This morning we got up early and hopped on our bikes for a ‘quick’ ride to Starbucks (which I now know is about a six-mile round trip). This time it was much less painful than the last time we attempted it – for one thing my butt isn’t the least bit sore, and neither are my legs. This improvement probably has something to do with the fact that we’ve gone for a few rides in the past week, and my out-of-shape body is starting to get used to this whole concept of exercise again.

The best part is that I’m actually enjoying riding. Like good little yuppy nerds, we got all the accessories – helments (I had to get a kid’s helmet. Apparently I have a small head. Go figure), odometers and bike lights. I should point out that an odometer is a marvelous little gadget for the exercise-reluctant. Instead of just getting onto the bike and huffing and puffing along without any clue how far or fast I’m going, this way I can watch those little numbers on the odometer. It’s a great incentive, actually. I can keep my eye on it and tell myself ‘only 2 miles til we get to go home. Only 1 mile now til I can go home’ and so on.

I’m not exactly up to Secra’s level, but it’s early yet. I figure in another week or so I might actually be able to do more than 5 miles at a stretch without gasping for breath (and this is at the oh-so-speedy pace of around 10 miles per hour. Yes, I admit it. I’m actually part turtle). In a month or so, assuming the weather holds, we might even attempt a trip down the back roads to the next town (probably about 20 miles away). I realize this is being extremely optimistic here, and that unless I manage to get just a tad speedier or this sort of thing will end up taking us all day, but I’m trying to think positive here.

Richard’s noted that we’ll need to get used to hills at some point before we cart our bikes off to Ireland. I admit that the thought of many hills fills me with a bit of trepidation. It’s not the hills themselves that’s the problem however. It’s the fact that in order to tackle hills, I’m going to have to finally figure out how to handle changing gears on a regular basis.

I’ve never really had to learn how to do the gear-changing thing. I tried a few times, but it was never successful, and I had too many instances of bike chains coming off the track as a result. The most exciting of those was back in college when I felt the chain come off and looked down for just a moment. Unfortunately, while doing so, I managed to drift off course just enough so that when I looked back up again, it was to see the parked car that I then rather rapidly got up close and personal with. I was going fast enough to not only hit it with enough force to shove the front fork of my bike back so far that the front wheel would no longer go straight; I also managed to split open my chin. It was actually rather amusing, in an odd – gee, I think I may be in shock – sort of way. I didn’t even know I’d hurt myself until some woman stopped her car and noted with no small amount of concern that I was bleeding all over myself (gotta love those head wounds). I was more concerned with the fact that I could no longer ride in a straight line (due to the aforementioned front fork issue) and I wasn’t sure how I was going to ride the rest of the way home. Luckily, she was nice enough to give me and my bike a ride home, where I slapped a band-aid onto my chin until my boyfriend came over later, took one look at me, and promptly dragged me off to the hospital for stitches. Later, I had to fill out insurance paperwork for my emergency room trip, and they couldn’t seem to grasp that I had been the one to hit the car, not the other way around. And then there was the fun of taking my bike in to get repaired and having the guy at the shop break down in laughter when I explained what had happened.

So we’ll see how I do. For now I’m sticking to flat surfaces, where the only uphill climb is going over the railroad tracks. I need to build up my stamina before I try the complicated stuff.

If Project – March: If you were to think of life as a competition, how would you rate your performance? What criteria measure your success?

If we are to consider life a competition, we must accept the reality that it is a competition without any other teams involved. It’s a race of one; a solo player standing on a big field surrounded by a few million other people who are locked steadfastly into their own solitary races – the outcomes of which have absolutely no bearing on the outcome of mine.

If life is a competition, the only judge that counts is myself. I’m the one I have to answer to for anything and everything I do. There are rules put in place by a society but it is my own guilt and regret that I have to answer for if I break those rules – or rules of my own making.

Life is a gift. I do not believe in a single supreme being; instead I believe that this life is merely a gift from the chaos of the universe as a whole – a chance to accomplish something. It is a gift equal to that given to every other living thing – human or otherwise – no more, no less. And it is up to me to figure out what I am supposed to accomplish, and how much further I’m capable of going if only I let myself stretch to reach it.

I am reminded of an episode of Red Dwarf, where the crew meets up with a rogue robot from the future who goes through time deleting souls he deems unworthy. As each person stands face to face to receive their judgment, they are faced with only themselves and asked one thing. Did they live their life to the best of their abilities?

I’m not sure how I would answer that question. I’m not sure I’ll ever know. I am brave in some ways, and timid in others. I am ready and willing to dive headfirst into situations, only to turn around and back away from others that may be equally as difficult, or even easier to handle. Life is meant to be lived, not endured. Life is not infinite – at least not life in one single form. How sad it would be to spend my life wasting time, or coming up with excuses for why I couldn’t do or try or be, because I was afraid of failure or simply too lazy or unwilling to make the effort?

I may not always be doing everything I can to make this life of mine everything it should be. But I am happy in my own skin, and that in itself is a victory. I like myself for who I am. I accept my faults (even the ones I wish I could just ignore). I push myself to test those boundaries and continually ask myself whether the boundaries are legitimate, or simply self-imposed. I take the opportunities to laugh and to explore, when I remember that they are out there and waiting for me. I jump into things to embrace them when I can force the practical side of my nature to let go and have faith.

And so, in all of this, I consider that my life, so far, is a success. Granted there is room for improvement, and there always will be, but as long as I allow myself to be challenged, to try new things, to meet other people face to face and accept them for who they are, and to never ‘settle’, I will continue to keep that grade high.

A few months ago we bought a set of eight dragons. They’re all no larger than perhaps seven inches tall, and so far they’ve lined the window sills in the breakfast nook, lending a little bit of bright color to the otherwise still undecorated room. They’re very cool dragons, and if the company ever makes more, we’ll be adding to our collection.

But the point of the dragons is that they are stuffed dragons, and as such, one might expect them to be fairly immobile. Occasionally some cat decides that there’s only room on the sill for one fuzzy creature, and so down the dragons go, but they flop directly to the floor and stay there.

This has recently changed. One small red dragon, with crooked felt teeth and tiny plush wings, has made it upstairs. Richard found it in the bathroom yesterday, just sitting there, playing dumb. I think he must have taken it by surprise – perhaps it wasn’t expecting to be caught so far from its window ledge.

There are suspicious tooth holes in the back of the little stuffed toy, but none of the cats can offer any information. They claim it’s because they’re too busy following all their toys upstairs and down. For example, several super balls have somehow migrated upstairs lately, and seem to prefer it there, no matter how many times Richard might search them out and toss them back to the first floor, where they can be pounced and chased in the middle of the night without waking us up (remind me again why I thought a carpet-free house was a good idea?).

Add to this the fact that the guest room door has been standing ajar the past two mornings when I got up (it doesn’t latch – a situation we will have the contractor remedy when he comes for the one-year walkthrough), and the door to my antique sewing machine cabinet was also open, the contents strewn across the floor. There were small shapes darting madly away out of the room and melting into the shadows in the hall when I went to investigate, but by the time I turned on the light, the room was empty, save for the furniture and the teddy bears that line the window seat.

It must be poltergeists. The cats are all innocent – I’ve asked them and they alternately flopped, purred, or otherwise performed their most adorable acts of cuteness to convince me they knew nothing of this situation. So if it isn’t the cats, then how else do we explain everything that’s been happening? Stuffed animals that move. Small rubber balls that defy gravity and jump up the stairs. And now doors that open by themselves and shadows in the corners that disappear when I try to see what they are.

We put a bookshelf in front of the self-opening door so it can’t swing in anymore. And tonight I’m going to move the little red dragon back down to its windowsill where it belongs, with warnings to stay put. Tomorrow morning, we’ll see if it paid attention. I’m not holding my breath though. Despite Richard’s best efforts the bat continues to travel on a regular basis. What’s to stop a small red plush dragon from joining in? After all, they both have wings.

Random Acts of Journaling – March:

“I understand lightning. I am not afraid of the rumble, gentle as an empty stomach but powerful enough to shake the ground beneath my feet. I’m not afraid when the sky opens up and blinds my eyes with rain. And when its cold fingers reach down, looking for someone to touch, I barely shudder anymore. I have an agreement with the sky. An understanding.” (T. Greenwood, Nearer than Sky, p. 1)

I am not afraid of storms. I am not afraid of the rain and the thunder and the lightning. I love the sounds of winter – the percussion of a storm on roof and windows, the delicate music of a gentle spring rain. Thunder startles me, but does not frighten me. I hear the deep rumbles in the sky and peer out the windows to see if I might catch a glimpse of what the sound heralds. The appearance of storm clouds in the sky does not fill me with any foreboding; they merely provide a unique texture to the landscape of the world up in the sky – the world created of cloud mountains and sunset-filled clear spaces that reflect like a body of water, calm as the evening.

I watch for lightning in the skies when storms come. Usually they are simply flashes of light, as if someone has tugged at the curtains to let the sun into a darkened room, before pulling them just as quickly and abruptly back into place, but once, just once, I saw lightning the way it is always portrayed in films; the jagged streak across the sky. I was in college, and a small handful of us came outside, drawn by the magnificent display. We stood in the rain, uncaring that we were getting soaked, arms wrapped tightly around our own chests in an effort to stay warm, watching the storm. Instantaneously, we all as one reverted to childhood, laughing aloud with delight at the sight above us. We craned our necks back, calling over the noise of wind and rain to each other. Did you see that one? Look, there’s another! Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?

I’m not sure when I stopped letting myself take part in storms as I once did when I was younger. I’m not sure when I stopped taking the time to go outside and stomp in puddles, with or without a raincoat, with or without the hood pulled over my head as if somehow that could keep me from becoming drenched as I tilted my head back with eyes closed to feel the water pour down on my face. I do not know when I last stopped what I was doing to go outside and watch the lightning in the sky. There have been too many obligations; too many reasons why I could not get so wet – reasons why it is not considered acceptable for adults to come in dripping wet and laughing like small children.

I am not afraid of storms. They bring a smell to the air when they are done that cannot be replicated – a smell of new earth and growing things, of calm serenity and crystal clarity. One can only be afraid of storms if one does not let oneself become part of them, embracing the sound and the flashes and the bluster. When I stand outside in the wind and rain, arms outstretched and head back, there is no fear. I am flying. I am completely free.

In all my life I can honestly say that I rarely, if ever, have food cravings. I’ve never been one of those people who just *had* to have chocolate, or cookies, or any other food that people regularly crave. Granted I get hungry, and more often then not I eat because I’m bored or feeling nibbly, but there’s never really been all that much of a craving going on. Because of this I’ve never been able to identify with those diet tips on how to handle cravings. I may want chocolate, but it won’t drive me crazy if I don’t have it.

Today, however, I have been craving Frito’s. It’s a bit unusual for me, considering that I was never the salt-fiend. That title was usually reserved for my college roommate, who regularly craved potato chips. This phase gradually shifted into a peanut butter cup phase, and I don’t remember what came after that, but through it all, she always preferred the salty snacks to the sweet ones. I, however, preferred the sweet. I’ve always been picky about cookies and candy bars, but give me a half-gallon of ice cream and a spoon and I’m a happy girl. Toss in a small box of the darkest chocolate you can find and I’m in sheer indulgent heaven.

But back to today, and my Frito obsession. I think this stems from the fact that one of the players in Friday night’s Call of Cthulu game brought a bag of Frito’s, and I rather unwisely nibbled on a few. It was, apparently, a bad thing to do. Ever since, I’ve been thinking about Frito’s, and today was just horrible.

I know it’s not the Frito’s, specifically. There are certain foods that must be eaten salty, or not eaten at all. Frito’s are one of them – they come naturally salted. Tortilla chips, popcorn, and french fries are the others. I strongly disapprove of the whole unsalted french fry movement that hit the fast food restaurants a few years back. I mean, come on people, if someone is that worried about their blood pressure, what the heck are they doing sucking down a Big Mac and jumbo fries? The grease quotient will kill them long before the salt intake will. And as for tortilla chips, let’s just say I’ve been known to take my chips and salt them individually at Mexican restaurants before eating them in slow nibbles so as to savor every bit of that crispy salty goodness.

My Frito craving was not helped by the fact that I knew that in the Food Cube just a short distance away from my desk were piles of those little lunch-pail bags of Fritos and all sorts of other salty munchables. I even went so far as to go look at a bag and calculate out the points.

Richard, heeding my plight (and my incessant whining via instant messenger), graciously brought home a box of light microwave popcorn (our air popper broke, darn it) when he went to get groceries this afternoon. It may not be Frito’s, but I have a saltshaker and a bottle of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray. It’s not Frito’s, but it’s all I’ve got, so it’ll have to do.

Friday night, a horde descended on our house, armed with character sheets, pencils, books, and dice so that EvilPheemy could finally run the first part of his Call of Cthulu game. For the first time in my (albeit short and sporadic) role-playing career, I’m playing a male character, mainly because with a game set in the 1920’s, choices for female characters were fairly limited. And it’s an interesting stretch for the brain – not just for me for some of the others as well, trying to put aside our up-to-date notions of how to perceive things and try to look at things from the perspective of that era. And this is all with action that – so far – has been nothing more out of the ordinary than a trip to an orphanage. It will be somewhat of a relief when the gruesome monsters finally do appear in this game, simply because that particular action will defy even 1920’s perceptions. I know how to play characters facing hideous otherworldly creatures. I’m just having a little difficulty playing a male doctor in the days before women were actually considered equals.

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I finally sat down this weekend and started going through the wedding album, using little blobs of rubber cement to attach copies of the invitation, announcements, etc. to pages. And then I decided to tackle the wedding pictures, getting them in order so as to start putting them into the album. I might feel like a big lazy slacker for taking seven months to get to it, except that I know at least one person who has been married for four years and hasn’t gotten around to sorting out her wedding album either, so by that comparison I’m a little organizational speed demon.

I carefully trimmed the pages of our ceremony and arranged them in the album. I remembered staying up late one night, looking for ceremony ideas online, not happy with the more religious versions that had been offered us and wanting to find things that would have more meaning to the two of us. I burst into the bedroom, a sheaf of papers clutched in my hands, and babbled excitedly at poor half-asleep Richard, circling the parts of each relevant ceremony that I thought we could do. He humored me a lot during the wedding preparation phase. Heh.

You have to love the weather around here. One week insanely cold; the next week warm enough to make everyone wish fervently they could go outside, and then just as quickly to what we’re dealing with right now. Wind. We get wind in this area of California. It’s not your mild delta breeze – no, this is, as the highway alert sign so blithely put it this morning – high, gusty wind. It’s the kind of wind where you find yourself exceedingly thankful that you are not driving a teeny tiny economy car as you pass over the causeway; the kind of wind where you don’t want to get on the wrong side of a semi because the driver’s having a hard time fighting the wind and staying in his own lane; the type of wind where it would not surprise you in the least to see smaller farm animals tumbling through the air overhead, bleating or squawking in indignation.

It is also the type of wind where I am torn between wanting to immediately go home and wash every single blanket or towel in the house just so I can hang it outside to dry and accumulate that marvelous smell of sun, and realization that if I hang anything at all it had better be large and heavy because the neighbors probably would not see the humor in finding my unmentionables scattered all over their roof.

Today I finished the project I’ve been working on intently for the past few weeks, and I find myself suddenly at a loss. There are other things I should resume work on, but I’m not sure my brain is capable of doing such an abrupt switch, on a Friday when there are only a few hours left before everyone can begin to slip quietly away in the hopes that no one will notice they’re leaving a bit earlier than normal. So in the meantime I’m re-reading through some old documents, refamiliarizing myself with the rest of my job that was hastily abandoned weeks ago when they said ‘ohmygodweneedthisdoneassoonaspossiblecanyoudoit?’ tossed me a system with the charming quirk of requiring me to reboot the application upwards of ten times a day (such that my motto quickly became Save Often Or You Will Regret It), and off we went. Admittedly it’s been fun and now I have a far more in-depth understanding of the code behind the software (far more in-depth, perhaps, than I ever wanted to be, but I digress).

We’ve got a mostly quiet weekend planned – a maintenance check for some of the larger appliances, and then me either trying to find new and inventive excuses to procrastinate yet another week, or actually getting started on the next batch of curtains to be sewn. There’s a Call of Cthulu game tonight, I’m the pianist for the service and I’m also singing in a trio Sunday morning, and a group of people are coming for dinner Sunday night.

Oh, and laundry to do, outside wrestling with hair in my face and clothespins that want to spiral out of my grasp, and wet and clammy twists of freshly laundered linens. Oh yeah. This is going to be fun.

I would like to know why it is that when, for the past 30 or so years of my life I have never had a working thirst mechanism (and let me point out here that dehydration headaches are just sooo much fun), now that I am making a concerted effort to drink the Weight Watchers minimum requirement of water per day (that would be 48 ounces, by the way), now I’m suddenly thirsty ALL THE TIME?

I hate water. Just in case you didn’t remember it from my last whiny little rant, I really hate water. And I hate being thirsty. And I especially hate having to go to the bathroom every time I blink because I’m forcing myself to drink all this water.

Yeah, yeah, better health, good for me, blah blah blah. Stupid mutter mutter “new lifestyle”. Hmph.

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Just wanted to thank those of you who responded with positive comments about my ideas for painting the breakfast nook. Although apparently I don’t get to claim it as an original idea, I am feeling a teensy bit less inept because people actually thought it sounded cool. So one of these months we’ll toddle off to the local hardware store and find just the right shades of brown and green, and slap a few trees onto our walls. Because, see, now we’re pondering painting foliage into the peaked roof of the master bedroom bay window. You see what happens when you encourage me?

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Oh, and speaking of paint and bedroom bay windows, the shelves are finally done. My dad came over Saturday and he and Richard did manly-man things with saws and nail guns while I stood around and occasionally handed someone a tool. This was perfectly fine by me because I think they were having way more fun than I would have, were it me. And then Monday Richard reached his limit of tolerance for having all the books piled in front of his armoire, and so he did all the touchup painting during the day and then put all the books on the shelves.

It looks so cool. We keep going in and admiring it. I’m disgustingly proud of it and I really didn’t do all that much (well, okay, I did the majority of the painting, but the building part was a tad more critical). There is plenty of room left for lots more books, although eventually we’ll need to make ourselves at least one more shelf. But hey, now that we know what we’re doing (quit snickering), that should be a piece of cake.

You can see our lovely handiwork here. I made those curtains (yes, more back-patting, what can I say), and that’s Sebastian, lurking behind one of the chairs. He adores the ottoman – hence the reason why it is perpetually covered with a fine coating of white fur. The cats are a bit miffed that the shelves aren’t quite wide enough for them to leap on, but they’re retaliating by having a fine hairball hacking festival everywhere, so it all evens out in the long run.

If Project – February: If asked to do something that you would otherwise find morally repugnant, what would it take to convince you to do it? What’s your price?

There are a lot of things I currently won’t do. Right now, it’s fairly safe to assume that I will never go hang gliding, parasailing, or leap from anything high attached only by a bungee cord. Chances are pretty good that I’m never going to pose nude for a public forum, dance naked in the streets during rush hour, or sell my body to the highest bidder. One can also be reasonably assured that I will never eat anything that is still alive when it enters my mouth, anything made primarily from a bodily fluid that is not milk,or anything that has obviously gone rancid/moldy/bad. The last bit is simply common sense; the rest because while I may be brave enough to try some things, there are limits to how adventurous (or stupid!) I’m willing to be.

This is the current assumption. But what if there were conditions attached? If someone was willing to give me enough money so that I could retire from working and spend the rest of my days wallowing in glorious and wealthy sloth, well, let’s talk. For that I’d be willing to go a bit further outside my comfort zone, but even that much money couldn’t persuade me to do certain things – hurting someone physically, or doing something that would embarrass or injure (physically or mentally) those I care about. No amount of money is worth that.

Money, however, isn’t the only bargaining chip, and here’s where my firm resolve begins to waver. If someone were to hold the life of someone I cared deeply about, and base it on whether I would do something that might otherwise be morally or physically repulsive, I’m not honestly sure how I’d respond. Would I let them do something to me physically to save someone I loved? Without a doubt. Would I agree to harm someone else in order to protect someone? I don’t know. Oh, granted, if I were to walk in on someone committing some horrible atrocity to someone, I’d find a way to stop them, and if their victim happened to be a family member, I’d probably be just the slightest bit more physical about not only stopping them, but making sure they weren’t going to be able to do that sort of thing to anyone else for a very long time. But that’s in the heat of the moment. It’s not the same as being given time to think – being given not only a choice, but the ability to fully accept the consequences of whichever choice I would have to make.

How far would I go for money? That’s an easy question to answer. How far would I go for a life?

I don’t ever want to know.

The problem with having your own house is that it is yours. It’s this great big blank canvas, sitting there waiting for you to put your personal touches on it, and the world, quite frankly, is your oyster. If you have the bucks, the time, and the talent, you can turn it into anything at all.

So here we are, with this lovely house, all sparkly white inside and just bursting with possibilities. And I really do want to try to do *something* with some of the rooms beyond whipping up curtains (well, okay, perhaps ‘whipping up’ isn’t quite the term, considering how long it takes me to go from fabric to completed curtain). In my mind, I envision soft pastels, or bold dark colors that make some sort of statement. The problem is, I don’t quite know what that statement should be. I’m incapable of looking at a paint swatch (or fabric swatch for that matter) and imagining the whole room in that particular shade. I have this really cool idea for the breakfast nook, for example, that involves painting a tree trunk up the wall in one corner and then stenciling in branches and leaves, but I’m not sure if it would end up looking really cool, or just really lame.

It’s a little bit easier when we’re talking about the back yard. It’s a big enough area that it’s easier to give a vague wave of the hand to one side and designate it as future vegetable plots, to consider flagstone courtyards with stone benches and arbors, and picture expanded decks, gazebos, and ponds with fountains and stone dragons lurking beneath the water. Back yards are much more flexible than houses. You can do all sots of things to yards if they are big enough, and they hide more flaws (and if that’s not really true, I don’t want to hear it. Leave me my delusions, darn it).

The problem with me and houses, however, is that while I may have plenty of ideas, the artistic talent simply isn’t there. I promised Richard when we got married that I would never ask him “Does this outfit make me look fat?”, but I did warn him to be prepared to be asked on occasion to view my outfit and answer the question “Do these match?” I can sew, but only when given a pattern with explicit instructions. I can paint, but only if it’s a very large surface (such as a wall, or perhaps the back of a set of bookshelves) and it’s all one color. My ability to coordinate and contrast hues is pretty much non-existent, and to put it bluntly, if your life at any point depended on me being able to successfully draw (sculpt/paint/mold/whatever) anything more complicated than a stick figure, well…let’s just hope you already wrote out your last will and testament. In other words, when they were handing out the artistic genes, I was apparently dawdling outside the door, petting stray cats.

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And speaking of cats, our well-behaved (ha!) little horde has come up with a wonderful new game lately. Richard goes through and tries to find all the noisy toys and toss them downstairs before he goes to bed. The cats dutifully cart at least one back upstairs, to be batted around the bedroom floor in the wee hours of the morning. Richard then gets up (in the aforementioned wee hours), muttering Unkind Words about the cavorting felines, scrounges around in the dark to find the toy, and tosses it back downstairs. This morning, after another rousing rendition of Make the Sleepy Human Swear, the toy he’d tossed down the stairs was placed prominently in his slipper. I think he’s being warned.