Monday we had KFC. It was at Ken's house because Common Grounds, where we had been meeting, had fewer and fewer things to sell at our last few meetings. I hear it's closed now, with paper over the windows. When there is no soda water two meetings in a row, you know something bad is happening.

But at Ken's house, there were two kinds of brownies and double chocolate cookies and a bowl of chocolates. We got incredibly high on chocolate. First it was like an opium den, where we sat around his living room just staring and chewing. Then the sugar hit and there were many Beavis and Butthead impressions and I got the giggles so bad I could feel I was this close to utter hysteria. I came home and fell into bed and felt hungover the next day.

Next time we're going to meet at the batting cages, then retire to the Bipartisan Cafe for our meeting. Dave and Ken were confused about why we were meeting at the batting cages. "Because I've never been and I need someone to go with me," I said. Obvs!

Tuesday after an uninspiring day at work I met leboyfriend for happy hour. He had saved the NYT crossword to do together, though it was Tuesday and didn't take long. We made a grocery run and then decided to catch the three-dollar movie at the Mission, even though it was Wolverine: Origins. It was pretty much exactly what I expected. There's something about seeing a movie just because it's the one that's showing that allows me to enjoy way worse movies than I otherwise would.

On Wednesday sanguinity and I met up with Gus, from our 2007 Badwater crewing crew! Aw, Gus. He moves constantly and really hates wearing his shirt in the summer. He needs a lot of exercise. He went swimming with his brother before he met us; then we walked him down to the Delta for southern food. Then more walking, down through the Reed canyon with a slurpee stop at Seven Eleven. Gus is a junior high math teacher. He is loud and has no fear-- everyone we met got a voluble "Hi!" and he asked anyone who was running how far they were going. He told people in lawn chairs they need to relax more. He asked a guy with a Mustang if he really drove it here from Alaska (it had Alaska plates). When I first met Gus in Stovepipe Wells, I was like, "how am I going to cope with this person for the next three days?" Now I adore him.

(Here's a typical conversation between me and Gus.)
Me: I love Seven-Eleven!
Gus: Oh, yeah? Why don't you marry it?
Me: I might, because they are buying up real estate and and expanding and it's very good timing for that.
Gus: Well, which do you love more? Seven Eleven, or algebra?
Me: Algebra.

Yesterday was my first evening at home on my own. I started my study of calculus. The book Sang picked out is in novel form, the story of some kingdom where a giant pushes the train along the tracks. I thought I understood all about the slope of a tangent line (is that redundant?) but the exercises at the end of the chapter say no. I'll revisit it tonight.

Now I have to fly if I want to catch my bus.

I got around to scanning my June 3rd comic for Three on the Third. (Despite the name, there's only one.)



Sang and The Librarian and I sat in the backyard yesterday under the guise of working on July's Three on the Thirds, but I drew only one and that was more than anyone else. I haven't scanned it yet. There was kool-ade, and later there were carnitas. Blue jays told us we should get out of their yard. It was summer.

The kitchen faucet has had a drip for a long time. Sang and fourgates took a look inside it a long time ago, and found it was stubbornly different from any of the diagrams on the internet, so we've put off doing anything. Unfortunately, the drip accelerated in the last few days. Yesterday I put a gallon milk jug under the faucet and it filled in a few hours. (Sang watered the rhubarb.) We reluctantly decided it was maybe time to call a plumber, who could also fix the ancient bathroom sink tap on the same call-out.

My inner cheapskate and repair-appointment-hater was not happy! Somehow, even though we got a late start to our evening TV and it was eleven at night, I found myself asking, "Honey, can you tell me about faucets again?" and popping the covering off the handle. Sang patiently got the tools out and we took it apart. "I feel baffled," I admitted, and put it back together again. She was on her computer; we both had a bunch of pdf's pulled up. "It says you should be able to use padded pliers and lift the whole thing right out," she said. Pretty soon I was disassembling the handle again, because it was so easy, and just to see. The part about the pliers was a lie, but Sang did find where to wedge two screwdrivers and lever out the mysterious assembly of parts! And then fish out the spring and little thingie that the internet says need to be replaced! It was midnight. It was very satisfying.

Somewhat less satisfying was the discovery this morning that we can't just use the other tap until we get this one fixed. The whole faucet is out of commission. I have the parts in a ziploc bag with me, so I can hop off the bus at the plumbing supply store after work. I hope, I hope I can get the right replacements and tonight we will have a working, non-leaking faucet! I realize this is the easiest of jobs for the knowledgeable, but I am really quite thrilled that it's succeeded so far.

In the meanwhile, the kitchen faucet is that milk jug, filled from the tap in the bathtub nearby. More convenient than camping, anyway.

I just learned from the BikePortland blog that Bonnie Tinker died on Thursday, in a right-hook bike accident with a truck on the campus of Virginia Tech, where she was attending a Friends conference. (Oregonian article here; I recommend you don't read the comments as there's a bunch of same-old-same-old yelling about bikes, liberals, etc.)

I knew Bonnie Tinker's name as the founder of Love Makes a Family, but I met her around the time Measure 36 passed in Oregon. Sang and I were at a meeting of college students, a couple of high-school GSA members, representatives from Basic Rights Oregon, and other GLBTQ activists interested in forming a coalition to keep working on marriage equality, and to improve communication and collaboration among all these different groups.

Bonnie was the elder in the room. She let a lot of people speak, and then she spoke. I felt right away that here was someone who had seen this entire process many, many times, and knew the pitfalls and how things were likely to go. She was a realist, though not mean about it in any way. It was very clear to me how valuable it was to have a member of the old guard there. She knew stuff, and still had the passion to act and keep going.

I met her a few more times in the next few years; Sang took a workshop she led. The bumper sticker on our car is from Love Makes a Family; it says "Another Family for Marriage Equality." (Incidentally, I read only tonight that the Tinkers in Tinker v. Des Moines, the landmark first amendment case about high-school students wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam war, were Bonnie's older siblings.)

She was 61 years old, and I get the feeling she was smack in the middle of a lifetime of doing and saying what was important to her. I don't really know, but somehow I don't see her having a lot of life-unlived regrets. She's a model to me of speaking out, discerning the truth, and keeping the core of yourself without burning out in a long fight. I wish she were still around.

At the last minute yesterday I remembered to go get a subsidized bus pass at the little campus transit office. Until now I'd been using the remainder of the annual pass I got at my old job.

Know what an all-zones everything-included pass costs each month for a university employee? Thirty-seven bucks. AND it's taken out of my paycheck before taxes. So under thirty bucks a month out-of-pocket equivalent.

I am delighted at my good fortune, but it really makes me feel for the people without deals through their employers. They're paying EIGHTY-SIX dollars, the retail price for a monthly pass. (Seventy-nine dollars plus shipping and handling, if you buy a year's worth.) And I feel even more for the people who have trouble getting that chunk of money together, who regularly pay the $2.30 individual fare each way for their commute.

It's kind of like how not having health insurance gets you not just the hospital bill, but extra-high prices for everything because you don't have the clout that insurance companies do to negotiate based on the volume of employer plans. So much depends on whom you work for, in this country.

pryl, we had dinner with your buddy Todd yesterday! His local friends pointed us to a Thai place Sang and I hadn't been to, even though it's practically in our neighborhood. Pok Pok is not like other Thai food I've had-- I got the impression it's northern food? It was delicious.

We got out the hiking books and kibbutzed on the best hikes for Todd's week in the Northwest. I think he settled on Eagle Creek in the Gorge, and either Ramona Falls or Cooper Spur up to the edge of the glacier on Mt. Hood, depending on conditions. By the end of the evening I was wishing I got to go hiking instead of to the office for the rest of the week. He made the Smoky Mountains sound pretty awesome, too.

I stopped someone on the street and asked for a picture of the three of us, so there will be photographic evidence. :)

Today I spent a long time cleaning food. A flat of strawberries that Sang bought "day-old" at a bargain price (she helped clean, too), a cantaloupe that's been languishing in the fridge, and cilantro that I knew I would let go bad if it wasn't in ready-to-grab form.

Okay, it wasn't that long. I'm a big whiner.

This afternoon Sang & I were sitting outside Otto's eating hot dogs when two police cars sped by on Woodstock, lights and sirens going. One was headed west and one was headed east. Uh oh... where are you going, guys? Laughter and general mockery broke out.

Yesterday Sang and LeB and I went to see Coraline at the college theater. I liked it at about the same level as I liked the book: enjoyable, but I wouldn't rush to read/see it again. Sometimes it seemed slow (and I'm usually okay with slow), and there were some clunky explanations from the ghost children that I found unnecessary. But it had some good lines, and a few scary bits that made me put my hand over my mouth. My favorite part was probably the beginning, where they really nailed the character of the bored, annoying kid.

I didn't get much on my list done today, so I'll work on it tomorrow. Things to mail, a run, writing. I think it will be a good day. And we have a big bowl of marginal strawberries waiting to be made into daiquiris.

I am supposed to be writing something scathing for KFC. We are all assigned to be scathing, except for Ken who is always scathing. He is supposed to write something pretty.

I'm having trouble with scathing. I might add to my grocery-store rants and turn them into a collection, but they are more hysterical lamentations than scathing.

Maybe Character Two could point out scathingly that I still do 95 percent of my shopping at Safeway anyway.

Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.

Metanote: starting next year I will up my pretensions one more level and post this two weeks before the longest day of the year!

Happy Bloomsday! Yesterday I ran across this comment by George Bernard Shaw on Ulysses. It's not every older writer who can acknowledge that he doesn't get the new guard, and that it's not for him, but still stand up for it:

"If Dickens or Thackeray had been told that a respectable author like myself would use the expletive 'bloody' in a play, and that an exceptionally fastidious actress of the first rank, associated exclusively with fine parts, would utter it on the stage without turning a hair, he could not have believed it. Yet I am so old-fashioned and squeamish that I was horrified when I first heard a lady describe a man as a rotter. I could not write the words Mr Joyce uses: my prudish hand would refuse to form the letters; and I can find no interest in his infantile clinical incontinences, or in the flatulations which he thinks worth mentioning...

"Ulysses is a document, the outcome of a passion for documentation that is as fundamental as the artistic passion -- more so, in fact; for the document is the root and stem of which the artistic fancy works are the flowers. Joyce is driven by his documentary demon to place on record the working of a young man's imagination for a single day in the environment of Dublin. The question is, is the document authentic. I, having read some scraps of it, reply that I am afraid it is, then you may rise up and demand that Dublin be razed to the ground, and its foundations sown with salt. And I may say do so, by all means. But that does not invalidate the document."

For once I got my early-morning act together and ran down to the Little League field at the park for some barefoot running. "Don't let your shoes get stolen!" Sang told me. I tucked them against the fence in one of the dugouts to minimize action from curious doggies.

The plastic temporary outfield fences are up, so I zigged and zagged around them. The turf was cold and just lumpy enough so I could feel my feet and ankle tendons working. There was no one at the park except me and the dog owners. (It's an official off-leash area til 8 a.m.)

When I was done I had wet mown grass all over my feet. Here's the smug part: I had brought a bandana! I cruised home in time to go to the farmers market, which I believe is our next activity. After cereal.

A good baby step toward my goal of becoming an indestructible ultrarunner.

I decided to spend a little birthday money on purple hair, now that I don't work for the Police Bureau and their "no colors outside the natural spectrum" anymore.

sanguinity was my stylist, and it was also her idea to dye the bottom layers and leave the top its usual brown and gray. That way I don't feel like I'm "covering up the gray" in a way that isn't really me. Also, I know I won't stay on top of the roots growing out, and this way they're under more hair and not so noticeable.

Photos by leboyfriend: ( Behold! )

Warning: total self-absorption ahead!

I hardly ever look at my browsing history, but today I was looking for a link I'd closed out, and ended up scrolling through a day's worth of browsing.

What a lot of time I spend constructing my fantasy self via reading the internet.

Today's activity:

- Usual suspects: email, LiveJournal, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader.
- Read a bunch of the New York Times. Somehow I'm half-convinced this is obligatory or makes me a better person...?
- Read Amazon reviews for several books, decided not to pursue most of them. Exception: put a hold on Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford.
- Read about pet hermit crabs. Grooved on the word "crabitat." Learned they need to be kept above 70 degrees, decided against pet hermit crab.
- Read about spa I plan to visit next Thursday.
- Read reviews of two local doughnut stores, neither of which was the one I visited today.
- Fake-shopped for t-shirts on etsy and ebay.
- Fake-shopped for real estate on craigslist.
- Checked my watchlist on Wikipedia.
- Looked up Oregon concealed weapons rules and read reviews of Glock 26.
- Read reviews of Van Cliburn concerts and fake-shopped for Di Wu CDs.
- Watched videos by the guys who did that Mother's Day video.
- Tried again to find that Borges poem I can never find, and thought again how this would amuse him considering the subject matter of the poem.

There's something unsettling about the amount of rehearsal that the internet has allowed in my life. Or does it just document (and pin down to the more-or-less external world) what I've always done mentally?

Ordinarily I'd share this on Google Reader, but it was messed up this morning:
Spongebob Squarepants and the Value of Bad Poetry
I really must watch more of that show sometime.

Next, if you have ever thought Emergen-C and fizzy water would make a delightful, extra-fizzy beverage, don't bother. Much fizzing at first pour, like a root-beer float, and then all the fizz is used up. I might as well have used tap water.

I just finished Ellen Emerson White's YA novel The President's Daughter and I am in love! So happy that there are three more books in the series and many more by this author! The first three President's Daughter books first came out in the '80s but have been updated. Interesting! Yes, they mention email now and have cell phones, and when our heroine likes something from the '80s it's ascribed to her retro tastes. The update isn't just a couple of things, like in the reissue of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (Sigh, all those girls who won't be thinking "belt? elastic? wha'?")

But the style is still that of an older book. No transcripts of IMs or emails like in Meg Cabot. It reads a LOT like Madeleine L'Engle, in fact, with a protagonist named Meg who reminds me strongly of Meg Murray in A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. I was gratified that Bookshelves of Doom agrees.

I have put the second book on hold already and plan to devour it as soon as it arrives.

Awhile ago nmaki sent me a sheaf of manila tags. I knew I would use them for some kind of project, but I didn't know what until this month!

Peonies are in blossom around Portland. I love them, especially the big fluffy pink ones. I like how old-fashioned they are, how they bloom so extravagantly that their heads bow over and touch the ground. I like the dark green of their foliage and I even like how ants seem completely gaga for them. They get overshadowed by the roses here, and never quite get their due.

Issa wrote a lot of haiku about peonies, and I am very fond of some of them. So I have broken out the extra-fine sharpie and copied my favorites on the manila tags. I'm carrying some in my back pocket all this month and will tie them to, or near, the peonies I see as I walk around the neighborhood.

I tagged the first one last night, just around the corner from my house. A white peony, battered by last night's rainstorm. (White peonies have a place of honor in my heart, too, ever since Louie earnestly tried to stalk one under the assumption it was a fluffy white cat.)

The three in my pocket right now:

a perfect match/ for the crazy cat.../ peony

day after day/ bathing in chaff/ the peony

a temple bell/ a lantern/ and a peony

Thank you nmaki!

It started this morning when I read halseanderson's post about her appearance in School Library Journal. The photo shows off her beautiful orange high-tops, and the LJ entry promises to reveal their "Deep Significant Meaning" later.

I immmediately thought of R. R. Knudson's Zanballer. Zan and her geek-scientist best friend (and now coach) Rinehart go to buy her athletic shoes. She tries on all kinds of fancy shoes and Rinehart measures and evaluates them all on forty-seven axes. Then she tries on an orange pair and says, "I like these." Rinehart doesn't measure another thing, just buys them. He explains that she is going to spend many, many hours training in her shoes and she should get the ones she likes.

There were three of these books, Zanbanger, Zanballer, Zanboomer, each of them featuring a different boy-dominated sport that Zan gets into. And it looks like a follow-up called Zan Hagen's Marathon, and a couple of books where Rinehart is into sports, too. I haven't read them all, but they were definitely part of my girl-power landscape. I LOVE a good training montage, and these had some of the best, plus a big element of geeking out over training, too, courtesy of Rinehart.

Knudson is my dad's age. She went by Zan, like the girl in her books, but it's short for her middle name Rozann instead of Suzanne. Her papers are collected in Mississippi, but there is no Wikipedia article for her.

First Mary Calhoun, now this... I may feel compelled to take a KidLit Wikipedia mini-sabbatical and start contributing. Shouldn't there be grant money for that?

ETA: And Susan Beth Pfeffer! Who is still a powerhouse and I can't wait for her third moon-disaster book to come out! Mon dieu.

Anyway, I'm sure Ms. Anderson's sneakers have nothing to do with Zan. I next thought of Sara in Betsy Byars' Summer of the Swans, who has orange shoes that seemed fun at the time, but now she's feeling 13-year-old ugly duckling and they make her feet look like huge, literal ugly duckling feet. So she tries to dye them baby blue, but they come out puce. It doesn't help.

Kidlit and orange sneakers. I am quite curious about the next iteration of this motif.

As usual, I drag my heels on scanning my comics. It wouldn't be done now if heroic Sanguinity hadn't taken over!

Anyway, here's a couple ( comics: )

Mondays are meeting day for me at work, and yesterday's meeting was largely about projects that are ending, grant funding that's running out, how to make budgets come out even, and who will be cutting their time to accomplish this. All in all, it made me feel a bit pinched and poor, even though no one has indicated my time allotment is in jeopardy. (I already work three-fourths time, which I love.)

So perhaps I was a bit more frazzled than I realized after work. I walked across downtown to Powell's. I really did not want to deal with people on the street, and assiduously avoided everyone who looked like they might be canvassing or panhandling.

Maybe it was poetic justice when on a corner that sees a lot of crazy people, a yellow-jacket started relentlessly investigating me. I waved and back-stepped and frowned like a crazy person until the light changed, and halfway across the street.

At Powell's, after the errand I had come for, I decided I needed some Ultimate Unwinding time, which for me means books of syndicated comic strips. The really mainstream suburban-family ones like Zits and FBOFW and in a pinch, LuAnn. I don't know why they're the perfect brain freeze and security blanket for me, but they are, even when I don't like them. However, even though seating was scarce, I couldn't bear sitting on the cool Science Fiction bench against the pillar that all the SF authors sign when they come through town, looking at For Better or For Worse. It was just too wrong, and I retreated to a different bench by the foofy blank journals.

At five I met Sang and LeB and a friend for some Thai food to celebrate LeB's birthday! I've grown to like the Thai Peacock on 9th and Oak a lot. It's not crowded at dinnertime (um, especially if you come at five o'clock, I guess), the service is excellent (including free refills on lemonade), and the food is solid. For some reason I thought of their food as not spicy, but yesterday it was just at the edge of my abilities. (i.e. a bit mild for the others, probably. I try!)

I was tired when I got home and ecstatic when I could retreat to my little cave bedroom, no phone no computer nobody watching, and go to sleep. I've also started Ellen Emerson White's The President's Daughter and like it a lot so far. Story of a rich kid without being all about the shopping, and comfortable writing that's smart without being frantic. Yay!

Happy birthday, evannichols, and many happy returns of the day! I wouldn't complain if they were all gorgeous sunny ones like this, either. Excellent choice of birthdays!

I'd been planning for months to run this event, but as a spring of laziness and several head colds in a row took their toll, I downgraded my plans from the 50k event to the 20k.

Earlier this week I'd felt all recovered from that last cold, but last night the sore throat came back. (Sang had the same bug and said it did that on her too. Grr!) It was still around this morning, despite a solid dose of ibuprofen, but I tucked myself into the car with Sang anyway. I so wanted this race to be my return to running, and so didn't want to have to tell everyone who asked how the race was that I sicked out again! They were just tail-end germs. Hardly germs, really. Of course, this did not stop me from whining and acting pathetic on the way. Sang was a dream. Despite being gotten out of bed early on a Sunday to go hang around a field for three hours, she didn't whine at all! She told me she was whining on the inside.

We stopped at leboyfriend's place to pick him up. He had coffee and toast all ready for us! It was only thirty blocks or so from there to the start, where I picked up my number and joined the 50k and 20k runners.

I hung toward the back of the pack and took my time. We ran up the Lower Macleay trail until it met the Wildwood, then stayed on the Wildwood til my turnaround. I was passed by all but a few of the runners and it was peaceful for awhile; then the 10k runners, who started 15 minutes behind us, began catching up. After their turnoff it was peaceful again for a bit, then I started meeting the faster 20k runners on their way back. The trails were pretty wide, and headphones weren't allowed, so there was plenty of room for everyone. There were a few non-racing hikers and dogs on the trail who looked baffled but mostly cheerful about meeting up with a few hundred runners.

The course was well-marked with surveyor's tape and the aid station was everything one could ask for. (Except the late beloved pink-and-white Mother's Cookies, sob!) My new favorite aid station snack is pieces of Payday bars. Salty nougat and peanuts with sugar in the form of caramel-- how did it never dawn on me how perfect they are as running snacks? I also made free with the Clif Bloks, which I am too cheap to buy for myself but love at races.

I was on my own for most of the return trip. Really pretty, running through the sunlit forest! I saw a beautiful snail and felt much fellow-feeling. Robins flitted around and the wild roses were in bloom. I know this series of races includes some beauties in California, but I bet Portland measured up today.

Somewhere in there the endorphins took over and I found myself thinking how race day is always, by definition, perfect. Because it is what it is, and whatever happens is part of the race. It's a time of total acceptance. No point in kicking oneself or obsessing over the future, because this is race day and it's all about now.

I finished in something like 2:46 to little fanfare, snacked on goldfish crackers and beef jerky and some electrolyte drink that LeB fetched me that was the most fabulous thing ever. We all went back to LeB's place where he fed us bagels with lox (so good! perfect!) and he and I chilled while Sang went to campus to do her stats homework at the computer lab.

When I got home again we walked the dog, I iced a sore knee, and we went for take-and-bake pizza. I'm fading fast and may give in and start swigging Nyquil or something, even though these are tail-end germs and hopefully will be pretty much gone by tomorrow, right? It was a good race. I couldn't have done it without my team because there's no way I would have gotten my butt out there today without them. And I'm happy to be a runner still. Thinking of instating a habit of putting in three miles on foot every day, no matter what else is going on. Louie would probably benefit, too.

Here I am where the action is after the finish (photo by LeB):