Whatta Fiasco

This weekend was a new fencing tournament sponsored by a local fencing club. Double bonus points in that it was held about a mile from my house. (Negative points for all the local fencers who couldn’t make it to a local tournament when those same fencers so often seem to nag me about when and where they can compete. Oy.)

In the end I drug myself out of bed and cheered on two of our foilists on Saturday. (Two other club members drove in from KC as well, just to watch.) They had a decent turn out and a C1 event. Our fencers went out in the round of eight but didn’t have a bad day all told.

On Sunday there were two of us from the club fencing in a very small mixed epee event. With one more fencer we would have had to pools of five. Instead we did a grand pool of nine, which certainly got us our money’s worth of fencing. And there were a number of folks I hadn’t fenced before, so I got to fence all of them, which as both good and bad.

So, how did I do? I had one 5-0 victory in pools, my first in competition so far as I can recall. I had two 4-5 losses, and the rest were onesies and twosies. The only person I didn’t get a touch against was the eventual winner. That bout was a 1-5 loss for me, but only because he got a red card for weapon failure. I don’t like those, but it’s part of the game. And then I lost my first DE to the guy I had beaten 5-0 in pools.

It all felt pretty crappy at the time, and for a good few hours afterward. But it wasn’t a wasted effort. I was fencing intentionally and planning the whole time. The guy I never actually got a touch on? He was a couple of inches over six feet, all gangly arms and legs with excellent speed and extension. A very tall flying spider monkey. I managed to maneuver him into backing up and folding himself into a ball – and then missed landing the actual touch. Whereupon he replaced and hit me. That was the most glorious in a series of failed touches. It was something of a theme.

The fencing brain is most definitely there, but the execution isn’t quite up to snuff at the moment. I can’t even really blame my knee, because it wasn’t bothering me and it didn’t prevent me from carrying out any of the plans I made, even if a lack of confidence in it may have limited some of those plans. I can blame a certain lack of emotional toughness. The sheer weight of all those losses interfered with my focus during my direct elimination bout. You’d think with my extensive experience this wouldn’t be a problem, but it still is. It’s still on my hit list.

The good news is that once I’ve had time to settle down, it’s easy to remember how much fun I was having. And if it wasn’t fun, I wouldn’t still be doing it. The other good news is that my club mate tied for third and appears to have earned his E2006. Good for him! And now to get ready for another small tournament next weekend.

In case you missed the news, Mike Ford died recently and I realized I hadn’t ever read any of his books. This is part of correcting that.

The back cover blurb brings up an almost inevitable comparison to Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and there are many similarities. The story follows a group of bright young people on the cusp of adulthood living in a Lunar colony that is in the process of determining what to do with ideas of independence. Beyond that, it’s a completely different book.

The biggest difference you’ll notice is structural: the book is not divided into chapters or sections. Scenes shift radically without so much as the breathing space afforded by a blank line. It’s the literary equivalent of MTV editing. But it works. And by the end of the book the prose pulls itself together and takes flight. Lovely.

Growing Up Weightless

One of the good things about a collection of short stories is that you can nibble it in small, story-sized bites. This is useful for someone with a tendency to multitask their book reading. And when the collection is especially good, it can be tempting to pause longer and longer between bites to prolong the reading. That also lets you digest each story separately, giving each its due. It took me a long time to finish this collection and that was a happy thing. It was well worth it.

As of yesterday, I’ve been keeping an on-line journal in one place or another for eight years. (Ho hum.) Which reminds me that I need to continue moving the old posts over to the new database.

Other than that, it was a decent weekend. Scheduling weirdness resulted in me spending a couple of hours waiting around on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, but in recompense I got to spend time with the god kids and got to cook a puzzle solving pizza in a nice kitchen. The puzzle involved how to make pizza without any yeast in the house and the store is far enough away that if you drive to it, you might as well go ahead and eat out. So I used a biscuit dough for the crust. To keep it from being ridiculous, I used one part buckwheat flour to three parts white flour, overworked the dough slightly, pricked the crust, and used a chunky sauce. The buckwheat makes for a gray crust which some might find a bit off-putting. But the boy chowed down on it and it wasn’t bad at all for a field expedient.

Sunday was as gray as the buckwheat biscuit crust, but much wetter. I kept the cat company at home while catching up on some reading and some movie watching. (And I noticed a Pillsbury ad for biscuit pizza dough. Huh.) I even spent some time playing my mandolin. I was afraid all those baby calluses would have disappeared during the trip to Memphis, but I’m still doing a decent job of picking out melodies and having fun.

Several of my coworkers like to stop and see what I’m reading over lunch. If it’s nonfiction and over five hundred pages in length, I’ll invariably get a comment on how the book looks intimidating or “too smart” for the commenter. This one was no exception, but it’s not a book that anyone who can make it through a newspaper should feel intimidated by. Which isn’t to say that it’s something you’re necessarily going to enjoy reading. I found it terribly depressing.

Reading about the failure of ancient and/or distant civilizations can be quite sad. Reading similar stories of impending disasters in the here and now is horrifying.

Sex, drugs, and violence in Paris. It’s another bank heist gone terribly wrong. Eric Stoltz (good heavens, he’s been in a lot of movies I’ve seen) and Julie Delpy (she was in But I’m a Cheerleader? good grief) were gorgeous, and Jean-Hugues Anglade is wonderfully dark and broken.

The dog that barks ferociously when you’ve shown up on time but his owner hasn’t, can turn out to be a big snuggly fur ball who would be much happier if you stayed and played with him instead of spending eight hours or more on the road.

Driving eight hours after putting in a full day of work can be pretty sucky. Being a passenger in a van being driven by someone who is slapping himself on the face after seven hours of driving after a full day of work makes you glad for rumble strips and keeps you awake. I very much wanted to offer to drive, but there were reasons not to. And we made it to Memphis by a little after midnight.

I started the morning by hearing about a fire downtown as I was riding down in the elevator to find some breakfast. Downtown Memphis isn’t very big and the fire was a block away. My club mates had an excellent view of the burning church from their hotel room window. A fire in downtown Memphis makes a mess of the roads and shuts down the trolley completely. But so far as I know, no one got hurt.

Fencing when you really aren’t sure if your sprained knee is healed yet isn’t all that much fun, but you can make it as good as you can. And it’s possible to enjoy yourself, even while wishing you were a better fencer. Maestro even came over to watch one of my bouts (my worst bout of the day, naturally) and gave me some good advice. Having club mates there to cheer you on is pretty cool.

Cheering for your club mates while they fence in their events is also cool. Rushing to get their weapons fixed so they aren’t left without a working epee in the middle of an event is nerve wracking but satisfying.

Brazilian steak houses can be a satisfying source of too much protein. Mmmm. Lamb. Being able to walk there and back from the hotel was almost as good.

If you want to see the famous ducks at the Peabody Hotel, get there well before show time. If you get to the hotel five minutes before the ducks do their duck thing, you won’t be able to see them for all the crowds. At least, that was our experience on a Saturday morning. Please don’t let your kids chase the ducks! It makes me want to throttle them. (The kids, that is.) Luckily, they (the ducks) only have to spend three months being paparazzi victims before rotating out of the duty.

In all twelve pool bouts and two direct elimination bouts I fenced this weekend, my opponents were all people I hadn’t fenced before. That was fun. And there are a number of them I’d very much enjoy fencing again.

I’m very much hoping to make it to the veteran’s event in December but I’ll need to keep an eye on production schedules at work.

It’s a terribly depressing libretto. An American sailor takes a young Japanese bride, knowing full well that he intends to desert her. Three years later he returns with his American bride to take away his son who was born after he left. He is wracked with remorse when he realizes that Madama Butterfly has been faithfully waiting for him to show up and complete the betrayal. He offers money. She kills herself. And it’s very difficult not to read the story as an indictment of America, and of colonialism in general.

But Puccini’s music is captivating. Soaring. Even if you’ve never willingly listened to opera, you’ll hear something you recognize. Barbara Divis (Chio-chio san aka Madama Butterfly) was really quite good. I had been anticipating outrageous bel canto soprano swooping, and she was anything but. It was quite a pleasant experience, and I overheard more than one person on the way out (clearly new to the experience) exclaiming that it didn’t take any effort at all to enjoy the performance. I thought it was an excellent choice for the first show of the season.

Oh, I did notice that the new supertitle board was wrapped up and being used as a screen for the old projection system. I know they had some problems with it last year, but I would have thought things had been straightened out by now. Or maybe it’s lower priority now they’re breaking ground on the new performing arts center.

The knee is well on its way to full recovery. I even did a full fencing practice Friday night and found reduced wind to be more of a hindrance than the knee. And yesterday I took time for a gym work out. I’m still not up to a full regular workout there, but it’s close, and my knee isn’t complaining today. This makes me happy. Other than that, it was a quiet weekend with plenty of time to read and some quality time with hubby.

No workout tonight because it’s opera night. Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Not exactly cheery stuff, but it should still be good.

I hadn’t been to a movie in the theater for some time, and that as mostly why we ended up at this one. Besides, I rather enjoy a good martial arts movie now and then. (But I could do without sitting through all those horror movie trailers. Ugh. Not my genre.) The movie is a fairly straight forward morality play. Young boy gets caught up in the ideas of glory and revenge, becoming a jerk who generates more fear than respect. Life changing event occurs. Jerk discovers the error of his ways, reconnects with life, gains the respect of both friends and enemies, and finds his greatest victory in defeat.

Along the way we get some interesting fight scenes, although I’m always wishing they didn’t do quite so much wire work. Unless you’re deliberately invoking divine powers, pushing these fights too far over the top tends to ruin it for me. And it’s such a shame, given the level of talent involved.

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