Tales From An Alternate Reality

We've barely crept out of the weather where I have to bike in the garage due to rain or wind, and now we're into the stage where excess heat gets added to the mix. :( By August, a 90- to 94-degree day will not stop me from going outside, but this time of year? I just can't do it.

I managed to get out yesterday (and hit another snake!), and I got out 3 days last week. The first two days went well, Friday not so much. I got a flat tire, and discovered that I could not change it myself! In fact, I had to get help from two different guys working together just to get tire irons under the beaded tire rim to get the inner tube off and replace it with a new one. /o\

This is bad. Everyone knows that Continental tires run tight, but this is on a whole other level. My current ride is a gravel bike that used to have 32c tires on it. I had the shop put on 28c tires a few months ago, because I don't go off-road at all and I'm using it like a road bike. BUT... I now remember that the reason I stopped using 25c tires and went to 26c on my previous road bike was because I couldn't get the 25s on and off without breaking the tire irons. The wheel rims should be the same circumference for ALL of these bikes--only the width should be different. But I wonder if Continental applies some different kind of logic, and shrinks the tire slightly with the decreased width?

I really like the 28s. I'm able to ride faster on them than the 32s. In fact, I had a ride this past month that averaged 16.9mph, and that's the fastest I've ridden in YEARS. Am I going to have to go back up to a larger tire size now? Or can I buy a wire-beaded 28 from a different vendor and see if that works?

AGAIN? Yesterday was 64^o, but winds were too gusty to ride outside. Every other day in the last 11 days has promised highs in the mid-upper 50s that instead becomes 48-53^o, which is too cold with the wind-chill you get from cycling.

I mean, I'm really enjoying Orphan Black, but I need Walking Dead levels of peril (every 5-10 minutes) to really make the time pass, and the show doesn't offer that.

But, in random GOOD news... Corey Booker got married to a lovely woman last week! I love Corey Booker—he's my presidential Dream Candidate. Probably not this upcoming election cycle, but someday, I hope?

We're nearing the end of this week's Idol poll, and I could really use your help with the votes. I'm in the middle of the poll here. All the authors' entries are linked there-- please read and vote for your favorites!

I mentioned in the last post that we seem to have finally (fingers crossed) settled into Fall weather here. That means it's also gnat season out on the bike path (ugh), and I honestly can't tell if that's because it may be getting a little damper and/or if it's the lower temperatures. I DO know that they go away when it's hotter, and also on cold days in the winter. Right now, I'm just glad I have my gnat mask to wear. What a difference that makes!

It also means it's getting darker earlier, which nobody likes. These last few years, I've started to wonder whether I'm finally getting Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), or if it's just that life circumstances have actually been sad? But right now, the future is looking brighter and I'm still feeling a little bit of the blues. Urk. That's the last thing I need! HalfshellHusband has that, and one person in a household is already too much.

Last year's New Year's Eve was probably the worst ever—our house had burned, we were staying in a hotel, and I'd spent hours in the house's toxic environment trying to remove everything valuable and portable before thieves got the chance. I was tired and disoriented, and I don't know if I was even aware it was New Year's Eve until it got late and fireworks started going off. None of it seemed real.

This year, I spent the evening with our meager supply of flashlights and a single Dollar Tree candle, listening to the storm raging outside our rental house and hoping the power wouldn't go out. Our house was lucky that night, but the experience provided a dry run for the following weekend (a week ago), which featured flickering lights, and ferocious winds screaming over the roof so loudly that I was Googling "inland hurricane" just as we lost power. I have only ever heard that kind of wind during hurricane scenes in movies and TV shows! Scary. We don't have any large trees near this rental house, though there are quite a few next to our actual house. I find myself thinking about these kinds of things more and more often, as weather all over the world grows more extreme.

The power was out for 10 hours overnight, which was not the worst time of day except that without the electric blanket, it was too cold to sleep. The rain and wind were especially brutal here around Sacramento, so losing power wasn't surprising. We had a 17-hour outage in 2021, also due to a storm, and that was a wake-up call. Our municipal power company is really good and conscientious, so prior to 2021, if we lost power it was usually restored within a few hours. The intensity and frequency of these winter storms has changed all that, and now we need to think about it more seriously.

My sister who lives near Portland goes through this every year, and they're still not prepared. But one thing they DO have, which HalfshellHusband wants to remove when we rebuild our own house, is a wood-burning fireplace. They spent a WEEK huddled around it during an outage a few years back, a total godsend since outside temps were near or below freezing. We will have a gas-fueled fireplace going forward, which I can't see ever being useful in troublesome conditions.

This is what life has come to now. People living in the mountains or other remote areas often have wood stoves for heat, which is exactly what you'd want during a prolonged outage. Without power, your furnace and space heaters (and even pellet stove) won't run, and your range and microwave won't work. Wood stoves help with both problems, which just... we imagine we're living in a modern age, and then Mother Nature smites us for our hubris. \o? :(

Our storms have dumped a LOT of rain on California, endlessly. By the time it (hopefully?) clears up for a few days, I will have biked outside ONE TIME in the last 4 weeks. Ugh. Biking on a track stand in the garage is better than nothing, but when it goes on this long, I lose a lot of conditioning. This is also true during long heat spells in the summer. But it means that I watched a lot of great streaming TV this year, all on Netflix:

( All the TV )

And there's so much more in my Netflix list to possibly try out during the upcoming months of continued garage-biking. Which I hope will not be a thing, but let's not kid ourselves. :O

We had a few days of reprieve before the next Doom Cycle begins. And by 'reprieve,' I mean 92-96^o days instead of 99^o-plus.

I got out for a nice ride last Thursday—it was only 80^o by the time I finished. Right now, I'm lucky if that's the starting temperature! Friday was a rest day after 9 days of biking in a row, because I was just too tired, though the overcast skies made me kind of regret not going—for the first 3-4 hours, anyway. Then the smell of smoke rose up (yikes) and hung around the rest of the day.

I biked in the garage Saturday, and also unexpectedly on Sunday. Last week, I was super-tired every morning, and it took me forever to wake up enough to get ready on Sunday. I was also suffering from an intermittent medical condition that we refer to in our house by its technical term, which is, "feeling 'swimmy' between the ears." Ugh. I sunblocked and everything, but when I went outside, it was already 90^o (about an hour early). I seriously considered biking outside anyway, but decided not to because of that lingering disequilibrium, so I biked in the garage again instead. :(

Mondays are tough in the summer, because I have a weekly meeting that lasts until noon. But I checked the upcoming forecast, and today's high of 95^o was the 'coolest' day for the next week, so I went out riding at the same starting temperature of 90^o I'd passed up yesterday. BUT, no dizziness, so it was more workable. The ride wasn't too bad, and I finished at 93^o (the hottest end-of-ride temperature this year) without having to creep through the last few miles, so... \o?

I would have liked a little more water, though, and I'm finally ready to move that rear bottle cage from my old bike onto my new one. That will let me carry 2 bottles to drink and 1 to "wear" instead of just having 1.5 bottles to drink and 1/2 a bottle to wear. These are 20 oz. bottles, too!

For garage biking, I'm almost finished with Castle, Season 2. That is, I've seen the S2 finale, but now I'm picking up the episodes I inadvertantly skipped by misnavigating the earlier disks. I only ever watched the 3 episodes that came up on each disk's initial menu display—I didn't realize there were two more episodes hiding via a "Next" button. I've got a few spares to pick up from S1, too. :O

I don't think I mentioned how sorry I was to finish Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles back in late June. I really, really liked that series, and it was just opening up into newer and more fascinating possibilities when it got cancelled. :( I also loved the haunting, melancholy quality it had, which was so unexpected in a Sci-Fi series, but was perfect for those larger questions about whether "humanity" is simply something that you are/aren't, or whether it's something that you might hope to achieve. *Sigh*

Next up after Castle: probably a rewatch of Six Feet Under? Unless I can get the Netflix download-and-stream app to work on my laptop. Streaming right off the network is still a no-go, the Wifi signal just isn't strong enough. :(

Well, now that I've blathered on about heat and biking and TV forever, I'm off to bed. Geez, look at the time!

I guess I hadn't realized quite how burned-out I was from the combination of my stressful work project and the last phases of Survivor Idol, not to mention the isolating effects of the pandemic. It's been a struggle to do much of anything, including posting to my journal and catching up on my friends-list, making phone calls and writing/answering emails, and taking care of 'paperwork' for various household issues. Plus finishing the sewing pile and some reorganization projects...

So much Blah, and so little that brings me anything like joy. I feel like I've been hanging on by my fingernails since last Fall, and even with something closer to normalcy on the horizon, it's too late. I ran out of "cope" months ago, and I don't know if it's coming back. :(

So, what HAVE I been doing in the last month? Well, I got my second COVID shot (the Pfizer vaccine). It made me pretty sick for about 24 hours, but I felt almost 100% again after that—except for having a really sore arm for almost a week. Our daughter visited for the first time since Thanksgiving, which was wonderful! She's doing well, and is working at her summer internship after finishing her first year of law school. She also has a boyfriend—her first—and we're thrilled that someone she likes has noticed how special she is. Her previous romantic experience from junior-high onward was pretty much the same as mine, and we'd really hoped it wouldn't be...

The weekend after that was Mother's Day, where I made it out for a walk with our son (not even a hike, as it was too hot), and worked on our taxes all weekend. E-filed the federal return, and drove to the main post office to mail the state return around 10 p.m. on the last possible day. Ugh. Although I was not alone... :O

I've been doing a lot of yard work, cleaning up weeds and trying to get things planted before the Season O' Scorch settles in. Final planting was last weekend (temps of 100, 105, and 100), i.e., later than I would have liked. Now I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I've bicycled a lot, sometimes in the garage when it's been too windy or too hot (which has been often). I think the season for the peppery smell and the cottonwood fluff on the bike path has come and gone. I haven't seen much new and interesting wildlife lately, except for a tiny egret (about 1/6th the size of an adult, which made it automatically cute) and the lump that refused to get off the pavement when I tried to shoo it and which turned out to be a small tortoise. \o?

We've been catching up on TV shows, and lamenting the effects of the last year. Many shows seem excessively "woke" (too much all at once, and if only they'd been farther along the spectrum to begin with), making it appear that they're all trying to tell the same story. Both The Good Doctor and New Amsterdam have become more like soap operas than dramas, which, hey—there are bunches of medical soap operas we're already not watching, because we don't like the genre! We're irked at the sudden shift in Bloom's character on New Amsterdam (in the world of the male gaze, all kinds of women seem to be randomly bisexual, whereas men never are). It doesn't feel as if the justification has been established, and rewatching House with The Boy, I can't help thinking about where things will go on that show and how much of a jolt that will be for him. The writing just doesn't support it. Also on New Amsterdam, Max seems to have become obnoxiously manic, and he's vying with Helen's niece for "most deserving of a smackdown."

I've finished a bunch of books lately, too: Real Life and Memorial (which have overlapping themes and which show how much alcoholic parents can screw their children up), Uncomfortable Conversations With A Black Man (recommended), Piranesi, Leave The World Behind (which aborts rather than finishes), and now, Neuromancer. Lots more to go after that!

I hope you've all been having a good Spring, and have been able to get vaccinated if you're eligible. I'm looking forward to being able to leave the prison of this house behind soon...

We had an impressive storm here this afternoon—thunder, lightning, rain, and a lot of hail. Big-ass hail!

I've heard people talk about huge hailstones, but in all the places I've lived, the size only ranges from "rock salt" to "pea." Today was the largest I've ever seen—it was marble-sized!

The cat was unsettled by all of that racket, and decided to run around and howl (because that's fun for everyone), and then watch the storm through a window for awhile. I miss the house in Portland where I lived as a kid. It had two stories, and on the top story, there was an enormous half-circle window in the eating area next to the kitchen. That was the perfect place for watching storms, up above the forest level and with all of this big, open sky stretching out on both sides and running all the way to Vancouver. \o/

A couple of hours after the storm peaked, there was still some rain and hail going for awhile. My home office is in a corner room, and it's on the other side of a wall from a drainpipe. That gets noisy during storms, but today it was all,

BUM-BADA-BUM-bum-BUM-bum-BUM-bum! BUM-bada-bada-bada-BUM-bum-BUM-bum!

I felt like I was back at Disneyland, on my way to the Jungle Cruise or Tarzan's Treehouse or the Indiana Jones ride, just strolling through Adventureland and enjoying the escapism. That's certainly where I would rather have been, especially when yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of being sent home to work remotely. Boy, it's sure been a long year... :O

After that lovely false Spring around Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, Winter returned again—with a vengeance. There was a freeze warning on Monday night, but very little talk about the windstorm that started late on Tuesday, which was by FAR the more serious of two events.

I was up late Tuesday night (as usual), and the winds were unsettling—so strong, they sometimes shook the house. This is where you hope nothing breaks loose and crashes through the roof. :O We lost power several times after 9pm, and then by midnight it was out for good. I lit candles so I could see better, and finally went to bed around 1:30, hoping things would get fixed during the night.

They did not. It was so cold, it was hard to sleep. I'm an electric blanket and heating pad kind of person—without them, I'd be awake all winter long, much like I was on Tuesday night. :(

( Read more... )

It put me behind schedule for the week, too. I outlined an Idol idea on Tuesday (when we got the new prompt). Then I started writing it longhand on Wednesday, and ugh. Writing is so much slower than typing, and it's hard to maintain focus. Also, my scrawl...gets looser and sloppier with each passing year. :( Anyway, the entry is done now, and there's a link to the poll at the bottom where you can vote! \o?

And office-wise, I had a nice, prioritized to-do list ready for Wednesday morning, and couldn't get to anything before 4:15pm. So I've continued to do smatterings of it after hours and into the weekend. Including now... :( Maybe this is why weekends rarely feel like weekends anymore?

Wow. My birthday was last week, and I wasn't even fully ready for it to be October. Now, the month is almost over!

Birthdays in COVID timez are stranger than usual, though at least this wasn't an important milestone? My son and his friends all turned 21 this year, and it was anticlimactic to say the least. Mine was just a regular birthday, though I cannot grasp the fact that I'm 57 now. Who IS this person?

Plus, as is typical for Sacramento, it didn't FEEL like my birthday. Last Monday, the high was 93^o. I was able to go for a bike ride, but it was a shorter one and also downstream (the area I do not love) because there isn't enough shade upstream when it's that hot. G.A.H. (It was also oddly smelly, with a long stretch of "open sewer," a few seconds of what I think of as "burning bus brakes," and an encounter with "resin.") \o?

We had takeout dinner from a nearby Italian restaurant, which included way-too-large slabs of their dark chocolate cake (stupendous). HalfshellHusband had planned to make me a birthday cake from scratch this year, but the recipe is still sitting on his desk like a reproach. He probably still has another 4-5 weeks of healing on his broken leg before he'll be able to do anything normal? Hard to know--it's still incredibly painful for him just to sit or lie in bed, without even trying to stand on that leg. Walking is a long way off.

It cooled down a little last Thursday, so I was able to able to get out in the yard long enough on Saturday to deadhead some roses, pull a few weeds, and bemoan the state of things. The roses were way overdue by then, but with all of the incredible heat and/or smoke we've had from near the beginning of June through just recently, I haven't been able to do much of anything outside for months. The yard needs a LOT of clean-up. Some plants also need replacing, but is it too late for that already? Fall is such a mess here. When summer goes on too long (like this year), you can't plant too early or things will scorch. But if you plant too late, the overnight temperatures and then winter are just as deadly. And Spring was a lost cause because all the nurseries were closed!

But as with most years, instead of having the time to tackle all of that, I'm playing a new round of Idol instead. So I spent much of the weekend thinking about story idea #1, then starting a poem instead, then losing the "feel" of the poem and working on a non-fiction entry for days... and then finding the rest of the poem after the non-fiction entry was complete, so I could flail over which one to post in the last hour before the deadline. \o?

This Idol mini-season is something different, modeled even more closely on the Survivor reality TV show than ever (which makes the community posts even more fun than usual). It's being played here at Dreamwidth, and elimination is currently based on which of the two tribes has the fewest votes each round. I wound up being captain of the Asaga tribe, based on an early all-community ranking, and I think that's probably how all of the selection worked? Some of my besties are on the other tribe (with bleodswean as captain), and some of them are on my own tribe, but it's just 19 writers overall and it's a really great bunch of people. If you can, please take a look at my entry for this week (I went with the poem), and follow the link at the bottom to the poll to vote for ALL the entries you think are good!

I'll put up an Octobuddy update at some point, but this post is long enough already, so toodles for now!

Ughhhh. It's been oppressively hot and/or smoky here for 4 1/2 weeks now. On the few days where the highs have been < 93^o, there's usually been too much smoke to exercise outside. I've only been able to ride outside 5 times over these many weeks. FIVE. :O

I've lost a lot of strength and stamina, because riding on the trackstand bike only does so much. Though I am SO glad I moved that thing indoors and set it up in the laundry room 3 1/2 weeks ago. It's in the way of everything, but at least the air inside the house is viable. HalfshellHusband also fetched the 'grabber' from the hip kit we're storing in the garage, so we can still get clothes out of the dryer pretty easily, as well as things in the cupboards on the far side of the bike. \o?

I never thought I'd be monitoring the air quality (and its forecast) so obsessively, but this is the longest stretch of smoke pollution we've ever had. None of these fires are actually IN the Sacramento area, but they're burning to the West, the South, and the North of us, and the mountains to the East form a barrier that tends to keep the smoke stuck here. :(

There aren't as many fires in the Northern hills and mountains as we sometimes get, though some are re-burning areas that are very close to where the devastating Camp Fire destroyed entire towns two years ago. The ones to the West and South are an unwelcome surprise. All of this stems from a series of thunderstorms over Northern Californa a month ago that included more than 10,000 lightning strikes and started about 30 fires. Firefighting resources are stretched really thin, and the fires are always hard to contain in the summer. The grass and forests are really dry, and it's a rainless time of year.

Normally, we would escape all of this by going up to Oregon to visit my family, but COVID makes that unfeasible (hence the feeling of being in jail). Even worse, Oregon is also battling several thunderstorm-triggered fires (and at least one caused by arson) that started over Labor Day weekend. One of my sisters is on the edge of an evacuation zone near Portland (she is packed and ready, though), and my mother is in Eugene near another large fire that has destroyed several towns along the beautiful McKenzie River Highway (126). I spent a LOT of time checking fire and evacuation maps for Oregon over these last 5 days. The winds near Portland have dropped down and are shifting back toward the East again (back toward what has already burned), which is good, and there's some hope of rain tomorrow. But how sad for the little towns along 126 and Highway 22 (both gorgeous areas) that have been devastated, and I see that one of the fires has crossed over the edge of the Warm Springs Reservation too. Horrible. As with California, having a bunch of fires all start at the same time makes it nearly impossible to contain any of them. And there are three large ones up North that are in danger of merging together across the Mt. Hood National Forest. :(

Meanwhile, in non-depressing news... this is happening at our house right now:



It's one of those 'grown your own' creatures that I got The Boy as a gag gift, probably from Dollar Tree. I was all set to donate it to Goodwill, and then I thought, No--I want to see how big and creepy this thing'll get. It started off at a diameter of about four inches. Now it's on its second bowl, and it's bigger than a salad plate. It grows verrrry slowly, but eventually its eyes poke up from the water and you have to add more to submerge them again. That's the biggest bowl we have, and I don't know that I'm willing to sacrifice the bathtub if it reaches that size... but I might be. I mean, the package says it can potentially grow up to 6 times larger, so who wouldn't want to try THAT out? \o?