from Joy Beeson

September 2015

Worldwide Folklore #1

to Harold Marcum

There have been no changes here — or only trivial ones, such as my purchase of a Trek Pure pedal-powered wheelchair when my knee went out of whack a couple of years ago.  Thanks to being able to exercise it without putting weight on it, I healed completely in short order.

The Pure is a style of bicycle-shaped object too new to have settled on a name.  "Comfort bike", "step-through biked", "crank forward bike", and "semi-recumbent" are among the names it has been sold under.  You can't manage to ride more than a mile or two at a sitting on a "comfort bike", but it gets me to church when my back is out, and I enjoy taking it for a spin around the block now and again — since you don't so much steer the thing as aim it, it still gives me some of the thrill of first learning to ride.  (But when I rode it yesterday, it had been parked for so long that I had to pump the tires up first.)

I haven't been reading much because I spend all my evenings playing with the computer and reading Usenet.  I also subscribed to the Usenet-style version of Baen's Bar, Not all the posts make it through the NNTP translation unscathed, and some come through the translation as complete gibberish, but I can't read Web forums at all, so I'm glad they give you options.  (It also does a mailing list.)  I'm sitting out Chris Nuttall's current novel; it's a "the Nazis won" alternate history, and that theme was worn out when I was still reading horse stories and westerns.

I carry a copy of "The Radio Boys and the Flood fighters in my bag for waiting rooms.  (My next appointment is for a mammogram, and Women's Imaging always gets you out before your appointment was due to start, so I don't think I'll make much progress on it.)  It's excellent waiting-room reading because it isn't a story at all, only a series of unrelated incidents.  For example, the boys go to visit the uncle of one of them and while there, they string up an antenna. In the process one of the boys steps on a rotten board, falls into an abandoned and very cold well, is dramatically fished out and thawed out, then they sit around in the evening listening to music on the radio, thanks to the new antenna.

There was one incident which surprised me: one of the boys eagerly awaited a new "radio set", it arrived, he put it together using his elite radio skills — and then settles down to listen to broadcasts.  The infodump at the beginning strongly implied that the theme of the series is the boys using their elite radio skills to Save the Day, but I'm more than halfway through and have not yet seen any evidence that they know how to transmit.

I like most of the authors Patricia mentioned.

I don't go to movies or even watch TV or videos; I used to manage to sit still for shows by knitting socks, but nowadays it's a rare show that doesn't make me glad that noises don't carry from room to room in this house. (I think it's the rough ceilings; there aren't any doors.)