:TESTO:The race on Thursday was great. I finished the 10 kilometers in 55:50, in 3155th place, a third from the front of everybody. I didn't push myself hard, and I didn't go wimpily. I feel proud of my six-point-two nine-minute miles. Bitter winds chased behind us, the coldest and the worst coming just after I finished, bringing my first snow for the season.

Conversations of mashed potatoes, football, cranberries, and cousins floated through the pack as I wound my way forward, past the joggers and to the back edge of the runners. As the kilometers grew in the counting, talk of food gave way to silence, or comments on the wind, footing, and slope of the course. A couple of guys with guitars and amps marked every mile (each mile had its own guitar-guy and amp, that is to say), and a forest of hands with water, backed by a grove of latrines, welcomed us halfway.

My sister and her counterpart met me at the finish, cheering me through. I felt great, I danced to music of the end-race band, and awaited my mother's return, to be surprised by unexpected cousins - go here and search for "Adamson". We weren't going to meet up for turkey that day (the death of my grandmother has shaken the walls of family tradition), and yet meet we did, in the wake of the run.

We also had a fantastic time singing and drinking wine and roasting cheese and marshmallows over a campfire at the farm the following day - a fantastic new tradition, as far as I'm concerned.

Food, because food is important:

• I made the corn pudding.
  
• Sister's partner brought rich, herby mead of his own brewing.
• Mom made pumpkin pies, and baked whole sweet potatos
  
• Dad made a lot of food, including
  
• the fantastic nut loaf (which is ground-up nuts made into something better than meatloaf)
• very moist turkey, rich delicious gravy
  
• savory marvelous stuffing, and I usually don't like stuffing.
• Sister brought excellent, cheese from the commune, tasting more cheese-like than any cheese I had recently
  (it was a cheddar, with presence yet not sharp enough to obscure heady milky undertones, and neither squishy nor crumbly).

I don't want this blog to become just a laundry list of What I Did On My Vacation. Therefore:

A stampede of rainbows   lead the earth in its spin
with a thousand footfalls   and hearts beat the wind
breaching the sky            to unleash the snow

***

Yesterday's ashes will not burn,
and yet in company of kindling
the present fire
finds strength in embers. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:My rent check.

Was stolen from the mailbox.

And cashed by somebody who wasn't my landlady.


Argh.

I call the bank tomorrow. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:My mom suggested that I run and/or walk Cincinnati's Thanksgiving-morning race with her, and I've been training for it, on weekends.

However.

It turns out that the race in question is a *ten* kilometer race, not the 5k I had in my mind. The distance is significant -- it's been three or four years since I've run 6 miles straight. I ran 4 miles on Sunday, a respectable 6 kilometers, and I had been feeling pretty good about completing a 5k race at a decent pace. Now, in light of the doubling of my imagined course, I am filled with the apprehension of an unknown challenge (regular readers will note that this falls into the "can I do this?" category, without a hint of "am I normal?" yet with a strong aftertaste of macho "am I tough enough?").

So I might ditch the bike and catch the water taxi to work tomorrow, and run the 2 miles home, as a little more training before Thursday.

Maybe.

***

The school system's URL-blocking service has decided that the family of no-ip.com redirection domains are unsafe for the Future Leaders of Baltimore, and so the easy and fun-to-remember adamson.bounceme.net is blocked within the walls of schooldom. Perhaps I shall strike upon this as an opportunity to dissect a full-bodied URL -- my students have progressed beyond typing "www.searchterm.com" to research a topic, but many don't understand the purpose of URLs -- I haven't yet discussed DNS or directory hierarchies in any depth.

I also had a nice chat with our school's acolyte of Blackboard, the online content 'management' system, which several of my readers should be familiar with. We're getting a local webserver for the school, sometime in the Not Distant Future, and he and I were discussing the relative merits of unstructured web-hosting of class content, versus the ever-helpful, always-underfoot framework Blackboard provides.

My sympathies are clear. Blackboard induces claustrophobia, the course content seems to cringe and cower among the crowded omnipresent interface. I look forward to the web server, and will be sure to make sure that any teacher who wishes it has unfettered access to their own little place on the site, and let them make the choice between Blackboard and freedom for themselves.

***

Soon there will be corn pudding. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I almost got to see a live production of the Rocky Horror Show in a small theater, but didn't know it was an option until already committed to cornbread and chili at home (with friends from last year's new-teacher cohort), and an odd murder-comedy at the nearby Vagabond Theater, and a pretzel. Not-Rocky was a disappointing realiziation, but the show and food in its stead were quietly pleasant.

I also discovered a bizzare file-corruption,  in the neighborhood of  /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices, which is every bit as important as it sounds and it's a wonder things have been working for as long as they have. (The issue only became apparent when I went to fiddle with DragonDrop, for the heck of it). I need to re-install Mac OS X, for a number of reasons, but I don't want to do so until Prometheus comes back from the shop. Maybe I'll do so anyways, as I've got old Unferth (the school-provided Thinkpad) to keep me in production... although it's not the same. However, I can't even do that, because Nat's copy of Tiger (which I never bought) is currently on loan to his brother, so I'm stuck copying core system libraries by hand from Nat's machine to mine. Which is adventuresome, to say the least, but I've done worse to Mac OS X...one of my earliest experiments with Mac OS X development involved replacing the "AppKit" user interface framework with Folger's Instant Crystals, and nobody could tell it wasn't the real AppKit, except for applications launched after the switch, which didn't. Fortunately, I had left the Terminal open, and so was able to recover before the walls fell down around me.

Dammit, the development bug has bit me (I've got napkins full of scribbles, and no way to make them real), and I'm hobbled by my broken system(s). I may have to pull down JBuilder onto Unferth and get back to my roots, just to get my fix, if this matter doesn't sort out soon.

And my cornbread was almost fantastic, but became un-fluffy in later moments. Still very tasty, but too dense.  (It was a buttermilk-and-canned-corn type recipe, page 166 of the Chic Simple cookbook, for what it's worth. I used plan nonfat yogurt instead of buttermilk or sour cream, because that's what I had, but I think the fault might have been older baking powder, or too much stirring)

Almost forgot the kicker.

My mom called me this morning, and said to me, "HI, David. I had a dream that you were in great danger," in a conversational tone describing two teenage youths tracking me to my home in "inner city Baltimore" to do me harm. I'll happily attribute the dream to mother-hen protection-feelings, versus psychic forewarning, but it's worth being aware of. Like the egg of two weeks ago (another miss, not nearly so near as the one of last year, but still on my window, thus still on my mind), I'm not the target, and I'll count myself glad that it was absorbed by my mother's dreams (o protecting window of the classroom of my soul), instead of manifesting in the now.

A near miss, indeed. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:My dad was in Oberlin on Sunday. He ate at the Feve, and sat outside of Dascomb, looking upon Harkness and King. Hardly fair, but he did do me the courtesy of phoning me from the Dascomb parking lot, letting me be in Oberlin through him.

(our family has the ability to see the world through each other's eyes -- a result of radioactive carrots from the farm)

I'll get up that way sooner or later, my northern pals. Perhaps I'll aeroplane myself thence for spring break, and pick up nearby Michigan by ancillary transit in the same swoop. When the ground thaws and the sun rises, look to the east!

***

Nat and I made a delightful mango sauce last week, and served it over tempeh and couscous. Old mead makes pleasant cooking wine, and a little ginger makes everything all right.

Acorn squash, tonight.

***

I've begun putting Ubuntu LiveCDs into the hands of unsuspecting students.

These CDs have a very nice Windows launcher that I hadn't met before -- they offer to install Firefox and OpenOfice and the rest of the gang on the Windows side, while also providing aid in re-booting into clean shades of brown.

That's nice. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Instant Maple Brown Sugar Oatmeal.

A staple of youth,
is it any wonder
that I like
my chilis
and stews
and sauces
thick and sweet?

Liquid carbohydrate
to fill up the belly.

Warm and smooth
to soothe the soul.

Who needs to chew?

***

As yesterday's post suggests, I did very little on Saturday.

I ought to inject "Comics" after "Cookies", for I chewed through four collected sets of Vertigo-label comics from Nat's shelf, two "Fables" (refugees from nursery rhymes and fairy tales struggle with their identity in the mundane world) and two "Y, The Last Man" (every organism carrying a male chromosome spontaneously dies, save for one man and his pet monkey, who travel (disguised) across the country in search of hope-for-humanity, and true love). The latter is nicely done, artful, haunting, and thoughtful. The former was fun, and a bit silly.

Comic, you might say.

***

My former post also suggests that Dad Adamson has been busy in the kitchen, and has baked and mailed be bubble-wrapped cookies.

I gave some to the electrician, who repaired our baseboard heaters. Thanks to last week's teaching of basic electrical whatsit, I followed what he was doing as he measured volts and followed cables to discover a trickily hidden severed wire.

This is, I feel, one of the best things about teaching -- I learn new things.

***

Friday night, I drank 3 Woodchucks (ciders) and an unidentified shot. The latter three were at happy hour with fellow teachers, following a dull day of professional development. I had a fun time, and walked two point five miles home, for the fourth drink (a Woodchuck) with dinner (a burger).

That's the most I've had to drink (gedrunken?) in an evening, I think. My observation is this: drinking is dehyrdating. Most people know this already, and I had heard it before, but now I've felt it. I was certainly nothing like hung over, but I slept poorly and woke up feeling drawn and thirsty.

Good reason not to drink too much, too often.

However, I'm glad (in a self-consciously macho way) that I'm not a drinking weakling. I was cogent and operating smoothly through the drinking, and chose to stop when I did, with the knowledge I could have had another drink while remaining in self-control. While I didn't drink a ponderous amount, I none the less feel like I can check reasonable alcohol tolerance off my "I wonder if I can" list. (This may also be an "I wonder if I'm normal" list -- even though that's not an attitude I like, I've percieved it in myself, who so often felt and feels to be on the outside of common social experience).

Right. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Ham
Bikes
Books
Cookies
Electricity :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Second time at the dojo. Better than the first,
a former Oberlin winter-term instructor was teaching tonight.
Many capable hands taught me gently, reminded me forgotten things,
like how to hold my feet, to move the whole body, to stay off the center.
Reminded me not to walk into a sword, not to break my partner's wrists.
I rolled and I parried, I threw and was thrown, and I laughed.
Many are teachers on both sides of the mat.
Most were old, some younger folk tonight
made me feel less the odd duck.
One bad ukemi (falling)
will be a lesson long remembered.

***

My bike's lamp-bulb is burnt out.
Flashlight bulbs aren't lasting as replacements.
Should I replace the ancient, dragful dynamo,
and get a new fancy light in the process,
or hunt for an appropriate mini-bulb
that can handle my high-voltage
night riding?

I shall ask of the bike-people on Broadway.

***

Gentle reader, don't read too much into yesterday's Halloween grumble-post. I was a bit frustrated then, but blogging and subsequent talking to Liz and Nat have worked their magic, and I feel better.

Echoes of conversations with Rafe, tonight. Be warned, o Reader. David of Baltimore is not the same creature as David of Oberlin, and may surprise you with his thick hide and unsavory tendencies.

The house thing is going to happen, one way or the other. We've discussed it plainly before, the three of us. I think it may be best in the end. Cut me loose from the Ober-womb, as it were. I might not have made it clear that Nat and Liz are very much good people, and would never fink on their lease -- they're here through the end of the year, although they may be fixing and/or renting their possible purchase in the meantime.

I still find the real-estate game baffling. Liz loves it, loves planning and pricing and speculating and organizing. I give that game to her gladly. :ENDTESTO: