ursamajor | this is just to say

If William Carlos Williams could not only come over and help us out with the plums in the icebox, but the hundred-odd plums that are falling off our neighbors' tree into our yard on a daily basis, and have been for the last several weeks? We'd welcome him. We can't keep up. We really need to buy a net or something for next year, rig up some kind of system to catch them so they don't go splat. We've been retrieving the ones that survive the fall, and cleaning up after the ones that don't, but it's kind of a lot.

Our neighbors have a lovely mature plum tree in their backyard that drops tiny clingstone plums beginning in late July/early August, smaller than ping pong balls. They can be eaten raw, or they can be boiled down into something between a jam, a sauce, and a compote, straining the pits out afterwards. But honestly, running out of ideas. (On toast! with yogurt! Baked into a cake! As a side sauce for roasted meat ...) Probably I should get over being scared of Proper Canning (boiling jars! loud popping noises!) so that we can more safely preserve the jam for later in the year. It would be lovely to eat, say, hamantaschen with hyperlocal plum preserves we made ourselves! But what we've got is both too thin to work for that, yet permanently boiled onto one of the pots. Ah well.

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Other than the plum-pocalypse, late summer carries on. Choir has begun, and there are intriguing rumors of a more challenging small-group chamber choir to audition for. Repertoire-wise, this year involves ... not a lot of new-to-me music; if I hadn't been sick in April, it would have been a very good year to add on a second choir with more challenging rep. Ah, well. I am delighted that we will have an a cappella piece during the spring concert; I do miss that, being in an orchestral choir.

I survived the Giant Run, though it was much warmer than previous conditions, and in direct sun the entire time, so I did not remotely PR, hahaha. But my intervals are improving; this week, I am actually jogging more than I'm walking; 3 min jogging to 2 min walking.

hyounpark looked at the C25K plan I was following, had similar-but-more-informed qualms about how it suddenly ramped up around week 5 or 6, and mathed out a slightly different plan. If there's one thing I've absorbed from him about running over the decades, it's that increasing your mileage/efforts more than about 10% per week is a decent injury risk. So adding 30 seconds of jogging to my intervals in previous weeks has felt manageable; adding 60 seconds this week felt intimidating, but that I've handled it so far? Feels like an accomplishment in and of itself, so I'll take it. And yeah, I know, math says that as the absolute numbers get bigger, 10% of said absolute number gets bigger, too; at some point this means the interval will go up by two minutes! Then five minutes! By which point I'm hoping to be able to run for 20, 30, 45 minutes in a row; be able to run an entire 5k in that time. H thinks this is doable - I mean, I'm mostly-walking 5ks in 50 minutes right now, and my jogging intervals are in the 12-14 minute mile range right now. I have eventual goals of 10-minute miles, a 30-minute 5k. Maybe even a 10k next year; there's a lovely one up in the redwoods in May where the 10k is the shortest distance.

I can feel the improvements in both my biking and singing, and I think it's because I'm treating this as something to track my improvements on? My love for biking and singing is far more long-standing, far more intuitive. Right now, I find jogging reasonably tolerable; the joy is coming from spending time with H doing something he loves, and from seeing concrete results that it is giving me a more functional body. If literally the only thing that happens bodywise is that I gain better breath control? I'll be a happy camper.

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Choosing my icon for this post made me wonder how much US stamps cost now, and they are up to 73 cents, heh. Maybe I will make an updated version of this icon and reverse the 3 and 7!