Tanka challenge 4/26/11

The glitter of lights
Strewn across the darkened hills
Reaches my window.
Halyards clink in the channel,
In the distance a train howls.

Tuesday night follies

Biked to work today. The ride in was chilly but uneventful. The ride home sucked due to a constant, momentum sucking head wind that made me get stuck at a long light, miss the usual BART train that I catch and have to catch a slightly later one. Despite sunny skies and temps in the upper 60's, I kept my fleece on all the way home.

Decided not to kill myself and took the truck to taiko instead of riding another four miles into a 20 mph head wind. Then decided to kill myself at taiko. Played good and hard as we worked on "Yodon," soloed three times in the rotation on "Jisshin" because we had uneven numbers of bodies on each side of the o-daiko, and decided it would be cool to attempt to play "Shinkyoku" on o-daiko just to see if it worked, which was fine with both my sensei. I made it through one full sequence and about halfway through the repeat before I hit the point where I didn't think I could lift my arms.

Whole new class of beginners started trickling in as we finished "Jisshin" and went into "Shinkyoku." I can remember when it was me goggling at the advanced class in April, 2008. Wow, I've been doing this for three years....  

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My copy of The Japanese Way of Tea arrived Saturday. I've read the introduction, translator's notes and made a good dent in the first chapter, which is about tea traditions in China before contact with Japan. Written by a grand master of the Urasenke tea tradition, it's a scholarly study which should actually help answer my questions about what was being done with tea in Japan before tea ceremony as we now know it.

My copy of Heart of Oak: A Sailor's Life In Nelson's Navy arrived this afternoon. crimsongriffin (and any hardcore Aubrey-Maturin, Horatio Hornblower fans out there), this is a gorgeous book. Have had little time to do more than feast my eyes on lavish photographs of Royal Navy artifacts, but those range from rope to old stockings and dungarees to medical implements to navigational instruments and on and on.