train, break, books. new year?
Dec. 31st, 2010 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aamcnamaraAfter writing a very odd post on my stopover in Chicago on the way here, I deleted it, and henceforth got distracted by home and Christmas and family and books and friends and being back in Minneapolis/St. Paul and winter and so on.
(Minnesota has snow. Minnesota has lots of snow. It was a little unpleasant yesterday, when it started raining and there was damp and wet and slush everywhere, but what can you do? And at least it still looks like proper winter outside.)
---
Monday the 20th after lunch I got a van to the train station in Springfield. I checked luggage and found a fellow-student or so to chat with as we waited for the train. Then I boarded, and--I was away.
Railroad tracks skim the edges of towns. That whole afternoon I kept looking one way and seeing idyllic Massachusetts landscapes, the other and seeing run-down industrialism, the backs of houses, the streets on the rim of town. By Albany, NY, it was dark. Clouds tried to catch the moon. Our train linked up with one from New York City, and we moved off again.
All my memories of Ohio are fuzzy, sleep-blurred. I fell asleep around Buffalo NY; I kept half waking when the train stopped, to blink at rows of streetlights and warehouses somewhere in Ohio. The state seems composed, to me, of those things--those, and dark rivers. Trains have to ease slowly over bridges, so I woke and watched the streetlights on the banks try, and fail, to gleam any distinctions off the water.
I had breakfast in the dining car: oatmeal with jam, orange juice, sections of an orange, tea. The dining car itself was very pleasant. It had tablecloths (paper, but they looked like cloth), and blue curtains on the windows, and while everything came in plastic dishes, they were nice ones. The bowl my orange sections came in had scalloped edges. Amtrak had made the effort.
(There was a moment there where I stopped and realized: I was timing the steeping of my tea with my pocket watch, in the dining car of a train, and I blinked and looked out the curtained window at the snowy Indiana landscape and shook my head and wondered how I stumbled into this life.)
We got into Chicago around ten o'clock that morning. I wandered around Union Station for a while, confused, trying to find a rental locker for my unchecked bags. The locker rental system is damnably confusing there. You have to use five- or one-dollar bills (to rent a three- or four-dollar-per-hour locker), or a credit card; you also have to put in your fingerprint and confirm it, so they can be extra-double-certain that it's you. One of the machines persistently decided that my fingerprint was not the same as itself (there's a philosophical tangle for you). Eventually, though, I found one that would accept me and managed to stow all my excess stuff.
On advice from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
csecooney, I headed east on Jackson Blvd. I found a tea shop (I seem to have an instinct for them) but skipped it for the time being and went to the Christkindlmarket. It's a little open-air market, mostly selling things like strudel and hot apple cider and cocoa and expensive gorgeous German glass ornaments. Not the sort of thing I spend a lot of time on, but it was a good diversion and a place to wander. After being on a train for twenty hours, I really wanted to stretch my legs.
So I proceeded back to the tea shop, Argo Tea. I got a huge cup of Earl Grey. When I opened it up, I frowned: the top of the tea was all foamy. I went and inquired, after fretting back and forth with myself for a bit, and they said, Oh yes, we use a foamer on the tea. Yes, we do use it with things that contain dairy. We clean it every hour, but if you want we can clean it right now and give you a new cup of tea.
Which seemed like a good plan, given that I had another leg of my trip ahead of me. So that's a dual warning and commendation: they do use a foamer on their tea (and don't let you know ahead of time), but if you ask specifically they're good about it.
Anyhow, it was good tea. I sat and drank it and used their free wifi and ate the granola I'd stuck in my backpack for a lunch.
By that point I was in a pretty weird mood. I was overcaffeinated, between the Earl Grey and the Lipton that morning--I don't usually have caffeinated tea at all--and I was short on sleep, and, due to the fact that I'd been on a train for twenty hours and gotten used to the motion, I was not entirely certain that the tea shop was not in fact in motion.
As one does when one is in a peculiar mood like that, I went on the Internet and found someone to talk to, one of my friends who had done nothing wrong except to be the only person I knew on the Internet at that point. I was hyper and incoherent at her for an hour or so, until it seemed a decent time to return to the station.
My train to Minneapolis was then delayed by an hour and a half. There weren't enough chairs; I sat on my suitcase. When I finally got up to board, I was still not sure whether the train station was in fact in motion, either...
...fortunately, then I got on a train again, so I didn't have to be confused about if the ground was moving or not any more.
The second leg of the journey wasn't all that bad. I peered up out of the windows in the dark trying to recognize the Twin Cities from an odd angle. I got bits (ah--we're going along the river under the bluffs where the Science Museum is!) (there's University Avenue!) but nothing connecting them. Maybe when I go back I'll be more awake and can take notes.
The worst part of all that was the getting in at midnight, and the finally falling into bed at one in the morning. And I was not wholly certain whether my bed was in fact moving...
But then there were days and days of winter break, so that was okay.
---
Brief summary of books so far this break:
Freedom and Necessity, Bull and Brust, on the train, a reread: still excellent. Good train reading--long and dense enough to occupy my head for a while, compact enough to put in luggage.
A Fine and Private Place, Beagle:vcmw gave this to me a while ago and I kept forgetting to read it. I finally did! It was not quite what I had been expecting--to be fair I think I was expecting Spoon River Anthology by way of Peter S. Beagle, and it was not that. But it was interesting, and the voices (particularly the New York accent) quite distinctive.
The Well-Dressed Gentleman's Pocket Guide: A gift from my sister. A quote: "Instinctively, the gentleman craves a hat." Details on various kinds of coats, hats, etc; diagrams of several methods of folding one's handkerchief or tying one's tie. Lovely.
Fun Home, Bechdel: A friend was getting rid of this, so I nabbed it. I'd read it before, but didn't remember many details. Elegiac.
Mythic Delirium, Issue 23: In progress--I am a slow reader of poetry.aliseadae has a poem in this one, which is really the reason I got it (see: do not read much poetry), but the other poems are lovely as well! And a couple of other people I know in here too, which is neat.
I also got copies of Gaudy Night and The Jewel-Hinged Jaw for Christmas, which I haven't started rereading yet but certainly will at some point.
---
Other than that (and finishing the solstice stories left over from 2009, which I did on the train) I have been fairly useless this break. This is okay, I think. That is sort of what breaks are meant for. (I just feel like I ought to be writing oodles of novels because I am me.)
But I started compiling my resume for physics-research applications yesterday. And today I did a copy of the second (first and a half) draft of A Returning Power to edit, and renumbered all the scenes in order so they no longer go 8.5 10 9 12/11 10.1 (my numbering system was based off an outline I did before I started the redraft).
And somewhere in there it became almost 2011. Which is just strange. But here we are.
(Minnesota has snow. Minnesota has lots of snow. It was a little unpleasant yesterday, when it started raining and there was damp and wet and slush everywhere, but what can you do? And at least it still looks like proper winter outside.)
---
Monday the 20th after lunch I got a van to the train station in Springfield. I checked luggage and found a fellow-student or so to chat with as we waited for the train. Then I boarded, and--I was away.
Railroad tracks skim the edges of towns. That whole afternoon I kept looking one way and seeing idyllic Massachusetts landscapes, the other and seeing run-down industrialism, the backs of houses, the streets on the rim of town. By Albany, NY, it was dark. Clouds tried to catch the moon. Our train linked up with one from New York City, and we moved off again.
All my memories of Ohio are fuzzy, sleep-blurred. I fell asleep around Buffalo NY; I kept half waking when the train stopped, to blink at rows of streetlights and warehouses somewhere in Ohio. The state seems composed, to me, of those things--those, and dark rivers. Trains have to ease slowly over bridges, so I woke and watched the streetlights on the banks try, and fail, to gleam any distinctions off the water.
I had breakfast in the dining car: oatmeal with jam, orange juice, sections of an orange, tea. The dining car itself was very pleasant. It had tablecloths (paper, but they looked like cloth), and blue curtains on the windows, and while everything came in plastic dishes, they were nice ones. The bowl my orange sections came in had scalloped edges. Amtrak had made the effort.
(There was a moment there where I stopped and realized: I was timing the steeping of my tea with my pocket watch, in the dining car of a train, and I blinked and looked out the curtained window at the snowy Indiana landscape and shook my head and wondered how I stumbled into this life.)
We got into Chicago around ten o'clock that morning. I wandered around Union Station for a while, confused, trying to find a rental locker for my unchecked bags. The locker rental system is damnably confusing there. You have to use five- or one-dollar bills (to rent a three- or four-dollar-per-hour locker), or a credit card; you also have to put in your fingerprint and confirm it, so they can be extra-double-certain that it's you. One of the machines persistently decided that my fingerprint was not the same as itself (there's a philosophical tangle for you). Eventually, though, I found one that would accept me and managed to stow all my excess stuff.
On advice from
csecooney, I headed east on Jackson Blvd. I found a tea shop (I seem to have an instinct for them) but skipped it for the time being and went to the Christkindlmarket. It's a little open-air market, mostly selling things like strudel and hot apple cider and cocoa and expensive gorgeous German glass ornaments. Not the sort of thing I spend a lot of time on, but it was a good diversion and a place to wander. After being on a train for twenty hours, I really wanted to stretch my legs.So I proceeded back to the tea shop, Argo Tea. I got a huge cup of Earl Grey. When I opened it up, I frowned: the top of the tea was all foamy. I went and inquired, after fretting back and forth with myself for a bit, and they said, Oh yes, we use a foamer on the tea. Yes, we do use it with things that contain dairy. We clean it every hour, but if you want we can clean it right now and give you a new cup of tea.
Which seemed like a good plan, given that I had another leg of my trip ahead of me. So that's a dual warning and commendation: they do use a foamer on their tea (and don't let you know ahead of time), but if you ask specifically they're good about it.
Anyhow, it was good tea. I sat and drank it and used their free wifi and ate the granola I'd stuck in my backpack for a lunch.
By that point I was in a pretty weird mood. I was overcaffeinated, between the Earl Grey and the Lipton that morning--I don't usually have caffeinated tea at all--and I was short on sleep, and, due to the fact that I'd been on a train for twenty hours and gotten used to the motion, I was not entirely certain that the tea shop was not in fact in motion.
As one does when one is in a peculiar mood like that, I went on the Internet and found someone to talk to, one of my friends who had done nothing wrong except to be the only person I knew on the Internet at that point. I was hyper and incoherent at her for an hour or so, until it seemed a decent time to return to the station.
My train to Minneapolis was then delayed by an hour and a half. There weren't enough chairs; I sat on my suitcase. When I finally got up to board, I was still not sure whether the train station was in fact in motion, either...
...fortunately, then I got on a train again, so I didn't have to be confused about if the ground was moving or not any more.
The second leg of the journey wasn't all that bad. I peered up out of the windows in the dark trying to recognize the Twin Cities from an odd angle. I got bits (ah--we're going along the river under the bluffs where the Science Museum is!) (there's University Avenue!) but nothing connecting them. Maybe when I go back I'll be more awake and can take notes.
The worst part of all that was the getting in at midnight, and the finally falling into bed at one in the morning. And I was not wholly certain whether my bed was in fact moving...
But then there were days and days of winter break, so that was okay.
---
Brief summary of books so far this break:
Freedom and Necessity, Bull and Brust, on the train, a reread: still excellent. Good train reading--long and dense enough to occupy my head for a while, compact enough to put in luggage.
A Fine and Private Place, Beagle:
vcmw gave this to me a while ago and I kept forgetting to read it. I finally did! It was not quite what I had been expecting--to be fair I think I was expecting Spoon River Anthology by way of Peter S. Beagle, and it was not that. But it was interesting, and the voices (particularly the New York accent) quite distinctive.The Well-Dressed Gentleman's Pocket Guide: A gift from my sister. A quote: "Instinctively, the gentleman craves a hat." Details on various kinds of coats, hats, etc; diagrams of several methods of folding one's handkerchief or tying one's tie. Lovely.
Fun Home, Bechdel: A friend was getting rid of this, so I nabbed it. I'd read it before, but didn't remember many details. Elegiac.
Mythic Delirium, Issue 23: In progress--I am a slow reader of poetry.
aliseadae has a poem in this one, which is really the reason I got it (see: do not read much poetry), but the other poems are lovely as well! And a couple of other people I know in here too, which is neat.I also got copies of Gaudy Night and The Jewel-Hinged Jaw for Christmas, which I haven't started rereading yet but certainly will at some point.
---
Other than that (and finishing the solstice stories left over from 2009, which I did on the train) I have been fairly useless this break. This is okay, I think. That is sort of what breaks are meant for. (I just feel like I ought to be writing oodles of novels because I am me.)
But I started compiling my resume for physics-research applications yesterday. And today I did a copy of the second (first and a half) draft of A Returning Power to edit, and renumbered all the scenes in order so they no longer go 8.5 10 9 12/11 10.1 (my numbering system was based off an outline I did before I started the redraft).
And somewhere in there it became almost 2011. Which is just strange. But here we are.