switchback princess

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    My legs are telling me that the decision to hike Mt. Baldy yesterday (with a group from school) may not have been one of the most well-advised decisions I have made within the span of my life so far.
    Today, I cannot walk except after the waddling fashion of a drunk penguin. I cannot make it down stairs except sideways or with the aid of my butt. Even after 9 1/2 hours of sleep last night, I could barely sing in church this morning because my lungs and physical heart felt raw and exhausted.

    Mt. Baldy is about ten thousand feet tall, extremely steep, and generally regarded as the most difficult hike in Southern California. Or was it all of California? Also the hike's about 9.2 miles round trip and I'd never hiked anything longer than about 3 miles. Or anything steep. Or dealt with elevation. Mmmmm choices yerz mature and informed wunz oyerz.

That one. Except without the snow. (picture from Google.)

Picture that roommate Marissa took. Not at the top.

random picture from Marissa of friend Kim (right), me (center, dyed my hair brown recently) and PME (left) that I liked.

    Professor Mine Enemy, who was leading the hike, spent a couple of considerable chunks of time babysitting me. Coaching. Shepherding. Mother-henning, essentially. I was being a weak, gasping slowpoke and had to stop a lot and he'd stay with me, wait for me to catch my breath, make me get going again, give me little pep talks about conquering sections and going from strength to strength, tell me to stop apologizing, and so on. (He later did this for one of the upperclassmen who was having trouble with the descent, and I think talked with her about music most of the time. Dude is a good and faithful shepherd.) Really being just so extremely nice. It was sweet and also humiliating.

    (I feel like I should reiterate that the nickname is a complete misnomer by now and he's one of my favorite people in the world.)

     SO I CLIMBED ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP OF MOUNT BALDY AND BACK DOWN AND WENT HOME TO COLLEGE AND SHOWERED AND THEN STUDIED THE GRAMMAR OF KOINE GREEK LAST SATURDAY WHAT DID YOU DO

    When I was a kid I could never picture myself being twenty years old. It sounded so ancient and distant and impossible and I could never imagine what it would look like for me.

    Well!

gravycopter

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    What I had for dinner:

    Roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, salad, apple juice, chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup on top.

    Words that Professor Mine Enemy used in Greek class today:

    "κόσμος."
    My name, three times.
    "Megatron."
  

      What was in the sky when I took a walk after dinner, when the air was warm and humid after a hot day and a hot rain:

    A helicopter. Clouds.

sophomore on saturday

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    AWW YEEUH

    SCHOOL TIME

    It is good to be back. Being back is a good thing.

So this is most of the student body, all dressed up for convocation. When I say it is a tiny college I mean that.

    I'm so happy to be with all my friends again (including Best Friend, who is a brand-new freshman), things are going really well with my two new roommates so far, my best bro Jim finally got here today (Saturday) although move-in day was Wednesday, I've got all my books, I just got back from a quick trip to the store with bestie Laura for the supplies for our traditional shared meal of sourdough bread and potato soup (to feed ourselves tomorrow because the cafeteria isn't open on Sundays), I've got a bag of Pepperidge Farm Geneva cookies, and I have now memorized the Greek alphabet. Things is peachy.

tough luck, mr. grayson

    Dear Harriet Walter,

"Following Haly's clues, he finds a mysterious Book of Names in the circus that holds his on the last page^[14] .[He's forced to fight a rhyming demon named Acheron when his clown Jimmy Clark is attacked by an ex-fiancee using black magic^[15] .]"

 from a plot summary on the wiki page of Dick Grayson.


    Oh my gosh comics are dumb.

oh golly i can't write anymore yay yay hurray

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    hurngh blurhghkl rarr

    rarrrrrr

    ararararr

    what am I doing with my life

pretty sure Rigby isn't actually supposed to be on the couch

    what i am doing is totally failing in the attempt to become a young adult

    and also watching a lot of batman movies

    (while eating unhealthy children's breakfast cereal)

    (in my pajamas)

    Back to college in two weeks. Sophomore time! (pronounced sop-ho-mor-ay)
    'Til then, I'm still housesitting - I had a week off but came back yesterday - and misusing the ability to access the internet at all hours (which I didn't have for most of the summer) by reading through Tumblr all the time. And by watching Batman movies.

     I can't really concentrate on anything right now or I might be able to explain why Tumblr is destroying my attention span and making me (with my super mimcky writer-voice) struggle with expressing myself and articulating actual ideas (especially without images and communal reactions)

    bewaaaaaaare

master of the beasts

Dear Harriet Walter,

    Well! Apparently it has been a while, she says as she sits on top of the back of a couch, kicking away at a dog's stuffed toy because the dog wants her to play fetch but she wants to write. (Dog toy is too gross to touch with my hands without washing said hands before returning them to the laptop.)

    Today is my fourth day of housesitting. The murder mastiff isn't here, as the people I'm working for actually found a really cool boarding place that specializes in working with large, aggressive dogs who have behavioral problems and since his owners were having several kinds of trouble with him anyway, they decided that that was a happier option and might do some long-term good.

    However, I still have to take care of one largeish, energetic, nervous, and easily bored young dog named Rigby, who is some kind of short-haired, lean, coyote-like thing. She needs lots of attention.

    And I also have to take care of five cats (two downstairs and three inside or adjacent to the barnish thing, one of whom is a Persian and needs his fur brushed and his eyes cleaned often), four chickens, and the young potbellied pig.

    The pig is, of course, the pig that I previously saw in a pet shop and wanted so badly to own. This is the family and home that he went to. (You might wonder how I can be sure. The pet shop does not often have pigs, the family bought him around the time I know he was there, I recognized him when I first saw him, and I have pictures on my phone from when I saw him for sale to compare to the pig I take care of.) Yep. I get to live with and take care of the pig I yearned for, for three weeks. His name is Papa. He takes blueberries from my fingers quite delicately.




    Housesitting is a very strange job. It requires very little of what we think of as work, instead calling for one to step into a person's or a family's shoes, inhabiting a broken-off piece of their life while they're gone. Taking care of their pets, sleeping in one of their beds, raiding their pantry, washing with their soap and so on, but with none of the family interaction of their lives, very little of the driving away to go places and buy things and work, no knowledge or history of their habits and hobbies in the lives they lead at home. I feel like another person's ghost, in a functional way.

    Sometimes I feel like I'm being paid to haul the pig's large rubber water bowl to and from the house to dump, rinse, and refill it, and clean out the cat litter, and groom the cat, and feed creatures several times a day, and take the dog out to potty, and walk the dog down the gravel roads, and be lonely and isolated from other humans all day (as I'm way out in the country)...and sometimes I feel like I'm being paid to sit on my butt and watch Batman TV shows.

    Speaking of whom, life lesson learned today:

    when tasked with brushing a floofy white cat, first make sure that you are not wearing a black Batman t-shirt.

books books sugar DEATH

    Dear Harriet Walter,

•     I have literally never in my life watched as much television as regularly and extensively as I have been doing these past few days because of the USA Olympics trials. Auntlet says that this is because I'm discovering something very new to me (I've never watched any Olympic things or athletic things before) and I'm having to figure it out. This is especially true for gymnastics, I think. Limbs, Harriet Walter. Limbs everywhere.

•      I read Dracula recently. Bram Stoker and such. I was hoping it would surprise me and be way cooler and more interesting than I expected, like Frankenstein was (you'll remember that Dr. Mac made us read that this spring as an illustration of the themes and cultural reactions of Romanticism).

            Nup.

•     If you have ever lain in bed at night, sleepless and haunted by the question, "I wonder what was up with the commerce, warfare, and intercultural relations between early Dutch settlers and Munsee Native Americans in the early colonial period of America's history," suffer no more. I can highly recommend The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley by Dr. Paul Otto, mainly because the dude himself gave me a copy earlier this summer and I read it because hey why not. It is actually a pretty interesting account! 

•  Speaking of history books, look at this book Dr. Mac has assigned for Comparative World History next fall (one of the four he's assigned so far). It is about sugar and history! Two of my favorite things! Oh my lands, I almost want to order it early and read it before the semester begins.

I hope I don't look back on this in the fall and be like "olawks can't believe i was excited to read that what a wretched heap of poo."

• I have gotten a job housesitting in late July and the first half of August for a couple living out in the country. This is a slightly unusual housesitting job, as the couple has to prep me for it for several weeks before I actually begin the job, and by "prep me" I mean "have me over to their house every few days so that their Tibetan Mastiff puppy can get used to having me around and stop being an antisocial guard dog about it all." And by "antisocial" I mean that my private name for him is "the murder mastiff."

This is an example of a full-grown Tibetan Mastiff. Yeppers.