Sense of Adventure

Back from a flying trip, in sundry senses of the word. Some fun stories to tell. Some not to.

Tired now.

When I left it was 90°. Or more. Naturally I left the swamp cooler running so as not to bake the cats. It gets cooler at night usually, of course, but I figured it was no big deal. Especially as opposed to making the cats endure potentially lethal daytime heat.

So I’m flying back this morning and they announce that in Albuquerque it’s 49°. Whoa! 49! And when we arrive, it’s like 48°.

My friend Larry gave me a lift home. Also he drove way to hell and gone north to Corrales so we could retrieve the Em. He’s a pal.

(My car is … not reliable right now. So I had to plea for help.)

When we walk in of course the cooler is churning away. Out come TJ and Squeak. And they look at me and are like, “Dad? FREEZING!”

Oops. I mean, the damn heater was on. Took me a minute to figure out what was making all the noise, once I hastened to get the swamper off.

Oh - I also contrived to get to the kennel without Emma’s retractable leash and X-harness. The kennel guy lent me a leash to get her to Larry’s car. We got in the backseat; she seemed pretty eager.

The plan was for me to sit in back and hold onto her - usually I cinch her in with the shoulder belt through the harness. Which I lacked Also I figured that was less hassle on Larry. I was hoping Emma would be okay with the proximity to Uncle Larry as it was: even though he’s a close friend, and official External Member of the Milán Pack, he hasn’t spent a lot of time around her. So I wasn’t altogether sure he had yet graduated to the Official Emma List of Approved Persons. And if you’re not on that list, you’re on the Watch List.

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So I had the German Bomber Channel on for electronic wallpaper a little while ago, and they were showing their Engineering an Empire show on Rome. And I was struck by a wonderful vision. (Thud.)

The scene: a couple years in the future. I’m enrolled in a course at Syracuse University. And the tall, lean, distinguished-looking professor points to some projection or exhibit and in his characteristic deep, slightly nasal, slightly metallic voice asks, “Can anyone tell me what this is?”

And I’ll pipe up in my best Professor Hikita accent, “It’s your hand, Buckaroo!”

Enough whimsy. Okay; like that’s gonna happen.

Yesterday was a good day. Got a lot written. Annja’s current exploit’s really picking up steam, and The Dinosaur Lords are going great guns. Plus I did a lot of necessary world-building on DinoLords, which helped the writing a great deal.

The key there was that I actually wrote story, not just typed notes and drew maps, both of which I also did. I know way too well what kind of a trap that note-making thing can be: a whole novel, The War for America, wandered off into the swamps and bogged down because, in large part, I devoted so much time to writing reams of notes. That and not having an actual synopsis, but rather an idea in my head where I wanted to go. Not so good an idea. It turns out that, while I have a great gift of improvisation, I need a certain amount of structure both to activate it and to direct it usefully. Who’da thunk it? Anyway that’s why I’ve got upwards of 700 pages of novel and am not half done - and have, I judge, upwards of a million words of notes. Seriously.

(Someday I’ll go back and finish that. If events don’t overtake it first. Which is a major possibility.)

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Been a busy day. Got a lot of writing done, and also made good progress in the yard. I’m finally about ready to plant the honeysuckle clipping I’ve been nurturing in a pot on the kitchen counter for the last year and a half. Soon after that I’ll be planting native grasses front and back. Yay!

Also, I finally got the necessary preparations made to learn at last whether I’ve indeed achieved compost. However I was too beat tonight to filter the stuff and find out. Tomorrow…

Poor Emma has somehow got a slice in one of her pads. Poor tyke. I gave her a quarter aspirin to relieve the pain. She’ll have to heal a few days before I take her out walking again.

Click here to read the reason behind the season - what makes Cinco de Mayo so damned special. I was going to watch the largely unknown 1970 Clint Eastwood/Shirley MacLaine (!) oater Two Mules for Sister Sara (the only movie I know of set during the Franco-Mexican War) in honor of the great day. But I’m too racked-up for that too. Maybe tomorrow for that as well.

A bit of an experiment today - take that as yesterday, Friday, May 2^nd, the day before this nominally posts.

As I mentioned in our last thrilling episode (and, yes, I’m easily thrilled) I’ve got both Dragon NaturallySpeaking and my DVR up and running. So today when I took Emma Dog for a walk down by the Nature Center, I decided to try my hand at an audio diary. I keep a journal of our walks anyway, and it’s struck me several times just how convenient it’d be to be able to record interesting events, sights, impressions, and suchlike, just by speaking. I do carry my beloved Pilot T/X religiously, but writing into it’s … not so efficient. Especially since Graffiti 2, their writing interface software, basically sucks. Although in truth I’ve never been terribly accurate at writing on my PDA.

But talking, obviously, is pretty easy.

Also, of course, it’s my intent to dictate my fiction on the go, implementing what I’ve long thought of as my “Man in Motion” concept. So I reckoned this’d be a prime opportunity to test several things at once.

What follows, therefore, is my transcript of the day’s session. It runs 1006 words. It’s proofread, but not edited - I’m proud I only said “um” once. It’s as close to word-by-word as I could make it.

Feel free to skip this one. If not - here goes:

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Well, they promised us awful winds today…

It’s been a good day, mostly. After the usual cocoa and mobilizing exercises I headed off to the office, which is to say Village Inn, where I had breakfast (yeah, at 1:30 in the afternoon. Sue.) and wrote plenty on Annja.

Fortuitously, the battery capacity on my Toshiba notebook and my bladder’s ability to contain all the water and coffee I suck down both tend to run out about the same time. As usual when those things happen I called it quits.

I packed up and headed out. Went to the grocery store, to get some necessities such as fresh garlic. Can’t do without that.

As I parked I saw a stocky, red-faced woman wandering the lot carrying a clipboard. Never a good sign. After I turned off the car I hauled out my Pilot to write in the date and time for a cool Baroque trumpet piece they were playing on KHFM, so I could look it up later on their website.

She came right up to my window and, despite the fact I was doing something, said, “Are you registered to vote?”

“No.”

“Would you like to register to vote?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a vile thing to do.”

She made a face and a dismissive gesture. Fortunately she didn’t argue. She turned and walked off toward Carlisle. I kind of hoped she’d wander into traffic but this didn’t happen, at least soon enough for me to see it.

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Today started off very well.

Actually got up when I intended to - my sleep pattern, to give it more dignity than it deserves, got all out of whack when I was finishing off my recent Rogue Angel novel. I’ve had a terrible time trying to get either enough sleep or regular sleep. To one degree or another I’ve had trouble with that most of my life; I need, and intend, to get it squared away soon.

Did my mobilization exercises, then some kettlebell. To cool down I did the Long Form of Yang taijiquan. TJQ works great for that.

I drank my morning cocoa. Then I packed up the notebook PC and headed to the Village Inn over on Menaul near University, a regular haunt, for huevos rancheros and coffee. VI does surprisingly good huevos rancheros, at least here in Albuquerque. Never, never order them anywhere outside New Mexico. Trust me on this.

I wrote for a while, most productively. Well-pleased, I headed out into a cool but lovely day. By which I mostly mean, calm. We’ve had some cold, explosively windy days the last couple of days. I was glad to see the wind abate.

First I went to Costco and dropped 160 bucks and some on fripperies like food and necessities such as coffee. You understand the priority, yes? Sadly, I could probably live a Neptunian year off stored body fat, but evolution has cruelly and senselessly neglected to provide our bodies the ability to store caffeine. This constitutes the single best refutation of intelligent design I know of.

(Oh, and by all means, guys, feel free to drop the whole “Flying Spaghetti Monster” gag any time now. It was never that great to start with; it’s long since tipped over into pure boring asshattery. If your goal was to prove that people who claim to favor science can be just as annoying, irrational, and sometimes outright scary as the loopiest Fundie loonball … mission accomplished.)

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Saturday was the famed Sci-Fi [sic] Night at the NM Scorpions hockey game. It was a lovely late afternoon for a drive - welcome to the actual beginning of New Mexico spring.

I’d downloaded directions to the Santa Ana Star Center and they seemed clear enough. I got a bit of a shock, however, when I came upon the Santa Ana Star Casino far short of where the map told me I was going. In my simple naïvete, here I thought the Center would be attached to the Casino. Nope.

At least the map was clear enough to give me confidence. On I drove. And on.

Later fellow attendee Jane Lindskold told me she’d called to ask for directions. She asked specifically what the Center was near. There came a pause, and then the reply, “It’s not really near anything.”

No, it’s not. It is, in fact, way out in the weeds.

Still it was hard to miss, rising out of the desert pretty much by itself. I got there with my box of books right before the doors were to open and joined my fellow writers at our table on the concourse. Two tables, actually, as well as another table for Bubonicon staffed by con chair Kristen Dorland and her sister-in-law (whose name I never manage to get; sorry.) I got slotted in between Walter Jon Williams and Gerald Weinberg. Out on the ends were Jane and Robert E. Vardeman.

The Center is relatively new, and a very nice, clean facility. Things started out fairly slow. Over the course of the evening, though, we got a fair amount of interest. A lot of kids came by to check us out, always a good thing - we need that rising generation of readers to keep us from having to get actual jobs.

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As every schoolchild knows, an invaluable resource for any homeowner is having a Crazy Tree Guy.

A Crazy Tree Guy is … wait. Is it possible there’s some part of that you don’t understand? He’s a crazy guy who works on trees!

More to the point, a Crazy Tree Guy is very knowledgeable about trees, possibly from residing in them, and does good work for cheap. He’s also in his way reliable: the Crazy Tree Guy won’t necessarily appear at the time appointed, or even on the day, but he will show up and do the work. Compare that to, say, the cable company…

Yesterday my Crazy Tree Guy reappeared on my doorstep. He’s a tall, skinny, middle-aged white guy who shaves his head and face, although I seem to recall seeing him with white stubble. He’s not a bad-looking guy, though in twenty years I can see him being the very image of Popeye the Sailor Man. He moves in an oddly stiff and abrupt way, a bit like a lizard.

He mentioned that after I hired him to trim the huge dead limbs off the big Siberian elms in my front yard, he had promised to come back this spring and clean the trees up for me. Actually he did the trees two years ago in August, and promised to come back last Spring. But what the hey: Crazy Tree Guys aren’t bound by your boring whitebread calendar!

Of course, as a self-employed (which in the eyes of the Corporate State means unemployed) full-time professional writer I don’t intend to fling handfuls of poo at Crazy Tree Guys, or anyone, for being unorthodox and free-walkers.

Anyway, I’d noticed the elms were sending up big bushy shoots from the roots and crowding the sidewalks, and had about determined to go out myself and do battle with them, possibly with the cool Ontario Knife Co. machete a friend gave me years ago. Or just my kukri. But, ah, one salient trait of Crazy Tree Guys is that they work cheap enough that I, not yet rolling in the dough, can afford them. So I told him sure. He then, in his inscrutable Crazy Tree Guy fashion, wandered off.

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So today I dropped a cool $124 and change on supplies at Costco. Eggs, facial tissue, olive oil … that sort of thing. I impulse bought a door mat for $19. Okay, so I’ve needed one for a couple years now. But it’s not a necessity.

On the one hand I suppose I need to be cautious, what with price inflation just starting to blow up. If I were smart I’d probably split for two tons of toilet paper. There’s something that’s going to continue to be in demand. Of course, a year from now that door mat’ll probably be worth a million dollars. Then again, a decent scavenged wood screw will go for more than my current net worth.

… Anyway, the mat’s going right back, it turns out. It’s huge. It’s not so much a welcome mat as a porch carpet. Ah, well. Shoulda read the specs closer.

Meanwhile … to actually talk about the nominal subject of this post … I saw what struck me as a leading contender for Worst Dog Toy Ever: the Plush-Toy Skunk.

Um. Leaving aside the cliché in the room, skunks are redoubtable predators who can quite savagely rip on a dog with powerful claws as well as teeth.

And now, not leaving aside the obvious … hello: they’re skunks?

Do you really want to accustom your dog to the idea it’s a good idea to play with them? What’s next? Cuddles the Rattlesnake? Mr. Sparky the Chewable Electric Cord?

It’s like giving your kid a Bath-Buddy Toaster.

Among the other somewhat bizarre and variegated wildlife we’ve got in my neighborhood, there indeed are skunks. How do I know? Well - and you’re not going to believe this, I know - I’ve smelled them. Especially in the Spring.

Love. It’s in the air, baby.

Well, our New Mexico weather is following its usual pattern. As seems to be the case most places, the seasons change quite definitely on or about the first of the month - not three weeks later, as per the bureaucratic (or fascist) calendar. And you can start sensing the onslaught of the seasonal change - not just by temperature and length of days, but the color and quality of light, the feel of the air, the smells - a week or two before.

Sure enough it’s begun to feel springlike here of late. The temperature’s trended up. Unfortunately that’s also meant we’ve started with the winds that makes Spring my second-favorite season as opposed to first. Yesterday, despite the fact it got above 60, the winds were savage, making it unpleasant to venture outside during the day. (Also, despite the warmth down here in the valley, the mountains were dusted with snow clear to the bases; a good deal remains today.)

Today I went to meet with a friend to walk by the Rio Grande Nature Center. When I woke up it was cloudy. When I left the house it looked as if it was clearing up and definitely wouldn’t rain. When I met my friend at the RGNC parking lot ten minutes it was solidly clouded over and seemed to threaten imminent rain. Ten minutes later when we left the pond it was clear overhead and getting bright.

So it remained for most of what would turn into a 9.31 mile walk. I’ve intended for a time to work up to 10,000 steps a day, as measured by my trusty Omron HJ-112 pedometer. While it appears the Japanese originally picked that as an auspicious number for steps in a day because of a cultural battiness for the number 10,000, it turns out actually to be a pretty near-optimal number of steps to take. Go figure.

So today I took 16,457. No, seriously. And that’s just counting between the time I parked my car and the time I climbed (gratefully, I’ll add) back in.

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