Nobody Knows Anything

I have a new running record: 20 miles! Woot! Go me!

Mind you, it was only supposed to be 29 kilometers (18 miles). But you know me: gotta overachieve.

Rob and I ran the Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Run yesterday. I was somewhat nervous about this, down to having a race anxiety dream the night before. I told Rob when we got there: “I’m kinda scared.” Last week, when we did a 13 mile run at Waddell Creek I couldn’t finish it running because of my hip, and here I was trying for 29k? Was I completely insane?

The short answer was, Yes, I pretty much was, but I managed to finish it. Not well, mind you, or particularly fast, but I managed to run 20 miles up and down hills and I finished it standing.

You could do one of 5 courses: the 10km (from the starting area to Route 9), the 21km (from the starting area to the Aid Station and back again), the 29km (from the start to the Aid Station, then back up the hill to a separate side loop, back to the Aid Station, and then back to the starting line), and the 50km (the 29k + 21k courses).

Oh, and there was a stream to ford in the middle of it. That went up to my waist. And was really, really cold. It actually wasn’t too bad — one of those fun things to talk about! — except our shoes stayed squishy for a mile or so afterwards, which got kind of old.

The hardest part was the hill that started after the stream: straight up and down. It seemed to take forever to get to the Aid Station. Then we had to go back up the hill to the yellow ribbon that marked the beginning of the 8km extra loop. Rob said, “And the 50k’ers have to do this hill three times altogether.” The 50k’er behind us said, “Don’t remind me.”

It was a beautiful run, but I don’t think I’ll be doing again. For one thing, the incline was just too steep at too many points. I’m still having a hard time going up hills. For another thing, an equestrian event was held the day before our race. As you may or may not know, “equestrian” means “horse,” which means that the trail was covered in horse manure. Fresh horse manure.

It got to be a little much.

The funniest thing is the private joke I’ll be taking away from this race. As 50k’ers passed us, returning from finishing their 29km segment and heading out to do their 21km segment, Rob said to me, “It would take a gun to my head to get me to leave the starting area again.” This became “Gun to my head” and finally a shake of the head and “Bullet.”

When we finally finished (after our impromptu extra mile or so), I said to Rob, “It’s weird, but I don’t feel hungry.”

“Exercise suppresses appetite. In 45 minutes we’ll be knifing one another for food.”

We went to Emily’s Bakery again, because their sandwiches were so good last week. They were really good again this week. My sandwich was done first, and I sat down as Rob’s name was called. By the time he returned, I’d finished half of my sandwich already. “I’d still swear I’m not hungry,” I said, “but I can’t seem to stop eating this as fast as I can.”

Rob has said he wants to try a 50km at some point. I said, That’s completely nuts, but then I remembered: last year was my first trail run, 8km. This year, 29km. What’s to say I couldn’t add another 21km at some point?

I’ll have to get a lot better at hills though.

I’ve done much better with the No Reading thing than I thought I would. I have not been completely successful in avoiding reading. The toughest parts have been not reading blogs—under no circumstances am I opening NetNewsWires, no no no—and not reading before bed, because I always read before going to bed (and now I just lay awake, telling myself stories). On Monday we got our Entertainment Weekly and I read it cover to cover, which should have been my first clue that something odd was going on, because I have never read EW cover to cover. I mean, seriously: do I need to know that much about Michael Mann’s problems in making the big-screen version of Miami Vice*?

And I read some cookbooks last night while making dinner. I did find myself wanting to read other recipes as well—”Oooo, doesn’t that sound tasty?”

I have noticed a few things that are different. For example: I’ve been writing by hand to avoid the temptations and distractions I get from sitting at my computer too often (as I write this entry, the only applications that are open are MarsEdit and iTunes), and even though I haven’t written by hand for years and years, I’ve been writing quite a bit. In fact, the past two days, whilst the children have been splashing around in the blow-up pool in the backyard, I’ve been sitting in the kitchen a)watching them and b)writing. Know how many times I’ve managed to do writing when the kids are around? Two times: yesterday and the day before. Editing by hand is a pain, but I’ve kind of solved that by only writing on the right-hand side of the notebook, leaving the left-hand side open for any changes I want to make. I figure I’ll edit as I type it in anyhow.

My mood is noticeably more relaxed now that I don’t have the constant inflow of news and analysis that I usually check in on all day, every day. I still am jonesing to read Firedoglake, but clearly I can live without having access to my 350+ blog feeds. Maybe I should make a mini-list of feeds to check daily and keep the vast majority of the blogs for when I need something to read. Also, I bet at the end of the week my favorite blogs will have a nice backlog of stuff to read.

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I know one person reads my blog to find out how his brother is doing, so I will catch you up to date on my exercise regime, because that mentions the brother quite a bit.

On Saturday Rob, Nina, and I went for 13 mile run at possibly the only site in the Greater Bay Area we could have done such a thing without suffering heat stroke or sun poisoning: the Waddell Creek trail that goes from the Pacific Ocean to Berry Creek Falls and is pretty much shaded the whole way. While the rest of the Bay Area was “enjoying” 105F temperatures, we were in the high 70s as we chugged along. I’ve been having trouble with my piriformis muscle/IT band, so I had to walk the last two miles because my hip was hurting and all of us had forgotten to bring our drug of choice, ibuprofen. We then went for an excellent lunch at Emily’s Bakery and Rob and Nina picked up a few chocolates at Richard Donnelly Chocolates. Given that Rob had already arranged a fancy evening out for him and the missus for their 19th wedding anniversary (!!!), I thought it was damn decent of him to show up with a box of chocolates for her as well.

Nina got the alcoholic chocolates for her and her man. I don’t know if many places have single-malt scotch chocolates, but Nina says that not only are they better than they sound, they’re actually extremely tasty.

Rob and I also went running yesterday morning, starting at 6:30 to beat the heat. (We failed. And the Creek Trail was simply jam-packed with people also trying, and failing, to beat the heat.) We decided to take it easy, and both of us reported feeling fairly ragged—I was shocked when I glanced at my watch and it said my heart rate was 136, because I would have sworn it was in the high 160s. (Yes, I’ve become one of these people who has a pretty good idea of where her heart rate is, most of the time.)

The very last stretch to my house goes up a hill, and I always record the highest heart rate of any local run on this hill. Good way to end a run, eh? Usually Rob and Nina run to the top of the hill, stretch, cool down, and play a few games of dice in the time in takes me to get up the hill. And yesterday started out as no exception: my inner voice was saying, “I’m dying, I’m dying, I can’t do this.” I thought about saying that to Rob and imagined him replying, “Thanks for sharing.” Then I thought, I wouldn’t say that to him, why am I saying it to myself? So I decided to change the tape to: “I am running fast, I am having a great time.” And it certainly felt like I had more energy going up the hill. Rob and I arrived at the same time, for instance.

I asked Rob later whether he’d noticed a difference in my going up the hill, and he said: “I had to speed up to keep up with you.”

Now, admittedly, it’s not a huge hill or anything, but damn. That is high praise coming from Mr. “I’m just going to run ahead and meet you at the top.”

I gotta try this affirmation thing more often.

* Once, during our second or third experience of the interminable preview for Terrence Malick’s The New World, I leaned over to Darin and said, “I know this is an unfortunate choice of words, but do you ever feel like Hollywood is shoving Colin Farrell down our throats?” He cracked up and said yes. If I read one more goddamn story telling me that Colin Farrell is either the next Big Thing or the current Big Thing and I should love him, dammit, I’m going to start the Colin Farrell Boycott Society. I’m sure he’s a very nice guy and very talented, but gods, Hollywood, stop it already, would you? You can’t make us love him. Three and a half years ago, when I was the Sherman Oaks Gymboree with baby Simon you had a bunch of women in their mid-thirties making fun of Colin Farrell, and I don’t think his reputation has gotten any better.

No, not yet another political blog… this is about moi, your genteel hostess (almost wrote gentile hostess, and I am that too). I will be out of touch for the next week. Not posting, no mail, very little to no iChat (and that only to communicate with my running buds Rob and Nina).

I have been doing The Artist’s Way for the past couple of weeks—mainly by doing the morning pages, three pages written in longhand first thing in the morning, often while I’m still in bed and bleary-eyed and periodically falling asleep over the book. But I’m doing some of the exercises too, and the big one for Week 4 is: Reading Deprivation.

Total reading cold-turkey.

I am the sort of person who has a book in her hand as she walks to school to get her daughter. This is going to be…interesting.

I’ve already come to the conclusion that I have to schedule the reading of blogs and websites, because I’m spending too much damn time on it every day to no other purpose than filling me up with a lot of tsuris* that, frankly, I just don’t need. My brain doesn’t need to be stuffed with data 24/7.

We’ll see how this goes, at any rate. I’m already looking around for a notebook to do my fiction writing in this week, just to avoid putting hands on the keyboard.

* No, I’m Gentile. Honest.

They’re simple, they’re effective, and they’re from 1820.

The year 1820, that’s correct.

There’s nothing in there about eating only protein and fat and avoiding carbs though. Maybe that was in another letter.

(Via lifehack.org)

I myself have not seen Pirates of the Caribbean: Everybody’s Money Belongs to Us, but via the Kung Fu Monkey we get the Ninja of Ask A Ninja doing a hilarious review of such. I don’t think I’m ready for Ninjas of the Caribbean myself though.

“More Gore! Less Verbinski!”

Darin and I discussed where to go for Date Night. “I know, I know,” he said, “Pirates.”

“Actually, I’d rather see Who Killed the Electric Car?”

(Pause.) “Really? So would I.”

So we went. And when we walked out, Darin said, “I’m really beginning to hate cars.”

Who Killed the Electric Car? is the story of GM’s experiment with a car that ran on electricity, the EV-1. The people who made it, the people who drove it, and the people who regulated it in (and out) of existence. There are EV-1 fanatics, who begged and pleaded with GM to be allowed to keep their car, there are engineers who are working on making electric auto technology ever more fabulous, and there are the automotive/petroleum company spokesmen who simply ooze, well, slickness as they lie, and lie, and lie.

California, the largest market in the nation, passed a law saying a certain percentage of cars on California roads had to be zero emission by 2000. GM, which had developed an electric car, turned it into a consumer item, the EV-1. They were evidently hard to get, because GM didn’t want customers to have them: they wanted to fight the legislation instead. Eventually the California Air Resources Board (CARB) caved, seduced by the promise of hydrogen fuel cells, and GM (and the other auto makers, who’d jumped into the market) killed their electric cars. They didn’t just pull the leases and take the cars back, they crushed and shredded them, wanting to ensure that they never got out there again.

The film goes through a list of suspects in the murder—consumers, Big Auto, Big Oil, the consumers, CARB, hydrogen fuel cells (which, if you don’t already know, are a gigantic chimera that are going nowhere fast), batteries. And the answer is pretty much a Murder on the Orient Express solution (with the exception of one suspect, which hilariously gets a “Not Guilty”).

At the end there’s an upbeat, optimistic look at the future, with hybrids and plug-in hybrids that get 125 mpg and other technologies coming down the pike. Which, after the depressing movie we’d just watched, was a nice way to end it. (Not very realistic, of course: the answer to our problems is not more single-passenger vehicles, but a start at any rate.)

The bit from an old newsreel about how the discovery of new oil fields in Iraq will bring that nation so many good things was hilarious.

The movie overall is rougher than some other commercially released documentaries we’ve seen (such as An Inconvenient Truth) but it’s very entertaining and told me quite a few things I didn’t know, despite living in California. Definitely recommended.

I got rolling on my new Xtracycle last week.

I love my new bike.

It really is an SUB — it’s held everything that I’ve needed to load on it so far (a purse-backpack, a briefcase with my computer in it, four bags of groceries, and/or two kids), it handles just as well as the bike did beforehand, and it looks snazzy.

Today Sophia and I had a plan to bike to Stacks, a breakfast place in Campbell six miles away. She made it the first two miles, but then after a not-terrible spill wanted Darin to pick her up. I met up with Darin and the kids at the Campbell Farmers Market and then we had breakfast. After breakfast Simon wanted to go to the park near our house, so I said, “Okay, I’ll meet you there.” Sophia asked if she could come with me instead of in the car with Daddy.

Sure. Hop on. Put on your helmet. Hold on.

And off we went.

Despite the 90 degree heat, the sailing was fine down the Creek Trail to the park. I would say, “One, two, three,” and Sophia would sing out, “On your left!” to warn the unwary of our approach. Sophia says she much prefers riding on the bike to riding in the car. “You get fresh air, you can see people, you get wind in your face…”

A man who had his dog riding in a box strapped on the back of his bike stopped to ask me what kind of bike it was I had. “Oh, a Trek,” he said. “A Trek connected to an Xtracycle!” I told him, and then I gave him the song-and-dance about what it can carry (200 pounds) and how easy it is to get stuff (like a dog in a box) onto the rack.

I have taken the bike for food shopping a couple of times, always with Sophia, who now always wants to go along if a bike is involved. Strapping canvas bags into the Xtracycle’s Freeloader pockets is easy and fast, and the bike handles just fine with a full load.

As I get stronger with bike riding, I can see that I’m going to need my car less and less. I gotta remember the sunscreen next time though: I got baked today, and not in the fun “Oh, let’s drink some more tequila” type of way.

I bought a Peapod seat for Simon, but that hasn’t worked out so well — when he was in the seat, the bike’s handling got very difficult. He’s not thrilled with riding on the back without something to hang on to (other than the back of Mommy), so I’m installing a stoker stem and handlebars next week. Once those are on, I can see Simon happily sitting on back on the way to preschool.

Sophia has been an official two-wheeler since Tuesday—except she was riding the little toy bike she’s had since she was two (Darin calls it “the clown bike”), which didn’t exactly count. We kept encouraging her to try her “big” bike, the bike she got for her sixth birthday, but every time she got on it, she cried and said she was scared.

Yesterday she was riding on the clown bike and I once again idly asked, “Want to try your big bike?” “Okay!” she said, the way she has many, many times before. So I reluctantly dug it out of the shed (which is currently filled with varnish fumes, so being in there was unpleasant) and gave it to her. She walked it down to the street.

And took off.

She didn’t even need to start on the hill, which is how she got started on the clown bike. She just gave herself a push forward and started pedaling.

Now that she was using her big bike, she did not want to get off of it. After two hours I said she had to come in, because I was too tired to play traffic cop any more. (For a tiny street that could not serve as a thoroughfare by any remote stretch of the imagination, damn we get a lot of traffic.) She went out after dinner too.

First thing this morning she asked if she could bike after camp.

Now that she has her own wheels, we’re never going to see her again.

It’s not a good sign when Darin and I walk out of a theater rewriting the script.

I really wanted this to be good. I’ve wanted a fun popcorn movie that I could totally enjoy for a while, and I come away sorely disappointed all the time. That this film has gotten so many plaudits says more about the competition out there than about its own qualities, unfortunately.

This movie is ostensibly a sequel to Superman II, and it attempts to bash our heads in with that fact by quoting the original Superman. Repeatedly. Literally quoting them—Darin listed several lines that were straight out of that film (and, I guess, Superman II). And the story’s just not particularly interesting—Lex Luthor’s dastardly plan has to do with real estate… which is, of course, also right out of the first film.

To give you an idea of how weird this film is in terms of plot and characters, there’s a scene where Lois Lane, her cute little tot in tow, stumbles into Lex Luthor’s hideout. In the midst of Lois interviewing Lex about his secret plan, a Major Plot Revelation dawns on Lex about his captees. (If you haven’t figured out this particular plot element by this point in the movie, there’s no hope for you.) Imagine the hold over Superman this would give him! So what does Lex do?

He leaves Lois and company on the boat, ostensibly to drown. Not that he makes sure of that, mind you; he just assumes it. Or something.

Huh. Isn’t that in the List of Things an Evil Overlord Should Avoid Doing?

The movie is also hella along: they could have and should have trimmed at least a half hour from this flick. It has, as Darin put it, three endings.

Brandon Routh: never really appealed to me in all the pre-publicity, but he’s okay in this film. Also: cute.

Kevin Spacey: good in the few scenes he has, but he doesn’t really have all that much to do.

Kate Bosworth: oh, was she in this movie too? I didn’t think she was as bad as some reviewers have made out, but Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, I think not. (Of course, if Judy Miller can get one…)

There are definitely some good things in the movie—the sequence with the airplane and space shuttle is very exciting. (Although that’s our introduction to Lois, and it’s not a very mythic introduction.) But on the whole…I have no desire to see this flick again, and, not that I have the time or anything, but I really, really want a flick that I’d at least be tempted to see twice.