Peeking into the rock

So my physical therapist walked me up my stairs to my bedroom and declared me fit to move back up in a few days, whenever. He said the stairs were a bit steep and narrow and to be respected, and we agreed that maybe early next week.

You know where this is going. Last night I decided I had had enough of sleeping on the futon couch in the library. It's narrower than the bed, it's not flat, it creaks, and I'm tired of the wee bit of a room it's in too. So I moved my pillows and my bedside light and my night-time surgical socks and a bottle of water (a steel bottle I refill, not a bought plastic thing) and I climbed into my beautiful beautiful bed. Which totally smells funny because of the mattress being made of some kind of unrefined cotton. By the way, I loaded up a box with those things and shifted them up the stairs a few at a time, so I could still use both hands to climb the stairs.In terms of stair use, I am exactly at pre-surgery functionality. You realize what this means: that going forward that particular function can only be getting better than before surgery. From now.

Anyway, I wish I could report that my first night in my own bed was a wonderful relief, that I slept two nice big lengths and only had to get up and go downstairs once to pee. Instead, I was awake all night. My two longest sleeps were an hour each. I was not in pain, though I may have been slightly undermedicated--that's always a possibility because of my bizarre pain threshold. I did have some digestive thingy, not severe, and the bright bright moon was shining right through the skylight like it had some kind of dorky message to deliver. Mabe that was it. Or maybe I was just too excited. Or I've reached a new status where I need more exercise to sleep.

It wasn't terrible, terrible. I spent hours doing leg exercises--little mild ones that go right to the edge of the rangfe of motion and no farther, which is wussy but I do a lot of those and only a little of the pushy ones anyway. Also I read two more books and now I have no library books. One was Bird of the River by Kage Baker, and the other was After the Fall, During the Fall, Before the Fall by Nancy Kress. The former was a lot of fun, and the latter was well-crafted, poetic and earnest.

I think someone recommended the Baker to me years ago, but I grabbed it on a whim because I was powering through my library visit so as to not delay K too much. I liked a lot about it. I liked that she posited a society which has gendered division of labor, but really different division of labor from what we're used to. It feels as if she took inspiration from real-life traditional women divers and then said "Well, what if there was more of this kind of thing? Which changes make sense?" And there's some unevenness to the implications of this, in a natural way, and there are also some occupations that are gendered more like we have experienced them, and some which are more permeable. I was a little less satisfied with the Noble Savage-not-Savage cultural essentialism going on with the greenis forest people and completely unsatisfied with the demons, but I gather that this is one of several books in the same world, and I expect some of my discontents will be addressed in other books.

She did really well in laying breadcrumbs for the adventure plot which was backgrounded for a lot of the novel, which makes me happy because that story would not have been as compelling to me for the foreground as the one that was, which was the protagonist making a home on the big river boat. The characters were interesting and mostly likeable. I did have two quibbles with the protagonist's characterization. I missed the place where Baker told us exactly how old Eliss is when she arrives on the boat, if she ever did, and the clues in the text were confusing. I know her brother is ten when they arrive. Eliss has been taking care of him for years because their mother, when she is not working as a diver, is a drug addict and also prone to getting into scrapes with the wrong men. She doesn't seem to consider herself old enough to work herself, so I was thinking she was under fourteen, maybe twelve, given the kind of economy the place seemed to have. But people are reacting to her as if she was at least fifteen, leading to my next problem...she's the very best, of course. She becomes the very best person to work in the crow's-nest, noticing all the snags and all the times the bandits are hiding in the bushes. There's a hint almost at the end of the book that there's a good reason for this, but it's not tied up in a nice bow ever. But also she's the prettiest. The person who tells her this in so many words is a boy who has a crush on her, so maybe it's not really The Prettiest Princess, but he's explaining why she's getting perved on all the time. (of course, anybody who's been a teenaged girl can tell you, you don't have to be the prettiest to be getting perved on all the goddamned time in all the rudest ways possible goddamn it). So those are marginal, and not that bad. I did like the book a lot.

The Kress--well, I'm not sure what to think about it. It's sort of like something you'd read in like 1979. But it was published in 2012. So I just don't know. It's a slim book, in which a small group of humans have been kept in a sealed environment for twenty years by entities that may be aliens, after the world has been pretty much destroyed by a combination of environmental disaster (some of which is possibly deliberately induced by spoiler spoiler spoiler), nuclear war, and stuff. Recently they have been equipped with a time machine that allows them to go into the past and pick up children and supplies. If you just read it as a story or maybe an epic poem, it's pretty successful--characters are interesting, you want to know what's going to happen next, and so on. It also works if you read it as an emotional response to the news. But even though the details of the science are nicely woven in, if you try to read it as an intellectual meditation on the scientific principles it references, you'll get annoyed. Well, I did.

Now I need to go to the library again, I guess. For that I will need to organize a ride, because I do not have the stamina to walk that far yet, and I'm not allowed to drive, and my physical therapist said I'm not ready to ride a bike anywhere yet thoguh if I can work out a way to safely get on and off a bike on a stand that is sturdy, I can do stationary biking. Though he said that at first I won't be able to puch the pedal all the way around, I'll have to piston it back and forth till I have more range of motion.

Sign of summer: breakfast was zuchinni and eggs, and dinner will be lasagne of sliced zuchinni and oh dear probably tomorrow UI have to pick the damn things again why did I plant two of them?