To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Oh my God. The city is planning to build a rink in my neighborhood. I literally live ten minutes, if that, from the proposed site. AHHHHHHHH.

Other skating things: Flist, it is time for you to help me choose music again. I'm planning to compete in the competition put on by the rival skating club in town in late April. I could just use the Amelie music again, since I'll be competing in the same division, but I had fun choreographing with P and kind of want to do it again. Here are the other options.

It snowed, sleeted, and freezing rained last night, changing over to rain sometime early in the morning. The ice from earlier this week is half-melted, many storm drains are blocked, and we are now under a flood watch.

Well done, Nashville.

More pictures from Tuesday (when it was icy and sunny) are on Flickr.

Since the rain had changed everything on the side roads to slush and the main roads were clear (if full of standing water), I was finally able to skate this morning for the first time in over a week. I think B somehow sharpened more rocker into my blades, because I got a good pop off some waltz jumps--the kind that usually takes a lot of effort--without even really thinking about it. I also had more pop off the Salchow.

Not much else changed from the last time. I'm still spinning on my toe pick. Really good checking on my three turn pattern is still a distant dream. Backspin is maybe a bit closer to actually getting all the way around before I bail. P did get me to go about 3/4 of the way around on each lobe of the outside circle 8, which is better than I'd been doing before.

In other news, I may be writing Agent Carter fic that's trying to turn plotty on me, but I don't know enough about the Captain America 'verse to know exactly what to plot. I think it's time to invent a bad guy/bad organization.

My actual root canal this morning was actually much less exciting than the "getting numb" part. I warned the endodontist that it takes "kill an elephant" quantities of anesthetic to numb my mouth, and he responded by doubling his usual dosage. Which gave me a mild reaction from the epinephrine used in the solution to make it last longer, but at least that was over after a few minutes of trembling and feeling sick.

Still wasn't numb, though. He gave me more, waited for it to sink in, started drilling. ABORT ABORT ABORT. He gave me a worried look, said I was already almost at the maximum, and made noises about getting one of the other dentists in the practice to put me under for this procedure. Then he gave me one last shot in the roof of my mouth--he said this was all he could give me before dire side effects could occur, and if it didn't work I was definitely going to have to be put to sleep--which luckily did the trick. (The dental assistant claimed I would be numb for hours and hours after it was over. Yeah, it started wearing off on the drive home. I definitely suspect I have this mutated gene.)

I must ask my regular dentist if he shoots me up in a different place than normal or if after fifteen years of experience with me he just pegs my dosage at the maximum right off without fiddling around with normal amounts, so I can give better instructions to new people.

After that, it was really only about twenty minutes of drilling and poking and pouring bleach down the empty canals (seriously, it smelled like a swimming pool even through the dental dam), all of which I could vaguely tell was going on but at least didn't hurt. The process of how a root canal is done is actually rather fascinating (they fill the empty root canals with gutta-percha! How very Victorian!), but I must admit I wasn't keen on getting a blow by blow description while it was happening to me.

It definitely seems to have fixed a lot of my problems, anyway. I'm still on massive amounts of ibuprofen and the odd half a hydrocodone because my gums are swollen to twice their normal size again, and I still can't chew anything tougher than an overcooked noodle on that side, but at least my tooth no longer hurts when I so much as touch my tongue to it, or when my cheek rests against the rim of real tooth exposed above my temporary crown. And the pressure under the crown is gone too, which is a major relief. They reseated my temp more comfortably, as well, and my bite feels less off than it did before. I should, they say, be back to normal in a week and then I can get the permanent crown.

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In other news, this weekend I went to Music City Crepes, which is the closest I've come to those awesome food truck crepes in Paris. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure anything here could quite compare to a warm gob of Nutella wrapped in pastry on a freezing spring Parisian night, though. Anyway, these guys could use more Nutella in their Nutella crepe, but the veggie crepe with mushrooms, black olives, pesto, and spinach was delicious. I will definitely be going back sometime.

I also saw a bottle of real maple syrup there for much less than grocery stores usually charge, so now it is mine and it is delicious.

As promised, photos from my expedition the other day. We just missed the peak fall foliage there; it was perfect in the yard, but the lake is a tiny bit colder and thus a tiny bit further along, apparently. Plus the dry summer didn't make for the most spectacular colors. Still, there were pretties to be photographed, and there's a setting on my camera that gives yellow leaves a nice glow. My graduated neutral density filter helps a lot as well.





( 20 total under the cut )

Meme from all over:

If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach. -- Alfred Hitchcock, 1899 - 1980

If I wrote fic/drew art/vidded/folded origami/etc today, the readers/viewers would immediately be looking for... what?

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This is happening in a few weeks. I'm tempted to go--hey, free admission!--but these things always wind up disappointing me. I think I didn't get the "appreciation for live music" gene. I like to be doing something else while I listen to music, or else I just get bored. Plus, bugs and heat. Maybe I'll just stay home and listen to YouTube videos of these artists? The Quebecois band is very cool, as is the East African dude.

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More music recs! All of one artist, this time, because I have had a bit of a Natalie Merchant renaissance. (I was such a huge fan in middle school and high school. Tigerlily was one of my very first album purchases, and I wore that CD out.)

Apparently she gave up writing original lyrics sometime in the past ten years, because after an album of folk songs, last year she set a bunch of children's poetry to music. Thankfully, by "children's poetry," I mean "poetry about or aimed at children," not poetry by them.

Not quite half are things you might find on CDs that are actually for kids, but the rest of the music is meant for adults. The styles range from jazzy to folky to a sweepingly symphonic in a way that reminds me of a movie soundtrack. My favorite is Spring and Fall: To a Young Child, which is a setting of the most depressing poem ever, thank you so much for making me want to slit my wrists, Hopkins. The song's pretty, though. Sad, but pretty.

If, after that, you're longing for old school, 10,000 Maniacs-era Natalie Merchant, have Headstrong, which has recently become one of my favorites.

And finally: Heaven, a duet between Brett Dennen and Merchant. The lyrics are basically a riff on the less-interesting half of "Imagine," or possibly a song Band Aid contemplated doing before settling on "Do They Know It's Christmas?", but if, like me, you're good at ignoring treacly, hippy-dippy lyrics, the music is good. Merchant's low alto and Dennen's super-high tenor blend well together, and I really like the light dissonance they produce in the chorus.

This weekend, it was actually nice out--sunny, in the mid 60s--unlike today and tomorrow and all of next week, when it's supposed to snow a-frakking-gain. You know the implicit contract in my moving back south was that while summers would be dreadful, I would not have to deal with frozen precipitation more than two or three times per year. Argh.

Anyway, I took advantage of the nice weather and went downtown to see if there was anything I hadn't yet photographed. There was in fact very little, but I persevered. Et voila:



( We are a kitschy, kitschy city. )

...Okay, so four inches of snow is fairly impressive even once a year in Nashville. This is the third time. And winter is only half-over.

I suspect the apocalypse.

Is the cultural obsession in this country with a white Christmas entirely the result of that song? To be honest, I have never quite understood it. Perhaps it's a northern thing. At any rate, we're supposedly going to have snow on Christmas for the first time in seventeen years, and only the seventh time since people began keeping records in the 1860s, or so the National Weather Service excitedly informs me every time I visit weather.com. I will report back on whether the snow is in fact anything special.

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In much more interesting news, holy crap, my camera can take THIS PICTURE:

( starry night )

It can also take a bunch of other pictures:

( like so )

I have been delivered of a bouncing baby revised draft! It is...32.5 pages. That's just about half the length of my thesis, researched and written in less than a quarter of the time. Ooof. I am so watching a movie tonight.

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Flood stuff:

The most amazing thing about this video is not the footage of a road in Cheatham County that the flood ripped up and deposited on top of some houses. Rather, it is the fact that the neighborhood residents, rather than wait until the state can fix the road, got some bulldozers and started fixing it themselves. I am officially impressed.

Jon Stewart gave the whole situation his usual amusing color commentary. I particularly liked the Detroit reference. ;)

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Some of this is flood-related as well, but check out this person's amazing HDR photos of Nashville and other places. I cannot even tell you how much I want the software he uses to make them.