The other day as I was moving my RSS feeds from Bloglines to Google Reader [1], I checked to see when was the last time I posted. Much to my shock, it had been back in August, and it was about an incident that had happened in July. All this time, I had been thinking that the last time I had posted was in September – like that wouldn’t still be a bad thing, although not as bad as it having been in August [2]. Really, not much has happened since then, and I’m sadly aware that there have been many random things I could have written about, but I didn’t. Alas – you’re all the poorer for not having experienced the wit and wisdom and bon mots that sometimes float around in my head that should be written down somewhere for posterity’s sake.

Moving forward! A wrap-up, if you will:

1. I have had to give up on the running for now. Around the end of August, I started getting awful pain in my left calf and knee which would leave me in pain for days and make the whole prospect of being active unattractive. My workouts would get shorter and fewer and farther between, which defeats the purpose. It didn’t help that the new treadmills at the gym didn’t have the same “give” that the old ones had [3]. Finally I made the switch to just using the elliptical machine and started using the arc trainer and haven’t had any pain problems since then. Better still, I’ve been able to increase my endurance on both machines. Yay for exercise!

2. You may have noticed that I haven’t done many “what I’ve been reading” -type updates lately [4]. Back in October, I thought about sitting down and doing just that, but couldn’t find the notebook I usually use to keep track of my reading. This did not bode well. Not only have I not made any notes in it since February, I hardly remember what I’ve read between then and now.

Since then I’ve finished two books, The Dragon’s Eye by Stephen King which was tense and slightly creepy and really good, and The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. It was okay, but it cheesed me off slightly – why does it seem like almost all books that are considered critical successes contain copious amounts of personal tragedy? Just once, I’d like to read a book about something happy that does really, really well and isn’t considered chicklit. Grrr… it’s a rant for another day, though.

3. Around August, someone asked if I was considering doing NaNoWriMo again this year. For a while, I really wanted to but wasn’t committed to the idea of starting something I wasn’t sure I would be able to put a good effort into. My blogging has dropped right off the last few months, which makes me sad because I enjoyed having this as a creative outlet. Plus, the more often you write the easier it is to do, and because I wasn’t blogging that often I wasn’t sure I would be able to do the 1770 words EVERY DAY for the month of November. I decided that instead commit to writting a 50,000 word novel, I would start smaller and do a short post every day – way more manageable, right?

Oh no. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had left the story from my 2006 attempt unfinished, and that there was a whole middle part I’d skipped over, and it bugged me that I didn’t really know what happened to get the cast from point A to point 3.14159 [5]. And the more I thought about it, the more I kept thinking up a story. Fast forward two more months and, yep, I reactivated my NaNo account. Today’s word count: 1954. That’s all of today’s words and almost 200 words for tomorrow. Woo!

That’s it for now. I will put an effort into posting more often, even if it’s something silly and trivial, like “today I saw a dead squirrel in the road, and I hope it was the one that ate the ONE TOMATO I got on my tomato plant this summer.”

[1] Bloglines, you have messed up my feeds for the last time! Good riddance!
[2] And since I hadn’t actually opened WP, I didn’t realize I had comments waiting for approval – sorry Sarah and Julie!
[3] Plus, they vibrate when you run and that just exacerbated the whole problem.
[4] Well, I haven’t done much updating period.
[5] This has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the post (but isn’t that the beauty of footnotes?) – my favourite cheer goes something like this:

Cosine, secant
Tangent, sine
3.14159
Gooooooo nerds!