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Notes from judo class tonight

Posted on by Patrick
  • I may need to order some belts before the next grading.
  • Bas­ket­ball prac­tice down­stairs is loud enough with­out the stereo.
  • It’s real­ly nice to hear some­one tell you they appre­ci­ate all the years you’ve been volunteering.
  • It nev­er occurred to me that instruct­ing at judo is vol­un­teer­ing, but of course it is.
  • Since when is Europe’s “The Final Count­down” a big hit again?
  • Half an hour of ne-waza ran­dori is lots, thanks.

Touring the Nonsuch

Posted on by Patrick

Nonsuch from starboard stern

My cur­rent WiP, Every­thing that Nev­er Hap­pened, is set main­ly aboard a small 17th-cen­tu­ry sail­ing ves­sel, a square-rigged ketch named the Man­dalay. It’s not a coin­ci­dence that it’s a square-rigged ketch, just like the his­tor­i­cal Non­such; ever since the first time I vis­it­ed the Non­such gallery in the Man­i­to­ba Muse­um, I’ve been fas­ci­nat­ed by the ship. I’m not a nau­ti­cal type; I’ve spent my entire life on the prairies, and have seen ocean a total of three times. But some­thing about the ship has always stuck in my mind, and I find myself con­stant­ly return­ing to it.

Maybe it’s just the name. I’m a suck­er for a good name.

Tiller

Any­ways, some­time in Feb­ru­ary it occurred to me that, to real­ly under­stand the Man­dalay and her crew, I might be wise to learn more about the Non­such. I sent an email to some­one at the Man­i­to­ba Muse­um, ask­ing for any infor­ma­tion they could give me, and also ask­ing about tours. I received some infor­ma­tion in the mail, a rec­om­men­da­tion that I check out a book by Laird Rankin, who’s some­thing of an expert on the Non­such, and an offer of a tour. To trim a long sto­ry to a short one, I went on a tour of the ship on Mon­day. Since the muse­um was closed, it was a quite pri­vate tour.

I spent three hours on and around the ship, ask­ing ques­tions of Robert, the muse­um’s res­i­dent Non­such expert. I learned a lot, and I took a lot of pic­tures. Some aspects of my sto­ry are great­ly clar­i­fied for me now. Some of the things Robert told me will find their way quite direct­ly into the novel.

And now I’ll get back to writ­ing it…

All my Non­such photos

Tesseracts 14

Posted on by Patrick

So yeah. Tesser­acts is an annu­al Cana­di­an anthol­o­gy of SF and fantasy.

This year, my short sto­ry “Heat Death, or, Answer­ing the Ourobouros Ques­tion” will be in it.

To say I’m excit­ed is to some­what under­state the case.

Edit—com­ments from the edi­tors: “[One edi­tor] wrote down ‘fun­ny, live­ly, like­able.’ [The oth­er] was even more enthusiastic!”

This morning came awful early

Posted on by Patrick

When my wife’s alarm clock went off at 5:30 AM, she said to me, “When did you get in last night?”

Me: “3:30.”
Her: “Yeah. I woke up at 2:30, and you weren’t in yet. I thought, Those idiots*, and went back to sleep.”

Those idiots were me and my cow-ork­er Craig, and the rea­son we got in at 3:30 AM was that we went to the city to see Neil Gaiman last night.

A cou­ple photos:

Neil Gaiman in Winterpeg

Neil Gaiman's green scrawl

I’ll prob­a­by have more to say lat­er. Right now I have to get back to work.

____

* My wife would like it point­ed out that she called us dum­mies, not idiots.

Contemplating a tattoo

Posted on by Patrick

…some­day. And so here’re the ones cur­rent­ly under consideration:

  • Two ravens, along with a quote from verse 80 of Hávamál: “Praise ice when over it”. (But ide­al­ly, trans­lat­ed into Icelandic.)
  • This — the cher­ry blos­som eight-sided mir­ror sym­bol of Kodokan Judo.
  • Eppur si muove — Galileo’s (prob­a­bly apoc­ryphal) rebut­tal to his forced con­fes­sion that the Earth does not move. It means “And yet it does move.”
  • “Lumi­nous beings are we, not this crude matter”.