My life has been rather uneventful as of late.
I suppose that's to be expected when you're a home-schooled homebody like myself, but when I'm older, I'm going to spend nearly every day out and about.
If everything goes according to plan, that is.
Not that I really expect that.
But one can dream.
Anywhoozle, I'd wager to say I've spent at least a good four hours reading in a tree in the past couple of days. There's nothing quite like nestling up against the downy fluff of gritty bark twenty-five feet off the ground, back stiff and sore from craning over a book, legs dangling over empty air. My perch is actually quite nice, if I shift around occasionally to ward off numbness (unsuccessfully). I sling my bag over one of the branches and camp out Katniss-style, and I can climb up a good deal father in it too.
I've lived at my house two flipping years and just discovered it about a week ago.
So I was really bored. I had this unassailable urge to climb a tree, and by darn it, I was going to climb one. Except that despite the largeness of our span of land, we didn't have any trees
a) with branches that were within my tippy-toed grabby-fingered reach
b) that weren't as completely dead as MySpace.
So I lugged this rickety excuse for a stepladder around the backyard and hoped that the boost would propel my unsatisfactory height to the appropriate level for at least some spindly-branched thing. Nothing seemed promising, however. (I was examining a very dead, very prickly number when a huge stripe-legged spider bungeed down in front of my face and sent me flailing backwards in a flurry of yelps.)
The one next to it, however, was golden.
(...Meaning more than marginally okay. Did you really think I meant foliage made of precious metal? My, but you're dumb.)
There are two mild knots perfect for footholds but you still need the stepladder to even reach the first branch, and have to perform a clumsy sloth-like swinging operation to get down, so I'm the only one in my family who can climb up there. Or bothers to. But the net effect is the same.
There are not very many ways to attain privacy at my house, and those even in their scarcity are not always effective, but tree-climbing is quite impeccable. It does ensure my legs are in a perpetual state of scuff and bruise, but that I can deal with.
So I've been doing quite a lot of reading lately.
I went on a bit of a reading hiatus for a couple months, a barren wasteland lacking the printed word, and it had scared me. Honestly. Reading has always been a great joy of mine, but no matter how hard I tried, it just wasn't pulling me in like it used to. I missed the neck cramps and under-the-blanket flashlights, longed for that gripping suspense that when I was younger didn't seem so dreadfully hard to find. Since the discovery of The Tree, however, I've read about five books and I'm hoping this indicates that my battered stumbling through the desert of non-literacy has come to an oasis.
I just hope it's not temporary.
(By the way, the Princess Bride is a good book. For realz. And, as a side note, one with an entirely misleading title you Manly Men of the Order of Raw Meat.)
I also started tae kwon do back up last week. It's fun, but the class is intimidating. Our instructor is a rather planetary grouch-with-a-mustache and most of my peers are super-high belts, and so far the class has been exclusively male.
And they're good.
...
Like, really good.
One of the red belts, an albeit good-natured karate beast who could break your jaw without so much as trying, we just call The Bad Man.
But hey, at least my oppressive guilt for not sticking with it before is enough to outweigh any future desire to quit.
~Elizabeth
P.S. My white belt is dangerous.
FEAR ITS BLINDING POWER.
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