Landing

I took a couple of days off to visit my parents, and now I'm back for a couple more days before I head off to ApolloCon in Houston. I have a truly frightening to-do list before I leave town, so I suspect half of it will remain undone as I give up entirely and end up curled up somewhere with books, DVDs or the Internet to block out the dread of all that I have to get done.

Actually, the kitchen is clean, so that's a start, and the laundry is done. I have a few business things to take care of, and other than that, everything else is non-essential.

The fruit fly infestation seems to be over. Nothing is flying around, annoying me, and nothing new is falling into my traps. I experimented with a lot of different things, with varying results. The fly strip I bought was very effective, but really unwieldy. In the bathroom, where a lot of the flies were congregating, a little sherry in a Dixie cup with cling wrap with holes in it over the top was really effective. When I did the same thing in the kitchen, only one fly went in. What worked in the kitchen was the cider vinegar with dish soap in an open cup, except it didn't start working until I added a splash of balsamic vinegar. Then they were lining up to dive in. Strangely, when I put actual fruit in one of the traps, they completely ignored it.

In other news, I saw How to Train Your Dragon 2 last weekend. I might have spent a lot of the movie muttering "You know nothing, Jon Snow." I also found myself disagreeing with that essay I posted a link to a week or so ago. I agree with the general premise about interesting female characters, but I don't think it applied to this film. In this case, it had nothing to do with gender and was really about what happens to mentors in stories. The point of a mentor is to prepare the hero and then step back and let the hero take the lead.

Now I'm going to attempt to walk to the library since I made it through all my books. The "attempt" part is related to last night's ballet class, in which the teacher expected me to leave the ground when jumping. I know, unreasonable, right? It did look prettier, and I felt like I was dancing, but then there was the landing part, which my legs weren't prepared for. I don't think the problem is really my knee joints but rather the overall strength in my legs. I really need to get in better shape. It may be time to dig out the old jogging trampoline and plop it in front of the TV, under the ceiling fan. I did that a few summers ago and it made a lot of difference. The trick is finding something I want to watch enough to distract me from the jogging but not something I care about so much that the jogging is a big distraction. The summer I kept up with it, I was catching up on the entire series of CSI on one of the cable channels. There's bound to be something moderately interesting that doesn't require a lot of attention either OnDemand or on at a good exercise time. I also need to do some overall conditioning and stretching.