State of the Schafer: 2019 in Review (Picture Edition)

Happy New Year, everyone. We just got back from spending Christmas with family in Sydney, Australia, where thanks to the worst bushfire season in living memory, the sky mostly looked like this:

My little cell phone camera doesn't do the eerie colors justice. The sky was orange, the sun crimson.

We were lucky during our visit. Our arrival before Christmas coincided with a cool front that pushed smoke away from Sydney and allowed firefighters in the Blue Mountains the chance for vital defensive work. But the day we left, on New Years Eve, conditions worsened again as high winds fanned the flames. Homes are burning, people have died, thousands are stuck without power or safe exit routes--and the only thing capable of stopping the fires for good is heavy rain, which forecasters say likely won't arrive until February.

But Australia has always had fires in summer, some people protest. Yes, they have. But thanks to the changing climate, this year's fire season is far longer, hotter, and drier than in years past. Nor are controlled burns the solution--as this well-researched article explains, the situation is complicated. Plus, during extreme heat and wind, the amount of available fuel makes only a small difference to a fire's intensity; the primary driver is weather.

Even 2000km away in New Zealand, we're feeling the effects. I woke up this morning to a sky so yellowy-orange I thought for a second we were still back in Sydney. Nope. It's just Australian smoke pouring across the Tasman Sea to blanket us.

View from our house this morning. Again, the camera doesn't do the color justice.

Nor is this the only sign of changing climate we've faced here in NZ. While Australia is predicted to get hotter and drier, NZ's South Island is predicted to get warmer and wetter. We had a taste of what that might be like this spring, with epic amounts of rain leading to flooding that destroyed bridges and roads and briefly cut off the entire lower half of the South Island from the rest of the country. We're okay here in Hawea, where the town is on a hill well above lake level, but Wanaka isn't so lucky. 

Flooding in Wanaka in early December

At least the government in New Zealand is trying hard to anticipate climate impacts and address them, as well as reduce the country's emissions, with all political parties coming together to vote for the Zero Carbon bill despite disagreements. 

The most depressing part about the Australian fires is that this terrible season isn't a surprise; scientists have been sounding alarm bells for years. But the Australian government, like the current US government, has prioritized short term economic gain over everything else. Even now, the prime minister insists he won't change policies. The New South Wales government has at least agreed to compensate volunteer firefighters for their loss of earnings while fighting fires in dangerous conditions for weeks on end with no finish yet in sight. Hopefully other regions of Australia will follow that lead.

On a larger scale, I guess paying the cost is all we can do, if governments continue refusing to address the root cause. But governments are put in power by people, and I hope with all my heart that in 2020 more people will understand the stakes we face and vote accordingly. It's too late to stop the climate from changing, but it's not too late to limit the worst effects.

Perhaps it's both the blessing and the curse of humanity that we're so good at focusing on the here and now. There is always light amid the darkness, and savoring the small joys of everyday life is what keeps hope alive.

The fires and smoke didn't stop my in-laws from throwing a lovely Christmas party

Having a great lunch with my husband

With the help of my sister-in-law and one of our nieces, we solved the Wizard's Quest escape room at Escape Hunt in Sydney. 

Looking back over 2019, despite all the horrifying developments in world politics and climate, I have a lot of good memories to savor. We visited a bunch of cool places in New Zealand I hadn't seen before, like the wild southern shores:

Windswept bluff near Gemstone Beach

and the busy, beautiful city of Wellington (SFF fans and authors, you definitely want to come down here for WorldCon in August!):

Wellington is gorgeous on a sunny day

Plus we visited the cozy homes of Hobbiton in Matamata:

I would totally live here if I were a hobbit

and Rotorua's steaming geothermal field:

Don't wander off the trail

and the lovely alpine scenery near Glenorchy and Kinloch:

View from Kinloch, at the head of Lake Wakatipu

not to mention the incredible Milford Sound in Fiordland:

Mitre Peak in Milford Sound

In late September, I took my son to visit family and friends in the US, where we saw Hogwarts Castle:

My son loved all the Harry Potter stuff at Universal Orlando (and yeah, I did too)

We played in a really cool water park (Universal's Volcano Bay):

Plus took a cruise in the Caribbean with my mom and brother:

I realize I need to plant about a million trees to make up for the environmental impact of this...or better yet, contribute to the development of a planetary sunshade. I think we're unfortunately past the point at which lifestyle changes are enough to make a difference. It's technology that will have to save us.

While in the US, we visited familiar, much-beloved haunts:

Boulder, Colorado...I do miss the Flatirons!

Wandering the Fiery Furnace in Arches National Park

Delicate Arch at sunset

And also enjoyed some new adventures:

The kiddo on a long rappel on the Rock of Ages route near Moab

Our guide helps him negotiate a downclimb in the slot section

Back in New Zealand, we spent plenty of days enjoying Lake Hawea, just steps from our front door.

Lake Hawea's beach is rocky rather than sandy, but the rocks sure are pretty

I never get tired of the view from the lakeshore walking track

The very best way to see the lake

 Although the ski season came very late this year (more reason to hate climate change, arrrgh), I still enjoyed some great ski days.

So did my son, who's good enough now to ski the infamous Motatapu Chutes with panache.

Celebrating a successful ski of a very steep chute

He also took up trampolining, and competed for the very first time, which is pretty darn cool. He's excited to progress further in 2020.

I, meanwhile, returned to figure skating--a lot more cautiously than I'd like, thanks to my aging back, but I've been delighted to find I can still jump and spin. I'm training for my first competition in over ten years, eeek! (The NZ Masters Games in Dunedin in February of 2020.)

Blurry pic, I know, but hey. It's hard taking pictures in a dimly lit rink.

But Courtney, what about writing? you may ask, assuming anybody's still reading this extremely long post. Where's your next book? 

All I can say is that I'm still working on it. Or rather, working on them, plural. I've still got The White Serpent novella and short stories in the works--Tales from Ninavel, I'm thinking I'll call the collection as a whole. Plus, I'm still plugging along on my new fantasy adventure, The Dreaming Sea. 

I'm bummed that I didn't publish anything in 2019, but I also don't want to put out anything less than the best I can write. I ran into a couple roadblocks toward the end of the year, on both projects, and realized that I need to correct course, which means revising and rewriting. But I've got a path forward, and I mean to use it. I may not be a fast writer, but I get there in the end. I definitely will attend WorldCon/CoNZealand in Wellington in August, so readers and fellow SFF fans, I hope to see you there. 

What else is ahead for me in 2020? Oh, I've got a few goals:

1) FINISH MY DRAFTS. FINISH MY DRAFTS. FINISH MY DRAFTS.

Really, that's the biggest one. But okay, I've got a few more plans and dreams:

2) Compete in Adult Gold figure skating at NZ Nationals, assuming my back holds out

3) Complete a coding project I've been working on: a fantasy book recommendation algorithm that uses book content/theme/style rather than sales information to produce results 

4) Formally open a consulting company here in NZ for my algorithm work

5) Find ways to contribute to climate change solutions

6) Keep exploring NZ's amazing landscapes with my son and husband

So, yeah. Busy year ahead. But exciting, too. Best wishes to all of you in 2020--let's hope this year becomes the start of a better future for everyone.

State of the Schafer: Starting Up Again

Okay, due to horrible flu viruses and travel and school holidays and various busy-ness, it's been a while. Real confession time, I've also been avoiding the blog because I keep wanting to post big long serious posts about politics and the inexorably changing climate and the desperate need for action. But the time and effort it takes me to create a nuanced, thoughtful, well-researched, persuasive post can perhaps be better spent in getting away from the keyboard to real-world actions, like calling representatives and volunteering with local groups. 

These little State of the Schafer updates are meant to be mostly for me and close family and friends, a way of keeping track of personal things in my life. I decided to stick to that, for now, although if you catch me in person, I'd be happy to discuss at length more serious matters.

Writing Progress:

I've reached the point in The White Serpent (the Cara novella) where I'm counting down scenes to the end. Seven more to go, woo! The draft currently stands at 31,291 words. I expect it'll end up around 50K. Often the words come faster and faster for me toward the end of a story, but I've learned the hard way never to count on any story coming easy. Each one is difficult in different ways; for me, that's part of why writing is such an addictive pursuit. The challenge keeps changing. Anyway, I shall forge onward.

Skating Update:

After so easily regaining my axel, I got all excited and started practicing double jumps. That might have been a bit premature. My back got iffy again, so I've had to stop the doubles, and take a break from sit spins, which are the most risky move for my lumbar spine. I won't lie, it's frustrating. Sometimes getting older sucks. More targeted core work may fix up my back enough to handle the doubles, or at least properly low sit spins, but I guess there's no guarantee.

Thankfully, other spins, single jumps, and axels seem fine for my back, as does footwork...and goodness knows I could use some practice on that. I've always loved jumping and spinning best, which means I tend to spend all my practice time on the fun showy stuff and neglect the finicky, more tedious things like choctaws and rockers and brackets. But a complex step sequence is a vital component of a competitive program, and my coach just finished choreographing mine, so now I have no excuse not to practice it. I still have hopes of competing later this year (I don't need doubles for that).

New Zealand Life:

During my son's school holidays, we went up to Auckland to renew his U.S. passport. To make the trip a bit more fun, we headed out to Hobbiton, which none of us had visited before. My son, who shares my love of Lord of the Rings, was quite excited to see the hobbit homes "just like in the movies!" I was a little worried he'd be disappointed in the experience, since the homes are exterior sets only, you can't go inside them (there's nothing in there!), and you're supposed to look but not touch.

But all three of us really enjoyed it. The set designers' attention to detail is just amazing, and the tour guide had a ton of funny and interesting stories about the movie filming to share. It was an overcast, sometimes rainy day, which made all the beautiful greenery seem particularly verdant. It truly does look like Bilbo and Frodo might pop around a corner to say hello at any moment. Behold:

Even in the dead of winter, Hobbiton has plenty of flowers

The kiddo is now too tall to be a hobbit! More than full foot taller than average hobbit height. Goodness, how the time flies.

I loved all the greenery. I think they should make a Hobbiton where the homes aren't just exteriors, but full-on houses...how cool would it be to stay a weekend in a hobbit home?

Bag End, with door invitingly cracked open.

The bench where Bilbo and Gandalf meet

I'd live in this one

Sam's house

View across the lake to the Green Dragon Inn

The Green Dragon. You can go inside this one, and have drinks and lunch. My son loved the buffet; they did a great job of marking gluten-free choices and had tons of things he could eat.

Anyway, the whole Hobbiton experience made me want to do a LotR movie marathon and re-read the book yet again. New Zealand sure knows how to do tourist attractions.

In other news, after a horrendously dry start to the winter, snow has finally arrived. This is a huge relief to everyone in town, since the conditions at the ski areas were the worst in a decade. But now at last the powder is accumulating up high, and I'm super psyched to finally enjoy some steep and deep turns.

Snow at last at Treble Cone

State of the Schafer, Vol 6

Yikes, what a week. My son came down with the flu and was absolutely miserable for five very long days. (And nights. The high fever gave him screaming nightmares. Good times for all.) His head and eyes hurt so much he couldn't read or even watch TV for very long, which left me as his main source of distraction from pain and fever. It's always heartbreaking as a parent to see your child in pain yet be helpless to make that pain vanish; I'm just glad my son is still young enough to find some comfort in my presence. But needless to say, I did not get much writing or anything else done. I have never been so glad that I'm not facing any deadlines.

Happily, the kiddo has at last recovered, and my own immune system seems to have held out against the virus, with the help of lots of hastily snarfed vitamin C. I was terrified I'd get sick and have to cancel my planned trip to GeyserCon. But hooray, I am healthy and typing this in Auckland airport while waiting for my puddlejumper flight to Rotorua.

Writing progress:

I've only managed about 2K more words on The White Serpent since my last update, but I'm hoping to carve out a decent chunk of writing time each day in Rotorua. I always need a little down time anyway at cons, especially when it's my first time at the con and I don't know many people. I love meeting and making new friends, but the extra social effort required is always a bit of a challenge for an introvert like me, so it's nice to schedule myself some quiet time each day when I can write and recharge.

Skating update:

I did manage to squeeze in a skating session before flying out of Queenstown, which was a huge mood lifter after a very long time stuck inside the house with my sick kiddo. I was so delighted to be on the ice again that I even summoned the guts to try my axel.

The forward "leap of faith" take-off for the axel makes it the most intimidating of all the skating jumps. If you don't fully commit to the jump, it's likely to end badly. (How badly? There's a reason for the old stress fractures lurking in my lumbar spine.) You need to kick your free leg through and then instantly shift your weight from take-off to landing side, while simultaneously yanking arms and legs in to generate the required rotation.

All that can go wrong in a whole lot of ways. The axel is the only jump I've ever learned where sometimes, long after you think you finally have it down, you jump and your body suddenly says, "NOT TODAY, SATAN!" and bails mid-air. (This is so common a failure it's got a name: the "waxel", seen on occasion even in Olympic programs.)

So, yeah. Trying the axel again for the first time after 4 years off the ice was a nerve-wracking experience. I kept worrying that my body had completely forgotten how to do the jump and disaster would result. (I do wear gel pads over tailbone, hips, and knees when practicing, but still. No such thing as gel pads that can protect the spine.)

I comforted myself that I'd taken at least one hard fall already on footwork the other week, and my back survived. After some deep breaths, I went out for some axel attempts...and LANDED THEM, HALLELUJAH! Or rather, landed most of them. But even on the axels I didn't cleanly land, I didn't fall. And those I did land nice and solid on one foot...the elation was immense. I still grin wide just thinking about it. Even my coach was delighted, doubtless thinking of how much time it'll save if she doesn't have to re-teach me the jump.

It's only a single axel, sure, not a double or anything really impressive, but still. I came off the ice feeling like a superhero. That seems weirdly appropriate as the start to a science fiction/fantasy convention weekend.

Reading Corner:

I finished Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, which was just as good as everyone said. The story reminded me of C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner, with an ambassador struggling to navigate complex and deadly politics in a culture they can never understand as a native does. I liked Martine's protagonist Mahit more than Cherryh's Bren, which helped make the reading experience much more engaging. If you're looking for science fiction with a lot to say about issues of culture and colonization, or if you just enjoy SF with interesting worldbuilding and character interaction, this one's for you. I'm eagerly looking forward to the sequel.

I then devoured Rachel Neumeier's Door Into Light, the long-awaited (at least by me!) sequel to her 2012 novel House of Shadows. I adored House of Shadows for its lyrical, atmospheric prose, mythic magic, and interesting characters, particularly the bardic sorceror Taudde, who struggles to navigate questions of morality and honor while living in an enemy country. The story in House of Shadows stands well alone, but leaves plenty of room for futher intriguing developments--and ever since reading the opening snippet of the sequel on Neumeier's blog, I have been absolutely panting for more. I'm happy to say Door Into Light did not disappoint me. I thoroughly enjoyed being back with Taudde and Leilis and all the other characters. I think I'll be re-reading both books again soon, just to savor the experience once more. I particularly recommend the duology to anyone who loves Patricia McKillip; it reminds me of her work in all the best ways.

Right now I'm partway through Sangu Mandanna's A Spark of White Fire, which is YA space opera inspired by Indian mythology, with meddling gods and magic and sentient spaceships. I'm really liking it so far. Hooray for great reading streaks!

Pic of the Week:

Sunrise on the way to GeyserCon

State of the Schafer, Vol. 5

Oof, it's been a busy 2 weeks since my last post, with some not entirely happy events. My son broke a finger at school while playing "rippa rugby" (kind of like flag football, for all you Americans). Thankfully it's only a hairline fracture and not a bad break, but it's still been pretty painful, and he's frustrated about having to be careful of his hand for weeks as the finger heals.

Meanwhile, I've been having a bit of a flare-up of carpal tunnel, despite wearing wrist braces while typing and using a reasonably ergonomic work desk. Not sure exactly what set it off, but the best cure is to minimize typing and phone scrolling for a while, so this week's post will be on the short side.

Writing Progress:

My draft of The White Serpent is sitting just shy of 25,000 words, and I finally got another chunk ready to send off to both my local writing group and my more distant critique partners. I'd say I'm about halfway through the story. Often I find that the words come faster and faster as I get closer to the end. I'm sure hoping that's true this time...but I won't count on it.

In other writing news, I finally got around to asking the Wanaka library if they'd like to have a donated copy of my Shattered Sigil trilogy. They responded with enthusiasm, hooray! So soon there will be at least one library in New Zealand that has my books. I'm pretty sure there aren't any others, since the books were never released in Aus/NZ. Some Australian libraries ordered them through international channels, but I'm pretty sure nowhere in NZ carries them...until now!

I'm also excited that next week I'll be heading off to Geysercon, this year's iteration of NZ's national SFF convention. (The con moves around NZ; this year it's held in Rotorua, which has lots of geysers and hot springs and other geothermal features, thus the choice of con name.) I'm not doing any panels or anything, but I'll bring some books to sell through the con bookshop, and I'm very much looking forward to meeting and hanging out with fellow SFF people. Plus, I've never been to Rotorua, so that'll be cool. Hopefully I can squeeze in a little sightseeing/hiking.

Skating update:

My back is holding up and I'm having a great time on the ice, woo hoo! Right now I'm working on speeding up my camel spin, so I can have a good strong start for the camel-sit-backsit combination spin in my program. I haven't tried my axel yet, but after fixing my single jump entries, the time has now come to regain it. So I have to decide: suck it up and commit despite the risk of hard falls, or wait until I can get time on the jump harness? The harness can't be used on a public session, and the only freestyle sessions the rink offers are at hideously early hours of the morning, which is a pretty daunting prospect with an hour drive over a potentially icy pass. Decisions, decisions.

Pics of the week:

As cooler weather sets in, Lake Hawea gets really calm, which makes for beautiful reflections

Fall colors in our yard

Snow on Cardrona Valley peaks...the ski season is coming

I spent a lovely day hiking in the Flat Tops Conservation Area near Roxburgh with some friends

Reading Corner:

I finished The Bone People, and I still feel uneasily ambivalent about it. The imagery is beautiful, the style is unique, the depiction of the terrible cycle of child abuse, and how abusers are enabled by their communities, is devastating. Yet like this reviewer, I was not a little horrified by the book's seeming insistence that abused children should not be taken away from their abusers. In talking to Kiwis about it, I realized I am lacking some cultural context; Maori today are still fighting to keep their children from being removed by NZ authorities. One person said something I found particularly interesting: a culture's greatest strength is often also its greatest flaw. According to them, one of the great strengths of Maori culture is the emphasis on acceptance and forgiveness and inclusion for community members, yet in the case of domestic violence and abuse, a tendency toward forgiveness can lead to terribly sad outcomes. On the flip side, that made me consider how individualism has always been heralded by Americans as a great cultural strength, and yet now that focus on individual gain instead of societal good might well destroy us entirely. So anyway...I guess I can at least say The Bone People is quite thought-provoking.

My reaction to Laura Gilman's novella Gabriel's Road, in contrast, was purely positive. I'd been hoping for a satisfying conclusion to Gabriel's arc, and yep, that was nicely done. Plus, the story helped clarify some bits of the Devil's West trilogy ending that I had found a bit confusingly muddy. Most of all, it was pure fun to be back in the Devil's West world. I love Gilman's portrayal of intertwined magic and nature.

Now I'm on to Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, which I have high hopes for, after seeing a lot of praise from reviewers I trust.

State of the Schafer, Vol 4

Writing Progress:

With the kiddo back in school, this week was a bit more productive than last week, though my dreams of "serious progress" didn't quite pay off. The White Serpent is sitting now at 22,388 words, which doesn't seem like much increase from last week, but that's because I ended up rewriting one scene a bunch of times before I felt happy with what's in the draft.

You'd think outlining scenes would prevent this, and in many cases I believe it does. Yet I sometimes find I have to actually write a scene in full before I realize it isn't working the way I hoped. And then rewrite it, rinse, repeat. Argh, this is why I am not a fast writer. Oh well, onward ho! My motto at times like this comes from Dory in Finding Nemo: "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming..." So long as I don't stop, I will finish the draft.

Skating Update:

I drove over to Queenstown for another practice session, this time carpooling with another adult skater from Wanaka, which was a lot of fun. The trip over the Crown Range doesn't seem half so long when you can chat to a friend on the way!

At the rink, I had my first lesson with a local coach, and she was great. She worked on cleaning up my take-offs for my singles, which have gotten awfully sloppy after all these years. On a single jump, you can do all kinds of things wrong and still haul yourself around in the air and land okay. Not so with double jumps, which are a lot less forgiving.

Even in the short half-hour of the lesson, I could really feel the difference in height and flow for my singles with the corrected take-offs. Now I'm all excited that maybe with this kind of work, I could not only regain a double or two, but make them consistent enough to land in competition. But first I've got to put in the time to cement the newer, better habits, so they become reflex, in advance of trying any axels or doubles. Doubtless my back will be grateful.

I'm also excited at the idea of competing, period. There's an old program of mine from 2006 that I always wished I had skated better; I'm thinking I'll use that program again, so I don't have to spend precious ice and lesson time on learning a new one. Ha, though to remember all the footwork and everything, I had to dig up an old VHS tape of me skating the program at Adult Midwestern Sectionals back in the day, pull the video off the tape to a computer, and watch it a whole bunch of times. It's always kind of cringey, watching yourself skate. Every little error and moment of awkwardness seems tremendously magnified. But now I'm all the more motivated to achieve my goal of skating that program clean, with no mistakes.

New Zealand Life:

The house staining continues. My goodness our house has a lot of exterior wall. At this rate the job may take us all winter. Perhaps I can make it a race: what will become a beautifully polished, completed project first? The outside of our house, or my novella?

In parenting news, I've been fascinated by how many toys, TV shows, etc, from my own childhood in the '80s are still a thing today, albeit sometimes in updated form. My son has loved the modern versions of My Little Pony and Voltron and Pokemon. And now, for a real '80s classic, he and his best little buddy at school are super into Rubik's cubes. I guess in this modern era it's a heck of a lot easier to solve them, thanks to the internet. After mastering the original cube, now he's on to the Rubik's Tower. (I myself spent a fair chunk of time yesterday working through the solution to that one. Even with some internet help, it's not always easy the first time through.)

Pic of the Week:

Moody autumn day on the bank of the Clutha River

Reading Corner:

I'm not yet done with The Bone People, since I didn't have time for more than a scant few moments of reading this week. But I know what will be up next once I finish: Gabriel's Road, the brand new Devil's West novella from L.A. Gilman. Gabriel was my favorite character in the original Devil's West trilogy, which are weird westerns with a fascinating premise and some really cool nature-based magic. I loved Gabriel's struggle to confront and accept his ties to the Territory, and I'm hoping this novella will provide the satisfying resolution to his arc that we didn't get in the main books, where he wasn't the protagonist. I'm really looking forward to reading his story.

State of the Schafer, Vol 3

Writing Progress:

Between my son's school holidays, a skating camp I attended for my birthday, and a family trip to Invercargill, I didn't get a whole lot of new words onto the page--but I got some. The White Serpent (Cara novella) is sitting at just over 20,000 words, and better yet, I've got outlines for most of the remaining scenes all laid out, ready to write.

I don't like to outline a story completely ahead of time, but I do like to outline scenes ahead of writing them, especially the parts with dialogue between the characters. I find dialogue the hardest to write, so working out the conversations without worrying about internals and descriptions and body-language tags and all the rest of a finished scene can be a big help to me. That way I don' t waste time agonizing over words that would get deleted and rewritten anyway as I adjust the conversational flow. Once I have the conversation feeling "right", the rest is relatively easy to add.

The kiddo heads back to school today, so it's my hope I can buckle down and use those outlines to make some serious progress this week. We shall see...

Skating update:

As mentioned, I went to an adult skating camp that happened to take place on my birthday--talk about perfect timing. The camp was held at one of the few year-round rinks on the South Island, about 3 hours away in a town called Gore. (The town thankfully does not live up to its name. It's a perfectly pleasant country town with an excellent athletic center, including multiple indoor pools, basketball/netball courts, ice rink, and more. Someone on the town council must have really liked playing sports.)

The camp was short, only a few hours, but a lot of fun. About 20 adult skaters from Dunedin, Invercargill, Queenstown, and Wanaka came to participate. Everyone I met was so friendly and welcoming, it was lovely. As an introvert, I find it so much easier to meet new people when you all share a common interest/passion! We did a bunch of stroking drills together, then split up into groups based on ability levels to work on jumps and spins, and finished off by doing freeform interpretation to different styles of music. I've always been better at the athletic side of skating than the graceful artistry, so I'm terrible at making up interpretive moves on the spot, but hey, it's fun to try.

The adult camp gang

But speaking of athletics, I confess I totally chickened out when the coach handling the advanced group asked us to do axel jumps. I have not tried an axel yet since returning to the ice, and I wasn't wearing the gel pads I use to protect hips, tailbone, and knees when working on more difficult jumps.  The axel is notorious for having the most terrifying of take-offs--if you blow the jump, you'll take a nasty fall. Every time I started the push into the take-off, my brain was all, NOPE NOPE NOPE, and my body stopped dead before I could even get into the air. It's okay, though. Next time I skate, I'll put on all my padding and see about reclaiming my axel. For now, I was just delighted that my back didn't have any trouble with everything else I did.

New Zealand Life:

After the skating camp, my husband and kiddo and I headed down to Invercargill, the southernmost city in New Zealand. Invercargill has great cafes, tasty oysters, and all the big homewares, furniture, hardware, and electronics stores not available in our tiny little rural town. We needed to buy a bunch of stuff relating to staining our house, but since none of us enjoy shopping, we livened up the day with a trip to a boat factory.

Stabicraft manufactures aluminium-hulled power boats in a small factory just outside of Invercargill, doing everything from initial design through to final touches. In classic friendly Kiwi fashion, they're happy to take you through the factory and explain the whole process. They still build boats the relatively old-school way, with human workers using ordinary tools and standard machines, no fancy automated assembly lines or robots. As an engineer, I always love seeing how stuff gets made, and this was no exception. Apparently it takes about two weeks to manufacture a single boat, and about 40 are in various stages of progress at any given time.

Hulls being shaped

Bending the aluminium in a press

Ready for welding

Waiting for paint and other final touches

We then took a trip out along the southern coast of NZ to Gemstone Beach, which friends had told us is a neat place to visit. The beach is aptly named; the black sand is dotted with shoals of colorful rocks. You can apparently find real gems there, like jasper and even sapphires. I doubt we bought back any actual gems, but our son lugged home an entire bag of ocean-smoothed pebbles in all shades of the rainbow. The largest ones are streaked and striped and look like they could be dragon eggs. The rocks weren't the only attraction; the wild waves were amazing to watch as well.

Windswept bluffs and wild waves

Pebbles on Gemstone Beach

Black sand and blue sky

On our way back to Invercargill from Gemstone Beach, we stopped past Colac Bay, a famous surf spot (although you need a thick wetsuit! The southern ocean is frigid). The contrast of the gentle waves in the sandy, sheltered bay with the wild breakers at Gemstone Beach, only a few minutes' drive away, was fascinating.

Colac Bay

Standing at the southern edge of New Zealand, looking toward Antarctica (it's still 3,000 miles away...there's a lot of ocean in between)

Reading Corner:

I'm partway through The Bone People, which is...interesting, so far. Very artsy and literary in style, not just the prose itself but the physical spacing on the page, and intriguing in its character work. I'm not sure how I feel about the protagonist being a semi-idealized self-insert for the author, though. (The author makes no bones about this; the similarities between herself and her character are evident, right down to the names.) Guess I'll see how the story plays out. I hear it's quite dark, focusing on child abuse, so I'm braced for that.

I didn't take my physical library copy of The Bone People with me to Invercargill, so instead I read on Kindle a recent SFF release, K. Chess's Famous Men Who Never Lived. It's a quiet, melancholy, thoughtful SF novel about refugees from a parallel-universe New York struggling to adjust to life in our world and accept the tremendous loss of what they've left behind. If you like literary SFF like Emily Mandel's Station Eleven, E.J. Swift's Osiris, or Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni, definitely pick this up. Heh, and it made me want to rewatch Fringe, although that will have to wait until I finish catching up on Arrow. (I'm slowly working my way through season 5. Why did nobody tell me S5 is nearly as absorbing as the excellent S2? It's getting awfully hard to stop after one episode.)