The color tag making the numerals before the categories white shows up in the title tag of the archive page. Criminy.
I'm only 115 pages into it, but I love the combination of baseball, the Usan myth, and what I consider regular old myth of a Grimm or Lang, and native American myth of a Pacific Northwest flavor. It might be a children's book, but in my opinion a fairly advanced one. A couple of details I remarked on: after page 50, someone's vest is described as orange as the protagonist's father's Volvo. That's a detail I ought to have remembered from the first page, but I didn't. Also, a character arrives called Padfoot. Chabon must have read, or heard about, or had an editor tell him about, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Prongs, Wormtail, Padfoot, and the other one. My copy is very far away though. All the way downstairs, and this evening my legs are shredded.
Legs with the trainer again. Lunges two lengths of the gym, then ballsquats, stationary lunges, and regular squats, three sets of each exercise until my legs were jelly.* Calf raises, not yet balanced enough to hold weights but enough only to touch the railing occasionally. "Russian twists" on the fitball, shoulders on the ball and planted feet, rotating shoulders with stationary hips: obliques. Then prone, chest on the ball, walking forward on my hands until the ball was under my knees, holding for a count of ten or infinity or whatever: whatever the muscles are across your saddle. Some hack squats, and he talked me through adding 20 pounds to the original 90 in the third set. And I could do it!
Then a step class. This is not your mother's step class. Okay, I'm new to this instructor, but Chris leads a much harder class than anything I have taken.
Which isn't saying much: community center step and adult ed step just aren't that hard. The December I graduated from college, to move home for the eight months before I started grad school, my father bought me membership in his gym. That was great, because both my parents went and it was such an easy stop between work and home. That's when I first did step, which can't have been new in 1991, was it? New enough that I remember a lot of instruction rather than stepping.
But still, the man is on two risers (per side) and never sounds short of breath. The final killer element in the two classes I've taken so far has been ski hops. Some people, like me, just hop, and I can work in the occasional higher hop with my heels approaching my ass. Others, like him, hop much faster overall, while landing side to side, with fully bent legs. This would be why I will never ski moguls.
*Putting this into my exercise spreadsheet, having not counted how many repetitions I did, I could not quantify it numerically. So I wrote, "To the pain," because once again, "The Princess Bride" is a useful movie.
Not so curly now. Actually if I air-dry it and maybe scrunch it a bit in my fingers as it dries, it gets decent waves; but it can either be a) like that, with thick shanks of hair waving, yet tangled, or b) combed, therefore untangled, and hence fairly straight. And I've become one of those people who is always messing with her hair. I hate people fucking with their hair in public. I don't want to watch anyone clip her fingernails either, for one thing; for another thing, if you have to fuck with it just to have some peripheral vision it's a stupid style. I am trying to, as Haitch put it, "embrace the down," but that's hard to do when it won't stay out of my face, damn it. I bought some gel, not that I particularly know how to use it; my fear is that if I put enough crap in it to keep it out of my face (and the cutter deliberately--at my request even--cut a few pieces short), I'll look like John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction."