We finally got to go rowing here, for the first time. The high school coach lent me a very nice boat, though unfortunately it was a bit too big for me. This surprised me, since he had a few rowers my size. But I think he wanted to give me his best – which also seems odd, since he had only my word and Rudder’s (and the mute evidence of Rudder’s Empacher) that I know how to row. It felt really, really heavy, but some of that was wind and current. It was calm when we went out, but a front began to come in and it was windy when we left. Anyway, heavy rowing or not, it was wonderful being out on the water again.
(It’s also nice that for once, Rudder wrote up the travel blog entry instead of me.)
There were racing kayakers out as well. They were much faster than kayakers I’ve rowed near before. It looks like fun, and has the added advantage that they can put a boat out without help – the dock was so high that it took two people to put a rowing shell in the water, and then one had to hold it level while the other got in and put in the outside oar. Supposedly they’re getting a new, lower dock soon, though. At the moment, we can’t go out when there aren’t other rowers there, which really limits practice times.
On Sunday after the maids came, we went to the DIY (do it yourself) district so I could check out a yarn store and a bead store I’d heard about. This is another example of how shops are clustered here; the yarn store was actually general crafts including beads, then there were several other bad stores along the street in addition to the big one we’d planned to visit. The yarn selection is mostly brands I’m not familiar with, and it’s all wrapped in plastic, so I didn’t buy any – no way to know what I’d like without being able to fondle it. (Instead, I got home and placed an order with Jimmy Bean.) The bead stores were great, though – unfortunately I couldn’t find any findings (clasps, earwires, headpins) I was sure were silver, but the beads themselves were beautiful and varied, and there were some excellent prices for semiprecious stones. I think the best bargain was a string of freshwater pearls, 12″ or more long, for NT$80 – under US$3.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned that in order to prod myself into writing a bit more often, I’ve started a new project. The only thing I seem to be able to do or have any drive to do, in fiction, is just little vignettes, windows into people’s heads. I don’t know how to do anything much more complex, and haven’t gotten very far when I’ve tried. (I think part of that is because by the time I’d worked out the idea I knew enough to satisfy me and didn’t have the need to write it down.) Instead of forcing myself to write in a way that doesn’t seem natural to me, I had the idea of framing those small vignettes instead, coming up with a structure to pull them together like a string of cameos. I borrowed a bit of the idea from a master of that form. I hope to put up new pieces every day or every few days.
The idea is that there’s a metro train in a medium-sized US city, and the posts are what the various riders on the train are thinking. It’s set up as a community over at LiveJournal, in case other people want to play. I figured there might be others who would like to do five-finger writing exercises in this form, and the whole thing would be way more fun with other minds working on it. I set up a separate ID, Spoon River Rider, just so my icon wouldn’t be all over it, because that just seemed out of place. It’s set up so anyone with an LJ account can join, but I have to approve members to post. (It’s a one-time setting, not approval of each post.)
If the idea doesn’t seem to make sense and you’re really baffled by the whole idea, try reading the Spoon River Anthology. Actually, read it anyway, if you haven’t already. It’s good stuff.