Lifeguarding

My lifeguarding class is nearly all teens, including teens who have reached the age of majority, and I thought I had identified myself as an adult woman but I guess a lot of the teens didn't notice. So having them discover it was a bit of an embarrassing episode. No one has ever in my life thought I was my own age or older; I should have a medical alert bracelet made. They immeiately asked me about SAT scores, alcohol, and college, and I think I was a fairly good example on all counts. Since then I have been thinking about how much my life sounds like youthful imaginings. There's the whole trope of a camp boyfriend/Canadian girlfriend. I have an alive boyfriend, and we lived together for six months after he graduated college, but he lives in Boston. Now I just mail him sauerkraut and he mails me sweaters.

When I first left highschool for college I had a horror of being put back in high school or elementary school. I would have nightmares about it and everything. But now in my lifeguarding course I have a former juvenile hall teacher yelling things at me about responsibility and whatever, and it feels okay.

Lifeguard Cert Class

Usually everything interesting in my life is art-related, but not the Lifeguard Certification course I've just joined. The instructor asked us all to write down why we wanted to be a lifeguard, so I wrote about the drownings in Louisiana that made me decide I had a responsibility to be able to save swimmers. A large family was picnicking on a riverbank. None of the children or adults could swim, so when one teen fell off an underwater drop-off, several more followed to try to save him, and drowned too. I looked into it, and learned that it is unsafe to save a drowning person because in their desperation they will drown you if they are able, and that is when I knew I would have to be formally trained. The five allotted minutes passed faster than expected so I finished with, "I don't want to be helpless."

Almost all of the teens wrote that they want to be lifeguards because they love to swim and want to help people, and want a summer job. Oh. I honestly did not think of that. Swimming is my favorite exercise, but lifeguarding is sitting in a chair in the sun.

These teens have been in school all day, and now they are taking a 3 hour swimming + lecture class for 50 hours in two weeks. We get out at 9:30, and we got homework for tomorrow (but it's just reading). When will they do the homework? Teenagers are amazing! I was amazing in that indefatigable way as well. Get up at 7am to go to high school, bike to second high school for special class, bike back to first high school, then after school were committees to help the school, fitness club, or special-interest community college class. "peaking in high school" is for athletes, not students who spend all of their time reading and inventing weird little projects, but that was my peak to date for spending my waking hours progressing toward external, measurable goals.

Massachusetts Wishlist

These are the neatest things I know of in Massachusetts:

The Mapparium- A three-story stained glass globe visitors can walk through. It's a whisper gallery and since it was built in 1935 it's a time capsule of political borders and country names. 

The Glass Flowers at Harvard- these have been on my wishlist for years and years, so long that contemplating them doesn't fill me with wonder anymore, but I'm sure in person it will.

 The Edward Gorey House (a museum) plus topical letterboxes.

Travel In The TARDIS- a 20 box Doctor Who letterboxing series carved by several different people (not linking because the box is restricted). I would get to find 20 stamps on just a 4 mile hike! In the New England woods! Fairy tale woods!  I slightly hate the boxer who commented "Amazing series!!! Interesting characters, I think I may need to check this show out!!!" on this series. 

Casey- a 23 year old research assistant who is always up for adventures (shown here at Yellowstone, WY) provided they're safe and well-researched. He is lovely, but he's not 3,000 glass flowers; he can travel to California perfectly well. 

Today in LDRs

This year my boyfriend took up knitting, hardcore. We're long distance, and he's in Boston freezing and sitting by the fire wearing thrummed mittens and knitting me all this stuff and I'm in California in a T shirt making ice coffees and spritzing myself with water and not knitting him anything. So, these took a while.

Here I am in a flattering SF sunset wearing a scarf he knit with the same design. The pattern is from LeesyKnits, and it is just so cute.

It's necessarily knit from the feet up- the hedgehog spikes are single stitch checkerboard, and it doesn't look cute knit from the top down. 

I made an infographic!

This week I realized that humans are the largest primate, and not gorillas. I was so excited that I started researching mid sized megafauna which might be surprisingly smaller than humans. Right now I have access to my dad's graphic design computer (+knowledge) so I got to make this in Illustrator and I like it a lot. And I got to use Dawn's tablet! 

My dad told me to sketch in a very rough shape and then refine it afterwards, which he demonstrated by drawing a basically perfect great white in 0 seconds and then correcting one fin. (it's not in this image because the bottom of their range is 200 lbs above the top of the human range. I guess the small great whites I have seen in photos were juveniles) This took me four days, because at first when I got a tiny bit fatigued with refining lines my stylus control would fall apart.

The roughed-in first go animals were just a malformed mess, but this lion looks pretty good to me.

The 100 Push-Up Challenge

 I am doing the 100 push-ups challenge, where you do small sets of push-ups every other day until you can do two sets of 50, at which point you can probably do one set of 100, or are nearly there. I am doing the easiest tier, and I am pretty good at it. Every couple of weeks you do as many push-ups as you can to make sure you are still on the right tier. It's called an exhaustion test.  Yesterday I did my exhaustion test and I got 5. I thought that was pretty bad, but later I remembered I had already done the set of 5, 5, 7, 5, max. "Am I tired now? Is that too many? Am I okay?" gets me enormously fewer push-ups than "Okay, now do 5 again."

I didn't really re-read the directions for an exhaustion test, but I think next time I will just try for 100 and see if I get to 12 or something.

Relatedly, the "max" push-ups I can do after my little sets is always zero, which seems fine to me because look, I did 22 push-ups tonight! But I will enter it into my calendar as the recommended minimum.

I Dress Myself Correctly!

When I was younger my mom got me a The Color Analyst session, where a lady fawned over me and held up any number of scarves in different palettes to show what looked good and didn't look good, and then she gave me a little printed palette to compare to my wardrobe (so that I could discard non-matches) and take with me when I go shopping. (Also there were some great panels painted brown, blue, and two other colors that show whether you are warm or cool toned when you put your hand in front of them and your hand blends or pops out.)The idea is that you will be empowered when you easily look your best every day in flattering colors that coordinate with everything in your closet. I am not used to fawning, I mean I cut my own hair and do my own nails. So it was kind of nice, and kind of weird. I could tell that she could have spent 5 minutes doing the consultation, but then it wouldn't be engaging me and showing me how gaunt and pallid I can look if I wear black or orange. I keep the palette in my purse sometimes but I don't consult it when shopping. I got it out today, and compared it to the things around me, and I found that I am doing pretty good.

I even have a bunch of blue things like I am supposed to, even though I don't like artificial blue, because it is so easy to find blue things. This prescriptivist stuff reminds me of my little rant about the enormous percentage of women who are supposedly wearing the wrong bra size, because a bra fitting will yield a different size than the one she wore to the fitting. I wear the right everything size! I would know if I wasn't wearing the right everything size!