Clarity in Writing

I posted a new essay, which is here. It's also linked from the right side of the home page under My Writing, Etc. This was a really different writing experience for me because of the subject matter (arguing), something I usually avoid thinking about. If you have time, please let me know what you think.

Yesterday I spent most of the day working on this essay and on one about bicycling that I started a long time ago. I edited that one and submitted it to Small Spiral Notebook. I thought it would be nice to be published by an independent literary site if I can. If they don't take it, I'll publish it here. Small Spiral Notebook takes the approach to unsolicited manuscripts that small print magazines take, which is that they don't pay and they take a really long time (up to 12 weeks) to let you know whether they are going to use your piece. Oh, well.

Today Tom went out to play volleyball with his coworkers and I felt lazy enough to stay home. Now I'm going to go outside and worry about my "bird's nest spruce," a new shrub that is turning brown. Based on my experience with azaleas and heathers back there (they died), I think it needs more acidic soil. From what I read it sounds like the best way to lower the pH of soil is to lift the plant, amend the soil with something acidic, and replant. I'll go out and get some manure and peat moss, or ferrous sulfate, and lift the plant tonight when the sun isn't beating on it.

Basking.

Okay, it’s a really hot day. Maybe over 80 by now. This morning instead of wandering around the yard and checking on all my flowers, I went for a bike ride. The plants can fend for themselves for a while now that they’ve been watered and mulched. I went first to the Japanese Garden at the arboretum, in order to hover over someone else’s plants instead of mine. I love the shady areas that are carpeted with moss. I took some pictures of the gardens, trees, and shadows with my Nikon F3. The camera’s light meter seems to be acting weird, indicating inadequate light when it shouldn’t… I think. Normally I’d just trust it, but after a couple of years of use, I seem to have learned what to expect from the light meter under various conditions. And something seems to have changed. I took my best guess, ignored the meter, and clicked away. If the pictures turn out good, maybe I’ll learn how to make them into notecards and try to sell them.

The garden was peaceful. The north end slopes up past a pond and the higher areas are sunny. So as you walk from the south end you progress through shade, near the water’s edge, along a small cherry orchard, and out into the sun. I’d like someday to go to Japan and tour gardens with a small group and a knowledgeable guide. I wouldn’t say I’m a Japanese garden buff, but I enjoy them, and that would provide a beautiful way to structure a visit to Japan. Otherwise I wouldn’t know where to begin or what I’d be interested in. Anyway—maybe someday.

Then I biked up the Burke-Gilman trail to 65th Street and over to Magnuson Park on the lakeshore. This park is a former military base of some kind so it’s more of a giant wide-open space than a planned and landscaped park. There are huge fields, a sculpture walk, a boat launch, decrepit old sheds, and lots of fields and weedy shrubs and trees. The ever-present invasive blackberry and Scotchbroom are not pleasant to see, but combined with all the grasses, trees, and brush the whole thing adds up to home for a lot of birds. Of course, most of the ones you see on a casual bike ride on the paved roads are crows and redwing blackbirds, but these are entertaining in their own way. I stopped at a little gravel beach and dipped my feet, and saw to my left a redwing taking a drink and a wade at the same time. Thirty feet offshore, a crow hovered over the surface for several seconds as if dipping his feet. I wondered what he was doing. I saw him hover like that a while later too. Each time he seemed to fly off with something in his mouth, but it had never looked like he was snatching anything from the water with his beak. Hmm.

A man came and Viagra online with an adult and puppy pair of German shorthairs, sleek brown dogs that looked very fit and athletic. They were beautiful. They only stayed for a few minutes. It was a no-dogs beach; the man said the dog beach was not safe for the little puppy, but he wanted to let them have a brief swim. The puppy and mom dogs play-fought over an orange plastic throw stick in the shallow water. I asked the man if the dogs require a lot of exercise and he said they need to run two hours a day. That would be lots of fun but hard to manage. Tom and I would love to have a dog but we’d have to think carefully about how we’d schedule its exercise. Plus cleaning up after it, eew.

Got back on my bike then and backtracked to the U. Village mall, where I had a vegetable stir-fry I’d been pining for ever since I had it months ago on another mall visit. I don’t make vegetables at home often enough, nor eat enough fruit, so when I’m out I often try to get lots of vegetables in a meal. A typical day of eating at home would be granola, milk, and coffee for breakfast; a peanut butter and honey sandwich for lunch; a bit of smoked salmon or a Luna bar for a snack; and a can of soup for dinner.

Skewed Cinderella.

Just finished reading Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, by Gregory Maguire. Very entertaining! It's the Cinderella story told from another perspective, the entire thing narrated in flashback with short later-in-life portions at the beginning and end. It's out in paperback and makes a great summer read—meaning it's as easy as watching a made-for-TV movie. That's not to diminish it. Characters grow and develop, relationships evolve, and some events are happy while others are devastating. The story is not as simple as the fairy-tale version.

The stepsisters' mother, Margarethe, starts out as a fiercely protective mother, determined to make a good life for her girls, and ends up … different (to avoid giving away anything). The main character, Iris, shows artistic promise and, as a teen, longs to study under the local painter who is the family's first protector. I especially loved the early scenes describing his studio, his paintings, and Iris's growing response to them.

Maguire shows great imagination and creativity with detail, not relying on the bare-bones Cinderella tale, but developing it into a full (and thick) novel. Book-group discussion notes at the end refer to it as an historical novel. I wouldn't go that far in that direction. It does portray excellent period detail from the time of the Dutch tulip-investment bubble, and when the awesome Dutch painting style we are so familiar with was just developing. But the book was fanciful enough that I didn't feel I was learning history; I had no sense for whether or not the historical details were accurate, and didn't care. I was caught up in the plot—as I like to be, regardless what I'm reading.

This book was the choice of the book club I belong to, and I suggested it, so I'm responsible for leading the discussion. If I rely on the book-club discussion notes provided, it will be a cop-out, because they're lame as usual. Don't those discussion guides make you feel like you're back in ninth-grade English class, when the teacher asks one of these reaching-for-symbolism questions and the class responds with dumfounded silence?

Anyway, I think I'll add Maguire's latest book, Lost, to my list of books to read soon.

This is also posted on Blogcritics.

Pansy commando raid.

Pansies are growing in our lawn. Purple ones. I planted them last June on the back slope to “add instant color,” as annuals are always promised to do. Both the purples and the yellows survived the winter, blooming smaller and smaller flowers until nothing was left but foliage and I lost track of them. When I started working back there in late winter, I saw that three or four clumps of pansies were starting to grow and to show future blossoms. Now they’re blooming.

I thought these were the same clumps I originally planted. Now it seems they have reseeded themselves and launched an invasion, jumping five feet straight out into the lawn. They appeared there two days after the lawn was last mowed, as if they had parachuted in, and they have very little leaf or stem—just enough to support their little purple faces. Any day now, the lawn guys will come and mow again, and then I bet the pansies will pop back up. I love this climate.

We’re starting to get a lot of sunny warm days in a row. It feels so good to be outside. Yesterday (following up on my complaint about bad volunteering experiences) I went to the arboretum at 9:00 AM to help three experienced volunteers take plant cuttings and put them in pumice-gravel flats to take root. I was there until noon and had a great time. It was sunny and beautiful out, so there could have been few places as good to be as in the arboretum, under the trees. The three women volunteers I worked with were very easy to be with. Two were about my age, one of them an oceanographer. The third was an older lady who may be retired, or close to it. She was very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about all the plants, jumping from one topic to another. I’m looking forward to talking more with all of them next Tuesday. It doesn’t look like I’ll have my next temp job by then. Luckily I have a freelance copywriting project right now (a white paper about a software company’s technology) so I’ll earn a little money and appreciate the free time even more than I already did.

Now I’m off to Lowe’s to get a lot of bags of mulch. I thought I had enough, but no! You can never have enough mulch—especially when the weather starts drying out for the long haul, as it is now. Any day we’ll start seeing more brown in the lawn. Only flowers get the privilege of water.

The voice of (in)experience.

Tom and I went mountain biking yesterday on an abandoned gravel road, now known as the Granite Creek Road/Trail, where we saw a bobcat on May 4. It has views of lush green valleys and a variety of types of forest, from recent clearcuts to dark older growth with nothing but ferns and fallen logs under the trees. At the end of one branch of the road is a trail into a bowl-shaped, forested valley with a creek running through it, and a view of a pair of small lakes (Granite Lakes) far below in the bottom of the bowl. We didn’t get that far on our hike last month but we got there yesterday, in spite of some pretty strenuous challenges on and off the bikes. I’m so worn out today that I’m just sort of lolling around. Plus I donated blood this morning so I feel I have more of an excuse to move slowly.

Granite Creek Road goes uphill for at least six miles, not too steeply in most places, and crosses many little streams and one rushing, boulder-filled creek (Granite Creek). The bridge over the creek was built with enormous old-growth logs that you can see if you bushwhack down to the water’s edge. We did that last time, when we were hiking without the bikes. We wanted to use the bikes yesterday to save time on the long hike and see the lakes.

We did save about an hour each way, but then we started having a lot of problems with losing traction on the gravel. This was especially bad for me because my bike isn’t really a mountain bike to begin with, and I recently put slick and narrow city tires on it. My bike is a three-year-old Bianchi Volpe, which is a road/off-road hybrid style originally designed for Cyclocross off-road racing. Based on my experience yesterday, I can’t imagine racing this bike off-road. I spent so much time getting off and back on, trying to get traction, wrestling the bike to stay under me and go where I wanted, that I got way more tired than I would have from simply riding up a long hill. I might have done slightly better with knobby tires and straight handlebars, but even Tom on his knobby mountain bike had trouble with the loose gravel. Often we’d walk a while then just as we thought the terrain looked good to ride, we’d see that we were about to come to another stream running across the road. Some of those we could ride through, some were too rocky or rutted for our level of inexperience.

We dropped the bikes about two-thirds of the way up because we were pushing more than riding, and walked the rest of the way to the view of the lakes where we ate our lunch at 4:00. (Boy, were we hungry by then!) The narrower trail continues down another mile or so to a larger lake, Thompson Lake, which we couldn’t see from where we were. It’s always fun to cross over a ridge or hilltop and hike down into a valley or bowl, because the feel of the woods usually changes quite a bit. It gets quieter and darker and the views are shorter so you feel like you’ve made a discovery.

On the way down, it got chilly for a while and we put on our jackets, until we started sweating again trying to maneuver the bikes. Speaking for myself, anyway. With my bike’s downhill posture and drop handlebars, I was petrified. I wore my arms out by both gripping the brakes and by using my arms to hold my weight farther back on the seat than was natural. At times, I couldn’t even get enough traction to stop the bike right away, so then I would get off and walk. The options seemed to be (1) walk (2) grip the brakes and skid downhill until spilling (3) let off the brakes and fly over rocks until spilling painfully.

There were enough stretches, especially lower down, where we could ride so that we did save a lot of time. I’m not sure whether saving the time was worth the effort involved in riding, though I’m glad we challenged ourselves and tried something new. On our other visit, when we just hiked, we talked to one mountain biker who said he’d been on that trail a half a dozen times. If he’d had to push his bike and then abandon it as we had, surely he would have said so? Or maybe he was able to ride it. Maybe the gravel was packed better a month ago. Maybe it’s possible to be skilled enough to ride in that steep gravel. Who knows?

What we learned: The degree of steepness isn’t the only thing that can make a bike climb difficult, that it’s easier to lose traction than we thought it would be, and that pushing a bike and mounting and dismounting on uneven ground are very energy-draining exercises.

When we got to the bottom, instead of immediately loading the bikes in the car, we rode on the truly packed, beautifully flat gravel and dirt road that runs along the Snoqualmie River under the trees. It was evening and the air was so sweet that we could have kept going in spite of our tiredness.

Sometime we’ll go back and ride to the end of that road. I want to scout for places where I could get the car close enough to the riverbank to load some river rocks for the yard. (Does anybody local have any secret places to pick up river rocks? I only want six or eight nice round flat ones. I don’t want to take them from state parks or other places where it might be frowned upon. I am a polite Seattle rule-follower. I like driftwood too, which seems hard to find in legal spots.)

After we were finally done riding our bikes, we ate at Ken’s Restaurant in the truckers’ plaza at Exit 34 off of I-90. That place has the best hot chocolate we’ve ever had.