fives, from LA

As posted yesterday, the meme is:

Ask me my Top Five Whatevers. Fannish or literary or otherwise. Any top fives – it doesn’t matter what, really! Fandoms, ice cream flavors, cartoons or comics, women/men in my fandoms, ideal holiday destinations, goals for the future, celebrity crushes, books I wish would be made into movies, love songs, etc.

I will answer them all in the comments. Also, let me know if you want me to give you five in return.

Ready, set… GO!

LA asked a few, so here they are.

Favorite 5 places to row:
Let’s see:

• Our own lake in Oregon, because it’s beautiful and because it’s so great to just go out back and row.
• The Sydney International Regatta Centre (actually in Penrith), because it was very cool to row on an Olympic course
• Lake Natoma, in Sacramento: I don’t know how it would be to row there regularly – I’m not sure if anyone does – but it’s a great race venue
• The Schuylkill river in Philadelphia, because it was exciting to finally row in my hometown. The views are fantastic and so is Boathouse Row
• Towne Lake in Austin – walking distance from Sixth Street, nice long rowing venue

I would list Tempe Town Lake in Arizona, if only they’d put a dome over it. The lake itself is great, but the temperature and cleanliness of the air above it isn’t so good.

Favorite 5 college classes as an undergrad:
I’m not sure if there were five of them! Let’s see:

• Folksong, with the inimitable Kenny Goldstein – so much fun I took a couple other classes with him too
• Advanced mechanics, with Burton Paul: This one was about cogs and gears and four-bar mechanisms Dr. Paul was phenomenally boring when we had him for a class on stresses in materials, but somehow in this class (which touched on his own research) he was fascinating.
• Formal Logic: fun! And it counted as a math class.
• Finite Element Analysis and Heat Transfer: two separate classes, but I took them the same semester and you use the methods of the former to do the latter – finally something in engineering that seemed to come easily to me.
• Linguistics: which was every bit as interesting as I expected it to be. Though actually the graduate class I took just for fun at ASU years later was even better.

Favorite 5 Christmas ornaments from the travel tree:
I’m going to skip this one for now; Ted’s got an archive of photos of them, so I’ll do it later with pictures.

LA requested a couple of easy ones, so here you go:
- top five favorite things about where you live
- top five books (or other works) that inspire your own writing

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

five from Hobbitbabe

See previous two entries if you need an explanation.

Hobbitbabe asked for:
Five athletic accomplishments you’re proud of (not necessarily competition results).

Hm. The hard part here is how to define “athletic”; earning a private pilot’s license is one of my proudest acomplishments, but though flying counts as a sport in some cases, I guess it’s not really athletic.

• The next question is how to count the marathons; I’ve done five, so it’s probably best to lump them together so they don’t take up the whole list. I’m proud of my first marathon (on a rowing machine), my first marathon on the water (in a double), my next marathon on the erg in which I took a lot of time off the previous year, my first marathon on the water in a single all myself, and the marathon I erged in Taiwan just to have a goal to strive for, with nothing to push me but me.
• We tend to videotape races, so we can see how we’ve done. There was one, years ago in Long Beach, when I was way behind the others in the race and you could tell I’d given up – terrible form, not even trying for maximum power. I swore to myself then that I’d never have to see a video like that again, and I’m proud that I never have. I still come in dead fucking last sometimes (the difference between dead last and dead fucking last is a fair bit of open water) but at least I’m trying the whole way for the best time I can achieve.
• I’m proud to say I’ve not only rowed but competed on four continents, that I’m in my mid-40s and still rowin regularly, and that I’m pretty limber for age
• I’m proud that I completed the Concept 2 Holiday Challenge (goal is to erg 200,000m from American Thanksgiving to Christmas) most years since 2002, excepting only years I was rendered unable to do it due to illness, injury, and last year when I did the shorter 100,000 challenge version instead because I only had access to an erg for about 10 days in that period.
• I’m proud that I can still pike to a headstand. Start with head and feet on the floor, hands making a tripod with hear, legs straight and toes pointed. Then use your ab muscles to pull both legs up a once, slowly, gracefully and without kicking, into a headstand.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.