If you're not Rude, you can skip this part:
Hi, Rudy! No, I was just joking about your not coming around often enough. Whenever you want to come around is fine. If you can get time off to go to Char's for dinner next Sunday, that'd be great. Rae is coming and she's going to bring the baby. I'll email Char this week to see if she's free.
I looked at the J-list website and I got way too nostalgic to pick anything. I was going to write the guy to find out if he can get the Black-Black sugar-free version for Dave. (I didn't see it on the website.) I am also, I think, going to order some Daruma dolls.
What do you want for Christmas, by the way?
And for all the rest of you: Did you read that? How Rude!
THE GYM?!
No! I didn’t go to the gym today. Stop asking. Instead, I went for a quick little jaunt here:
up at Sandia Crest with:
Dave, Kelly First, and Sergei. Kevin was with us too, but he had hiked on ahead, which meant that he missed the apple, olive, and tomato nosh that we were having when I took this picture. The fruits and veg, however, were only meant to tide us over until we got to the halfway point in the hike. The halfway point is, yes, at the top of the mountain, but more importantly, there is a restaurant there. After admiring the mountaintop view for a few minutes we went into the restaurant and Sergei treated us to green chile cheeseburgers with french fries.
Seriously, that was what we ate midway through our three-and-a-quarter mile hike. Let me just tell you a little hiking secret: A green chile cheeseburger and fries may sound like a good idea midway through a short hike at 10,378 feet--and, yum-yum, it tastes pretty darn good going down--but once it’s past your lips, it feels like twenty pounds of lead in your belly. Want to make that last one-and-three-quarters miles of your hike feel like five or six miles? Well, you just go ahead and eat a green chile cheeseburger at the halfway point.
After the hike instead of a nice nap, Dave and I went to Flying Star to meet up with The Newbie and her mama because the mama needed help with a take-home math exam and an essay. Dave handled the math tutor role with great aptitude, but when it came to my role as English tutor, well, let’s just say that I turned the essay assignment into a great big ol' messay assignment.
To be fair, the assignment was complex, far more complex than any of the other essays my niece has been assigned, and she was really confused. She had written a first draft that the teacher was kind of meh about (she hadn’t followed his suggestions because she wanted to write her own stuff) and she was just not sure how to proceed from there. Because I have a few years of college essay writing under my belt, it’s difficult for me not to step in and say to my niece, “Write it this way. This way will get you an A.” I want to allow her to develop her own ideas and to learn to defend them in writing, but I also want her to know the tricks of the trade, to know that the easiest way to an A is to write an essay that parrots back what the teacher says in class (they call that “learning”) and that it doesn’t matter if you don’t agree. That’s so cynical, though, I know. I tried to point her in the direction that the teacher seemed to want her to go in, so we’ll see how that turns out.
But The Newbie? Well, she was in fine form today. She’s suddenly started to take great pleasure in growling and blowing raspberries at people, even total strangers, which is funny. And though she’s not crawling yet, she can do about four different yoga poses that are on the pathway to crawling. So that’s good.
Mmmm. What else happened today? Oh, yes. I started a new embroidery project, an E. coli bacterium, very stylized. I’m also thinking of embroidering a sampler of the Cyrillic alphabet and perhaps doing an embroidered version of the processes of meiosis and mitosis. I don’t know. I am quite taken with biological structures at the micro level, things like the nuclear pore complex or the phospholipid bilayer complete with transmembrane proteins. We’ll see. I may do those as clay carvings because carving is so (soooo) much faster and more forgiving than embroidery.
Speaking of biology, I happened to ask my niece today if she believed in evolution and she answered, “I believe in biology, but I don’t believe in evolution.” I managed to keep from spitting out my mouthful of lukewarm decaf coffee when she said that and I calmly talked to her for a bit about why and--
Ugh.
I think that alone made me more tired than the hike.
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