"A political statement against the lack of joy on the planet"

Sometimes you can't face the serious stuff full on and you need a hit of straight happiness. This is for you.

What a rough beast

I leave the office for one measly extended weekend of eating marathon meals and drinking mighty wines in Chicago, and everything goes to hell, such that by the time I get home o'nights all I want to do is kerflop into bed. Stories about the weekend of feasty goodness and watching TheVoice marry her feller are on their way.

Manny has now been visited by an acupuncturist-cum-chiropractor, who did many woo-type things and left him with a batch of Chinese herbs. The barn staff find this a tremendous source of amusement, particularly the one labeled "for weakness of the hind end." When it comes to horses, I have set aside my usual cynicism about alternate therapies, because some animals genuinely do seem to benefit from them, and the placebo effect isn't the probable cause. Still, I agree with one staffer, who summarized Manny's current regimen succinctly: "He needs to chill the hell out and gain some weight. Dude, the herb he needs is not Chinese." (Except that it maybe is, who knew?)

We had fun, though, with only me and Small Woman, on Grayson, in the class. Pat set us doing mirrored exercises, circles at each end of the ring and then swapping off, which we managed with elan and even panache. Then she had each of us do a Preliminary-level dressage test that she made up on the fly, reading us the moves as we went. I was startled by how hard it was and how well Manny did, and speaking for myself it was also engaging to focus on a variety of moves in sequence, rather than the usual routine of doing one maneuver repeatedly before switching to another.

There is a palm in Gilead, said Jack

Pete Souza's White House photos are an excellent antidote to bad news. He's been posting some wonderful shots on Flickr, well beyond the usual grip-n-grins and signings.

Official caption: President Barack Obama shakes hands with a French veteran during the 65th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, France June 6, 2009. The man was knocked aside by the crush of people after the president's speech, and a White House aide brought him over to meet President Obama.
Unofficial caption: Dammit, I'm-a cry.


Miro, Miro, on the wall...

We do the Harrison Ford "do not even" finger-point all the time in my family. The Obamas: They're just like us! Except with an organic garden and some nuclear codes.

Ow ow ow

I survived the ominously named Chisel class, a festival of lunges and squats and curls and push-ups. I festivated with the lightest dinkiest weights they had and was still barely able to walk the two sets of stairs out of the gym afterward. Also challenging: the teacher's heavy Kiwi accent. She would yell instructions over the music (...Alice Cooper's "Poison"? this class is awesome) and I would look desperately for a mirror in hopes of figuring out what she wanted us to do.

By the time I left, most of my bits were shaking with fatigue and lactic acid burn, so I was not my usual power-striding self. Teal was kind enough to not to give me attitude for being late for dinner, and we conducted a highly unscientific survey about the effect large quantities of crepes have on mental health status. Results are positive and call for further research, especially on the strawberry/kiwi/honey front, and the chestnut paste should not be neglected either.

Abs work! Try to keep a straight face through this video of Ricky Gervais and Elmo ad-libbing. Right, right, "Oh, Elmo, bleargh," but trust me.

Structuring the week

Monday: The painful yoga class. I've now gone to four in a row, enough to see what bits remain consistent from week to week (the 20-minute sun salutations warmup; the agony of abs work just when I start to think it's quittin' time) and what changes (the lunges, the balances, the perverse forms the abs stuff takes). I don't participate in the oms that start and end the class, but if I did I'd be hard-pressed not to faff around singing in thirds just to be perverse. Better to stand in silence.

Tuesday: Mini-med! It's back! Aaand Georgetown fail: every single presenter on the roster is a guy. Bring back the goddess of the shiny knife! The first lecture, on obesity and whether it is or should be considered a disease, was full of neurochemical goodness. Human adenovirus-36, you interest me strangely. The second, on drug development, was a disappointment; the speaker covered maybe 12 of his 40 pages, and noncontinuously at that. The Elder Gods reserve special torments for presenters who flip around in their PowerPoints. He covered some of the development process and discussed a couple of things he's working on, including a bizarre but potentially lucrative product that would fluoresce when it reached target cells, so clearly he knew his stuff, but he didn't do a very good job of presenting it. He also got on my nerves by claiming that Viagra was originally developed as an anti-allergy med; it was in fact an anti-hypertensive (and is still sometimes prescribed as such).

Wednesday: Well, we all know about the standing date with Lear or some four-footed facsimile. Last night I got Lear after he'd been worked in a kids' class, so he was less of a fruitcake than usual. We worked on cantering large circles, rather than the full ring, an exercise that forces the horses to balance themselves more precisely; Lear promptly lost track of all his feet. He did, however, do a perfect haunches-in, good turns on the fore, and stretches down for the bit, and he's getting more consistent about collecting himself, so we had progress. Pat has decided to spring for a blood test to find out whether he's incompletely gelded; I await the findings with interest.

Thursday: Pilates, or possibly Chisel, if I can get up the nerve to spend an hour doing what I'm told are many squats. This is followed by going out with Teal for crepes, because balance is very important, and because the thought of Nutella may sustain me through the fitnessing process.

Friday: Watching Dollhouse. Cooking. Passing out.

This whole structured-schedule thing is all very well and good, but how the hell does anyone fit in basic chores, let alone extemporaneous fun, during the week?

Allons-y

Here's an elegant bit of elegaic geekdom wot I am posting not just because David Tennant is pretty but also because he's been a fantastic Doctor. Christopher Eccleston left some big shoes to fill, but Tennant made it look easy.




I will post photos from last night's Halloween entertainment later, though I regret in advance not having been able to get reaction shots of the two guys in front of us in line at Giant. Apparently in the Dominican Republic you don't often see a giant Tigger and a witch in green scrubs buying booze and talking stats. It seems a shame that that would be the case, but no doubt they've got their own expected times and places for becostumed wonkerie.

"A library is just a genteel black hole that can read"

The evidence suggests that L-space governs really good used bookstores as well. Whenever we visit Seesterperson, I wheedle a trip over to her town's bookstore, which combines the virtues of a widely varied stock, an eccentrically organized system, and a comprehensive computerized inventory: you can poke around the shelves for hours, waiting for luck or inspiration or your credit limit to strike, or you can go straight to the counter and have your prey bagged and tagged in a matter of minutes. I generally take a combination approach, bolting back to the front to ask for coordinates on anything particular that comes to mind as I stroll, collecting whatever it is (muahahaha, half-price Sapolsky books, you are mine) and then picking back up in that general area, meandering along, head turned sideways in that enquiring-Scops-owl posture so ideal for cruising the stacks. Doing this back-and-forth routine for things in the general history and sciences section has the added benefit of a quads workout, since those shelves are filed on the second floor (ground floor: sociology, children's books, comics, trade fiction in paperback; basement, hardcovers and vintage; interstitial areas, literary biographies). Should I ever go a-missing, this will be the absolute first place to check.

Th'impervious horror of a leeward shore

4mastjack was kind enough to come out to the barn on Wednesday to take some shots of the dressage class. The ring tends to be a bit dim, and out of concern for possible unplanned spaz attacks I'd asked him not to use flash, so not many of the shots came out. A few did, though, and I will post them so that everyone can peer at Cappi and decide whether he lives up to my hype of him. I'm not posting them yet, because I'm a lazy layabout and it has been A Week.

Dressage did go quite well, though, and one of the joys of the summer session is that most classes have been suspended, making it easier to get the horses we want and to run over on time without anyone tapping hooves impatiently at the gate. Cappi, mane neatly trimmed by the first week's teen campers, was his usual excellent self. We tried a new exercise, walking and then trotting an equilateral triangle, the tricks being to keep a straight line on each side and to make the 60-degree turns as crisply as possible. Cappi seems to love precision pivot work; after the first round, he took to enthusiastically bunching himself up and spinning almost entirely on his haunches at each corner, then trotting a perfect line to the next point. Sterling, who shared our space, was having more trouble mastering the concept, and if it were possible for horses to look smug, Cappi did. "Neener neener, a Morgan can do what an Arabian cannot." Who can blame him? In looking through the photos, I saw that we really for sure don't match in terms of body size—my legs trail down his sides practically far enough to touch his knees—but Pat agrees that we make a good match in an "Odd Couple" sort of way.

The week ended on a positive note, too. Our office has recently implemented a summer swingtime policy, so every other week half of us get to go home at noon on Fridays, work permitting. That last clause is the bugger, and I still have not entirely managed to take full advantage of the extra time, so ideal for slackin' and nappin' and general back-kickin'. But yesterday Ginsey and I were able to get out by about 2:30, and after long sober thought about how to best spend the precious gift of time, we headed for Lauriol Plaza and the huge vortex of their margarita machines. If there is a better way to spend a summer afternoon than sitting in the shade and sipping on high-octane boozy drinks, I want it hunted down and shot.

[ETA: "Mongol"! Starring some guys with hot cheekbones, a bazillion and two horses, and the entire mobile population of Kazakhstan. Y'all, just...DAMN.]

It's not just me

Aussie girls wrangle too. Apparently our hormones don't make us ineffective ranchers. WHO KNEW.

This weekend was dedicated to the laudable goal of not dying from sweat, as DC is suffering its first summer spasm of vile heat and humidity and my body reacted by rejecting all solid food. Tools of art for survival included Vietnamese pennywort juice (sweet and intensely green—would drink again), the first Slurpee of the year, the latest Indy Jones flick (pleh), a couple of ginger drinks with friends at the Piratz barrrh, multiple iced coffees, moving at no speed exceeding a mosey save when Saturday's storm broke, getting a severe haircut, and, when all else failed, clinging limpet-like to the AC vents while playing James McMurtry's "Where'd You Hide the Body" about three billion times.

I hear that it's a dry heat in the Outback. Wonder whether they still need jillaroos.

'Membah this?

Ah, the first summer storm. So welcome, after last year's drought, so wonderful to know that we won't be a total dustbowl. All those tasty ions put everyone in a good mood. I like the first storm.

But that was yesterday, when I got caught brollyless and took shelter in that home of refugees and wayfarers, the Starbucks by the Metro, and that would've been all fine if a guy sitting next to me had not decided to lay an infinitely dreary line on me. Dude, I'm sure you meant well, but if your opener is that I look like Jamie Lee Curtis circa "True Lies," your game is epic fail. Shoo and let me read my book. No? You must keep talking? You will keep on and on asking me about my book, the paper, whether I ever just sit and watch people, am I local, did I go to school here? So apparently I must now walk home before the rain stops, amusing whatever section of the universe is tickled by tormenting anyone both umbrella-less and clad in a white shirt. Still: First storm! All is forgiven!

Today, though, SOGGYCLIPSE. Three thunderstorms in four hours, power to mi casa completely fried, I join the huddled masses at a local coffee shop, which is doing rather well out of the meteorological madness. Lacking real news, I will instead provide a link to a vid of some friends singing a song we used to do back when I was singing with the choir. I was trying to explain the conceit to a guy from Sonora—the song is about a hunter who sees a deer with silver antlers, and just as he's about to shoot it (as you would), it tells him that it knows he's about to be married and that it will, if he forebears to shoot it, come to his wedding and illuminate the party with its silver antlers. I dunno. It's ethnic. Possibly miffic. Presumably the guy accepts the offer, although the song really never makes that clear. But Sonoran guy just shook his head. "Horns at a wedding. Bad sign for the groom." That particular cross-cultural signifier doesn't seem to have crossed the River Don. Anyway, these singers do a lovely job. Urals-style music isn't for everyone, and I know to my cost that the tones can peel paint at a hundred paces. But, like good bagpiping (settle, peanut gallery, SETTLE), it can be gorgeous. Also, it dun't half take your mind off the storms. Of which there is another moving in from Ohio. To arrive at 2 AM. Farrrrrrk.

Wherever you are, huddle up and stay dry. It's crazy out there.