am back to hardly being able to walk.  Now, meloxicam is "necessary but not sufficient--" I also had to switch statin drugs and have years of physical therapy to keep the muscle pains at bay. But I didn't know until I quit it temporarily, because I mostly don't have very much pain in the normal course of things. It's function that's demanding the surgery, not pain.

Not directly related to surgery, but related to the things surgery is related to: in my trips to visit Frank and Hana in Prague, I always intended to but never managed to rent a bike. So I thought I would take my bike with me.But after talking it over with Zack, my roommate who was once a professional bike racer in Europe, I've realized that it's even more hassle to disassemble and reassemble a normal bike. He has convinced me to get a folding bike. It looks like I can spend about four hundred dollars and get a nice folder that can be adjusted to my height and can take my weight. I'm leaning towards the Citizen Barcelona. If you have any relevant experience or knowledge, let me know!

The idea would be that I would take it to the UK and other places when I travel, or even throw it in the car when I leave town, just in case. It is so much easier to cover a lot of ground on a bike than on foot. It may even become my primary bike, I don't know.

I still don't know when I'm going to visit Frank and Hana. Hana has gotten the job she wanted too, administering a university program for sustainable manufacturing and recycling, so for now they're doing great. I'd love to go in the second half of March, though it's no longer certain that he has ten days off in the middle as they have been re-doing the rota at frequent intervals. I would also love to be there for Eastercon at the beginning of April, but it may not happen. I have been doing a bit of daydreaming about visiting (Ilocating folk clubs, museums, and so on), though I've mostly been thinking about surgery and trying to make sure I get my February writing done. And playing sims.

Also to prepare for surgery I've been eating liver and the dog thinks her share is not enough.

So I'm a juror for the first time. I'm not happy to have gotten this case in particular about which I will say nothing to anybody until it's over, but somebody's got to do it. The jury selection process was hilarious: it took only a day and it had more people excusing themselves than were excused by the judge and lawyers put together, which tells you something. Or it will tell you something in about three weeks when I tell you the keywords that had people shaking and crying and begging to be let off. HInt: it's not that bad. I will say I kind of like the judge and neither lawyer seems to be horrible.

Anyway, the courthouse is about a mile from my house so I'm biking. We have an hour and a half lunch so I'm coming home for lunch. So that adds four miles of biking to my day -- a distance I could easily have been doing all along and probably should have been.

Half the distance is on a fairly busy street. Not New York City busy, but busy enough. The other half is on pedestrian-bicycle paths (mixed use by design) along the top of the levee and through the park by the benchlands. Here is my observation. Not everybody on a bicycle bothers to say anything when they pass walkers and slower bikes. And they really, really should. OH my, they really, really should.

I've been wanting to talk about this for a long time, actually. When I walk on the Moore Creek Trail with my dog, for example, it's a serious problem. I am walking with a dog, I have intermittent problems walking, I don't hear super well, and often I'm foraging wild fruit. If I think I am alone on the path my first thought isn't "cower over here on the very right edge of the path where the brambles aand poison oak are in case some hotdog with a silent bicycle comes zooming up behind me with no warning." I'm saying I might wander a little in the path. Other walkers might have small children with them, or people with walkers or other reasons why they aren't necessarily going to be completely predictable in their trajectory unless they know someone is coming.

When I ride on the levee I am far from the fastest bicycle out there. I do cling to the right when there are no pedestrians to pass but I am not going to hang out on the very edge of the asphalt. That's not safe, as any bicyclist knows well. Also, honestly, coming up from the underpasses that go under the bridges, I might wobble a bit on the steep part. If you're a hotdog on a fast silent bicycle and you're going to overtake me or a pedestrian, you should really, really, really say something. That's the only way we know that you're coming and that now is the time to focus on being predictable and cooperating with your passing venture. Honestly, I will cooperate. I have no desire to be creamed by a hotdog on a silent bicycle, whether I am walking or riding.

"On your left" is a good thing to say because nobody but bicyclists say that, so if your bicycle is silent the person in front of you knows what's going on. "Excuse me," "Passing," or "Watch out" are less likely to convey the whole message so cleanly. And while "ting ting" is apparently what they say in Amsterdam, it probably wouldn't work in Santa Cruz, since few will have heard it.

Another tip. If the slow little old ladies in front of you are meandering over on the left side of the path looking at the cute little duckies, do not try, as I did, saying "on your right" and slipping around that way. It doesn't work. It confuses them and they go every which way at once as they are trying to process what you're doing. I will never do that again. (the good thing about being slow is that you can stop very quickly if you're in such a situation, so nobody got hurt or even mad. We were all little old ladies, so we just all apologized and laughed at ourselves for being doofuses)


Another thing: people give you very nice responses. Some people avow as how it's really quite a beautiful day, isn't it? Some people thank you for having said something. And one fellow said "You certainly are," which made me wonder.

edit: it also means I have to cancel the appointment to have my refrigerator looked at Tuesday. Oh well.

So I'm writing along, minding my own business, trying to get some stuff in there to prevent everything happening at once and still have no pointless filler, when this fellow steps out of the crowd and bumps into my Yanek who is exploring the capital on his own. I'm trying to figure out who he is and he insists that he is the same soldier Yanek's supposed to meet two years (and a chapter or so) later. What the hell? And the conversation they're having is kind of creepy: it sounds like he's flirting with Yanek, which might make sense in two years when they're actually supposed to meet, but just now it's really creepy, as Yanek is sixteen and very, very small for his age and people still confuse him with a child.

I am going to have to fix this next writing session but for now I have to go to work early today. One way or another: either to go with the creepy and what the hell does that mean for the story? Or throw out the scene and do something else with the rest of this chapter.

It occurs to me that the appearance of this soldier might only just signify that I'm worrying about the wrong things and maybe I need to find an economical way to skip ahead to the events two years in the future and not worry about everything happening at once. Or he could be foreshadowng the creepiness of Yanek's army life.

On another front, the physical therapist is of course making magical things happen and I am in fact walking around and riding the bike as a bike now. If the rain ever returns I will have to return it to the stand in my bedroom. It is way too long since the last rain but the last few years have had divided rainy seasons, with big dry spells in the middle, and we've had normal-to-wet years anyway. A dry year will happen eventually, though, it could be now.