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This morning, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) calendula_witch and I walked my 60-minute loop. It's about 3.0 miles of suburban walking, along residential streets in the general neighborhood of Nuevo Rancho Lake. Up til this point post-operatively, my longest walk had been about 25 minutes to cover roughly a one mile subsegment of this loop. We made the entire loop in slightly less than 65 minutes in the frosty morning air, though I was staggering by the time we got back to the house, and went down hard for a (mercifully brief) nap.
This is huge for me. To reclaim my fitness, even nominally, is so important. Last year it took me months to get anywhere. With abdominal surgery, the wound healing was so much bigger an issue than the chest wall punctures I am now recovering from, so that's certainly a big factor. However, I also have to credit my extensive and constant walking and biking programs over the past 18 months with readying me for this recovery process.
I owned that hour, in the same way pre-op me owned that hour. (Well, almost so, certainly close enough.) There's still a million things wrong, recovery progresses apace, but damn it, my body can move.
I am terribly pleased.
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Nice walk up Twin Peaks this morning. I'll miss it, as I don't know when I'll be back in SF in the foreseeable future. I'm likely under a travel restriction through about July, though I may be able to sneak down to California briefly over the holidays.
I'm returning to Portland this afternoon, calendula_witch will be there on Sunday, driving the Witchmobile as she'll stay for a couple of weeks. shelly_rae is heading to Portland today as well, to be my cancer buddy, and calendula_witch's, through the surgery and the hospitalization following.
Lots of busy coming up, including the Niece's sixth birthday party on Friday and an early family Thanksgiving on Sunday. This is good, as the surgery is a week from today, and by about Monday I will be an utter wreck.
Had a stray thought while walking about the difference between my business writing (Day Jobbery) and my fiction. Yesterday I executed a quick project, only a few hours, in which I repurposed some existing text from our Web site and from a handful of sales proposals. This is completely normal behavior, because it preserves brand consistency, keeps me on message, and helps the salespeople by offering predictable language they're already familiar with. I'm not required to be original every time, in fact, quite the opposite. The creativity there comes from figuring out how to meet the requirement in the first place, writing introductory, bridging and concluding text, and generally positioning the whole project. Whereas in my fiction writing, I never deliberately repeat myself. (Well, almost never, but it's very unusual.) I go to a fair amount of trouble to not repeat other people, though we all do it by accident sometimes.
This may be about as revelatory as noticing the sky is blue, but I'd never thought of things this way before. Ah, brain, I knew there was a reason I take you for walks.
Also, I've continued to write through all this. Currently revising calendula_witch's draft of Our Lady of the Islands, a book that continues to be an excellent read.
All in all, my head and heart remain unusually calm these last few days. Let us hope for more of the same.
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My flight left Portland this morning in the pre-dawn darkness, and landed in Philadelphia this evening in dusk's last failing light. I spent almost eight hours sitting on airplanes, with a 40 minute break in the middle in DFW. Talk about your lost days... On the other hand, I did Day Jobbery work, got 3,900 words in on "The Specific Gravity of Grief", answered a couple of interviews, and took two naps, as well as reading a good chunk more of The Jade Man's Skin.
I did wear the stupid fricking mask. Boy did that get old after a while. I also pretended to OCD and used hand sanitizer frequently. We'll see if any of this helps stave off respiratory infection. Much like the city's alligator watch, we'll never know unless it fails. My state of mind in this regard is left as an exercise for the reader.
Dinner tonight with klingonguy, valverdi and their friend D—, who likely has an LJ handle but I'm not smart enough to figure it out. Quite nice an evening.
The Philadelphia Airport Marriott, on the other hand, is yet another Marriott property without wireless. I don't get it. For what these rooms cost, they shouldn't have any problem doing what every Motel 6 and mom-and-pop coffee house in the country can do. I'm done staying at Marriott properties, given how many other hotel chains seem to manage this minor issue just fine. I can't believe they don't get constant pushback from their business travel customers over this.
Tomorrow is a roadtrip from Philadelphia to the Pennsylvania hinterlands for Day Jobbe meetings. At least I'll see the sun tomorrow. And then off to San Francisco Friday, and my sweet calendula_witch.
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Your Sunday moment of zen.
Jeff VanderMeer, photographed at the Portland Japanese garden. © 2009 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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A friend needs a ride from Seattle to Portland on 11/6, to the Jeff VanderMeer/Cat Rambo reading. Anybody coming down tomorrow afternoon? Ping me, I'll hook you up.
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SteamCon has been fun, albeit low key. calendula_witch and I arrived earlier than expected, with a deeply surprising lack of traffic fail given the awful weather and the usual Friday afternoon crowded highway between Portland and Seattle. Ran into Tim and Serena Powers in the parking lot, who were gracious enough to help us with our bags. Ran into Duane Wilkinson just inside, all of which eventually devolved (through some mechanism mysterious to me) in us being invited to dinner by Megan Lindholm later that evening, in company with Tim, Serena, Duane and some of Megan's family.
After that, it was pretty much barcon, with fly bys from cmdrsuzdal, johnnyeponymous, marykaykare, cmpriest, blackaire, tamiam and, erm, lots of other people.
(Please note, it can be hard to see people in the bar. The chairs have high backs and don't face the lobby for the most part, so if you're looking for us, and you think we're there, it's worth stepping in and actually looking around.)
Early to bed, not so early to rise, some quiet couple time and a long walk, and now we're almost ready for our day. I'll be reading at 2 pm in a joint hour with catrambo, and holding forth on steampunk literature at 4 pm.
See some, all or none of you around here today.
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Some more meetings here in Torrance, CA this morning, then I'm off to LAX and heading back home to Portland. Not sure when, as I'm standby on three different flights, depending on when I get out of my meetings and how long it takes me to get to the airport, turn in the rental car, etc. But in any event, I should be at Nuevo Rancho Lake tonight.
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Your Tuesday moment of zen.
Cathedral Park, under the St. John's Bridge in North Portland, photographed by me.
© 2006, 2009 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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