Thursday 1 July 2021

Arose, did usual things, and went for a relatively early run along West River Road

GC Prep

I ran up river, stopping twice to walk up and down flights of stairs — about 100 in each case. This is a start at building up climbing and descent leg muscles for my September hike at the Grand Canyon. Coming up the stairs racheted my heart rate up to a higher level than I get to during my customary slow run. We will see what my leg muscles tell me about the {a|de}scents in a day or so, and I will increase or not as seems wise.

Writing – Capturing ideas while running

I also succeeded in finding a way to capture ideas during my run, in line with the assignment/instructions in my Journaling course. For me the issue is that I don’t really want to interrupt my run; my plan is that after I returned, I would make notes of ideas while cooling down in the car. But I thought it would be nice if I could just press the button on my headphone set, and dictate a note. I tried that, but Siri wanted me to unlock the iPhone first, which would mean digging it out of my waist pack, which interrupts the run. So no go. But then I remembered that in the past I seem to have been able to set reminders without unlocking the phone, and so I tried capturing ideas that way. That worked — well, you have to instruct Siri in a particular way to get it to work (“Remind me to <speak note> at 2:01pm”, rather than making it a multi-part command such as “Set a reminder for 2:01pm.”). Siri silently fails to set reminders if she can’t recognize any of the input (e.g., I had a note that was simply “Raskolnikov” that didn’t get taken, but if she can get some of the note with high confidence, she’ll make a bizzare stab at getting the rest of that, and it is generally enought to remind me of what I was making a note of).

So that was a win, and when I returned to the car I jotted down the notes I remembered in a little more detail, and then looked at the reminders which reminded me of a couple of other things I forgot, which I also wrote down. So assuming I am able to keep this up, this is a big win. A lot of ideas occur to me while I run, but some I forget by the end of the run (if today was typical), and many others will be gone by the end of the day.

I am now trying to figure out how to keep these ideas around in a way that they are accessible and skimmable. My current plan is to have a document that I list them in, each having a first line with a style that causes it to show up in the table of contents that word can generate. I developed this approach long long ago in my electronic notebook, and found the ‘first line’ table of contents a really good way of scanning/recalling/accessing old material.

The backdrop for this focus on capturing and recording thoughts is twofold. One part is that that is the current charge in the Journaling class. That’s fine, but its not the main motivator, as I feel like the Journaling class is going very well. The other part is that I hope it will be a way to make more progress in the World Building class. That is, that it will provide a way I can gather fragments that can help me develop a story with a plot and characters and technological vision — which is the assignment I have that is due July 21. The second meeting of the World Building class, last night, did not go so well for me. We were supposed to write one (at first) and the 3- 5 (later on) sentences in response to images the teacher presented. I found it difficult to do that, and thought many of the other students produced excellent responses. I plan to go through their responses to each image, to get a sense of how they responded — I suspect I was sticking too close to the image and trying to develop prose that somehow explained it. But, in the meantime, it left me feeling that perhaps storywriting is not for me, and that my interest in exploring implications of future or imagined technologies may not be best pursued through fiction. Anyway, my response is that I am trying to develop a few more daily activities that will help me make progress on the world building front. The capturing and recording thought-fragments in a way that I can make effective use of them is one activity. Another activity is to read and analyze on science fiction writing — especially short stories — so that I can get a bit more of a feeling about how to produce them.

Chat and Beer ‘bump’ with C

Had a very nice mid-afternoon chat and ‘bump’ (meaning beers) with C. We discussed coming up with ideas about day trips to investigate nearby sites of geological interest. We also discussed cars a bit, and the state of hybrid and electric car technology. C and K will probably stop by this evening for a bit of cherry picking, as our tree is nearly at the optimum point for that.

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For me it is time to do a bit of piano, and then get started on dinner.