Tour de France:

It's happening, and I've been watching it. It's weird to me that everyone in cycling, at least in the past, has just been a convicted doper, and now it's sort of just accepted and fine. I did watch that Lance Armstrong documentary during Covid, and I sort of felt like, well, if everyone is using drugs and Lance is still the best, then do we really care? If no one was doping, he might also still be the best. I did some cursory googling about this issue, and it seems like now the doping is just more on an individual and micro-dosing level, rather than team sponsored. I mean, okay.

Book Work:

I have written 10, 250 words of the Sophie Jones book since Mac has been at camp. I've also emailed a synopsis to my agent. We can agree this is excellent progress.

Running:

In a momentary lapse of judgment and self-preservation, I have agreed to race a mile on Sunday. Lucky for me, Shef volunteered to be my pace buddy, so now it won't be as bad as it might have been if he hadn't done that.

Today's the day Mac leaves us for three weeks at camp. He's very excited, can't wait to get on the bus, and claims he won't miss us at all. He resisted purchasing the required camp supply of stationery because he claims he won't be writing to us at all ever. I reminded him that the camp staff will require him to write once per week. We bought the stationery.

It's hard for me to imagine a better place for a fourteen-year-old boy than camp. He'll have a ton of autonomy in a youth-centered community. He'll have opportunities to create real and lasting relationships. There are wholesome mentors and thoughtful scaffolding for both physical and emotional growth.

I'm a camp enthusiast, and I'm happy for Mac. But I'd also like for him to write me some letters and pretend to miss me just a little bit.

We're in the Salt Lake City airport returning from a very pleasant trip to Park City, Utah. While we were on vacation, we engaged in various mountain adventures.

One highlight was a tour of Utah Olympic Park, site of the 2002 Olympic Ski Jumping, Bobsledding, and Luge Competitions. Our guide was two-time Olympian Casey Larson. He told us he is 5'10 and 135 pounds. These stats were relevant to our tour because ski jumpers are better if they're very small. The minimum BMI for men is 18.5, which is not a very big BMI. I wanted to ask, but did not, about the prevalence of eating disorders among ski jumpers.

In addition to these facts about jumping, I discovered that luge is the most dangerous of the winter sports. Conversely, Casey claims that ski jumping has the lowest rate of injury. I specifically asked about regular cross country skiing, as I was skeptical of the safety of launching oneself off a ramp into the air. But Casey said that even though they're going fast down that very steep jumping ramp, they're not that high above the ground in their flying squirrel positions. He also said that the regular nordic skiiers are more prone to overuse injuries.

Later, I got to ride a tube down the ski jump hill (not the ramp part, but the part you land on out of the air). It was extremely steep and scary, and I screamed the whole way down. I had to wear a helmet to do that, so it seemed plenty dangerous to me.

Now that I'm finished with vacation, I'm committing to writing 20 thousand words in the next three weeks on my fourth novel. So, there will likely be a whole lot of blogging along with that.

Second week of summer, ready set go.

Time to get serious about all manner of things, including Sophie and George, the main characters of my fourth novel. I mean, I hope it's my fourth novel. It's iteration #3 of novel four, so this is manuscript 4.3, I guess.

Except that I wrote another partial book before Minor Dramas, so maybe it's 5.3? Whatever, I think it's best not to think too hard about the numbering system.

I have a good feeling about Sophie and George, anyway. I think they're going to have a good story and fall in love while solving a crime together. Doesn't that sound utterly delightful? There will be some bumps along the way and plenty of quirks.

One of the quirks is that Sophie strongly believes in fate and omens. I have a running list of omens that will appear in the book. I'm excited about those. I'm writing with my crystals by my side, after all.

To be honest, I wish we could fast forward a little bit to the part where I have most of the details worked out and I could just be cranking out chapters in some sort of more-or-less order, but we're not there. We're never going to get there. We just have do things organically as we always have and that's that.

Onward.

Everyone knows I've been enjoying running since I was eleven years old. I've always had unconventional running form, the kind that prompts comments like, "I could never mistake your gait!" or, "I guess you can't tell how fast someone is by looking!" 

Do I wish I had a gazelle-like stride? I mean, sure. But, we can't get too hung up about these things and let other people's judgments steal our joy. 

Or something. 

Anyway. I had an alarming running-related pain recently and visited a physical therapist named Betsy. She has fixes for most of my problems and last week she said what she'd really like to do is "tweak" my running form. It turns out that by "tweak," she means completely remake it, a process that requires constant thought and effort.

I have to think about leaning forward, increasing the frequency with which my feet hit the ground, changing the relative locations of the forefoot strikes, exaggerating the push off, tensing my abs, but not my superficial abs!

Whereas I used to think about all manner of exciting and important things while I ran, now I think about whether I'm adhering to Betsy's compex and multi-step directions. We'll see how this goes.

 I'm always turning them over, but that seems okay, doesn't it? A sort of perpetual hope? 

Today's new leaf is about a summer routine. We buffered the school year schedule and the summer schedule with a period of intensity that has been perhaps unmatched in West family life. We did:

• Section track meet, a two-day affair
• Mac's 8th-grade graduation
• My final grades and comments
• Shef's graduation from high school
• Shef's state track meet, a two-day affair where he won the two-mile and finished third in the mile. This was also his final high-school competition, and we all knew while we watched him race that he will no longer wear the blue and green.
• Shef's graduation party
• Mac's birthday! That kid is 14 and "celebrated" his milestone by watching Shef race and also going to a party for Shef and his friends. He was a good sport, but come on. That sucked a little.
• Lots and lots of other graduation parties for kids I have taught and liked forever
• A visit to a book club that read Are We There Yet? It was a little awkward because when I arrived, I thought they'd read Home or Away. Luckily, even in my near delirium, I managed to remember the names of the characters in my second novel.

My grades are turned in and my senior mom moment is over for the day (We did the college athlete recognition this morning. Shef is about to be a college athlete), and now I'm supposed to be sitting here at the kitchen table doing my other job.

Which is to be a novelist.

Frankly, it seems virtually impossible at the moment that I could be capable of producing a novel-length work. It seems impossible that I could even make it through the day without tripping over myself and forgetting the name of the current vice president.

We're at approximately, "Man, woman, person, camera, TV" over here.

Nevertheless, I'm more than 400 days behind on my fourth novel. It's summer. I have to make myself work on it. There's simply no choice and no more wiggle room. This blog post is the warm-up. 

I'm going to tell you about the fight the dogs got into last night:

Generally, the three (3) dogs peacefully co-exist with some good-natured and energy-sapping rough housing mixed into their pleasant daily routine of lying on the couch in sunny spots.

But last night, something mysterious happened that upset the canine balance, and a spirited tussle turned frantic. Skip's yelps became screamish. I had to yank Ripper off of his neck. Teddy's toenails slid precariously on the wood floor. I might have kicked him.

The whole thing was slightly traumatizing, especially when we found chunks of Skip's hair on Ripper's jowls. Skip, we realized, was also bleeding in two places. He refused to leave my lap for the rest of the evening. We didn't know that a cockapoo could be so vicious, but I'm not sure that any of us were particularly surprised. Ripper does Ripper. And we named her that.

That's the whole story.

I'd prefer it's the end of this dog drama. I don't really need it in my life right now.