Day-to-day stuff, long and rambling
Jul. 1st, 2018 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lyornSo many days, so few entries.
Bouldering
I went to the boulder hall again today with K___, F____ and T____. It's getting a habit, and a nice one. After my fall and torn ligaments in August 2016, I had tried to get back up on that particular horse June 2017, but my ankle still wasn't stable, and my nerve was shot. I tried again in December and managed to stick with it. Fought a miserable fear of losing my grip and falling each time, and unfortunately the owners of the hall got bored or ambitious and made the "easy" routes a lot harder. I still cannot do dynamic moves, but I have become quite skilled at slithering up the wall and getting veeeery long to reach something that seems way out of my reach. It's not that bad a technique. And my shoulders are getting noticeably wider.
We usually spend the better part of the afternoon there, with a break for ice cream and coffee, and only stop when we are too exhausted to go up one more wall, or feel that the skin on our hands is coming off. After my 16-month break, K___ and F___ are now a lot more skilled than I am, so I can ask them stupid questions. Which I do a lot.
Motor Scooter, new
Overall, I have reduced my sport program to "3-4 things per week" which seems to be reasonable. Energy level is fine, pain is manageable. (Let's see how I feel tomorrow.)
As I am not bicycling much this year, or the last (once per week, max), and commuting by car is no fun, I have caved in to my desire for a shiny fast little motor scooter. It's a Vespa Primavera, 125 ccm, top speed is 90 kph. And it's dark blue.
I wanted a red one, really. But then I saw that metallic dark blue in the sun, with green and silver flitter, and my first thought was "ooooh, shiny" and the second, "I can't, I had that one 30 years ago". After 24 hours of angsting about losing the battle with the midlife crisis, "shiny!" won.
It feels smaller to me than my old PX80 did, although it is quit a bit larger --- 11 cm in length, 4 in height, and 22 kilos heavier. It's twice as weird that is feels so much smaller, as I am 15 kilos lighter than I was when I got the PX. But then, my last motorbike was a BMW R800R, which probably explains a lot. The additional weight is explained by there being ABS, and an electrical starter (I miss the kick-starter), and CVT automatic transmission (which I'm not yet fully used to.) It's also a 4-stroke, and not burning oil anymore. It's even meeting Euro4 norms.
The Scooter With No Name (Yet) needs less than half the gas that my car does, and is more than twice as much fun. Being a Vespa, it was quite expensive, but compared to the BMW... not so much.
Moving Stuff
Fighting clutter becomes more of a challenge, as my step father will be re-marrying in August (I am not sure how I feel about that, so I have decided I do not feel much about it at all). Him re-marrying means that he and his fiancée will be moving in together, cramming the content of two (admittedly not cluttered) houses into one. So I have to remove all of the stuff I want to keep. 2 metres of vinyl records, half a metre of CDs, half a metre of photo albums, three boxes of books, and one with 24 wine glasses (the old ones, which are reasonably sized -- I hate the current fashion of oversized wine balloons) and a set of crystal dessert bowls.
I am kind of surprised that it's not more. Especially that it's not more books. But when I was sorting through the 500+ books that were still in my old room, and the 1000+ books my mother had, I found that there were those (of my mother's) which I never had a desire to read, then there were those which I had read to pieces still felt not desire to read them again. Then there were several hundred of non-fiction books, where I discovered that either they were outdated in an unentertaining way, or I could get the info faster and better from the internet, or I had learned everything from then that I could learn.
I had meant to pick up some of my old school books for the notes I wrote in them, but I could not find them. Maybe they were in the cellar and got destroyed when the cellar had a bad case of fungus, 20 years ago.
But even so I now need to clear a few metres of shelf space. And I need to decide what to do about the vinyl.
***
Things are going well. Books are read. Some stuff is written, also not the amount or the quality that I wish. The cats thrive, mostly. The job is doing OK. The choir stays a tiny bit problematic, I'm getting used to it. Money's fine. Health is OK.
And in the meantime, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and I am more worried, scared and furious than I've been at any time since 1989. I still have not learned to do anything useful. About anything. <sigh>
Bouldering
I went to the boulder hall again today with K___, F____ and T____. It's getting a habit, and a nice one. After my fall and torn ligaments in August 2016, I had tried to get back up on that particular horse June 2017, but my ankle still wasn't stable, and my nerve was shot. I tried again in December and managed to stick with it. Fought a miserable fear of losing my grip and falling each time, and unfortunately the owners of the hall got bored or ambitious and made the "easy" routes a lot harder. I still cannot do dynamic moves, but I have become quite skilled at slithering up the wall and getting veeeery long to reach something that seems way out of my reach. It's not that bad a technique. And my shoulders are getting noticeably wider.
We usually spend the better part of the afternoon there, with a break for ice cream and coffee, and only stop when we are too exhausted to go up one more wall, or feel that the skin on our hands is coming off. After my 16-month break, K___ and F___ are now a lot more skilled than I am, so I can ask them stupid questions. Which I do a lot.
Motor Scooter, new
Overall, I have reduced my sport program to "3-4 things per week" which seems to be reasonable. Energy level is fine, pain is manageable. (Let's see how I feel tomorrow.)
As I am not bicycling much this year, or the last (once per week, max), and commuting by car is no fun, I have caved in to my desire for a shiny fast little motor scooter. It's a Vespa Primavera, 125 ccm, top speed is 90 kph. And it's dark blue.
I wanted a red one, really. But then I saw that metallic dark blue in the sun, with green and silver flitter, and my first thought was "ooooh, shiny" and the second, "I can't, I had that one 30 years ago". After 24 hours of angsting about losing the battle with the midlife crisis, "shiny!" won.
It feels smaller to me than my old PX80 did, although it is quit a bit larger --- 11 cm in length, 4 in height, and 22 kilos heavier. It's twice as weird that is feels so much smaller, as I am 15 kilos lighter than I was when I got the PX. But then, my last motorbike was a BMW R800R, which probably explains a lot. The additional weight is explained by there being ABS, and an electrical starter (I miss the kick-starter), and CVT automatic transmission (which I'm not yet fully used to.) It's also a 4-stroke, and not burning oil anymore. It's even meeting Euro4 norms.
The Scooter With No Name (Yet) needs less than half the gas that my car does, and is more than twice as much fun. Being a Vespa, it was quite expensive, but compared to the BMW... not so much.
Moving Stuff
Fighting clutter becomes more of a challenge, as my step father will be re-marrying in August (I am not sure how I feel about that, so I have decided I do not feel much about it at all). Him re-marrying means that he and his fiancée will be moving in together, cramming the content of two (admittedly not cluttered) houses into one. So I have to remove all of the stuff I want to keep. 2 metres of vinyl records, half a metre of CDs, half a metre of photo albums, three boxes of books, and one with 24 wine glasses (the old ones, which are reasonably sized -- I hate the current fashion of oversized wine balloons) and a set of crystal dessert bowls.
I am kind of surprised that it's not more. Especially that it's not more books. But when I was sorting through the 500+ books that were still in my old room, and the 1000+ books my mother had, I found that there were those (of my mother's) which I never had a desire to read, then there were those which I had read to pieces still felt not desire to read them again. Then there were several hundred of non-fiction books, where I discovered that either they were outdated in an unentertaining way, or I could get the info faster and better from the internet, or I had learned everything from then that I could learn.
I had meant to pick up some of my old school books for the notes I wrote in them, but I could not find them. Maybe they were in the cellar and got destroyed when the cellar had a bad case of fungus, 20 years ago.
But even so I now need to clear a few metres of shelf space. And I need to decide what to do about the vinyl.
***
Things are going well. Books are read. Some stuff is written, also not the amount or the quality that I wish. The cats thrive, mostly. The job is doing OK. The choir stays a tiny bit problematic, I'm getting used to it. Money's fine. Health is OK.
And in the meantime, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and I am more worried, scared and furious than I've been at any time since 1989. I still have not learned to do anything useful. About anything. <sigh>
