Highmoon's Ponderings

It’s now a week since my bike took a tumble from a Miami Dade Transit bus and got hit. I dropped it at Miami Beach Bicycle Center on Wednesday for repairs, kind of preparing myself mentally for the repair cost quote. I sweated there for a bit when I got confirmation that the rear wheel was a total loss and an original Electra replacement would be somewhere around $200, but Alex Ruiz came up with a better and cheaper solution, replacing the rim with a non-Electra one that is actually a bit stronger (it has dual aluminum layers from what he told me) along with stainless-steel spokes. The total was $107 with tax, which made Tuesday’s ride on the Metrobus the most expensive bus ride in my life. But, Elam now has a new tire that runs fantastic and is back in action.

Sort of.

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I’m sometimes asked why I blog and I rarely have a more meaningful answer than “just ’cause.” I’ve been thinking about that answer for a long time, and I think I now have a better one that actually means something.

I blog to have a conversation, sometimes with other people, sometimes with an idea, sometimes–oftentimes–with myself. I also keep a handwritten journal for the same reason, though that one gets the more personal chats, the ones I *may* have with people I love and trust, late at night, quite possibly drunk. May. But I digress.

For whatever reason, I have far more friends whom I mainly connect with online than in person, which means my blog serves another function, that of main line of communication between friends and family and I. It’s not that we don’t comunicate in any other way, but that the blog provides a very handy central point.

It is because I see blogging as a conversation that I also have come to adopt the following policy: always comment on other people’s blog posts. Or at least, almost always.

See, a blog post to me is like we’re sitting around a table, maybe having a beer, and you or I say something. In a face-to-face context, chances are high that we’ll have something to say in response, and then in response to that and so on. Maybe that topic will die down, but then we’ll pick up with something else. That right there is the process of blogging and commenting. When one blogs and there’s no comment to follow, it’s like we’re just sitting around the table completely silent, ignoring what any one is saying. Pretty soon you wonder if you’re alone at the bar talking to yourself.

This is why I’m setting a resolution to be more active in my comments to other people’s posts, because I don’t want them to be talking to themselves.

Check out another perspective on the same topic from Fred Hicks: No Silent Fan.

Likewise, I invite all my readers to comment on my posts; I’m looking to talk with you, not at you.

Gareth-Michael Skarka asked about roleplaying via Skype in a recent comment, and though he received some info from my fellow players in the Lady Blackbird game, which was conducted via Skype, I told him I’d write a post about it from the point of view of a newbie to the medium, given this was my first time playing that way.

In general, I am very happy having Skype as a new tool in my gaming box. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t replace face-to-face, in-person gaming, but it is far more engaging than play-by-post/-email, both of which I have done in the past few years and had mixed results with.

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Today I was to start my car-free commute to the University, due mainly to the fact that yesterday I got a ticket and had my license suspended and taken away (for a supposed unpaid infraction that was actually thrown out of court and reduced to $0, I found out later), and if I’m caught driving, well, it’s the slammer for me. No problem, I have a bike and Miami’s fairly good public transit system at my disposal. Let’s do this.

I biked from my house in South Beach across the Venetian Causeway and into the Omni station at the edge of Downtown Miami (see MapMyRide.com route here). It took me about 35 minutes and it was an eye-opener in many respects: how much weight I need to shed from what I’m carrying (I calculate I was carrying about 30 lbs between the chunky bike chain, backpack with school stuff, laptop and extra clothes due to the 40° weather), how different it is to bike for leisure vs when you need to get somewhere on a time schedule, and how I need to better layer for the cold so I can remove layers more efficiently while riding. All good lessons. And in the end, I did make it to Omni, fairly tired, with a nice burning sensation in my thighs from the exercise, but overall fine and dandy. I was actually quite proud of myself!

Then came the bus leg of the trip, taking bus route 93 from Omni station to 135 St along Biscayne Blvd. The bus pulled up, I brought down the front bike rack and hefted (ugh!) the bike into it. I was always afraid that the 700-size wheels on the Amsterdam would not properly fit the bus bike racks, but they fit just fine, surprisingly (700 is not a common size in the US). It was also my first time using the bike rack so I followed the instructions on the Miami Dade Transit (MDT) website to the letter when locking it, but asked the driver as I got on if I’d done it right; my bike is back-heavy due to the panniers so it felt a bit wobbly and I wanted to be sure. She made a non-committal noise and shrugged; I took that to be a yes.

Elam on the bus bike rack.

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My first week back at FIU (and University life in general) is over and I’ve quite a few people wanting to know how it went, so the easiest thing is to write this post.

General

It’s been eight years since I graduated with my BA in English, and seven since I went back (and quickly dropped out of) my Masters, so it’s been a while since I’ve been in a classroom for formal schooling and lecturing. It’s been even longer since my last Science or Math class, and that’s pretty much all I have in front of me now, which makes it even more daunting. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but thankfully, it has been not bad at all.

Since I’m taking general Science pre-requisites I need for the Nursing program, it means I am with mostly freshmen in class, which means my professors are, for the most part, taking the first few class sessions fairly easy. This isn’t the Fall semester, when the freshmen would’ve been right out of high school, so we’ve started digging into our classes proper by the second session, but even so, we’re going at a nice, easy pace. This has been wonderful for me, because it allowed me to get my bearings as well, and ease into University-mind once more.

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Those were Rich’s word during the game and on his after-game tweet (see my previous AP post) to describe how our Lady Blackbird game came to an end. “French” here could stand for “artistic/impressionistic/avant-garde,” but I’ve a feeling that it really stands for “unsatisfactory.” Or more completely, visually spectacular, but narratively unsatisfactory. If you take a moment to read through Rich’s AP Report and Mick’s Report of the last session of the game, I believe you’ll arrive at the same conclusion.

What is interesting is that, to me, describing it as a “French movie” made a lot of accurate sense. I’m not gonna say that I’m a film connoisseur–that title more aptly goes to my wife who does have a degree in Motion Pictures and is the one who studied the various film movements that we could lump under “French”–but being married to my wife, I have picked up a bit of exposure to this kind of art cinema over the years. And yes, that means having seen movies that fit the very same description I wrote above (Picnic at Hanging Rock, I’m looking at you!). But that has also taught me that not all stories are linear, and that sometimes a story is done even if I don’t think it is.

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