Listen to the Rain

After the frozen winds of this weekend, today is sunny and 21°C. Yesterday it was 26°C! That's Chicago spring weather for you. I took a walk out on the riverwalk and noticed that the $9 gelato place isn't open yet, which is sad because I would have loved to eat it while sitting out on the giant stairs near the water. That time will come soon enough. The restaurants were open and people were sitting on the tables.

We had a surprise meeting this morning, by which I mean I was caught by surprise by it even though it was in my calendar and had been for months. It was just a standard division meeting that's both not exciting and filled with quote CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY information, but there was a section about AI. The thing that got me was that they mentioned they named an in-house AI assistant after one of the people who works here and even came up with a backronym for it. I looked around to see if anyone else was as uncomfortable with this as I was, and no one seemed to be. Then again, I went on a Butlerian Jihad rant to Laila after she somehow used a hotkey to open up Microsoft CoPilot on my computer-

Me: "[blah blah]...okay Laila? No soulless machines."
Laila: "Okay abba."

and I imagine that makes me a bit of an outlier.

I've restarted my full exercise program after a long time of slacking. I used to do dozens of pushups a week but when I had my appendix out a while back I obviously had to give that up. I got back to walking a bunch almost immediately but by the time I could do pushups again I could only do a fraction of the amount I could do before and of course it was discouraging. Well, discouragement can only go so far, so I put all my exercises into my phone reminders because that's proven to be something that actually motivates me. Now I have exercises six days a week, plus all my walking, so hopefully it'll make a difference. It's definitely a bit of a drag--I am not one of those gym-motivated people, and other than walking I do not ever look forward to exercising. But since I'm middle-aged now, I need to make sure I keep doing it if I want to stay healthy.

Alright, work's over, time to go home.

Well, it happens every year.

The liturgy is the same every year, so it's hard to come up with new things to say (probably the same problem some rabbis having during the drash), but there's comfort in that. It's like Passover, like Sukkot, like all the holidays we have done for thousands of years. In good times and bad, in times of persecution and times of leniency, when those who hate us are strong and when they are weak, here and in Israel, it's the same. Even in Jerusalem, they still say לשנה הבאה בירושלים ( l'shana haba'ah b'Yerushalayim, "next year in Jerusalem"). It's nice to submerge yourself into the ritual, when you always know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen: to listen to "Kol Nidre" and then to be sent out to "B'Shem Hashem" on Erev Yom Kippur, to hear "Avinu Malkeinu" and the "Unatanah Tokef" and end with my favorite song, "El Nora Alilah." It's not a Neilah without hundreds of people (would be thousands but there aren't that many left behind at the end of the day) singing along as the gates are closing.

At Break Fast afterwards, I sat with a couple and their teenage daughter, who had a moment of fangirling when she learned I knew worldbshiny. She had seen the Spongebob Squarepants musical that sashagee and I also saw--and which I didn't write anything on here about, searching through my archives--and when I told the daughter that worldbshiny had won a Jeff for her Foley and that I knew here, she was incredibly excited. She actually squealed "That's my first choice!" when I said that worldbshiny sometimes gave guest lectures at Northwestern, because it turned out she was going to college for musical theatre. All of which is to say, the kids are alright. At least the ones willing to stick out YK through Neilah.

The interesting part is the part that's different every year, and that's the classes that happen during the afternoon. There's a gap between the end of Yizkor and the beginning of Neilah, and Mishkan fills it with various seminars and events you an attend. I went to one about "stillness," which was basically a guided meditation session. We all lay on the floor with our knees up and just concentrated on our breathing, in for four, hold for four, out for eight, for about five minutes, and it was one of the only times I've actually been able to achieve 無心 (mushin, "No-mind") while meditating. Then we did facial self-massage, rubbing our temples and squeezing our eyebrows for a few minutes, which felt nice but didn't get me to sink into the activity the way that the first part did. Between each session we talked with a person next to us about our experiences, how we found it and how it made us feel, and what we got out of it, and it was a really nice way to just be for an hour before I went off to the second class.

It's traditional to read the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur, because of the themes of judgement and repentence--in Hebrew תשובה teshuvah, literally "returning." Like so much of Tanakh when you look at it, Jonah is a bit odd. G-d tells Jonah to go to Ninevah and Jonah immediately runs away, tells the sailors to throw him overboard as soon as they ask what's going on, and when he goes to Ninevah and the people there listen and change their ways, asks G-d to kill him because he's so annoyed about the outcome! So why is this in Tanakh and what message are we supposed to draw from it? Jonah tells us in Chapter 4 that he ran away because he didn't want Ninevah to be delivered from judgement, perhaps because Ninevah was an enemy of the Children of Israel. The sages also give two other reasons: the first is that he thought he would be a laughingstock because if he proclaimed that the city would be destroyed and nothing happened, everyone would think he was just some ranting weirdo on a streetcorner rather than a righteous prophet of G-d; and the second is that if Ninevah did repent, it would look really bad for the Children of Israel, who were told to repent by many prophets and yet consistently refused to do so. But why is Jonah's immediate response the modern millennial humor "Things are bad, death is the only escape"? We spent an hour talking about that as a whole group, because the room was set up as a classroom so the usual practice of breaking up into ḥevrutah wouldn't have worked, but I enjoyed the discussion even though it kept moving on before I could contribute anything.

The next day was the Chicago Marathon, and my sister wanderluster_kp was in town running with nytesenvy as support. wanderluster_kp asked if she could sleep at our place since the marathon check-in was around 6:30 a.m. By the time we woke up she was already gone, but we got ready and headed out in time to see her round the bend at the northern part of the race, around Addison. And it turned out that uriany was there too! He and friends were waiting right near our location and saw wanderluster_kp at the same point. They invited us to go further south to catch her later, but my parents were bringing Laila home so we needed to be there to meet them. After lunch and nap time, my parents and I left again to go down to Chinatown to catch them on the southern leg of the race. It took a while--apparently nytesenvy was having some trouble and had slowed down--and they weren't visible on the tracker any more, but we did see them go back a bit after the end-of-race 15 mph car went by, and then we left again to go toward the finish line. They finished with a time of around 6 hours and 52 minutes, and then we picked up wanderluster_kp and took her back to my house to clean up.

It was a very Chicago day for a marathon, though--bright and sunny in the morning, and gale-force cold winds in the afternoon. Classic.

I'd had the same desk since roughly 2007, now pretty wobbly and with a broken keyboard tray. I just did a quick search trying to find a picture to show what it looks like, and I can't--maybe the model is very out of style. I've also had the same computer chair and one of the arms is falling apart.

Anyway, I've been wanting to switch to a floor desk for years, something like this. But of course, you can't get something like that in America because there is zero market for it and overseas shipping would be 4x the price of the item. Even online, when people talk about sitting on the floor, you always see comments about how the commenter could never sit on the floor because it would hurt their knees and back (probably true), and how the originally poster shouldn't keep sitting on the floor because they too will ruin their knees and back (haha do they not realize that Asia exists?). Well, even when I sit on a computer chair, I sit cross-legged and I only support my lower back against the chair. The whole point of sitting is to be fidgeting constantly, moving into a new position as the previous one becomes uncomfortable.

My current idea is to get a desk top that's something like this one, and then use storage cubes (something like this) for the corners, with regular coffee table legs for the rest of the support, then maybe some similar boxes on top. Keyboard tray in the inner corner so that it'll be at the natural height of my arms (maybe a foot off the floor). Plenty of room for two monitors (a third if I get one) and my work laptop and I'll finally get to sit on the floor like I've wanted to for a while.

We take Laila to the park just about every day to get some of her energy out, and the park that's closest to us is designed for babies and toddlers far more than for older kids so there's plenty of equipment for her to burn off her energy. She's taken to running around the edges of the park through the leaves, and that's led to two stories in the past week:

One

Lately Laila has taken to walking along the raised concrete border of the park, either holding onto one of our hands or by herself, and a few days ago she ran into a boy around her age who wanted to do the same thing but going the other way. They got close to each other, then very close, and then Laila--who is used to everyone who gets close to her face wanting to give her a kiss--closed her eyes and leaned in to "MWAH" the boy. With a very 😐 expression, the boy turned his face away, stepped carefully around Laila, and kept walking along the concrete border.

Two

There's another kid at the park who seems to just have a bad disposition. Twice now he's yelled "NO! NOOOOOO!" when Laila came nearby and once yelled "NO BABIES!" at her when she went over to see what he was playing with. sashagee even told me that one time he even pulled his fist back like he was going to hit Laila, and when his father stepped in and told him that he had to apologize he started throwing a tantrum. sashagee overheard him talking to another father at the park, saying, "Sometimes I just don't know what to do. He's just so angry."

This is a Laila story because Laila still just takes it all with a smile--she doesn't take it personally at all. Even when the kid yelled no loudly at her, she just looked at him and kept on going. She's so pure-hearted.

I spent years dithering back and forth over it, debating the pros and cons, not knowing whether I'd like it or not while my mother and my sister both got Apple Watches and said they liked them, and finally when the 6 came out, I asked for one. I've had it for a bit now and I can see why some people are fanatics for it. I'll never be one of those people who's always talking into my wrist, and I turned off the always-on display so it's only on when I raise my wrist (which seems to double the battery life so I only have to charge it every other day), but I set up the Infograph watch face to show my steps, activity rings, the phase of the moon, sunrise and sunset, the weather, and a link to my calendar. I have spoken to it once, to tell it to set a timer, which was easier than pulling out my phone--and like my phone, it only speaks Japanese.

I got the 40 mm because I have relatively small wrists for my height--I'm 6'5" / 197 cm, but I wear size S shirts--and I really like the way it looks. It looks more like a watch and less like A Device, and with the screen off most of the time it's a mysterious blank cube on my wrist. Like the Monolith.

Right now, most of what I've used it for is exercise tracking. I set up Activity to track all my exercise and closed the rings for the first time today, and I've been engaging in a competition with my mother and sister. My sister took the train back to Michigan today so she obviously didn't get a lot of exercise, but my mother--for someone who's almost 70 (tomorrow!), she moves a lot. I'll really need to work hard to beat her consistently.

I'm not sure it's possible to do so without revealing our true names and so gaining power over each other, but if anyone wants to be Activity buddies message me.

I went to bed at midnight last night but couldn't fall asleep until 3 a.m. Originally I thought the guy who lives below me was having a party or something, because I kept hearing music and laughing and people's voices, but I went out into the living room and I didn't hear anything, so I think he just fell asleep with the TV on or something. I listened to a few meditations, I read Twitter with the screen accessibility brightness hack, I tried visualizations, but nothing worked, until I turned on my Rain Rain "city rain, cat purring, sound of a dryer" mix, which finally worked. And then I woke up at 7:30 a.m. and I'm still exhausted.

Sigh.

After the Anime Chicago Sampler on Saturday, I went off to eat dinner and then got back online for smtemp's birthday! She was hosting an anime power hour, so people got out beers (I finished off about one ounce from each of four almost-empty liquor bottles) and we watched an old power hour video that bret.thomas.391 had made for an ACEN past. And then we watched a Disney power hour on YouTube, and part of more anime, and then seloy shared her screen and we looked at old photos for hours. I wasn't in any of them--most of them were from before I started hanging out with the suburban friends, or while I lived in Japan--but it was still great. Group Zoom calls that are just discussions I'm less of a fan of, but something where we'll all focused on a unifying activity? Those are great.

I also ducked out for a while to go talk on Discord with some of the Anime Chicago people, which was similarly lovely. A small group discussion--made smaller by some of the people zoning out--after an afternoon of watching anime. 最高.

I had mentioned going on a walk on Friday, and on Sunday, britshlez texted me during my Japanese lesson saying that she was nearby on a dog walk and asking if I wanted to walk for a bit. I came out, we got take-out margaritas at Cescas Margarita Bar & Grill, and then walked south on a side street, down through St. Boniface Catholic Cemetery, past a group of decorated cars in a procession driving past the home of a girl having a birthday, and over to her house. She went off to see her sister, who just had a baby and is having a hard time, and since I was already down near where worldbshiny and lisekatevans live, I texted one and then the other. Apparently, though, it was such a nice day that everyone had the same idea--both of them had already been out on walks and gotten back not that long before. worldbshiny and I made plans to walk next weekend, and lisekatevans suggested we walk or video chat sometime this week, so The weather is supposed to be gorgeous all this week, so there will be time.

And then I went home, ordered ramen from Blowfish because I didn't want to cook, played Stellaris, and tried to sleep. It didn't quite work, and now I'm exhausted, but I'm here. I guess that's a victory, nowadays?

How appropriate that I'm posting this on Labor Day, comrades.

​( Content warning: Food, weight discussion )

After a delicious breakfast of broccoli, rice, pickles, hamburger, sweetened omelet, salted mackerel, burdock root, breaded fish paste (がんす, a local dish), tea, and pudding with caramel sauce (Hotel Active, for all your Hiroshima visits!), I went back to the room, got my suitcase, and schoolpsychnerd and I headed down to check out right on the dot of our requested 9 a.m. departure time. Then we walked out onto Aioi-dōri and set to wait for the streetcar.

Hiroshima's street cars are a local institution. They've been running since before the war--there's actually at least one car that's been in service since before the war and survived the bombing--and Hiroshima actually turned down proposals for a subway network in favor of an underground mall because, well, they already had the streets cars. I've spent uncounted hours of my life on them, what with my incredibly long commute to and from Suzugamine every day, and sitting on them was kind of like stepping back into the past.

I had forgotten the little chime they play when the car starts moving after a stop, though...

We rode the streetcar to the end, past the stop where I used to get off for work, though now renamed to 修大附属鈴峯前駅 (Shudaifuzoku-Suzugaminemae Eki) since the school combined with a boys' school due to low enrollment. Even the old ramen shop, おじいちゃんの作ったラーメン (Ojiichan no Tsukutta Ramen, "Grandpa-Made Ramen"), was still there, though we didn't have time to go.

Then at Miyajima-guchi, we took the ferry across to the island.



After dropping our luggage off in the coin lockers and showing our friends the asshole deer of Miyajima--schoolpsychnerd has a video of me leading a deer around using a wrapper from an ice cream cone, but it just looks like I'm using elf magic--we headed straight over to Itsukushima Shrine to take advantage of the high tide for some nice views. It was all set up like the aftermath of a festival, maybe Tanabata, with a floating stage. There was even a priest in the actual shrine conducting a ceremony, which I've never seen before. And that also means that I had no idea what the ceremony was for, either.

After we went through the shrine, everyone was pretty hungry and xoDrVenture wanted oysters, so we stopped into the first restaurant we saw that was serving them. I got anago-don, fried conger eel over rice, because while I've made some effort to stick to kashrut during this trip, I'm willing to make an exception for Miyajima eel. And one of the waitresses wanted to touch my hair when we left and said it was soft.

After lunch we headed into the shōtengai to do some shopping and snacks in preparation for schoolpsychnerd and I climbing the mountain. We bought a set of tea cups and a wooden case for putting matcha in, and I drank a "banana milk" (basically a smoothie). After heading down to the other end of the shōtengai, we walked back and went to the rope way stop. Originally it was going to be four climbers, but by the time we got there the group had been whittled down to just schoolpsychnerd and me, so we dropped off our excess gear with the people going up the ropeway and took our first steps on the trail up Misen.



The climb up Misen isn't the hardest climb in the world. Most of it is worn stone steps like those shown in the picture, and even though the heat and humidity were brutal at sea level they weren't as bad under the tree canopy. Of course, we were climbing a mountain, so we were sweating buckets in any case.

We saw quite a few people coming down the mountain, and there was a work crew fixing one of streams that run underneath the steps in some places. There was also an old Japanese man who gave schoolpsychnerd his fan when he met her, saying that he no longer needed it since he was coming down the mountain. That occurred near the bottom, which I'm glad of because that fan came in pretty handy on the climb up. I'm not sure I've ever been as disgusting as when I reached the top, except for the last time I climbed Misen.

tropicanaomega and xoDrVenture were waiting for us at the railway station near the summit, another friend and tastee_wheat having gone to make the climb to the top. I went over to buy some ice cream, only to have the woman working the food desk ask me in pretty good English if I had been at the kagura performance the previous night. I recognized her, since she had been there with an American guy and she said that she knew us because he talked to us. That was the basis of our interactions though, so I ordered my ice cream, ate it, then waited for everyone to assemble.

We took the rope way back down and then the shuttle to the Miyajima Seaside Hotel, where I've stayed with my parents before and where aaron.hosek, who went ahead to Matsumoto, had arrived first and asked them to send the shuttle to us. We went to the hotel, checked in, and the showered to get slightly less utterly disgusting and changed into our yukata for dinner:



Dinner was, of course, amazing:



We ate pretty much until near exploding, though slowly, which helped prevent any actual explosions. It was a little under two hours total for dinner, between the different courses, the talking, and the slow eating of many tiny portions, and was the best meal I've had yet in a trip full of great meals. When we were done, we all got dressed up in our yukata except for one of us who wanted a bit more opportunity to rest and went down to the front desk to ask the shuttle to take us back near the shrine.

Itsukushima is lit up at night, but it wasn't as pretty as I remember it being this time. Or maybe it was just that even though the sun had gone down it was still incredibly sticky. We walked from the pier to the shrine, past it a little until the houses started and the streets started to remind us of Fatal Frame, and then back to the pier, where I successfully called the hotel to ask them to come pick us up. Back at the hotel a bunch of people went to the onsen, but I took advantage of the facilities in a different fashion--I took a bath in the huge bathtub, which was actually large enough for the water to cover my knees. When I started to feel a little cramped, I drained out the water, dried off, and went to bed.

Steps taken: 17538

So, the apartment is almost entirely packed into boxes thanks to the efforts of the supremely efficient schoolpsychnerd. We picked up the keys to our new apartment today, including the room key, building key, storage key, and mail key, all of which look the same. I'm going to have to come up with separate keychains to put all the keys on so I can remember them all.

The actual moving day is on Friday, but schoolpsychnerd is planning to move a lot of the boxes tomorrow with the help of a friend. We don't want to move too much, because the movers are coming and they'll be moving all the heavy stuff and we don't want to litter the whole apartment with things and make their job harder, but we also want to move enough that they won't actually have much to do. Even if they do have a minimum time we have them for. But we're going most of the moving ourselves, and I'm glad that I'm in much better shape than I was last time I moved. I'll need it to walk the four blocks with some of those boxes.

We've now lived longer back in American than we lived in Japan. I wrote that post about where is home a month ago, and every time I see some picture and get really homesick--and I think that's an appropriate word--for the rice fields of Chiyoda, I have those sentiments again. But we are moving into a nice apartment. I'll post pictures when we have them.

Friday - Burgers, Art, and Sauerkraut
The next morning, schoolpsychnerd again had to be somewhere early. This time, though, I didn't even wake up when she wished me goodbye, so I was pretty disoriented when I woke up and the room was otherwise empty. I loafed around the room for a couple hours, getting progressively hungrier and less willing to leave the bed, and then I finally scarfed down all the remaining nuts and headed out the door to a burger place I had looked up on my phone. When I went outside, the weather was pretty much my ideal weather: cloudy skies, cool breeze, wet ground, and the smell after the rain. It was almost enough to make me change my mind and go into the Irish bar I saw along the way, but I kept to my original plan.

I had originally set out with the intention to walk from our hotel down to the National Mall, and I managed to stick to that plan even though when I left the restaurant it was raining. I went to the Freer Gallery of Art (and apparently just missed an exhibition about the tea ceremony! By one day! ARGH!), which was recommended I think by my father, though I can't remember exactly who told me to go. Anyway, it's a collection of art from what a 19th century art collector would have called "The Orient," so there was everything from Japanese screens to Arabic pottery. The last one I didn't devote much time to, despite how beautiful it was, because I've never really been interested in pottery. Honestly, I'd be happy with plain white bowls or bowls made out of dark wood, much like my taste in furniture.

There were other interesting things, though:

That's a literal starmetal dagger. Emperor Jahangir had it made out of a fallen star, and later said that it "cut beautifully, as well as the very best swords." So maybe there is something to that meteoric iron superweapon fantasy trope!


That's a picture of Kōbō Daishi on his trip to China to learn the teachings of Buddhism, which he later brought back to Japan. I mainly liked this image because it has a literal example of red oni blue oni (赤鬼青鬼), though the art is definitely beautiful as well. It's the kind of thing I'd love to have in schoolpsychnerd and my bedroom, in my imagined dream residence where the bedroom has byōbu, tatami floors, a futon instead of a bed, zaisu and low table, and so on. I can probably do a lot of that even if there isn't a tatami flooring, really. I actually prefer sitting on the floor in a lot of cases.

Oh! Also, in a weird coincidence, I found proof that schoolpsychnerd, like Nicholas Cage and Keanu Reeves, is an immortal vampire who has survived through the ages and secretly manipulates us from behind the scenes:


Green and Gold: the Little Green Cap, but it's pretty obviously a picture of my wife. I'm on to your schemes!

The collection of jades was neat, but it's just jade discs so it doesn't make a very good photographic subject.

After I looked all around there, I used my remaining time to head back into the Museum of the American Indian and look around some more. There was a short movie called Who We Are that they showed in the theatre on the top floor, so I headed up there to watch that. It was maybe fifteen minutes and primarily served as a well to tell people that Native Americans aren't just records in history books or cultures frozen in time, both of which I already knew, but it was a good introduction to the idea. Then it let us out in an exhibit that went into detail on various tribes' traditional beliefs and practices, most of which I knew almost nothing about. I couldn't stay for the entire time, though, because schoolpsychnerd texted me to let me know she was finished with her presentation an hour before I expected, so I had to start walking. I was determined that I would walk from our hotel to the National Mall and back to our hotel, and I did. It just took me about an hour since it was mostly at a slight-to-moderate incline. I didn't go back to our room when I walked into the hotel room; I just sat on the couch and let schoolpsychnerd know that I was down there.

We were going to meet with satinalien for dinner at Old Europe, but she was feeling under the weather, so schoolpsychnerd and I went ourselves. Here's a sample of what we ate:


That's dark rye bread with Griebenschmalz vom Schwein, or a spread made from rendered pig fat. It may have been the least kosher thing I've ever eaten, but it tasted fantastic. I also got the Schnitzel Old Europe, which had veal, chicken, tomatos, onions, hollendaise sauce, and sides of sauerkraut, potatos, and mixed vegetables. And beef stew as an appetizer and a dark chocolate cake. It was quite possibly the most stereotypical German meal I could have eaten other than the lack of bratwurst, but you can't have everything at once. I also learned that my pronunciation of German is not particularly good, which shouldn't surprise me since I've never studied it at all. Maybe I should look into that if I plan to go to German restaurants more often.

After that, we went home and went to sleep. We were going to meet up with some friends, but they were drained from the day's activities and so were we, so we all went to bed.

Saturday - Trip Home
Not that much to say for the final day, since it was mostly just taken up by going home, going shopping, and then sitting around at home. There was one minor hiccup when it turned out that the hotel's free shuttle didn't run on weekend's until 9, so we had to walk from the hotel to the Metro, and then that Metro trains only run about every half an hour on weekends, but we made it there, made it to Union Station in time to take the MARC train (which only started weekend service in December!) back to the Baltimore airport, and then flew out. The only notable thing was the restaurant we ate in in the Baltimore airport had USB plugs in the wall. They also were locally-owned and served locally-sourced food which was really good, but I didn't take any pictures so you'll have to take my word for it.

It was pretty great. I'm glad we had enough money and I had enough vacation time that I could come along, because if I'm going to be a tourist in a city, DC is a great place to be one, and a lot of schoolpsychnerd and my friends seem to live either in DC or in the cities around it. Next year is Orlando and I've heard that it's in Disney, but how much fun would that be by myself? The year after that is New Orleans, though, where I've never been before, so I have to go to that one.

Whew! That took forever to write.

I had to ask for a deadline extension today. I feel like a real journalist.

My muscles are made of lead. I really hoped I'd be feeling better, but (except for how I felt Sunday night) I feel worse. This must be how a Martian who came to Earth would feel.

A hand-made Valentine's Day card is the best gift ever.

So, while Ultimate yesterday was awesome, my muscles today are doing a fabulous job of telling me that I shouldn't have played it. At length, and with some vigor. While I'm more in shape than I was (I didn't get excessively tired during the game, and I didn't need a break, or even really to sit down, after it was done), I'm not as in shape as I thought. With more Ultimate games forthcoming, though, hopefully that should get better soon.

As a show of solidarity with my muscles' pain and anguish, I will share with you the most emo video ever made.

If anyone can out-emo that, please post it. I'm curious. ^_^

Starcraft board game?

Awesome. I mean, clearly actually playing Starcraft is awesome too, but a board game? 180 miniatures? Card-driven combat? 2-6 players?

All I have to say is, "Zerg Rush! Kekekekekekeke ^_^"

My knee has been clicking a lot when I do anything other than moving it in simple up-and-down patterns. It's a little worrying, though not that much. It's not painful, there's no loss of movement, and since I had knee surgery when I was 13 I knew something like this would happen eventually. I just hoped that eventually would mean "sometime in the distant future."

I should probably stretch more before exercising. My stretching right now is kind of perfunctory.