I have actually been writing some this month!
One story that I'd finished some months ago had a flaw: the resolution wasn't produced by the hero taking decisive action. But I remembered something slightly related in my own life that prompted me to realize how the hero could take the necessary decisive action, so I was able to go in and edit the text. There's still a bit more work to do, but I'm very close to having a much better story.
Other than that, a pretty ordinary month. Lots of dog walking. A good bit of sword fighting. Enjoying the last days of summer and the first days of fall.
Newsletter mis-feature on micro.blog
I use micro.blog to send out my newsletter. I’m generally pretty happy with its newsletter system, but it does have a serious mis-feature: There’s a very narrow window for editing the newsletter between when it generates it, and when when it sends it out.
The main thing I want to edit is the front text that goes at the top of the email, ahead of the blog posts that I’ve identified as ones that should go into the newsletter. As near as I can tell, there’s no way to create that text until micro.blog gives me the draft newsletter. By default (the way I had it set up until a few minutes ago), there is then only 30 minutes before the newsletter goes out.
That might be fine, except in practice it turns out that the alert arrives after I’ve left on my main morning dog walk, and then the newsletter goes out before I get back.
As a stop-gap I’ve increased that gap to 3 hours (the largest gap the system allows, it would appear). That’s not perfect—I’d like to be able to write the front-matter anytime in the month before the newsletter goes out, and then edit it repeatedly over the month. But it’s good enough that at least I won’t keep missing it just because my dog gets to luxuriate in a long morning walk every day.
Recovering from exercise
For years now, I’ve been trying to figure out (and writing about figuring out) how to exercise in ways that support all the different things I want to do. My latest hobby, HEMA (sword fighting), has seemed like it required more support than most of my other activities, which prompted more (and more different) exercise than I’d been doing before. I’ve worried for a while that I was overdoing it, and I’m now pretty sure that’s been true.
The specific experiment that convinced me was skipping a few HEMA practice sessions. My HEMA club has two-hour practice sessions on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Two weeks ago I just wasn’t feeling it on Tuesday, and then again on Thursday. Each of those two days I skipped practice, but otherwise did my regular workouts—and started feeling more energetic each day. Last week I repeated that. Not only did I continue to feel better, I also was able to step up my regular workouts a bit.
I’ve had two specific issues: a sore elbow and a sore neck.
I’m pretty sure the sore elbow is not HEMA-related, but rather dog-walking related. I think I’ve fixed the issue with how I was handling the dog, but my elbow has been slow to recover—probably because of either how I was handling my longsword, or else how I was exercising to support my longsword training. Having taking a break from longsword training (just going on Sundays, when we’ve been doing rapier training), and having my elbow get much better, even while I continued doing the rest of my exercise regimen, I’m pretty sure it was the actual longsword training that was keeping my elbow from getting better. As I write this, it’s feeling entirely better.
The sore neck, I suspect, is also HEMA-related, I think due to the asymmetrical stance of longsword. (Rapier stance is even more asymmetrical, but I haven’t been doing it as long or as vigorously.) Anyway, after a couple weeks of less training, my neck was, and is, feeling much better.
Of course I’m doing all the regular stuff to enhance recovery: stretching, good diet, trying to get plenty of sleep, etc.
I’m still working toward a plan for exercise. My current thinking is to give up one of Tuesday or Thursday HEMA practice. Then I’ll do four days a week of general exercise focused on support for my HEMA activities: Specifically, I’ve started two different programs of steel club swinging, one 1-handed and the other 2-handed, with a plan to do each of those two days a week. That would add up to 4 days a week. Add to that 2 days a week for HEMA training, and I’d be exercising 6 days a week, with one day of complete rest.
No one day of that should be completely exhausting, so maybe I’ll be able to recover better than I have been.
High water after thunderstorms
There’s a small creek that runs behind Winfield Village. It feeds the ponds in the Lake Park subdivision, and then the water flows on to the Embarras River.
It usually has only three or four inches of water in it, but after heavy rain it swells quite a bit.
Helene isn’t some unpredictable catastrophe
I don’t get why people are treating Helene like some unpredictable catastrophe, rather than just the way things are now.
I’m like, “Hey, it’s going to be like this all the time from now on—either impending disaster, disaster occurring, trying to rescue people from the disaster, or recovering from disaster—from now on.”
It’s weird that people don’t understand that. I mean, it’s so obvious to me, but people are still treating each new disaster as an unpredictable one-off.
Although some people are getting a clue. Zillow, for example, will now show climate risks for property listings in the US.
