The Adventures of Goldilocks and Her Bears

One of the things I treated myself to in retirement was a lifetime National Park Pass (because of the senior discount). Which, of course, is only useful if I actually use it. I've been thinking about getting back to doing the occasional short car-camping trip. (Short enough to leave the cats to their own devices, so mostly fairly local. But with some light cat-checkup I could get as far as Crater Lake.)

First step will be to pull out all the camping gear to check that it's clean and in good working order. I have a set-up for the back of the Element with an elevated platform bed with gear stowed underneath. I can take a bicycle, but not the recumbent (which is a good argument for keeping the fold-up Brompton).

At one point I bought a pop-up so that I can set up a larger "living space" off the back of the vehicle, which I haven't ever used yet. So I need to do a test set-up. My plan is to use some of the canvas from my old pavilion to create walls for it, so that I can use it for changing. (Changing clothes while wriggling around in a sleeping bag is for the young and flexible.) So I need to do that.

And then, of course, there's the issue of scheduling reservations, though mid-week availability will help there, I imagine. I haven't found a similar program for state parks -- there's a senior discount program, but it isn't as generous. But state parks are more numerous, of course.

So I've probably already mentioned (many many times) that one of my strategies for leading a balanced and productive retirement has been to identify a variety of "activity categories" and aim to do something in multiple categories each day, as well as aiming to do something in each category on a regular basis. That is, I don't have to hit every category every day, but I should rotate through them and get good coverage.

Today is the first day that I hit all 12 categories. I may at some point add more categories, but these are broad enough to cover almost everything. So what does that look like?

Got up around 6am (which seems to be what my body wants to do at the moment). Light breakfast and post about the podcast on social media {Category=Promotion}, then completed revisions on Skinsinger story #3 {Category=Fiction writing}.

Went out on a bike ride {Category=Exercise} and paused at the turn-around point to have coffee and read/annotate a chapter of my current LHMP book. {Category=Read for LHMP} Divert the end of the bike ride to set up the gym account that I get as part of my Medicare Advantage plan.

Shower and decompress for a bit, reading the current hard-copy novel (as opposed to the current audiobook). {Category=Fun reading} Then do a page of Medieval Welsh translation. {Category=Language} Type up the LHMP notes. {Category=Writing for LHMP} Then work on the "What is a Related Work Anyway?" background research. {Category=Writing organization/research}

Do a deep-clean of the bedroom. {Category=Housework/organization} Start dinner simmering (not a category). Do a session of weedwacking in the backyard. {Category=Yardwork}

At this point, knowing that I had a zoom date in the evening {Category=Socializing}, I wanted to push through and hit the last item {Category=Play Music}, so I put together my flute (which I haven't touched in a decade or so) and started some scales. The fingers were willing, but the embouchure was weak. This is going to take some work. (The higher priority is replacing a harp string and getting it into tune, but ticking the box with the flute was easier.)

So now I have dinner almost ready and at least a couple entirely free hours before bedtime. I know this all sounds really busy, and I'm serious that I don't have to hit every category every day. But it was fun to manage it at least once in my first month.

Started the day by biking down to Walnut Creek for some routine lab work. Dropped by Brioche de Paris for breakfast afterward combined with LHMP reading/note-taking. (My plan to reduce my "eating out expenditures" is being stymied by my current routine of doing LHMP reading in coffee shops. I'm not beating myself up about it, since I also combine it with my bike ride.) Texted the former co-workers to see if anyone wanted to meet up for lunch when I pop over to Berkeley Bowl tomorrow (since Wednesday is their on-site day).

When I brainstormed about how to structure my days in retirement, I came up with the idea of having a list of "activity categories" where I would try to regularly check off a certain number of different categories each day. (The point is the doing, not the checking off.) Most of them are things I'd been doing previously, though not on a close-to-every-day basis, like exercise, yard work, housework, LHMP reading, LHMP blogging, etc. But I added three categories for activities that had largely fallen off my routine: writing fiction (duh!), playing music, and--after some thought--working in non-English languages.

I'm still working on getting the first two into my routines, but yesterday I pulled out a Medieval Welsh text that I haven't previously translated (Owein) and started working through it. It helps that editions of Medieval Welsh texts generally have a glossary at the end, so in the event I don't know a word, I don't have to be going back and forth with a dictionary. But I was a bit surprised at how few items I had to check.

My current process is to copy out the original on every third line of a ruled notebook, take notes for vocab I had to look up, or verb forms I needed to work out on the second line, and write my translation on the third line. Out of two notebook pages, there were four words I didn't know, three I checked but had remembered correctly, and one verb form I needed to look up. There's also a passage where I know all the words, but I'm still working on the overall sense.

It helps that I'm intimately familiar with several of the branches of the Mabinogi, and the overall grammar and vocabulary of the medieval tales tend to be highly similar. (Also: I know the general shape of the literature.) But it was still gratifying to find that I could pretty much sight-translate 90% of the material. After I finish Owein, I want to try some poetry because I want to work up to translating a poem that doesn't appear to have an English translation published yet.

Given all the language study I've done across the decades, it's felt sad that I don't use most of it except as general background radiation. I'd like to brush up on my Latin, and I'd like to get a more formal grounding in reading French (at least academic French), which I can get the overall gist of, but don't have the grammar for.