I wish there had been more time. The amazing Amy and I went to the Asian Art Museum yesterday, where we saw the special exhibit on Indian royalty and just a teasing bit of the rest of the collections.

Men have really blown it in the adornment department. Those maharajas knew what was what. They wore silks embroidered with flowers and massive ropes of pearls. Turbans! With jeweled ornaments shaped like feathers! They had inventive facial hair and gold thread encrusted slippers. I blame the British and their proper dark suits.

“Embellish everything” might be one of the guiding principles not only of the clothing, but also the furnishings and much of the painting. Got an elephant? Get it an embroidered blanket, a headpiece with jeweled ornaments, some pompom and silver earrings, a necklace fringed with silver bells, a silver tail ornament, a silver howdah with silk cushions and a place for your parasol-holder-to-the-prince to ride behind you, and a matched elephant hook and fly whisk inlaid with hunt scenes. By the way, the hunt scene should include a tiger the size of my smallest fingernail, detailed down to the eyeballs and stripes pursuing a spotted deer of even smaller proportions. One of the elephants depicted in a parade scene had a platform balanced on his tusks so the prince could have a dancing girl right there in front of his face.

Given the level of detail involved in the art, the exhibition designers get big points for providing magnifying glasses to use in the galleries. However, this does not make up for the fact that photos were not allowed. As I’ve said numerous times, I am fine without taking photos, but there had better be a pretty darn complete collection of postcards for me to buy in the shop. Didn’t happen here. Also, having really cool pop-art stickers of various Hindu deities in the galleries and not in the shop is mean. (I wanted, but did not buy, the Chinese character blocks.)

Outside of the special exhibit, we saw some nifty baskets and pottery. I liked this piece because it reminds me of an ammonite drafted by a geometer.



Indian goddesses have things pretty good. Not only do they get magic non-sagging round breasts, but they often have an extra set or two of arms. And if that isn’t enough girl power, one must simply consider Kali, who will kick your behind several ways to Tuesday:



(Kali was in the Indian statuary gallery, so I was allowed to take her picture without fear of karmic retribution.)

Must go back and see more!

Breaking the caffeine/sugar/soda habit is not working yet. I am going with harm-reduction as a strategy for that problem in the moment while I attack a different angle of the larger problem, which is that I am a large problem! I have the success of my exercise habit to encourage me. I think I will eventually win against the Coke machine. For now, my new habit plan is to inhabit the exciting world of portion control.

The rules are pretty simple. I work best when things are simple. I have some red bowls of a reasonable size. At mealtimes, everything I eat has to fit in the bowl, no heaping allowed.

Now I realize that this method may not work if I decide to fill my bowl with ice cream three times a day. Fortunately, it is too cold out to eat ice cream. I’m not going to worry much about the content of the bowl for now. This is about adjusting my sense of full back to a reasonable level. Once I’m used to the quantity, I’ll focus in more on the quality. To be honest, I don’t think that my problem lies so much in what I’m eating; it’s all about eating too much of whatever it is.

Date night is an exception. I’m not going out with my red bowl. I can, however, choose to eat half of what I’m served. This worked last night reasonably well, although I did eat all of my dessert because it was beignets, there were two little ones, and they weren’t going to save. And, because it fit easily in my bowl, I ate the other half of my truffled grits, carmelized onions, and roasted glazed chicken for breakfast. Yummy!

It was a sad weekend in football land. I detest the Patriots for numerous reasons. And my team, my own home team, for whom I’ve had to apologize for years, reached the NFC Championship, only to lose to the Giants. Again. Sure, that last time they lost to the Giants was a long time ago, but not in my head. Of course I will still watch the Superbowl. I will hope Tom Brady gets sacked on every offensive play. I will remember that Eli is my second-favorite Manning. But it will not be The Same as having my own team in the game.

I have a bit of a post-Sunday hangover, not because I drank too much—it was an alcohol-free day at my house-- but because I spent pretty much all day sitting on my butt on the couch. My body objects to this kind of abuse nowadays. I did explain that it was raining outside and that biking was out of the question, but my body is not good with words.

Today, to get past that icky lethargic feeling, I took myself off to the gym for stationary biking (much better than no biking at all, plus I got all enthused listening to Al Green) and weightlifting. No more aggression in my body now.

And there’s always next year for my team to win it all.

Elizabeth George writes books I want to read. If I were somehow in charge of everything, she would come out with a new book immediately after I finished the previous one. (Please note: I do not advocate author abuse. I want her to live a long and healthy life. I just hope she writes lots and lots more because I like it.)

Her latest book, Believing the Lie, however, is not my favorite. I do not want to be a spoiler, but one particular plot twist and the characters’ reactions to it bothered me; I also think she cheated on the resolution of that particular plot line. Happy to discuss with anyone who has finished the book.

As an entry into the continuing saga of her main characters’ lives, however, the book is more satisfactory. Both Lynley and Havers deal with big issues. I’m a little peeved at the ending, which has nothing to do with the book-centered plot and everything to do with the recurring characters. It is a cliff-hanger of epic proportions and that’s just painful.

May she resolve that cliff-hanger soon.

I have discovered that the usual motivational tricks don’t seem to work for me. The picture of my 18-year-old self in red bikini that I had on the fridge did not make me think twice about what I put in my mouth or induce me to exercise; it just amused the kids, who did not recognize me or their dad in the picture, which was funny, but not useful. (I'm the one in the red bikini. Rick is the blond one next to me. My cousin David and his then-girlfriend Jackie are behind us and that is Lake Tahoe in the background.) The process of tracking what I do bores me more than the results motivate me, although I do like it when Heidi tells me I’ve broken a previous lifting record. As long as I don’t totally embarrass myself, I don’t have to be as whatever as the person I’m biking or lifting or walking with.

Two things seem to work. The first one is perhaps counterintuitive. I have to allow myself to be bad at whatever it is I’m doing. If I’m bad at biking, I don’t feel like I have to ride up Mount Everest at record speed without breaking a sweat on the very first day I get on a bike. Anything I do while trying something I am bad at is likely to be an improvement. As I get more competent, there will always be parts of whatever I’m doing that I’m not good at yet, so it works continuously.

In practice, this means that when I got on my bike today and found all the parts of my body that hurt from yesterday, I told myself I didn’t have to go far or fast. When I had tricked myself into going far enough that continuing on was less work than turning back, I concentrated on the part about not having to go fast. By the end, I had worked through the stiffness in my legs and my behind was back to numb rather than feeling the exact spots where the seat meets the sore bits. I did six miles and I finished fast enough.

The second thing is that whatever it is has to be enough fun. I have accepted the fact that I will never wake up in the morning thinking, “Yay! I get to lift weights today!” It is good that I can wake up saying, “Yay! I get to go spend an hour with my friend Heidi, who makes me forget I’m doing something boring!” Because biking makes me feel like a kid at recess, it works for me. I haven’t quite found the perfect thing to make gym cardio fun enough, but I can at least make the music loud.

Off to have fun being bad at things!

I would like extra bonus points for today. I have gone on two dog walks and two bike rides. The dog walks were short; Cricket and I did our early morning paper run and then after the second bike ride I chatted with my friend while he walked his two dogs. I was late to my first bike ride, so I pedaled furiously to meet another friend, had a leisurely bike-and-chat session, and then a furious dash home to stick my bike on my car for the big bike ride.

The big one was 14.5 miles. I was challenged severely by the fact that my riding buddy is taller and younger and fitter than I am. This is good for me. I hope he wasn’t too bored. He kept explaining that I’m supposed to shift gears. He’s probably right, but I understand pedaling faster and harder; I’m never quite sure what shifting gears is going to do. I will call that an area in which I should explore my potential for growth (or at least exploit the comic possibilities!).

I had to stop a few times when my heart rate redlined, but I did, eventually, pedal to the top of every @#$% hill. I am absurdly encouraged that I get to go down every hill I go up.

Now I just need to figure out where to ride tomorrow!

I’ve been thinking about habits. I read Zen Habits and I subscribe to Flylady’s emails, so even if I didn’t naturally think about habits, I’d be prompted to do so pretty darn often. I’ve often wished that more things in my life were as obvious and automatic as brushing my teeth, or that my memory habit that knows where anyone in the family happens to have left his or her shoes (it even works on my own shoes, as the only female around here who wears shoes!) could be applied to other memory tasks. My newest habit of biking as often as possible has proved resilient in spite of a six-week enforced break.

Habits of thinking are harder. They become the unexamined premises of life. Food is love, for example, might not be such a good thought habit to keep when love might actually want to go outside and play instead.

My reading habit does not necessarily have to be a book-storage habit. I’m still considering this one carefully. The easy-to-remove books are already gone from my shelves, the ones I didn’t like, or didn’t want to finish. Some of my books are beautiful objects as well as books. Do they get special treatment? Some would be hard to find again. Some remind me of particular times or places. Many I read again. What about lending? My shelves are the shelves of first resort for my kids. I just don’t know, but I suspect that more purges are coming, at least to make space for new developments.

Then there is the habit of assuming that everything is my fault. (The temptation to take the cheap shot at myself right here is strong.) It’s not an entirely bad way of thinking. If I am responsible for the things that go wrong, I have the power to change them for the better. But when I take responsibility for the interactions between other people, for example, I may be taking it all too far. What might go in that space if I opened it up?

Current habit undergoing transformation is, again, the Coke habit. It’s a little hard to pinpoint what I’m clearing out, since I struggle with both the sugar and the caffeine. Both need to go. For now, I get Excedrin for the caffeine and I can have things that aren’t sweetened with HFCS for the sugar part. I have all month to make further refinements.

While I was away, my computer complained at me about being full. Brent is trying to train me to remember the exact text of the messages my computer gives me, but so far it isn’t working: I get the gist. Normally, what I do when my computer talks to me is tell Brent and ask him to make it go away. Often, he does not make it go away, but rather gives me lots of instructions on how to do it myself. He does not understand that I keep all that knowledge in his brain on purpose.

Knowing this, I regarded this message hopefully. Full was a concept I understood. I even knew what to do to make my computer less full and it is something I generally enjoy. Fun with the trash can! All those cute little crumpled papers explode in little puffs of imaginary smoke! I could fix the problem and brag later to Brent about my amazing triumph over the gremlins lurking within my laptop!

It was very fun. I disposed of all the files I still had leftover from System 9. I tossed things I had never used, things I had never even known I had! I felt extremely virtuous as I emptied the trash that last time.

But. I happened to have had three versions of MS Office kicking around in there. I deleted two of them, smartly saving one to use! But it was the wrong one, the really old one, the really really old one. I was more than a little relieved when Word actually worked.

I had to confess to Brent rather than brag. I was duly shamed. He said he would fix it when we got home. Apparently, what he meant by that was that he would give me the disks to do the reinstallation myself. That is kind of like fixing it, but not entirely. This morning I took some deep breaths, murmured comforting words to the gremlins, and reinstalled the software All By Myself. And then the updates. And then the updates to the updates. And then the warning systems to update the updates and correct the incorrect bits and report the reporting system to the update monitor. Believe it or not, I am absurdly proud of myself for doing this.

***
In this context, then, and in the spirit of Getting Back to Work, I returned to my neglected CSS book. (This is another example of the Brent Principle of Non-Helping. “Will you help me learn CSS?” “Sure.” “When can we start?” “Why don’t you get a book…”) (Brent has very many stellar qualities, including almost infinite patience with me; I find his teaching style in my direction mostly amusing…) (And yes, I know that it is better for me to learn to do stuff myself. Sometimes I just don’t want to.)

Anyway, enough time had passed since I last opened the book that has been sitting obtrusively next to my right elbow on my desk that I felt the need to review what I had theoretically already learned. I am happy to say I remembered most of it. Also that I have absorbed the content of another chapter, but I am saving the exercises until I no longer want to kill the writers of the book.

Diagrams are useful. When one is explaining which parts of the text-like substance are which, circles and arrows come in handy. Also, if two things are at the same level of a hierarchy, do not list them as sequentially smaller parts of the whole.

I am now one chapter closer to a new blog design.

The whole purpose of my reading contest with T. was to get him to read more. That mission has been accomplished: he is a dedicated book addict who caused me to have another 20 or so pounds of luggage on the way back from Australia. Neither of us has collected on our wins in a good long while. The worst part of the whole thing has been getting him to write what he reads down. So I’m still going to keep track of what I read and will mention if he finds something so good I have to read it, too, but it is no longer a contest. If what you liked best about the book posts was what T. has read, I’m sorry; you’re stuck with me.

So, since school started, I have read 33 books and 13,907 pages. I’ve already either blogged or mentioned the most important detail (thumbs up or thumbs down) for 17 of them.

Of those remaining, T. and I both read several. We liked Brian Selznick’s Wonderstruck, but not as much as we loved Hugo Cabret.

John Flanagan has finished off the Ranger’s Apprentice series with The Lost Stories, some loosely linked short stories produced in answer to his readers’ questions. It’s about time. He has embarked on a new series called Brotherband. T. liked the first book, but I haven’t read it yet. I haven’t decided if I’m going to read it or not. I may have had enough of John Flanagan’s prose to hold me.

T. liked The Clockwork Three, but I really loved it. This is explained by the fact that while there are adventures and a sort of quest, the book is pretty much a fairy tale about three friends. Bonus gold stars for an ending that did not meet up with every standard of the genre.

We like Rick Riordan. We like him enough that we would probably enjoy reading his grocery list (2 yams large enough to eat Manhattan, 1 gallon milk, preferably cow rather than yak, Q-tips of doom…). Fortunately, he wrote another book we got to read instead. Read Son of Neptune, but read all the rest of his books first. Be aware: these books are like crack; you may not leave your house again until you have finished them all.

As I was reading Jasper Fforde’s most recent Thursday Next book, I kept thinking that T. would like his work. My only question was whether T. had read enough of the books referred to in the books to understand what was going on and to find it funny. In answer to this thought, Jasper kindly put two books in the store in the YA section, The Last Dragonslayer and The Song of the Quarkbeast. They are just as clever and outrageously funny as all his other books, but knowing how to read is the only prerequisite to enjoyment. When you are done reading all of Rick Riordan’s books, start on Jasper Fforde’s. (His grocery list might run to things like Dodo snacks and Ex-Lax for constipated wizards…).

In school, T. read several O. Henry stories. I hadn’t read any since maybe middle school, but I came across The Best Short Stories of O. Henry and plunged in to see what I thought now. T. was not impressed. I understand why, now that I’ve reread. He is masterful at the concluding twist, but all the stories are the same. Perhaps the book is now the literary equivalent of a charm bracelet—out of fashion, but interesting in its way (please note that I love charm bracelets, fashion or no.) as an artifact of a particular time and place.

Wildwood is a book we bought in Sydney for both of us to read. For a change, I got to go first. I think T. will like it, at least partly for the coyote army and the cannons. I liked it because it’s a great story with smart characters who have to figure things out. Also because it is about the areas of the map where the unknown is.

I have had several E. Nesbit books on my shelf for a long time. They come in free e-book form, so I downloaded the lot to my iPad and devoured The Wouldbegoods, New Treasure Seekers, and Five Children and It. I think T. would have liked the stories when he was younger because the children get into some lovely troubles. I have two more left, but I’m saving them for a gloomy day. That concludes my reading in the kid and young adult realm for the moment.

I finished Careless in Red and prepared to be sad. It was my last novel-length Elizabeth George novel. She’s a genius. And, fortunately for me, her next book is coming out in six days. I love it when authors get my psychic messages.

My reading of Trollope continues slowly. I finished The Kellys and the O’Kellys. There were plenty of good Victorian problems and an ending full of weddings. It stays on the shelf. I can’t think of a person I would buy it for, but there is probably someone out there.

At a used book sale, a copy of The Lacuna insisted that I buy it because it was a hardback book, I wanted to read it, and it was a buck. More than worth the investment of a dollar (and almost as good a deal as the copy of Underworld I scored for a quarter at a library book sale!). It was fascinating! What’s not to like about a book with painters, writers, and communists? And, of course, really nice prose.

Finally, I read The Christian Agnostic. It is out of print. I expect this is because of the psychic leanings of the author. The person who recommended it to me did not remember that part, but rather the part where the book talks about the conflict between traditional church liturgy and services and rational thought. It did not help me through my current spiritual issues, but it is an interesting examination of the problem.

Until I read something else, this is it!

We are home. The welcome bit was perhaps slightly marred by the fact that some part of the water heater decided to fail while we were away. Hot showers are essential after ten zillion hours in an airplane. Two pieces of good news: Brent is a genius, so it is better now and we belong to a gym with excellent hot showers.

I traded T.R. for Cricket yesterday. T. was ecstatic to see his dad and Cricket and I are happy to snuggle peacefully on the couch again.

The suitcases are unpacked. The laundry is done. We have food in the house.

I still have a chunk of stuff to sort out in my office (where am I going to fit all these new books?), but that’s a good problem. Photos to sort and prints to order! Albums to make! Spiffy new postcards to display!

Best of all: I rode my bike. Because my body is still catching up with itself after that whole changing-continents thing, I had to do some serious prodding to get myself out the door. I told myself I did not have to go far. In the first block, I was sure I wasn’t going to go far. By the third block, I had a grin plastered on my face and knew I was going to do my usual six mile circuit. It was harder work than usual, especially the last part, but I did it!

One final note: I wore my Uggs out in public and my kids did not, in fact, die of shame. And my feet are very happy.