Good choice

I almost skipped rowing last night. The drive home from work had been drizzly, and I had half a review of Mutiny on the Bounty to write, and I'd just gotten two new Netflix in the mail, and this Poached Eggs Over Rice recipe called to me, with its long-cooking brown riciness, and I've gotten sucked into Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love and must spend a certain amount of time with it each day. I am nothing if not gifted with the excuses.

I'm so glad I went. In rowing, there are three basic categories of hard workout. There's the "just start rowing and I'll tell you when to stop, unless you keel over first" endurance row, and there are the sets of sprints that leave your lungs seared and your mouth tasting faintly of metal (also known as "Saturday"). And then there's the heavy-lifting row, which is my favorite kind of row: slow and heavy and all about muscle mass. We row by pairs, so that the boat is heavy and sluggish. We row with one arm tucked behind our backs to build our upper-body strength. We practice pushing as hard as we can and using the momentum to creep back up and do it again. It's all about straight backs at the catch and getting that extra bit of pull with the arms at the release, and it can be transformative for a crew: suddenly everybody settles their weight back at the same time, and the THUNK of the oars feathering gets loud and urgent, and the coxswain says he can see the bow rise out of the water with each stroke. It's the kind of row that looks easy from the shore but leaves everyone sore the next day. Sore, but happy.

Which is way better than The Notebook any day.

More than the sum

You all know I love evening crew practice. (Mostly.) It's the most sane thing in the world, somehow: cool air, black water, the thunk-THUNK of oars feathering and squaring, the rush of bubbles under the hull of the boat. But sometimes, I'll admit, the best part of practice is coming home from practice.

Last night I started to make Julia Child's Potage Parmentier (potato-leek soup), but ran out of time before a date with Persepolis at the Parkway, and ended up shoving the whole pot into the fridge for finishing today. After practice tonight, I pulled it back out and put it on to simmer while I ran through the shower.

Now, Potage Parmentier comes to me from Julia via Julie and Julia, my personal favorite snarky food memoir. Here's what Julie (in my mind, she's just Julie now, as Julia was just Julia to her) has to say about it:

"Once the leeks and potatoes have simmered for an hour or so, you mash them up with a fork or a food mill or a potato ricer. All of these options are far more of a pain in the neck than the Cuisinart...but Julia Child allows as how a Cuisinart will turn soup into 'something un-French and monotonous.' Any suggestion that uses the construction 'un-French' is up for debate, but if you make Potage Parmentier, you will see her point. If you use the ricer, the soup will have bits--green bits and white bits and yellow bits--instead of being utterly smooth. After you've mushed it up, just stir in a couple of hefty chunks of butter, and you're done. JC says sprinkle with parsley but you don't have to. It looks pretty enough as it is, and it smells glorious, which is funny when you think about it. There's not a thing in it but leeks, potatoes, butter, water, pepper, and salt."

My thoughts exactly. I don't understand exactly how boiling potatoes and leeks to death makes them look, smell, and taste so fantastic, but it does. I thought maybe the butter was to blame, since it's, uh, butter, but the truth is that the whole thing smells pretty amazing even before the butter goes in. Apparently I've been underestimating the flavor concentration of two major vegetables. I'm sorry, leeks and potatoes. I should never have doubted you.

And so after an hour of sprints up and down the center of the lake, of wrestling a seventy-foot boat down a bi-level dock and back up again, of dodging seven-seat's backsplash, of my not-quite-not-sick lungs rattling like a consumptive's, I was nothing but pleased to come home to a little bit of slightly green, slightly chunky, very leek-y and very potato-y soup. There's not much better.

I was only trying to be virtuous

This is the second time this week I've shown up for an apparently-cancelled crew practice.

Guess I'll have to take a hot shower, eat some homemade pizza, and knit my way through In Her Shoes instead. With slippers and a blanket. Too bad about that. But what's a girl to do?

(Though, frankly, if I'd known I might have gone for a run before it got dark.)

Eight Things

Oh, my! I've been tagged! Whatever shall I do?

Rules: Give 8 random facts about yourself, then tag 8 more people to do the same thing.

The facts are these.

1. I always eat colored candy in reverse-rainbow order, starting with purple (or brown, if we're talking M&Ms) and working my way up to red.

2. I keep a mental list of alternative careers just in case the wordy writing-editing thing fails me. Thus far: librarian, florist, movie location scout, professional driver on a closed course.

3. My friend Maggie and I like to pretend that we're going to start an all-girl punk cover band called Israel and the Minor Prophets.

4. Top Five Celebrity Crushes, Fall 2007 Edition: John Krasinski, John Corbett, Jon Stewart, Zach Gilford, Lee Pace. Orlando Bloom visits when he has a few days off, but he's awfully busy with all that swashbuckling he does.

5. I hand-wrote most of a novel in the seventh grade.

6. I'm not much into shoes, but I adore cute purses.

7. I am a starboard rower, which means that a) my oar goes to the left, b) I sit in an odd-numbered seat (usually 1 or 7), and c) my right arm is bigger than my left.

8. I used to be grossed out by the Presbyterian tradition of dipping sourdough communion bread in grape juice, but now I like the way it tastes.

I don't think I have a combined total of eight bloggish friends, so: if you have a blog and want to consider yourself tagged, do so. If you don't have a blog and want to consider yourself tagged, well, either or Blogger or Wordpress could probably oblige you...

I love a man with a sense of humor

I thought my coach was joking when he told us to row for an hour without stopping.

Sixty minutes and 2,880 strokes later, I know: He wasn't.

If you like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain

My crew got caught in the rain tonight. Rowing in the rain is kind of a trade-off situation. On one hand, it sounds worse than it is: the water is usually dead calm when it rains, so the rowing is easy; rain means cloud cover, which keeps the air a little warmer; and a bit of cool water feels nice on the back of the neck. Rowing in the rain is tranquil. On the other hand, it's...raining. Our oars get slippery and we hold the handles too tightly, which unbalances the boat and causes blisters. And there's nothing worse for concentration than a drop of water sliding through your part, down your forehead, and off the end of your nose.

We don't usually row in the rain. We'll keep going if we're already on the water, but if we're just showing up, we know what's good for us: if we hurry through our indoor workout--and herein lies the true spirit of my crew--we can just catch the 7:00 movie at the Parkway with enough time to stand in line for pizza. Every once in awhile, though, we get caught in the middle of the lake and we decide to stay out. It's not bad. I think we all secretly like it, at least for a while.

Also: thank goodness for soup and hot showers.

A Cricket in Lakeside Park

I heard a sound tonight that I haven't heard in quite some time. My crew team recently moved from its rat-cave boathouse on Lakeside Drive to temporary housing at the Sailboat House, over in the park by Children's Fairyland. We were just docking after our workout, and I heard crickets in the trees! I didn't know we had crickets in Oakland. It's too chilly here, too foggy, too noisy, too everything. But there they were, like it's summer and I'm eight years old.

Crew these days is as close to perfect as it gets. We're in that precious window between the summer windy season and the long, dark night of the soul called "October through April"--the water is flat and silver, the sun is just setting, the clouds are pink, and the birds scatter in front of us as we row. Our coach has decided that we should enter some long-distance races later in the fall, which means lots of 5-k pieces for us. We row for half an hour without stopping, and it's just us out on the water with the rush of the boat through the water, the thunk of the oars squaring and feathering, and the guys on the shore playing the bongos in the stillness of the twilight. After awhile, we relax into the cadence of the boat, and everyone gets a little bit better balanced, a little swingier, a little stretchier in all the right places. It's good, and it makes me feel placid and pliant afterwards. I'll need to remember these evenings when it's January and forty degrees out, and I'd rather stay on the couch with a book. Because winter will be here soon enough; I guarantee it.