I skipped the ones on the 4th entirely - after a long string of social engagements (all fun!) I was ready for some time to myself on the 4th. Slept in, spent the morning curled up with a good book (The Bastard of Istanbul, one of the recommendations from an excellent "Fictional Istanbul" list that a librarian friend in Seattle recommended after last week's attack - click here for that,, "librarian's coping mechanism", he called it, so sad but a good way to learn more about a place that I definitely don't know beyond vague memories of history class) then went out to the club in the afternoon to plant a lavender bush in my garden and go for another surfski spin. There was a potluck going on when I got there but I decided to be antisocial 'cause I was there for some good exercise and if I sat down and started chatting there was a very good chance that wasn't going to happen.
It was kind of windy so I stayed in the basin - that worked out well because one of our race committee folks, Yosi, was also out, and because I was looking kind of shaky, he paddled with me for a while and gave me some pointers. The pointers didn't entirely match what I remembered learning from Bob Twogood when I took a couple of lessons from him, but those lessons were a million years ago now and I think Yosi was giving me more cruising speed hints than sprint and I found that listening to what he said really did steady me. I didn't get out on the ski that much last summer, and the year before I let her spend the entire season out of commission, and I'm also in kind of crummy shape after a fall, winter and spring of the most intensive doctoring I've ever been through - so calming down from struggling to do a high-angle sprint stroke when I wasn't feeling in the least bit comfortable on the ski was a good approach (I'd been getting exercise all right, exercise in frustration) and by the end of three and a half laps of the basin (about 8 miles) keeping Yosi's pointers in mind, I was feeling much more at home on the ski. Must keep at that.
After that I picked some green beans from the garden (ate half of them raw on the way home, almost as sweet as sugar snap peas, yum - the green beans went in where I used to put the cukes, but after 2 years of losing cukes to stupid mildew I decided to try something different, and the beans are producing beautifully) and then I just went home and finished my book and went to sleep. Missed the rain that way, too. Read/paddle/read - that was a perfectly satisfactory day for me. Happy 4th!
It was kind of windy so I stayed in the basin - that worked out well because one of our race committee folks, Yosi, was also out, and because I was looking kind of shaky, he paddled with me for a while and gave me some pointers. The pointers didn't entirely match what I remembered learning from Bob Twogood when I took a couple of lessons from him, but those lessons were a million years ago now and I think Yosi was giving me more cruising speed hints than sprint and I found that listening to what he said really did steady me. I didn't get out on the ski that much last summer, and the year before I let her spend the entire season out of commission, and I'm also in kind of crummy shape after a fall, winter and spring of the most intensive doctoring I've ever been through - so calming down from struggling to do a high-angle sprint stroke when I wasn't feeling in the least bit comfortable on the ski was a good approach (I'd been getting exercise all right, exercise in frustration) and by the end of three and a half laps of the basin (about 8 miles) keeping Yosi's pointers in mind, I was feeling much more at home on the ski. Must keep at that.
After that I picked some green beans from the garden (ate half of them raw on the way home, almost as sweet as sugar snap peas, yum - the green beans went in where I used to put the cukes, but after 2 years of losing cukes to stupid mildew I decided to try something different, and the beans are producing beautifully) and then I just went home and finished my book and went to sleep. Missed the rain that way, too. Read/paddle/read - that was a perfectly satisfactory day for me. Happy 4th!
The sunset on the 3rd was enough fireworks for me for this year. And then there was this bee on a coneflower.
4 comments:
Lovely Pictures. Sounds like you had a great Fourth!
It was a pleasantly quiet one. Every now and then I do like a day to myself.
I love the pictures. The bee is amazing.
I posted the song "Istanbul (not Constantinople)" on my blog only a couple days before the attack. I won't claim to be prescient or anything. But I don't think I know any relevant books, so I'll have to check out that other site.
Ah - I had seen that and didn't realize that was before the attacks. I love the They Might Be Giants version (OK, I love anything that They Might Be Giants does). Eerie that that came up so close to the tragedy there.
I'm loving my Istanbul books but I wish the inspiration for reading them was not so awful.
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