Fatigue

My apologies for not updating the blog yesterday. Yes, my string of one-post-a-days has come to an end. Two days ago - Saturday - we drove about 300 miles to my mother's house, and on the exact same day drove 300 miles back, so that the cats would not get lonely. (Or at least, wonder where the foodbringers went?) That's 10 hours in a car, ladies and gentlemen, and the next day neither of us were good for much of anything.

As my pillow hit the bed, I told myself "You know what? I owe a blog post." But I was just too damned tired. I cursed fatigue and went right on to sleep.

The fatigue is not merely a product of the long trip. In my present weight-loss regimen, I've been trying to work out about five days a week or so. One of the devices I use is a treadmill at work. This treadmill has an aerobic setting where the goal is to get one's heart rate up to 140 beats per minute. The first week I worked with the machine, it wasn't a problem - I did this for thirty minutes. The next week, I increased the time to 35 minutes, also with no problem.

However, last week I set the machine at 40 minutes - and could not get my heart rate about 140. The two days I managed to contribute 40 minutes with a (mostly) 140 beat/minute heartbeat left me wiped out for the following days. I only worked out 20 minutes on Wednesday and Thursday, with nothing at all on Friday. I felt like a dead man walking during the latter half of the week.

As for mental fatigue, well, I have HHoF to provide some respite. But not recently. I'm about four or so installments ahead of my beta reader, and I've been working and revising various parts. I have a loose outline with which I work - keeping in mind certain things I'd like to see happen in each chapter. Generally, a chapter takes about 13-20 K as a text file.

The biggest a story has ever been is 39 K. The visit to the Fielding campus for unforced labor was that big. The trip to Atlanta was that big. And now, I have a story that is 74 K. And it is still not finished. What the hell? What am I thinking? The only person who writes stories that long is TAG, and I'm not as good as TAG is. Who is going to sit through 74 K of something?

Spanish women's basketball starts on October 10th. College ball starts in November. It's going to be a busy winter.

By the way, about "True Prep?" I read that - out loud - to Ruth to and from my mother's house. It's about 250 pages, and around 230 of them were read out loud. If you want to know my list of HHoF reference material, that list would include:

The Official Preppy Handbook by Lisa Birnbaum
True Prep by Lisa Birnbaum
The Debutante's Guide to Life by Cornelia Guest
Class by Paul Fussell
The Prep School Cafe at College Confidential

True Prep is scary, particularly given its list of prep school grads. Did you know Barack Obama and John McCain both went to prep school? You couldn't swing a stick in Washington without knocking someone's class tie off.

There! I think it would be easier to build a prep school from pine and twine and attend it for twelve years than to commit all that to memory. Although, reading me botch it up shall be hilarious to one and all.