On Verbosity and Busy Days

Big Words and Long Sentences

I think the my last few posts have been kind of crappy – but what the hell, people have been reading them.

One of the girls with whom I was emailing on eHarmony (no, I’m not a complete internet dating failure) asked me if I was “verbose”. I know she has no control over my impression of her use of the word, but I was slightly offended. Verbose – to me – means “overly wordy” – as in, “characterized by the use of too many words“. It’s hardly a compliment. Succinct, terse, even laconic would be adjectives I’d sometimes rather were applied to my writing. I’d probably prefer “loquacious” to verbose. But I suppose if the shoe fits…

I have a monster vocabulary, and I’m not afraid to use it.

Please, dear reader, don’t think that I intend to flaunt: I don’t look to create situations in which to use polysyllabics, it just happens. As you can see.

Anyway, I’m constantly at war with squeezing a complex thought into a single sentence. Truncation is not an option. I really need to read more Hemingway. I’ve seriously been trying to use short, declarative sentences more often (for ease of reading), but they sometimes sound so terse and/or curt.

Weekend Plans

Since I’m effectively sans hiking partner for the forseeable future, I’ve decided to switch hiking days from Saturdays to Sundays. After a 50-ish hour week of work, getting up at 5:30 on a Saturday is tough without knowing that Scott will be walking in my door on time – and that if I’m up late, I’m holding the whole process up. A few extra hours of sleep on Saturdays has been good for me in the last couple of weeks.

I have 5 mountains left to climb to get into the Catskill 3500 Club – Graham, Doubletop, Lone, Rocky, and Kaaterskill. Heretofore, I thought this would take me 5 more weekends, but in reality it will take only 3. Graham and Doubletop are close enough to be hiked together, as are Lone and Rocky. Both will be long hikes, but more efficient than climbing all four mountains separately. Ascending Kaaterskill High Peak will also be a long hike. All are bushwacks. I may have to go back to the southwest peak of Hunter Mountain, as Scott and I couldn’t find the canister the first time around. I’m not particularly looking forward to that, but I am looking forward to that 3500 club patch and sticker for the Mini.

So it’ll probably be Graham and Doubletop on Sunday – I’ll post maps tomorrow.

As for today, I have a good sized list of shite to do. Ideally, I’d like to get my kayak in the water – in fact, that’s as close to a priority as I’m willing to label it, considering that weekends are for relaxing (yeah, right – sleep when I’m dead). I finally picked up a PFD yesterday, so I now have all the basic gear I need to get out on the water.

I’d also really like to get to the office and dump my handwritten edits to Nicole’s novel into Word and send them off to her, but the prospect of walking in to that building on an off-day is not what I would call appealing.

I’m Kind of a Geek

The point of my first sentence – crappy posts (in my opinion) of late – was to segue into how much time I’ve spent on the computer working on things peripheral to the actual content of this blog. I’ve spent so much time building a following on Twitter and joining social media sites to promote the blog that I haven’t had much time to actually craft my posts the way I’d like. Whatever. They’re only good for a day anyway.

For example, I spent a bunch of time time trying to edit the code of the current theme (the overall layout) of this blog yesterday. And really effed it up. Which was actually a good thing, because I now have more of an idea of what I don’t know about CSS and PHP than before. I dug my CSS book out last night and finally downloaded a text editor. It looks like I’ll be spending some time at SBUX using my free 2 hours of wi-fi per day. I’m psyched to learn the rudiments of coding. All I’m really looking to do is be able to change some of the features of this theme with which I’m not too happy.

Stay tuned. Changes coming. I’ve also met some very interesting people on those various social media sites – I’ll put together another “Network Updates” post soon so that you can meet them.