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Catching Up
Although I tell myself that I take an extra day off from work after a convention to rest and recuperate (since I often lose sleep during a con), in reality I end up spending about half the day catching up on things I wasn't able to do during the weekend.
Seeing as Worldcon fell over the first of the month, this meant paying bills (rent, credit card, electric & gas). It also meant finishing catching up on e-mail, and, not incidentally, writing yesterday's journal entry. I had several days' worth of newspapers to read, and all those CDs I bought at the con to listen to. (I also ended up pulling out the Roger Stern-written issues of Doctor Strange and reading those. They're quite good, bringing a depth of character and complexity to Marvel Comics' great magician that I've found lacking in other interpretations.)
In the afternoon I also went out for a bike ride, and made it all the way around Lake Monona, which I believe is about 10 miles. So it was a longer ride than I'd attempted this summer, but being around a lake, it was mostly flat. It took me a little over an hour to make the circuit. It was cool and cloudy most of the day, great weather for biking!
Here's a quick map of my route, glommed from Yahoo Maps (yes, I stole this idea shamelessly from CJ Silverio; hopefully it won't piss her off, but I'm still flexing my muscles with this graphics stuff):
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On the map above, I headed south (counter-clockwise) from the cross (right near the state capital, by the way) across the John Nolan Causeway (the little bit of water to the west of the Causeway is Monona Bay), and then basically hugged the lake all the way around. I made two rest stops, one of them at the lovely park at the northeast end of the lake, and was able to look across the lake from several good vantage points on the south and west.
Thursday I'll try biking to work again, and try another lap around the lake over the weekend. The largest of Madison's lakes, Lake Mendota, is supposed to be about 26 miles around (as far as I know, there's no organized marathon around the lake; seems like there should be); I don't think I'll go that distance this year (I expect by Hallowe'en it will be too cold for much biking), but maybe next year.
Myself, I'm rather mystified by it, for several reasons. One, Diana has never added much to my life; I always perceived her as someone who was "famous for being famous", and in that sense almost entirely a creation of the media and the happenstance of modern royalty.
Two, I have a rather strange attitude towards death; most people feel a need for commiseration and joining together at a time of death, but to me the reaction to death is a very private one, and I rarely have any need to talk about it with other people. (This has caused me some trouble in the past, as I end up seeming rather cavalier about the subject to most people.) So the outpouring of emotion over Diana's death is utterly mysterious to me, especially because few-if-any of the grievers actually knew her or (I suspect) what she was really like.
Of course, you can also file under "things I find inexplicable or strange" the drive to get married, to have kids, to dance, to wear exotic clothes, etc. etc.
Which may explain why I'm still single.
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