Snow, beautiful snow!

We have finally received a few inches of snow and it feels like winter.  Of course, it always feels like winter when the temperature hovers around 20 degrees, but at least with snow there is the hope of snowshoeing.  I have a little group of friends who snowshoe with me, but to my horror, they were all busy on Snowshoe Monday!  My friends couldn't come out to play and I was sad.

 However, like the trouper I am, I stayed in my jammies an hour longer until it warmed up to 29 degrees, strapped on my icewalkers and headed to Lone Pine.  I know I should have snowshoed anyway, but Lone Pine is closer to my house and, after all, we didn't get THAT much snow.  The trail up to the top of Lone Pine was snow-packed and icy, so I was glad to have my trusty YakTrax and my poles to keep me upright. 
 
 It was a beautiful day, cold and crisp and the walking warmed me.  I climbed up the Cliff Trail and paused when a bunny dashed across the trail in front of me.  Bunnies aren't bred for brains, so this one stopped under a big rock, believing himself to be invisible.  I fumbled in my pocket for my camera, turned it on and found the bunny - still frozen and 'invisible' to me.  Poor bunny.  There's a reason that they are incredibly fertile.

He was cute and as soon as I rearranged my camera into my pocket, grabbed my poles and continued on my way up the trail, he hopped away through the snow.

 The trail led me up to a vantage point below the overlook, but I am always fascinated with the geology of a place, so I looked up at the rocks looming overhead.  At one time in Lone Pine's history, the overlook was used as a dumping-off place for old cars, dead refrigerators and bald tires.  There are still a few traces of rusted bits of castoff machinery below the overlook, left there by the Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department because it's too hard to remove.  Now we have a lovely trail system where there was once only the novel pastime of seeing how far an old tire could bounce on the rocks far below the drop-off point.

As I looked up at the rocks, I began to feel the cold, so I pushed on up the trail looking forward to being at the upper vantage point.  There is a place on the trail where a hiker must climb up and over some sizable rocks.  This always means to me that I'm past the steepest part of the trail and the end is in sight.  I like climbing on the rocks.  Somehow, they seem friendly and not so steep as the switchbacks that lay just behind me.  The sun was shining and I thought I'd stop and take another photo.

My next stop was at the overlook itself where I admired my little town, the mountains and the view of Glacier National Park in the clouded dip beside Columbia Mountain.  The mountains in winter are beautiful and I longed to be in the park, no matter what the weather.  Perhaps a snowshoeing road trip is a good idea.  Then my working friends could join us on a weekend.

I always like going downhill much more than going uphill, so I started on the downward path toward the bottom of the hill and my waiting car.  I didn't see any deer this time, so my little bunny was my only companion on my hike.  I can't wait for more snow so I can snowshoe up the trail. 

 Today, we woke up to rain.  RAIN.  It'll be icy on Lone Pine this afternoon, but I might make the attempt anyway and dream of more snow later in the winter.

STATE OF WONDER by Ann Patchett

I just finished another great book by Ann Patchett.  This time she returned to South America where BEL CANTO was set, but we were taken to the Amazonian jungle, down sinuous rivers choked with trees on both sides and filled with terrifying predators, insects and cannibals.

The main character was Dr. Marina Singh, a pharmacologist who came to that field after leaving a promising surgical obstetrics residency after a tragic accident in which she blinded a newborn during a C-section.  She worked for a large pharmaceuticals company, Vogel, in her home state of Minnesota.
Marina seemed apart from everything from the beginning.  She is a the daughter of a blond Minnesota mother and a professor from Calcutta, India.  She works with Dr. Anders Eckman in statins and is having a secret affair with the CEO of Vogel, Mr. Fox, who never shows her any affection, or even recognition in public.  Marina is coerced into a trip to the Brazillian laboratory after word comes that Anders has died of a fever on a trip to Brazil to judge the work of Dr. Swenson, brilliant but elusive head of the drug development lab in the jungle.  That Dr. Swenson was once Marina's teacher and mentor during her disgrace in surgery adds an element of suspense and tension to Marina's life.
This novel is Marina's journey from the comfortable, mundane life in Minnesota to the steamy, unknown life in the jungle.  The nearer she gets to the answers that she seeks, the more she is stripped bare of her former life.  And, as her former self falls away, her true character shines forth with her innate humanity and courage.

Meeting her nemesis and former mentor changes how Marina thinks about herself and her abilities to be a doctor.  She begins a journey of discovery about her priorities and her loves, and in the process, she finds a vein of iron in her personality that allows her to save one friend while sacrificing another.

The end of the book leaves the reader with a lot of questions.  I want to know where Marina goes from here, having been altered beyond imagination by her experiences in the jungle with the Lakashi tribe and their miraculous trees, moths and mushrooms that can both extend a hand to fertility and condemn a woman to a lifetime of childbearing.  Dr. Swenson was the tragic result of wanting too much and having too little to give.

I would recommend this book overwhelmingly to anyone who loves a good story and a puzzle to consider long after the last page has been turned.

String Theory for the Middle Ages

I'm becoming more and more convinced that as women age, they fall under two theories of body changes - the String theory and the Dough theory.  Some women become thin and stringy, appearing to lose mass to the point that their muscles and tendons show prominently through their skin.  At first, it's a good look - one of strength and sinewy grace.  Grace soon gives way to grotesque and you look at them and think about wasting diseases.

The other theory is just as unkind.  What were once well-defined muscles become, well, doughy.  This dough has the properties of bread dough - floppy, stretchy and pale.  One looks in the mirror and wonders at what temperature those doughy blobs would firm up again to resemble firm contours of health.  Maybe that's why so many seniors go to Arizona and Florida.  They harbor a secret hope that the heat will improve their dough.

NanoWrimo goal achieved!

I last made a post just before the National Novel Writing Month of November kicked off.  I guess I can only write one thing at a time.  I did meet my NanoWrimo goal of 50,000 words.  YAY!  It was more difficult than last year because I overextended and agreed to work for 5 days, thus missing my goals for those days - 10,000 words. Gulp.  I managed to make them up and squeaked by at the last minute. 

My novel this year was a quieter one.  Last year, I found myself embroiled in an epic.  It grew larger and larger, kind of like a piece of tofu that I tried once.  I spit out the tofu but the novel lives on, still growing larger and calving into two future novels.  While that is exciting, I decided to experiment with a quieter novel this time.  A contemporary novel with one main character who has life problems to face.  I found it to be less exciting than sending a young man to war, or killing off several people during the influenza epidemic of 1918, but with a quiet novel, it's easier to go deeper into the character and really get to know her in depth.

I attended a class associated with the NanoWrimo month and, together with my classmates, we discussed the problems of writing a novel.  It was fun to hear how other people handled the flow and creative life of a longterm writing project.  My instructor, Kathy, advised us to put the novel away once we had our rough first draft and let it 'percolate' in our minds.  So right now I'm letting my quiet novel percolate while I've started another rough draft of a book that has been in the back of my mind for several years. 

Ideally, this is the start of a continuum of writing and percolating, editing and percolating, writing and percolating.  The object is to continue a process, a neverending yet everchanging process.  I like the sound of that.

Write, write, write

Last year I wrote 60,000 words in one month.  Unfortunately, I didn't write much more for the other eleven months.  The reason for my productivity was the National Novel Writing Month program - or NaNoWriMo - that takes place each November to encourage the lazy writers around the world, such as I am, to jumpstart their creativity. 

I am very creative - in my head.  Translating it to the page, or to the computer screen, is the problem.

I do very well when placed in a classroom situation with deadlines or in a writers' group, to which I belonged for several years in the 90's.  That was great.  I had a small group of like-minded friends who encouraged each other to write, share and meet regularly.  Knowing that I'd face my circle of writing friends once a month gave me motivation to produce something to share.  I guess I'm a social writer.  I want to write for myself, however, other than in journals and on the occasional blog.

I have stories to tell and time is getting shorter by the day.  That is why I persist in joining writing classes and NaNoWriMo.  Maybe some day I'll either get motivated to write everyday in a more organized way, or find another writing group that I love as much as I did the last one.  Until then, I've set my goal of 50,000 words for November, joined a linked class at the local college and bought my shiny new pens and flash drive. 

Wish me luck.  I'll let you know how it's going.

Inverse proportion to fat?

The older I get, the more I'm convinced that there is a calculation out there in the mathematical cosmos that proves that fat increases with age and that efforts to remove that fat become inversely harder.  I am living proof.  I got back from a wonderful vacation in Scotland recently where I indulged - just a little too much - in the Scottish heritage.  By that I mean going to the great pubs and drinking a lot of ale and wine and whiskey.

This was me on my last day trying to get in the final pint of Old Speckled Hen.  I already look bleary eyed and it was only lunchtime.

Anyway, once I got home I was surprised to see that I had only gained about 4 pounds but I immediately set about making up the difference.  In Scotland I walked miles and miles each day but once back in Montana, I only walked about an hour a day - my normal exercise - and still ate and drank like I was on holiday.  Hey, my body got used to a certain lifestyle and didn't want to quit.  I decided that it was time to pull out the big guns.  I started using livestrong.com again.  It had worked a couple of years ago when I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes and helped me drop about 30 pounds. 

The catch is that I have to write down everything I eat.  Everything.  The website uses My Plate calculations and reminds you how much you still are allowed to eat for the day.  BONUS!  If you exercise, My Plate adds calories to your day and YOU CAN EAT MORE.  Yay!  So, after about a week and a half, I am a couple of pounds lighter and I feel better already...OK, I feel smug and virtuous...but seeing all the junk you eat in black and white really does make you think about what you're putting in your mouth.

Of course, I still have a glass of wine in the evening - carefully calculated - and I can't say that I've faced much hardship holding my caloric intake to 1750 calories, especially if I burn a few hundred calories in exercising each day.  The problem that I see in the future is Old Man Winter and his curtailment of my outdoor activities.  Guess that's why I keep the gym membership even though I rarely use it in nice weather. 

Walking in Scotland

  I recently took a trip to Scotland with three other women and had a great time.  We drove, we ferried, we hiked, we looked at castles and it was all wonderful.  We walked miles everyday, altogether and in pairs, depending on our interests of that particular day.  The walks that I cherish most, however, are the two days that I was entirely alone walking around Stirling and around Edinburgh.  Those were the days that I truly got the Scottish experience and the excitement of being on my own in a foreign place.
A week ago I was in Edinburgh  and I walked all day by myself.  Two of my companions were on a birding expedition to North Berwick on the coast, and the other was exploring the city on her own.  We all had very different interests and ideas so we amicably parted and headed out on our own.

Edinburgh is the most walkable city I've ever visited.  From the New Town to the Old Town, from Holyroodhouse Palace to Edinburgh Castle, you can walk for hours and be vastly entertained.  I started from our hotel in New Town and walked up Calton Hill, a rather steep walk that paid off with gorgeous views out over the city in all directions.  To the north and east was the Firth of Forth and the North Sea stretching beyond the New Town full of regimented Georgian crescents.

To the south and west from Calton Hill I could look across the Old Town with its spires and castle looming on the horizon.  Each view seemed unique to two separate cities, which in fact is true.  Edinburgh is divided into the old and new, but the two sides live in splendid harmony.

I walked down Calton Hill and over to Old Town to the Royal Mile, a street teeming with shops and tourists.  The walk up the steep hill was almost like a pilgrimage as I passed traditional Scottish pubs and shops along with the kitschy tourist shops featuring 'Scottish' icons made in Malaysia or China.  I talked to one local shop owner who had been in the same location on the Royal Mile for 34 years.  She bemoaned the fact that local businesses were being run out of town by the less scrupulous sellers of foreign goods passing off as true Scottish merchandise.  It's the same in the U.S.  What we don't manufacture ourselves is outsourced and comes back as another example of a loss for our economy.  It appears to be a smaller world than I thought.




I finally trudged up the Royal Mile past St. Giles Cathedral, the statue of David Hume with his shiny big toe (it's supposed to be good luck to reach up and rub Sir David's toe - of course, I did that every time I passed him), and the Esplanade.  The street got tighter and narrower and I could envision the defensive measures that would be successful in such tight quarters just below the Castle.  The castle itself was immense and impressive on its volcanic crag.  The views were spectacular and I was fortunate to have a sunny day - a rarity on our trip - to enjoy those views.

I also got a lot of views of tourists, hopefully having as much fun as I was.  The crowds were unavoidable, but I chalked it up to the consequences of being in a big city and let the common attitude of enjoyment wash over and around me.  Nothing spoiled my day and I struck up conversations with anyone who stood next to me - a shared series of moments. 

After the castle I walked down to the Lawnmarket where I sat for a while and had tea and a fruity scone.  I loved ordering a 'fruity scone' and it was delicious.  I found a yarn shop just off the Lawnmarket and bought three skeins of Harris Tweed.  This will look great as a sweater vest.  The Old Town is rather hilly and has a lot of steep, narrow closes that are the old streets of the town.  When I say narrow - I mean narrow.  You could probably get a small cart and horse down one, but I don't know what altercation would have occurred if  TWO carts met on those tiny thoroughfares.  Bedlam and much shouting, I'm sure.

I went on a tour of these leftover underground closes - created when entrepreneurs and city fathers needed to build on street level with the Royal Mile.  How did they do this, you ask?  They chopped off the existing buildings and built on TOP of them.  This left tiny dark ex-streets underneath the newer part of Old Town.  What did the poor schmucks do who were living in the chopped-off buildings?  They got shoved into other tenements or relocated to the New Town down at the bottom of the hill.  Ah, Progress.

Oh, one other disgusting fact about the narrow streets of Old Town.  Before the age of plumbing, the city legislated a time of day when it was permissible to throw out the contents of your chamberpots.  These contents were thrown out the window ONTO THE STREET where the rain eventually washed it down to a loch at the bottom of the hill.  Well.  By the late 17th century, this loch was the town cesspool which the city fathers drained to create Prince's Street Gardens.  Beautiful gardens...and well fertilized.

After digesting all the fun facts of medieval life, I walked through said gardens and spent a couple of hours at the Scottish National Gallery.  Fabulous art, Old Masters and lots of Italian teenagers on what looked to be a painting scavenger hunt.  They shoved their way forward of more discerning art critics - ahem, I mean me - and frantically wrote down the details of the paintings on what looked like a class test.  I was getting a little tired by then, so I'm afraid I wasn't as tolerant of youthful studies as I should have been.  I wandered around New Town for a while searching for the Mecca of All Mysteries - The Oxford Bar made famous by mystery writer Ian Rankin as a favorite haunt of John Rebus, Detective Inspector.  I've read all of the Rebus novels and had to see what the Oxford Bar looked like in reality.  Well, it looks like a bar.  Not a traditional pub of imagination, but a neighborhood bar. 

I snagged a half-pint of Belhaven's Best from the young bartender as well as a bag of crisps (chips to you Yanks) and sat down to sink in the atmosphere - and to rest my swollen ankles.  Yeah, beer and chips are good for that.  There was one other patron - a businessman drinking his pint and looking through a newspaper.  I searched around for signs of Rankin or Rebus and did find a couple of framed newspaper articles.  Granted, it was 4:00 in the afternoon, so the place wasn't exactly jumping.  I did get a good rest and I caught up on my journal.

By the time I rested and was ready to go, it was raining a little, so I walked all the way down Prince's Street past the famous and not so famous shops inserted into Georgian houses.  I drank in the architecture and filed it away, hoping someday to return to Edinburgh to continue my walk.