Writer: science fiction and fantasy, personal finance, and Esperanto
This is making the rounds. I shared it on Facebook as instructed, but I thought I should share it here too.
I have already voted. But I probably don’t count as a young person any more. (Photo is of me and Jackie outside the county clerk’s office, after having exercised the franchise last week.)
Jackie and I went to the University of Illinois Meat Sales Room, aka the Meat Lab, to buy eggs. On the way in, I noticed a sign on the window saying that they had fresh chickens available for $1.75/lb.
I had just been saying on twitter that, with USDA changing the rules to allow chicken to be shipped to China to be cut up into pieces and then shipped back to the U.S. and sold as “Product of USA” with no further inspection, it was perhaps time to just switch to only eating local chickens. These chickens, produced by the university’s agriculture department as part of their educational mission, certainly qualify—the Poultry Research Farm is only about 2 miles away from our house.
So, once we got in line with our eggs, I told the woman at the fresh case that I wanted one chicken. And I got one.
It weighs 8.26 lbs.
Basically, it’s the size of a small turkey.
I have never seen a chicken this size. It outweighs the next biggest chicken I’ve ever bought by a solid 50%.
Jackie has undertaken to cook this enormous chicken, which will no doubt provide leftovers for days.
Years ago I had a panama hat that was great for hot sunny days. I think I still have it, but after a few years the straw cracked in the crown and I had to retire it from regular use.
For years I made do with felt hats, which are also great, but not ideal for hot, sunny days. So last summer I went to the local Rumours Hat Shoppe to look for a replacement panama hat, and found this hat—a panama hat as re-imagined by Stetson:
It’s a great hat, but it turns out not to be the right hat for hiking in the desert. (It’s more for sitting on the veranda and looking out over my plantation.)
In particular, the Stetson panama hat doesn’t have a cord to keep it on in the wind.
So, after a blustery day at Zion Canyon made me concerned about losing my hat, I visited an outfitters shop in Springdale and purchased a Tilley hat:
I’m simply delighted with this hat, which does have a cord, arranged so that it can go both behind the head and under the chin, but which can be easily tucked away inside the hat when it’s not windy.
Hopefully I am now all hatted up for years to come.
Jackie, of course, suggested a sourdough slug, and returned the next day to find this:
(Replying to: One of Jackie’s coworkers)
One of Jackie’s coworkers at the bakery had less than a loaf’s worth of dough, so she made this sourdough snail.
Thanks! Turns out Urbana Boulders has a “starter kit” with a 5 visit punch card, 5 shoe rentals, and 1 hour of instruction, all of which sounds like exactly what I need.
Happy New Year to you too!
You’ve had a terrific 2017, Philip! Happy new year! You should totally get that climbing pass at UB and give it a shot.
Sky overhead is pretty clear, but there are heavy clouds off to the east, so there’s no pinkiness to the dawn sky. Just dark grey and pale bluish-grey.
Look what I found on the freebee table at Winfield Village! A sloth stuffie!! He has three toes!!! (The sloth is my totemic animal.)
Recovering the ability to move well after decades spent sitting still is hard. I’ve spent years working on it, making fitful progress—walking more, running (when I managed not to injure myself), riding my bicycle, lifting weights, doing taiji, etc. I feel better than I have since I was much younger, and I move with more flexibility, mobility, power, and control. I am very pleased with my progress, especially these past three years since I went down the rabbit hole of natural movement, but it was a hard trip.
The internet is a help—there are many, many videos of movement gurus demonstrating how to move well, and many pages with advice, corrections, and exercises for getting from here to there. One good place to start is with Katy Bowman, whose eight books and thousands of blog posts provide step-by-step instructions on recovering the ability to move well (and much else besides). But as I say, it’s hard to do without local support, and until the last few weeks my efforts had just one source of local support—my taiji instructor and community of fellow students (now my students).
So I am delighted that we now have one of Katy Bowman’s students teaching here in Champaign-Urbana: Restorative Exercise Specialist Ashley Price. I’ve taken several of her classes and can assure you that she knows her stuff and knows how to teach it.
(She also knows how to geek out about it, which is a marvelous delight for someone like me. I learned so much about shank rotation! Learning to get my humeri into neutral position made a world of difference for my rhomboid pushups.)
I gather that her special interests are things like diastasis recti, pelvic floor dysfunction (and pelvic function in general), which are potentially issues for everyone, but especially pregnant and postpartum women, but she also teaches the full range: foot function (did you know that your foot contains 26 bones and 33 joints?), squatting, neutral posture, core function, shoulder mobility, etc.
Getting this sort of local support earlier would have helped me a lot. Although most of the work of recovering the ability to move better comes in the form of time spent moving, it’s easy to exacerbate problems rather than improve things when you start to move more. I’ve certainly limited my own progress many times by trying to up the intensity when I should have been becoming more grounded in the basics, or simply by practicing moving incorrectly.
Taiji is an excellent movement practice, being as it is about having an intention to move in a particular way, and then paying attention to whether or not you are executing your intention. But its roots in martial arts give it a particular focus, and it does not serve all areas of movement equally well.
The first time I tweeted something about Katy Bowman, one of her senior students tweeted back, welcoming me to the fold. I said something like, “I’m just working my way through the archives of her old posts,” to which Petra Fisher responded, “That’s how it starts.” I have to admit that she was right.
If you want to learn to move better, and you’re local to the Champaign-Urbana area, I recommend Ashley Price highly.
Local sf writer Elizabeth Shack has been doing the work of organising a few writers to meet Thursday evenings at a local coffee shop. It’s not a critique group; it’s a writing group. There’s a few minutes of conversation and sharing of news, but the main point of the event is to do the usually solitary writing in a slightly less solitary environment.
I’ve been twice now. (I’ll be going again this evening.) I’ve been highly productive both times so far.
I think Elizabeth would be pleased to have the group who shows up expand. (This sort of thing works better when there are enough regulars that when one or another person has to miss a day there’s still a group.) She’s got a contact form on her web site, if you’re a local writer and want to express an interest in joining us.
