Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

After a stretch of a couple of weeks where I couldn't walk very far (or fast) without pain, I was feeling somewhat better yesterday, so walking to the Whole Foods and back was OK.

This morning I was, again, feeling better/a bit closer to what I think of as my normal. I went to Whole Foods to get a couple of things, hoping to be back before it started to rain.

It still wasn't raining at a quarter after 1, so I went out again, this time by trolley, to shop for socks at the nearest Target. They have only a small selection of clothing, but I was able to get two packages of cheap non-wool socks in different styles. Plain black for both, because the packages with colors and patterns were things like eight pairs in eight different solid colors, less than half of which I liked, or a three-pack of one pair with a black-and-white leaf pattern, one in black and yellow, and in plain black with a yellow toe.

When I got home my phone said I'd walked about 1.2 miles (which means it was probably about 8/10 of a mile) and I was feeling fine. I then took out the trash (which means a choice of two different sets of stairs, neither of which is great for my hips and knees), and that was OK, but after dinner I noticed some pain in my right foot and then hip. So, another naproxen (I had one before going out this morning), and maybe I won't go anywhere tomorrow.

cattitude and I got back from Montreal a couple of hours ago; we were there for Scintillation, a small science fiction convention organized by Jo Walton.

I mostly had a good time, despite some bits where I was having trouble connecting/finding people to hang out with, and some down moods that I suspect were due either to physiological stuff (I bruised my left thumb badly, and pain interferes with sleep) or the state of the world outside the convention. I did a lot of walking, at least by my recent standards; if this doesn't leave me miserable in the next day or two, I'm going to treat it as hip strengthening PT and increase my goal for that. ( health/exercise details )

I went to a few program item and enjoyed all of them: Friday evening Jon Singer and Teresa Nielsen Hayden talke about medieval recipes, and Sunday morning Jon and Emmet O'Brien talked about lasers, odd corners of biology (endosymbiosis is more complex than I'd realized), and the possibility of using Bose-Einstein condensates to explore how event horizons work. (They told us that it's possible to slow light down to a few meters per second in a BEC; the suggestion is to see what happens if you move said concentrate at several meters per second, i.e. faster than the speed of light inside the BEC. As far as either of them knew, this hasn't yet been tried.)

As a tribute to Ursula Le Guin, Jo decided to have an hour of people reading Le Guin's work aloud. The pre-con description had said that it would be good if other people read, but Jo was prepared to read Le Guin aloud for an hour. I emailed her last week to say I wanted to read, and mentioning a couple of specific things I was thinking of. Yesterday morning, when I walked into the Jon Singer/Emmet O'Brien mutual interview, Emmet asked if I'd be willing to be organizer for the Le Guin panel an hour later, because Jo might be dealing with other things. I said yes, of course. I decided to read "Coming of Age in Karhide," which worked well: if I'd practiced and known how long it was, I might have picked something shorter, but people enjoyed it, and I got comments afterwards from people who were pleased because they hadn't already read that story. Someone else then read "The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadahn of Derb," a delightful piece that is partly about Venice. We then got a couple of excerpts from Malafrena about what it means to work for freedom, and a few poems. (The person who read the poems wanted to read from Le Guin's version of the Tao te ching; I don't think Jo owns that.)