Summer blogging
Jun. 26th, 2010 09:27 amSo both ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
catvalente and zoethe have challenged us to blog, to write something substantial daily to keep LiveJournal alive and hopping with conversation. I approve of this; I agree with it. My few ventures on Facebook have not left me with the best impression of its signal to noise ratio and its constant pokes urging me to get others more involved with the noise part, and much though I enjoy Twitter, to the point of writing a little story using the format, it has an even more transitory, shifting feel, flickers of thought in an endlessly moving world. Which is part of its charm, but it's not blogging.
The problem is that it's June, and this is now.
When I started this blog, I had a car, and I was just about to start a job that required a lot of travel. I didn't blog daily or even frequently at first, especially because less than a year later I was involved in both a full time job with overtime and extensive travel and graduate school, which is not a combination that leads to long, thoughtful blogging. My posts shot up in 2005 after I left that particular job, when I was still doing things, which is the main thing, and have been trickling down this year.
Now, it's June.
Unless someone drives me around, I am restricted to places I can reach on my trike and the bus. In the winter, the trike and I can zip around fairly well, as long as sidewalks are involved. The bus...ok, this actually does deserve a separate, angrier entry, but let us just say that right now, it might actually be easier for me to reach a bus on the moon. As of Tuesday, we have been reassured that Lynx is diligently working on the accessibility issue (this is not actually a disability problem; this is a the bus can't stop at the bus stop problem and not incidentally keeps changing where it actually stops, which goes back to the current major irritation of my life: the state of Florida's inability to fix a road on schedule and without turning it into a scene from an apocalyptic horror show). A fix – for the bus, not the road - should be coming by September.
So, the trike.
In Florida's June, the heat always hits by about 10 am at the latest; the rain – a marvelous, heavy, thundering and blinding rain — usually hits in the afternoon. Neither condition is exactly optimal for using the trike. This sends me out me out at hours I'm unfond of, to run any errands I need, to be back before 10 am – assuming, of course, that the usual morning dizziness has not hit to put a bit of crimp on things.
Sometimes this conflicts with real life schedules – and by this, I mean the library, which does not open until 10 am, and does not have any particular shady places where I can sit and wait for the doors to open. In the winter, I combine a library visit with other errands or other explorations. Not so June. I watch the clock carefully. Yesterday was an absolute must hit the library day – I had a DVD that absolutely could not be renewed again – and although I could have left earlier, that wouldn't have allowed me to check out any new books or DVDs. And, alas, I need new books in my life; need to see them sitting there, tempting me with their words, even if they turn out to be really terrible or mildly disappointing books indeed. (But! White Cat, by Holly Black, was worth the read. I did see the final twist coming, but now I want the next one. Why didn't you horrible people tell me that I have to wait until next May for the sequel???? I hate you all.) So I waited until the right time, got on my trike –
to find that I had managed to get a flat tire.
The trike is a bit different than a car or a bike in this respect – I can ride it, even with a flat, as long as I ride it slowly and carefully, so I did until I got to an air station, pumped up the tire, and took a careful look at it. Then, library.
By the time I emerged – not too long after – the heat had arrived, in all of its weight, and I knew that would be it for the day's excursions.
June is also the month where most locals go into hiding into the air conditioning. Central Florida still bursts with Things To Do, but these are things many of us are avoiding until things are a bit cooler. Specifically, although yes, I'll be heading to the new Harry Potter Wizarding World at Universal, I will not be heading there in the next few months, in this case less because of the heat and more because of the crowds which have convinced me this is a place I can wait a bit to see.
By mid-July and August I become a little more accustomed to the heat, a little more flexible in my hours, a little more willing to go to see the zebras and the ostriches and the miniature horses, the lakes, the herons delicately poking about the water grasses, the hawks that watch the bike trail. By August, a few other Things Should Be Happening, and things Have Been Suggested in September, and we may well be moving by or in the fall. We'll see what that does to blogging.
I should note, also, that some of my comparatively slow blogging progress comes from spending time in my own worlds. I am working on getting Lindell and Portia – there, you now have some character names subject to extreme change from a work-in-process – to do something other than sit around and chatter endlessly over coffee, which is giving this work, I feel, a rather caffeinated waiting-for-Godot feel which is all well and good but not precisely what I was going for.
In the meantime, I may have some TV shows to chat about (once I get around to seeing Leverage) and some long delayed posts on other matters that I will try to stir into some sort of coherency. And who knows? Sometimes, my saying that I have nothing to blog about causes me to have lots to blog about.
catvalente and zoethe have challenged us to blog, to write something substantial daily to keep LiveJournal alive and hopping with conversation. I approve of this; I agree with it. My few ventures on Facebook have not left me with the best impression of its signal to noise ratio and its constant pokes urging me to get others more involved with the noise part, and much though I enjoy Twitter, to the point of writing a little story using the format, it has an even more transitory, shifting feel, flickers of thought in an endlessly moving world. Which is part of its charm, but it's not blogging.The problem is that it's June, and this is now.
When I started this blog, I had a car, and I was just about to start a job that required a lot of travel. I didn't blog daily or even frequently at first, especially because less than a year later I was involved in both a full time job with overtime and extensive travel and graduate school, which is not a combination that leads to long, thoughtful blogging. My posts shot up in 2005 after I left that particular job, when I was still doing things, which is the main thing, and have been trickling down this year.
Now, it's June.
Unless someone drives me around, I am restricted to places I can reach on my trike and the bus. In the winter, the trike and I can zip around fairly well, as long as sidewalks are involved. The bus...ok, this actually does deserve a separate, angrier entry, but let us just say that right now, it might actually be easier for me to reach a bus on the moon. As of Tuesday, we have been reassured that Lynx is diligently working on the accessibility issue (this is not actually a disability problem; this is a the bus can't stop at the bus stop problem and not incidentally keeps changing where it actually stops, which goes back to the current major irritation of my life: the state of Florida's inability to fix a road on schedule and without turning it into a scene from an apocalyptic horror show). A fix – for the bus, not the road - should be coming by September.
So, the trike.
In Florida's June, the heat always hits by about 10 am at the latest; the rain – a marvelous, heavy, thundering and blinding rain — usually hits in the afternoon. Neither condition is exactly optimal for using the trike. This sends me out me out at hours I'm unfond of, to run any errands I need, to be back before 10 am – assuming, of course, that the usual morning dizziness has not hit to put a bit of crimp on things.
Sometimes this conflicts with real life schedules – and by this, I mean the library, which does not open until 10 am, and does not have any particular shady places where I can sit and wait for the doors to open. In the winter, I combine a library visit with other errands or other explorations. Not so June. I watch the clock carefully. Yesterday was an absolute must hit the library day – I had a DVD that absolutely could not be renewed again – and although I could have left earlier, that wouldn't have allowed me to check out any new books or DVDs. And, alas, I need new books in my life; need to see them sitting there, tempting me with their words, even if they turn out to be really terrible or mildly disappointing books indeed. (But! White Cat, by Holly Black, was worth the read. I did see the final twist coming, but now I want the next one. Why didn't you horrible people tell me that I have to wait until next May for the sequel???? I hate you all.) So I waited until the right time, got on my trike –
to find that I had managed to get a flat tire.
The trike is a bit different than a car or a bike in this respect – I can ride it, even with a flat, as long as I ride it slowly and carefully, so I did until I got to an air station, pumped up the tire, and took a careful look at it. Then, library.
By the time I emerged – not too long after – the heat had arrived, in all of its weight, and I knew that would be it for the day's excursions.
June is also the month where most locals go into hiding into the air conditioning. Central Florida still bursts with Things To Do, but these are things many of us are avoiding until things are a bit cooler. Specifically, although yes, I'll be heading to the new Harry Potter Wizarding World at Universal, I will not be heading there in the next few months, in this case less because of the heat and more because of the crowds which have convinced me this is a place I can wait a bit to see.
By mid-July and August I become a little more accustomed to the heat, a little more flexible in my hours, a little more willing to go to see the zebras and the ostriches and the miniature horses, the lakes, the herons delicately poking about the water grasses, the hawks that watch the bike trail. By August, a few other Things Should Be Happening, and things Have Been Suggested in September, and we may well be moving by or in the fall. We'll see what that does to blogging.
I should note, also, that some of my comparatively slow blogging progress comes from spending time in my own worlds. I am working on getting Lindell and Portia – there, you now have some character names subject to extreme change from a work-in-process – to do something other than sit around and chatter endlessly over coffee, which is giving this work, I feel, a rather caffeinated waiting-for-Godot feel which is all well and good but not precisely what I was going for.
In the meantime, I may have some TV shows to chat about (once I get around to seeing Leverage) and some long delayed posts on other matters that I will try to stir into some sort of coherency. And who knows? Sometimes, my saying that I have nothing to blog about causes me to have lots to blog about.
