Sculpin

These are my links for August 5th through September 16th:

• EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect - Sarah Palin, whom John McCain has said knows more about energy than “probably anyone in the United States of America,” doesn’t actually know how much energy her own state produces.
• ?Alaska Women Reject Palin? Rally is HUGE! « Mudflats - The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever in the history of the state.
• Kermit Software Assists in Hurricane Tracking - Kermit still exists: “The EM-APEX float uses Embedded Kermit with an Iridium data modem, a Motorola model 9522. C-Kermit is used ashore on a Linux box with several serial ports and modems. The floats phone home, log in, then give shell commands to start C-Kermit for data transfer.”
• Techskeptic’s Data Daily: Fractal Wrongness - Fractal wrongness: the state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. From a distance, a fractally wrong person’s worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any part of that person’s worldview, that part is just as wrong.
• strawberry chiffon shortcake | smitten kitchen - This.

Wow, I really screwed up my knees last weekend. Good job, me. And then yesterday I overworked them. I’d forgotten that the level of pain that usually means, “Hm, maybe be a little bit cautious,” means, in my knees, “Back off now or pay the price, bitch.” I wish I’d remembered; I found it out after a yoga class, years ago, when we had a crack-brained substitute teacher who decided to whip us gimps into shape. I’d thought I might be cutting it a bit fine that day, but in fact I was cutting it way past fine and had bad knee pain for a week. Had to mostly stay off my feet for about three days, as I recall.

Let’s hope this one doesn’t take that long. In related news, I think I won’t be climbing hills for a while. Frankly, I am not sure I’d even want to hobble down to the parking lot to work on bike riding skills today.

Today’s lack of fun:

1. Get on the bike, fail to gain momentum fast enough, fall off shrieking.
2. Try again. Get on the bike, fail to gain momentum fast enough, fall off shrieking.
3. Give up for the time being, because there’s no point rubbing my nose in failure.

On Saturday I biked with Josh on the tandem to Wallingford. On Sunday, we took the tandem up the hill to the Blue Saucer, which is near the second-highest point in Seattle if I recall correctly. For me, this is a hell of a lot of hill-climbing, and my knees feel it. I’ve even got some minor limping going on. Maybe that’s why I failed today. Failed failed faility failed, friends. I was more or less on the flat here, with a very slight uphill grade; next time, I’ll point myself downhill.

I’m not sure that this forty-pound bike is the best thing to be learning on, either. I could turn on the motor, but OH HELL NO am I adding a motor to this learning process. Like I don’t have enough to think about.

I was about to add, “And I can’t find the charger anyway,” then turned to the right and saw it where it has been sitting there looking at me for months. Seriously. I can’t find anything in this house.

What I need is an electrician. Can anybody recommend an electrician?

See, once upon a time we were going to have a hatch put in so we could store things in the attic. For my birthday, my mother gave me a few hours of handyman time from the husband of someone we know. That was last October. Hooray. Josh bought attic stairs and everything. We tried and tried to get on the same page with the handyman, but he had this and that, hernia surgery, extra work, a family reunion, etc. So that took about seven months. Then we realized that the only place we could put the stairs was in the hallway. That meant moving a light. “I’ll do that this weekend,” said Josh, and then he took a good look at it. Oh, God, it all goes down the rabbit hole from there, but the upshot is to do much of anything to the wiring, we’ll need a bunch of electrical work done. We took bids, accepted one, and the guy put us off for weeks before admitting that he was really too busy to do the work.

Meanwhile, no attic storage space. And my mother has moved from her three-story house into a two-bedroom apartment. I, foolish only child, have said, “Oh, sure, you can store that in our attic.” Which we will have any day now, right? No. No. I live in a storage depot. Not to mention that she’s given me about fifty pounds of random papers and photographs to sort through. (”This is yours!” says Lady Bountiful, dumping another load of old report cards my way. Oh joy.) It doesn’t help that Josh was laid off in spring, and the contents of five years of clutter buildup in his horrible office has now taken over the dining room. I am going mad, I tell you, mad.

And because I live in a storage depot, I don’t have enough room to do my Pilates exercises. Basically everything has gone to hell here.

I’m going back to bed.

I hate to rag on one of my favorite institutions, but this was not one of the more successful Tilth Harvest Fairs I’ve gone to. We went up there hoping to get a case of the world’s best pickles from China Bend and some cranberry honey from PSBA. Mostly, though, we were going there to clean out the China Bend stall — they make these great salsas, good enchilada sauce, some killer dips… it’s all good. We brought the trailer so we could really stock up.

But China Bend wasn’t there (boo!) and the PSBA booth appeared much reduced. No cranberry honey for me. Shoot. Poor Josh looked a little shocked; he’d been looking forward to those pickles for weeks, and (so he tells me) he had plans for that salsa.

Maybe it’s been a rough year for China Bend, what with the fuel costs and the bad weather. Therefore we should mail-order extra pickles.

It wasn’t a total loss. We came home with a bag of keeper onions and some decent-looking plant starts. I picked up some kind of loom in a free pile on the way back. Most satisfyingly, we made it up the hill to Wallingford without feeling like we were seriously overdoing it, which was a big change from the last time we dragged ourselves up there.

The tandem gets a lot of attention with a trailer on the back. We’re practically a parade. One woman even went sprawling on the pavement because she was looking at our bike instead of at where she was going.

Today’s bike practice was notably mostly for the fact that I really, truly did not want to do it. But I did it anyway. It helped that I bribed myself with an ice cream bar afterwards. Truth is, I’ve been bribing myself the whole time, and mostly with better stuff. Theo chocolate is some powerful positive reinforcement. I’d better stock back up on those coconut-curry bars. And the fig bars. And maybe some other bars. Ahem.

My stopping has not miraculously improved overnight. I’ve been tending to underestimate how fast I’m going and putting a foot down way too soon; then there is hopping. But the last time I stopped today, I nailed it and it was perfect. Not just okay, not just showing promise, not just without losing a kneecap, but perfect, in perfect control. The stars aligned. It can be done.

Now when I yelp in fear and dismay I make actual words. I doubt the young mothers at the playground appreciate the words I’m most likely to come up with, though. Their children, on the other hand, are probably very interested indeed.

Tomorrow I’ll take a one-day break. We’re planning to take the tandem up to the top of Wallingford, so I will be getting plenty of biking time, not to mention hill-climbing practice. Besides, I’m getting the picture: if I don’t build in a day off every week, I’ll be burned out before the end of the month.

MikeK asked me a while ago how my garden was doing. “Shit. Crap. Ugh,” is about what I said. I’d gambled on a moderate-to-good year this year in my garden planning, and did I ever lose.

And don’t get me started on the wacked-out C-to-N ratio of that compost I had delivered from Cedar Grove. It might not matter so much if our native dirt weren’t basically sand with rocks in. Josh and I have started collecting grounds from a coffee shop up the hill, the Blue Saucer, to help fix the situation. (We’ll be testing the soil acidity next spring, if you’re wondering.) You should have seen the look the owner gave Josh the first time she saw him packing the bags of grounds onto his Xtracycle. Super extra bonus hippie points!

But even the best soil would have done only so much for us this year. Brrr. I knew it was bad, all right, but this shocking news brings it home to me: the Tilth Harvest Fair is tomorrow, and the Tilth Tomato Tasting is canceled this year. Not even the black-belt vegetable gardeners at Tilth could produce enough tomatoes in this weather.

Even with this lousy year and that lousy soil, though, I’m still getting some good tomatoes from the Beaverlodge plant. That one’s a keeper.

And by “the streets” I mean two and a half blocks. But hey. That’s streets.

I knew it’d probably be a strain today for Josh to get home in time to take a trip to the parking lot with me, and that served as encouragement for me to step it up some. Today for the first time I got on the bike without having him around as moral support. (It is much nicer to have him around cheering me on, let me tell you.) The parking lots were sure to be full, so I took a deep breath and decided to go all out and play in the street.

We live on a hill, and starting there seemed like asking for trouble. So I walked the bike up to a local flattish side street and halfway up to what I figured was about the crest of its tiny hill. A car immediately passed me, which seemed like a bad, bad omen. But I hopped on the bike all the same and… nothing. I can’t convey the feeling of how weird it was when it did not go. I checked the gear: yeah, first gear, okay. I tried again. No go. Apparently I’d learned to start, sure, but only when starting downhill. Or maybe I’d just lost my touch. It brought home to me that, oh boy, I really did not know what the hell I was doing. I was on the tiniest little upward slope, and it seemed ridiculous that that was the problem, but okay, I walked the bike forward twenty feet and started again. This time it went, and I went with it, feeling significantly less confident than I’d hoped to be feeling. It didn’t help that the bike was making strange and horrible noises. (I think I have to fiddle with the front fender.)

Josh enlightened me later. “Yeah, the gearing on that bike is really meant for use with the motor on. It really doesn’t have a low enough gear. You could get it started going uphill if you were ok with standing and mashing on the pedals. But sitting down? Difficult.”

I came to the sharp right turn I’d intended to take and my confidence entirely fizzled out. I could just about hear it, over the fender noise, going flat. At the last moment I took a gentler curve instead and wound up going down a side street that I’d never been on before in more than five years of living here. It was a bit steep, and I rode the brakes down, my eyes bugging out. Then a right turn to another block and I was done. My knees felt too shaky to bike the last half-block uphill to our house.

I’d thought I’d bike around and around my little circuit, but it was time to sit down. There’s no point freaking out my subconscious.

In some ways this time is the hardest part, and in some ways I suspect it’s the easiest. I hit a lot of milestones every day. Later I’ll want to learn to do them well, which is less easy to quantify. Plus there are some things coming up that really seem intimidating to me. Signaling, for one. I can just bring myself to unclench my fingers from the handlebars enough to brake; actually removing a hand from the bar and holding it well away? Whoa.

This seems to be the day, though, to be one of the universe’s designated brave people, in a very mild way. After my .2-mile road trip, I figured I’d earned a latte, a big one. When I came into my local coffee shop, the owner and barista were freaking out over an enormous wasp that was buzzing inside at a window. Who can blame them? It was the size of my thumb and probably weighed five pounds. They had a cup to put over it, and some paper to put under the cup, but they couldn’t bring themselves to get close enough to do the job. So I volunteered. (Though I did ask for some stiffer paper, because I did not like the thought of having nothing but a sheet of office paper between my hand and an enormous angry wasp.) Then on the way home I helped a nervous kid cross Lake City Way.

I’d probably have done these things anyway — well, possibly not the thing with the five-pound wasp. But learning to ride a bike as an adult is doing a number on my head. For just a few hours after facing the bike, I’m a little bit braver, a little more open, and a little bit more compassionate with people who are afraid. Only a little, but it’ll do.

It only became electric when I accidentally turned on the motor before starting. That was unnerving.

Josh and I went down a few minutes earlier than usual to the parking lot today, which is when I found out that early is not so great. The lot was about half full of cars and there was more activity than I was comfortable with. I really didn’t want to be biking around while people were pulling out of parking spaces. So, after some harrumphing, I suggested that we go down the block to the playground, where I thought I remembered a smallish circuit of pavement that I could use. Unfortunately, there’d been some wooden bollards put in since the last time I’d been that way, and when I came to a certain sharpish right turn, I didn’t have confidence that I could take it without running into a post. So instead I headed into territory that I hadn’t scouted and wound up riding widdershins around the empty wading pool for a while, congratulating myself on turning left.

The park was packed with kids. Wow, there’s nothing like learning to ride a bike to make a bunch of cute little children seem like a writhing, screeching, unpredictable, pestilential mass of fleshy obstacles. It was very distracting, which was useful practice.

After a while, we wandered back to the parking lot, which had mostly cleared, and I rode around that a few times. This time I turned left downhill into blinding sunlight. Once I had the opportunity to handle an oncoming minivan, and I did fine — it probably didn’t hurt that I was gritting my teeth and grimacing maniacally, which seemed to put him off a bit, judging by his shocked pallor. Overall, I think I’ve roughly doubled my biking time from yesterday, and quadrupled it from Day 1. Pretty soon I’ll need a bigger course.

I’m getting better at picking a line and keeping to it, though I’m still having a hard time doing that in turns. Starting is coming along really well — I had been sort of shimmying and skooching awkwardly onto the seat before starting off, and now I can push off and get onto the seat in one motion. (This does, of course, feel like taking my life in my hands.) Stopping, well… stopping I’m not so good at yet. Sometimes I make a beautiful smooth stop and elegantly put a foot down; sometimes I brake too quickly and fall forward off the seat. (Thank you, generous standover clearance.) I should take some time to just start and stop and start and stop until I get the bugs worked out of that.

I managed to retain a less frantic heartrate today, which left me much less adrenaline-addled. Also, I made a number of interesting new and different noises of dismay, including an involuntary “YARRRR!” that Desolina would probably recognize from back in the day.

Thanks very much to the folks who’ve cheered me on! Oh, and Naomi — those Electra Townies sure do look sweet. I was looking one over at Gregg’s a few weeks ago and hefting it to see if I could lift it onto a bus rack. (Sure, no problem.) Another bike that Josh has suggested is the Breezer Villager with a U frame — isn’t it pretty? And hey, next to an Oma it almost seems inexpensive. Almost.

Another day, another half-dozen turns around the parking lot, and then a half-dozen more. I’m getting better. In fact, I was getting so much better that I thought I would try relaxing, at which point the bike suddenly wobbled mightily and I let out my first terrified yelp of the evening. Okay — don’t be that relaxed. Check.

Josh convinced me to put my fingers on the brakes as I went around, which caused the real yelping of the day. I starting gripping the bars with my thumb as hard as I could, until my hands went a little numb, which of course made me grip harder because oh my god I can’t feel the bar. Eventually I compromised by keeping my pinkies on the bars, which gave me enough extra proprioception that I could relax while still having immediate control of the brakes.

Everybody knows that when you turn, you shift your weight. What I didn’t realize until late today is that the motion of turning the handlebars works better if I initiate it from the waist. Shifting weight and turning bars became the same motion, and the entire system became much less twitchy. That’s especially good because it’s a fairly twitchy bike to begin with — not the ideal situation.

Tomorrow I will try turning left around the parking lot. (And the crowd goes wild!)

Josh was talking last night as if the basic issues are technical. “Maybe we should put you on a coaster bike on grass,” he said. “Maybe we should try taking the pedals off.” Actually, I think he just wants to experiment on me. I can relate to that. But the fact is, technically I’m having no catastrophes, which is what passes for doing well at this point. The problem isn’t technical. The problem is dread.

Dread settles over me like a personal weather system. I am enveloped in a black fog. It’s almost literal — that first day, tunnel vision gnawed away at the edges of my visual range. I didn’t really notice it at the time, being so busy ensuring that I was not killed and eaten by grates, curbs, or small surface irregularities. But in my mind’s eye, when I call up what I saw then, all I can remember is a round hole in the dimness into which I rode while my brain chanted, “Okay, we’ll make it to there. Okay, we’ll make it to there.” There was perhaps twenty feet away. Further than that, I wasn’t counting on making it.

Today, the fog was a lot lighter. Tomorrow, it should be lighter still. Hell, today I rode over a grate, twice.

My job is now is partly about gaining muscle memory and all that jazz, but mostly about managing fear. I believe that keeping it in very short, frequent, consistent chunks is the key.

I’ve done it before and I’ve seen how it works: if I get macho or defensive and start going too aggressively into the fear, I overload myself with adrenaline and re-inscribe the fear into myself, and then I’m really screwed. No kidding — ask your local animal behaviorist. This, by the way, is why I raise an eyebrow at people who believe that fear is something to be ashamed of. In my experience, it seems like they never do anything — but of course they start things all the time, or say they’re starting things, or mean to start things. It’s just that they run themselves into the ground because they’re too stupid or bullheaded to treat their fears gently enough to be effective. And then, odds are, they try to drag you down with them by trying to inflict their shame on you, too. I say, if you value living in a way that gets your ass off the couch, these are not the people who are good for you.

So, yes. Being an aggressive idiot is not so great. On the other hand, if I’m lazy or inconsistent, I may not lose ground the way I do if I’m macho, but I’m still not getting much of anywhere. I think this is what went wrong in 2006; I tried to balance learning to ride with three or four other physical practices, which meant that I was riding about once a week. That isn’t enough. It has to be every day.

There’s a rule of thumb about making friends: try pinging them seven times. (You know what I mean by “ping”, right? Make a personal contact on your own initiative; show some casual interest in them; drop them a line and say hello; that kind of thing.) The idea is that if an event happens again and again, it’s at about the seventh time that the brain stops counting and starts filing those events under “stuff that happens a lot.” Familiarity happens. It’s as if the brain’s counting, “Weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird… okay.”

How scientific this is, I don’t know. It sounds to me like pop science that has been spun into urban legend. But it’s a handy rule of thumb that probably isn’t ridiculously far off — after seven contacts, either the friendship is beginning to happen or it isn’t. If it is, then great; and if there’s no reciprocation after seven contacts, I figure I’ve done enough to give up in good conscience. (In fact, I figure that I’d better.)

I’m trying to make friends with the bike. And as much as gaining understanding, skills, and muscle memory are useful, this week I think it’s mostly just about going “ping” once a day. The Rule of Seven reminds me not to pass judgment on the emotional experience just yet. Everything might be different in a week or so. As weird as it seems now, unfamiliarity has a surprisingly short halflife.

I never really learned to ride a bike, you know. When I was a little kid, I won one in a contest from Jolly Time Ice Cream. It was a sparkly powder-blue machine that I picked up at Gregg’s. But I lived on Capitol Hill, which wasn’t exactly learn-to-ride-a-bike territory, and I was allowed only to ride it in circles in the neighbor’s driveway. (Thank you, Mrs. Hedeen, wherever you are.) So my bikeriding experience is pretty much limited to knowing that the feet go on top of the pedals.

Back in 2006, I took a little stab at learning to ride a bike by myself, using Josh’s old electric. But I went out only three times. The summer got away from me — I was doing some hardcore gardening that year — and I became more interested in our new tandem; then, when fall came, some heavy family drama distracted me. (In retrospect, I wish I’d spent less time worrying about other people’s opinions and more time riding a bike. I suspect I can file that under Important Life Lessons.) And then in the spring of 2007, I sprained my hip in yoga. I really nailed it. I could hardly walk for a month; I hired gardeners because I couldn’t put enough weight through it to use a shovel, even six months later; and, above all, I wasn’t going to get back on that bike. The tandem was okay because it’s a step-through, and it wasn’t too long before I was able to carefully slide one foot over that low top tube. (It was perhaps less okay than I was letting on, but I had cabin fever. Can you blame me?) Anything higher than that? No way.

That hip is a continuing problem, but I have enough play in it now that I can get on the bike if I lean it waaaaaaaaay over. Getting off the bike presents more of a technical problem; the best I can do involves a lot of sideways hopping. Graceful! But I can sort of manage it, which is good enough for now. So today, back to the parking lot I went, back to the trusty old electric, with Josh for moral support.

Holy crap, that’s hard. I started at the top of a tiny little slope, hardly a grade at all, but I felt like I was peering down into the abyss. “Okay, now I let go of the brakes,” I told my hands, but they weren’t listening. There were cracks in the pavement which clearly wanted to eat one of my tires and kill me. Also a grate, which wanted to eat a tire and kill me. And a curb, which was going to call my tires to it, eat them, and kill me. Cars were whizzing by not 200 feet from me, and probably one of them was going to come over and kill me. At some point I was going to have to turn a corner, which was probably going to kill me. However, if I didn’t let go of those brakes I was going to die of shame for sure, so with an effort I unclamped my fingers and off I went. Miraculously my left foot found its pedal. Impossibly I made the turn. Someone was shrieking in terror, but as long as that was just me, that was okay.

“Brake! Braaaaaaaake!” yelled Josh as I coasted to a stop. Right. Braking. We have to do that when we’re not on a tandem. I forgot.

It’s kind of tricky to learn a scary new thing when your heart rate isn’t supposed to get much over 140. I hopped my way sideways off the bike and sat down, practicing the emergency edition of my old biofeedback exercises, until my heart slowed to something more reasonable; then I tried it again. My leg seemed too heavy to lift a foot onto the pedals, mysteriously heavy the way a reluctant cat can make itself heavier than it should possibly be. But lift it I did and off I went again, and it was a little better. I was still shrieking in terror, but I could shriek words now: “Everything is fine! Everything is perfectly fine!” On Josh’s advice, I tried focusing out a little further from the bike, which seemed to help. Turning seemed to get even harder, though, until I was shouting at the bike, “Turn! Turn, you fucker, turn!”

We can’t have been out there for more than ten minutes, but that was plenty for the first day. Josh swears that I can learn to ride a bike in a month, no problem. If the weather holds even a little, we’ll find out.