…Or maybe a nap?

Fatigue is an RA symptom that I have trouble gauging. After all, when my joints hurt, well, *my joints hurt.* I take some ibuprofen or naproxen, maybe drink a beer, and I’m either good or my joints still hurt. With fatigue, I can drink coffee and still be tired. I can drink an energy drink and still be groggy. I can go for a walk or a run and still be addle-brained. I can take a nap, go to bed early, and wake up tired. But I always wake up groggy. I’m not a morning person. Surely, another cup of coffee will put it all right…

Anyway, I apparently over-did it over the last couple days and paid for it yesterday (and am probably still paying today).

Thursday, we went to Mark’s for Thanksgiving dinner. Nice, quiet meal, though I might have drank a wee bit too much sweet tea vodka over the course of the afternoon and evening.

Since Eric’s parents aren’t in town this weekend (they’re going to come down for Eric’s graduation next month), we didn’t head back up to Mark’s to watch the Nebraska/Colorado game. Instead, I decided on the spur of the moment to head to Fran’s tailgate/pig roast. Since I hadn’t made any arrangements for a lift (like last year), I figured I’d head out to where they were supposed to be and if I didn’t find anyone I’d head back home. I’d have a nice morning walk and a rail ride if nothing else. Luckily, I spotted Fran unloading the pig roaster as I was headed back and thus avoided a repeat of the Cell-Phoneless-Girl-In-a-Parking-Lot Incident of 2008. Had tasty smoked pig and potato salad, way too many beers, and a conversation with Dan’s four-year-old about Star Wars.

And then on Saturday, the fatigue hit. I wasn’t hung over, I was just utterly tired. I got up, went for a run (felt decent), napped. Listened to half of a Nebraska basketball game, napped. Tried to do some reading for gaming, went to bed. It seems like the rest of the day, I sat and stared at a computer screen and contemplated napping.

Right now, I’m a little creaky in the joints, but not zapped. I’m doing some writing, watching some tennis. I do kind of wonder if over-indulgence of alcohol doesn’t cause more flare-up symptoms than over-doing exercise. Or maybe last weekend’s games are catching up to me too. Or maybe it’s the changes in weather we’ve been having (it’s cloudy today!). Or maybe… *shrug*

Opposable Thumbs, and other things I’m thankful for

After faring pretty well at league finals (I was mobile to the end!), I injured myself yesterday at pickup. I was cutting back to the thrower (I don’t remember whom), trying to out-run Chris Morgan, running "through" the disc space like you’re supposed to… The disc was thrown, I reached for it, misjudged… And the disc (a zippy throw, moving full speed) hit the tip of my left thumb, jamming the digit. The tip and the inside of the knuckle are bruised. Well, they were yesterday; I haven’t removed the tape yet today. The joint where my thumb meets my palm is sore too. Effectively, my thumb isn’t currently able to work in an opposable manner. And, man, you don’t miss opposable thumbs until they’re gone!

But seriously, I’m thankful for all the things my body can do, thankful for another year of decent health. I ran a 5K this year, I played four games of ultimate in a day. I’m thankful for the wealth of information available to me and the ability to make good decisions about my health.

I am thankful that ideas for fiction continue to flow, that Eric and I continue to tweak this writing collaboration thing. I am thankful that he pushes me to do better, that he pushes for our fiction to be better. And I’m glad that I’ve found new love for fiction this year. I do it a disservice by not working harder.

As ever, I am thankful for the people that populate my life. Eric, my family, my friends. I’m an introvert, so it might not seem like I value other people, but I do. Thank you all!

A Better Monday than Usual

Feeling okay with the world today. After all, it *was* a good league and really the bad part is that it’s over. Had a nice dinner with some of my teammates on Friday night too.

I’m feeling better physically too, but that isn’t saying much. I took a walk to the post office this afternoon and since I only felt some tightness in my right hamstring, I decided to finally check out Bookmaze. I picked up a flier from them at the last writing-ish convention I went to, probably WesterCon a few years back. Yes, there’s a bookstore less than a mile from my apartment and it’s taken me several years to check it out. What has been wrong with me?! It’s an okay little place. I browsed through the hardbacks and picked up an anthology of Asimov mysteries and Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home. It was past lunch time, so I saved their paperback section for later. When I got home, I was still not writhing in pain and I walked to Guerrero’s with Eric to pick up lunch. And that was probably where I over-did it. My right hip is now pretty achy when it wasn’t before. I haven’t decided whether I want to go for a run tomorrow.

I’ve cut 8K from Model Species and am not quite 2/3 done. I’m lazy and easily distracted.

14-1, 0-19

League finals was yesterday. Huck Discs & Chew Bubble Gum made it to finals, but lost to Good Huck Charm, our Tuesday night counterpart. We played four games; I believe all of them went past soft cap. Which means we played from 12:15 to 7:30-ish with a few short breaks. The guys had only three subs, way too few. Us girls fared better, averaging a two in/two out rotation. By the fourth game we were all pretty beat, endurance-wise.

On the plus side, I got to play the most games possible with a team that I very much enjoyed. A 14-1 record is nothing to sneeze at. It’s certainly the best record of any team I’ve been on, much less captained. On the other hand, this is my nineteenth league and I still haven’t been on a championship team. You’d think that even statistically, out of a sixteen team league, I would have made it once so far. Not so much.

Today, Eric and I have been hobbling around with terribly sore muscles, and napping, and eating salty foods with our ibuprofen doses. In a little over a month, I’ll be setting up registration for league #20.

Ponies by Kij Johnson and Chris Buzelli | Tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Stories

Ponies by Kij Johnson and Chris Buzelli | Tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Stories.

We’re not really being told what the other ponies kept, but assuming that they’re usually giving up wings or horns, they should have speech, but they aren’t talking. Also, the girls lose their names?

Wow. Well then.

Neil Gaiman’s The Price

Neil Gaiman’s The Price.

“The Price” by Neil Gaiman—A Kickstarter Drive | Tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts.

No deep notes on this one. Just a nice solid little story.

Book #25 – The Devil’s Teeth

Book #25 – The Devil’s Teeth by Susan Casey

A while back I saw Susan Casey on Charlie Rose talking about her recent book on giant waves. An interesting interview and a topic I know nothing about. I took a look for The Wave at PaperbackSwap and saw that Casey had also written a book about great white sharks and the Farallon Islands. The Farallons are a group of islands 30 miles west of San Fransisco. They are a big breeding ground for seals and therefore a stop over in great white shark migration. They’re also a weird hub of biodiversity and a creepy, harsh place to live on or work from. Again this is a place I’d never heard of and was intrigued by.

The book is roughly in three parts. In the first, Casey describes how she came to be interested in white sharks and her first visit to the Farallons, basically as journalist. She covers the research that has been being done at the islands, but doesn’t go into great detail. For the rest of the book, I supposed. The second part involves her second trip back during the off-season shark-wise. She also includes some of the history of the Farallons. They’ve been a hub for fur hunters, egg hunters (sea bird eggs were a commodity in gold-rush San Fransisco before enough chickens made it west), and the US military. The place is inhospitable and has a long history of maritime tragedy.

Which makes Casey’s decisions in the third portion of the book somewhat befuddling. She writes on page 169:

"The chance to be with people who possessed these elegant survival skills, I realized, was a big part of what had drawn me here. This was an oasis of competence in a bumbling world, clean and straight where things were usually compromised and bent."

Unfortunately, she proves that she’s pretty much a part of that bumbling world. While she has very little sailing experience and a doesn’t seem particularly interested in gaining any expertise, she pushes to be the sea-bound member of the Shark Project’s experimental floating research platform. Things, of course, go awry and Casey doesn’t seem to feel much responsibility for the results. She chalks it all up to being "shark crazy;" that anyone who has seen a white shark would understand her want to see more. I don’t buy it. For me this attitude soured what might have been a really interesting book.

—###—

Five more books in a month and a half? I might be able to make my 30-book goal yet.

Other things read and links to my reading notes:
The Popinjay’s Daughter, by Anne Cross
Memory Boxes by Pam L. Wallace
Household Spirits, by C. S. E. Cooney