I was out walking Ashley this morning when I saw this painting on top of the recycling bins near my house in Winfield Village.
I immediately thought of a guy (probably this guy) who would buy thrift-store landscape paintings and then add a monster to them.
I shared the image above with Steven, who immediately thought of the same guy. (Steven was the one who found that link, before I was even home from walking the dog.)
Isn’t that little lake just begging for a sea monster of some sort standing in it? Or maybe some little cryptids lurking in the trees?
Steven commented while he was visiting on how much fun vole-watching on my patio was.
Ashley thinks so too.
Ashley has caught three voles that I know of (because she was on-leash when she caught them). She may have caught some others on the patio when she was out there off-leash.
One thing that surprised me, because it is so different from our boxers when I was young, was how gentle her mouth is.
Our boxers would promptly dispatch whatever they caught—groundhogs, even raccoons. One shake of the boxer’s head and whatever it had captured in its powerful jaws was dead.
That is not Ashley’s modus operandi. Two of the voles that Ashley captured were released unharmed, after I told Ashley “drop it.” (The third got eaten before I got organized to tell Ashley not to.)
In addition to the three voles, Ashley has caught both one (rather stupid) squirrel, and one (rather immature) robin fledgling. Both of those were released unharmed as well.
I’m not quite sure why. I know some retrievers have very soft mouths, so they can bring back a dead fowl without ruining it. Maybe there’s a gene for that, and Ashley has it? Or maybe it’s just that she was rewarded repeatedly for being very gentle when she took treats from people’s hands?
Whatever it is, I like both aspects of my li’l pupper: truly a mighty hunter, but also a gentle one.
As you’ll know if you subscribe to my newsletter (sign up in the sidebar), my brother and I are attending SFWA’s Nebula Award Conference in Chicago.
Today Steven had SFWA board stuff all day, so after breakfast I went to the hotel fitness center for a workout.
Normally I always do a full warmup before a workout. (This is slightly problematic, as too often I just do the warmup, and then need to walk the dog and fix lunch, and end up never getting to the workout.) Today, because the scheduling seemed to work better, I did the workout first, right after breakfast. Then I did my morning exercises in the early afternoon.
That worked out surprisingly well.
One reason it worked out well was that I did most of the workout on new-to-me machines, so I started with reasonably low weights and worked my way up to working weights, which basically amounts to a warmup all by itself. I did:
Single-leg Romanian deadlifts with a 25 lb dumbbell 3 x 5 left/5 right (my only non-machine exercise)
I forgot to do goblet squats! There wasn’t a leg-press machine, and I kept thinking, “What can I do to work my glutes?” But I didn’t think of goblet squats. I can do those tomorrow, as well as hitting the other machines (leg curl, biceps curl, and chest press are the ones I didn’t do today).
In con-related news, I have successfully registered! I have a name badge, a program, and tickets for a promised book bag.
I’m expecting Steven’s board-related activities to wrap up shortly, and then we’re talking about heading out to a margarita bar. Or, if his thing runs too late, maybe just having a beer here in the hotel.
Have you ever seen a more pleasant garden spot than this sterile bit of lawn, concrete, and pavers at the Crowne Plaza O’Hare? There is no seating at all. There are some walls you can sit on, if you’re reasonably tall, but even the lowest bit of wall is too tall for me to balance a laptop on my knees.
I did find one cigarette butt, so I know the space does not go completely unused.
A while back someone among our local group shared a link to a set of books they’d found on the internet, with interpretations and drills for Meyer’s Art of Fencing. Word among the local group was that the people behind the books publish stuff “based on interpretations that are… subject to debate,” and suggest taking all of it with a grain of salt.
What caught my eye, though, was not the interpretations, but rather the suggested drills.
They reminded me of the sort of drills you find in a certain class of music texts, where they’re going to go on to the advanced stuff, but they want to make sure you’ve got the basics down, so they’ll have exercises like, “Play every major and minor scale in every key for every octave.” Which, you know, if you can’t do it pretty smoothly, you’re going to have trouble doing the advanced stuff, so you might as well know that right from the start.
And that’s what these drills are like. One is to stand in each guard and cut, thrust, or shift to every other guard. Then take a few quick notes. Did moving from that guard to this or that other guard seem easy and comfortable? Did it seem like it would be useful, or just leave you open for your opponent to take some advantage?
The next drill was to stand in each guard, and then execute each of Meyer’s cuts and thrusts. Again, take some notes. What seemed like it worked?
Drills like that don’t seem like they would depend on the author’s hot takes on anything about Meyer. In fact, they seem great on every level. I can get an idea of what might or might not work. I can get some practice doing each of the cuts and thrusts. I can spend some time standing in each of the guards.
Those are all things I can benefit from.
So I started doing some drills along these lines today, starting with Right Ox and Dempfhau.
Me in Right OxA Meyer rapier fencer in Right Ox
I want to get a little lower in my fencing stance, and maybe hold my sword a little more forward, but it doesn’t seem as bad as I imagined.
Although Meyer doesn’t say so anywhere I’ve found, Right Ox is the guard you’d find yourself in at the end of drawing your rapier from a sheath. (Thibault says this, I think.) If your opponent drew before you, the very next thing you might need to do is fend off an attack, which suggests to me that Dempfhau might be very useful. So that’s one thing I drilled: Dempfhau from Right Ox followed by a thrust into Longpoint, followed by falling back down on the sword that I’d dempfhaued, and then moving to Iron Gate or back into Right Ox.
Besides that, I did some moving from Right Ox to several other guards (High Guard, Left Ox, Low Guard (on the right and on the left), Iron Gate, Plow, and Longpoint). I need to look more at the low guards and at plow, but the point of the drill is to start putting in the time, not to already be doing everything perfectly.
All over Europe, farmers are parking their tractors on bridges, in front of fuel depots, and across from government offices, to protest government policies that are making the economics of being a farmer completely untenable.
It’s not happening so much in the U.S. At least not yet. I guess, as long as people are willing to pretend it’s not welfare, farmers are willing to take government money—even as their livelihoods are being destroyed.
But…
But emergency checks are not farm policy. And without a permanent Farm Bill, the next drought, the next bad harvest, the next crisis, won’t have a safety net waiting — just another extension, and another prayer.
Blue corn battered black cod with brown rice. Batter is half blue corn, half all-purpose flour, and has paprika, black pepper, thyme, and just a touch of cayenne pepper.
I have been meaning for a while to write about how I seem to need more recovery from exercise now than I did five or six years ago. Back in 2020 I could do a hard workout one day, take one rest day, and then come back and do another hard workout. This year I seem to need more rest days to recover. A couple of times recently, I seemed to need six days to recover from a hard lifting session or a long run.
When I mentioned this to my family I got back a chorus of variations on “Getting old sucks.” And it is entirely possible that my recovery capability took a dramatic hit between age 60 and 66. But I didn’t want to just assume that it was aging. I wanted to see if I could figure out if that was actually true.
(I mean, I know that there are a bunch of other changes between than and now that might make a difference in how much recovery time I need. One is that I walk my dog a lot. Although I don’t count those walks as “workouts,” they are still physical activity that requires some amount of recovery. I didn’t have a dog in 2020. I walked plenty then too, but I didn’t go for a long walk every day. Probably only once a week did I walk as far as I do almost every day now. Another is that now I’m trying to train for sword fighting. Those training sessions aren’t usually extremely intense, but sometimes they are, and they’re also somewhat unpredictable, meaning I can’t always line those sessions up with days when I’m ready for a hard workout. Plus, they’re fun—which makes it much easier to end up overdoing it.)
Fortunately, I have my workout logs from 2020—starting right before the pandemic, when I rediscovered the fact that consistency beats intensity when it comes to exercise, and then from the couple of years after that, when the ongoing pandemic meant that I didn’t have to do anything else, and could just exercise as much as I wanted.
I have at least two ideas about things I might do to analyze this:
Look at the logs. Is what I’m trying to do now (that seems to take so much recovery) more than what I was doing then?
Replicate those workouts. An experiment I could do is just take a few weeks and do roughly the same workouts I did back in 2020. If that goes well, then maybe my recovery capabilities haven’t gotten worse. Maybe I’m just doing harder workouts. Or anyway, workouts that are harder to recover from
So, I did take a first look at those logs, looking to see how much exercise I was doing for the first 30 or so weeks starting right before the pandemic, and how much recovery I was getting. I remember thinking at the time that I should aim for a workout every other day, accepting the reality that I’d occasionally miss a day, and end up hitting about three times a week, which seemed like a good goal. It turns out that, during this period of initial consistency, I was getting in almost three workouts per week as intended: 2.89 ± 0.83 workouts. The numbers showed a slight upward trend, with a few weeks with 4 workouts and almost none with just 2 in the last few weeks.
So that’s a first thing to try: Exercising roughly every other day, rather than overdoing it for several days and then needing several days to recover.
Every-other-day isn’t the only good workout schedule. Since I like working out, I kind of like exercising almost every day. Separately from that test, maybe I can come up with a six-day-a-week schedule that doesn’t overdo it: Just one or two exercises per day, focusing on different muscles, different body parts, and different energy systems from one day to the next.
I have so many things to try! (Along with trying not to overdo it.)
Most members of my HEMA club have painted their fencing masks in some way that’s meaningful to them.
I had long wanted to do so, but the thing I wanted to paint—the face of a sloth—was going to require at least three shades of brown, which I feared might be difficult to find. But when I finally went and looked on Amazon for acrylic paint markers, I found a set of acrylic markers in 12 different shades of brown!
I ordered them, they arrived yesterday, and I have painted my mask:
