Tauriasis

Here There Be Dragons

It is now the halfway point of September, which means I should be well on my way to finishing up my NaNoWriMo 2008 novel, right?  Wrong.  I get very easily sidetracked.  To be hoenst, I haven’t even gone back through and reread my novel.  I’m about 3 chapters in right now, and it’s surprisingly not all that bad.  I’m finding that I like one storyline more than the other, so I’ll have to go back and rewrite the half that I like less.  Still though, I’m not deterred.  The plan has just slightly changed and, as I predicted, SeptNoFinMo has become SeptOctNoFinMo.  So, I’ll give another update to this at the beginning October.  I’m hoping to have my novel read by then, which is a fairly reasonable goal I think.

That’s really about it.  I know this was a short post, but there’s not much to update on the novel writing front.

I’ve been reading more recently than I have in a while, and I just finished Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. I originally bought the book after seeing Mr. McDougall on an episode of the Daily Show talking about the book.  With my interest in anthropology, I assumed that the book would be an interesting look into the lives of the Tarahumara who live deep within the Copper Canyons.  Although the book briefly touched on these people and their culture, it was really only included in tiny bits and pieces.  It was mainly a book for runners, which wasn’t what I expected, but was ok with me anyway.

I’ve always enjoyed reading about running.  Every once in a while when I’m out shopping I’ll buy the latest Runner’s World magazine.  I should probably say right now that I don’t run.  I’ve tried to get into it before and am trying to get into it now, but I can go maybe 0.2 miles before I have to stop and gasp for air while my legs throb.  Still, reading about running always makes me think that there must be something more to it than just pain.  The “greatest race the world will never see” that the Born to Run subtitle mentions was a 47 mile ultramarathon that took place in the Copper Canyons pitting the best of the Tarahumara against the best of the North American elite ultra runners.  Kind of makes my 0.2 miles seem weak, doesn’t it?

My favorite chapter in the book though is one that has nothing to do with the rest of the book at all.  Near the end of the book is a chapter completely devoted to human evolution.  It attempts to answer the question of how we managed to win the evolutionary war when our stronger and bigger-brained neanderthal brethren died out.  The theory that Born to Run puts forward is that we evolved to run.  Our bodies have certain parts that are only linked with species that run (like the achilles tendon) and because we are bipedal we have the advantage of breathing that most running species don’t have (most running species get extra lung power by their organs sloshing back and forth helping to push air out and suck air in, but this limits them to only one breath per stride).  The problem is that when most people hear that we evolved to run they automatically link running with speed.  But we didn’t evolved for speed… we evolved for endurance running.  We survived where neanderthals didn’t because we could run for long periods of time over great distances.  How did this help us survive?  Well, through persistance hunting of course.  Animals don’t sweat, so they rely on their breathing to cool them off.  The result is that when a group of hunters chases down an animal for long enough, it drops over dead from overheating.  We had the endurance, so we got the food.  This is Born to Run’s theory anyway, and I think it sounds about as plausible as any.

Mainly though, Born to Run is the story of a guy (Christopher McDougall) who got hurt running and wanted to know why he was in pain when some old Tarahumara guy in sandals was pain-free.  Rambly at times, but always interesting; I highly recommend it.

It’s been an interesting week. A couple of days ago I found out that almost all of the people at the job I left in March are losing their jobs because their contracts expired and aren’t going to be renewed. Then, just yesterday one of my good friends at my current company was given the option of resigning or being fired because there wasn’t enough money. I also found out that about 80 people got laid off from the company where my dad works this week too.

I knew that the economy was bad, but I assumed that Huntsville was immune to it. Or at least that the government contracted jobs were immune from it. The most alarmnig part of all of it is that the person from my company that lost his job was on the same contract that I’m on. For now things are ok, but I’m still a little shaken. They gave him no warning at all – in the morning everything was ok and around 10 am he went back to his cubicle, quietly packed up his things, and left out the back door. An hour later the owner of the company sent out an email about him leaving the company. It all happened so fast that nobody even knew he had resigned until the email came.

I have a feeling that things are going to get a lot worse with the economy before they get any better.

My parents drove down to Huntsville over Labor Day weekend to visit me.  Last time they were here was early May when they came down for my birthday, and they weren’t able to come back for a while after that due to my mom having knee surgery at the beginning of June.  She’s up and around now and moving better than ever.  When we went out for a walk on Saturday she was able to go about three or four times as far as she used to be able to before we had to stop and rest, and even then we were stopping because it was hot out and she just wanted to cool off as opposed to stopping because her knee hurt.  So, she’s making an awesome recovery.

Saturday night she was sitting on the futon next to me talking about knitting socks, when she pulled out a book that one of her friends had gotten her.  It was Knitting More Circles Around Socks, the sequel to Knitting Circles Around Socks (which I currently own), by Antje Gillingham.  I enjoy knitting socks in part because I think that they’re really easy to knit despite popular belief that you need to use two magic wands instead of needles for it to come out looking anything like a sock.

I’ve always been intrigued by the Circles Around Socks method of using two circular needles to knit both socks at the same time.  It seemed to me to be a very efficient way of getting your socks done with the same number of rows, the same size, and at the same time.  As I was looking through my mom’s book I saw a pair of slip-stitch socks that I really wanted to try, and so my mom challenged me to a sock war.

The way that sock wars normally work in the knitting world is that everybody involved in the war gets an address, shoe size, and sock pattern.  It’s a race to get your pair of socks knit and mailed off to your target before another knitter does the same thing to you.  If you get a pair of socks in the mail, then you’re dead and out of the game.  At that point you wrap up the socks you were knitting and send them to your killer, who has to complete them and mail them off before getting killed themselves.  It’s a silly little game, but sounds like a ton of fun.

The sock war with my mom is a little different.  Next time I see my mom, if one of us doesn’t have her socks done, then she’ll have to take 2 skeins of the winner’s sock yarn.  So, it’s not really a war by any stretch of the imagination and more like yet another attempt for my mom to dish off some of her yarn.  Still, at the end of it at least I’ll either have more sock yarn or a pair of socks.  So really I win either way.

In one of my previous posts I mentioned my brief bout with novel writing doing NaNoWriMo.  National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a month-long forced march approach to novel writing.  Every year hundreds  of thousands of writers sit at their computers on October 31st, buzzed from the Halloween sugar high with their coffee drip IV at the ready, waiting for midnight to hit so that they can start on their newest November novel creation.  Fifty thousand words in thirty days (coming out to roughly 1667 words written per day) is the requirement to “win” NaNoWriMo.

Last year was my first experience with novel writing, and I hit my 50k words in the first 16 days.  The issue is that although I’d won NaNoWriMo by my word count, I didn’t actually finish my novel.  So, I’m going to attempt to take September and part of October and make it SeptNoFinMo (September Novel Writing Month – I know it only has September in it, but SeptThruOctNoFinMo sounded too complicated), and I’ll see if I can’t finish up my story from last year before it’s time to start on a story this year because whether it’s another 25k or a whole new 50k to finish off my story, I want to have it done before NaNo ‘09.

As much as I’d like for this to be solely a September project, I’m 99.9% sure it will overflow into October, mostly because it will take me some time to re-read my story from last year and decide where I want to go from where I left off.  Plus I have a lot of grad school applications to fill out, a few books I want to read, and a play-by-post game of Exalted I’m participating in that should be starting up sometime soon (more on this in a later post).

One way or another you’ve made your way here to Tauriasis. So, now what? Just what is this blog actually about?

My interests are extremely varied, so you’re probably going to get a whole mish-mash of topics. My current interests include archaeology, novel writing, reading, songwriting, photography, learning guitar, learning Japanese, speedsolving rubik’s cubes, knitting, poi spinning, and trying to figure out what to do with my life. I’ll more than likely touch on all of these in this blog at some point.

A few of these activities I’ve only dabbled in. I’ve only ever attempted to write one song, my novel writing experience comes from a month-long novel-writing challenge (NaNoWriMo), and the only thing that might give you the idea that I’m interested in photography is the fact that I own a fairly decent SLR camera. With some of these activities, however, I’m a bit more experienced. My poi spinning skills aren’t too shabby for no longer than I’ve been doing it; the first sock I knit actually looked like a sock, which is apparently a rare occurrence in the knitting world; and if you give me a half hour I can solve your 5×5x5, 4×4x4, 3×3x3, and 2×2x2 rubik’s cubes for you.

Mostly though I plan on this blog being about interesting things that I’m doing or that I’ve heard about, which means I could really write about anything.

I’ve had this blog for about a month now. I keep meaning to post things to it and generally get myself out there on the intarwebs, but the thing that keeps stopping me is that I don’t know what to post first. I can think up all sorts of ideas for other posts, but it’s that first one that’s been stumping me.

So, my solution to this is to just put this here as a marker. Maybe someday I’ll come back and change this and make it more First-Post-On-My-Blog-Worthy, maybe I won’t. Either way it’s time to get on with it I think.