Some more fiction pondering

Way back in the day, someone in one of the roleplaying magazines suggested a campaign background that included the Americas having been created via Japanese court magic to have something that would keep Europeans coming from the east busy for a long time. That has, of course, precisely the same othering, trivializing, ultimately eliminating problem as The Thirteenth Child.

But what might be very interesting is a story in which new lands and seas are sliced into the world, creating new stuff for everyone to explore. And if they're pulled in from different geological areas + different evolutionary histories, then there'd be lots of exotic animals all around.

In my head is a story about Pacific Northwest traders sometime before 1800 or so, maybe Chinook or Tlingit, stranded somewhere in the interior of North America with hundreds or thousands of miles more land and sea between them and home, with motives that combine a sharp eye for entrepreneurial possibility (a whole land of stuff nobody controls access to would be a very big deal for someone from the tribes in this area) and the simple desire to get home...if home is still there.

We want information! Information!

It appears that whatever I may be thinking of doing to my body, I am very much my engineer father's child. :) I'm having a lot of fun tinkering up a spreadsheet for my pedometer tracking. Now admittedly I'm putting in more pastel colors and such than Dad would, but the nested count loops to avoid error messages in averages? Yes, that's Dad's influence all over.

In related news, Numbers—the spreadsheet in Apple's iWorks package—is astonishing. Pages is quite a good word processor, but Numbers is bogglingly good, with every scrap of functionality I used to use in office management chores with Excel, and just beautiful. The use of color, on-the-fly highlighting, and other feedback is amazing. I did some formula designs over just to watch the process again.

Now to poke some more at graphing options.

Weight, day 1

My new bathroom scale today. It's one of those casual marvels, capable of tracking body mass, water volume, and some other stuff...as I read through the instructions, I pictured Dad being delighted and then seeing how he could spoof it. ("What happens if we put some mass in a non-reflective plastic bag?")

The key number: 330.2.

That's actually not as bad as I was dreading, bad as it is. I've been heavier, at least twice. I'm pretty sure I was heavier than that this time last year, and that I've lost some weight in the last few months.

Still. Looks like my earlier guess of 2-3 years' sustained effort is going to be about right.